We recently connected with Alcides Aguasvivas and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Alcides, thanks for joining us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

Well it was early 2021 and I had just learned about NFTs, a new type of digital asset. While they had been around since 2015 it didn’t really start taking shape until 2021. I spent most of that year learning about NFT and investing into projects that I liked. It was now October and I had been invited into an NFT launch event for a photographer in NYC. At the point there were only a hand full of people that I knew what were into the web3 NFT space (Now it’s grown to two hand fulls) so I invited 2 of my friends to go.

The event was a pure success. There were hundreds of enthusiasts that showed up for this event. The vibe was great, music, drinks and live performances. My friend, now Co-Founder, July and I stood on the sidelines just appreciating what was going on. For an emerging space where less than 1% of the population know what an NFT is, we were in awe of what was going on.

The next day, July called me to meet at his house. I got to his house and the first thing he said was “We have to do something!”. The idea was a social app that allowed users to stay on top of their portfolio, communicate with others and access liquidity by borrowing against their digital assets. As collectors we dealt with a lot of pain calculating all our assets using spreadsheets and trying to find others to communicate with. My co-founder, July, coming from a luxury watch industry always had an idea to be able to tokenize a real world asset like a watch where it would be added to your entire net worth. Our thought was that if you have $50k in the bank but $1M worth of watches, then that should be part of your net worth where most financial institutions would not use them as such.

Two months later we had built a team and our v1 platform was launched, providing news, NFT sales data and upcoming projects. It’s no 2024, we are backed by a couple of funds closing our seed round, V4 has launched and we keep speaking to users and developing the product.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a Dominican American tech founder in the Web3 space. At the age of 22 I started my first agency, Pix-l Graphx, a branding and marketing company. At that time a lot people were graduating college and were having a hard time getting a job they loved and I didn’t want to have that issue. My first year in college a had a project to do and it was to come up with the name and branding for a fictitious company. I did the brand for Pix-l Graphx and then register the company. That was the start to my entrepreneurial journey.

Move forward to the end of 2020, I began to get really involved in the blockchain crypto space. I had always known about crypto the tech intrigued me but it took some time to finally dive in. Once, I did, I was sucked in. As small as the space currently is it is very much a live and so much is happening and everything is moving at a mile a minute. It really is exciting to be part of the new space.

By the end of 2021, we launched our v1 website of NettyWorth. The startup was created to give users a fully integrated platform where they could manage their crypto and digital assets portfolio as well was communicate with others and be able to take out loans all in one place. And that is what we have been working on since then. Currently everything is fragmented and you need multiple tools to be able to achieve all this and we plan to make it easier for everyone to manage their assets as well as using machine learning to connect borrowers with lenders. As it is I used to manage my portfolio on a spreadsheet and now I can connect my wallet and see my value in seconds.

I can’t say one particular thing that I’m proud of because, I’m proud of the entire journey. I can’t be any more grateful to work with the partners and team members that I work with. Two years ago to have this idea of NettyWorth from an event that we went to where we are now is mind-blowing to me. If I had to pick out one thing, I think it would be the fact that we have joined the small percentage of latino founders who raise capital. In an industry where 1% or less of latinos/blacks startups get funded. So being able to do this and raise on a platform like Republic, where they only allow a very small amount of companies to raise on their platform was big for us. I mean Robinhood and SpaceX raised on that platform.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

My Co-Founders at NettyWorth and I have known each other for over 10 years. In 2004 at 21 I started a branding and marketing agency while I was still at the university. My Co-Founders, July and Ivan were client’s of Pix-l Graphx, the agency. They had a motorcycle store and an online shop. We had built their first e-commerce website and through out the years we would work on other projects for July. We were always friendly and would talk from time to time but we never really connected but it always felt like at one point of another our lives would cross paths and it finally did. Ivan funny enough was the person to get me into Ethereum NFTs and we walk talk from time to time and July and I didn’t connect over NFTs until the night of the photographer’s launch.

I always like to use the phrase “Connecting the dots” for me in life every we do today is leading us down a path and the dots always connect at some point. For me it was time that we worked on something together.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

In the beginning we were bootstrapping everything ourselves. As founders in tech many have a technical background, while I built our V1 website, we didn’t have the full technical knowledge to build everything ourselves so we had to fund the company. We didn’t think about going after investors for over a year, so all the investments were done by July and myself. We believe in what we’re are doing so much that we invested about $250K out of our own pockets. Not many startups can say that and we are grateful to have been the position to do so. All the funding came from stocks, crypto, NFT and real estate investments. Early last year we decided that if we wanted to scale and build a big brand then we needed to go after funding. It’s now 2024 was have raised over 6 figures and working on closing our seed of $2M before the end of the year.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nettyworth.io
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nettyworth.io
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nettyworth/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/NettyWorth_
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nettyworth