Co-created stories on chain
Founder Spotlight - Michael Carter (originally published on my newsletter March 14 2023)
In today's video, I interviewed another amazing founder, Michael Carter, from Storyverse (a blockchain spinout of Playco). Storyverse is one of the leading Web3-native creator economy companies backed by Blocktower and other leading funds.
He shared his insights with us and talked about some of the complex problems that he's solving in the Web3 space.
Michael's Founding Story
Their origin story is one that every founder can relate to. Michael and his co founder, Justin, had a strong background in gaming tech and social games. Justin is most known for founding Zynga (formerly traded on NASDAQ: ZNGA and acq'ed for $12.5B by Take-Two Interactive last year). The problem that they consistently saw was getting the product into users’ hands.
They looked at the Web3 landscape and realized that the problem is compounded in the Metaverse. Users start on a desktop, transition to their mobile device, and end up on social media.
They wanted to create something that easily brings the Metaverse into users’ daily lives by merely tapping a button and being immersed in an experience.
So What Does Storyverse Do?
Storyverse helps creators tell collectible stories on the blockchain, allowing them to collect royalties on IP that they have come to create and own.
Their hypothesis was to combine storytelling with an absolutely frictionless user onboarding experience in the Web3 space. To do that, they built a fully immersive, animated, and interactive onboarding process that users would enjoy using.
They realized that the "fun and engaging" factor was the most important factor in building a product that sticks. Similar to a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book that we grew up with as kids, Storyverse allows users to progress down a myriad of predefined paths. They saw this as the biggest opportunity for onboarding in Web3, especially for games and entertainment.
How Storyverse Helps Creators?
Michael shared the massive opportunity to create and own intellectual property for non-visual artists and creators in Web3. Despite fears of the internet eroding artists' ability to make a living, Web3 and blockchain is creating one of the most sustainable business models that artists have ever seen.
But it's not just visual artists with NFTs that can benefit from Web3 - content creators and storytellers can also take advantage of this massive opportunity. They can now not only create one story, they can create an entire universe of stories, allowing their readers to traverse down different paths, almost like Neo choosing the red pill versus the blue pill in The Matrix.
Storytelling is the original Web3 use case because the most resonant stories, that have lasted for millenia, have no attributable author, yet everyone knows them; these are the folktales and fables that we've all grown up with. The lesson is clear, the story is more important than who's telling it. We don't fall in love with the art work because we loved the author first. That means our content is our most powerful weapon as creators, not our perceived status.
How is Storyverse Onboarding Web3 Users?
So, Michael and his team started looking at the go-to market problem through the lens of Web3. That meant integrating the Metaverse into users' daily lives. From desktop, to Twitter, to Discord, to your mobile phone, Michael and his team wanted a user experience that conforms to how users behave.
That's the secret to transitioning from being exclusive tech built for early adopters, and something that normal people can easily transition into.
In that process, they stumbled into two core problems. The first is to build a product that is easy to use and engage with on a daily basis.
No thinking. No downloads. No friction. Just tap, and it works. Across any device. It needed to be ubiquitous and easy to use.
The second problem was to enable storytelling.
Michael and his team realized that storytelling is the most powerful form of communication history has ever experienced. It transcends time, location, and culture and is at the very core of the human experience.
The lesson for founders, especially in the Web3 space, is to build something that users value and engage with before layering on the compensation and Web3 tokenomics on top of it.
How is Storyverse Finding Product-Market Fit (PMF)?
Michael and his team realized that product development needed to be tightly linked to marketing, so they were intentional about incorporating customer feedback into every release. That tight feedback loop allowed them to focus on product-market fit and gain traction before getting too far into the weeds on the product side.
To help rapidly deploy the product to users, the team decided to build a non-Web3 version of the product and build a fan base of true believers that appreciated the value prop. This move allowed them to create a vibrant community of creators that were willing to create stories and share them on Twitter, which further validated product-market fit. This has accelerated their product release cycle and allowed them to project sustainable economic forecasts - not only for themselves, but for the creators that they serve.
Connecting with customers and baking their requests into the product is setting them on the path to their goal of serving 1 billion users one day. They reverse engineered their product development strategy to incorporate fun and intrigue so that they could not only grow like wildfire, but also sustain high levels of engagement.
What Compliance Challenges Have They Faced?
As Storyverse entered the Web3 jungle, they had to quickly understand laws from corporate tax laws to securities laws, to liabilities, and everything in between. Luckily they had access to a large base of investors, a sophisticated board, and world-class legal counsel, all of which helped steer them away from landmines.
The takeaway was to get good counsel, but not to get hung up on perfection to the point that it takes away from the core product. He said "If you're wasting more than a few months on compliance, you're probably going a little too far into the weeds and will start losing sight of what you're actually trying to do" which for him is to build the number one story based company in the Metaverse.
Closing thoughts
Blockchain is the new building material of the “palace of agreements'' we call civilization. Blockchain is poised to hold many more assets, identities/credentials, and workflows than it does today. This is especially true for non-tangible properties. In fact, these “new assets” are frankly easier to make and declare the rules around completely digitally. This makes IP well positioned to be an on-chain asset.
Regarding compliance, the statement “good is good enough” rings true.
Storyverse proves that creating something that’s easier to use is more useful than building something that’s subjectively “better”. Storyverse is an excellent play in bringing co-creation, co-ownership, following, voice on-chain.
If you are building a company that supports the new Web3 media landscape, please reach out to Sam@bloccelerate.vc. We would like to connect, learn more about what you're building, and support in any way possible.