Greg walks through a couple of frameworks he uses to generate ideas for NFT projects. One is studying traditional community design and the second is studying exceptional NFT projects. Recorded on May 23, 2022 for Crypto Packaged Goods Genius Call series.
Greg Isenberg is an industry leader in building internet communities. He is the Co-Founder/CEO of Late Checkout, a product studio, fund and agency that designs, creates and acquires web3 and community-based technology businesses. He is also an Advisor at Reddit. Previously, Greg was the Head of Product Strategy at WeWork and an Advisor at TikTok. He was the Founder/CEO of Islands, a messaging/community app that was acquired by WeWork. He was the Founder/CEO of 5by, a leading video discovery app which got acquired by StumbleUpon.
Connect with Greg on Twitter https://twitter.com/gregisenberg and learn more about Late Checkout at https://latecheckout.studio/
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Greg Isenberg (GI)
Let's get to know each other and let's talk about designing product in a Web free world. So a quick note on me. I run a company called Late check out we're kind of like the McKenzie of community based products and Web Three. We're kind of like sneakily behind working with some of the biggest projects in the Web Three world and also in the Web Two world. We also do investing and we also incubate our own stuff. Before I talk about actually product design and Web Three, I wanted to take a few minutes just to talk about how people might generate ideas for NFC projects. So this whole session is really just designed to get your creative juices flowing. And then we'll get into a Q and A and just sort of hash it out together. So here's two frameworks that I use to generate ideas for NFT projects. One is studying traditional community design, and the second is studying exceptional NFC projects. And I'll explain what each means when I think about the most sort of OG community organization. I think of religion. I think of the Holy book, holidays, places of worship, all these things. And I try to apply that to a Web Three products. So as an example, you can think of a Holy book, like a Bible, like a roadmap. You can think of a holiday like Christmas to a drop. You can think of a place of worship like this Telegram. You think of rituals like us saying good morning to each other. You can think of a sense of a community as sort of the same. It's identity and community. You can think of shortterm incentives, usually that's price fluctuations and status. And you can think of long term incentives, which in religion is like going to heaven, which is wealth and status. So I try to think about some of these different sort of old school ways of thinking about community and flying it to Web Three products. And the other thing I do is I look for new and interesting communities. Some of you might have heard me talk about the unbundling of Reddit, where you can look at different subreddits and see different communities that pop up. Another way I like to do it is look at demographics versus psychographics. So I can look at a particular demographic, which is like I like to think of demographics as sort of black or white. Like this person earns $100,000 a year. He or she or they live in London, they've got a family. You can't really argue with it versus psychographics, which is more interest based. So, for example, he likes Manchester United, or they save a lot of money or they like cats. And this combination of demographics and psychographics helps me ideate. I saw this tweet today by Dicky Bush, who's awesome, who talked about this a little bit. He talks about the magic of specificity. I write about yoga, mass market, ten followers, zero customers. Or I write about 15 minutes, beginner yoga flows for stay at home moms, niche market, 150,000 followers, 10,000 customers. Get uncomfortably specific, then go one step further. The point here, the point that he's basically making is he's looking at demographics and psychographics. He's putting it together. And that's the beauty of web two products, but also web three products. So when I think about communities in a web two and web three context, I think about it as or when I think about community based products, I think about how do you couple together a people, an interest, and a format. So as an example, if you look at the Loop project, I'm sure most people here are familiar with that one. The original community that they targeted was product designers. Dom is a huge following of product designers on Twitter and other places. So that was the initial sort of group. The interest was DND games, fantasy and RPG. And the format here was an image, black, white, and text. So thinking about format is really important in terms of the hook for this particular audience. The second way to do it is you basically remix existing projects and there's a few ways you can go about it. So one idea is you take a similar idea, but you pick a new community. So you're like, I'm going to go build cool cats for Canadians and I'm going to slap utility on with that. Or we just talked about Loot. Similar idea, new format. Let's go create Loot for numbers. Or you take a similar idea and you add new utility. So, for example, a lot of people here are probably familiar with the Crypto project, like thinking about Zombie Toads, which is offshoot CryptoAds where they just applied a social token called Brains. And then the last one is a similar idea coupled with a brand and creator. So, for example, what would boxing bunnies look like with Jake Paul? You can take a similar idea and attach it to a creator. These are four sort of mini ways to help your brain get going, to get the creative juices flowing. And I just want to say that one of