FMS FinPub Pro

Their trading creators are processing $600 million/year of payments. Should FinPub pay attention?

• John Newtson

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FinPub Pro is produced by The Financial Marketing Summit, the #1 networking and marketing conference for financial newsletter publishers, trader educators, and digital financial media.

John Newtson, host and founder of The Financial Marketing Summit can be reached via LinkedIn at John Newtson

John Newtson:

All right, hey everyone. I got Blake here from WAP. I think everyone now has probably heard of WAP. Definitely everyone in FMS Pro has heard of WAP. Everyone in the broader FMS community probably has. Maybe not If you haven't. Wap is what I think of as one of these many walled gardens that we're seeing pop up, like Think Substack kind of a platform that has a bunch of publishers on it. Substack kind of a platform that has a bunch of publishers on it. Right, so WAP has been. I think it does more than finance, but you have a huge trading, education and trading service kind of business in there and they do a bunch of stuff from having the platform that helps process payments but also all these marketing opportunities on there. So today we have Blake Toves toves is that right? Tovez tovez, blake tovez um joining us. Blake's part of our fms pro community. Um, everybody in fms pro can hit him up in the discord. Um, thanks for being here, man yeah, it's uh.

Blake Toves:

It's finally good to be on, after I think it's almost almost a year. Got to make it out to an in-person event, though, um. I've connected with quite a few people in the community lincoln andrew, keen, um and hope to bring some folks from our side too into the fms pro community a lot of, uh, the creators, the people who are in the finance space on our platform. They wouldn't even know who agora was if you brought the name up.

John Newtson:

Yeah, so that's. It's funny because when I first started FMS there was there was the same separation, right. We had um kind of the trader education community and affiliate community, and then you had kind of a newsletter community and it and I was surprised too, because even then this was 2013, those two worlds didn't know each other existed and so we brought them together and that kind of became fms, um, and so it's funny because now we have that same thing happening um here, with all these new creators coming coming on and it's cool, it's exciting because that means there's lots of folks out there to do, do deals with, do business with um and yeah. So just kind of give the people who don't know wop um a little more of an overview. You want to kind of just give like a high level description of what the platform is and does.

Blake Toves:

Yeah, so WAP started as a small team out here in New York. That was originally like a launch pass alternative, so just a simple payment gateway that connected a Discord group with a payment processor and it took this whole niche of sneaker bots Discord group with the payment processor and it took this whole niche of sneaker bots. So folks who would pay to learn about when shoes would be at like a deeper discount and then buy them immediately. That was the first niche that they got into. And then every on the periphery folks who are interested in sneaker bots were also interested in trading and sports betting, and so they started to acquire a lot of Discord groups, not like buy them out but process payments for them. And it has since grown to now a billion dollar valuation with investors like Peter Thiel, some other folks who in the most recent round last summer I don't think I can name them, but if you go to Crunchbase you can see all the breakdowns of folks who've invested into it People like Chainsmokers, that one EDM artist. You got a lot of interesting people on the board.

Blake Toves:

And we're out here in New York. Behind me is this Domino factory. It's like a sugar factory that they stripped everything inside and put in a modern office and that's where we've mainly been working out of and it has since uh grown to from 60 million process last uh last year around the time 660 million a month, now 110 million a month and a lot of people they use us for processing, a lot of people use us for hosting their community. We're a fierce school and kanjabi competitor and many communities have been moving from those sites over to WAP, and one part because it's free to host your community on WAP and secondly, the payment processing capabilities are just way better than those two options. That's originally why I even came over to WAP.

Blake Toves:

It's been a year since I've been aware of this company and I just wanted for me, with the communities that I was consulting for, I wanted a seamless checkout process and some of these sites, like school at the time, did not have that.

Blake Toves:

So that was the initial pain point for me. But upon going deeper and deeper I realized, wow, wap really has something special here and for anybody who's in the FinPub space, they might find it useful to take a look at how WAP has been promoting itself on just as a brand, and you can learn about our creators through the YouTube channel, the WAP YouTube channel. We have, like these documentaries, these mini documentaries with each of the main creators that are on our platforms, people processing half a million, a million a month. We have these. We have our content guy go out and do it in person and think of it as a day in the life video. But we have a representative from our team that just talks about how they got their start and their entire business model, how they work, what their future plans are and we've been able to grow the YouTube channel quite well that way. We've been able to grow the YouTube channel quite well.

