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Background
Mint Season 2 episode 5 welcomes Jess Sloss, instigator at Seed Club, an incubator for the crypto space helping creators and communities launch and grow successful social tokens.
In this episode, we talk about
- Finding and aligning your community with a universal purpose
- The ownership economy
- Frameworks used to derive liquidity for early-stage social token projects
- DAO management roles
- The importance behind on-chain revenue
- The rise of a human stock market
…and so much more.
Thank you to Season 2’s NFT sponsors!
1. Coinvise – https://coinvise.co/
2. POAP – https://poap.xyz/
3. Socialstack – https://socialstack.co/
4. Celo – https://celo.org/
5. PrimeDAO – https://www.prime.xyz/
Interested in becoming an NFT sponsor? Get in touch here!
Let’s start with the basics. Who are you, what were you doing before crypto and where are you now?
My name is Jess. I’m the instigator of a project called Seed Club . We are a DAO that builds and invests in communities with tokens. Yeah. I mean, I guess I got into crypto in 2017. I was really fascinated with this idea of being able to own and have a say in the networks that are coordinating our economic lives and fell down the rabbit hole pretty quickly worked on a number of projects over the last few years, but I think really found my footing in this emerging social crypto space. So in just about a year ago, I think we’re going to have our year anniversary coming up soon and what I can figure out exactly when we actually started, but about a year ago the emergence of some early signs of value and opportunity within the social token space became apparent. And I was lucky enough to be joined by a great group of early collaborators to form Seed Club where, you know, today we’re 62 collaborators. These are the member owners of the Seed Club DAO backed and have launched close to 17 projects and currently recruiting for our third cohort, which will kick off at the beginning of September. So trying to put things in the social token space.
How did you come to the conclusion that you wanted to have a say in the projects that you use which have an economic impact on our lives?
Okay. I mean, I guess I was really early into social media and got really excited about the opportunity that sort of democratized access to distribution would bring to the table. So this idea of being early blogging, early Twitter, being able to like publish things and have people see it and you know, I’d run a business early on and spend you know, thousands of dollars on advertising before and just realizing how ridiculous and painful it was to pay for attention and really wanting to see an opportunity to have more direct to my audience or to my customer relationship. So I got really into social media. I was excited about it and, but pretty quickly it started to be apparent that, you know, giving a Facebook or a, you know, later Instagram or YouTube, like control or like the, the dominant being the monopoly, essentially over attention and access to you, to your audience was maybe not the best idea you can see what’s Facebook, you know, the, the idea of removing organic reach and instead forcing people to pay for advertising to get that reach was pretty clear example of that sort of S curve of adoption and development within these platforms where they’re, you know, platforms are all about building and giving and, and collaborating and you know, creating value for users to a point where they’ve captured the lion’s share of attention and sort of have this you know, viral growth or exponential growth themselves and then they start to turn that off and instead begin monetizing. So this like, you know, build an audience, then kind of sell them out in order to monetize model was pretty apparent to me and it was very frustrating to sort of think through like all this value and effort that has been put into building up a Facebook page or even you know, and then it was a YouTube subscription sort of subscriber base only to have it be algorithmically limited and really forced towards advertising. So that was like the direct example.
How have you kind of seen crypto approach this problem? Obviously it’s a big ethos and a big narrative for crypto in general, even more so with, with social tokens and NFTs, what are some examples that come to mind that attempt to kind of go after this problem and eliminate it and bring kind of power back to the users? What is like one of the more recent examples?
I mean, I think the jury’s still out on whether we’ll see like, you know, competitors to YouTube or Facebook or whatever, and that same model that we’re we’re, you know, cryptos are the central piece to it. I think Audius is probably the best example of this and other, you know, I think have 5 million monthly users right now and are seeing some really great success. It’s still is a tiny percentage of what something like Spotify would have as far as their monthly users and listeners. So I’m optimistic that something like that will happen that eventually once a consumer application rolls out like a true sense of ownership to its users that that will ultimately result in its growth. More projects like that going that direction. But you know, I think right now that what I love so much about the community token space is how visceral that feels like the idea of being able to ya know .So friends with benefits is a project that I’m sure you’ve talked about a lot here, the ability to sort of buy tokens that represent ownership in this community. You know, there’s a set amount of tokens and I own a percentage of those. And that gives me access to this community. And through my efforts, you know, I host a Thursday afternoon, social token chat there and been involved in supporting the project in other ways I can have an impact on the increased value of this token. And as more demand comes to that token, I get to see you know my value increase. So I think that’s a very tangible example of like having a sort of, I guess, profiting from the increased usage, the example of early Uber drivers or Airbnb years .Again, I think they’re used quite often and saying, well, these folks created a ton of value for these networks, but don’t get to profit in it.How do you actually have a say in these networks? And what does it say look like, and is it truly a say or is it more of like a, you know, a nice to have or like yeah. Is there ever really truth on these things?
Yeah. I want to bring up something because it’s super on par with where the conversation is heading right now. This article came out on Bloomberg. So basically the headline is Facebook, Google, and others should pay us for using our data, here’s one way to do it. This was published three hours ago, and a lot of people kind of argue that these conversations only live on crypto Twitter, right? The sense of ownership, the sense of being a part in having a say in a stake in the products and services. But obviously this is starting to exist beyond crypto Twitter, right? This being the most obvious example. And the writer, Peter coy is basically arguing that maybe there’s a way to get paid 10 cents for every single dog or cat picture you post on Facebook or maybe even $5 a month for your searches on Google. In return of them using your data. Right. And I assume I see you nodding your head to share with me a little bit about that. What do you think?
So like individual data, even bucket a data it’s not valuable. It’s the network effect is valuable in these communities and these platforms. So it’s the network of Uber, the network of Facebook. And so unless they’re giving equity to people who are creating value on these networks, then no amount of pennies and dimes being paid to from my interaction on the platform is truly reflective of the value that we’re creating. And I think that that’s why crypto is so innovative, like tokens represent ownership and a say, and a governance right. And sort of an indication of being early and all these things are what’s truly valuable. And I think the you know, we need to get to hopefully a world where we can give people tokens that represent something that’s much more equity-like that represents the value that they’ve created and either betting on something early or bringing a lot of value to a network early. And that is in assets, not in income.
Yeah, no, I hear you and I think a lot of these like more modern-day web three companies, there’s the element of starting a DAO and going strictly to the token model. But there’s also like this hybrid model of starting that LLC, and then bridging out into a token. And what’s interesting is the employees that get hired for these hybrid model firms. They kind of prefer more of the token route rather than the equity in the LLC itself, because the real value, the real liquidity, the real growth that you see like front on, in hand in front of you is from the token appreciation. So what would you say, how do you kind of determine between bridging that through that hybrid model versus going full throttle down web 3.0?
