Chasing Financial Freedom
Chasing Financial Freedom
Ep 294 | 7 Game-Changing Strategies for Real-Time Community Engagement & Advertising
Ever wonder how small businesses could transform their advertising game and engage with their community in real-time? Join us as we dive into an illuminating conversation with David Van Beekum, the brilliant mind behind Tweva, the first social TV network tailored for local influencers and small enterprises. David will discuss his tech-savvy upbringing and Tweva's innovative strides since its inception in 2019. Learn how this revolutionary platform allows businesses to showcase their content, play interactive games, and gain community recognition.
Explore the groundbreaking features of Tweva's local advertising model, from an ingenious bid strategy to a non-competing ad policy that fosters community support. Discover how GPS integration and a unique reward system with Tweva coins set new targeted, affordable advertising standards. David passionately shares his vision for scaling Tweva globally, offering invaluable insights into the future of social TV and localized marketing. You won't want to miss this exciting episode packed with innovative ideas and opportunities!
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Hey guys, ryan DeMett from Chasing Financial Freedom Podcast. Hope you guys are having a great day. Today on the podcast, we have David Van Beekum. David is a co-founder, inventor, author, tech enthusiast and patent holder, but this is a pretty cool thing that he's working on. He's the co-founder of Tweva, the world's first social TV network for small businesses and influencers, so we're gonna talk about that, sir. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hey, ryan, thanks for having me on the show. Very excited, very excited.
Speaker 1:You're more than welcome. I know it was a little bit of a wait, but we'll get this sucker turned around for you quickly and get it out. Before we get started in talking about what you're doing, can you give the listeners a little bit of your background and who you are?
Speaker 2:Sure, so my name is David Van Beekum. I grew up around electronics from a very young age. I had a video mixer underneath my bunk bed when I was probably eight years old. I had a 32 channel mixing board when I was about 10 or 12. I had reel-to-reels, vcrs and computers galore. So I grew up around technology and I've always been fascinated with computers, technology and not physical labor. I will say that my dad was a electrical contractor and he did a lot of the physical labor. I, whenever I went to it, I'm like, yeah, I like sitting there and just figuring things out and building things. So it's been quite a while since then, of course. So it's been quite a while since then, of course, but recently, with Tweva and bringing the TV idea to market, has been sole focus pretty much in getting this thing launched.
Speaker 1:How long has it taken you to get from conception to where you're at today with Tweva?
Speaker 2:We started I believe it was 2019 with the idea, maybe it was 2018 towards the end, and we were sitting down with a few of our investors beginning ideas and saying, like, how do we create something for small businesses that they could control in their establishment? And you go through a couple of revisions, right. You say, hey, let's make a slideshow TV. And then you go, okay, that's cool, but that's not the coolest thing. And there's some other people that that's cool, but that's not the coolest thing. And there's some other people that were actually doing something like that. But it's always in revision, right. You always come up with new ideas and building things, but it's been a couple of years now since about 2019, 2020.
Speaker 1:So can you describe Tweva and what it does? So some people that are listening are not techie, so we'll have to give them a little bit more of a run, but can you describe what it does? Sure.
Speaker 2:So I always tell people it's the first world's first TV social network. But essentially what it is, it's giving the TV the first ability to have two-way communication with everybody in the room, right? So if you are at a bar and you're sitting there and you're like, hey, I want to show you these awesome pictures where I was just on vacation, you're showing that maybe to one person. But if you were to be able to share that onto the TV, that would be an established two-way connection. Or maybe you'd be able to play a game with the TV and that would also be a two-way connection Scavenger hunts or something like that. But essentially it's a social network, right? So you can interact with it and others can interact with it influencers and content creators. Even this podcast, you could show a clip of it at different locations at different times.
Speaker 2:I don't know about you, I'm not crazy about sports, I'm a nerd. There's others have shared the same. My wife loves football. I'm like, okay, how do you play it? And I've been watching it 10 years At a bar. My head or my eyes would tend to go to other TVs, other TV screens. And if there was a podcast, or if there was something about business or something about technology. Most likely my eyes would be there and I think a lot of us tend to watch influencers and content creators. It's up and coming. It's not filtered by big media companies. Right, it's some of the latest cutting edge technology, but it's not really being shared publicly. You have to go on YouTube, you have to go somewhere else, and Tweva allows all of us to be able to create content and share it publicly to create content and share it publicly.
Speaker 1:So how does one? If you were wanting to put your social media out on Tweeva or you're an influencer, how does one get on it?
