Top Goals: NFT mints, Fiat buys, New users. To thrive as a platform, we must achieve 20% monthly growth per Market-Product-Team Fit. In this Q3 and Q4, rather than spreading thin, the team needs a single focus and going deep. Our theses are:

  1. NFT Mints. Primary sales of tokens are the most disruptive use case of blockchains. These sales as fundraising are also the most critical driving force of a new market. For examples, network tokens for funding protocols in 2017 and 2018, governance tokens for decentralized finance in 2020, non-fungible tokens for community engagements in 2021, and land tokens for Metaverse games in early 2022. We claim that NFT mints for artists, musicians, writers, athletes and performers will soon dominate the Web3 market as the creator economy. These mints are mostly intended for true fans to be funding creators with social collectibles rather than for secondary sales or speculative investments.
  2. Fiat Buys. An ecosystem grows by inflow of assets and by layering of services. For example, NBA Top Shot basketball NFT purchases were through credit cards, and exchanges heavily promote recurring buys through small but regular bank withdrawals. Users must deal with fiat gateways, bank limits, regional restrictions… as well as wallet custody and security. Native Web3 products, however, must use tokens as utility and incentives. Users must also deal with stablecoins, token conversions, bridging assets across networks… as well as treasury dashboard and portfolio management. We claim that solving these challenges for fiat buys and token management will be our most critical customer service.
  3. New Users. Anyone can participate in ****the Web3 economy but only tens of millions users so far. Hundreds of millions are creating content, commerce, games from the support of merely a thousand of true fans each. In contrast, tractions on decentralized finance and profile-picture NFT are mostly limited to crypto natives or influencers. We claim that, by onboarding a creator via new campaigns, many of their community will be joining our platform. For fast iteration, our focus should be creators with monthly production and consumers with weekly engagement – such as musicians on iterative mixes or writers on regular newsletters.

Gaming Platform: wallet integrations, tournament escrow, embedded marketplaces

NFT Mints (Fiat Fundraising) via Events & Merchandises

Music NFT: Access, Social, Livestreams

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<aside> ❤️‍🔥 And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it—or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can... Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to… When a great team meets a great market, something special happens. – Marc Andreessen on Market-Product-Team Fit (and Y-Combinator’s 20% Benchmark)

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<aside> 📝 The initial use case of Ethereum was crowdfunding whether it be the original DAO or initial coin offerings…. the ability for strangers on the internet to come together to fund a campaign, whether through a DAO, smart contract, company, or NFT. Mirror has further enabled this behavior via its variety of crowdfunding mechanisms [Dutch auctions account for 25% of the total ETH fundraising contributions], and it will likely continue to serve as an important aspect of funding niche or large projects for creators and communities. The content platforms of tomorrow will not only be user-owned and operated, but they will also enable new user behavior such as spinning up DAOs based on niche communities, supporting creators directly via NFTs, and new business models based on cryptoeconomic primitives (e.g., programmable royalties, Mirror NFT splits, etc.) – Messari on Writing NFT (10.1K ETH raised, 16.8K sponsors, 624 writers)

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<aside> 🎵 Music also has a unique history and ownership culture that could unlock asymmetric value. Among artists, musicians arguably create the most cultural impact relative to what they capture… NFTs offer a lifeline for more artists to earn a living from their work, which could accelerate their adoption… Value comes from access to an exclusive brand, in-real-life events, and the growing mindshare. Musicians have some of the most rabid fanbases in the world, as evidenced by the 40M-strong fan club for K-pop band BTS. – Delphi Digital on Music NFT

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<aside> 🍕 Ownership manifests across a spectrum of experiences that range in user effort, responsibility and degree of collectivity. One user might own a single digital media asset, like an NFT. Another might influence a network’s operation via a governance token. The experience of being an owner encompasses both passive (i.e., hodling) and active participation. At its core, the ownership economy not only offers a powerful new tool for builders to leverage market incentives to jumpstart new networks—it also holds the potential to create positive social change through the wider distribution of wealth-building assets. – Variant Fund on The Ownership Economy (a16z’s Creator Economy)

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ONE on Messari’s 2022 Theses