I just think it’s exciting that we can go full throttle web 3.0, like that’s the innovation. Is it right for everybody? Definitely not. There’s a lot of reasons why you want to have a you know a corporation that you raised into and the limitation of liability that exists for that. There was a ton of regulatory uncertainty that we’re dealing with still, no matter what model you go with, but definitely some, you know, more with, with some paths than, than others. So I just think it’s a very exciting that this is an option and because of how much less friction exists to bring people together around a multisig with tokens and a snapshot and to, you know, pull capital and go do cool things inevitably more of these things will be started and soon the question will really be like, do I really have to start a coin? I mean, the best founders are already asking me this already. Do I really have to start a corporation? And the answer is maybe. Maybe depending on what you’re trying to build and how you’re trying to structure it.
Let’s reference this article again really quick. This theory, this element of people want to own the products that they use. It’s an ongoing narrative. Jesse Walden is one of the godfathers of that narrative, right? It’s a known thing. But when I talk to my cousins, who I consider more of the normie crowd, okay. When I talk to friends, when I talk to people that work in traditional companies, right. They use these platforms they’re incredibly addictive and they just consume the content and they don’t really think twice whether or not they should own it. Right? When do you think we’ll start seeing that dynamic in that shift on a more main scale type of level, because right now in crypto Twitter, it’s very much so the belief. Right? But beyond that, beyond that Bloomberg article, I feel like many people don’t think about it as philosophically and as critically the way we do.
Yeah. I mean, I think a big part of that is that people don’t know there’s another option. Right. And so there’s an education component and I think, you know, as more people do realize that, that the idea of like, do I want to earn ownership to use a thing or not earn ownership to use a thing. I think that becomes like a pretty more obvious decision. But I think there is like an underlying concern here where like ownership in a purely financial sense, you know, traditionally has been very concentrated and it’s not for lack of trying to be more distributed. So the fact that most people don’t care about it and don’t know why to care about it, or maybe they can’t, maybe they, you know there’s sort of like a short-term profit need or earnings need that ways the ability to sort of hold long-term. And I think we saw Eric Arsenault from the Rarible DAO post something about this around like the experience being or people are mining, you know, Rarible tokens for doing things on the rebel platform and the vast majority are dumping it. And so you’re seeing a concentration of those tokens in the hands of more of a professional class. So I think like the reality is we’re going to hopefully just do a little bit better than the way it is right now. I think that’s what we’re seeing in Twitter generally. Like there is a more distributed ownership base for the most of these projects. There is a lot more choice and voice and exit opportunities, so we can, you know, move away into doing new things if we don’t like the way a community or platform is going. And so I think we’ll, you know, it’s unrealistic to think that we’re going to have 100% of the population being stoked on ownership, but I think we have a 10, 20, 30% increase. I think for me, this idea, like the concerning thing around our digital economy that we will live in, especially over the sort of web two era, was just how many winners there were, but just how many losers there were, there was no middle class in the creator economy. There’s no middle class in this sort of digital world. And the sort of like the impact networks have, you know, when our economies become networks that the normal distribution curve just seems to disappear because there’s no physical bounds to it. And so I think crypto now through the introduction of scarcity through NFTs and ERC-20s the ability to sort of earn algorithmically or through other schemes might increase the likelihood that we’ll have some semblance of the middle middle-class in a digital economy. And I think that’s something that we should be working towards.
I remember seeing an article from Cooper and Kinjal covering this topic and I know a few others have kind of covered and wrote about it and you’re seeing this argument. I feel like you’ll see a lot of this art or these arguments prevailing. More specifically in like the creator economy and all these like random ass Tik Tok creators that are really just gamifying the algorithm, but they get a lot of views , but they don’t know how to really build communities, but they might have a small following subset. If people that engage with them and those are the type of like the micro economies that you’re referencing?
Well, I mean, I think the opportunity for many micro-economies to exist is exciting, I think the fact that those Tik Tok-ers , you know, in a world where Tik Tok was web three they would be earning for the value they’re creating. Right? So their ability to win the game, that is the algorithm is about the algorithm was what Tik Tok should reward. Ultimately they’re rewarding them with views right now. And they’re just unable to turn those views or those followers into revenue or money. Right. And so I think having, you know, the aligning an incentive scheme, such that the more addictive content that you can create, the more Tik TOK tokens you earn and therefore giving somebody an ownership stake in the network is the thing that leads to more of a, you know, a middle-class of creator. So creators need to be earning ownership, not just income off of these platforms for the change to happen.
No, I hear you. And I know a big part of what you guys do at Seed Club is really focus and prioritize these web three communities also dabbling on the creator side. But I know a lot of that has been shifted towards the web 3.0. Communities and a core component of these web 3.0 communities is the liquidity, right? That kind of drive power people get paid out in tokens. They still need to live their lives in the real world beyond the web 3.0 world cash out. Okay. And as you and I can both agree, it plays a large role in opening up the project to the community. Is there some type of framework you guys used to kind of incentivizing liquidity for native tokens as you grow these communities? Like, what does that look like from your point of view?
Yeah, so I think like we take a creator or a community-specific approach to any project. And so the first conversation that we have with somebody who’s building a community token is really to, to understand what the goal is and where they think a token can create value within their community. So, you know, we’re not talking about minting tokens right away. We’re not talking about liquidity, we’re not talking about revenues, et cetera. It’s really about trying to align their goals with what we see tokens being able to do. And so for many of the communities that we work with liquidity is not something that we recommend to even dive into early on. And I think it’s part of a much broader plan and it needs to be thought of as part of a strategy to ultimately unlock the most value that these tokens can unlock within a community. The second you have liquidity. Yes you do have the ability for people to cash out into Ethereum or some other token, but for many communities, that’s probably not a good idea. And you can just reference you know, startups, for example, where, you know, for many startups, you’re looking at 6, 7, 8 years before you have a liquidity event. And while that might seem awful in many ways and, and arguably it is in many ways there’s also a big benefit for community members to be aligned over the longer term, because the reality is you’re probably not able to create something of exceptional value in a course of a week or a couple of months. So the thoughtfulness around when some liquidity should be brought to a project, really, it sort of leads to, I think, more positive outcomes. You know, we even sort of put a lot of thought into like the distribution of tokens early on whether they’re NFTs or, or your ERC-20s because so much of I think the challenge in this space is how do you actually get people who truly care and want to create value within these communities to be owners of the communities when speculation is so easy to do. So, you know, I would say we have four or five tokens that we’ve helped launch out into the market. We’ve worked with 16 or 17 projects. Number of them are still running a playbook that’s all about building connection and value and standing the ownership base of their communities prior to releasing tokens to the open market. So I think that’s like the most important part as far as like, you know, incentivizing liquidity. We’re fans of a number of models, but one that seems to be leading is, is sort of whitelisting LP providers. So giving core team members or backers of the project, the opportunity to provide liquidity and to earn tokens. So much of the design of these token models, I think, especially in the ones that we’re talking about, which are community tokens, where, you know, mostly the tokens are supposed to live within the community treasury and are being used to invest in, in growing the project. You know, the idea of how do you actually, like who gets the chance to earn those tokens matters quite a bit. And you want to make sure that they’re aligned long-term, especially if they’re significant earners. So white listing token or liquidity providers seems to be a good way to go about doing that. And also, you know, the, Uniswap V3 provides new opportunities to sort of set tight bounds as far as what token prices could be. So there’s more and more options. And I think other tools are coming out that’ll make this easier. But I think the core point here is just to be very thoughtful about when you provide liquidity. Some, you know, friends with benefits, as an example, that’s brought up all the time to me, where they were saying, well, you know, FWB had a liquidity pool from day one. And my counter to that is like, yes, but nobody knew who the hell they were or why they might want to own one of those tokens today. When a token price is north of $50, anybody in their dog who’s been watching this whatsoever is going to look at that and say, you know what, probably worthwhile for me to punt an ether on this, because it might just pay off. And now all of a sudden you have your ownership base and pricing based, based on people who are just purely speculators rather than, you know, the amazing community members that Trevor and team were able to bring together.
