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.
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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.
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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.