Web3 Marketplaces Offer Evolution above the Status Quo / Anjali Young

Transcript

is it working oh now you can hear me oh wonderful well welcome everybody it's so nice to see you I was actually supposed to be in the upstairs like Institute of crypto Anarchy and then they moved me down here kind of at the last minute but it's a beautiful room so I'm happy to be here um all right let's start well I'm Anjali young I am the co-founder did I do that it just happens sometimes all right keep going okay I'm so sorry about that I don't know how that happened hopefully it will not happen again okay here we go

so I am the co-founder and CCO for a bridge our company is Abridged we started in 2018 Incorporated in 2019 um and our product is collab land now collab land has turned into its own legal structure it's a Colorado Co-op it's a dow and I'm also a dow officer for Colette land and happy to be here today at eth Prague it's been pretty wonderful there's something special about youth conferences especially baby Eve conferences that remind me about how much I love this space all right so we're going to start off I'm kind of going to go with my slides but it's kind of going to be a little bit of a free-flowing conversation so

hopefully you'll all accommodate me with that uh collablin started like I said as a project of Abridged with a bridge we started in 2018 Incorporated in 2019 as a social contract wallet actually am beer if you've seen ambir they were around at the same time and they stuck it through and they're still here so kudos to ambir but we started off as a social as a contract wallet with social recovery you hear a lot about social recovery now but back in 2018 2019 it was not the same kind of buzz and it took us about two years uh six hundred thousand dollars of our own money and about I don't know 500 people VCS not answering our phone calls and not

answering our emails to Pivot and so in January of 2020 we pivoted to no code tooling no code tooling was an answer to the fact that we couldn't get users to use our social recovery contract wallet so maybe we can get developers to come into this space the idea from the very beginning was how do we get people here into crypto how do we inspire people to join what we think is the maturation of the internet which is an opportunity to solve some of the world's greatest problems together you know we have the internet back in 1994 I I started working my first job out of college

actually in 1996 was at an internet startup that was doing search years before Google and it was kind of that same excitement which is like the beginning of the internet where everybody from the world is going to be able to come together and kind of imagining what it could be and it's that same kind of excitement that we feel about crypto right now which is like a Global Currency and what can a Global Currency unlock in terms of coordinated human Global coordination and what problems can we solve together so we couldn't do it from the user side with the wallets and so we pivoted to the app side which is how about developers come in to crypto how about

they don't know how to use anything maybe they don't know solidity they can use our no code tooling and with that no code tooling they can build apps build the city and then maybe we can have the citizens kind of moved in so with that this was starting in January of 2020. we were building lots of different experiments everywhere one of them was like voting we were calling it voting is the new like trying to get that web to people in like maybe if we call them call it voting is the new like then maybe it'll excite people to say oh this is maybe this is interesting and maybe we can create something special this way and maybe this is something where we can have the power that's going to be as

easy as liking something but that we can vote try to make voting sexy right everyone's trying to make it sexy that didn't work we tried lots of different experiments and then collab land was the experiment that worked which is having people join a group and this was initially on telegram having people join a chat group with the token that they hold we initially started with Malik shares my co-founder James Young was one of the writers of the white paper for the Malik Dao and is a huge Dow Maxi which really guided and formed what we've turned into today um but it was using Malik shares you can join a telegram group and then if you

transfer or sell those molec shares you get kicked out of that group and it started with Dows it was mainly a dow product and that's where we got our foothold where people were saying oh collab land oh we can get everyone you know you can verify it on chain Who belongs in that group and that gives us the opportunity to vote together for the opportunity to um pitch to each other kind of understanding who's in that community and who has skin in the game for that Community initially like I said a dow tool shortly after investment groups started forming around collab land if you were around in like 2016 2017 you remember the Ico boom well now in 2020 people were still holding those tokens