How do you go by developing your community’s why?
I mean, I think it’s something that’s refined and not developed so much that it’s a core thing that we’re looking for when we explore whether it makes sense for us to work with the community or not. That’s a big part of like our application process for the accelerator and for the studio that we run, we’re really drilling down into that quite deeply. And the big piece here is like you know, a strong why I think sustains and allows you to sort of evolving and overcome challenges where any of the mechanisms like liquidity mining or airdrops, or, you know, play to earn games, maybe that are just being snapped onto these communities in the short-term PFP, chasing the profits of flipping NFTs. Like these are all going to get a whole lot of attention in the short term, but once there’s a deeper why it is to the importance of coming together and working towards something it’s going to be very short-lived and Seed Club’s model, essentially, as we take a small ownership stake in all the communities that we help launch, and we’re locked up in line with the founders at the very least. And so we want to be early diamond hand-holders, which means we are partners, which means we are marrying these founders in some way. Our brand is tied up with them and we want to make sure that there is a long term focus here. And so we’re very, very, very thoughtful about drilling down and checking whether this why is something that resonates, that makes sense that checks out that is aligned with the creator’s experience. And is something that actually, we think we’ll have, you know the pole power to maintain over the long term. I think, you know, it’s interesting that you described FWBs why as being clear, because I think I agree with you though, I don’t know how I would articulate it. So maybe that’s a counterpoint to that point, but I do see a number of people out there saying that, you know, the community tokens off, they don’t have a clear why. And it’s very hard to have a clear why, or at least it’s going to evolve over time. I think that’s a huge benefit. I think it’s like the idea of like what these tokens you’re really doing is creating a shelling point for attention and belief and ownership and responsibility and action around an idea. It can be something like a wall street bets community coming together to stick it to the man, or it can be a moms group that are coming together to mutually support each other through, you know, through whatever challenges they might be having. And you know, what we need to do through designing community tokens is best, you know, empower these tokens with that mutual belief and sense of belonging and that story and narrative that’s going to sustain beyond any sort of short term hype or excitement or their markets whatever may become. So I think the best community tokens are going to be ones that have a clear why, at least for now that motivates people to take action. I think one of the most ones that’s kind of blowing me away is what Krause House is doing. I don’t know if we’ve talked to those guys yet. So it’s a DAO that’s coming together to buy an NBA sports team. They have a mission to buy an NBA sports team. And that’s the look that I gave them as well. Like, are you kidding me? And yet people are like, heck yes, let’s do it. They don’t care that it may be completely unreasonable to go do, or there’s no possible way to do it. Just they’re United in this big vision. And that the team does a great jobs for driving short-term action and belonging and working groups and making stuff , et cetera. So I think like, yeah, sussing out the why and, and seeing what, what resonates is going to be interesting. I mean, I guess it’s how we’re going to be making bets on a lot of these things moving forward.
Okay. So from that point, right? What advice can you give creators in like future wave three communities on finding and discovering that why? How could they go through that process and do it successfully?
Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think that the concern I have, even with the premise of the question is that it’s this idea of, of manufacturing something. And I think like, you know Derek Sivers, who’s the founder of CD baby always talks about how he only ever wants to work on companies that are being pulled out of him. He doesn’t want to start a new company unless it’s being pulled out of him. And I think that probably rings even more true in this world that we’re playing in right now where you know, forcing something and trying to manufacture something, is just probably not going to work. You really need to be able to get a number of people who probably even don’t know about you to come together and, and believe in a thing. And the way you do that is by having a, you know, a true bleed, deeply held belief in, in why something needs to exist and the progress you’re trying to make. And so I think there’s like any number of whys to be discovered. And I think that’s a personal journey for individuals to say, okay, well, what is this thing that I really want to put my time and effort and, and reputation on the line for? And I think a lot of the, probably the top streamers and content creators probably do have that wide deeply ingrained. Like there’s a, you know, a Casey Neistat. It was really about the creativity and the you know, discipline and the pushing forward of a craft. And I think, you know, he has been able to build a large audience around that and I would assume a large part of that audience would probably join a DAO that he created and could focus the effort of that crowd on something good that matters to them. And that would be a worthwhile pursuit. But I don’t think like sitting down and saying, okay, well I want to create a token or a DAO. How do I come up with a strong, why that’s going to motivate people is relative to the appropriate way to go about doing it. Very much feel like Seed Club. Like I describe it as like a you know, a horse that was just, you know, all of a sudden I found myself riding and I just feel responsible for, you know, driving it, steering in the right direction. Let’s make sure there’s water. It’s make sure it eats. And sometimes it’s bucking and sometimes it’s running sometimes it’s trotting, but yeah. You know, there, there is any number of times in my career where I felt like I was really just pushing a big Boulder uphill and this feels like I’m just running down downhill next to it. And I think the best whys are like that. There’s this sense of something that exists out in the world that should exist. And that can point to, you know, a number of projects that we’re working on that, that fit that mold like forefront is like, Hey, there’s just nobody talking about the data and, and the markets around and the people around social tokens, we should be talking about that. Jumped from the joint junk community, which is a B2B marketing community saying, Hey, there’s like, no , marketers or a big market here. People, they care about it more than most people. There no place for them to learn. Let’s go create something. You know, Matthew Shane from song camp literally was on our live stream and said, Hey, I had this kind of crazy idea. Should I go do it? And I was like, heck yes, you should go do it. And now they’ve been producing amazing experiences with amazing music entities. And they’re probably leaders in the music NFT space, despite the fact that there’s artists with millions upon millions, upon millions of followers that are coming into it, they don’t have that sort of deep ingrained sense of mission and community. So I think you know, if somebody is like, I want to get into the space, I don’t know, like, what is my, why my recommendation is you should join a community that resonates with you at first. Go get your hands wet there, figure out what’s going on. And then if you’re like truly have, have built sort of an audience or early community and you want to explore, you know, how to shape a token project in a way that makes sense. That’s really why we invented Seed Club. It’s an opportunity for people to like understand the intricacies and the nuances of what needs to go into launching one of these tokens and why running into it and just minting a token right off the bat, or even worrying about all these things, like getting a perfect economic design, et cetera, without really, you know, diving into the problem area deeply is just not worthwhile. And that’s, I mean, I watched so many projects come in from day, week one, and just sort of transformed by week four and five through our accelerator program.
What are some other key roles in DAOs that are required to make it successful?
