In this episode of the Venly Expert Talks, host Alexandra Arens talks with Mack Flavelle, Founder/CEO of Big Head Club, Co-Founder of Dapper Labs, and Major Brain Behind Cryptokitties and NBA Topshop. Mack has really gotten things done in Web3. He shares his 5 Tips for Building Success in Web3.
Tip 1: Design for the Degen’s When launching, aim for the tipping point but have a plan for muggles.
When building in the NFT space, you have to design your products for market fit and crypto enthusiasts, and Degen’s should be your primary market fit. The products should appeal to the existing community; they should be easy enough for them to purchase, use, and build a community around. The project should aim for the tipping point and have a plan in place to manage the success that comes along with the customer journey. Having a plan in place to manage your project tipping point ensures the longevity of projects and the overall success of projects launching into web 3.
Mack also advised that projects should have a plan for educating and onboarding new users. New users are entering the Web 3 space and they require a learning curve to understand what projects are about, use cases, and how to join the community. Successful projects should have a plan in place to manage new users and their journey into Web 3 Space.
Mack had this to say: “Five years is a very long time in crypto, but one of the lessons from Crypto Kitties was that we made a bunch of choices specifically for Degen’s.” When there was a fork in the woods and you could go left or right, and the left was for the Degen’s, we went for the Degen’s. And the reason that worked out for us is because it enabled these maniacs with their piles of internet monopoly money to come spend it.
So, we formed that tipping point where you’re like, “If so many people had bought these things for a hundred dollars each, nobody would’ve cared, but you sell them for a hundred thousand dollars each when you hit that tipping point, you hit that milestone.” It’s like you ring the bell and the fucking maniac comes out.
So, this plotting of a tipping point is like, “We didn’t do this on purpose.” And so, designing yourself to have that kind of story and making it easy for people to take the payments is very useful and helpful. “
Tip 2: aim for wild transparency. They will find out. Tell them when there’s no gun pointed at your head.
Using Web3 and blockchain technology, transactions are becoming radically transparent and automatic. Anyone who joins the blockchain has access to the entire ledger of transactions because it is an open platform with full auditability and immutability. And because nothing can be changed on it without a change log, we can hold each other and the information on the blockchain accountable. This can enable projects, which we are now seeing through the art-driven buying of NFTs today, in addition to making transactions more transparent, which has led to the emergence of cryptocurrencies today.
This transparency in the Web 3 ecosystem now also applies to founders and teams starting a project in the space. Because the Web 3 community is incentivized to unmask project founders and start-ups, it is considered necessary because anonymity makes it hard to hold the powerful accountable. Web 3 investors, users, and the entire ecosystem are heavily scrutinizing projects and founders in the ecosystem as the stakes are now higher and project founders must be wildly transparent about their project journey, roadmaps, and challenges, and be open about their past success and failures in the Web 3 space.
Mack had this to say about transparency and how it can help projects in the space build trust with users and investors: “The most recent lesson of this is Azuki, right? The Azuki guy was trying to hide that he was involved in these earlier projects, which is too bad for him. It’s too bad for those projects too. There’s no point in hiding things in this space. As you have, you have a bunch of people with a significant financial incentive, um, in success, poking around your shit.
It’s going to come out. So, with crypto kitties, I haven’t figured out, you know, the fish can’t smell the water or whatever. I’ve never been able to figure out how much of my blockchain indoctrination is fact versus just from the school of Dider. I was raised in the school of Dider.
That’s where I learned all of this. So, I don’t know how much of my opinions are tainted by just this. You know, the fact that he had a bad morning once or something, or a good morning, but we took some shit really seriously. In other words, you should not fuck with what is on-chain. Once something is on-chain, it’s supposed to be there forever.
And this idea that you would just pull down your contract and update it, that felt like sacrilege to us. We left the option open because this is a smart software design. You don’t assume that you’re smart enough to get it right the first time. So, we grow to contract essentially with a pause button, but we also put a string on that pause button.
And we did pull it down, and then we paused it, pulled it down, fixed something, and put it back up. And I think and hope we eventually pull the string off the contract so that anybody looking can be like, “Oh yes, I know, this is true decentralization.” “They can’t even change this anymore.” Don’t lie to people in NFTs or on the blockchain. When there’s a bunch of money involved, they care. They’re going to find out. “
Tip 3: You’re not smart enough to get it. All right. Design flexibility into your systems.
The concept of building a completely decentralized platform to host decentralized applications has long been a vision of the crypto community, even though “Web 3” may be one of the greatest buzzwords of 2022. Although it’s noteworthy that some blockchain companies started developing Web 3 applications four or five years ago, the Web 3 market has only lately begun to gain traction. More companies are utilizing the adaptability of decentralized applications thanks to Web 3’s clarion call for growing the utilization of blockchain technology.
Builders in the space must have flexibility at the core of their projects. This gives them the leverage to retool their products very quickly to meet emerging use cases or pivot to solve challenges when they launch products into the marketplace.