John Newtson:

That way, nice, as well as finance, just for for. I think at one point you guys are saying I think um trading offers were like the second biggest or one of the top, second biggest. So of that 110 million, you know offhand about what that is a month in processing through there.

Blake Toves:

Yeah, we're looking at around 50 million a month of it, right.

John Newtson:

so there's about $50 million a month in sales guys going through WAP's platform. So there's this, like you said, a lot of these kind of trading Discord communities, people who are creators.

Blake Toves:

Every model you can think of. Really, it could be a done-for-you trading algorithm that people are selling. It could be a simple for you trading algorithm that people are selling. Could be a simple discord community with no high ticket back in we're talking just low ticket.

John Newtson:

It could be entirely high ticket coaching program and everything in between yeah, and so for anyone who's been, you know the people who come to fms two years ago I talked about this in the state of finpub that, like, what we were seeing was an explosion in the the creator side of the finance subscription communities and that we were seeing them pop up all over the place and that that was one of the main trends that that we talked about in that state of FinPub. And so now you see, like here's a perfect example, you have a platform that's processing $50 million a month when what you said, like the bigger creators are doing, you know, maybe five to 500,000 million, 2 million a month. So a lot of that, there's a lot of like these successful smaller creators building great businesses there. And what's interesting to me is you can do there's the community side you guys have added recently the micro influencer kind of the clipper piece which I'm going to get into.

John Newtson:

You have the processing, but you're you're, like you said, you're replacing kind of a content management and community, uh, education piece that they can post on there. So it's kind of trying to go after being an all-in-one solution for, I would say, a more robust product mix than, say, like, substack and Beehive are very much focused on the newsletter, the email newsletter, and now, of course, substack has added some other features there, but their core thing was the newsletter, whereas you guys kind of took the rest of the marketing world, social media, discord communities, things like that and that seems to be like you built out from there, which is, I think, an interesting difference.

Blake Toves:

Yeah, and in fact there is no robust email marketing capability inside of WAP. The simplest version of that would be within, so you'd make a post and that post would be sent out via our email servers to the list of all your users. But there is no flow that you can build or broadcasting system. It's very non-email centric. It's very hyper-focused on the apps within the WAP ecosystem. The most recent cool thing is your own custom LLM custom chat GPT that people could ask questions about content that you have on your site, on your, within your community, and they would get an answer from a chatbot nice, nice, that's pretty cool and so just for that, I want to make this kind of point to the people who you know, email has been the driving force of sales for everybody for 20 some odd years.

John Newtson:

Um, it's like we're funny to be in a newsletter boom in other spaces when I'm like it's 25 years old, the e-letter um and uh. So there's resistance to anything that say, oh, we're not doing, we're an emo only kind of publisher and it's like that's kind of missing. The point here is that we know, like you know, sms has become an increasingly large part of sales for people in terms of um, sales channel. We also know that, like kind of this idea, I keep bringing this idea of walled gardens up, but just to kind of illustrate or expand on that for everybody, what I think one of the trends that we're seeing from a marketing perspective is that we're seeing these platforms and communities rise up that themselves represent a unique marketing opportunity and rather than say, hey, I need to have everything integrated on the back end of one system, we're seeing a lot of opportunity to generate revenue and sales by going onto these platforms, participating in them to some degree and having some of your business generating on WAP, it'd be like having something on Substack, because Substack is more than just the email capability anymore. There's an online community there and that's why they're able to have some discovery and people who are publishing they're able to generate. Like you know, 20 to 30 percent of their subscribers are coming from that platform, as opposed to just everywhere else.

John Newtson:

And so I think that this idea of participating in multiple platforms like WAP, like Substack, like Beehive that's becoming more important, and it also represents a lot of opportunity for people who are just doing the same thing and having acquisition issues, because there's a lot of acquisition, specifically the acquisition opportunity. That's exciting to get somebody who has a more established business to move over to a platform, right. And so, with that, I'd like you to like let's start with kind of that piece right, there's a ton of capabilities on the back end in terms of content, but let's start with like what is this Clipper network and what does that represent to people in terms of actually acquiring customers? Clipper Network and what does that represent?

