First off a big thank you to Alex Kehaya for having me as a guest on his podcast. It was a great time. I talked too much as usual but appreciate the opportunity and platform.

I was interviewed on "The Index" podcast and primarily discussed the creation of bizqiz, an AI-powered web-based trivia game that rewards users with digital collectibles. I share my background, including experiences in Web3 and the ICO revolution. I talked about the potential of blockchain, my interest in product and software interface design, and a vision for interactive TV and digital engagement. The interview delves into the technical aspects of bizqiz, its use of AI and blockchain, and its potential for brand engagement and customer insights.

Key Points

Innovation in Engagement: bizqiz represents a unique combination of AI and blockchain technology to create a trivia game that is not only entertaining but also offers digital collectibles as rewards.

User Experience and Brand Interaction: The platform emphasizes user engagement with brands through interactive content, demonstrating a new approach to marketing and customer relationship building.

Future of Digital Identity and Marketing: Joey discusses the future of digital wallets and collectibles in creating a comprehensive digital profile for users, highlighting a shift in how brands could interact and market to individuals.

Where to Listen?

Transcript

[00:00:00] Presenter: Welcome to the Index Podcast, hosted by Alex Kehaya. Plug in as we explore new frontiers with Web3 and the decentralized future.

[00:00:18] Alex: Hey everyone, and welcome to the index, brought to you by the graph where we talk with the entrepreneurs building the next wave of the internet. We do this because we believe that people are worth knowing. We believe in telling their stories so that you can learn why they are here pushing for a better future.

[00:00:34] Alex: Today, I'm excited to welcome Joey Janisheck, the creator of Biz Quiz, an AI powered web based trivia game that rewards users with digital collectibles. It's launching this week, and I'm excited for him to share more about what he's built. Thanks for being on the

[00:00:49] Joey: show. Hey, Alex. Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.

[00:00:53] Joey: So I love

[00:00:54] Alex: bizqiz for a lot of reasons. One, it's built on Holaplex's Hub product, which is really cool. Like, it's a really unique combination of AI and blockchain technology, which you don't see, like, that many real use cases that combine both those technologies. But before we get into that, I just kind of want to hear your background.

[00:01:12] Alex: Start at the beginning. Like, what were you doing before Web3? And then tell me how you got into this.

[00:01:16] Joey: I'm Joey. I live in Austin, Texas. I've been a kind of a gun for hire for Feels like decades. I used to be the young kid who slept under my desk in the WebOne startup. And now I'm the grizzled veteran who's Nobody wants to hear another story about a bad startup, but I've got them.

[00:01:35] Joey: Web3 I find a fascinating place. I was part of the ICO revolution eight years ago, nine years ago. I think the idea of blockchain and the power of an open database that the World can see and remix is so powerful. I'm not a big, a defy guy. I'm not that smart. I'm a big product guy. I'm a big software user interface guy.

[00:02:03] Joey: And what I find interesting about all the blockchain and what gets me pumped every morning is just the idea that we're just getting started. We're 13 years into this since the, the Bitcoin paper came out 14 years and we still haven't figured out. the perfect use case, you know, whether it's digital collectibles or it's flipping monkeys, we're still trying to find the right story to tell.

[00:02:28] Joey: But we'll get there. We'll get there.

[00:02:30] Alex: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think there really does need to be a different narrative outside of just like speculation is entertainment. That's one of the reasons why I like this quiz, because I think it does combine in a unique way. These two technologies, AI and, and blockchain technology, that's entertaining.

[00:02:47] Alex: It's still like harnesses that idea that you can collect a digital good that you own, but it's also something that I think, you know, already exists in a lot of places. Growing up, we used to love going to this place called Buffalo Wild Wings, like after a surf, there was always trivia there. And we played like all through college that was like wing night and trivia night or like huge night.

[00:03:07] Alex: So when I saw biz quiz for the first time, that is, it really resonated with me and tell us what it is. How does it work? We'll walk everybody through what it is because I don't want to give away the, all of it. And I want to let you talk about it. You know,

[00:03:19] Joey: the promise of interactive TV, like we've seen that for.

