On this episode of The Innovators, I spoke with Jasper Fu, CEO of CoinSub, about what crypto payments actually look like when you strip away the hype and aim for real adoption.

CoinSub has been operating for roughly two and a half years and has grown to a 22-person team, most of them engineers. The company’s focus is narrow by design. Instead of trying to convince millions of merchants to adopt crypto directly, CoinSub sells infrastructure to payment service providers. These are the companies that already process card payments for thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of merchants. CoinSub’s bet is that adoption happens faster when crypto looks like just another payment option, not a new system merchants have to learn.

Fu framed the problem simply. Crypto and stablecoins are often described as liquid assets, but in practice they are hard to use for everyday payments. Merchants do not want to think about wallets, chains, or conversions. They want money in their bank accounts. CoinSub handles the movement behind the scenes, converting between dollars, Bitcoin, and stablecoins, then packaging that capability so payment processors can offer it under their own brands.

For merchants, the experience is meant to feel familiar. Crypto becomes another icon at checkout, alongside cards or digital wallets. Whether funds settle as stablecoins or dollars is not something the merchant has to manage. Fu compared it to card networks. Merchants do not think about how Visa or Mastercard clears transactions, they just expect it to work.

That distribution strategy also shapes CoinSub’s view of competition. While many crypto payment companies target merchants directly, CoinSub targets the providers upstream. There are billions of dollars flowing through a relatively small number of payment processors, many of which lack the technical capacity to build crypto infrastructure themselves. CoinSub positions itself as a way for those companies to keep pace without rebuilding their stacks.

Usage data suggests there is real demand, even if it remains early. Fu said CoinSub processed roughly $400 million in transaction volume last year. That number varies widely by region and industry, but it reflects actual consumer-to-business payments, not trading or speculation. Some sectors adopt faster than others, including cross-border commerce and industries that struggle to maintain stable card processing relationships.

Fu pushed back on the idea that crypto adoption hinges on hype cycles. He views blockchain and tokenization as infrastructure, a more efficient way to store and move data and value. Speculation and scams, he argued, appear in every new technology wave and do not define the underlying system. In his view, hype draws attention, but utility determines what survives.

Stablecoins are central to CoinSub’s timing. Fu said regulatory clarity, treasury backing, and growing institutional interest have aligned incentives across governments, issuers, and payment networks. Payments and commerce, he said, are the logical next phase after issuance. Once stablecoins exist at scale, the question becomes how people actually use them.

Fu’s path to CoinSub started outside crypto. After leaving a corporate role, he took time off to think about what he wanted to build next. Payments stood out as a place where incremental efficiency could have broad impact. Making money movement cheaper and more accessible, particularly across borders, felt like a net positive use of time and capital.

That mindset also shapes CoinSub’s internal culture. Fu said he prefers the startup environment because it allows for empathy-first leadership and long-term thinking. He believes effort cannot be bought, only invited, and that teams perform better when people are treated as contributors rather than interchangeable resources.

Looking ahead, CoinSub is expanding beyond its initial engineering phase. The company is working to capture more of the payment service provider market while it still has an early mover advantage. Longer term, Fu sees applications beyond checkout, including payouts, invoicing, and potentially ATMs, anywhere money needs to move across systems or borders.

Fu is realistic about maturity. He expects fragmentation before consolidation, with many stablecoins and blockchains competing before a smaller set emerges as dominant. In that environment, CoinSub’s role is to abstract complexity away from customers and let them benefit from whichever systems ultimately win.

Crypto payments, in Fu’s telling, are not about replacing everything overnight. They are about quietly fitting into existing workflows until their presence feels unremarkable. That, more than price swings or headlines, is what adoption looks like.

Transcript

John Biggs (00:07.982)

Welcome back to The Innovators, a podcast about amazing people doing amazing things. Today on the show I have Jasper Fu. He’s the CEO of CoinSub, a stable coin operation. We do a lot of crypto on here, so I’m happy to have somebody back from the crypto world. Welcome, Jasper.

Jasper Fu (00:27.501)

Thanks for having me, John.

John Biggs (00:28.588)

Yeah. So tell us about CoinSub. How long have you been around and what are you up to?

Jasper Fu (00:33.923)

Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been around for two and a half years. The team is about 22 people now with 17 being engineers. And what we jumped into the space to do is like everyone’s heard of this stable coin crypto blockchain Bitcoin stuff, right? And there’s a variety of value, value props. But what we realized is a lot of it’s just not hitting to the mass market.

We particularly target payment service providers in fintechs, right? A lot of stable coin around, a lot of Bitcoin around, why can’t we pay with it was our first thought. You say it’s liquid, how do we make it liquid? And as we dug into the space, we realized this early, early stage of adoption, there’s a lot of demand from both the merchants, the businesses, as well as these payment providers to be able to offer this, right? But this is totally new tech to them.