Blake Toves:

to people in terms of actually acquiring customers. So with the onset of creators promoting products, you have short form content on every single platform, blowing up brands, and we found that Drake and many other artists have started using their own fan base to get free work essentially not all the way free, but you say you're a big artist and you want to get more views. Overall, like a brand awareness campaign, you would load up money inside of WAP and we would have a clipper manager signed your account if it's big enough and would organize your fans to edit all the content. You'd have a google drive with all the videos that you'd want them to make edits of and they would create their own fan page accounts and post those videos on there. And the way the algo works is often new accounts. They get a nice little boost and the potentiality of going viral on those accounts versus just consolidating all the videos onto one account. Virality potential goes up. So the way that the Clippers are incentivized is they get paid on every like a CPM. Every 1000 views that they may get, they'll get paid $1 $2. If one in particular goes crazy it's 100,000 views maybe there's a bonus, and so there's different incentives that you can have for folks within the uh content rewards program. Paying them based off views is the simplest way to think about. So, especially for anybody who has like a guru facing business, they would find great utility in using this. It's especially if this guru has high energy and is reacting a lot to the markets.

Blake Toves:

One of the largest brands on the platform, tjr, trades this guy in his early 20s, based out of Puerto Rico. Many of his videos are of him. It's vertical, with him at the top and then the chart that he's trading with at the bottom and he's explaining what's going on with the chart, maybe reacting to it, maybe and when I say react I mean he is uh like yelling at a screen or he's showing something. That's where there's a unique, useful insight, but it's entertaining at the same time. So think of whatever long form video that explains a concept like support and resistance.

Blake Toves:

He's going to explain that in a short form. He's going to explain that in a short form and if he does that in a creative way can reach a pretty broad audience and maybe has a like how the creativity potential is endless. You could Some folks I'll just speak on the gambling niche because I've seen it they will have their laptops open in the middle of a convenience store and they'll be game and they'll have people that are just walking around them like hey, should I put it all on red or black? And then just you know stuff like that, and so something could be comparable to the trading space.

John Newtson:

But I got an example what's exciting about it is is, and and one of the things that and we'll be talking about this more and more in fms pro is that the one of the highest roi and we'll be talking about this more and more in FMS Pro is that one of the highest ROI spaces right now for acquisition is micro-influencers, and that is going out to people like this who have a small channel, have some kind of reach, and trying to get them to go out there and build views for you and drive them to some kind of a lead gen opportunity. Drive them to some kind of a lead gen opportunity. And some of the numbers that I'm hearing and I can't say from everybody in who there are pretty ridiculous numbers, like numbers we haven't seen in acquisition for quite a while. People who are spending, you know, are getting like 10 to one or more ROIs for every dollar spent, and at pretty substantial scale too.

John Newtson:

We're talking over $10 million, and so I think that's the really exciting thing here is that here's a platform that has specifically a marketing opportunity that lets you come in and have a bidding system for micro-influencers. So most of the things that I see out there you're finding an agency, which is great, or you have people who are just doing cold emails and outreach and cold DMs to people to see if they can get them to do something like this, and so having a platform that lets you go to people, small creators specifically, who are doing stuff in trading space too because there's a lot of offers there, so they're out there. It's a lot of offers there, so they're out there it's a really exciting little thing. That's probably not so little in terms of Do you have any idea on what kind of revenues driven or leads have been driven with that?

Blake Toves:

Yeah, it's a pretty brand awareness oriented campaign where when somebody assesses the ROI, they look at how much money am I making per follower in general.

Blake Toves:

And if my funnel is to sell via my Instagram from the Instagram stories or even from DMs, then it's very relevant for me to run this sort of campaign. Then it's very relevant for me to run this sort of campaign. But say, you just have something as simple as like a link to your newsletter and bio and you command all of your Clippers to make sure they have that link in there. Then you could track it that way and you can make it about your newsletter and generate email signups from that. So, and you could, for anybody, anybody watching this as you watch this you can go to wop right now, make an account and go to the discover section and see the types of affiliate offers on there, as well as the, the communities that have the most bounties available, bounty as in the, the ones who are getting the most out of WAP's content rewards ecosystem they're loading up the most amount of money. I don't know if it makes sense to share.