Speaker 2:So you have to go through a small approval process and then you'd also have to get approved by those specific locations, right, so that we can look through that content. But you join the network and you'd create content and share it on a first few TVs in specific locations. It's really from a hey, there's a lot of content creators out there. Can they share the picture of a croissant and coffee? They're sharing it on their Instagram, their digital. But if you were sitting next to that person, you wouldn't know if they had 500,000 followers. You might think, oh, okay, somebody's taking a picture of some food.
Speaker 2:This way, it allows that person to become an expert or a person of influence to that local community also, just besides online. And that kind of happened from when we were putting in one of the TVs in one of my government buildings in my city and I was talking with the lady and she goes oh, did you know that my daughter has 500,000 followers? And I'm like, no, I would have never known. I don't know what she looks like. If she walked in I wouldn't even know. And that was another piece that would be really neat for influencers to create.
Speaker 1:So how do small businesses benefit from this?
Speaker 2:so small businesses probably 98 of them have never been on tv right, when is the last time you saw your little pizza shop at any tv location? If you're sitting at the chiropractors or sitting at any other location, we're not going to advertise a food to a food business, but, let's say, a different type of location. You've never seen them and most likely it's because it's $5,000, $3,000, $10,000, depending on the reach to get on TV and most small businesses are not going to do that. So we really wanted a way to leverage technology and to help those small businesses, especially after COVID, as we go through all of that craziness.
Speaker 2:How do they get shown in their community again as having the best pizza or the best chocolate cake or a bakery? Even so, they would leverage it by putting a little money into the account or paying a subscription and they would get shown on different TVs around in the community. But it also shows as a digital display too for them. If they put a Tweeba TV in their location, it would be a few other commercials, but also their food, the weather, their social media. So people are looking at that one, some people watching TV, some people saying, oh, that's the weather and oh, there's a live band here on Friday night. I'll stop by again and so it's just rotating through little community events that are going on. Maybe it was a 4th of July parade and somebody wanted to share a little clip of the parade going by. Those are the kind of small town community things that can be shown with Tweeba how does the advertiser, the small business or the influencer get our obtain ROI?
Speaker 2:They get that by. This is a little bit different than a pay-per-click right. This is more about per thousand views, but they're going to pay based upon if they want to track it. There's QR codes, right. So if someone sees an ad, they can click a QR code. You got to have a good hook for that, but they're building that community audience and awareness with this.
Speaker 2:Now you have your passive advertising and then you have your direct advertising. This leans more on the passive. Most likely, you're not going to research nice watch and Rolex will be. Hey, we have to sell you on this, right? Rolex and other big companies are just saying this is the best quality watch, and in driving by a billboard, it's passive advertising, and this is something that most businesses don't. Really they can't achieve because it's expensive, and it's one of the things that we wanted to help businesses.
Speaker 2:Let's say it's a chiropractor and instead of the chiropractor saying call me, I'm the best chiropractor, and instead of the chiropractor saying call me, I'm the best chiropractor, do you have back pain? Do you have this? Do you have that pain? Instead, he uses Tweva to educate his clients in that city, right? So instead of he's the best, tell people how to sit in their car when they're driving Don't lean over. Your spine is sitting like this. Even when you're bumping, make sure you sit up straight and they can educate.
Speaker 2:The way they do is infotainment with TikTok, right, but we're doing this on a TV, so it's not vertical, it would be horizontal, and there's a different strategy, because you just want to be the person that is the expert in that community, which they can't do with TV unless you have that high budget. Even if you did, though, would you say I'm going to spend $10,000 and just educate them in sitting in a how to sit in a car. Right it's, they wouldn't do that. It would be high paced, fast, 30 second commercial. So this uses a little bit different of a strategy, mixing both TV and what influencers are doing today with digital content and saying, hey guys, this is something that's untapped right now, it's unheard of, it's still being created, just like the influencer market is, and it's a little bit different of a twist, but it's the best of both worlds.
Speaker 1:I like the educational piece because that's how I started out on social is you can't sell everybody on your products and services. So if you educate them on what you do, you're going to bring more people into the fold, which will tend to interact with your product more or your services more, but then you also be able to bring more eyeballs in. So I like that Typical. You're saying these are small businesses, these are going to be like pizza shops and stuff like that that you've put in TVs in and so forth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could be anybody. Really it was coffee shops, it's pizza shops, it's a city hall that wants to put their local menu not menus but local schedules right what's going to happen this week. And they thought it was a great idea to also put in small business advertising to help the local plumber right. And so, as that content goes through, we might have a seniors event on this day. Soccer for the kids is this day, and when people are walking in and out, it's almost I wouldn't say it's exactly like a TV channel, but it's something that's different. It's dynamic. It's not just a digital display, but it opens that up for others to interact with it, so it could be really anything, anybody anywhere. There's even some public outdoor displays again at local public parks. This is what's going on in the community. You might be looking at it saying, oh, there's a car show at this park on Saturday, those big digital LED signs.