so now it became a situation where large holders of these tokens from 2016 and 2017 were creating whale communities do you have a one million of this token or 200 million of this token or whatever 50 000 of this token now we can get you all together and let's see if we can do some sort of deal flow everyone here is the early adopter of crypto let's see what we can come up with that oh my gosh I'm already going too slow okay so collabland was the third version of that um like actually Dow's investment groups and then social tokens social tokens for me personally I thought social tokens are going to be the way that we get more mass about option um Alex masmash he was a creator that

had his Alex token that actually moved him from Paris to San Francisco just by selling a token called Alex token and saying if you believe in my mission come and support me and help me create this new create something I don't know what it's going to be but if you believe in me as a person come and join me and tokenizing himself was a way for him to get that funding we've seen so many different use cases of that now but that was really early days and then nfts it started with meme in October of 2020 but it wasn't until board ape started using collab land in April of 2021 that things really changed for collab land which is now you buy an nft in this case a 10 10K pfp and now you can join a community of

people that also own that token and once I saw that I was like wait a second this could be something this could be huge so I personally from the collabland Twitter account started dming every single new community that was coming or not even Community every new nft project that I saw on Twitter I was dming them immediately and I'm saying hey these people just bought your nft how about you get them into a Discord together and let's see maybe you want to do that maybe you want to create some sort of membership access with this nft and it worked after about six weeks I didn't have to do it anymore everyone that I reached out to said oh yeah we're

already using collab land um that was like a first like personal win for our small team of four at that time okay and then in August of 2021 we're like wait a minute we have a million users we have our infrastructure bills are going up we've raised a really teeny tiny pre-seed round in January of 2020 again this is like before collab line even has any product Market fit and so what do we do now like how do we how do we decide how to move forward and so we kind of went out for a series a at that time it was like okay let's do a series a and this was like Peak funding time and so we started off with like a 25

million dollar valuation and then a 35 million dollar valuation and then a 75 million dollar valuation by August of 2021 we were getting a hundred million dollar evaluation and that scared us because the more conversations that we were having with VCS it became clear that it might be our data that is worth a hundred million dollars um and for us it was like we did not want to share member data um there's a dystopian future we can all see because of web 2 how when something is free we're the product and so for us we're like if we start sharing this data then our crypto communities are going to

become the product and as you know once your wallet address is shared once that your Discord ID is connected to that wallet address or your telegram ID is connected to that wallet address it cannot be unknown once it's known that's it people can follow you around and share that social graph and share those maps with advertisers and people are going to always be able to see where you're moving your money and where you're moving your assets and who you're connected to and so for us that was like a hold the phone let's not do this let's try it a different way and so we launched a fundraiser so in October of 2021 we launched launched a fundraiser with collabland which was called the patron nfts which was if you buy this nft if

you've gained value from collab land we've been doing this now for a year and a half if you've gained any value from collab land buy this Patron nft there is no guarantee anything is going to come out of this but what we can guarantee you is this we will keep collaborland free and accessible for everybody and oh I don't know what's happening okay there's a little thing here but we're gonna ignore that we're going to keep collab land free and accessible for everybody we're going to keep our data private and membership members are going to own their own data and what you realize then is like when you allow your communities to participate in your fundraising then you are obligated to keep them at the top of your mind that's

how you do it if everyone does that every social network out there does that takes fundraising from the people who are using their product then that obligates you which is something we believed in but including them in our fundraising really changed everything all right now where are we today in February of 2023 we launched a token the collab token it was a 100 free retroactive distribution we did not charge for at the token at all nobody could buy the token from us it was given to everyone who's ever connected with collabland 15 of our total tokens I know it's not working but that's okay I can enroll uh 15 of our total allocation

went to our top 100 communities communities that have used collablin from the beginning communities that had the largest uh membership so they got our tokens and then we had um so everyone that's connected our team and our our investors are all on a four-year lockup no there was no pre-selling of the token to investors I don't know if and if you know the way token Dynamics work but mostly when a company or a project launches a token they pre-sell their token and so on the first day there's a lot of dumping on the public that's clearly not what we were trying to do so we didn't do that the whole idea of the token is participate in the social network that belongs to all of us