[00:03:23] Joey: 30 years, I think Disneyland has rides where you can step through history and they have a, there's like some sort of interaction that you can have with your TV, shopping's easier, your chores are somehow easier, and we never achieve it, you know, everything becomes work. That's kind of problem. Number one, I feel like interactive TV hasn't happened and it should, because we all have super computers in our pockets.

[00:03:48] Joey: Number two, you know, I am a competitive guy and, you know, whenever jeopardy comes on. In the living room. The only competition I have is, you know, whoever happens to physically be in the room and you're trying to show off that you're the smartest guy in the family, which is easy to do, but I want to show off my knowledge.

[00:04:07] Joey: I want to compete against other folks. Like, I want to at least know where I sit. So the idea of competition in something as trivial as trivia excites me. I got a supercomputer. I want to have some fun and show off what I know. And there really hasn't been a product that nails that. The closest we got is HQ, which was a wonderful app.

[00:04:31] Joey: You have to download the app. It was kind of appointment TV. We're at. You know, was it three o'clock in the afternoon every day, Scott would come on and you'd play a trivia game and you'd win, you could win, you know, five bucks. So, fast forward, I think that brands have a problem in that they're not getting engagement with their audience.

[00:04:53] Joey: If you are a product person, I'm the guy in charge of the new Coke energy product. I want you to understand the features of the product, why I, I want you to buy it. So I want to engage with the crowd. And one of the simplest ways is just a trivia game. So that was kind of the origin of kind of biz quiz years ago, I had an opportunity to work with ESPN.

[00:05:16] Joey: We did, you know, quizzes on TV. They used to be called second screen. And this was eight years ago. And ESPN had us build. Essentially a kind of a quiz game show for them. And the biggest challenges we had there were twofold. One is the amount of content that needed to be generated. ESPN is fortunate enough to have a whole bullpen of copywriters.

[00:05:39] Joey: So that was easy for them. Smaller brand X wouldn't be able to pull that off. And then the other problem that we had was fulfillment of a reward. You gave me two minutes of your time. I want to give you a t shirt. People will do anything for a T shirt. That's the old saying. And the beauty of kind of what I've been able to do with Holaplex is I can now, instead of giving you a T shirt, I can give you a digital collectible.

[00:06:05] Joey: Completely streamlined, dropped off in your vault. And the The beauty of what we're trying to do is you don't need to know blockchain. That isn't part of the learning curve. I just want you to have a fun time. And I don't need you to understand AI. I just need you to put in, in a kind of a raw text format, what you want the audience to know and understand about your brand.

[00:06:28] Joey: And in 60 seconds, we'll have them give, have a useful interaction with your brand and understand it. How did

[00:06:36] Alex: you solve the content generation

[00:06:38] Joey: problem? You know, the beauty of the open AI and kind of chat GPT, we're just getting started here, you know, six months ago, it came out of nowhere, came out of the blue, what I've been able to do, the current state of the APIs lets you take a large chunk of content and whittle it down into a game show.

[00:06:58] Joey: Essentially, we can determine and control what voice is used, you know, normally you go for like an eighth grade level reading. Level or we can even up the ante and make it for technical people for experts in a particular field. So the beauty of API is the open AI APIs is that we can kind of pump in raw data and get useful stuff back out, but it gets better all the time.

[00:07:24] Joey: You know, Bard is a little bit better with words. Then chat GPT, so what you wind up doing is kind of combining APIs to kind of wash the rice twice to get some clean. Oh wow, so you use

[00:07:36] Alex: both Bard and opening on the back end.

[00:07:38] Joey: Bards API isn't open for mainstream yet, but you can use the web interface. So if we're working demos or we've got a particular client will manually rinse the content through Bard and then pump it through the APIs on open AI.

[00:07:54] Alex: I know people listening won't be able to see it, but it, you know, we'll have the video online as well. Can you maybe share your screen and walk me through a demo?

