Yawn Rong - Co-Founder of Stepn

Hello Community,

We’ve got some brilliant projects within our portfolio and want to tell you more about the founders and teams behind them. On a regular basis, you will have the opportunity to learn more about specific projects through our interviews. Feel free to post any questions you may have further down in the comments section.

In today’s interview, we spoke with Yawn Rong, Co-founder of Stepn. Let’s go!

Hi Yawn, how are you? Can you please tell us more about yourself?

I am a serial entrepreneur who has built two successful brands in Australia before venturing into the crypto industry in 2017. I built a crypto investment firm and incubator in the same year and in 2021, my neighbour Jerry and I started the STEPN project.

What pushed you and your team members to develop and launch a move-to-earn project? Please tell us more about the Stepn story!

We had this idea back in early August 2021. The initial idea was building a Web3 Monopoly game, but after watching various similar games with characters running on the game board, it gives us the idea that we should utilise motion with token incentives. And started a project toward the end of the bull run, we decided to make it light and simple on the mobile end, it appears to be the right decision, for many graphic heavy Game-Fi started before us, they completely missed out.

As we started to design tokenomic in Sep 2021, we realised the correlation between moving outdoors and curbing global warming - as people start to walk to commute or buy gocesary, the less motor vehicles they use. So we made fighting against global warming via carbon offsetting one of our key objectives.

Another reason we pick the move&earn concept is that the World has over 400 million running app users, and over 1 billion people use walking, jogging, or running as a form of exercise. The market potential is immense. COVID also successfully raised people's awareness of personal physical and mental health, and in 2021, the online fitness industry has experienced an unprecedented 33% annual growth. Capturing this non-crypto market means move&earn games can nudge millions of people into Web 3.0.

How many users have you impacted with Stepn so far?

We've hit more than 3 million monthly active users and over 800k Daily active users.

Can you tell us more about the collaboration with Asics? Or any other partnerships or collaborations you are working on?

We hope to build a Web3 lifestyle application with gamified and social components. ASICS is a well-known Japanese multinational corporation that produces sportswear. ASICS is the first attempt for us to bring ecosystem partnership to the STEPN-verse, and we will continue to work with them to release new campaigns.

For the upcoming external partnerships that will be launched in the second half of this year, we will prioritise launching them in the existing realms. Some of them are signed and some of them are in the final stages but all under NDAs so we cannot disclose much. These names include some renowned sports clubs, film IPs, social media conglomerates, and more.

What would you like to accomplish by the end of this year? And the end of 2023?

Here is the roadmap for this year. We will fully finish our DEX - DOOAR in Q3 and work toward releasing our independent NFT marketplace and launchpad in between Q3 and Q4.

We will release a range of ecosystem partnership collaboration soon, along with building our Web2 presence such as giving away STEPN branded water and appeals at the offline events such as marathon, music festival and conference we sponsored and hosted.

Toward Q4 this year, we will work toward releasing the concept of our social feature. For this industry, I think at best we can only give 6 months prediction of what will happen, in the next year, we will focus on sustainable growth and user acquisition, and optimise the game, infrastructure and social platforms we built.

How big is the Stepn team today? Where are you all based?

Now we are very much a global business, with over 250 staff working both full and part time with us.

What has been your biggest lesson in building a crypto startup so far?

If you have an idea and passion for something, just do it and try your best.

Anything else you would like to share with us?

1. Always focus on iteration, speed is everything in this industry.

2. If an idea doesn’t work, pivot quickly.

3. Ensure at least 24 months of product runway.

4. Always focus on macroeconomy. None can escape.

5. Good investors are important to success.

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Thanks a lot for your time Yawn and good luck with your project!

The Morningstar Ventures Team