the most important things about ideating NFP ideas is the ability to in one sentence explain what clearly is your project to peak curiosity. And I like using this one liner formula. How, what and why, what's the format? What's the utility? And I say, what's the resonator? Maybe because I speak French. So as an example, World of Women, what is their one liner? World of Women was created to bring diversity and inclusiveness. There you have their mission and purpose to the NFC space while bridging the gap between collectibles and single edition artwork. There you can kind of understand their format. Loot is a randomized adventure gear generated and stored on chain. Axe Infinity is Pokemon inspired universe where anyone could earn tokens through skilled gameplay and contributions to the ecosystem. You'd be surprised how many Web Three projects cannot nail their one liner. Now let's talk about Web Three and product design. We've talked a little bit about ideas, but let's get down to it. Great follow on Twitter. Actually, he kind of summarized how I think a lot about designing products in Web Three. Brand building in 2021 and 2022. And 2023 is much closer to a video game design than is the graphic design. In building more character story arcs, world out designing logos and a 90 page brand guidelines. Here's what we thought the future of web design might look like. At least I did. Super clean, minimalistic. What would Steve Jobs do? Type design. This is what the future of web design looks like. I can't see if anyone knows what this is. I'm sure some people recognize this. This is Neopets right in the chat shadow. Neopets, if you ever played Neophetic or ever made an impact on you. But this idea of a world where you can do things is the future of Web Three product design. So as an example, Lake Checkout, I told you a little bit about what we do. We didn't design a website. We decided we obviously had to do a world. And we haven't announced this or anything like that. But you could actually connect your wallet and buy merch. For example, if you go and click this construction zone. We just launched this today where you can connect your wallet and if you have the Late Checkout token, you can actually go and buy it, which is pretty cool. So these are the types of things that people are going to expect when you're doing Web Three product design. How many of you have seen this project? I'm sure of a lot. It was the number one project on Open Sea Goblin Town yesterday in terms of volume. And let's just go and look at it from a world perspective. So you get on their website. This is actually animated. You see the little Goblin coming up. You can see they have a particular way of speaking. So you can just enter right here and then you enter Goblin Town and it's just like you really get the sense from and everything is kind of like moving and it's just a unique aesthetic. So you kind of feel like you're in some world. Although it isn't as worldly as, for example, Late Checkout world. I think they did a pretty good job, although not an amazing job at creating the world. Any Cool Cats holders in here will recognize this website. This is the new Cool Cats website where you can go and do certain things. However, what I don't like about it is you have to have the NFP to actually go and access the world. So they kind of miss out on a huge portion of people who just really want to kind of browse like, for example, in the late checkout, what we talked about in late checkout, token gated, I'm still able to browse without having the tokens, right? So I think there's a huge miss in terms of cool cats not opening it up to the public, but overall, good aesthetic. You kind of see the world, and it's quite good vibes. This is turf. I think the website is turf Dev, if I remember correctly, and it's a Metaverse sort of game type product. And it does really feel like you're in a world here. This is their website. You can kind of Zoom in and you can actually click on one of the NFTs and you can learn more about it. And again, talk about worlds. I kind of understand. I kind of get the sense of it, and I kind of get the vibe. So overall, pretty good job by them. Here's a missed opportunity. So, Chris, I know he was really into crypto as I was really into crypto until I'm into crypto. And this is their website, and I think they did. Grandpa is an incredible designer, and it's an incredible project. But this is an old way of thinking about web design and Web Three. It's very like 2D. They're kind of getting the sense. You kind of get the sense of like, here's the world, but you don't really get that 3D. Kind of like full immersion. When you're thinking about Web three product design, think about, how can I Immerse the person involved? That's your goal. It's 100% about immersion. If you can do that, then you created success in web through product design, another 2D kind of flat version, but was onto something. I remember when this launched in March last year, I guess I was like, wow, this is amazing. I feel like I have to enter the club and I press enter the board, a yacht club. And I'm like, oh, my God, I'm like, in the speak easy. This is so cool. If this launched today, this wouldn't be enough to get people excited. So I think it's taking this concept that they crushed and just taking it to the next level, cats, et cetera. So here's some product levers that you can think of, and we can talk about this in the Q and A. But here's a few things that you should be thinking. Maybe like screenshot this or I know some people are watching this recorded. Like, feel free to write this down. But here's what you should be thinking about if you're designing a web free product. These are a few of them world building. So what is the world that you're