Tavia: 0:00

In crypto, there is a lot of stupid money going around and people splash cash around different projects and activations and events without a way of really tracking all of this data to make sure what they're spending on really works.

Joeri: 0:14

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm honored to be joined by Tavia. Hello Tavia, how are you?

Tavia: 0:27

Hi, Joeri, I'm really happy to be here. Doing very well. On a side note, Eminem's new album came out, so it's a good week for us all.

Joeri: 0:35

It's a good week. Yeah, guys, if you're now wondering, who is Tavia, Tavia won. She's the CMO at Credbull and that's the first on-chain private credit fund. You know, for me, everything that's on-chain now that sounds really like the new online Now it's on-chain Sounds like I'm really excited about all of the evolutions. But who is Tavia? Tavia has over 12 years of chief executive experience in marketing, business development in B2B and B2C distribution, saas, blockchain and crypto, and she has served as a vice president of APEX's largest crypto custodian, with over 2 billion assets under custody, and head of commercial at Layer 1. Previously founded, a digital marketing agency was later acquired by a Fortune 500 advertising brand. Perfect fit for the show. Welcome Tavia. But yeah, maybe it's good if you can start telling us and its mission.

Tavia: 1:37

Sure, thanks for the kind intros, Joeri. So Credbull that we are the first licensed on-chain private credit fund manager. So that's quite a mouthful. But maybe we start with what private credit is. So private credit is basically referring to credit provided by non-bank financial institutions, to all private lenders, to companies that are not publicly traded, so it's a kind of alternative form of financing provided outside of traditional bank lending. So what we at Credbull do? We provide exposure to emerging market private credit via a tokenized and on-chain fund vehicle. So we offer investors high fixed yields from private credit lending to SMEs across high growth regions such as Middle East, india and Southeast Asia, and we also offer real-time transparency into the fund allocation. So if you look at Web3, it's a project in the RWA space and with the focus on this high-performing asset class called private credit.

Joeri: 2:35

Yeah, it's exciting for me, like the concept of all of that and everything where Web3 can play a role. And what was it exactly that inspired the creation of CredBull?

Tavia: 2:47

So private credit, as an asset class, it exists in Web2.

Tavia: 2:49

So it's a well-known form of lending that produces very high yield almost 20% APY and sometimes even higher. But outside of specific people in private credit lending in Web2, including accredited investors with huge assets or institutions nobody really has access to private credit, and our mission here at Credbull is to create an advanced financial freedom for everybody. So this includes the SMEs that now have the vital financing that they need, and also for investors within Web3 and Web2 who want to participate in the best yields that there is in the world. So what we do is we offer a structured product that has used totally uncorrelated to the price of Bitcoin. So everything in DeFi if you look at your screens, it's once Bitcoin goes in the red, everything falls in the red, and we think that this high degree of correlation in crypto markets just isn't very sustainable. So we wanted to bring real world access to private credit and fixed deals, bring it to Web3 so that there's stability, there is trust in the industry and people get to participate in this deal.

Joeri: 3:52

Yeah, trust, bringing on more trust that's definitely something that we can use to bring more people into the space. Also, I've heard that with Credbull, you have received a 10 million investment from Plume. If I pronounce that the right way, yeah, talk a bit about that.

Tavia: 4:12

Sure. So Plume is one of the fastest- growing RWA L2s in the space, really good friends of ours. And if you look at Plume, why this capital is really important and significant is because the capital raised by Plume is actually from Web2. So it is from family offices and Plume. They actually deploy this capital into our private credit fund as a liquidity provider. Why this is important is because if you look at Web3, it seems like everybody is just competing for the same share of the pie, which is what we like to call a red pond. But where does the blue ocean truly exist? We think for Web3? It is in bringing fresh new capital from Web2 into 3. So this first initial commitment of a significant 10 million TBL is just a start of things to come. So the ability for Web2 to trust Web3 enough to see advantages in coming on board in a tokenized fund structure and coming into a private credit fund, I think that's a very good sign for crypto as a whole.

Joeri: 5:14

Yeah, it's a very good sign, but yeah, it seems really amazing. You know how you explained it, but I guess there are also a few challenges that you have faced and that you had to overcome. Can you talk about that?

Tavia: 5:27

Sure. So I think there are quite many If you look at the kind of yields we're providing. So example of a product would be 10% fixed yield. This yield is very attractive for somebody you're speaking to in day-to-day life. But if you're telling somebody, instead of putting your money in a fixed deposit in a bank where it's paying you, for example, treasury bills, four and a half five percent if you're in the US, or even lower if you're elsewhere in the world, you can have a 10% fixed deal product delivered by a licensed fund structure. This is very attractive in Web2.

