Grit Don't Quit: How Beezie Got to Yes | Andrea Miele [EP. 323]

[00:00:00] Andrea Miele: Cause I'm not limiting myself. This is much bigger than just that. And I feel like some of the best founders are the ones that just wanna hit the grand slam. They're not looking for the home run. They're not looking for a single score. Like they want the grand slam, and that's what we've always set out to do.

[00:00:18] Andrea Miele: It's never just been like this small piece of the pie. It's much bigger than that.

[00:00:23] Andrea Miele: It's, it's gamified commerce, right? It's engagement shopping. It's truly and fundamentally a dopamine chase at the end of the day.

[00:00:32] Pete Townsend: This is MoneyNeverSleeps: sharp riffs, big ideas, and real insights from smart people. I'm Pete Townsend, GP at Norio Ventures. Let's go.

[00:00:43] Pete Townsend: My guest today is Andrea Miele, co-founder and CEO of Beezie, and she's one of the most resilient founders I know. Andrea has been in crypto since 2015, and in her pre-crypto life, she was driving growth, building teams, building culture in high-tech healthcare.

[00:01:00] Pete Townsend: For transparency, I invested in Beezie via Techstars way back in 2024. And small world, Andrea grew up about 15 minutes north of me in Western Massachusetts.

[00:01:11] Pete Townsend: Andrea Miele, welcome to MoneyNeverSleeps.

[00:01:14] Andrea Miele: Hi, Pete . Money does never sleep. It's the perfect, it's the perfect name for a podcast. I've always loved it. How you

[00:01:21] Pete Townsend: Isn't it? Thank you. Yes.

[00:01:22] Pete Townsend: Listen, Andrea, let's start with Beezie, with the business. For people not familiar, give us the business in a nutshell, yeah?

[00:01:31] Andrea Miele: Yeah. So I'll explain it the way I tell my parents or my kids. We take the physical thing and we create its digital twin, and we put it on this thing called blockchain, and that we, then we let people buy and sell the digital while we custody. I mean, it's simple, but the fun part is the gamification.

[00:01:50] Pete Townsend: And, having been with you since 2024 and seeing the the evolution of this and seeing and remembering that first chat that we had about the Claw, that significantly accelerated things, didn't it?

[00:02:07] Andrea Miele: I mean, the Claw is the hook, right? It's the gamification layer is what I call the answer to a marketplace's cold start problem. And I remember when we first started this journey, which feels like many lifetimes ago, a lot was focused on the logistics, right? Having the Brinks vaulting partnership, these resellers not having to burden, their backend with dealing with shipments and transactions.

[00:02:33] Andrea Miele: And, and that's great, right? And it makes up a big part of our offering, but it's not that sexy at the end of the day, right? Like, what is the thing that we're gonna get UGC from that's gonna bring new users onto Beezie and have them then make that marketplace transaction over in eBay?

[00:02:52] Pete Townsend: Tell us about the, the products that are featured on Beezie

[00:02:57] Andrea Miele: We have a full suite marketplace, right? And then we have the Claw/gamification. And I say /gamification because

[00:03:05] Andrea Miele: it will not always be a Claw. That's our flagship. It's been fun. We run with it. I love it. But, the smart contract on the back end can be spun up with a front end that looks like anything. It's really just the instant liquidity loop that makes it exciting.

[00:03:21] Pete Townsend: Absolutely. And you and I have talked about this before, that it can be sometimes frustrating when others, would put you into a bucket called TCG or trading card games. Why does that undersell the vision?

[00:03:33] Andrea Miele: I don't see it as frustrating anymore because now it's quite validating. We were one of the first out there to talk about it, and I will say we always came out as multi-category. Beezie has been the type of company that saw the next thing first, right? We saw this, like, instant buyback liquidity and developed that smart contract before anyone else did.

[00:03:55] Andrea Miele: We saw the opportunity beyond trading cards and sports cards and came out as multi-category with many people, including, investor conversations saying, "Why multi-category? Like, just, just do the one thing." Well, now the one thing has, you know, 80 new sites popping up every single day, and what we will see is that the platforms that live and die by the one thing will live and die by the one thing.

[00:04:22] Andrea Miele: Because the bigger conversation is the gamification of commerce, and that's not just restricted to trading cards.

[00:04:30] Andrea Miele: And it's funny, there are still conversations where they don't get the bigger picture, which is multi-category gamification, and they're like, "Why not just TCG? Focus on that. It works."

[00:04:39] Andrea Miele: You're like, "'Cause I'm not limiting myself. This is much bigger than just that." And I feel like some of the best founders are the ones that just wanna hit the grand slam. They're not looking for the home run. They're not looking for a single score. Like they want the grand slam, and that's what we've always set out to do.

