Startupy Issue #6: a laid back newsletter about very serious ideas

 

🥸  MOOD

🪐  HOT LINKS IN OUR UNIVERSE

Tokengated Commerce by Alex Danco & Packy McCormick

🕺  Curated in Token Gating, NFTs & Digital Wallets

The Art of Not Taking Things Personally by Dave Bailey

🕺  Curated in Emotional Intelligence & Personal Development

Web3 and Media by Troy Young

🕺  Curated in Aggregators, Creator Monetization & Web3

170 connections → 128 content, 23 companies, 19 related topics

29 connections → 3 content, 15 companies, 11 related topics

19 connections → 9 content, 4 companies, 6 related topics

Top Author → The Creator Economy, Unbundling LinkedIn & Financialization of Everything

236 connections → 43 content, 181 companies, 12 related topics

166 connections → 103 content, 51 companies, 12 related topics

🌱  COMMUNITY HEALTH

Welcoming Sonia Litwin, Jihad Esmail, Rob Hardy, Jordan Bester, and Sixian Lim to our curator community this week and virtual high-fiving Gaye Soykok, Sarah Drinkwater, and Henry Chow for their contributions.

✨  CURATOR SPOTLIGHT

Why is social commerce interesting? 

Historically, societies have organized around centers of commerce: bazaars, markets and malls aggregated various suppliers in a single point of distribution where consumers could find goods and wares from across the world: ranging from daily produce essentials like meats and grains to luxurious products like silks, spices and jewelry.

 

The obvious takeaway is that the medium of social interaction transformed from being a physical to a digital place; but a more nuanced analysis reveals that the medium, for the first time, is no longer a locus of commerce. Social media networks create a completely new medium — an entire digital territory — for modern social interaction that use objects like videos, photos and text, as well as novel distribution mechanism like algorithmic feeds and ephemeral stories to create a digital surface area that is both infinite and catered specifically for the user.

 

So, this is a relatively long way to say that the medium of our social interaction changed from being commerce based to something entirely different. Consequently, the development of the internet economies in the West spliced this inherent relationship of commerce and socialization and resulted in a bifurcation of eCommerce and social networks into two different verticals.

 

Thus, for true eCommerce unlock, a new commercial arena must be built that intrinsically layers in, and enables, social interaction. This will be both a demand and supply equation, with new business models and technologies set to innovate the two.

 

The Past, Present, and Future of Consumer Social Companies by Patrick O'Shaughnessy & Turner Novak

In mobile gaming, every incentive is optimized. Gabriel Leydon is the co-founder and former CEO of Machine Zone, one of the biggest and most important mobile gaming companies. He understands how to create incentives to get people to spend more, get their friends to join, and stay playing the game. His Invest Like The Best podcast provides insights into this communities can learn to design better incentives of their own.

 

Social Commerce: Web3 and The Digital Franchise Model by Sam Blumenthal

My breakdown on how new web3 primitives can enable a digital version of multiplayer retail, and why it's important. 

 

Headless Brands by Other Internet

A great overview on how brands can transform from centralized organisms to distributed systems.

 

Pinduoduo and the Rise of Social E-Commerce by Anu Hariharan & Nic Dardenne

An in depth examination of Pinduoduo's core primitives and monetization strategy. 

 

A new project founded by Ty Haney that rewards users with collectibles that unlock exclusive products and private events in exchange for participating in customer feedback loops that help determine brand decisions like packaging. 

 

A social commerce app built on the insight that shopping can be codified based on reviews and ratings. 

 

Novel allows brands to bake loyalty, exclusivity and recurring revenue programs into NFTs that they can sell directly on their storefront.