John Newtson:

Yeah, why don't you pull it up? And I'll just share your screen, Okay cool.

Blake Toves:

Cool and there's a lot. Hit the WAP page like this. You have explore, you have leaderboards, but if you go to leaderboards you go to trading. You can see on these categories what are the newest companies as it relates to trading that were just created. The most addicting meaning the most time spent. It even gives you a breakdown right here. So most addicting is a list of WAPs ordered by the most time spent inside the WAP for each user in the last 24 hours. So for this one, gold pips 86,000 or 87,000 minutes has been spent in the last day in this specific free signals group Nice. It's a Forex group and then you have options inside of Pro Shows the minutes I like to go to most money made. That's a really fun one. It used to be where you could see the exact amount of money people were paid, but we removed that feature because some folks didn't like it. But you can see real clearly which companies are making the most. I'll tell you the ones at the top. Here. They're doing a million a month.

John Newtson:

So then, just the $20,000, $10,000 a month. What do those members represent?

Blake Toves:

So maybe the top ones. They sell high ticket, but this one in particular is a low ticket group.

John Newtson:

Okay, so those are the prices of the products.

Blake Toves:

Yes.

John Newtson:

Okay, which is another thing.

John Newtson:

That that's.

John Newtson:

It seems like a lot of this, not all of it, but there's a lot of this working towards high ticket funnels, right, and and I think that's important for people to realize, because this is a lot of social content and, yes, there's also paid ads.

John Newtson:

They'll send the bio advertising to their funnel, but a lot of this social traffic is still going to high ticket funnels, right, and there's a couple of things with that. One is it speaks to quality of traffic, right, people are buying $20,000 products. But also that, like, the high ticket sales funnel, like with phones, is increasing. It's increasingly being used across not just FinPub, but like the whole biz op industry, the whole internet marketing industry, because, as everything else got harder and more expensive, like you need that high ticket to make things work, but it's working really well. And so, again, people who don't have a high ticket phone kind of operation or set up like it's a missed opportunity. But also, just in terms of WAP, the fact that you can go on a network and people are driving, you know, views into things that are generating customers on super high ticket prices on products is, um, I think, a big change over the last five years, whereas we have a lot of people who've been in the business for a long time.

Blake Toves:

And here's that, by the way, the bounties so you can earn one dollar per 1 000 views. Earn three hundred dollars per 1 million views yeah, they position it before you end it.

John Newtson:

I just want again because I'm trying to put this in the context for people who've been in the industry for you know, we have people been in here for 20 years, 30 years um, you know, tests that happened five years ago on different networks, like people you know, like oh, that doesn't work. And then we always say it's usually when they're too early, we try things too early and then it didn't work until you kind of ignore it. But like, uh, the micro influencer piece, like it's working. Now it's been working for the last year and a half really well, maybe two years, and it's crushing it and so, having that kind of component, I can't stress enough how much it's worth testing for folks. And so, yeah, if you want to go back to the bounties and show the bounties is the bidding system right, yep.

Blake Toves:

And an issue people would have with this is well, how do I know if the views are real and it's not just a bunch of bot traffic or low quality traffic? We have a tool that allows you to look into that and verify. Oh, this is not the type of traffic that I would want to pay for, and you specify that. For each of these that you see here, there are rules specified in detail on what they look for to qualify for those payouts.

John Newtson:

So what kind of qualifications can you put in there?

Blake Toves:

Oh well, like you can qualify for a payout if you got 1,000 views and it was from first world audience, like us, canada, and yeah, that's, that's the simplest one, and we have a tool that checks for that right, and then when you submit, uh, the bounty, you can put parameters, including regulatory issue things.

Blake Toves:

Oh yeah, it can't be said right, yeah, you could say do not mention these words and have all the words there, okay, or these language, and in the same way that an affiliate program would be set up for highly regulated offers, you would do that Nice.

John Newtson:

Right. So what else does WAP do that maybe we don't know about?