And most of the solutions in this space are either going for, hey, directly to the businesses themselves, or they’re these esoteric APIs that are hard for non-technical people to understand. So what we do is we pre-build out the infrastructure so that somebody could go from US dollars to Bitcoin to stable coin to US dollars. And we apply that to different things like payment acceptance and payouts.

and we wrap and package that whole thing up and allow other companies, allow other payment providers who are already selling say card payments to now add this additional capability underneath their own brand.

John Biggs (02:07.726)

Interesting. in a nutshell, is the focus more on stablecoins? Is the focus more on general crypto? What am I as a merchant? So say I’m a merchant, want to sell my widgets online or I want to sell them in the store. What am I doing with you guys? How do you sell to me?

Jasper Fu (02:25.924)

So merchants usually get their payment products through their payment provider. So that’s the interesting insight that we had, right? You usually only want to work with one person and that might be say your stripe or your clover or whatever it is. So we actually sell to the clovers, you know, the clovers of the world, the payment service, the payment processors of the world. But what that looks like for the merchant is

you reach a point of awareness where you’re like, I know that I should probably accept this kind of payment, but at the end of the day, I’m just trying to expand my business and grow my revenue. So for us, it’s just one more thing that gets added on at checkout, and that’s the last thing you have to worry about. Whether it ends up as stable coin or whether it ends up in US dollars in your bank, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. Focus on your business. You don’t worry about how your credit card gets there from Visa or MasterCard, and you don’t worry about how PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Clarion don’t work.

And so that’s the kind of level of adoption we want to bring where people understand that there’s some value there and we just go, great, here you go. Let me make sure that it’s comfortable for you.

John Biggs (03:32.383)

So the icons when you check out are like credit card, don’t know, PayPal, Venmo, Alipay, and then crypto. OK. You’ve got a lot of competition in that space. How is that working out?

Jasper Fu (03:37.997)

with crypto.

Jasper Fu (03:46.244)

So the competition in this space would only apply if the target market is the merchants themselves. There’s very few companies that are actually targeting the payment service providers. If you think about it, there’s hundreds of millions of merchants in the world that capture trillions of dollars of payment volume. But there’s only really thousands of payment service providers, independent sales orgs, and these are the ones that are already kind of selling card processing.

they’ve already captured the entire market. And the reality is most of these have been around for 15, 20, 25 years and they’re not tech savvy. So when you get these first movers like a stripe, right, offering stable coin payment acceptance, what that actually does for the rest of the industry is it pressures kind of the middle of the pack or the earlier adopters to take action. And there’s not enough time for them to build it because as you said,

the space is saturated and it applies to not just crypto but traditional payments as well. And so the options to buy and to date, we think of ourselves as like orthogonal to the competition. Our difference isn’t in what necessarily we’re offering them as an end product but rather the deployment model. Rather than deploying it to the merchants and trying to onboard millions of merchants, we onboard a couple dozen.

payment providers that then grant us access to hundreds of thousands of merchants. So that’s it.

John Biggs (05:15.854)

And then hundreds of thousands of customers as well. I mean, this has been the age old question, right? First off, when mass adoption? And how much of crypto is hype versus reality? So what are you seeing in terms of people using that button, basically?

Jasper Fu (05:40.878)

So we’re seeing about, like last year we saw about 400 million in transaction volume. So relatively significant pretty early on. And it varies by industry and it varies by region. So I’d say that the demand from a consumer perspective exists. Demand from the merchant perspective also exists because customer goes, hey, can I pay with crypto? And the merchant goes and asks their payment provider, hey, how can I pay with crypto? So this kind of upstream demand is occurring now where it’s

may not have particularly in the US in the past couple of years. So the demand is there. And now whether or not we want to think about whether it’s hype or not, I don’t think about this as crypto itself necessarily.

John Biggs (06:17.006)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (06:21.422)

I mean, you said yourself $400 million in money moving through the system is wild.

Jasper Fu (06:27.748)

Mm-hmm. Which is a relatively, you know, if we think about it at scale, it’s super small, but it does prove that there’s that actual volume there, right? In the actual use case of payments and commerce from a consumer to business perspective, not necessarily B2B, not necessarily watch trading or, you know, exchange trading or high frequency trading, but actual use case for somebody who’s like, man, I got some Bitcoin in my hand, like,

John Biggs (06:31.075)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (06:54.958)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (06:55.808)

Why shouldn’t I just be able to pay with it? Or cross-border payments, of course. And then there’s also certain industries where they’re just, they have a really hard time keeping card payments and they’re not even weird industries. It’s like peptides. Peptides for some reason, like really has a hard time keeping like a stable card processor. And the demand is there. The product is actually relatively stable. And just makes no sense financially that that’s not being taken care of. know, that industry is not being.

John Biggs (07:07.64)

go.

Jasper Fu (07:25.643)

addressed.

John Biggs (07:27.63)

I mean, there’s obviously some places where crypto works really well, like online gambling and sort of adult stuff, that kind of thing. But it sounds like just even for like supplements, which would seem that that shouldn’t be a big problem.