Yeah, so I think there’s the core thing is there needs to be a core of an organization that keeps the heartbeat going and momentum building. And so I think, you know, there is sort of this often misguided belief that that is just a community that all of a sudden, a community just manifests and they’re gonna make decisions based on consensus, and everybody’s going to be pulling in the same direction and we’re going to create this amazing thing. The reality is there’s usually one or two or a small handful of people who are taking the responsibility to move things forward. You know, for Seed Club, in the earliest days, that was me. And now we have a team of three along with a number of Collaborators that lead our working groups. I think if you look at someone like friends with benefits, it would have been Trevor and a small group of people and now they have you know, five or six different working groups with, you know, operations and communications and various roles that are in play there. So it was really going to you know, I think that the, in our organization that rolls the instigator, but I think there’s, you know maybe a title is not the most important thing here is just, how do you find an, I guess you just require somebody who’s going to be taking that responsibility and pushing things forward. You know, much like other organizations, you need to have a finance focus, right? How are you budgeting? How are you deciding how to pay and reward people? There needs to be somebody who’s, who’s running operations, right? There’s any number of things to manage within the discord server or you know, transactions to engage or broader conversations to have. I think we can borrow from a lot of the existing organizations and think of like, what are the roles we need to have to keep this economic engine that we’re building growing? But I think what’s exciting is that there’s like all these other roles that can start to pop up. And I think each community really should just be paying attention to where, where there is value to be created or a need, and then figuring out how to match community members to that role as fast as possible. I think it’s a very hard thing to do. I don’t think, you know, I don’t think we do a great job of it yet. We’re really trying to get better at it. But I think that’s a big unlock is sort of identifying opportunities and creating opportunities for individuals to kind of step up. But you know, we see marketing and communications and meme, you know, meme dealers, the Elon Musk’s meme dealer, just, you know, et cetera. We’re seeing, you know, folks who are doing data visualizations, but I think the, the interesting thing is, what we’re seeing work really well is have some core folks that are taking responsibility for moving things forward and then making it easy for a broader crowd to come in and, and support those folks. So look, I think a structure moving forward would look like, you know, five or six working groups with one or two people in those groups that are by their part-time, but more directly compensated in a task with the responsibility of managing those groups and then giving them those folks, a budget to you know, quote unquote hire or recruit, or, you know involve other members of the, of the team or the, of the DAO in that effort. And so I think that’s one way other ways are a lot more chaotic and it’s really just about like fighting for resources and pushing ideas forward. And I think, you know, all of these experiments are worthwhile and it’ll be interesting to see. And I think it’s going to be about, ultimately, we’re going to see matching organizational structure with the type of DAO that is being created as being key. And it might not be super clear yet how to do that, but I think it will be in the coming months.
Do employment standards change in a DAO setting? For example, you talked about, for example, having six working groups? Two people, working groups, having someone part time leading that, managing it. How do people think about, or either, how have you seen people thinking about how do you guys think about compensation for these individuals? Obviously they’re paid through the native token, depending on their funding. They might even get a certain stipend through USDC or USDT right. Let’s say, they’re just like, they’re just the Genesis, right? Trying to incentivize people to come on board through their, why paying them through tokens what does that payment structure look like?
Yeah. There’s no one-size-fits-all here whatsoever. So I think like 90% of my time is spent working with folks that are leading DAOs and communities and working alongside them to help figure out what the right fit is for them. And, and I think like the best way, Joey DeBruin, who’s a, you know, a researcher in residence with us at Seed Club coined the phrase, or described the process of were saying we’re in the case studies phase, not the template phase of DAOs and social tokens and communities. I think we can pull insight from many, but we need to make those decisions relevant to everything from our why to our founding members, to the work that we’re trying to do. So like Seed Club, right? We work with many projects and the types of projects we work with are early stage, and they’re not out in the world and distribution is such an important piece to us. So we can’t be super public about all the projects we’re working on, which means we can’t just say here a community come and support us and help us figure this out. This is a challenge, because in many ways there were probably be a lot of value in better-involving folks to it. So we’re really trying to figure out what the right way to do that is. But for us, the idea of having some core members that are responsible for doing working groups here make sense and, you know, we’ll find whatever the appropriate sort of compensation is to you know, be competitive in the market and also you know, give people the type of upside that they want from participating in these communities early on. And, you know, I think the good thing is people who are joining teams right now are really collaborative. Right. I think that you have to approach it in a collaborative way. I know song camp just went through a whole discussion with our team around it and the community around it. How do we use these funds that we’ve, that we’ve raised, like where should they be used? How should we pay people? How should we think about paying people? Should we pay people? And it led to, I think, a better outcome than, you know, Matthew or I, or any sort of members of that team could come up with through engaging that community. And it also brought them closer together and there’s a deeper sense of ownership. So that sort of collective, like, you know, my salary through Seed Club was decided by a working group of people who did research and suggested something and then voted on it. And then the community vote, like our DAO members voted on it and it was enacted. And here we go. And you know, I think that’s just sort of like that, that process is probably key to building you know, consensus and authority and validity in that payment structure.
How do you differentiate social capital from financial capital?
Yes, I think communities, individuals will say DAOs a community like Seed Club needs to think through how we allocate both our financial capital and our social capital. And so financial capital would be, you know, how do we spend our budget? How do we, how do we spend our tokens? You know, do we back a project? How much should we back a project, etc. The social capital is I think much more nuanced and maybe the most overt way. It’s like, who do we want to align ourselves with? Which projects do we want to partner with? Which projects that we accept into our accelerator what types of projects do we work on? You know, I think increasingly we’re going to see the value of curation in the space grow. And when there’s an opportunity for anybody to launch a token in any community to launch a token and we truly believe there will be millions of community tokens out there, being able to determine which community tokens are of high value is going to be a big challenge. And so, you know, we think that by being thoughtful about how we align ourselves with projects today, we’ll be able to position ourselves to be that trusted voice in the space. And that our curatorial sort of partnership and backing of projects in the future will create value for those projects. And that partnership will be valuable for projects themselves. So that’s sort of like the investment of social capital. How do you actually build that social capital? I think is how we show up on a daily basis. Yes. It’s the culture of the DAO . Yes. It’s who we brought in first. You know, most of my first eight months of working on this project was really talking. I mean, I talked to people every single day, all day long, and a big part of it is trying to make sure we find great people to come and join us at Seed Club. And, and I’m just ecstatic by the 62 member-owners that we have today that are all not only outstanding operators or builders or artists out in the world, but they’re all great human beings. I sort of had this mental model of like if any of our team members were locked in an elevator accident, would they have fun or at least enjoy each other’s company? And I think across the board, the answer is yes. And so can I scale that? I don’t know if we can scale that, but I think it’s definitely the intention. So how do you like, to me, that’s more like the, how do we build an engine of, of increasingly growing social capital? But I think the people who do it the best, or are friends with benefits like that is purely social capital. It’s about the sense of belonging. It’s about the sense of, of like, you know, where do we, what do we build? What sort of parties do we throw? There’s all this intangible stuff that just keeps unlocking new levels of value. And you know, I think the sense of ownership and the creativity and like the irreverence and, you know, the, the way that somebody handles issues on discord or that the community responds to how you go and do fundraising, all these sort of things built into this growing a pie of social capital. And it’s unclear to me how sustained, or how much of a moat exists there or like, is it fragile or not? But I think it’s the important thing is to, I think, start thinking through how that, that there isn’t just financial capital that we’re allocating, but there’s also social, social capital.