Blake Toves:

We have this app store. People can submit different apps. That allows them to create more value in the WAPs, the products that they sell. So for those who maybe are thinking one-dimensional in that oh, I have course I have coaching, I have community Well, there's other useful tools in here that some people would argue would be their own SaaS that you charge on a monthly basis for this syncs up people's bets.

Blake Toves:

There are, like that AI tool I had mentioned earlier on the call Wisp, I believe you can scroll through here and see a few and this is what, oh yeah, a companion that will tell people about the content in your web community and you install it and once it's installed, you can configure it for your, for your people. You can have support tickets, a simple image editor. You can play Squid Game in your WAP Things that make it sticky. Because the entire team were not just focused on the amount of people processing money through the platform. The engineering team focused on how do we get people to stay on the platform and visit it multiple times a day, every day of the month, because we're playing the venture capital game and those metrics matter when you're attempting to raise even more money or whenever you're talking to your board of advisors, letting them know hey, we have a healthy ecosystem. People are actually using the product. You can host giveaways. You can have a map where all of the folks inside of your community can be viewed.

John Newtson:

All right. So what are the processing fees here?

Blake Toves:

Oh yeah, so we can get into the finance and processing side my favorite one. Oh yeah, so we can get into the finance and processing side my favorite one and you have most of our million dollar a month. Accounts are at stripe rate or we can beat it. For anybody who just comes off the street and makes a WAP account without talking to anybody on the team, they're at a 6% total processing fee because they can self onboard. We don't know what they're going to do. Often, if they talk to us, we can get the rate down substantially.

Blake Toves:

It depends on what their volume is. It depends on what their dispute rate is and their industry Oftentimes the industry not as much, but the dispute is a big deal. And then many people have come to us not even to process their payments but for financing, because they have high ticket offers. We have one stock options group that does 2 million a month or more and they run about 37% of their volume through one of our financing options. And because we're so big, we have negotiation power, and so SplitIt is a company that we're engaged with Klar, afterpay or other solutions to we have access to, but split it as one that is exclusive with us at the moment, and that's a unique product I could go in several minutes about, but that's just yeah let's not.

John Newtson:

Let's talk about that, because it's a nice um, it's an interesting financing option for high tickets. So, yeah, what, what's the deal with the? Just just kind of give a quick overview of what you can do with split it.

Blake Toves:

Can I bring in my guest? Uh, derrick, who is our head of payments? Let's put it up. All right, let's bring him in good timing. What's up? Hey, derrick, take a seat I'm in frame.

Derek:

I'm in frame. Um, what's going on On the split it piece? Perfect segue into a conversation around that. Yeah, to Blake's point, we have many buy now, pay later options that the higher ticket guys are really focused on, split it being our bread and butter right now. Traditionally with split it they were e-commerce physical product only and you had to be doing 10 to 15 million a month top line to be considered for an account. After some work with them, we're introducing it to the digital coaching high ticket space in a way that they never really considered prior and by doing so we're taking over some liability, a little bit of the risk, as well as the underwriting to give it to businesses that traditionally couldn't have got it.

Derek:

So the way that Splitit's working is, as a credit card nerd, it's just a hyper creative credit card transaction and so it acts as a pre-auth on a customer's credit card. If you send somebody, for example, a 12K USD payment link, they're going to on our interface, get an option for a 3, 6, or 12-month payment plan option and through this flow there's no social, no ID, no address, upload, nothing outside of a standard credit card information link for uploading information on. They enter standard billing materials, credit card number. They choose between three, six or 12 months and they're presented with an interest-free financing option for let's use the example 12 months. What happens on that 12K payment link, right, is it shows up on their credit card as $11,000 pending and $1,000 goes to to be paid, acting as a standard credit card transaction, right. 30 days later, another $1,000 goes to to be paid, acting as a standard credit card transaction, right. 30 days later, another $1,000 shears off that pending and goes over to to be paid, and so on, so forth, for 12 months, and I use the 12K for that 12 month example of it will always be just that $1,000 flat. On that numerical example, there's no origination fee, no extra fees of any sort, and it's just a standard transaction in the eyes of a credit card processing company, in comparison to traditional buy now, pay later financing so not needing credit checks of any sort allows us to offer this in 17 different countries all of the eu, australia, canada, working on mexico next and a little bit of latin america. But we genuinely believe we're the first product offering for instant buy now, pay later for those countries outside of Canada or the US. For the most part, merchants get paid in four days, nice and easy, and I know we were talking fees there a second ago. Internally, knowing the types of businesses we were going to offer it to, we spent a lot of time determining what we wanted to price it at and we just came to the conclusion that pricing that 15 flat rate to the merchant and no interest or no fees whatsoever to the customer was the best route.