Jasper Fu (07:42.372)

It should not, supplements, VPN tools, oddly enough, multilevel marketing, of course. And then now this new class of AI girlfriends that surprisingly large group. whether crypto is hype or not, I think about it on a multi-tech cycle level.

John Biggs (07:45.719)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (07:49.879)

Yeah.

Jasper Fu (08:08.606)

Is the underlying technology, call it blockchain, Are cryptographically tokenized assets meaningful or impactful anyway? Do they solve anything? Do they make the market larger? Do they make it more efficient? And the answer is yes. At the end of the day, it’s just a more efficient way of storing, retrieving, accessing data. The fact that we choose to tokenize something and the fact that someone chooses to do a get rich quick scheme that happens in every single industry. And so, yeah.

Are there use cases where it’s all hype? Absolutely, that’s how new tech gets there, right? If there’s no hype, no one’s sitting there reading research papers being like, yeah, this is great. It gets adoption through the people that’ll hype it, and then it kind of reaches maturity at some point.

John Biggs (08:52.014)

You mentioned before we were talking about the rise of stablecoins. I mean, we’re talking about ETFs. We’re talking about government adoption. sounds like, gosh, sounds like Texas is trying to do something right now with their own sort of currency. Are you in the right time for all this right now? Was it harder a few months ago?

Jasper Fu (09:16.758)

When we first started building it was certainly harder, right? Stablecoins themselves, like all of this, like the terms have to get into the human zeitgeist and kind of be branded. And then somebody has to understand what that actually means.

And then it has to gain adoption and practice. So yeah, absolutely. This is such a great time to be doing it. The other day I looked and I think it was like stablecoin.org or something, the domain was on sale for like a hundred thousand. I was like, this is how you know we’re still super early in awareness because you know, somebody would snatch that up if this was a little bit, you know, more mature of a space, right? Um, but I think stablecoins are just starting to get adoption, regulatory clarity.

John Biggs (09:46.775)

Okay.

Jasper Fu (10:02.083)

The incentives are all properly aligned, right? Stablecoins being backed by T-bills, meaning that there’s more purchase of T-bills from the government, which means they have an incentive to positively impact the creation of more, the issuance of more stablecoins. So I think everything is pointed in the right direction for.

adoption and more money coming into the system.

John Biggs (10:25.586)

Why did you pick crypto? Why did you pick this?

Jasper Fu (10:30.916)

Oh man, so I was leaving corporate and decided to take a little sabbatical to hike, hike some mountains. Sitting there I was like, what do I want to do with the next phase of life? I want to do something that’s meaningful, like I’ve got a decent network, new great technical talent, and more or less are like, okay, what do I do with the next phase of life? What can I do that’s meaningful, impactful, and

net positive or additive to society. And I went through a couple of different thoughts and ideas and just realized like, if I can make the market and payments a little bit more efficient, not just for institutions, but for individuals, grant a little bit more access to financial systems and shake things up a little bit and make the market larger itself. Like, yeah, I think that’s a good thing to put time into. And of course, having your finger on the pulse of money movement never hurts for

John Biggs (11:28.75)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (11:30.221)

growth network valuations.

John Biggs (11:31.966)

If you want to make money, you go where the money is, right? What about getting funding? You guys are working on a round now. How’s that going?

Jasper Fu (11:34.743)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (11:41.097)

It’s going super well. Stablecoins is really hot right now. Stablecoin, stablecoin payments particularly, right? It took a little bit for people to go stablecoin issuer companies like this trend goes, okay, great crypto, great stablecoins. Okay, now what do we do with the stablecoins? And payments and commerce is kind of the next wave of interest. And so we’ve seen a lot of interest from traditional finance funds.

high net worth individuals, family offices, as well as of course the crypto VCs. So it’s currently the hot spot to be. Now it’s just trying to figure out who do we align ourselves with maximally? Like what actually makes sense here? Far cry from two years ago when it was not a sexy thing to talk about stable coin three years ago, when it was not a sexy thing to talk about stable coin payments because everyone was so hype about real estate, know, RWA tokenization, still a thing, right? And token launches.

John Biggs (12:39.278)

Do you think the industry’s finally hit that level of maturity where it needs to be to, I mean, first off, support a constellation of startups that are actually doing things that people want them to do, right? That people are excited about. And also that they’re not going to have like rug pulls and huge funding announcements that end up petering out. It sounds like you’re slow and steady wins the race in this case, right?

Jasper Fu (13:07.78)

We are very slow and steady. We’ve got a long-term plan for what we think will happen at each stage of adoption, and we kind of just go forward with that and try to ignore the hype or take advantage of the narrative whenever it makes sense. But as far as the industry reaching maturity,

Jasper Fu (13:30.888)

Not yet, right? We’re at the stage where everyone is beginning to have awareness of the value and opportunity, which means we’ll actually have more influx of capital coming in for a variety of reasons. Each of those will be interested in capturing their own ecosystem. So the technology is actually going to become harder to use in the short term as it goes from just once upon a time, say just Bitcoin or Litecoin, right? Two tokens to a fragmentation of dozens, maybe hundreds of different stable coins that are each that

of whom each have their own incentives to maintain their ecosystem and may or may not be compatible with others. Same with the underlying blockchains. There’ll be more and more of them each trying to do an ecosystem battle.