Tavia: 5:58

But if you bring it to Web3 with the degens who are into staking, restaking liquidity, mining meme coins, they are like I want returns of 30, 40%, 100 plus percent. Then that kind of tails in comparison. So it really depends who you're talking to and what you're trying to sell them. So what we find a little bit of a challenge at the beginning days is when we are speaking to people, including institutional, like hedge funds or proprietary capital.

Tavia: 6:24

Those guys they don't get out of bed for returns under 30, 40 percent. That they are doing by themselves. So then we realized that, hey, this isn't the right target market we're speaking to and there must exist a kind of segment that sees 10 percent yields and above as and stable yields that are uncorrelated as something attractive. So we had to tweak our target audience, who we're looking for, both on the institutional side and the retail side, to eventually find the right fit. So who we found, for us at the end of the day that were really right fits were DAO treasuries, for example, project treasuries that they have a significant size of treasury and stable coins that they're looking to deploy.

Joeri: 7:03

Tavia, yeah, a question that I always like to ask is with people like you that have a lot of experience in different sectors you have 12 years of experience how has all these different industries background that you have or has it had up to or has it defined your role as a CMO right now?

Tavia: 7:23

So I think that the various experiences in different fields and also handling both retail side for B2C and also institutional side for B2B you get an appreciation and understanding of the different marketing slash sales cycles and you also understand what it means to be on both sides of the discussion or negotiation. So, for example, in B2B marketing, when I was previously at an AI firm and when I was previously VP at the largest crypto custodian, you really learn about how to manage different stakeholders. Often the deal size are in a few millions for assets under custody or assets under management and those deals don't typically close unless it's something in the range of six to nine months. So how do you at the same time move the project forward and move the deal forward and look after all the different stakeholders? You learn what gets them over the line, what keeps the AUM assets under management there and coming, and when you work with retail side for B2C, you learn how to create campaigns that are almost immediately effective and you learn the key metrics that you have to capture.

Tavia: 8:29

I think the biggest lessons over the 12 years is moving to be more strategic. So when I move from various roles more junior, from individual contributor working in smaller teams to more executive roles. When you're managing more people, you find that you would learn the bigger picture more. So you would often have to make decisions or shape strategy to move the needle on what really matters. So you would help to set the organizational direction and then building and guiding teams on execution instead of doing it yourself, but of course, having the various experience of starting to do it by yourself, doing various aspects of marketing, doing various aspects of sales, of business development. When you guide your own team members on how to do it, you would appreciate what works and what doesn't work. And also when you're interviewing and building those teams, you would have experience and you would know who to hire.

Joeri: 9:18

Right. It's all about finding the right people also to help you, and not doing everything by yourself. That's a lesson that we all learn, but it's good to in beginning, to learn how it is done, so after that you are able to to delegate and to find the right persons to do it also. You mentioned Web2, Web3. It's coming together. I love, love that when that comes together, when technologies come together. But how do you see the Web3 technologies transforming traditional marketing strategies, are there any innovative marketing techniques that you have implemented in Credbull?

Tavia: 10:03

I've seeen many Web3 projects try to deliver on the promise of a Web3 native Ad marketing platform, accurately reporting on traffic delivered and cutting off the middleman, like your Meta, your X or your Google, but to be honest, I haven't seen any successfully executed in a big way like this. So I still think we are far in a ways, from that, and that's why our industry relies heavily on things like KOLs, on buying traffic from specific telegram channels or X channels, and those metrics are often hard to quantify accurately. Let's say that I think that one very interesting next marketing wave would come from user segmented wallet targeting and also wallet messaging. So this is what I project to be the future. So one project I would like to share is my friends at a company called MetaCR. So they are doing quite a good job at wallet tracking and segmentation.

Tavia: 10:49

So what you can do with this tool you track users from a landing page to specific wallets and those user data and analytics you can use it for audience segmentation. You can use it to understand the behaviors. So after this campaign, are my users actually lending into my product, into my fund? Which users are then real wallets to me that I should separately pick out and nurture with different sequence? So this Web3 attribution tracking from landing page to the actual wallets where you see the transactions actually happening. The data is so crucial and so important because you really get to identify number one, the KPIs of your campaign. Number two, segmenting out different target audiences because some are more valuable than others, and then how to speak to all of them differently. And I think the next wave and interesting thing that marketers can take note of is really not only taking this data that's that one, but number two, how do you make sense of that data and to create more effective campaigns?