trying to create things to do? How do you include games and stuff like that onto the experience so that it isn't like, I hit the publish button and I launched this website, and it's a ghost town. You have to constantly be thinking about how do I get people and create experiences and mini games. I always think about it as mini games. Even if it's not a game like a mini type game. Mini experience that you can go and do something sound. So many missed opportunities to include sound both from like I click this and something happens and also music to really again immerse people into the product. I always say storytell don't Copyright. So in web three you want to storytell and not just like write copy. So think about how do I create a hook? How do I create challenges, a climax, resolution like you're creating a movie script. So you have to be thinking about storytelling as people are going through the experience leaderboard so that people are highly competitive and human nature. So thinking about where to include leaderboard is really important. What are ways to earn social? Tokens and NFTs this could be connected to the many experiences. What are ways to share things on social? So having experiences that make people share on social? What are quests that people could partake? Is there virtual land that people could buy? So for example like on the Lake, check out website. Should we sell land? Should we give land to our clients? How do we think of token gating content in commerce? How do you think about video and animation? Not static. Goblin Town did such a good job at video and animation crypto as an example and Cool Cats actually was very static. How do I think about tokenomics? How do I think about the cost of the NFC? These are levers that you have, right? Goblin Town was a freedom in so it got a lot of people onto the website. Cost is a really big lever to get people to do stuff on your product. How do I think about a closed versus open world? We saw Cool Cats being mostly closed. But how do you think about it being open? How do you think about rights? I'm sure a lot of people here know about CC zero but thinking about different rights and how that could spread the meme and then of course utility. The bottom line is you become as a web three product designer. You become this mix between a film director, a game designer and a web designer. And it's this like new role, this really new role where you have to understand a little bit of all because you have to understand storytelling, you have to understand audio visual, you have to understand like web. What can you do on the web? But these are some of the product levers that you should be thinking about. And now I just want to open it up to folks.
Chris Cantino (CC)
Mind blowing. Everyone in the chat is just like Holy Moly, it's so refreshing to hear about this world building and all the different tools that we have to create. To tell these stories is incredible.
GI
Yeah. Thank you for allowing me to share this. I wanted to share this because I don't feel like there's enough talk about Web Three product design. There's so much out there books, podcast, and I don't know if other people agree with me, but I just feel like we need to start the conversation around what are best practices when it comes to Web Three product design? What are the dos? What are the don'ts? And I can't believe there's 123 people in here. Pop goes hard. I love it.
CC
They've been excited. Yeah, it's cool. We've got 2000 holders out there, and I think 1400 are in the chat and 150 today in the video. And we're recording it so we can share it with them, too. And this is really cool. I think the one thing as you kept talking, I kept thinking about the opportunities for CPG to create more of a world and how about the universe of consumer goods and how we can kind of tell that story and marketplace or like a shopping center and kind of like creating the hustle and bustle and all that kind of fun stuff we could do. So I was definitely inspired and, like, taking notes, and I could see everybody else in the chat with chatbots, too. And if you're in the audience and you have a question, please start raising your hands as we get this going.
GI
Yeah, I know. I want to hear from you all. I think once you put a film director hat on, I I should buy one of those, and you should buy one of those. We should actually make pop ones. Then it kind of changes how you think about web design. Right. For example, on the Late Checkout website, we were talking about how do we put people moving, walking around? How do we put our clients? How do we have our clients have buildings there? Wow. What does that look like? Right. So thinking about all these things through is super helpful.
CC
Okay, let's bring up Nftgod.
Guest
Great presentation, man. I took a ton of notes. I think this is really unique, interesting information. So really appreciate it. So my question is this, first of all, can you hear me clearly?
GI
Yeah, you sound great.
Guest
All right, cool. My question is this. I think that a big part of Web Three is not only having a great product, I think a lot of companies are learning this right now and releasing really high quality products as you showed. But I think there's a huge art kind of to the early game as well. And if you can really master the early part of the product development cycle, you really set up yourself to be in a position to succeed. So I want to kind of pick your brain on what do you focus on when you're building products earlier? How do you start building community building attention so that when you do release your product, you get a lot of eyes right away. So kind of interested to hear your thought process in the early product building stages and how you start building it out.