John Biggs (14:12.608)

Is there a collapse or is an ecosystem collapse or can the industry handle that?

Jasper Fu (14:17.924)

It’ll be a consolidation is what I’m thinking. I mean, at the end of the day, the money flowing in is large by individual standards, but relatively trivial by traditional finance standards, So the ecosystem can certainly handle it, but you’ll see consolidation early on when automotive manufacturers were around the US. The US had hundreds, if not thousands, of automotive manufacturers early on. And then, of course, it kind of consolidates and peters out to a couple of the dominators.

And I expect that to happen with this as well.

John Biggs (14:50.744)

Why do you like the startup world versus corporate, or do you?

Jasper Fu (14:55.272)

I like the startup world because I got this hypothesis that you can still be like a good person and an honest person and treat your team well and like go empathy first. And that that’ll turn out actually better than kind of treating an individual as a commoditized resource. You can buy people’s physical presence and time, but not their effort.

John Biggs (15:01.038)

Hmm.

John Biggs (15:19.214)

Did that frustrate you in the corporate world that you had all these people who got paychecks but they didn’t do anything?

Jasper Fu (15:31.318)

It wasn’t that so much as the people who really wanted to shine and excel were not like accordingly, like rewarded. almost like, you know, you see all these like young people that are excited, want to work hard, want to kind of grind, push forward, get into a corporate setting. For me, it was consulting. And then it almost just, you hit like a quick, like quick stand real quick.

And so that’s not necessarily frustrating because I understand why things work the way, like why it works the way that it does. But I just want to be able to create, well, I want to see if a different culture can be created and still work.

John Biggs (16:20.558)

Would you jump back into, hold on a second, would you recommend somebody go into corporate first, consulting first, and then do startup? Or should young people do startups immediately right out of college or in college?

Jasper Fu (16:34.149)

depends on your financial situation. Corporate is, well, I don’t know if job stability is still a thing. Corporate’s reasonably reliable. Startups, corporate’s reliable and safe is what I would say. Startups provide far more opportunity for upside, whether or not you’re just grinding away at your own consulting company or building websites for people. There’s far more upside to it and far more personal growth that must.

John Biggs (16:35.757)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (17:03.535)

happen. So it depends on whether you want to just have a nine to five or a set amount of time traded for money and then enjoy the rest of your life or whether or not you have something that drives you that you want to keep growing and learning for.

John Biggs (17:21.678)

What’s next for CoinSub? What are you guys working on?

Jasper Fu (17:24.388)

So as we complete our arrays, we’ve been engineering heavy so far. And now it’s just taking this working formula that we know and expanding it. In terms of bringing together the best talent, the best consultants, making sure that at least from a payment service provider industry, like our existing target segment, that we capture a significant portion of the market while we still have a first mover advantage in who we’re targeting. And then beyond that, it’s seeing where else

the same technology of money conversion while it’s on ramps, off ramps, and this kind of flexible technology can apply, whether it’s like ATMs, right, it’s kind of an interesting side one for us, or whether it’s like focusing on particularly like on the payout space. So it’s just seeing what’s next, what’s the next spot.

John Biggs (18:17.614)

Who’s your ideal customer? Like who would you love as a customer?

Jasper Fu (18:21.803)

Right now, things like a Worldpay, an Adyen, a Square, Anything that has large distribution as far as controlling merchants. But then, other than that, our favorite customer is the one that has some level of, call it startup hunger. It doesn’t matter if they’re like a middle-sized, right? There’s plenty of...

John Biggs (18:45.475)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (18:50.996)

middle market companies whose names are unknown, who have significant reach in the tens or hundreds of thousands of merchants that are doing single digit billions, right? But at scale comparatively, they don’t have a differentiator. So somebody who wants to utilize, basically take advantage of this emerging technology and disruptive kind of money movement to take their company from one of the smaller fish in a saturated market to an outstanding kind of front runner.

John Biggs (19:21.634)

Have you used, are you using crypto or stable coins in point of sale? you tried that yet? Is that a thing?

Jasper Fu (19:28.451)

That is actually our point of sales virtual turnables checkouts. That was our first entry in. And then subscriptions was our differentiator for a value prop that others did not have.

John Biggs (19:39.84)

Mm-hmm. And how long does it take to like, mean versus like, I don’t know, tapping, how long does it take to do a crypto transaction?

Jasper Fu (19:47.011)

So the actual point of sale, longer, which is why I wouldn’t recommend crypto for physical transactions, rather digital, unless time is on the issue.

John Biggs (19:54.368)

I’m thinking I’m thinking like that. I don’t know the vape the vape shop or whatever, right? Something like somebody somebody wants.

