Benzinga is hosting a two-day crypto event at New York City’s Pier Sixty, Dec. 7-8, 2022.
The likes of Kevin O’Leary and Anthony Scaramucci, as well as leaders at DriveWealth, Prime Trust, Synctera, and beyond, will talk about controversial topics, perspectives on opportunities, and threats in fintech, as well as share insight into how they’re monetizing on disruptive trends.
Ahead of this, Benzinga will periodically publish articles on industry leaders making big impacts. Today’s chat is with Kristen Mader, Enterprise Manager of Guardian Enterprise Solutions.
The following text was edited for clarity and concision.
Q: Hey Kristen, nice to meet you. Want to kick it off with an introduction?
Kristen Mader: I have over a dozen years of entrepreneurial and small business ownership experience. As a small business owner, I pretty much wore all the hats, and it provided me with a good foundation for moving into something like crypto.
How did you get involved with Guardian?
I was a volunteer at first. So, last year, when the native token of this ecosystem launched, I volunteered. I became a holder and started working with them.
It started to feel like home, so I worked even more. Eventually, the team brought me on as an enterprise manager. My role is the conduit between users and the user interface, and then the back of the house (developers and APIs).
I have my hands in the marketing and advertising that we do on the platform, too.
What’s the purpose of the Guardian Platform?
Guardian was originally intended to be built as a single platform, offering a plethora of things that users would need to manage and research investments. Everything from news to charting.
How does all this market volatility impact how you build the company?
We launched in April of this year, when things were still fairly healthy in the market.
The market is quieting down now, and people are hunkering down. What we're doing, though, is we're still building, running the surveys, and still looking ahead at things we can do in the future.
It makes very little sense to just sit still and wait.
What’s on top of your mind, now, given the age of the company, as well as the interesting market environment you chose to launch during?
Top of mind for a lot of projects is lower transaction volume.
For instance, people are either sitting tight with what they have or they're much more cautious if they are going to jump into something. I've talked to other projects, and it does seem that things have slowed down as far as that goes.
Projects are not spending a lot of money on major marketing. We, and a lot of others, are focused more on word of mouth and using the social platforms that we can.
How do you gain trust in the marketplace, as well as scale?
We're offering something that's built solid. It's meant for the long term.
We keep building, and we're showing that we have these amazing tools like charting options on the platform. We even offer ways for people to explore careers in crypto.
There's just a whole bunch of different ways Guardian can be used.
You recently conducted some market research. Want to tell me a little bit about it?
So the surveys were put out a few months ago. It was a total of 41 questions, but it actually only takes about 5 minutes of time. And, most of them are multiple-choice or simple answers.
The questions themselves give us not only demographics for the respondents. They tell us what they look for when they first find out about a project, or how they got into crypto.
For instance, was the logo or white paper that got them interested?
We dig a little deeper like that, and it gives us a better idea of what folks want moving forward.
Going forward, what are you most excited about and concerned about?
It's always our goal to successfully complete a utility. We don't know what's down the road or what people are going to ask for. So, we just try and stay as flexible as we can, and explore as many collaborations as we can. The future is unknown right now, though.
Who are some of your competitors? What’s the difference between you and them?
Coinmarketcap. However, we're going in a different direction than them as far as innovation. So, I don't know that the similarities will be there for very long.
Anything else to add?
We do have a couple of components that are coming out.
I'm actually leading one group developing it, and we're looking at the end of Q3 for a release. It's great because it is a collaboration with the ArchAngel team.
The components we’re building will allow projects to more easily communicate information to users. We’ll also be launching an educational component.