and let's build together let's build that value together we also launched a collab land Marketplace and that Marketplace is specifically directed to Dev so if any devs are here in this audience today if you are building a Dev for crypto communities any kind of mini app or any kind of a toy that you think would be useful for crypto communities then we want you in our Marketplace because the idea is we got here on our own we got here with our small team but now we want to open it up to anybody and we want this crypto community space to thrive and grow and it's not something that we want to do alone on the whole Beauty and the unlock of the blockchain

is that you can work interoperability you can be interoperable with everybody else and so um we wanted to create a distribution channel so now we're at 50 000 communities with collab land if you have a idea for ways that crypto communities can Thrive and survive then you are going to be able to have this distribution to all of the communities that are already using collab land so definitely interested in that if any of you are out there we want to try to encourage people to build in this space I will tell you from being in this space for many years now crypto communities are the way to getting more people into it into the

space like having an opportunity to be with other people learning together growing together having that shared token is an unlock we just haven't seen before and so if you're thinking about like what should I do where should I build I'm going to encourage all of you to build for crypto communities um I talked a little bit about the collab land token and we have the collab Landau and so the purpose of the collaboran Dao is to curate the collab land Marketplace so they determine what apps are useful for their communities in the for collab Land We service mainly four different types of communities Adele's which were our first love uh D5 projects like I mentioned um gaming communities like think of axi

infinity and different there's so many different ones gaming Club there's lots of different gaming communities and then nft communities there's a little bit of overlap in that you build a dow product and nft communities start using it they start behaving in dow-like ways and so these are not four distinct groups anymore anymore since using collablin but they initially started as four distinct groups so if you want to build anything for crypto communities of those types then definitely um consider building the for the collab land Marketplace okay so now we have like I said we have the collab land Marketplace that's going on right now which is if you're a collab Land Community admin or a project owner

you can customize the experience for your group um I've listed some of the different types of um apps that are already in our Marketplace which is poapp which is Easy distribution and collection of poapps right from Discord uh snapshot which is voting you might want that for your Dow but really we see a lot of nft communities also using snapshot we have verifiable credentials which is building reputation like what are we doing right now we're in a bear market like what value can we all provide for our communities well one thing we can provide is reputation building I don't know how many of you were here during the last bear Market but it was those relationships that we made during the

bear Market that were valuable to US during the bull market uh Rohan from NBA Top Shot and jiho from axi Infinity both relationships that we had from before the bull market started and they were one of the first people to use collab land and that was able to buoy us for having showing our reliability of our service because they have groups that are 400 800 000 Discord members but also when they grew they were able to take us along with them and so it's really these relationships that are happening now that are going to mean so much to us so definitely think about that we have the guest pass right now we're like I said we're in a bear market and so people

aren't spending another opportunity for guest passes for people to get a trial into that Community um you can give a two-week trial a one-month trial it's really customizable for the admins to decide so I won't talk about the rest of those and then we have the dev portal that's where devs can submit their many apps so it's dev.collab.land where you can submit your mini apps for the marketplace and also you can get free API keys to test and try out so even if you're just thinking about it um definitely try it out our one of our mini apps that we have in the marketplace right now is a chat GPT style AI support mini app and that actually came from our hackathon so we

we definitely are interested in working with first-time developers as well like if you're interested in getting a distribution Channel and getting a lot of people using um your product right away because that's what we really need you know it's this is an iterative process like you want people to use your product and then you want to get feedback and grow together like that's just the whole beauty of this and so if you're interested in that definitely let us know you can get a free API key and then we're going to have a member portal now with the member portal like I said a little bit earlier about reputation and building an identity right now so that way when the next bull market comes you're when the opportunities come you're going to be able to point to what you did and it be permissionless you don't have to talk to your Bot your

