Take chafing out of your customer experience.
Is there any better feeling than trying on a new pair of jeans and finding the perfect fit? Of course not. We have a whole movie franchise based on how great of a sensation that is (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, for those looking for a movie recommendation)! When it comes to staple wardrobe items—a good pair of jeans is at the top of the list. And surprisingly, we have the Gold Rush to thank for that.
When Levi Strauss moved to California in the 1850s, he found a community of men bonding over the hard labor of mining for gold and the constant chafing of their thighs. Though gold could be found in the river, Levi realized that an empire could be built on land. He started a general store and his blue jeans took off. Strauss provided a service that supported the community of miners, and he created something that could bring them even closer together. Our guest today is doing much the same.
Michael Gasiorek is the Head of Marketing at TrustToken, where he’s created an entire community that’s bonded over the only thing more powerful than chafing: cryptocurrency. He’s mastered how to foster a close-knit community between CX leaders and their customers, and he’s sharing how we can do the same.
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"Change is coming and it's going to ripple out through every possible financial sector. Money as we know it is going to change...I think it's going to increase accessibility to financial opportunity for all. It's going to chip away a little bit at the calcified centers of power. And it's going to really create more of a meritocracy around money.” - Michael Gasiorek
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Time Stamps
* (0:00) Eureka!
* (7:16) Understanding crypto
* (8:54) How to build a digital community
* (11:22) Navigating the customer flywheel
* (15:46) Crypto is eating finance
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Connect with Michael on LinkedIn
Narrator: Early one morning, James Marshall went down to the calmest part of the river to start his workday. He was building a sawmill for a local landowner. Every day, James grabbed his shovel and waded into the shallow water to dig a ditch that would carry river water through the sawmill. But that day, before James could start, something caught the corner of his eye. A handful of small luminous flakes were perched on top of a rock about six inches beneath the surface of the water.
James bent over to narrow his focus, but he already knew what it was. The glimmer of gold in the sunlight was unmistakable. Unbeknownst to him, James had just changed the course of American history forever. That fateful morning in 1848 was the catalyst for the largest mass migration in U.S. history…
750,000 pounds of gold would be discovered in California. The modern equivalent of $2.1 billion dollars would be mined in 1852 alone. Over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of people would pour into California from across the US and abroad with the glint of gold in their eye. The California Gold Rush was on.
The would-be miners flocked to the American River in Coloma, California with a single goal in mind: find gold and get rich. But ultimately, few of them succeeded. Can you recall the name of a single person who struck it rich mining gold in the 1850s? I didn’t think so. The names that live on in the history books aren’t there simply because they made a quick buck. Samuel Brannan, Domingo Ghirardelli, Leland Stanford— the reason we still know them today is because they saw an opportunity that was greater than gold.
The most famous name of the gold rush era never had any interest in panning for gold. Levi Strauss knew the real opportunity was beyond the river. He saw the game differently. Instead of wading into the chaos, he set out to be part of the infrastructure that would support the community of miners flocking to California. Not grabbing a piece of the pie, but growing the dessert tray for everyone involved.
In the early days of Levi’s arrival, the young German immigrant started off selling imported dry goods from his brothers’ store in New York. He sold all the Gold Rush essentials. Needed new waders to get the gold in the middle of the river? Levi’s had it. The ladies from the saloon not giving you the time of day? He sold combs and purses. Levi’s store was the place to be.
But then: Levi saw a new opportunity. He would use the peaking California Gold Rush as the foundation to launch an empire. He heard from local prospectors that they couldn’t find a decent pair of pants to withstand their grueling work conditions. So he grabbed the rough canvas material that he used for tents and wagon covers, and got to work. He originally made waist overalls that miners liked, but they chafed. He substituted a twill cotton cloth from France that later became known as denim. "Serge de Nimes" in French, the pants earned the nickname blue jeans.
Levi’s pants would go on to not only be durable in their material, but also their shelf life in American history. From the miners of the California Gold Rush to future presidents, Levi’s jeans would become an American staple. Arguably the most popular article of clothing in the world.
