139: Leverage Your Bitcoin Savings With Aki Balogh

06/10/23 • 30 min

https://youtu.be/R6rWz5uvn8k

Aki Balogh is the Co-founder and President of MarketMuse and the CEO of DLC.link, a platform that lets users lock their Bitcoin in escrow, supply Bitcoin as collateral, and earn a yield while maintaining full ownership. We discuss ways to leverage your Bitcoin to earn a yield, what a wider crypto adoption means for other currencies, and the basics of Bitcoin smart contracts.

—

Leverage Your Bitcoin Savings With Aki Balogh

My guest is Aki Balogh, the Cofounder and President of MarketMuse, an AI-powered content intelligence and strategy platform and DLC Link, a tech company allowing Bitcoin hoarders to earn a yield on their Bitcoin while maintaining full ownership. Aki, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

It’s great to have you here. You’re the first one who’s going to talk about Bitcoin on this show, even though we are 140 episodes in. I’m super excited to get my feet and the show wet into the crypto world. How did you become an entrepreneur and why did you choose marketing content and crypto as your fields? What attracted you to these fields?

I might have even inherited a gene from my grandfather to be an entrepreneur. My first “business” was I was selling jokes when I was seven years old for a quarter. It started off as a joke. At 14, I started a Hungarian film club with my mom, then at 15, I started a small business, 16 or 18. I started a conference series at the University of Michigan. I started another couple of clubs, a technology club for BBAs, etc. I’ve always been doing side projects and hustles.

Many years after that, I was at a venture fund, OpenView Venture Partners in Boston, looking at $5 million to $20 million investments for tech companies. The founder of the fund pulled me aside and said, “I like you but you shouldn’t be here. You should be building a company. You can do venture and invest later. Learn how to build a company.” The next thing I knew, I was starting market news where I was looking to bring AI to marketing. I did that for eight years and then passed that on to CEO Charles, who succeeded me and then started this new project where we’re enabling utility for Bitcoin. I would say it’s a little bit of always being entrepreneurial and then always trying to follow the technology that can make, I would think, the biggest impact on the world.

Charles Frydenborg was a guest on this show. He was a very interesting guest. We talked about market news and how you create and use AI to par content, but this is not a topic. We are going to talk about your second business or at least your follow-up business, probably not the second, maybe the 12th, I don’t know. Why did you get interested in crypto and what did you see in it that was promising for you?

I heard of Bitcoin in 2011 when I was in San Francisco, but I didn’t do anything about it. A lot of people have my early crypto sob story of I had some amount of money and I could have put it in Bitcoin, but instead, I put it into myself, which in hindsight might not have netted the return otherwise. I didn’t get into it because of the tremendous sob swings we saw.

This is another Hungarian connection. Steve was born in Hungary. I am from Hungary also. Not everybody in crypto is from Hungary, but one of the people who’s rumored to be Satoshi is Hungarian Nick Szabo, but that’s not what it was. I was leaving market news and looking at new projects. I got interested in the crypto Web 3. I made an introduction for my friend Lazo who has a software development agency where they built crypto stuff and they ended up winning the project to build the Chivo Wallet for El Salvador, which is El Salvador’s Bitcoin wallet.

Their president, Bukele, made Bitcoin like legal tender in El Salvador and they needed a wallet technology to hold the Bitcoin. These Hungarian guys went and built it. There was a first wallet that didn’t work and then they built the second wallet and it worked great. What I saw is when they launched the wallet it had 250,000 daily active users right from launch and over a couple of 1 or 2 months, it got up to 4 million registrants, which is also astonishing. I think you have to have an El Salvador citizen number and ID number to get the wallet.

A lar...

https://youtu.be/R6rWz5uvn8k

—

Leverage Your Bitcoin Savings With Aki Balogh

Thanks for having me.

A lar...

Previous Episode

138: Fear Not To Share Equity With Ian Schnoor

https://youtu.be/FDw4G2K8kM8

Ian Schnoor is the Executive Director of the Financial Modeling Institute (FMI) and Founder of The Marquee Group, a leading financial modeling training, consulting, and accreditation provider. We discuss financial modeling essentials, the basics of giving equity to your employees, and effective ways to attract and retain good employees.

—

Fear Not To Share Equity With Ian Schnoor

My guest is Ian Schnoor, the Executive Director of the Financial Modeling Institute or FMI, and the President and Founder of The Marquee Group, a leading financial modeling training, consulting, and accreditation provider for finance’s most important decision-making tool, the spreadsheet-based financial model. Ian, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Steve. It’s a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

If this happened many years ago, I would be extraordinarily excited because at the time, I was doing a lot of financial modeling and I was very into it. I’m not as into it now, but I’m still excited about having you on the show and bringing me up to date with what’s happening in the financial modeling world. Tell me, how does one become a financial modeling entrepreneur? How did you get here?

I would describe myself as an accidental entrepreneur, as I’m sure is the case for a lot of entrepreneurs. We didn’t grow up and at five years old say, “I want to become an entrepreneur.” I don’t know that many people do. Based on my background and my personality, I thought I would be a corporate person for my whole career.

I was always very interested in paying attention to what I was thinking and listening and being adaptive to change. I started my career as an investment banker. As you mentioned, I spent six years in banking. At the time, all banks trained all their own people. Every year a new cohort would come in, a bunch of new juniors would come in, and they would call people that were a little older me to train them.