How can communities push towards achieving on-chain revenue?
Yeah, I think NFTs are the core innovation here for social DAOs like FWB and like the bill and this actually expanding quite a bit. Right? So like PFPs, as an example, like communities like Bored Ape Yacht Club selling out a number of NFTs. And then building a really strong secondary market that can really sustain a lot of development and building within that community. That’s a great example of on chain revenue. You know, we sold off a series of entities that represented sponsorship over our creator crypto summit at the beginning of this year, that’s on chain revenue. The FWB example is on chain revenue. I think like what the tools that mirror are building with additions or on chain revenue for media DAOs you know, the ability to sort of want to sponsor and back and collect these things and show your signal. You’re supportive to a creator is on chain revenue, but I think we’re still really early days as far as on chain revenue goes. And I think the directions I’m interested or that we’re really trying to push is looking at like, what does subscription look like in these community tokens or like social DAOs , you know, owning seventy-five FWB tokens is great, but the likelihood is that I didn’t buy those from the DAO . I probably bought them from another person who was selling them on the market. So there wasn’t revenue that’s going to the DAO directly. It’s not always the case, but that’s often the case. And so some sort of mechanism where there’s a mixture of subscription revenue to unlock some extra benefits that also leads to a portion being paid out in tokens, I think is an interesting model that we haven’t really seen takeoff yet, but we’re eager to push that forward. And I think there’s, you know any number of interesting models that are going to come from the integration of communities and DeFi . Like I truly believe that the next a hundred million users into crypto are more likely to come from Kanye than they are to come from compound. Like what would communities and creators do well, right. They built the trust and authority of an audience. And so that means that they have the ability to communicate, to capture it. They have the right to somebody’s attention for some amount of time, whether it’s in an inbox or on a video. And the biggest challenge I think we have in crypto is that it isn’t obvious why this matters to start with, right. It isn’t obvious why a DAO is better than a corporation, or why borrowing on AAVE is better than borrowing from your bank or why staking something in a liquidity pool is actually valuable. And so we need to have people who have earned the right to that extra beat or two that gets the necessary information across to somebody to get them to go, oh, that’s kinda cool. And to be fair with the crypto world, most of the content that’s out there is really schemey and pump and dumpy, right? Like it’s like, here’s a token why you should buy ADA today and it’s going to be up a thousand percent and you know, what I think we’re not seeing it’s like, so, I mean, the example I’d love to give us what Packy McCormack is doing. Like the work that Packy does at not boring is phenomenal, right? He has a newsletter, 30,000, 40,000, 50, a hundred thousand people. I don’t even know thousands of people read and they read every single week because he’s built up that trust and the good that he’s done for the Ethereum community, the Axie infinity community NFTs is monumental. And so, okay. As more and more of these people come in, there will be more and more you know, web three interested folks in those worlds. And I think they will have the ability to introduce new consumers to DeFi . I think they will earn, you know great referral fees and, and marketing budgets and sponsorships for all those sort of things. I think those opportunities exists for DAOs and communities as well, and maybe are even better suited there.
I think you brought up a great example that at some point I’m a believer that Kanye is going to have the Kanye DAO, right? He’s going to host his own creator DAO, and there’s going to be exclusive gap X, Yeezy drops, you know, specifically for token holders and people are going to be, airdropped probably Kanye songs, unreleased songs, you know, or samples, or there’s going to be this whole element of web three, fun and developing and all these individual communities. And these are gonna be all the normies that come from the Instagrams, the Snapchats, the Tik Toks, cause that’s their main form of distribution to onboard them. So it’d be interesting to see how kind of that plays out down the line.
Yeah. Whether or not Kanye comes out and does create a DAO. We’ll definitely see hundreds of thousands of others do it. We’re seeing that it happened already, you know, RAC was an early example of it. And I think there’s a lot to be done there still. But a lot of these folks who are stepping into the NFT space, I think it’ll be the natural progression will be for community tokens. I think there’s a number of artists that are in the rally ecosystem. That as soon as you know, there’s more and more tools that roll out there, I think you’ll see them take advantage of that. But yeah. So this idea of like, I always I think I use Taylor swift as an example. I don’t know why. If I was like, I think a Taylor swift token and community token like a Taylor swift coin is like, not a great idea, but I think like a Taylor Swifty coin is a great idea and the difference being that you tokenized the fan community rather than tokenizing the artist. And I can almost like imagine there being competing Swifty communities that are bidding up on every single Taylor Swift NFT that gets dropped or the new album that gets dropped for or whatever. And so they’re kind of having these like Essentially like the BTS army, right. But swifty army that’s out there you know, supporting the artists, but could probably be directed in any number of different ways. And, you know, we’re doing this in, I think like the switch from like web two creator to web three is still a very challenging one because the vast majority of people don’t know why or what web three is or what a Metamask is, and it’s going to exist like that for a little while. But I do believe these big creators coming in are going to create that urgency or interest to actually learn. But right now, you know, we’re really focused on the web three communities and NFT communities are a perfect example of this. You know, one of the projects I was involved in, in launching is squiggle DAO , which is you know, a generative NFT art on chain art collection of 10,000 rainbow squiggles. We did not create them. They were created by the founder of a platform called art blocks, but we use them as a way of sort of getting people into a community, giving them some ownership in the community, focusing our efforts on kind of building a large invaluable collection of the community or have tokens that are community-owned and we’ve done that well, but I think what we really want to shift our attention to is how do we go be just like the best advocates for the fun and irreverence that a crummy squiggle represents out in the world. And so could we be throwing parties at the art blocks party that’s happening in Texas, this October, if you’re an ECC next year, you should probably walking into a squiggle DAO party. And there’s probably squiggle streamers that are coming up and just the fun, ridiculous pieces of all of this and I think the reason that’s valuable is that it introduces more and more people to this sort of unique art collection and really doubles down and increases, sort of more of an emotional connection there to a broader audience. So we’re going to see this just like a tiny slice of what’s happening in this weird obscure world of on-chain, generative art. Yes. Imagine what happens when you have communities of folks that are thousands, millions of people that are brought together because of the love of music and care about some of the same things that that creator cares about. It’s gonna be pretty cool to see.
One of the most exciting things that fire me up is, okay, you build these online communities, they’re vast and distributed, but the second you may start meeting them in person at all of these centralized events and see people face to face, there’s nothing more exhilarating knowing that I’m a part of this community, you’re a part of this community. We have shared value in this community and look at what we did together, right? There’s something very special and something very beautiful and elegant about seeing that come to life. Not only digitally, but physically too, through these events. I love that.
