An Introduction to Pickax w/CEO @jeffdornik

I've had to come in like three times before I finally got a mic. Oh, we just played yo-yo. I heard you. So it's still the only thing. This is why we can't have nice things. No. Hi, everybody. Hope you're having a good day. Well, you know what's interesting. When I posted about pickaxe, I said, oh, this is a great fit for me. It's the first time I'm able to post my vaccine stuff without censoring. It caused, I got a lot of issues. Like I had people abashing me for trying to move people to another app. Like it was much nonsense going on. And then I noticed the space I was in right after that, the minute we brought it up, we started having issues. I don't know if that was just my paranoia or not, but just to keep, just to let everyone know, if there's some issues, just do what Altrus said, maybe just update or I don't know. Well, they were also with pickaxe. They were forcing people who were promoting it to put paid sponsorship. Under the tweet, you know, how there's that option and people who were not being paid to promote pickaxe, who were just shaping their, saying their opinion, had to put that in. Yeah, that was, that was a full on throttling tactic. One million percent, nobody was paid for that. That's something that I think is just irritating beyond. But I understand worth threat. It's, I could get it, you know, we're competitors. I totally understand that. But one other random thing I just want to say real quick is, I don't know if Jeff will repeat this, but I'll just very briefly say that we're not, our goal is to not get you to, hey, drop everything you've ever built on Twitter or Twitch or kick or, or, or, or Gab or, or whatever, or sub-stack, but like we're not trying to get people to completely drop what they're doing and come over to pickaxe exclusively. Like all we want to do is give you an additional outlet. We're, we're not here to suppress anybody. It's full freedom of speech and a handful of other things, which we'll get into. I'll save all the good stuff. But we just want to be able to help and assist. We really truly are coming from a selfless place. And right now the streamer economy, the influencer economy, the creation economy, like everything in general. I think quite frankly it sucks. It needs a lot of work. And we want to be able to help everybody and to give them additional outlets to monetize and a handful of other things too. So we're going to be getting to some really, really good stuff. I really appreciate everybody's patience. And I think I just saw my man Jeff show up. What's up, mate? All right. We're just waiting for OG. She should be here momentarily. Anyway, guys, I, with everything with social media, AI, creators and all that stuff, I took it upon myself to create a little intro and outro song for this space. So do me a solid. Listen to this and share, repost this out. Let's get this room filled up. Here's the start of the space. Here it is. This is called Pick X. As usual, everything fails me here. Smitty Jeff is here in KFC. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to try to step to question a joke. You know, no one's in. We're riding, we're connecting. Stop running clean. No bias, which is hiding. I'm going to see. Welcome. Welcome. Yeah, it's Smitty. I'm real quick. I got to interrupt. Please, please send me that song. I would love to do a drum cover of that. Please. I'm putting everything in the purple pill. And everybody, if you have any questions, like I said, we're going to kind of keep it limited to speakers. And I want to really focus on talking with Jeff and Chaz. But put questions that you might have in the purple pill. And we'll definitely get to those. But we definitely first off, we want to welcome Jeff. Can you hear us? I can hear you. Thanks for being on. Hey, Jeff. Welcome. I'm really interrupting. Oh, there she is. Never mind. She was having connection with you. Welcome, Jeff. And all of it. Yeah. Wait till you hear the closed song. I made two bangers. I was quite thrilled with it. So, and they got the lyrics and everything. With the signal app, you can make some pretty fun songs and stuff. So, you know, with content creators, this is what Pickaxe has kind of derived for. And Jeff, I just want to get into it real quick. I understand you used to be an advertiser in New York and then COVID happened. And then Elon bought the app, bought X, and that kind of put the idea of developing a social media. So, can you kind of give us the initial thought process and kind of what took it from idea to product and to launch and how it's been scaling? I know my friend, Farrell Housewife, she's been bugging me for months. Get over here. Get over here. Get over here. And I finally did. And I was like, oh, man, this is pretty cool. So, the floor is yours, Jeff. Like, give us, I understand you, the idea was in 2023. Then you were in development for about a year and a half or what? Yeah. It's interesting, too, because it's like, you know, when you look back at your life and you know, for me, I'm a Christian. And so, you kind of see God's hand in your life. And if one single thing didn't happen in your life trajectory, then you wouldn't be where you are today. And it's really, you know, because it's like, I went to school in college to go into youth ministry and, you know, hang out with a bunch of high school kids and, you know, mentor and teach and train and all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, fast, fast forward, you know, I, you know, having like a bunch of jobs and everyone in the ministry because the real estate market crash in 2008 was, and nobody was hiring in churches. And