[00:04:58] Andrea Miele: It's never just been like this small piece of the pie. It's much bigger than that.

[00:05:03] Andrea Miele: It's, it's gamified commerce, right? It's engagement shopping. It's truly and fundamentally a dopamine chase at the end of the day.

[00:05:12] Andrea Miele: It's an engaging dopamine chase that also entertains people at the same time because particularly the next generation of buyers are much less interested in just a static sale. They want to feel something. And, you know, that's what we're building towards.

[00:05:26] Pete Townsend: I heard you talk to Pet Berisha about that actual physical feeling that you get when you rip a pack of cards, for example. rip that, that pack open. And that actual experience, you've said, was the trade-off, that you're trading that for the liquidity and distribution.

[00:05:45] Pete Townsend: And convenience. Yeah. Yep

[00:05:47] Pete Townsend: And I think this goes back to some of your childhood experiences with with cards. Like I remember myself opening up a pack of Topps baseball cards, and the smell of the stale bubblegum that was inside the pack that sometimes stained the back of the cards, right?

[00:06:05] Andrea Miele: Yeah. I mean, it's very hard, like you said, to replace that moment. And that that's not limited to cards, right? It's like opening a real-life present. It's scratching off a scratch ticket in person. It's opening, a blind box. It's that physical, tangible thing in that moment is a super special moment.

[00:06:24] Andrea Miele: And we, didn't set out to completely replace that. We just set out to make that more efficient. So, if I could scratch off a scratch ticket and all of a sudden if I win, that money's in my bank account versus having to go back to the store and do the thing. And I'm sure there's plenty of people that have like 10 or $20 wins just laying around their house that they just haven't gone back for.

[00:06:47] Andrea Miele: It doesn't mean that those pieces are gonna go away. It's, it's just an alternative option that, adds an, an extra layer to liquidity and efficiency

[00:06:56] Pete Townsend: it's a very good point that there's a different sensation and feeling versus ripping a pack of cards where, where you started and like you said, opening the blind boxes, but also the feel of the, the feel of the luxury bag,

[00:07:07] Andrea Miele: You can't replace that, right? Anyone that sets out to just completely replace that, it's the wrong game. You have to figure out how can I complement that.

[00:07:15] Pete Townsend: And do you find that that trade-off is acceptable if people trust Beezie and trust you and trust the platform? And how have you built that trust?

[00:07:26] Andrea Miele: That's a big piece of, what we set out as, you know, a goal every single day since inception. I mean, we had our vaulting contract with Brinks set up before we even began, like, full-scale development on the platform because it's foundationally one of the things that I believe, particularly with a new consumer that has never been onchain, the blockchain's completely abstracted.

[00:07:53] Andrea Miele: They come in and they, they sign in with their email and they buy with their Apple Pay. We're still a startup, you're not seeing us as, like, a name brand household known platform yet. But Brinks is, right? Brinks is a name brand. Everyone knows that truck going from point A to point B.

[00:08:12] Andrea Miele: And so that was one of the ways that we, hope to build that trust with our users.

[00:08:17] Pete Townsend: building trust isn't only important with the users, but also it's important with investors and raising money, right? And I've watched this one up close, and we saw some of the best known funds in the space that passed, and more than once.

[00:08:32] Andrea Miele: We sure did.

[00:08:35] Pete Townsend: and, and I remember when you were somewhere around 30 No's, and I told you not to get worried until you hit 100.

[00:08:42] Pete Townsend: And walk me through that journey from the first round now into the next round that you're working on now

[00:08:50] Andrea Miele: It's been soul-crushing and validating at the same time because we were so early into this meta.

[00:08:58] Andrea Miele: We got a ton of No's. We got a ton of No's. Just people didn't get the vision at all. And that was, that was really hard. But we did get some yeses from some amazing investors that are still on our cap table, have been with us every step of the way. Some have doubled, some have tripled down. Simon Dedic from Moonrock is the top of my list when I think of people who have just never lost the faith, saw the vision, and have been right alongside of us.

[00:09:30] Andrea Miele: So I feel incredibly grateful for that. Raising this last round was quite different because people understood that this thing was finding product market fit. I won't say it was easy. It's never easy. And, sometimes you get No's and you, you just don't understand why. And you get like an AI slop response of, "Sorry."

[00:09:53] Andrea Miele: Again, soul-crushing, especially, you know, when you're coming out of the gate with like 100 million in volume.

[00:09:59] Pete Townsend: What was that turning point where they weren't an early investor and they weren't coming back to double down on what was your last round, and they were new relationships.