[00:08:02] Joey: Would love to see it. Yeah, I'm going to log you into the backend. This is the, called the producer and the producers are where all the, the games are set up.

[00:08:10] Joey: So now you'll, you'll see a bunch of logos here. Some of these are real, but most of these are, you know, we're trying to get. Demos and understanding. So please, Taylor Swift, don't, do not sue me. She's the biggest show on earth right now. And I'm very curious when they have all these folks assembled in the stadium.

[00:08:30] Joey: You know, how do you engage with them before she comes on? Taylor Switz,

[00:08:33] Alex: if you are listening, he does want to work with you. So

[00:08:36] Joey: I do, I do. I want to engage with your audience. And the goal will be let them have a little bit of fun. With the phones that they have in their pockets, they scan in a QR code that you got projected on the big screen and the game is afoot and two minutes later or three minutes later when the game is over, you'll deliver digital collectibles or you'll deliver a QR code that can be used at the merch table or, you know, a coupon to Buffalo Wild Wings.

[00:09:04] Joey: I mean, to be

[00:09:05] Alex: honest, you don't really need her permission to do this because all the all the quiz data is you're going to show is publicly available information. Like I could see a fan page on on Instagram wanting to use this to collect emails and like engage their fans with, you know,

[00:09:18] Joey: rewards a hundred percent.

[00:09:20] Joey: So here I'll show you. So basically it's. These game shows you set when they start and when they end a QR code is generated immediately that can be scanned and you can jump into the game. The challenge that I've gotten as far as communicating the product is that this product can be used in real time.

[00:09:38] Joey: So at. 12 16 p. m. Which is what time it is here. I can start a game and at 12 18, it can end. So we have this live interaction. So cool. Use cases. Yeah. Use cases would be like the the concert venue or a trade show, or I'm live streaming on twitch appointment TV. I want to engage with the audience right here right now.

[00:10:00] Joey: And then we also allow it to have an evergreen mode, which It turns the game into more of like a Google form where anybody who shows up at any time can participate. So if you go to play. bizqiz. com, you can engage with a pickle palooza tournament, and that's in the evergreen mode. I'm just going to go to ESPN, try to find something, just going to grab random content.

[00:10:27] Joey: Oh, I don't know, foot surgery. Not the most interesting, but you can just essentially grab content. I'm copying. I'm going to jump back into the producer, and I'm going to create a quick event, and we're going to call this ESPN Now. Who knows? And I'm literally just pasting the content from ESPN. com. Hit creating, and what we're going to get Is a game is getting created and it should show up here and what's happening is we're going out to open AI, which is running a little slow today, so it might take 30 seconds.

[00:11:01] Joey: So I apologize for the delay. It'll go and crunch the content and turn it into a 1 minute trivia experience. The beauty is we've already got Holaplex plugged in, so there'll be digital rewards, right? So ESPN up. Nice. You didn't even have to

[00:11:21] Alex: refresh

[00:11:22] Joey: the page. Correct. So I'm just going to jump into this, right?

[00:11:26] Joey: There was a second quarterback out with a knee injury. So it just took that, was it Marlon Humphrey? I don't even, didn't even remember. Oh, Ryerson. So it took the raw content. It's turning it into.

[00:11:38] Alex: Yeah, let's read this one. It says, it says, which Ravens quarterback has a season ending toe injury? What was it?

[00:11:44] Alex: Who was it, Tyrone?

[00:11:45] Joey: Yes, sir. I just picked a random article. So you have seven seconds to

[00:11:50] Alex: How many Pro Bowls has Humphrey played? Three. I'm just guessing. Three. But like, a real fan would know this. You know, they

[00:11:58] Joey: probably would know. And the idea is we just took a random article. We just took a random article and I think we got zero points.

[00:12:07] Joey: We didn't get any of them correct. So what you see is we've got a scoreboard. So we didn't actually get any of them. We should have probably took something that I knew answers to. But what I wanted to communicate is that we just took Text turned it into a game show and it's taking off. We have digital rewards in place.