it was a bunch of, was a part of a bunch of startups. And then, you know, one thing led to another, and then I became the VP of operations in an advertising agency in New York. COVID hit, they fired everybody that wasn't actively working on a campaign. And that's when I started podcast network, called Freedom First Network. And we ended up, you know, building that up pretty quick, where it's getting usually 50,000 to 100,000, you know, views and episodes across the entire network. And, but at the same time, we also got censored off of pretty much every single platform you can possibly imagine. And including X, you know, at the time, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, Bandus at one point, not only did they ban us, but then they went after a podcasting host and told them you're not allowed to have freedom for network on your hosting platform, or else you won't be able to distribute any show to Spotify. So we dealt with a lot of censorship, you know, dealing with all that fast forward to Elon, buying Twitter and then converting it to X. And he came out with this policy, trying to claim that he's a free speech apps ludicitor. And, you know, we're gonna have a free speech platform. And finally, a free speech social media platform that's, you know, a big tech thing. And they come out with this policy called Freedom of Speech, but not Freedom of Reach, which means that you're technically allowed to say whatever you want, but that doesn't mean that they have to let anybody actually see it. And which is, which by definition is not conducive to the first amendment, which literally talks about a bridging speech. That's what the government's not allowed to do is a bridge speech, which, you know, translates that it means to limit speech, which is exactly what Freedom of Speech, but not Freedom of Reach means. And so I saw that. I saw the writing on the wall, and I had the opportunity to pitch this idea to, you know, who ended up becoming my investor. And we ended up getting it funded, started building it out in 2023. We officially launched the app. We were in beta for about, you know, six months or nine months, but we officially launched the app in February. And then we had kind of a, you know, decent launch and all that. And then in July, or technically we announced it in June, we announced our rev share program and where creators can start earning revenue on pickaxe. And then we went from in June, we had 60,000 post views for the entire month. So we are still, you know, extremely small. And we went from 60,000 to the month, the first month of our rev share, we had 180,000 views. Then the next month we hit 580,000 views. And then last month we hit 1.7 million views. And this month we're already on trajectory to hit at least 2 million views, if not more. And so it's been a wild ride. It's been a lot of fun. But it's like now we're finally beginning to see some of that traction, some of that growth scaling on boarding a bunch of new people completely organically where I'm not having to pay for advertising. It's just, you know, you guys and the audience and our users and all that kind of stuff, actually just sharing their experience of people are coming on and loving it. And so I'm really excited about the future. I'm excited about a lot of the things we're working on and developing and going to be rolling out over the next, you know, even like six months, it's going to be a game changer in the social media space. So I'm really excited. And yeah, that's kind of what's led up to where we are today. Yeah, I mean, I know I've gotten probably 10 people on there, like a handful today alone. We got Mulberry on, we got Money Penny, huge creators content. What they're doing is very valuable. Sue got on, you know, OG Moonlit might not be freer. He does a YouTube podcast. Like so, I mean, like it Ferris was really talking about it. Ferrell Housewife, they're both longtime friends of mine. And so it is, it's just been organic. And it's nice, it's really cool to see friends that we have over here, over there. And we're like, oh yeah, you're over here too now. So it's been cool. You guys just recently rolled it out too, like the iOS or to the app based. Cause I think you initially started basically PC based. But here in what the last five, six months you started the app roll out. Do you have both four iOS and Android or? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's both both iOS and Android. And I think that for us, we have a lot more iOS users. So the Android, I think, I think is still a little buggy. We're still working on that, but because we don't have as many people using the Android app as we do iOS, we do when you think about it, we don't have as many beta testers. So we always tell everybody, give us feedback, tell us how to fix it and help us to make it the best one possible. So if you guys are on Android, definitely use it, send us feedback and we'll keep making it better. What about is this right now constrained to just the United States only or is it worldwide? I mean, I know money pennies, she's UK based, available worldwide PC or what's any country restrictions or limitations at the current present moment. Yeah, technically right now, we are US based only. I mean, we don't necessarily advertise it, but I mean, anybody theoretically can join on the web version. And a lot of it and a lot of people don't understand why, but running a platform, there's several different logistical things that we have to deal with. Number one, we have to deal with if we allow international people on as creators, then we have to deal with international finance and taxes and reporting.