Derek:

Uh, to the stocks stock option trading account that blake had mentioned, they're doing significant volume through this program and, anecdotally, what their sales reps are running is just saying hey it, for example, it's 10k today or 11 000 to finance it for 12 months. They're just passing through 10 flat business eats five, which is below what they're paying. Most accounts are paying with clarna firm K today, or 11,000 to finance it for 12 months. They're just passing through 10% flat business eats five, which is below what they're paying. Most accounts are paying with Klarna firm after pay anyways Right, and so they're saving a little bit.

Derek:

Their customer eats the 10 nice and easy in comparison to interest that they would see within a firm or a Klarna in most cases, and that framing and that that selling of it has turned into. The biggest guys are using it for the financially qualified but price sensitive prospects. Right, this isn't an end-all, be-all golden standard, the last financing option you'll ever need, but it's fantastic for the guys that are doing numbers, that have sales teams losing deals to financially qualified prospects, which arguably, are the worst deals to lose. Right, they had the money but they just didn't buy and and so implementing it there for sales teams is what's turned it into, like their ace up their sleeve in most of the programs we've seen.

John Newtson:

Nice, nice. Do you have any evidence, anything or otherwise, on kind of bumps they're getting?

Derek:

Yeah, so that stock option trading account that Blake had mentioned, that's just one of our favorite case studies is Blake had introduced them and we spent a lot of time onboarding them early to our relationship. They were looking at 1.6, 1.7 million a month as a record prior to working with us. They were trying every financing solution under the sun um, in a bunch of different creative ways uh, different Stripe accounts and their cousins, mom's, sister's name, right To have an Affirm account for 11 minutes, then it'd blow up, right, and so we had brought them in. We added split it and it was funny. On the initial sales call they just said, hey, if we do 2 million this month, the whole sales team is going out to Monaco for F1. And I was like I'm already going, so I'm going to meet you guys there.

Derek:

What month specifically? That was April. We added them April 21st. They basically ran all the volume that they had through the rest of that month through Splitit, doing 600 grand in nine days and that for that team was monstrous. It was insanity. And now they're hovering between that 2.1, 2.6 mil a month since April and it's only been two months of an example. But yeah, it was insanity and that was our first really crazy use case of someone using significant uh, or using it for a significant amount of their volume. And so that's when the study we're bringing up to everybody now of like, if you're running 40 percent ish, you know give or take of your volume through this and you're at scale, you're going to see an insane and uptick in conversions that's killer, that's.

John Newtson:

I appreciate that. So I have the payments guy on here real quick. This is a lot of this is high process or high risk processing, right, yeah, so what kind of like you have you have beyond just the this, this product overall? Like, what are you guys doing for your processors and how are you handling the fact that you do have high risk kind of product lines in some of these places?

Derek:

Of course, when I joined WAP, we were single PSP running everything through Stripe, and this is like we've talked about this across all the socials a lot. We were Stripe only and we were doing very well. All things considered, we have a fantastic relationship with Stripe on a merchant of record level relationship, which puts us in in between as a buffer, as taking full liability. We still run tons of our volume through Stripe as a platform and this is also like publicly available that we talk about a lot. But we also have five PSPs as well that are stacked on the back end, that are layered in and that are orchestrated through, and so we now have a cascading payment orchestration platform that is optimized for the highest likelihood of authorization on a transaction, depending on region, ticket size, card brand, so on and so forth.

Derek:

And so through those PSPs, we just went through extreme underwriting with them taking full liability as a merchant of record provider and just basically negotiating terms of we're going to onboard deals that you guys normally don't board, but because we're holding full liability, let's just not worry about it, right? That's kind of the framing. And then, down into the depths of it, we've just established our own risk policies, what we're willing to do and what we're not willing to do. And there's certain verticals, neutral related stuff male enhancement, excessive FTC related trading offers right. The stuff that you know is violating one or 37 policies or regulations right. We don't touch almost any of that right. But if it's staying within standard laws and a majority of the world will board the deal in the high risk realm. But we're sticking to that digital info, coaching, fulfillment style businesses versus the physical, which makes it much easier on our end to be able to support them longer term versus-.