[00:12:26] Joey: If we would have answered one question correctly, we would have unlocked a claim pack. And these are all a Plex powered. Digital collectibles. They're all on the Solana network. I kind of want to answer a question right.

[00:12:40] Alex: Yeah, let's play again or play the pickleball one. Yeah, let's haven't already played it.

[00:12:44] Alex: Let's see if that one will unlock it.

[00:12:46] Joey: A hundred percent. Let's go hit up the pickleball one. I know

[00:12:49] Alex: nothing about pickleball, but I have some friends who like pickleball. The

[00:12:53] Joey: people who love pickleball are obsessed with the old pickleball. Every game has its own unique URL and private branding. So right now, the, the, the Biz Kids was a generic look.

[00:13:07] Joey: This pickleball is pickleball branded Taylor Swift. Oh, cool. Taylor Swift branded. So from a brand perspective, you control the messaging. Alright, so I know this one. So let's jump into, this is in an evergreen mode. So if you were to jump in and play, if you go to play biz kids.com, you'd see the exact same thing.

[00:13:25] Joey: The game's about ready to start. And then I'll show you, we'll answer one correctly. So I know wrist injury is the answer. It's the most common pickleball. That was the number

[00:13:33] Alex: one injury, yeah. Yeah, let's read the questions out loud for people who can't see that way they can

[00:13:37] Joey: Forgive me. Yeah, a pickleball's most common injury.

[00:13:40] Joey: So there'll be four questions and answers here. Who's considered the father of pickleball? McCallum, Grover, Bell, or Pritchard? Hmm. I know. I know all the answers to these. It's a trick question. Pritchard and Barney McCallum invented the game in 1965. There's an opportunity to put an interstitial in, reinforce, you know, whoever's paying for the project.

[00:14:03] Joey: And here's the leaderboard. Leaderboard, current standings, what's the pickleball equivalent of a home run, a dink, ace, kill shot, or volley? Kill shot. An ace. Ace. Yeah. One more question. What's the most popular pickleball paddle material? And I know this. Wood, graphite, aluminum, or composite? Oh gosh. I know.

[00:14:24] Joey: Pickleball folks know this like the back of their

[00:14:25] Alex: hand. It's getting expensive too, graphite. There you go. It's game to game. I'm sure that would cost 100 for

[00:14:31] Joey: a paddle. So what folks don't see is we have a leaderboard, live leaderboard in place. The good news is I logged in and I answered questions correctly.

[00:14:40] Joey: The way this game was set up is if I score a minimum of 50 points, I have the ability to unlock and I will have won a digital collectible. So what you're seeing on screen for the folks who can see are Solana based digital collectibles powered by Holaplex. So I'm just going to go claim. I've got four that I can go claim.

[00:15:01] Joey: And these are just random branded digital collectibles that we created. Again, it's all on chain. You have a wallet, but we don't call it a wallet. We call it a vault. So you have your own vault address. You know, we've got attributes, we've got all these classic digital collectible, blockchain based items.

[00:15:25] Joey: It's got an address. It's got a transaction ID. The other beauty is you can send, you actually own these digital collectibles. So you can transfer these to another location if you want. So if you want to send them. And

[00:15:39] Alex: now the brand can associate. the user's email with their wallet address and see like anything that one with hub, you can see like all the wallets and the addresses and if they transfer it out, you can actually track where they're transferring it to.

[00:15:54] Alex: So you get a lot of data about the user and you know, maybe even like what are their assets they might hold, which will help you with targeting and things like that for that, that direct relationship between like the wallet of the user and, and the customer. Oh cool. This is like analytics

[00:16:07] Joey: dashboard. So yeah, analytics.

[00:16:08] Joey: So this is opt in. And we're tracking you in kind of four dimensions. Web one, we've gathered an email address, you know, odds are you gave me a burner email on the way in. So, but we are capturing that. Number two, we are putting in a hidden pixel, so bring your own pixel. So if you're a HubSpot or you're a Google Analytics company.