Levi wasn’t interested in the precious metal peeking out from under the mud—He was focused on providing for the entire gold rush ecosystem. He saw the bigger picture, what the community needed in order to grow and prosper.
As CX leaders, we need to understand our role when it comes to fostering the communities we’re a part of. We create a system of support that allows the greater community to thrive. We build the infrastructure. We create the networks. We listen, nurture, and uplift.
But sometimes, we’re traveling through uncharted waters. How do we build trust when it comes to brand new markets? And unregulated digital technologies that few people even understand?
Well, whether you prefer tailored, slim fit, athletic or boot cut, put on your favorite pair of blue jeans, grab your pickaxe and shovel, and let’s wade into the river. Cuz we’re panning for CX gold.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about building community. How Levi Strauss contributed to the California Gold rush by supporting miners and providing a blueprint for community builders of the future. In this episode we’ll hear from Michael Gasiorek, Head of Growth at TrustToken AND Founder and CEO of Truth Cartel, about how he and his team found a unique way to listen, filter, and construct an intimate community with their users in the crypto space. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
Narrator: There’s a reason they call it “digital gold.” Just as prospectors flocked to California in 1848, miners and traders have flocked to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies with the hopes of striking it rich overnight. And this modern-day gold rush has minted its share of millionaires. Since its mysterious inception in 2009, Bitcoin has amassed a market capitalization of over a trillion dollars. And the global market cap of all crypto currencies is closer to 2.5 trillion. And growing. But this industry has not ascended to these heights on the backs of miners and traders alone.
Cryptocurrency thrives because of the people building the infrastructure and supporting the ecosystem as a whole. Fresh investment continues to flow in, made possible by those who have invested in the community before. People like Michael Gasiorek.
Michael is the Head of Growth at TrustToken, where their stated goal is to bring economic opportunity to all by building finance infrastructure for the internet age. And if your eyes glazed over and your brain went numb the second I mentioned cryptocurrency, don’t worry, you’ll be an expert in no time. Because Michael is here to be our guide.
First, here’s Michael explaining the problem he’s trying to solve...
Michael: What we are known for is one of the first ever stable coins. Now what's a stable coin. Think about it as a digital. Right. When you try to move money around the world, uh, you're usually going bank to bank.
You're having to go through that bank system. That's usually going to take a few days. It's going to cost you a pretty penny. If you're moving a serious amount with a wire, uh, when you take a currency, digital, that currency moves much faster, much more cheaply, and it goes directly peer to peer, never touching a bank.
Um, that TUSD, uh, asset, that's what we call our stable coin. And there are many like it now, um, is now moving a few billion dollars, uh, around the world. There'll be every month and it's got about a billion dollars in circulation. And the other thing we've been known for, for since about the last year, just under that is a lending protocol
You could think of that as, um, again, sort of peer to peer lending, just like a bank would do. Um, but we do it, uh, without any locked up collateral. So instead of thinking about it as a loan, you might get in your car, your house, think about it as a loan, you might get for a student for student debt or for, uh, say debt financing.
We're not without backed up by a, by an asset of some sort. It's the first protocol of its kind. Um, with a credit score with, without any sort of collateral. Um, and in the last, uh, few months, it actually hit that billion dollar mark of you might say assets under management, if you will. Um, and, uh, has done about half a billion dollars in loans.
So fast growing, uh, first of its kind and something we're really proud of.
Narrator: Michael works to bolster the crypto ecosystem by supporting and building community....and in the world of crypto, there is no better way to start than word of mouth.
Michael: how do you cultivate word of mouth, you cultivate an amazing community. You, you make people feel really listened to it's the ultimately most empathic way of doing marketing, because you're really in direct one-to-one communion with people that you're, that you're servicing. Um, and they in turn bring that message out to others
what you'll notice in crypto, and this is broadly across the category, is that the, the sort of two or three classical, maybe even four classical, um, steps in a customer relationship, uh, model that I use in my marketing. And I've been talking about for a little while.