[00:10:13] Andrea Miele: Oh my God, I could talk for hours about this for other founders because there's a lot of insight from this last one that I don't think I had before it. I'll say it's obvious, but once you have a great lead, that makes everything kind of fall into place. And we found an incredibly amazing, supportive, hands-on lead.

[00:10:34] Andrea Miele: They're called Psalion. The GP there just gets it.

[00:10:38] Andrea Miele: Aside from that, I think a lot of people came on because of the vision and seeing the forest through the trees and seeing the opportunity and coming in with a team that got it beyond this exact moment.

[00:10:51] Andrea Miele: So you really have to have people that aren't coming in to just, like, trade tomorrow and then be off. But the confidence was there, right? We did everything we did off of rubbing a couple pennies together. We are one of the, if not the most resilient and grittiest team in this space. Like, we're, we might be the only platform that survived Blast and is now thriving.

[00:11:17] Andrea Miele: Show me another one. I don't know. We never stopped. We showed up every single day. We never stopped. We did all of this without having a huge war chest, and we were up against some teams and some platforms that had massive war chests. So I was really confident coming into every conversation and, and looked at this round like, "Okay, if you don't see it, it's your loss, not mine, because there's gonna be plenty of people that see it."

[00:11:46] Andrea Miele: And I think that's really, really important

[00:11:49] Pete Townsend: Did things ever get to that point where it was, "Hey, I'm all set here"?

[00:11:54] Andrea Miele: Yeah, and that's actually one of the fun parts. There were plenty of No's that actually we gave where it wasn't the right fit, they were kind of being too slow. We had others that were ready to, take that check if they didn't want it. And so if it felt like someone was either trying to come in for the wrong reasons or just was on the fence, it was really easy for me to say, "Hey, you know what?

[00:12:17] Andrea Miele: It's, it's not right for us at this time, so I'll add you on our investor email and keep you updated."

[00:12:23] Pete Townsend: That's a great feeling.

[00:12:25] Andrea Miele: It's a great feeling

[00:12:26] Pete Townsend: And now that you are, like you said, Blast to Flow and now Base and Solana. Solana's live now. What's next? New verticals, integrations? Where does it go from here?

[00:12:39] Andrea Miele: We were on Flow, and Base is obviously a massive consumer chain, and we were limited with our distribution on Flow.

[00:12:46] Andrea Miele: So, we expanded to multi-chain in January, and that's when we saw the numbers just, go crazy. We've done, I think at this point, 185 million on Base this year alone in volume, in trading volume, about 93, 94 million in revenue. But Solana has really owned this narrative around collectibles, right?

[00:13:09] Andrea Miele: Every new builder is building on Solana. And it's for a reason. They, they get it. They understand that this is the thing that's going to onboard the next wave of users into crypto. And so, it, it-- for us to ignore that entire segment of the space, regardless of how hard the lift was to integrate, would've been a massive gap.

[00:13:33] Andrea Miele: The next piece for us beyond that is adding in new categories, new brand partnerships, which we'll be announcing really, really soon.

[00:13:41] Pete Townsend: Well, listen, Andrea, you've taken this so far, and I know it's gonna go a lot further. And congrats on getting the round, the second round now to this stage that you've got it to, and can't wait to see where you take it from here

[00:13:54] Andrea Miele: And thank you for your support all along the way. You've been on this journey since day one, and it's been, it's been great to have you as a sounding board, as a mentor. Appreciate having you in our corner, Pete.

[00:14:06] Pete Townsend: Oh, absolutely. Always. listen, I knew from day one, and I know people say that a lot, but that, from that very first time we spoke, I could just see it in the whites of your eyes. And usually that doesn't happen over Zoom, but I saw it.

[00:14:19] Pete Townsend: And when I talk to people, Andrea, I say what I said at the beginning, that you are one of the most resilient founders I know, and you and Pratik together are an unbelievable pairing, and it just makes total sense.

[00:14:31] Pete Townsend: And I see the drive, the growth, the ambition, the desire, the resilience, the just don't stop.

[00:14:38] Andrea Miele: Grit don't quit. That's what

[00:14:39] Pete Townsend: it's amazing.

[00:14:40] Pete Townsend: It's amazing,

[00:14:41] Pete Townsend: what's the best place for people to go to learn more about Beezie and what you're doing?

[00:14:47] Andrea Miele: Beezie.com. You can follow us on our socials too. There's always great engagement and giveaways. So, Beezie, @Beezie on, X, and then beeziedotcom on Instagram. And our Discord is always super active. Amazing community, really helpful. So pick your poison

[00:15:08] Pete Townsend: and to all of you out there, thanks for watching and listening, and don't forget to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. It helps others to find the show, and it means a heck of a lot to me.

[00:15:17] Pete Townsend: Till next time. See ya.