Mack had this to say about his experience with Cryptokitties and the lessons he learned from the flexibility designed into the project from inception. “So, with Crypto Kitties, there were 32 genes possible in each category.” Like now, we called them attributes and inside categories. And when we launched, we had no idea what all of them would be or how we would use them. We essentially, like, it’s like building a building and putting in some extra rooms and somebody’s like, “Oh, is that the nursery?” Or is that the pantry? And you’re like, “I don’t know.”
What I do know is that we intend to stay for a long time, and we aren’t wise enough to predict the future. So, I think it makes sense to build an extra room. Maybe it’s going to be your shy boyfriend. Who’s going to move in there? Maybe we’re going to have a kid, maybe your goddamn mother-in-law, whatever it is.
As you could imagine, there’s going to be room. A need for room in our home. In the future, designing the smart contracts and all this Web 3 stuff in a similar way. Things are changing so fast. There’s absolutely no way you got it. All right. Whoever the fuck you are, however smart you are, you didn’t get it.
All right. And so, you design flexibility into your system so that you can manage your own stupidity. And that of the other people you’re going to work with is a really, really good idea that takes different shapes depending on what kind of system you are designing, but like, flexibility as a principle in the joints, right? “
Tip 4: Nubes are expensive. Tread carefully.
The internet was founded on the idea of bringing people together. Over the past 30 years, the internet has changed, and so has how we connect with it. Web 3 is the future of the internet, and bringing new users into the space should be at the center of projects in the ecosystem. Onboarding new people into crypto and Web3 is one of the biggest pain points.
The success rate of onboarding Web 3 users depends on a number of factors, including a good user experience (UX) and a high-quality, user-friendly UI (user interface). Additionally, simplicity has a role in this. Projects must prioritize the process of onboarding Web 3 users, and it needs to be made simpler. In order to attract more users and increase the likelihood that your projects’ dApps (decentralized applications) will be successful, projects should make the onboarding process simple and fluid. It goes without saying that you should keep things as straightforward as you can and use tried-and-true procedures.
Mack had this to say about Web 3 and how projects should manage and onboard new users into the space. Onboarding people is hard and expensive, and onboarding people, when there’s this much at stake, is really, really hard and expensive. And everybody really cares and everybody really needs to figure out this shit. And in, you know, that app ecosystem, millions of people were using the software before any sort of openness was brought to that ecosystem.
whereas we have started with a decentralized open ecosystem. We have a bunch of awful UX that doesn’t make any fucking sense. The Metamask has improved this dramatically, but it’s still hard to use. I’m still trying to explain it to people. No, no, you’re just holding the keys on your cold wallets, not the NFTs, not there, but just to the thing so that you can get to the NFTs, which are still on the blockchain.
None of this makes any sense. None of this is easy. And so, onboarding people with this is really expensive.
Tip 5: Your group of NFT owners is not a community.
The community is the holders of an NFT project who actively mint, collect, buy, sell, and analyze your NFT project. Web 3 builders should build a community around their projects that is based on the fundamentals, value, and use cases of the products. Project founders should avoid valuing projects around token prices because communities built around this are fickle.
It is now ineffective to spend a lot of money on marketing; instead, it is crucial to establish an NFT community from the get go. A robust community not only serves as the cornerstone for NFT projects, but it may also create buzz, which increases support and boosts traffic to your projects.
If you want to draw participants, NFT artists, and builders, make your project valuable to you and them as a community. Show that you care about your audience in your road map. Give them what they desire. With NFTs, the project ends if no one contributes, making your (and everyone else’s) NFT useless.
Host / Podcast Bio
Venly Expert Talks is a Podcast for Web 3 builders, business owners, entrepreneurs, and leaders who share their experiences for the benefit of the listening audience. The Talk show host is Alexandra Arens, content manager at Venly.
Venly is a blockchain technology provider creating tools and products to help companies benefit from blockchain technology. The global vision is to build both developer-friendly products and an intuitive interface for end-users.
Venly has been recognized as a digital pioneer and delivers ground-breaking innovation to companies such as Atari, Ubisoft, Bondly, Shopify, and other industry leaders.
Guest Bio
Mack Flavelle is an experienced product lead and game entrepreneur. He joined Axiom Zen through the group’s acquisition of Hammer and Tusk, the leading AR/VR community in the world. Axiom Xen is a venture studio. They turn undeveloped ideas into companies. Axiom Zen is the parent company of Hammer & Tusk, a leader in the world of immersive experiences (AR/VR) and the Midas Guide, an online community focused on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.
Before founding Hammer and Tusk, Mack served as VP of Marketing at Tapstream, VP of Product at Wiley, and founder/CEO of Compass Engine (acquired by East Side Games).
Mack was co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at Dapper Labs, maker of CryptoKitties and NBA Topshot, and is the CEO of Big Head Club. CryptoKitties is a video game built on blockchain that allows you to purchase, sell and breed virtual cats.
Big Head is a team of creators, developers and early pioneers in the NFT space. We exist to create strange and marvelous NFTs that stand the test of time.
Mack studied Game design at Vancouver Film School and then went on to study Programming at British Columbia Institute of Technology.
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