Anonymous social network where your net worth is your username raises $3M from Dragonfly and Starting Line

him and chat about the the business and his his day job outside of posting um because he's built a very very fun social network where username is your net worth. Andy, welcome to the stream. How you doing? Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Are you in a secure location?

You've probably upset a lot of people with what you've built, but it's opt in. It's I guess it's opt in, but it just feels like something people would push back on, right? You've gotten push back for that, right? to a degree. Uh people have been a lot more positive about it than I thought they would be actually. Okay.

I think what happened is I tapped into a latent anxiety that everyone actually had and it seems sort of like people are like, "Thank god someone's doing this so I don't have to worry about it anymore. " So is it is it anonymous? It's just your network. Yeah.

Quickly explain explain the product for people that haven't seen it. I think a lot of people have probably seen it without realizing it. seen screenshots of like polls or comments or things like that which I think are fascinating but but yeah explain it uh for the audience.

Yeah, so we're building an anonymous social network where your username is your net worth. The main idea is to provide a verified place to have financial conversations that are difficult to have in person or with other people around you because of the inherent uh private nature of finance.

And so we're collecting net worth information from bank accounts, brokerages, crypto wallets, and then later we're also going to do real estate and all kinds of other financial assets. And we're trying to calculate this one big number that we can assign to everyone and allow you to speak from your position basically.

What what are some of the key learnings insights? I mean I think I think the polling function where people can users can ask a question and then see like you know let's say it's a yes or no answer. you can see how much net worth is like backing up the results.

And so I feel like it it exposes like okay what what what does like what side is wealth on on this specific issue but I'm sure you've had a bunch of other interesting learnings. it.

I think probably the most interesting thing is when I set out to build this, I thought it would be inherently a place for financial discussion where people would talk about tax strategies and ARBs and alpha and stuff like that.

And it's really become more of a general place to hang out and what I figured out is actually every conversation is a financial conversation. Your net worth and the experiences that have led you to that number uh sort of dictate the way that you are going to look at other things as well.

And even if you're talking about something that's kind of boring or weird, that number is still relevant in that conversation, even if you don't bring it up every time you talk to someone. Totally.

I feel like there's a lot of anonymous social networks that have gotten like problems with like bullying and stuff and just like toxic communities because of the anonymity. Have you run into any problems? Are you fighting it in any particular ways or do you think it like Yeah.

Do people ever come on there and try to eat the rich? just net worth negative $2,000. We are actually in an incredible position as a social network because our moderation strategy is to just ban your bank account.

And so if you break the rules on the platform, we can just block out the accounts that you've connected with. That's so interesting because normally on like Reddit, you could have somebody that's angry and then they can just create they could be getting banned and just recreate accounts.

Yeah, it's like how would you create new account with a huge you have to set up a new bank account, transfer all your money over there. Like that takes a long time.

And if you do that enough times, eventually you will uh make other people angry who will ask you why you're making so many bank accounts and we don't even have to worry about it. That's very funny. That's wild. How's growth been? What's the news? How's uh are you monetizing yet?

I can imagine lots of different ways to monetize. can see, you know, you you have interesting data that other social media companies need to kind of piece together through behavior and things like that.

Like I I imagine the big social networks try to build a profile to understand like what is this person's purchasing power? You guys get it. You the users, you know, providing it. Um but how are how are you thinking about monetization? I think there's a couple of big strategies that we can try to go after.

Uh referrals is something that I've looked at for a while. Uh if you look at a public company like Nerd Wallet, a lot of their revenue is coming from referrals to loans and mortgages and credit cards.

And from our position, if we have a bird's eye view into your finances, we're actually pretty well equipped to show you products that would benefit you financially. Um so we're not just selling you something, but we're also trying to sell you something that makes sense with the type of portfolio that you currently hold.

Yeah. It's like, hey, we noticed you're not using leverage. Did you know did you know that you could love her up? I'd love to refer you to Harry Winston rare jewels of the world. Discover the sunflower collection or maybe what are you reading? I'm reading how to spend it.

It's the it's the wealthy section of the Financial Times that comes on the weekend. Uh refer you to Vasheron Constaton the quest. Vasheron Constanton celebrates seeking excellence for 270 years. 270 years of doing better if possible. What were you doing? What were you doing if possible?

These are going to be great referrals. You got to call you got to contact the the ad salesperson at uh at at HTSI. They got the graph diamonds ad in there. This is going to sell like hotcakes when you go when you start monetizing. That's the broad plan. That is the broad plan.

Uh before this, I was doing basically a bunch of different side project apps. Two cents started as a side project. Sure. And I was just trying to figure out something that could ship out the door three or four times a month or or a year and see if anything would get traction.

And so the early growth on Two Cents has been really amazing. It's probably the most popular thing I've ever built. Uh and almost entirely organic. So it has come from Twitter on the timeline from other posters wanting to sign up and be on it.

Um I've actually gotten a lot of comparisons to this earlier app, Poster, which was popular a couple years ago. Oh, I I invested in poster. Really? Yeah. It was a wild It was a wild place. Last but but it's so you know pe people are It's interesting.

A lot of people will use two cent that have never had an alt or an anonymous like account and I think it becomes extremely freeing for them to feel like they can have conversations online without being tied back to their LinkedIn, you know, or being tied back to their family.

And I and I do think yeah I just think you've tapped into something super interesting because money is so is just at the core of everyone's life whether they want it to be or not and giving people a place where they can talk about it freely. Of course there's still going to be judgment.

Like of course there's going to be people on the app that are going to think a certain way about someone's financial situation or or you know what they're saying or or how they're spending their money. But it does. Um I feel like the next uh I I feel like it'd be funny to build out uh I'm curious.

Would you ever build out like a feed of like the users kind of like if they obviously opted into it, but just like purchasing? Uh I feel like I feel like a lot of people would would be very fascinated in that. Um in in a different way than like Venmo used to do it, which I was like why is Venmo a social network?

you know, it's like I don't want like I don't want people to know what what I you know, whatever. But yeah, this is on the road map.

We would love to have a feature where you can opt in your transactions, your recent transactions, and then almost quote tweet them and say like, I I bought this $18 shawarma at this bodega. It sucked. Here's a picture of it. And it kind of proves that you did that, right? Like you're not just saying it.

Uh and same thing for brokerage movements. If you sell a bunch of Apple stock or whatever, you can write your due diligence and then also prove that you actually made that sale. So, you're not just saying you did it. We're proving it through financial history that it happened.

Uh, and obviously that's going to be entirely opt-in. You can choose to show things or not show things, but it it'll be the only social network where you can have these types of conversations where you can prove that you're actually moving your money or making these transactions that you're claiming that you are.

Very cool. Well, very cool. Uh, speaking of money, have you raised any money? We have. We have raised $3 million from Dragonfly and starting line. Congratulations. And was that just announced today? I didn't see it anywhere. It was uh yesterday. The official two cents account on two cents increased by 3 million. Right.

And so you saw it. We are our spot on the leaderboard has jumped up uh a couple places which I'm very happy about. There we go. Congratulations. What's What's the What's the number one spot on the leaderboard right now? Oh yeah. Who's the richest right now?

We have well so I don't know because it's anonymous but they are at 26 million 26 million verified liquid. Wow which is crazy. Verified and liquid. That's pretty crazy. My DNA researcher maybe maybe you got to get MS on there 8 million 333 every month. You're like okay I know who this is. Got $100 million contract.

Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Uh great to meet you and have a great rest of your day. Congrats on the round. Thank you for having Bye. Cheers, Andy. Up next, we have Gabe from Harvey AI. Very excited to talk to him