Joeri: 11:44

Right, yeah, maybe you don't know that, but I had a business analytics company before, before I went into marketing and before I went into Web3. So, yeah, for me also, my background helps me to create what I'm doing as a CMO. I also had an investment club for a long time, but not Web3 like Web2, the traditional stocks but yeah, so it's interesting to to hear your experience and and your vision around it and your ideas, because, yeah, wallet messaging and stuff like that, it's like the, the new hot things that are there. Of course, you need to measure them, you need to be able to optimize your campaigns.

Tavia: 12:21

And I think that when you shared Joeri, it was very important, because sometimes I see, if it's in crypto, there is a lot of what I call I don't know if I can say this stupid money going around and people splash cash around different projects and activations and events without a way of really tracking all of this data to make sure what they're spending on really works. And I think, for long-term effectiveness and also for your community, which, whom you have raised funds from, it is more responsible and, I think, a more responsible thing to do, and also for the longevity of a project if you use data to guide your decisions.

Joeri: 12:57

Yeah, for me, like, measuring is important, but also trust is important. Let's talk a bit more about that. How can we have more or create more trust in the Web3 and the crypto space?

Tavia: 13:10

I think this is very important because in crypto space it's funny, because blockchain, they say, is to create transparency without the need for trust, right To facilitate a lot of transactions without the need for trust. But it's also in crypto where you see a lot of bad actors that do things that breaks the fundamentals of trust. So for us, I think values that we approach from is to always communicate early and communicate often, so people don't always get things right the first time around and we always own the decisions, but it always comes from the right place and the right intention and then we follow through with our work. So making sure that the things we do that are campaigns-wise or who we're working with, is really on brand and aligned, and I also think that drives into cultivating a team and everybody on the team having a personal brand or ethos of what they stand for. So I can give you an example of a recent campaign we did with big ecosystem partners.

Tavia: 14:08

So a lot of the projects on there they are meme coins competing for the same traffic source. So those meme coins are giving away 80 to 90% of their tokens to get traffic. So they're giving away crazy airdrops and unsustainable youth, but we just don't do that. We know what we do. We're providing high-fix-yield product and it's for somebody institutions or retail that realize the need for diversification and it's not to the crowd of people that you know is asking when moon, or when is something going to go 100x? So in that project we've made the decision to participate but also not give out a crazy amount of unsustainable token ox. And that doesn't mean we're the most popular project on there In fact we are not but we understand what we are and what we are not.

Tavia: 14:54

And the second portion is also realizing that trust and communication is not just verbal. It is a follow-through on certain expectations that we have in our market. So, for example, would be airdrops campaign. So airdrops campaign if a user you put them through so many on-chain tasks that they have to do, they have to stake and to hold their position for months, but in the end the airdrop rewards you're giving them is not matching expectations. That causes a baseline of distress and of course you can't please everybody in an airdrops campaign when you run that.

Tavia: 15:24

But there is a kind of socially acceptable reward that people get used to once you're in this space. So I think a part of trust for that is also one important element. And then I think one last point would be around tokenomics. So whenever you are looking at the team behind the project, checking on team vestings, to make sure that the team is not controlling too much of their token supply, not dumping tokens on retail, so far as at Credible we're all locked with at least one to two years cliff and then we have four years vestings. It's a signal to the community that we're here to build. None of the teams are going to cash out our dumb tokens and I think those overall are signs of how we are building trust.

Joeri: 16:03

Great If you checked out my podcast and I know you did. There are some of the questions. A question that I often ask is it's not some question that I sent beforehand, but it's just asking what are you the most excited about, Tavia? You can look at your role at your company. Are things happening in the Web3 space?

Tavia: 16:24

So one of the things I'm very excited about recently is Taunt, so the use of Telegram for onboarding of mass retail. And so how I come into this project was I just heard about this thing Tap and Earn. Everybody's talking about Tap and Earn and I had a chance to play the Tap and Earn game. At first I brushed it off because we come from quite institutional background and I was like this game is so silly. People are just tapping in exchange for future tokens which none of the tokenomics are even out yet. So why are people doing this? But the more I spend time on it, I realize one thing. So I was in the.

Tavia: 16:55

I was in the industry whereby marketing is supremely important, more so than the web3 project.

Tavia: 17:01

Lives and divides marketing and attention is a currency.

Tavia: 17:05

So what, for me, this tap and earn games are doing on TORN or Telegram is that they're capturing attention and exchanging attention for monetary rewards, and it's the most simple, straightforward way to do it.