I feel like it has even more impact these days, given how distanced we all have been over the last couple of years. Yeah, an early supporter of FWB token holder to FWB. I’m stuck in a line with 400 people outside of the Miami club, trying to get into the FWB party. I RSVPd, nobody reached out to me like what’s going on. And yeah, I look over and there’s Trevor, who’s the founder of FWB still stuck in line with me as well. Right. Like just couldn’t get in. But the conversation in the crowd wasn’t like, oh man, I can’t get in. It’s like, oh my God, this is next level. This is I’m like, this just puts FWB on a whole other level. So there’s this sense I think of like belonging digitally. That definitely changes when you meet in real life. And I think that what I watched there was sort of this unlock of saying, okay, there’s actually a lot more value than just being a part of a discord server. And I think that’s what we’re going to start to see across the community and social token space in the next little while, is this understanding that we’re starting with these basic primitives, but truly it is the sense of belonging that’s over here, that’s over and above it, all that matters. And that can, you know, we talked to started off talking about the disproportionate power that platforms have on the online world. I think what we’re seeing with what tokens are going to do is say, well, actually, yeah, That the point to show your support for me as a creator, isn’t subscribing to my YouTube channel. It’s not subscribing to my email or following me on Twitter or on Instagram, it’s owning my token. And then wherever I go and bring that token, wherever whatever platform, whether it’s discord or something else, whether it’s a party in Paris or something else like that token becomes like the shelling point for our belief and our affinity around that community rather than something that’s owned by a platform. I think at the end of the day, that’s the truly disruptive piece.
There’s two more things I want to talk about is M club, which had a successful crowd sale on mirror. Congratulations for doing that. What an awesome thing to see, come to life. And so many like-minded people, 47 ETH that’s no joke. I think last time I checked, that’s like 140 K that’s going towards, which I want you to tell me more about, I know it’s a media DAO that lives strictly for mere creators. Tell me more about what you plan to do with that 47 ETH. What’s your vision?
So, I mean, the vision behind M club was to create a space for people who are interested in being a part of a zero to one moment in a DAO to have that opportunity. So we were really thinking through how do we best put our efforts towards creating, learning, and educational experiences within the Seed Club discord and the idea of doing like a course or just more of a media series didn’t quite click for us. Like there’s sort of like something different about getting your hands dirty and building these things that I think are essential to be able to actually learn from. So I think that’s like the underlying goal. And as we talked about before, we needed to be pretty clear about our why, and we’ve been big supporters of the mirror ecosystem from day one Seed Club of the first right raise. And we’ve been very active in bringing great people onto that platform and you know, song camp is another example of a project that crowdfunded and launched on that platform that we helped work with. And so, you know, it was pretty obvious to me that there’s a lot of opportunity in that ecosystem. And I also love this idea of not asking for permission to be able to create things that are going to benefit another group. Like I talked about out earlier, we didn’t have permission to launch squiggle DAO. We just did it. Talk to M Club is really about creating a grants-giving DAO or a DAO that’s focused on backing creators that are launching and doing cool things on mirror, or it’s not associated or aligned with the mirror company and organization sort of completely organic and ad hoc. And so we just sort of said, Hey, look, we’re looking to raise 20 ETH to put a pool together and give folks you know, a share of a vote let’s say, in this, in this DAO to create a way for people to, to help co-create something. And the focus we have is on backing great projects on mirror. That’s kind of it. And what we’ve seen over the last three weeks is a group of people come together align around a few core working groups create a season one game plan that was just passed. So season one is going to run for the next 60 days and really starts to formalize a lot of the answers to the questions that I think you’re getting at, which is like. You know, beyond just supporting creators on mirror, like, what does that look like? How do you back them? How do you decide to back them? What’s our role in the mirror ecosystem beyond just allocating financial capital you know, what does a media data look like? How can we be active in leading what that looks like? And so we have 185 members or token holders in the DAO . There’s about 35 who are super active every Wednesday at 10:00 AM. We have a town hall call where working groups are reporting back on what they’re working on, and these are just brilliant human beings doing cool things that blow me away every single day. Today we had Dennis from, from mirror sharing sort of the vision for Mirror . And I think that gave a lot of our community insight into like what’s coming. And I think it’s really exciting to see some of like what I think some people will call a pivot in the near future, but I think for those of us that have been watching, it will just seem like this further empowerment of creators and communities from a great platform. But yeah, I actually asked Dennis I’m like, what was it like for just like having just like a random group of people come up and say, Hey, we’re going to build a community based on your communities. It’s like, welcome to crypto.
I’m a proud supporter of MClub . I have one of the NFTs I voted to pass season one. However, you would define me as a contributor. I’m one of them. So I’m excited to see that come to life and what season one entails over the next 60 days. So more power to the core team that’s making that happen and bringing that alive. Another thing I want to talk to you about, in plug, you talked about this early on cohort number three for Seed Club. Super exciting stuff. So cool to see. So give me a quick brief, what are these cohorts? How can someone understand these cohorts?
So cohorts are how we organize our accelerator program. Essentially we create a thought. As you can probably tell I’m a big believer in the power of community. And I think small focus communities that have a purpose over a short period of time are some of the most valuable ways to collaborate, especially on the internet. So what we do is we recruit a few times a year to bring the smartest, most creative, interesting people that are exploring how to use tokens within their communities, or as creators themselves together to run through a six-week program that exposes them to the latest, greatest thinking of some of the smartest people that are in and around the social token and NFT space. And so, you know, the first season one was really a great learning experience for us. We worked with folks like RAC and Connie digital and Alex Masmej and Carlos from ForeFront and some of the folks that get Daniel to like figure out what they wanted to do and how they were doing it. And it was truly a good learning experience for us. And you know, for participating in these cohorts Seed Club earns a number of tokens from the creators that we helped launch. So we earned some of those wonderful tokens and they’re in our treasury. Our second cohort was really the first one where we really said, okay, let’s help people go from zero to one and we had 12 projects that we launched with. It looks like we’ll probably have 10 projects that will ultimately have tokens out in the world. You know, global coin research forefront. You talked to Jeff from John previously. The protein community is working on one right now. And, and, you know, there are numerous other tokens that are sort of in the works there. And that was really about really helping to, I think in many ways to simplify the project, but mostly I think it comes down to having sort of like the sense of being on a path or on the front lines together. Right. So we jump in alongside our builders and our creators to really help figure out the the nuanced details of each of their community projects. And you know, I think we had folks like Jesse Walden and Jacob from Zuora and James from collab land and Rubin, who’s just a wonderful legal wizard or you know, thinker in the space and a whole host of others Cooper Turley, you know really just the people who are thinking and building on the edges and exposing them to our projects and that’s so the project, sort of getting an understanding of how they should design their economy. How should they go to market, et cetera. You know, after that, the cohort is just sort of the starting phase. We run a continuity program. So all of our projects become, you know, as I said before, we’re long-term partners. So we support projects, you know, over the longterm number of projects that don’t have tokens out yet. I still speak with on a regular basis and we’re helping to sort of push things forward there. So it’s really just a joining, whatever cohorts is becoming a participant and a member in Seed Club, our job is to help them launch a great token. And if they’re able to do that, then they also earn a stake in Seed Club as well. And then hopefully are incentivized to continue to benefit and support other projects that come after them.