Jasper Fu (19:59.461)

At best, you’re looking at like 50 to 45 seconds in 45 seconds, right? Depends on which chain it is. I think there still needs to be another kind of layer built before point of sales is functional. Can you imagine standing in the line at the grocery store and everyone waiting 45 seconds? You have to pay is nearly infinite. There’s a level of like pre-funding and trust and risk that goes on there, which can be built towards.

John Biggs (20:03.726)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (20:17.23)

Yeah, exactly.

John Biggs (20:22.648)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (20:29.11)

OK, very cool. All right, so coinsub.io, you’re looking for investors and you’re looking for partners. And you’re well on your way to actually making people. Maybe I’ll try to find some of your partners and I’ll pay for stuff with crypto. What do I pay for crypto recently? I think I bought a watch once with crypto. So there you go. So I’m on my way there,

Jasper Fu (20:35.854)

Mm-hmm.

Jasper Fu (20:50.458)

cool. Yeah, luxury goods, definitely. Also, less interesting use, but one-on-one invoicing. How do you invoice someone from Turkey? If they got stable, there’s certain, we use our tech ourselves within our team members, so our team is globally distributed. And so sometimes it’s the only way to pay our team members. So there’s these interesting use cases there as well.

John Biggs (20:58.733)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (21:14.114)

Yeah, very cool.

John Biggs (21:18.188)

All well, Jasper, thank you for joining us. This has been a nice deep dive. And I think you explained it better than almost anybody else has explained crypto on this show, so it’s important. All right, Jasper Fu, coinsub.io. I’m John Biggs, and this has been The Innovators. We will see you next episode.

Jasper Fu (21:27.645)

thanks, John.

This week on Keep Going I talked with Nelly Mendoza, the founder of Nelly Creative Studios. She has been making jewelry for about ten years, and her story is not a clean startup arc. It starts with her walking into a class in the basement of her college art center, kind of by accident, and finding the one thing she kept coming back to, even while she was majoring in economics.

The part that stuck with me was how practical she is about an “impractical” career. She did not raise outside money. She took a few fellowships, one was about $5,000 after graduation, and used it to buy materials, mainly gold, and get herself set up. After that, she kept the loop tight, money from projects went back into materials and equipment. There is no magic here. It is repetition, reinvestment, and staying alive long enough to get better.

She also talked about the part people skip when they say “follow your passion.” In a creative business there is no set path. There is no job ladder. It is trial and error, and it can be lonely. She described those stretches where sales slow down and you start asking if you should turn around and do something safer. She had those moments. She also knew that if she took the safe route too early, she might never leave it. So she learned to measure progress in small wins, one new client, one new piece, one new idea, and keep moving.

On the growth side, she did the work that actually gets attention. She built a consistent online presence, wrote blogs, kept a “jewelry journal,” and made her brand for both men and women, not just women. She leaned on word of mouth because jewelry is visual, people see it, ask about it, and that conversation sells better than an ad. Then she added something a lot of online brands miss, physical experiences. Last year she rented a gallery, invited people she trusted, and let them handle the pieces in person. No storefront, so she created the moment herself. She is planning another pop-up, and she is careful about safety and about building a real community around the work.

One more choice mattered. She took a job at Tiffany, in their innovation studio, for four years. Not to quit her business, but to buy time and learn. She called it a kind of second degree. It gave her skills, contacts, and more confidence in how the industry works. Then she left when she felt the job was taking too much time away from the thing she wanted to own. That is a hard call, and she made it without pretending it was romantic. It was about control and focus.

Her economics degree shows up in how she thinks about pricing and tradeoffs. She does not price from feelings. She prices from materials, opportunity cost, and the reality that gold has gotten expensive enough that old prices do not work anymore. She is now thinking about entry-level pieces for younger followers, using different materials, without turning the work into disposable trend-chasing.

If you want the lesson from this episode, it is this. Making your own way is slow and it is messy. You do not need a dramatic leap. You need enough runway to learn, enough discipline to reinvest, and enough patience to stick with the lonely parts. Allie built her business the old-fashioned way, one piece at a time, one customer at a time, and one decision at a time. That is still how it works.

Transcript:

Welcome back to Keep Going, podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. The other show we have Nelly Mendoza. She’s the founder of Nelly Creative Studios, your jewelry maker. Nelly, welcome. Yeah, so you’ve been doing this for 10 years. I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to who is actually making jewelry or some kind of like

Nelly (00:58.162)

Thank you.

Nelly (01:02.184)

I have closed ears now, yep.

John Biggs (01:09.728)

or accessories, etc. So this is a this is a new one for me. So why don’t you just tell me about the business and how you started.

Nelly (01:15.45)

Yeah, so I started in college kind of by accident. Just enjoyed making jewelry, just walked in into a class one day into like the basement of the art center and then started making jewelry that way. And then I was an econ major, kind of went back and forth in terms of careers, but the one consistent thing was always jewelry. And then once it was time to pick a career, you know, last...

last semester or last quarter of school, I decided to try jewelry. I got, yeah, so I started that way. At first, I wasn’t sure what it would look like and how the future would pan out. But as time continued, I kind of figured things out a little bit more.