[00:16:33] Joey: We can use your tracking pixel. So we, we have that just number two captured. If you're using the brave browser, you don't even show up. So that's not as effective. Number three, you've got a wallet associated with your engagement and that's permanent, right? So once you claim a reward, it'll be in that wallet and we kind of have a.

[00:16:56] Joey: Paper trail that you've opted into and a reward for your participation in the game and then number Four is we have a literal score So as you engaged with the content with the under the auspices of a you know a quiz game We know what you know, you know, we know if you're a pickleball expert or not a pickleball expert So why what it's really interesting.

[00:17:19] Joey: Yeah, why would I sell you a 300 paddle if you didn't know?

[00:17:23] Alex: The father of yeah, you just qualified that lead. That's pretty actually something I never thought about with the quiz game is like you, you qualified the customer and that's, that's really important. That's really cool. So why do you think it matters that they have the wallet that like the brands now have all this data, especially the wallet.

[00:17:39] Alex: I'm interested to hear what your opinion is on that. I

[00:17:42] Joey: think where wallets are interesting, you know, there's all these different uses of wallet. A wallet is a flex. You used to rock a Rolex on your wrist and sit in a conference room. And that's how you, you set yourself up at the pecking order. Now your public wallet address is your flex.

[00:18:00] Joey: Like if I go to a party and you know, I have this particular digital collectible. You know that I'm serious about this space. You know that I'm, I value, you know, what's going on in blockchain land. So the idea that if, if I were to win a digital collectible and I transferred it to another place, that might be my core wallet, I think there's an interesting story that develops a profile that's created and again, all opt in, not like sneaky Facebook way where they follow you home essentially, and they listen to you over your, your devices.

[00:18:33] Joey: Like this is. You've engaged with content, you've moved the collectible to a place that's tied to your identity. And then, ideally, I can maybe mark it to you, you know, long term.

[00:18:45] Alex: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Is there more on the screen you want to show, or should we go back to just like full, full picture faces?

[00:18:50] Joey: Yeah, yeah, I could turn it off. But the idea is reports content creation, and give the users a fun experience. One of the things that we're working on is the questions that we asked were Generic right now, you know, so four questions about pickleball. Great. But in the future, if there would be a fifth question that is derived from data that we've learned about, you know, your wallet that might be connected or your email address, you know, something, the example I like to give.

[00:19:22] Joey: I have two, two stories. One, I'm a huge Boston Celtics fan. I love hoops. Celtics are my team and Amazon. And Facebook had been showing me Lakers jerseys for 20 years. So you cannot tell me that this machine is accurately kind of targeting individuals, you know, because your suggestions are things that I would never buy in a million years.

[00:19:47] Joey: The other interesting. It story is my mother in law, you know, she's not an Amazon person. She doesn't know about subscriptions and just having stuff dropped to her house. So what we did is we sent her dog food for her dog, and she has an adult toy poodle. So what I did is I got her a subscription for dog food, and I bought an adult toy poodle dog food.

[00:20:09] Joey: And what I would see is adult toy. Recommendations for the next six months. Oh, my God. Right. And that's Amazon. That's the guys who are supposed to be. So I think there's a lot of broken recommendation engines. I think marketers are just pouring their money into a hole and it's inefficient. And with something as simple as a quiz game.

[00:20:33] Joey: I think we can target an audience a little bit better. And then we'll move away from quiz games. It'll be a little bit more interesting, a little bit. broader in the future.

[00:20:43] Alex: Well, yeah. And I think the interesting thing too, is that Amazon doesn't give the advertisers that data, like what's in your wallet, what's your past order history, for example, like I can see what's in your wallet.

[00:20:52] Alex: I know exactly what you've been or other products you would have interacted with. And it's composable across many platforms. That's where the exponential power comes from, from a targeting standpoint. It's like once you have that relationship with the customer and they start bringing that identity with them across many different places, you get an even more accurate picture and yeah, more effective, more effective marketing.