Speaker 2:Similar, it's just a smaller, uses a TV, things like that, so it could be anywhere.
Speaker 1:Are the? What markets are you serving now? Is it just Florida?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just central Florida right now and we are. It's the beta test, the build test, but it's a scalable product. So if somebody wanted to open up anywhere, they could fire up a TV and show local content if that content was available. So they could do their weather, they could connect their social media. But it would need probably most likely a couple people to be adding content. That's really what it is right most likely a couple people to be adding content. That's really what it is right.
Speaker 2:A TV station may have eight hours of content 24 hours of content based upon what that viewership is of the channel. We have 24 hours available, right, minus the rotation of the food items and things like that. So we may have 12 hours available on each display until someone says hey, I was at a parade, let me share this content into the network. Hey, there was a beautiful picture of the sun was right, it was the morning. There was dew on the flowers and the American flag at City Hall. That's a neat picture. Ok, that exists somewhere online or maybe on that person's phone, but can we give them a public place to share that? Or someone created a piece of artwork and they wanted to share that to the community. Now that content is being semi moderated through either the person at the city or and or AI, but the idea is to have that kind of a community billboard slash TV channel to allow us all to interact with it. Otherwise it's someone deciding what we should be watching, right?
Speaker 1:Who would be and I know you talk about influencers and small businesses are there individuals or potential? Who's your ideal avatar for this, for your product, for this service?
Speaker 2:I should say there's a few different ones. So the person putting in the TV is obviously someone with high traffic, and then the advertiser piece would be anybody that would want to gain influences influence within the community and then you have your creator, which is somebody that knows how to use a camera. We don't wanna have bad, bad quality content, but it's weird somewhere right now. Isn't it weird how the shaky phone I wasn't the office show that brought out the shaky camera. Yeah, that seems to pull a little bit better sometimes, even online. The forward facing camera a little bit blurry, not the perfect lighting, but that seems to spark some attention with people. And I wonder if it's because the cycle of, like big corporate branding and mistrust is on its way down and we're going back to community.
Speaker 2:I wonder how many people a hundred years ago or 150 years ago, before the industrial complex was building out, did you go to somebody for bread? Did you go to somebody for milk? Did you go to somebody for water? Did you go to somebody for your shoes? Did you go to somebody for your suit? Was there about 20 people? How many do you go to now?
Speaker 2:Target, walmart, right, you pick four or five, but that person is not really a person. So when does that come back to? I had 20 relationships, but because it's skipping the generations, you don't really say your grandfather would say I miss talking to those 20 different people. Right, it happens in a slow cycle, but I think it feels like we're doing that we rather would watch somebody talk about a product or a service at a personal level and how it's affected them than to watch a $10,000 commercial. So Tweva is positioned for that next move where people will sit down and say I just want to hear somebody from my community talk about their plumber or their chiropractor, or a testimony of someone. Again, most businesses are not going to put $10,000 on. Can you have Aunt Sally make a video about her experience with a small business? We're going to put 10 grand on that one. Hopefully it'll. Oh, can't test that. So Tweva allows us to do that at a very local level.
Speaker 1:What type of costs and you don't have to share? I'm just curious someone wants to be an influencer or somebody wants to come in? What type of costs are they looking at?
Speaker 2:We're looking to make this incredibly affordable. So you would put in five or $10 into your account and you would start um advertising with a bid strategy. So you say, hey, I want to put five or 10 cents per commercial between these hours at this bar and that bar or this section of restaurants, because each one is so different. Right, so it's a very affordable product. Now, obviously, if you bring out per location, it sounds cheap. But if you added a hundred locations, a thousand locations, it could get expensive. But that's why it's based with AI and with a bid strategy.