Uh, first you build a community in the first place, right? That often means getting a few folks that, you know, already kind of know, and love you maybe personally, or from your past work and getting them together into maybe a discord channel, which is sort of a, a channel for chatting a little bit like slack, um, and getting those folks to give you feedback about this thing you're building, right?
The next step is you got to educate these people.
How this thing works for us, that looks like a lot like content, right? So we're producing a lot of blog posts. We're working with influencers who already have existing channels to tell them a little bit about what we're doing, and then they communicate that out to, to their followers. Um, so we work a lot with influencers, for explainer videos on, you know, sponsored tweets and what have you, education being a big, big, big core component.
So now that your community knows how this. Maybe a few of them start adopting it. You start getting a little bit of traction. They're actually playing with the product, they'll connect a wallet. And we get into that later. Would that even means, um, and maybe make their first loan, maybe they start earning their first interest.
And when enough people do that, you've got some real traction. You go to step four and that's the step that we will call in sort of marketing matrix here. The credentialing phase, you take the traction you've gotten and you take that to the next higher order of people, maybe. You know, a bigger community, maybe that's a bigger influencer.
Maybe that's the press, or maybe there's a borrower that was waiting for you guys to get a big enough size before they touch the damn thing. Now, when that flywheel starts turning along the way, you're going to start getting feedback about what to build next we're daily communication with our community.
Narrator: This process Michael lays out emphasizes the importance of community building. The community you create with your users will make or break the success of your product. By listening to gold miners, our pal Levi discovered their pain points. And I’m not just talking about chafing. If you listen to your customers, they’ll tell you exactly what you should be building next.
Michael: We have about 5,000 in one channel, about 30,000 on Twitter. Um, and they're telling us daily about ways they want to see the product. Bugs, um, you know, feature requests, um, ideas for, from what other protocols are doing that might be rivals, or it might be my partners. Um, and that gives you then the less sort of last and final step of this process, which is you build the next iteration.
That's when the flywheel starts all over again, once you built it, the community again gets participants as participating in it. You gotta educate them at the next step of what you've built. Then you get adoption of that. Again, you credential that next step and you get back the building and that fly wheel turns and turns until you built something that is really sizable and starts to speak for it.
And the word of mouth takes off and the community becomes your sort of user experience and customer support channel. The community becomes your, you might say like engineering, advocacy team telling you what to build next. Um, the lines are so blurred in our industry between who the customer is and who the core team is.
Uh, and the more blurred they are typically speaking, the more decentralized and stronger the protocol and the product.
so it's often up to us to, to, to latch on to a really cool idea coming from a community member and saying, you know, this is great.
Let's take this to a sidebar. Let's develop your ideal. Okay. Now you're somewhere that's sophisticated, concrete and actionable. Why don't you go ahead and poses the community and let's see what they have to say about it. And if they support your idea, if you successfully advocated for this thing that we together have given some shape, um, we're, we're a hundred percent.
So we work very closely. Hand-in-hand, there's not a lot of like this activism, activists, like board member type energy. It's, it's very purely collaborative,
Narrator: The beauty of a community flywheel is the virtuous cycle it creates for your customers and your company. You invest time and energy into your community and they invest their time and energy using your product, giving you feedback, and being evangelists for the company. But the decentralized nature of cryptocurrency takes this concept to a whole new level. Each member of the community is truly invested. They feel and act like owners. Their participation moves the needle forward.
Michael: you would think of it as there are people who own your stock Then there are people who participate in, you know, maybe, um, you know, they might trade your stock. They might own your stock for the long term. And then there are those few people who not just own your stock, but based on having, you know, 0.1, three voting share, start attending your board meetings and start voting for certain things.
So start literally rallying advocacy, like advocates to their side, so that suddenly they're voting as a block on getting certain things. And basically our boardroom is open all the time. It's open 24 7 in a, in a comms channel, open to the public, whether or not you have any of our stock.
maybe one day, they want to be, uh, you know, a really deep participant.
And then the other day they want to sell your token for upside. Um, which I think is also why this community is so important because community does one thing that, um, Probably the marketing people are so concerned with too, which is retention because suddenly you don't just stay because the product is good and you see the promise of it in the future.