John Biggs (02:04.536)

So what was the driving force behind this decision? I mean, you had an economics degree and making jewelry is, I suspect, fairly difficult thing because it’s fashion-based and I can’t imagine that it’s cheap to get started.

Nelly (02:23.694)

No, it’s not cheap for sure. You have to be creative in terms of, know, I never got any external funding just because I know what that means. It’s like giving up control of who you are and the type of work you’re working on. So the only funding I got was a few fellowships. Like post-graduation, I got like $5,000 to just buy materials. So I just bought gold and a few other things. And then I was

kind of set up in terms of a studio space. I used the space in the college for a bit. And then that was my first kind of funding. And then after that, I continued to self-fund whatever projects I would get, I would just kind of put back into my work. So I would just go back into buying gold or materials or equipment.

John Biggs (03:14.926)

So tell me about the process. How do you start a jewelry business? What were some of the things that you faced?

Nelly (03:24.04)

The reason I started was because there was really nothing else that I wanted to do. No, you know, it’s, difficult at first. You’re like, okay, I want to do this career, but how do you do it? It’s not as easy as, okay, I want to work in investment banking. Let me apply for different roles. And then I’ll go through these application process, you know, application rounds and interview rounds. It’s more of, okay, you want to do this. You have a goal, but how do you get there? It’s not.

Like someone has done that already and laid a path for you. So it’s a lot of trial and error in terms of how do you get to where you want to be right from you. It was always having control of my own work, being independent and just making beautiful things and having people buy by them as well. Right.

John Biggs (04:12.794)

Mm-hmm. How do you get attention as an artist in that way? mean, obviously, you need to build a fan base. You need to build folks that are repeat customers. But you also have to capture people who are just going to come off the street and say, hey, I like this. What did you do to get started?

Nelly (04:31.558)

Yeah, so I definitely made sure I had a strong presence online. So all of my socials and whatever I was putting out very consistent. So I would always write blogs and I have a jewelry journal just based on, okay, like this is, you know, what the trends are happening for men. And, you know, and I always focused on having serving both men and women as opposed to just doing jewelry for women.

and just having that consistent product, right? So I started my first clients where people I went to school with and then just kind of started telling their friends. And fortunately, jewelry is a very visual product. you know, people see it on you and they’re like, I like it, it’s easy to sell in that way. So you always, you know, I have the work that I wear, but I also, the best people,

Are my best clients or those who wear it and kind of tell their friends? So it’s a lot of word of mouth. And then how do you get it to the wider public? Last year I had my first show. So I rented out a gallery and I just invited friends, friends of friends and, and so on. And a few people who walked in, but it was a closed event, private, just kind of getting, you know, it’s like, people have kind of known me for a bit, but don’t really know who I am and letting them interact with my.

product, especially since I don’t have a store or anything like that. Just having the physical aspect has also helped. So that’s kind of like the next phase of my business, just continuing those pop-up ideas. So I have one planned for this year, for example, somewhere in SoHo again, and just letting people interact with the product. And this will be for a bigger client base. First one was mostly for people already knew.

Obviously you’re dealing with jewelry. You don’t want just anyone walking in. I want people to feel safe when they’re in there as opposed to someone randomly walking in and being a safety thing. So I’m always careful about who I invite and making sure they’re interested just to create, because I’m not just making jewelry or selling jewelry. I also want a good community of people who enjoy my work or who enjoy the arts.

Nelly (06:54.648)

and as opposed to just, you know, it’s just something I sell.

John Biggs (07:00.206)

Was there ever a moment when you said, I should probably get back into investment banking?

Nelly (07:05.339)

that’s very interesting. would say, yes, definitely a few moments where you’re just like, okay, like I’m not selling as much jewelry. just, you know, the creative, the creative career is so interesting because it’s very lonely. You go through these moments where you’re just walking a path and you’re like, this is the right path. Or is it time for me to turn around? I would say once I was past those dark moments of doubt,

I was like, all right, I just have to keep going and things, you know, you have to build slowly. And for me, like the reason I didn’t go until one of those traditional careers starting off is because I knew I would get trapped in that safety net very early on. And it’s once you’re in that, it’s so difficult to leave. So at least for me, it’s like, all right, I had to celebrate the small wins. All right. I have a new client. have a new project, a new idea. I just have to like, put all my focus on there. So.

for very brief amount of time, but I think for me, I just knew this is kind of what I had to do. And if I didn’t do it at a younger age, as opposed to waiting, things just get more difficult. And for jewelry, you kind of have to have mentors and you have to just kind of out in the field and explore and figure things out.

John Biggs (08:28.952)

Did you feel you were able to do it because you did have that backup of an economics degree? I mean, this is like the age-old question, right? Do you go to school for something practical and then do your art on the side, or do you kind of fall in completely? What was your thinking when you were in that position?