Tavia: 17:17

Everybody can tap, so that's the beauty. But why I'm very much interested in this is because when I looked at how seamless the TORN onboarding process is, to get points to play the game and then to connect to a wallet and then, using facial verification to do KYC, you can buy tokens using your Apple Pay. That whole process for me is more seamless than any MetaMask wallet I have ever used on any browser. So that excites me because I truly believe that Web3 cannot be sustainable in the long term unless it onboards Web3 users in a seamless way. And everybody has been saying that, but this is the time when I experienced it as a real user and I was really impressed. So I think, if any project is here working on a retail arm that you're looking about looking at mass retail users onboarding. I'm not trying to show Peligram and Torn Network, but I really think they did a very good job in the user experience.

Joeri: 18:08

Yeah, they did, and I love this example that you are giving now. It's really valuable for our listeners. Is there maybe another advice that you would like to give them to people that are now listening and are, yeah, you want to help them.

Tavia: 18:22

I think if, let's say, users are looking in Web3 as a whole, I've been in Web3 for around three and a half years and what I realized is that fads, they come and go and we are really an industry that is searching for a narrative. So when I just came in, icos were the craze, defi was the craze, Liquidity mining was the craze. Everybody had a profile pic NFT. Then industry changed really quickly into GameFi, defi, and then now it's into RWAs, ai, and then there's always been meme coins, gamblefi, politify. There's always something new coming and fads are fads and they can seem so real because of a lot of attention onto these industries and a lot of liquidity. But do they really last? So I think for listeners looking for careers or where to spend their time and energies in Web3, I think we really need to sit down and to have some modalities in thinking. So what I like to do is to go back to first principles in Web3. So I take a quite harsh view in the whole Web3 industry because I really think that the only proven vertical so far has been in liquidity and facilitating the trading of tokens, ie exchanges and transactions. That, to me, has been the most enduring. Everything else has proven to be fads that come and go. So if you're looking at something, for example at NFTs or GameFi, ask yourself is any game players going to say, oh my gosh, you know what I really need? I need an NFT and I'm playing this game. So if that doesn't seem very plausible to you, think about how much of this is driven by hype and marketing, dollars and attention and the need to create speculation to pump up token prices in a certain vertical, versus how much of it is going to be long-term and sustainable. So I'll give an example to our vertical. So real assets, right, rwas.

Tavia: 20:11

Is tokenizing the whole world really such a good idea Just because the technology exists for you to tokenize something? Is there really value and business case to tokenize, for example, real estate? So what value does it have for you if you can own a tiny fraction of a French townhouse, for example, would you rush into this market for that? Or tokenizing Pokemon cards, for example Is there a big enough interest and liquidity pool for secondary trading markets? So tokenizing something just because it's really hot, it doesn't immediately create liquidity where it doesn't already exist. This is the greatest myth in RWA. If we're talking about products of, for example, private credit fund. Why I decided to join immediately create liquidity where it doesn't already exist.

Tavia: 20:49

This is the greatest myth in RWA If we're talking about products of, for example, private credit fund.

Tavia: 20:53

Why I decided to join Credbull even when it was really early on, it's because private credit is the best performing asset class in the world today and access is only reserved for accredited investors. Without a few million, without existing prior connections in Web2, there's no way for you to get access to this file. But now, when I put it on chain, anybody can access it, both retail and institutional, at a much lower ticket size under $1,000 compared to at least half a million previously, and there is real demand for 10% plus stable fixed deals. So that, to me, is just a question of logic. So I think my advice to listeners would be if you're really intending to join any project, don't go for what's the fat. Don't go for what is really popular right now, because your career wouldn't even be there a year from now. Go to projects that you truly believe in with the overall mission, and think for yourself whether there is a need and liquidity that will flow to such a project that would make it sustainable.

Joeri: 21:43

Yeah, great advice. I would also say choose those projects that you love and understand, too, what it is about, because it's like with everything in investing, of course, that you really understand it. Thanks so much, Tavia, for these tips, and people want to know more about you. They want to know more about Credbull. Yeah, where would you like me to send them?

Tavia: 22:08

So if they'd like to learn more about Credbull and the project, please follow us on X at Credbull, defi. And for myself, I'm more active on LinkedIn, so my handle would be KVOM.

Joeri: 22:19

Great, I will put them in the show notes. Like always, there is a blog article, there is show notes linked to the podcast episode. So yes, Tavia thank you so much. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show thank you so much for your time, Joeri guys.

Joeri: 22:35

wow, a lot of value in this episode. I'm sure that this can be useful for people around you, so be sure to share the episode with them. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this. What also helps me is that, if you give me a review, these first five stars help me to reach an even bigger audience and, of course, I would like to see you back next time, take care, bye.