[00:21:13] Alex: And frankly, the consumer gets more, you don't want to be marketed like adult toys just because you ordered dog food, right? Like now you get accurately targeted with things you actually want to buy at some point or that you would be interested in. I think

[00:21:25] Joey: though the wallets are going to have an interesting future.

[00:21:28] Joey: Where they become, like, different profiles of myself. So, me as an NBA fan, I'm gonna have a wallet that will have my top shot and other things in it. And I want you to mark it to that wallet. That is the outward facing thing that I want to tell you about me. And then I'll have other wallets that will be about, you know, other hobbies or my professional life or So, I, I feel like the wallet is the The ultimate vehicle and the digital collectibles or NFTs that you own flesh out that profile.

[00:22:02] Joey: I'm a sports person. I'm a gamer. You know, I like to ride bikes.

[00:22:07] Alex: Yep. So, you know, I always ask this question towards the top of the show. What have I not asked you that I should have asked?

[00:22:13] Joey: Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if there's a question about me. I don't have a good answer for you.

[00:22:18] Alex: What's next for bizqiz?

[00:22:19] Alex: Like, where are you taking it? What's your vision for how big this can get? What's next for you?

[00:22:24] Joey: Well, the, the marketplace, the big dog in this kind of quiz space is Kahoot. Adult professionals might not know Kahoot. They might use it in the conference room, you know, once or twice a year for some gathering of the company.

[00:22:40] Joey: Anybody who's been in, in grade school in the past 10 years or high school. They know Kahoot like the back of their hand. It's just part of their learning. And they have a huge marketplace, but a huge market that they've captured. The problem with them is it's not for brands. It's Kahoot first and McDonald's brand second.

[00:22:58] Joey: And what we're trying to do with bizqiz is that your brand comes first. Like we can private label every piece of this. This is just an engine. We don't make money unless your audience gets engaged and you see a return on your investment. And everything we do is focused on that marketing person getting a return.

[00:23:17] Joey: So many folks are spending 50 grand a month and sending it over to Facebook and diminishing returns. And what we want to do is. Engage the crowd in a fun, simple, rapid onboard new way. I mean, that's

[00:23:32] Alex: the thing that I love about this. It is fun and it is simple. Like the tech under the hood is not simple, right?

[00:23:37] Alex: You've, you've weaved together some really interesting technologies that make this really useful and easy. But the idea of like doing quizzes, right? Like that's, that's pretty simple, right? And the, and engaging brands in that way. And I think that's part of what I love about it. Like there's so many complicated schemes that people have thought up for products in this space that have gone nowhere.

[00:23:55] Alex: And this is like, An existing market. I mean, brands are doing quizzes per se like this, but I do feel like it's an existing market and a concept. Everybody can understand. Gosh.

[00:24:05] Joey: Yeah, I'm going to like, take this quote and just put it on the front of my deck. You know, the hardest part is simple is hard. And then also there's this understanding that or assumption that simple is cheap.

[00:24:16] Joey: The problem is. You know, how do you communicate simple, show the value, and then maybe hide some of the technology. I feel like in the blockchain world, we love to brag about performance and we have all these acronym mumbo jumbo that noobs and normies don't care about. Like I just want the car to start when I send an email, it's going to show up in your mailbox.

[00:24:42] Joey: I don't care about everything else. So under the auspices of a simple quiz We're letting you play with some cutting edge stuff. You're engaging with content that robots created and we've leveraged the new of the new Give me 60 seconds and I'll get you more data about your customer base, your prospect base, than you'll get in any other 60 second interaction.

[00:25:04] Alex: Amazing. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure to have you and just happy to share more about bizqiz and your story with everybody. Thanks for being here. I appreciate

[00:25:14] Presenter: it, Alex. Thank you, sir.

[00:25:18] Presenter: You just heard the Index Podcast with your host, Alex Kahaya. If you enjoyed this episode, please give the show a five. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google, or your favourite streaming platform. New episodes available every other Wednesday. Thanks for tuning in.

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