Nelly (08:51.56)

You know, having an economics degree definitely made me more confident in terms of, all right, this is how you manage money a little bit more. I think as an artist, like before college for me, I had no idea how money worked. No idea about the stock market, you know, like the value of money, the opportunity cost of something, right? Like if you do X as opposed to Y, what happens? So it definitely taught me to think in a very analytical way.

you know, yes, do I regret sometimes not going into straight up just art, you know, an art degree occasionally, but then I look back at the big picture and it’s like, no, it’s better that I have both the analytical and the artistic because then I can look at something and figure out what it should be priced at as opposed to just the emotional side of, it’s just beautiful.

So yes, it’s an interesting question you ask, like which one came, you know, it’s like, what do you do, right? I don’t think I even thought an arts degree was gonna be something that would help me just when I was in school, but looking back at it, I think I would have been fine either way, but definitely the economics gave me a lot of confidence to just go into my career with full faith, if that makes sense.

If everything failed, I would have that. Sorry, that’s my dog right there. Yeah, I would have, you know, I would have something to fall back on. Yeah, I don’t know if I did a good job answering your question, but.

John Biggs (10:24.352)

Hahaha

John Biggs (10:30.478)

interesting.

No, think that’s, I mean, look, I think you’re honest about it. I think a lot of people would say that, no, I burned my bridges, I burned the boats, and I just decided I’m not going back. I’m not even going to follow the idea of becoming not an artist.

Nelly (10:46.308)

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s interesting. Yeah, for me, I just knew that it’s a time sensitive thing. I think in college, you have the benefit of, you know, you’re still a student and people are like, okay, like, what do you want to do with your life? And you’re almost allowed to play a little bit more, as opposed to what I see now with

A lot of my friends are just like very fixed in their career, very serious career and so on. Here, let me just take care of my... He’s... I think he just... He’s not used to seeing me on calls. All right, let me just give him a little treat.

John Biggs (11:18.606)

Yeah, sounds like somebody wants out of the hole.

Nelly (11:33.244)

or this early on, here, sit. All right. He’s a little shiba, so he’s very demanding of attention. He’s very much like, give me attention. He’s like a little baby. Yeah, I think for me, just knowing that very early on that I had that room to just play and if you fail, it’s not gonna be like, you have a mortgage, you have kids, and what are you doing with your life?

John Biggs (11:41.453)

Hmm.

Nelly (12:04.156)

So that’s what I mean by time sensitive.

John Biggs (12:07.018)

What would you say to someone who’s starting out in this industry?

Nelly (12:11.752)

to be patient. And you you can’t just, you can’t wait for things to just come to you. You just have to kind of go for it and get it. You know, like for me, it’s just, whenever I had moments of darkness and just being like, all right, what am I doing? Just, okay, it’s like, you know, you have the talent, you have the skill, and you can’t think about what you don’t have. You really have to think about, okay, what are the things that I can offer?

Because for me, was like, you know, totally self-funded, like buying materials, gold, everything, just kind of figuring that out. You know, I can be complaining of, I don’t have this or that, but it’s just, it’s, you know, to be in a creative career, it means figuring it out with whatever resources you have, if you really want to make it work.

John Biggs (13:01.358)

I mean, if you really want to make it work, does it mean to really want to make it work? Again, is it a burning your boats kind of situation? You wanted this. I think what I’m trying to say is when you told the story, the beginning of the story, you almost fell into the thing. You went down to the basement. You did some work in the student art lab or whatever.

Nelly (13:26.81)

Yeah, the Hopkins Center up in New Hampshire at Dartmouth. So it’s just like very random, right? Like completely random. And then here we are today. Yeah, so really making it work because here’s the thing, you can definitely make a living doing things that are easier. You know, you can go and again, traditional career and not worry about, you know, when is your next, you know, big project? Is something going to be done right?

John Biggs (13:32.311)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (13:35.949)

Yeah.

Nelly (13:56.956)

You know, like if you have a big client, how are you going to make sure, you know, like to follow through with them to deliver like the best product that you can. And it’s a lot of back and forth. And I would say for other stuff, it’s like, all right, you do your task and you go home. You know, there’s no such thing as like, I need to follow up with my client. need to follow up with my, my stone setter. I need to follow up with this other person. It’s just so many different links.

that I have to work with on a daily basis as opposed to just, I’m gonna just finish whatever I’m told and do that. And I spent a few years at Tiffany, actually my last day was just last year. And part of the reason I was working there in their innovation studio. So again, making it work at a point where I was like, all right, I have this job offer.

John Biggs (14:52.834)

Mm-hmm.

Nelly (14:56.496)

and I’m gonna have some time to just kind of keep figuring things out. And this was two years out of school. And I was like, okay, this sounds amazing. I can learn a lot. And I took that job, it’s like the financial security was great, but also I knew I had to go into the world and learn a little bit more just so I had more experience and again, more confidence. I think it’s all about building that.

creative confidence too.