So it’s very much so like a mutual marriage. Like I support you. We get token allocations and then in turn supporting Seed Club. And you get tokens, NFTs, whatever that may be. Are they tokens? Are they NFTs? How do you provide that level of allocation?
Yeah. So it’s still a model that we’re working through and hasn’t completely figured out how to do that well, but it’s definitely the founding intention we have. You know, I think like the imperfect example is like, how often we get described as like a Y Combinator, but for community tokens. The big difference is that you know, projects that that come through our accelerator do get ownership in an accelerator, what level that is and how we define that, I think is still something that we’re working on. But it just is such an obvious thing to us that, that the people who are leading the charge, who are learning, who are at the edges, who are you know, the experts in their field should be incentivized and rewarded for helping to support the next wave. And so if we have just sort of this flywheel of aligned and incentivized, amazing human beings in a space where the reality is human capital is a big limiting factor in our space today. It’s not financial capital, it’s talent, and the ability to take responsibility and move things forward. Folks who are able to join us and prove that out. We definitely want them to be meaningful holders of the club token.
When you started cohort one, I feel like there are a lot of things you learned throughout that process, especially also transitioning to two. And now applying those learnings, those lessons into three. Can you walk me through, is there anything, well, one, what, what are some things you learned going through one and two that you’re applying to three whether it be in the mentoring, the individuals that you bring on, et cetera, et cetera. And, what are the top 3 things you wish you would’ve known prior to starting Seed Club?
So I think like the big lesson in all this is, it just takes time. It takes time. And if you really want to get it right, you need to lean into that time and be okay with that. So I would, I think before we went into cohort two, I thought we would have all of our projects launched tokens by the end of the six weeks. Why not right? And the reality is like, that’s just a very unreasonable expectation and would lead to a worse outcome for our projects. And so we know we need to be a lot more patient and ultimately need to be improving and how we continue to support projects long-term. Like right now we’re able to do it because it’s small and we have a set number of folks that are there, but as we continue to scale up, we need to think through how we, as an organization, scale up our ability to support projects. And so I think that it just takes time and takes effort. And the limiting factor is people who kind of know what they’re doing and can jump in and really be helpful as boots on the ground. So I’d say that’s one. Two, I think, like I see communities today you know, more like startups, like I think we were taking the decision we will make on, on which projects come in to Seed Club , I think will increasingly look like similar decisions that are being made around startups. And I say that mostly to mean like, we want to back exceptional founders, exceptional creators, sessionable individuals and folks who have proven that they’re able to sort of overcome adversity and just continue to work on something despite, you know, maybe the initial game plan, not quite working out. So I think we were, you know, maybe not focused on that sort of second cohort, but we did a really great job at that. And I look at some of the ways that our participants are just sort of rolling with the punches and making decisions and bouncing back and overcoming some of the challenges that exist in such a nascent space and it’s super inspiring. And so I think we’ll use that to inform our decision-making process quite a bit, moving forward. And also I think like that we still are very much in the beginning of the idea stage here. You know, it was very easy for us to want to double down and say, we just want to do tokenized communities that look like friends with benefits, but for X and we’re really resisting that urge because I think there’s still many more ideas and directions that can be done. Every week, month, seemingly day, new primitives are developed. And we want to really just try to work with as many different, interesting projects as possible right now, instead of really doubling down on any one. And so I think that’s like a lesson that we’re going to continuously learn and keep top of mind. At some point it will make sense for us to be a little bit more focused, but I think there’s still so much more innovation to happen here that it’ll be interesting to see ultimately how this next cohort shapes up. One unique thing we’re doing this cohort is our token holders will be given the opportunity to make decisions on who gets accepted. So if you think about the club token will represent sort of sharing governance. So how do we run our organization? But we’ll also represent a direct share in like, who do we accept into our organization? So a curation tool. And so we have some exciting plans for lesser like TCRS type structure that will roll out. And so it’s, you know, it won’t be up to me. It won’t be up to any individual within our community to make that decision. It’ll be up to our token holders to make those decisions and you know, I think that’s gonna be a fun experiment to run.
Do you think we’re approaching like a black mirror type of scenario where people will start determining your level of influence and your worth based on how much you’re publicly traded at?
I think that happens today based on your follower, count on Instagram. I mean, as much as it does with the market cap, like I’m not super bullish on the idea of individuals having market prices on, their fame or celebrity, I think it’s going to happen. I think there’s, you know, billion dollar opportunities for the stock market of individuals or sports stars, et cetera. But the reality is for most creators and especially the ones that we work with, the idea of having a price on their creativity is just like the worst part of all of this is really something that they have to sort of deal with to be able to get the other benefits of it. And I think that the other limiting factor in the, in the personal token space right now is that the benefits don’t really come to creators. There’s not a good way of like bootstrapping your creativity selling by issuing a personal token. You know, I think platforms like Rally create a more of like a an economic design can lead to that, but BitClout doesn’t do that. Like you sort of have to like sell your BitClout and dump on your fans and it’s really just not a good way of funding, new creativity. So I think just to say there that like, it’s, I don’t think it’s going to see in its current state, I don’t think it’s going to see the level of success that many people do. I do think there’s a lot of exciting projects that are being built in that vein that are going to lean more into the social capital or the backing people up early, or we’ll probably use NFTs rather than, than ERC-20s to sort of represent that. And I’m pretty excited about that, but yeah, I think, you know, people will opt in to having market prices on them and, and it’s going, look, I think weird for the next little while and save some sort of broader context or platform that really thoughtfully integrates on it .And I just don’t think it’s going to be a point of interest in the, in the near future.
People shouldn’t think that I know what I’m talking about. I’ll throw one other thing out there cause I know we’re over time, but I think it’s like, there’s a lot of subtlety to all this sort of stuff. And, and really like what you’re asking somebody to do is really commit to something and committing to a personal token over the long run I mean, ultimately you’re going to want to retire or you’re going to die. And so there’s like a period of time where this is going to be relevant and somebody is going to get screwed. But somewhere along the line, a community or a DAO is something that you’re trying to build forever. It’s trying to exist forever. Even like a personality. So like somebody who might tokenize like the zombie that was just party bid for, that’s a thing that can live forever. Right. And so I think those types of tokens make a ton of sense and I’ll back them and we’ll align behind them. But you know, the Adam token would have a very short duration of value in my mind. And I might still buy it if there was utility and I would buy it to back you because I like you and I’m stoked on what you’re doing for our space, but it’s just, there’s like a lot of things that kind of have issues there. And I think one other maybe controversial point, and I don’t actually know how I feel about this, but I’ll throw it out there. But this whole NFT world where people are like music NFTs , right? People are buying music NFTs to support artists. But there’s this big push to have royalties be embedded in these NFTs . And I think one possible outcome of all of a sudden that’s shifting the idea from I’m buying an NFT to collect or to back , to support an artist who one were on buying an NFT to get access to royalty streams from an artist is that there’s a chance that these NFTs are going to be worth a heck of a lot less, or it’s going to distort the collector base to the point where it’s actually not that interesting to own these NFTs anymore. If I’m collecting them because I have intrinsic value and maybe there’s a benefit of there being some sort of financial value. That’s a very different thing than if I’m making a financial decision on whether I should own the rights to XYZ piece of music. And the reality is most pieces of music don’t earn any money and so when we start to represent the actual dollar value, that’s accruing to these assets the vast majority of them aren’t going to be worth anything. And so for many creators, I think it might be better off for us to be able to actually use NFTs, to represent the social capital, the creative capital, the sense of belonging, the membership in the community than it is to represent a revenue stream. I might be very wrong, but I don’t know.