former boss about what you did but you're going to have these verifiable credentials that are issued by collab land and issued by your community that can already happen and actually member to member it can happen as well in the communities um so you're going to be able to manage those in your member portal you're going to be anyone that's ever connected with collab land you know like adding and disconnecting a wallet you're going to be able to do that from your member portal so that's the wallet management and then we're also going to have a member Marketplace if you have an idea for like an app that would be member focused one of the ones that we're thinking about right now that we're actually going to be launching with is called nuggets and with that one you can move your verifiable credentials you're it's not stuck on the collab land

platform but you'll be able to move it to different wallets and so it can be shareable in different ways so developing oh my gosh I'm completely done anyway where are we at now we're at 50 000 communities and growing we have over a hundred thousand members of holders of collab token it is not a pump and dump truck project it is not a speculative project we just completed three years of service and truly it is service so um we're so proud of that and half of those people are in the Dow so you know trying to like spread that down message all over is definitely a priority for us uh this is me I'm dama daroca on Twitter I'm dama daroca on um Discord as well and on Instagram if

you're interested we are collab line at collab underscore land you can find me on LinkedIn and also really quickly if I have another minute we produced a series of mini documentaries called let's form group so there's seven different types of collablin communities we featured them in little mini short films that are just beautiful and really meant to fight this narrative that the reason that we're all here is because we're greedy we're hyper finalized financialized we're Dog Eat Dog we're not I can tell you from being in collablin we are not I've seen so much change and I've seen so much opportunity for people that have been traditionally cut out of wealth building cut out of opportunities being

able to change their lives through crypto and so um definitely check out our movies share them with people outside the space days let's kind of try to change this narrative what we're trying to do with blockchain and crypto is give opportunities to everybody in the world and give us an opportunity to work together to solve some of Humanity's greatest problems I imagine global warming being changed for the very first time trying to get a real handle on that because now we have our own money this is a maturation of the internet this is a maturation of a global community and let's just see what we can all do together so thank you foreign oh yeah are there any questions I can have one question

yes uh hi uh first of all we are using collab land for our Gaming Community and it's an awesome product and it wasn't only easy to set up from the developer side it was also easy for our users to get access to the Discord channel so fantastic stuff uh I was wondering from your perspective looking at like the bearish market that you spoke about how do you experience are you experiencing any any anything being like engagement or activities being slower in the communities or like a slower growth in terms of community because I that's what we are kind of like dealing with right now and I was wondering if like you have like a better overview on like all the community absolutely yes that's absolutely true there's been a tremendous slowdown in the number new

communities that are starting and also engagement within communities is slowing down that's not a problem I feel like I need to solve myself and that's part of the reason why we have the token and why we have the marketplace let's all work on it together like if you are a community admin or a project owner join the collab line Discord we have um group set up where admins and even members can give their ideas for new apps that might be interesting for your community and then we have developers there that could build those apps and so this isn't just my problem this isn't just collab lands problem this is all of our problems like my job is to tell you crypto communities are important you know I'm the child of American or Indian immigrants to America and having a

landing Place having a place that people can go where you have some connection that's what allows people to thrive and if we're trying to get people into crypto we need to give them a place to land and so communities are where we can do that a global Community is where we can do that and so I would say yes absolutely there's slow down part of the reason why we did our token allocation to the top 100 communities is so that they could use the collab tokens to incentivize and reward and activate engagement with their own members during this time so yes I feel responsible for that but I also want to say if any of you are interested in that like think about crypto communities think about

what the Immigrant experiences like and how being having a safe place to land is important and so yes if you have ideas for that you know like part of it we have a meme contest uh mini app that you can use so it's like we have lots of different apps that are coming into the marketplace that are meant to help engagement and having uh get us through this hard time because it is a hard time but there is also a way through it but we all have to work on it together thank you [Music]