Every year, they’d say, “Ian, the new guys are coming. We need you to train them.” I’d say, “Okay.” I’d be working very hard. For a couple of weeks in the summer, I would be teaching all the new hires that had joined us. People always ask me, “How did you decide to leave banking?” I didn’t. That was an easy decision. That decision was made for me.

I always tell people that if you stick around in banking long enough, someone’s going to make that decision for you at some point. It was after 9/11. I was working at Citibank. There were cuts every week. They were cutting offices, groups, and people, and our team got cut towards the end of 2001. The decision was not should I leave. The decision was what to do next.

I had a couple of opportunities to join other banks right away, but it didn’t feel right. I’m glad I listened to myself. I didn’t feel ready to jump back into another banking role. I paid attention to what my body and my mind were saying. I thought about it. I thought about what could I do and what I like to do. I always loved teaching. That’s how I got to a university. I tried to tutor people.

I like teaching and modeling. I thought maybe I could try offering up the service to run modeling training and even some modeling consulting. I did that, and I thought I’ll do it for 3 to 6 months to take a break from corporate life. I’ll take a break for six months, and then I’ll go back. It’s been many years. I haven’t gone back yet, but such is life. It was in a circuitous way. That’s how it happened.

I’m so fascinated to hear that because I was in a very similar situation. I was at ABN AMRO Bank, which was one of the competitors of Citibank at the time. I got the X about a year later than you did. I think it was September 6th, 2002. I rallied the opportunity to get out, do something else, and do my own thing.

Anyway, you decided to teach people and to stay with financial modeling and get into it. What I’m really curious about is, how did you turn it into a business? It’s one thing to do some modeling on the side, get some clients, and teach people. You’re turning it into a business, growing it, and make it a scalable business. It’s a much harder proposition. What happened?

I appreciate you recognizing that because you’re right. Like a lot of teachers and trainers, when I started doing this many years ago, I was a solopreneur. I like to say it was a one-man operation. Eventually, after a few years, I hir...

Next Episode

140: Drive Sales Through Conference Speaking With Mark Bealin

https://youtu.be/OjV2vV9BtPE

Mark Bealin is the Founder and Principal of SearchLab, a rapidly growing internet marketing agency that helps local businesses grow through search engine optimization, paid search marketing, and website design. We discuss the evolution of SEO, how to drive sales through conference speaking, and ways to get more conference speaking opportunities.

—

Drive Sales Through Conference Speaking With Mark Bealin

My guest is Mark Bealin, the Founder and Principal of SearchLab. They offer local SEO and paid media services to small and medium-sized businesses , combining large agency capabilities with the enhanced attention of a boutique firm. Mark, welcome to the show.

It’s good to be on with you, Steve. I’m looking forward to this.

It’s good to have you, as well. I’m all into exploring what’s new in the SEO and the paid-media world, but let’s start with your journey. How did you end up founding a digital agency? What journey brought you to this point?

It starts around the Great Recession. I was interested in this thing as a kid. I used to trade baseball cards. I’ve always gravitated toward this thing. I had a normal job. I was working at a company called LocalLaunch! I did well there. During the Great Recession, we all were going to lose our jobs. This was in 2009.

At that point, I started my first agency, which was called Evolving Interactive. I worked there for eight years. For about five of those years, it was good. I then started to have a little bit more complications in my personal life. I got married. I started to have children and wanted to do different things than the other founders of that company.

It’s a funny story. I went and gave notice on January 10th of 2017. When I went home that day, my wife went into labor with my son. I had given notice and had a baby within 24 hours. It was a momentous day in my life. At that point, I stuck around for a little while. On March 1st, 2017, I started SearchLab. A lot of that had to do with wanting to provide for my kids. I’m the only owner of it. It has been a great experience ever since. There are a lot of things I’m leaving out there, but that’s the gist of it.

With any enterprise, there are ups and downs . Even when you’re growing, you don’t grow like this but you grow like this. That’s the nature of the beast. You figured out some things in this company based on what we discussed in our earlier precall. One of the things that grabbed my attention was the sales framework that you developed at SearchLab. Can you explain what that looks like and how you work it?

One of the things in my industry is there are a lot of conferences, trade shows, and that sort of thing. There are niches within those trade shows like conferences specifically for automobile dealerships or medical practices. I recognized pretty early on that being on those stages and connecting with our audience would be a key to our growth.

I was okay with getting on those stages, but I wasn’t great. I started to hire people who were good at it. The first person we hired was Greg Gifford, who is well-known. He speaks all over the world about SEO. It worked as I thought. As soon as he got on the stage, it was fine, but it was a problem because we were getting leads but we needed to clean up our sales process. At that point, we began hiring salespeople.

The components are these. You have a speaker who presents at the conference. You’re going to have a salesperson who’s going to take leads from that conference and bring them through an orderly sales process. Oftentimes, if not always, we will exhibit at those conferences. We’ll have a booth and we’ll have an exhibit where salespeople will look for people. They’ll cultivate relationships and bring them through an early process.

What’s interesting about us is our sales demonstrations are done by the product expert. The people who are on the stage do that. I don’t think Greg has ever put a name into our CRM once. The salesperson does all the hard work of negotiating a deal and getting it across the finish line. The product expert does a lot of the sales demonstration and the client-facing stuff.

What we’ve evolved into now is we’re going to be at something in the neighborhood of 30 conferences. We’ll have a sales presence there. We’ll have speakers at as many of those shows as we possibly can. We’re going to have three people on my team who a big part of their day-to-day life is to travel around, speak, and present at confere...