Well, I just wonder, and I’m really just thinking aloud here, whether if, if we just start to put the focus on the you know current value of future cash flows, versus the value of being able to support somebody early on and being a member of the community that we’re going to devalue. It will be seen as they’re being less valued in the royalties than what might might’ve existed if you’re just making a bet from your intrinsic motivations. I think that the reality is it’s probably both. And the reality is it’s probably about what story do you tell? And if you go to like a crowdfunding website they’re using to back somebody is like, It looks more like a stock market and just showing like the revenues that are coming from it, it’s going to lead to a certain type of user or if it looks more like a crowdfund Patreon style thing with the music front and center probably looks different. So it’s by no means, am I saying this is the outcome, but I think a lot of people just think, okay, well, if we actually financialized these assets more, it’s going to create more value. And I wonder if that’s true. Like, I think there’s instances where it might not be true.
One of the most recent instances that comes to mind is Torey Lanez, the rapper. So yesterday he sold a million NFTs for a dollar. Each NFT represented his album. Okay. Now you can’t stream the music in the album yet. But the takeaway is that the way he promoted was from the point of view of like, you guys are gonna make money from this, right? Like you guys can flip that shit on the secondary market and I’m giving you guys bags. Like I’m looking out for my community. You guys are going to buy this for a dollar and that’s probably the lowest it’s going to go other than other than zero, but you guys are gonna be flipping this on the secondary, like all their, like everyone’s going with these profile pictures, et cetera, et cetera. Now, there is no real like, okay, you buy this NFT album and the intention of buying an album is to consume and enjoy the music from that album. And I went on that sale and I went to go like purchase. I was like, wait, does it make sense to buy a thousand copies of this album to flip and on a secondary market, maybe from an investment point of view, I’m not particularly interested in that. Like, I want to support the artist for his creative experimentation, with the medium of crypto in the medium of MP3 files. Right. And it just led me to buy like $1 worth. Right. But by the time I wanted to buy it, I couldn’t buy anymore because it sold out in a minute. The point being is like, now he issued a million NFTs. He sold a million albums. He went platinum in one minute, technically by the music industry terms. Right. But it was strictly from the point of view of go flip, this shit go make money. Right. Rather than from the point of view of like, I may do an airdrop down the line, like Uniswap did for its early supporters of its platform. Which is another interesting model, which he may even tinker with in the future. But yeah, just, just something to bring up.
Yeah. I mean, I think like the examples, like this are why, so my take on that is great. Cool. Like that’s a great experiment to run and he’s been able to hack to be a way to get it platinum, like, hell yeah. Like this is we’re early streamers were doing, I think. Right? So I think those experiments are worth it and worthwhile and all the power to them. I think like the big question is like, what’s next? And what expectations are you setting up? And I, you know, I think like the reality is the people who purchase those things are most likely purchasing them not because they want to be a part of a community. They wanna be part of like more of a speculative thing or the novelty of it. You know, by all means I think like, it’ll be really interesting to see what the secondary market of that looks like. And if there is long-term value there. And I think that the question is like, what happens, you know, next time? Right. So I think it’s at that, this is going to work out and there’s going to be a strong secondary market and when he comes out and does his next album, boom is going to be a big thing. But the likelihood of that happening in my opinion is pretty low. Like, I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of copycats copy of that model and kind of burn it out really quickly before he even gets a chance to come do it again and so his move really would be just like Jake, Paul’s moved back in the NFT craze is like, okay, you just done this big NFT drop. What do you want to do next with it? And I think, you know, look at what Gary V’s done with V friends. Like the friends is a top 10 selling secondary marketplace every single day, every single week. There’s, you know, there’s utility backed into it. It’s supported by a team they’re trying to do new, cool things. It was early. Yes. But there’s, there’s you know, a number of collectors that are big, you know, who’ve done really well from it because of the value that’s created there. And and I think like, Yeah, we both need to, I guess, balance off this how do we go do new, cool, interesting things, which I think you could argue that Tory Lanez did with like what where’s like the longevity that comes out of this. How can we like pivot this into something that’s going to last longer? I think that’s the hard part.
I know we put a lot of emphasis on the why and the purpose of doing something right. But even what’s like more so important is like, what is next? What is that long-term plan of continuously creating excitement, continuously creating utility from whatever it is that you’re selling, right. Continuously providing reasons to keep your community engaged in a discord server, whether it be through multiple events per week, like you’re doing an FWB or forefront, right? These are things that creators need to start thinking about as they build their web three communities, right. That engagement what’s the long-term plan. And like how can I create utility from whatever it is that I’m doing. Right. Is there anything else you’d add to that list?
I just think that there’s a lot of again, it’s about setting expectations, I think in large part. And so I think we’ll see successful projects that aren’t actively building out discord communities but have created other unique experiences across the internet. So I think like, yeah, no matter what, you’re in this world where momentum wins and so how do you maintain momentum? But I think there’s gonna be a lot of creative ways to do that. And it’s not all going to be about just trying to drive attention on discord or secondary market sales or what have you. But I think we’re in a world where creativity gets rewarded. Right? And so the idea that we can just go copy what somebody else has done and go run a game plan and that book and have it work is probably it hasn’t worked in most of the social media world and web 2.0 and it’s definitely most likely to work in web three beyond maybe the first early copycats. I think just generally we’re we should be building for the long-term we’re part of this brand new epoch, this huge, you know, inflection point in, in web three it’s brand new. It’s new enough that we all have an opportunity to sort of be a part of this rising ship. And I think those folks that take long-term you make long-term bets on assets. You make longterm bets on people you make long-term bets on, on ideas and on ways of being, I think those pay off. And so I would just encourage anybody who’s thinking about launching a token to just be thoughtful of that and you know, I think one of the things that I’m really happy to be in a position to do is to have a large amount of inbound interest for folks who are thinking about launching tokens. And I think what most people will say is that, you know, I do my best to, to take those calls and to help direct people into the right direction, because I think those little you know, the slight adjustments in how we’re focusing in, on what we’re focusing on, what we should be building, I think can have a really big compounding impact. And, you know, I’ve been blessed with this opportunity to have a bit of a voice in this space and I’m just going to continue to hopefully use it for good.
I love it, man. I think that’s a perfect place to end off Jess. You’re a pool of information and knowledge. Thank you so much for spending some time with me being on mint and, and sharing your knowledge with everyone. I hope to have you again before I let you go quickly, plug yourself. Where can we find you? Where can we find Seed Club? All the above.
@SeedClubHQ on Twitter or see seedclub.xyz. I am that tall guy on Twitter. You’ll be able to find me on the internet. Just follow Adam. He’ll retweet me every once in a while and it will be good.