Speaker 2:So you're going to say, hey, I'm looking for this customer. Is someone? Is a mother with a child going to be at the bar at 1130 at night? Are we going to be really showing baby toys or a gift shop at 11 o'clock at night? I don't know. Maybe that might be motorcycle equipment or sports shoes. It might be something different. Equipment or sports shoes, it might be something different. So if we can figure out where people are at certain locations, we can really hone down on that. We don't have to do that broad pay all the TVs, like the bigger companies do right All day long to hopefully find that. We will include that into the strategy. But also we'll have customers using the Tweva app, which, if they choose to, they will have GPS turned on in their phone and it will follow them around. So the ads on the TVs are changing with the customers that are walking in and out of the building. So we'll be able to build out a longer term strategy based upon customers that visit certain places at certain times.
Speaker 1:I'm presuming you guys will help with placement also. So if you have somebody that's a chiropractor, you're more likely not going to have that chiropractor in. I don't know, I'm trying to think of something that'd be off the beaten path. I don't know a computer shop.
Speaker 2:It could be right, because if it's a TV, yeah, it can be, maybe chiropractor is not a good idea.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's an Italian joint and you're not gonna an Italian restaurant and you're not gonna go ahead and put it into a burger restaurant, correct?
Speaker 2:correct. So there are 178 different types of categories of companies and but if you base that down, there's less per category. But we just said why don't we not do food to food Most of the restaurants that we talked to? I said would you have a problem, if you're Italian, to show on a Chinese food or a? And they would say I don't know if I would want them showing in mine, right, because you want to promote your restaurant and your business when you're in the Italian. Oh, that looks good. Maybe I'll try that next time.
Speaker 2:Might not want to pull somebody out of that, that to say there's plenty of locations, right, there's the chiropractor shops and there's computer shops and computer stores, and they can just cross that way, not show on the same. So we're strong on the no. No compete against each other. We want to build a strong network where the business owners are also contributing. So if the business owner may have a 50th birthday party, right, somebody comes in. Why not show that on the TV, right? Why not show the fun that you could have at this place? Oh, I can have a birthday party here for my wife or my mother or father that's a great idea or my grandma or grandpa. So we want them to love the TV. We want them to love this as part of who they are in the business and also help them drive traffic to the TV, right, because if you walk in and say, hey, let's say I was at the beach this weekend.
Speaker 2:So you walk into a shop, oh, let's see what's going on. Is there any things? Oh, where's the Tweeva TV? How would we do that? Right now You're going to have to go on Facebook. You're going to find the town. You have to join the group. Oh, there's three questions to join the group. Never mind, that's it right. And then the admins are going to approve you three days from now. Now, if there was a local TV channel that was running and you could look at what's happening that day, that week, maybe there was a lunch offer on the pier. Yeah, I'm not on the pier, how would you know that? So this is a way for the community to build traffic in that local foot traffic themselves without being competitive. So you're not going to see that in another food shop. Maybe coffee shops will say yeah, you know what, I just serve coffee. Give me a percentage of the ads. You can show those. You can show those food ads in my building but, that's opposite, so they're going to share, right.
Speaker 1:Is there a? And I'm not trying to get into your numbers, I'm just curious. There's a way to make money off of the ads, but then also the TVs, the TVs are actually compatible with most.
Speaker 2:We'd love to put in our own TVs, but we're just using the TVs that are there. So we are charging for advertising and then also a subscription to access the network from the professional side. So we can do content creation, graphics, media, commercials, things like that. We don't want to do that long term right. Facebook doesn't create content for you the most. Twitter doesn't either.
Speaker 2:I think that's really the influencer's job. Personally, the influencer that lives in that town is going to talk better and speak the language of the town better. I don't want nothing against vegan or vegetarianism, but you have a social media writer writing about hot wings or barbecue wings. They're not going to do the same language. They're not going to do the same, and I can say this because my family's were split. It's just the way that we perceive a product is so different and the influencer does such a great job with that. They look at the lighting, they look at the language, the hashtags and I really think bringing out or giving them a platform to bring out that customer to the public, they're going to do it best and they can see the reactions. They could be sitting in the restaurant at the times.
Speaker 2:There's the ad. Let's see how many people watch it. How many people here are actually paying attention to that burger with a pound of cheese melted pouring on it. Have you seen some of these like weird, let's make it go. Viral commercials, a huge cookies, right? And you're going like, okay, does that work? Yeah, maybe for the AI. I have an idea, that theory that the AI doesn't know what those things are, so they send it to trending, they send it to a million people and that's why these things happen. The second burger doesn't get so much. The third burger doesn't get. The fourth burger you pour cheese on it, like the AI is like yeah, guys, we know what that is, but what actually works, what works in a community, of that community is completely different.
