NFT and Utilities: Building Memberships and Loyalty Programs - Miro Radenovic

the best value that I can give it to you based on this topic and uh what I think is that uh I will describe you my journey in the last three years in this specific space from where I'm started what I buil and what I've found out at the end so back okay so who I I uh I'm an entrepreneur from Milano and uh I build my first company that forside in 2010 H after 10 years I build those internet AI those are companies working in the Consulting space and we build a SAS both companies are doing uh quite great in Milano and um I I decided to invest a small portion of the revenues in order to invest in the web three space and for this reason I started another company called The Mind 2002 so basically I started investing in this space uh around here because I was kind of amazed of uh the bubble that we all saw around nfds so prior this I didn't know nothing about blockchain I was just an entrepreneur working in the software development and um when I saw this uh huge explosion of nfts I was kind of amazed of two things the first one is how many communities were building around something that for me was completely new and the second thing that I never understood was uh what was the value of this I mean we saw launching nft projects but at the end for me they were just pictures and I couldn't never understand why this huge technology that can provide a lot of benefits had so much hype in fact the hype exploded and we saw the empty bubble but at the same time I was looking of those communities they were building and I was also looking on how the current communities are built today so if you look at any type of community all those communities are somehow locked in and uh they're locked in in some centralized spaces where they don't have any kind of control on their mon on their monetizations so the idea was okay so what will happen if we provide all the features that the blockchain provides to all the digital communities that are on the web uh if you look at the content creator economy for example uh there is a huge problem there first of all anyone who is investing in this space is treating Their audience just as consumer so they're looking they're seeking for likes for visibility but at the end they don't give any value to to their followers and the second thing is that if you're investing a lot of your times on this umor economy at the end you finish to be locked in in a center place where uh the the product basically owns all your community data it takes a percentage of your earning and basically um decid fixes pay payments for your work so you have no control of what you have built and from my uh entrepreneurs perspective I try to understand what is the market size of digital communities at the end and so there a huge opportunity there so uh if you gather together all the influencers all the content creators the artists the brands that are building communities this is an expansion that is growing year by year so being an entrepreneur I said okay let's try to build a product and be uh allow anyone who's building a community to have the tools in order to allow them to actually own their communities and uh be completely independent basically for this reason we built uh y collect me so the core concept of UK collect me was to be what we call utilties of service so uh the idea is that uh you have your community you launch tokens around your communities but in order to provide value to these tokens you have to attach some value what do you mean attaching value it means that uh each each token can allow you to have uh something that you can actually have back from uh from the from the Creator so the basic idea is that this should provide be a plat that can support or creators that want to actually own their Community or for Brands organization trying to launch web three loyalty programs uh so instead of being vertical we wanted to create a product uh that will be free for everyone completely open to anyone and um with SM contracts that actually are owned by someone who is launching them and be fully flexible so a platform that anyone can try to launch uh tokenized communities and provide values through campaigns uh the four cor pillars was that we want to build something that is web three without complications so let's remove all the complications around the blockchain allow anyone to provide reable perks to the owners of those tokens and promote the short economy model and be able to anyone to create any kind of programs or nft memberships around web three uh how we made it we made it quite simple so basically uh we implemented account obstruction in order to reduce uh to consider the blockchain more as a protocol rather than promoting it so it's a non custodian wallet you can just click and login you will have an embedded wallet all transactions are completely sponsored and we are perment cut obstruction the idea is that you can launch over time different type of campaigns which can be fit for artists creators influencer for coring project or brandings organization and for each token during the time you can decide to attach real world perks for example what you can do is that you can attach um be can be a token gated you can say okay if you have this type of n FTS you are able to book with me um um to book with me uh a call or you can reclaim a ticket or you can do anything uh that you want so how did it go H not really really good and uh what are the biggest problems that we that we find out um the biggest challenge is that the community centralization so we are aiming to find people that are willing to use the platform but we divide them into groups so if you have a community it's really hard to transfer this community to different platforms so users are used to stay on telegram on Twitter and it's really really hard to convince anyone who has created a community to start using something different and this is a risk that usually people with communities they don't want to get into but if you're if you're willing to risk and try something new probably you have a small community but in that case if you have a small community uh you're seeking for visibility and the platform is not giving you visibility the second one which is the kind of the most important is the customer acquisition and education and this is I think it's typical in this space H but it took me a while to understand it is that um even if this provides a great features more than what the current Solutions are giving you you expend you will uh you will spend a lot of money in order to to um educate your users on what are the benefits of this uh technology another bigger problem is that we came from the nft bubble so every time we trying to explain what the what are the possibility of our um uh platform um people as soon as they hear the word nft they say no no this is a scam I'm not interested at all and the people willing to try and to invest some time to understand that this was taking way way way too much time and the third one is when we propos this also to organizations or to brands or to company there was regulator uncertainty where basically uh for each country they had different rules and laws on how to manage this and in Italy specifically uh was completely complicated to to handle this so uh Beyond this we had also different problems first of all we launched the product around here in 200 three 23 and the nft market completely exploded and the interest in this technology was almost zero there are some still signs that probably this will come back grow but this are just again speculation but we are kind of affected of the fact that the nft market was a complet bubble that disappear and um it's true that a lot of top is it true that many companies even the 40% of top 100 global companies have launched the nfts in the last two three years but it's also true that an estimate of 30% of this has already uh decided to delete their their projects and they disc they discontinued their n loyalty programs so still there are some companies that are investing in this but as our Target was to get and reach small businesses or small organizations uh still now uh things are not working well it's still hard to convince them to try but one thing that we saw and that that is actually working now are the nft ticketing if you look at n ticketing is there are kind of again uh type of uh loyalty programs because over on the nft ticketing you can build loyalty programs or memberships around them and uh we saw many of these uh um projects they are shifting in this trend so they wanted to launch n ticketing and on top of this start to build some nft uh loyalty programs and uh how I see the future I see if there is still some potential here to grow we have to restart again from almost zero and uh because of the cap the real world oranization if you look at them you will see how this can somehow fit around L programs and nfts so my conclusions of this exper experience in the last few years which I wanted to to show you is that uh it's true the token membership of program still have an advantage uh over current centralized models but unfortunately we are still in an early phase and it's really really expensive to educate web to users to make to let them try something different something new so what I learned from this is that uh it was worth trying it's worth still investing in this but we need to stay strong uh keep learning experimenting in uh building our projects thank you very [Applause] much do you have any questions about this thank you