A Productive Escape: Converting Screen Time to a Stock Market Investment with Taban Yolo

We can’t deny the fact that digital devices are everywhere. Now that we’ve entered the technological age, we spend more time tapping on our screens and less time doing things in the real world. As we go on with our days, nonchalantly using our phones, we often receive a notification that updates us with our screen time. Admit it; this part can be quite alarming. You’ll be shocked at how much time you spend with these highly addictive devices. But you’ll even be more surprised when I tell you that there’s an app that turns your screen time into stock market investments! Taban Yolo, is the co-founder and CEO of Shilling. He spearheaded the idea to make an app that turns your screen time into profitable investments. Let’s listen to the story of this savvy industry expert in today’s show and learn a thing or two about his useful app. --- Listen to the podcast here: A Productive Escape: Converting Screen Time to a Stock Market Investment with Taban Yolo Welcome to Actions-Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the most interesting and curious observations we have in our time, 2022, the year recording, is the relationship that we all seem to have with our phones, our devices, our screens of all kinds. I cannot even begin to tell you how many times people have expressed, just like me, the desire to spend less time on our devices, desire to spend less time in front of our screens, less time on our phone. It's even been enough that Apple, a few years ago, developed that screen time tracking that you can see. We can actually measure how much time you're spending in front of the screen. Yet, a lot of these people, just like me, continue to basically spend just as much time in front of our phones as we have for years, and years, and years. There's a lot of talk about wanting to do less, less screen time, less phones, but still doing mostly the same thing. My guest today, Taban Yolo, started a company called Shilling. His idea is to take the time we spend in front of our screens and convert them into financial investments. That's an interesting concept to wrap your head around. I'm going to let Taban tell you what it's all about for himself. --- Taban, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Stephen. The concept of Shilling is pretty simple. We get the time someone's spending on their phone and let them just convert that by setting parameters by how much they'll spend on their phone, how much time they think they'll spend on their phone, and then just connect that to a Shilling account that's built through a financial portfolio that they could start investing in. What that means is, if you sign up for the Shilling app, you set up your profile, you'll set your time interval. If you set it at eight hours, every eight hours of screen time that you hit, you'll be able to make automatic investment into a Shilling portfolio based off your risk tolerance. Is this designed to discourage people from excessive phone use or not thinking about how much time they're spending in front of the screen? Yes and no. Initially, when we came up with the idea and started building the company, it's solely intended to help people spend less time on their phone. We do this while, obviously, trying to create value for your screen time. As the months have gone along, and we started talking to more customers, we realized that there's this demographic that really don't care how much time they spend on their phone. They just want to get that value of the time they spend on their phone. I would say yes and no to that question. It could have a couple of different purposes. When you talk about your demographics, are there certain groups of people that you're targeting with this application, or is this something that's for everybody? Initially, when we came up with the idea, it was solely based off -- I was trying to get my girlfriend to start investing. I was thinking about a nice, curious way that would keep her an active participant in the investment process. I came up with the idea. I asked her if she'd be able to invest using her screen time. She thought it was a really nice concept. We saw the product as maybe something that a lot of Gen Z would be geared more towards. The more people we speak to of different age ranges, different demographics, there clearly seems to be a vacuum for service or product like this. It's not only Gen Z that spends a lot of time on their phone, on Facebook or Instagram. It's people of all ranges.Share on X I watch most of my news off of YouTube. I consider myself somewhat a millennial. I think that this product will serve across a lot of age ranges. Yeah. With different age ranges, there might be the two different motivations that you mentioned, that some people are attracted to the initial motivation of trying to find a way to de-incentivize their screen time, incentivize spending less time on their screen with other people just more looking to automate some aspects of their investing. Obviously, right now, we're about to roll out our beta test. Once we roll out the beta, we will have more solid information, more solid data points on how people are actually using the product. Yes, I do agree. That is a really interesting point of view. One of the questions I have, a little bit about the specifics of the product, you talked about something along the lines of every eight hours, it throws a certain amount of money into an investment portfolio. Do you have any version of it that has a threshold? Let's say someone says, "I'm okay with spending two hours a day on my phone, but I wanted to start dumping money in once I go beyond that 120 minutes, once I do 2.5, three hours, four hours in a day." We haven't gone to that point yet. We want to make it a service that will help you invest, obviously. Also, we haven't got to a point where we've gotten feedback to a question, what you just brought up. We feel like there's a threshold. If we get to a point where someone actually feels like the service is becoming a burden in the sense that a lot of money is being withdrawn from the account -- obviously, once you start talking about investments, people will start looking at returns and all this other stuff. We don't want people to feel that it's something that they have to constantly check their Schilling account. We want to make them aware. Every third day, you get a notification, "Hey, you hit your threshold. We're going to invest the X amount that you told us," and maybe that's when they could go check their accounts. That might be possibly down the road. Obviously, we haven't spoken to a huge spectrum of users. Maybe we will find users that actually really want to punish themselves and have a strict threshold and be like, "Hey, once I hit this amount, just keep pulling it out. I don't care how long it goes." If we do run into a scenario like that, and there's actually demand for that, then I don't see why we can't get a product and build a feature like that. A couple other specifics about the product, just so all the listeners who are interested in signing on can get some of these details. Let's say someone has a Chase bank account and the Chase app, and they have a direct deposit into that. Does the Shilling then pull from whatever account, or is it its own separate thing? Yeah. It will pull from a Chase account. It's no mystery, most of the bank transactions run with a company called Plaid. Plaid, they have their API software that you could connect these different bank accounts in the US. It's somewhat of an ACH transfer. Obviously, there's more in the backend to that, but you just log in, you log into the Shilling account, and we'll have an option for you to connect your bank account. You'll sign up to Plaid and then you'll connect your bank account to Shilling. That's pretty much how it works. Pretty much anyone that has a bank account of any kind. Some people use the big banks, some people use their local credit unions, things like that. Pretty much anyone in those areas will be able to use the Shilling application. Yes, absolutely. What about the investments that are open? I know people have different investments. Vanguard has the index fund investments. Some people prefer those target retirement things. Some people prefer individual stocks. What are the general options that people have available when you talk about this risk tolerance? That's actually a good question. We had our early adopters reach out to us. We have some people wanting to be able to have full autonomy, just full independence, and be able to invest in all these different assets, talking about stocks. Some people have brought up crypto. They want to have the ability to invest in crypto but still use the whole Shilling. These are the people that are first-time investors, or people that's not too savvy, people that really don't want to think about it that much. All they want to do is just auto invest, and come back every three or four weeks, and see how their portfolio is doing. For right now, what we're looking at is to actually build out those portfolios, to buy a bunch of ETFs. If you're looking at a conservative portfolio, obviously, you have less equity, less stocks, and more bonds -- more safe assets -- in the market and vice versa. Right now, we're looking at that. We're working with really talented people to come up with these portfolios and just make them available for use. I have a question from a product design standpoint. One of the things that's always on my mind about developing any product like this is the pull and tug between wanting to create a customization for every single use case but also not wanting to make it so complicated, because you created so many options that people that just want something simple can't get that....