You also stay because you feel something for this community over the people that you've come to know in it. And in many ways, you holding the token and you participate in a regular basis. Um, it's a little bit of a community for you. Like truly earnestly like a social media. Right. I'm not going to go so far as to compare it to your church group or to your college buddies.
But, um, you get to know some of these people, you get to start building with them. Um, you get to know them personally. You do, you do calls with them. And suddenly you're talking about, you know, where you guys went to school, what NFTs you should try to flip. And, um, you know, what towns you live in and where the best place to run out of your dog is.
And suddenly it feels like, you know, I like these guys. I want to stick around. Regardless of what the price action is, regardless of what the next step of the protocol is. Um, and we're always trying to, you know, get that emotional tie in with the product and with the token so that we can escalate people from just traders to investors, to them participants.
Narrator: Getting this level of emotional investment from your community takes time. And once you have it—the future is limitless. When James Marshall looked into the river that fateful morning, there is no way he could have foreseen the California Gold Rush and the community that would come out of it...
Michael thinks we’re on the verge of a complete transformation from the ground up. The rules of finance will be rewritten. Institutions will be rebuilt. The world as we know it will be changed forever.
Michael: when you think about what will happen in the future, it is my belief personally, speaking that a cryptocurrency will effectively eat up the tradition. Sort of financial infrastructure. You remember maybe back to Andreessen Horowitz, um, putting out the famous black post software's eating the world.
This is crypto is eating finance now in the short term, that might mean, you know, money moves around cheaply and you know, more easily, but over time it's going to mean so many other things it's going to, it's going to seep into all parts of our world. It might allow us to put a real estate contract. And to, you know, on the blockchain and then to basically break the house up into, into parts that you can now sell at a, at a moment's notice.
Um, it allows us to move to conduct sophisticated financial transactions simultaneously to move billions of dollars across the world. And with a few stops. Eh, the potential here is so vast and sophisticated that it is going to absolutely affect real estate wage and income and earning opportunities, investing, meaning, saving, lending, borrowing, um, you know, even insurance.
Uh, it's absolutely going to affect, uh, ownership of property cars and, and you know, other goods. Um, and you know, the, the way that it does that is by, you know, really turning the existing infrastructure. Now there are obviously vested interests that are core to our current infrastructure, governments and banks, right.
Um, that are not always so happy about the change that's coming. And I don't think it will be an easy transition. I don't think it will be an equally distributed transition. I think that certain countries and certain banks, um, will be quicker to jump on, but what I, and then some we'll fight it. Right.
What's going to happen. Well, this innovations isn't stopping, but it's going to move. It's going to move where it can flourish because not just cryptocurrency, but the talent in cryptocurrency is so fluid.
It can move with the drop of a hat, to a new jurisdiction. And from there, continue to blossom. But, um, the thing with smart contracts and especially decentralized projects is that what's, uh, what's, the genie is out of the. Once it's launched and the code is running. It's very difficult, maybe impossible to put that genie back.
So this change is coming and it's going to ripple out through every possible financial sector money. As we know it is going to change. and frankly, I'm really, really excited about that. I think it's going to increase accessibility to financial opportunity for all. Uh, it's going to chip away a little bit to tell spied set as a power, the moneyed, you know, uh, bag holders that currently sort of run the world. Um, and it's gonna, you know, really create a, more of a meritocracy around money. that's why I'm here. That's why I'm in this industry.
Narrator: For Michael, it’s not about grabbing all the gold he can carry and leaving the river empty for everyone else. He believes in the bigger picture. He’s not just investing, he’s invested. Building community and creating a flywheel that feeds back into itself. Supporting the ecosystem as a whole, so everyone can benefit from the greater transformation at hand. As we connect with the members of our community, and foster their connection with each other, we create a strong base of emphatic customers. A virtuous cycle of feedback and open communication follows suit. And who knows? One of them might just have an idea that’s worth its weight in gold.
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison, written by David Freiburger, and produced by Mackey Wilson, Ezra Bakker Trupiano, and Jon Libbey. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com