John Biggs (15:27.662)

So you basically took, yeah, you took a gig to work with Tiffany to just, but that was to expand your line, right? Just to have your experience.

Nelly (15:34.94)

Yeah, expand my line, expand my work, my experience. I spent four years there, but towards the end, was like, you know, it’s time again to go back into my business full time. I’m not dedicating as much time into it as I would like. And for me, it’s just, again, having that, you know, authority of this is the work I want to be working on and these are the projects I want to be doing. I think that’s what really drives me.

John Biggs (16:04.502)

No, so this is, I’m looking at the, I’m looking at the site now, nellycreativestudios.com. So it’s a little rich for my blood, but I’m a watch guy. I’d spend a lot on it.

Nelly (16:08.912)

Yeah.

Nelly (16:13.704)

I know I, yeah, I mean, it’s all, you know, with the price of materials nowadays, it’s, it’s incredible how much jewelry has like, appreciate it. You know, I had some stuff on there that, you know, now I can’t even keep those old prices because it would just be more in the gold. So it’s yeah, it’s definitely appreciated. And then, you know, that affects everything because again,

John Biggs (16:21.784)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (16:36.174)

Wow.

Nelly (16:42.93)

figuring out like, okay, still want to offer. So actually that’s something that I’m working on now, just offering more affordable work as an entry point for people. Because I have a lot of younger followers who don’t necessarily have the budget to afford a solid gold or a solid platinum bracelet. So are offering alternating materials that haven’t been as popular.

aren’t as popular yet and you’re kind of the first mover that makes sense making it popular and offering something different. I think, yeah.

John Biggs (17:23.064)

What do you want to say to somebody who is just discovering your work? Why should they pick up one of your pieces versus somebody else’s? I don’t know, go down to Tiffany, right?

Nelly (17:34.286)

is it’s always going to go out or go up in value in terms of, know, it’s like as I’ve gotten, you know, more experience and exposure, my work has only gained popularity. So something I see a lot now is a lot of, you know, brands who just kind of make stuff trendy. And they’re like, all right, this is trendy for now. It’s kind of following a similar path of like that, like fashion. And I hate to say this, but fast fashion in a way.

of like make something that’s trendy and then it’s not going to hold that beauty or value in the long term. So for me, it’s like making stuff that you can have and be proud of for 20 years, know, 20 years from now, like something you can give to your kids or your grandkids. and with Tiffany, you know, it’s their stuff is, you know, their bread and butter. You have the designs very consistent. but you can get that any, any other time, right? It’s not something that you can only get.

once in a lifetime. for a lot of my clients, do, especially when I do like a one of one piece, it’s something that they treasure and they keep and they wear almost like a piece of artwork that they’re wearing. Yeah.

John Biggs (18:48.494)

All right, so we’re going to send folks over to Nelly Creative Studio. Everybody’s going to buy all your jewelry, and you’re going have to make some more. So that might be a nice problem to have.

Nelly (18:57.562)

Yes. Yeah, exactly. And you know, the nice thing, you know, about having that Tiffany experience now, I just have so many people on my court in terms of the skills they offer, you know, and I didn’t have that before, like coming from a liberal art school, you don’t really have those connections. So I would say like spending those few years at Tiffany is almost like my second degree. And you were talking about an art degree, like I would consider that

John Biggs (19:16.556)

Mm-hmm.

Nelly (19:27.016)

kind of like my art degree in a way.

John Biggs (19:28.686)

All right, very cool. Well, Nelly, Nelly Mendoza, Nelly Creative Studios, go check it out. And tell us, I guess, tell us what they especially like. I like the angel pendant. Yeah, I like that. It’s like degraded, of, which is pretty cool.

Nelly (19:32.765)

Thank you.

Nelly (19:42.053)

the angel. Yes, those are. Yes.

Nelly (19:48.206)

Yeah, just for my show, I had a few different pendants with again with granulation with the 22 karat. And it was based on the gods. The theme of my show is Ambrosia, who are the gods. So I had, you know, those up pendants. It’s Aphrodite and then Apollo and then Hermes and then a few other gods. But those are always fun to me.

John Biggs (19:59.085)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (20:03.48)

Sure.

Nelly (20:16.2)

Those do very well for men as well.

John Biggs (20:19.116)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I should become a jewelry guy. I never became a jewelry guy.

Nelly (20:21.946)

Yeah, yeah, I mean the path, you know, the line between like watches are jewelry for men. And, you know, hopefully in the next few years, I’ll get to design more watches. That’s definitely a goal of mine. So yeah, one of one would be would be really fun.

John Biggs (20:28.663)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (20:38.936)

right, very cool.

John Biggs (20:44.238)

All right, well thank you for joining us. I this has been fascinating.

Nelly (20:46.684)

Thank you. Hopefully I answered all your questions. Thank you.

John Biggs (20:48.844)

No, I think you did. This has been Keep Going. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next week.

Nelly (20:56.38)

Thank you.