John Newtson:

Yeah nice, that's awesome. So when somebody comes on board like are they getting a kind?

Derek:

of a.

Blake Toves:

Is there a person they talk to, or is it?

Derek:

general rep. Yeah, we have self onboarding. Anyone can go and create an account for free and onboard you. We we limit many features for self onboarding individuals or merchants just because a lot of them are very like hyper-specific use case. But if you were to come through a sales rep, which is basically almost referral only, we don't have a real flow for onboarding through a sales rep, as our best relationships are through referrals.

Derek:

Always you come in through one of our sales reps or anybody on our growth team and we get a good understanding of the business. We know what specific features to roll out to you, what financing to do. We ask about previous chargeback history, the risk of the account, overall right and your average tickets to determine you know what are max ticket links that you can create, what pricing are we going to put them at. To Blake's point about our different pricing on credit card and financing, and then we kind of white glove onboard every deal of scale and so that stock option trading account we mentioned. Like the day that we onboarded them I got on a Zoom with their entire organization, the whole group, and then we had like 30 plus people on there and we did a full training on how to use the entire platform, how to frame selling with these different options, what credit authorization rates look like, so on and so forth. And so those white glove style accounts. We love spending time with Cooler cooler.

John Newtson:

I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. Is there anything else you think that you know established publishers should know about the platform and what you guys do? The embedded checkout.

Derek:

We have recently rolled out embedded checkout. It's been something that we fought tooth and nail for as a merchant of record. That's very difficult to get around. Traditionally, merchant of record requires it to be completely within our ecosystem. The checkups would have to be on a WAPcom URL. Recently rolling out the ability to embed our full payment stack, our upsells, our downsells, all our order bumps, into your go high levels, your click funnels, your web flow sites, whatever it may be. And now direct integration to go high level, working on closeio as other CRMs as well. Full Zapier integration, makecom, so on and so forth. But we have extensive webhook API capacity and now, with the embedded checkout, we're seeing larger offerings and publishers integrate us into their funnels. Finally, because they just hated our UI, which is fair right. Everyone has their obsessions with retention and conversion optimization, and so now that we can embed into your existing pages, we're seeing a sick uptick in bigger offers taking advantage.

John Newtson:

Killer. That's great. Yeah, awesome. No, that's cool. Guys, I appreciate it. This is cool. I think a lot of people are interested in this and becoming more interested in it, like I said, that we're pushing, there's so many new traffic opportunities for folks and as other ones kind of slow down, you know they got money to spend and looking for places to spend it.

Derek:

Yeah, the FinPub circle is a different circle than majority of the other biz opt style or, like copywriting, whatever different industries or niches that we've broken into very well. We're excited to keep breaking into the FinPub because it's the most tried and true, longest standing publishing circle in my opinion, and it's also the best people to work with every time. So we're excited to keep getting introduced to it.

John Newtson:

That's where Agoras came out with the first e-letter in 99, I think yeah, yeah, we've been doing email newsletters forever and publishing so yeah, no, it's a great community and they got a lot of great businesses there and so, um, I've been excited to kind of talk to you guys and hopefully have you guys out at FMS is coming up here. Uh, we have to line that up so sweet. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on here. I think this is awesome. I'll get this out to everybody. Um, if anyone has any questions, um, if you're an FMS pro, you can hit Derek up or you can hit Blake up in the, uh, fms discord. Um, if you have any other questions, if you're not in FMS pro, just hit me up and I'll make a connection.

Derek:

So, sweet, Appreciate the time and listening to the payments ramp, uh rambling there.

John Newtson:

No, no, that's what I love People who know what the hell they're talking about, rambling about what they look with what they're what they're doing. So that's the thing. So I appreciate you guys. Thanks.

Derek:

Beautiful Thanks, John. Have a good one man. We'll talk soon, okay, Thank?

John Newtson:

you Take care Bye.