Speaker 2:One of the tests that we had was we got a old version. Like we talked with one of the food companies from one of the restaurants and we said, hey, you got that chocolate cake. We got chocolate cakes on the shelf. Send me some video. Oh, we don't know if we have video, just send us what you got. So we got this like 1998 720p cake, a fork cutting it, with cheesy music in the background. So I strip out the music, strip everything out. Let's put a couple new fades in there and we'll run it.
Speaker 2:This was towards the beginning, it was a little bit early, we didn't ton of content, so maybe ran every 10 minutes or something like that. That restaurant sold three, three hundred percent more cake just because it was showing. Just because it was showing. And I would ask I would say what, as a computer programmer, as a background what are you sure this is this? And the restaurant said, yes, people eat with their eyes. They have to see what they want first. And they see it a couple of times and they go. I do just want that chocolate cake, I want to try it. Yeah, so it works. But again, you would have never been able to run that on their local TV if it was another TV channel. So it gives them the ability to show what they're doing, what they're like, what they're doing on Friday night, and it helps. So the influencers are the same.
Speaker 1:They're going to see what works and what doesn't work and they'll be able to work at a local level could they tie back in that 300% increase in sales to the actual whatever you want to call it the ad?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think if they put ask for a coupon code or when your server comes over, say a secret word chocolate cake, three layer you'd have to track it somehow there, unless they did it through online ordering. We want to keep that personality ordering. We want to keep that personality. We want to keep the personal relationship between the server and the customer. We had ideas and we've tested this also of what does the server do outside of work. So it's for tracking reasons, right. So I don't know if it would be a digital tracking or a verbal track, but what does the server do? Does the server have a dog? Do they ride a motorcycle on the weekends? What do they do other than that? Because most of the time you've seen it at restaurants, you'll be sitting there and I'll have this, thank you, and they're back. Then you have people that will talk.
Speaker 2:If we made a little connection of I ride, read it, or my son just bought a harley and you have a harley too, bam. Now we have this connection of I know who sally is, I know who joey is, and if you think about that over four or five or six times, where do you want to go friday night? Seriously, if pizza is pizza. Do you want to go talk to? So? And they were. Maybe their son or daughter or significant other knows something about a college. And we're trying to build the relationship using the bigger screen. Again, you're not going to look up your server on your phone. It's nobody's going to really do that. They're not going to facebook them and be like oh, I see that you, it's just a quick something on the tv. Hey, this is so, is so-and-so, this is what they do, building that relationship. So we might back to your tracking. We would probably have to track that somehow through the server or something like that.
Speaker 1:Nice. You say Central Florida. Are you taking clients on that if they're in the Central Florida area or no?
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. Every new screen is a new opportunity for someone to join the network. So pretty much wherever you are, you could it's going to use your digital display, but, yeah, anywhere that you are, if you're an influencer, same, we're interested in chatting with you, because each person has their own group.
Speaker 1:When you say central Florida, do we need to be specific to cities?
Speaker 2:No, no, it could be anywhere. Okay, we were in seven or eight different cities, and it's just. Whoever wants to create content, whoever wants to share and create that, join that network. So for the business owners, we also have a reward system. So once ads are being shown, they receive Tweva coins and those Tweva coins rise in value. It's crypto, but not it's not Bitcoin crypto.
Speaker 2:It's a token that rises in value with how many screens are put in, so it's a beginning investment. So every time an ad gets shown, they get a certain amount of tokens and if they keep the tokens as the screens build out, the tokens rise in value. They can exchange them for advertising or we were going to offer maybe gift cards, things like that but it's a way for that business owner to get paid for commercials, which is something that businesses don't have right now, that's great.
Speaker 1:Coming to the bottom of the hour, wrapping this up, the other question is if someone wanted to reach out to you and discuss more about what you guys are doing, where's the best place they can contact you at?
Speaker 2:So yeah, if you want to contact us, it's at twivacom T-W-E-V-Acom. Also, my email is dave, at twivacom and anywhere. Just search Twiva and you'll find all of our social media, our website, and you can contact us at any of those.
Speaker 1:That is awesome. I will make sure we put that in the show notes and make sure people can reach out to you, sir. Thank you for coming on, love, what you're doing it's different, but I think you're onto something. It's pretty cool that you could actually localize it, but then, as you guys grow, you can, guys could scale it something. It's pretty cool that you could actually localize it, but then, as you guys grow, you guys could scale it, and that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what we started with from the beginning is like the Tweva name is something that doesn't exist and we want this to be worldwide. We want this to be the TV network. So thanks for having me on the show Love talking about Tweva and enjoyed the time. You're more than welcome.
