Ser En

Posted on Apr 01, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

Why an Asian Cameo is moving into Web3.0

Lessons learnt from running a web2.0 creator economy product

Hi, my name is Ser En. I’m a BAFTA-winning film producer and co-founder of Sendjoy.

For over 22 months, my team worked with more than 300 creators from 12 countries to build Sendjoy, a D2C video shoutout marketplace, inspired by Cameo. We had a famous comedian, we had some of the biggest Tiktok stars in the region, even the most famous Corgi on Youtube all the way from Finland. However, business did not experience exponential growth despite the growing creator economy.

When we first started Sendjoy, we

-- talk about the passion etc. what we observed

-- then why it fails

We noticed the following:

  • Web2 technology made the role of 'agent' largely redundant, allowing any creators to directly monetise their community of consumers. This was Sendjoy's thesis;
  • However, the amount of money a consumer was willing to pay didn't measure up to what a creator was willing to charge for the amount of time they spent on 1 video and the exposure that came with it.
  • Therefore, all else unchanged, a creator generally preferred B2B sales to D2C sales.
  • In short, the unit economics of Sendjoy presented a gaping gap between supply and demand;
  • While B2B sales (eg. brand endorsement) scaled proportionately with a creator's number of followers, the same relationship, however, couldn't be said of D2C sales.
  • Creators in Asia are also shy to promote the service to their followers, therefore most of their followers didn’t even know they were offering the video shoutout service on Sendjoy.
  • Creators who didn't possess the aptitude or skills to convert followers into customers failed to realise this new stream of income.

From interviews with Creators, including the ones who didn’t join us as Sendjoyers, we noticed that maybe Creators want to make one creation, and continue to benefit from royalties. Even if the first few Sendjoy videos were fun to make, they got tired of repeating a similar content again and again, as creativity is not a commodity.

When we learnt that NFTs allow creators to keep benefitting from future royalties, that seem to be a sweet solution.

This is where Web3 technology comes in.

Helping creators become asset-owning businesses (First Attempt)

In December 2021, Team Eunak launched a Christmas greeting card NFT collection, inviting our Sendjoy creators to participate to create an NFT greeting card for the public to purchase.

We created this series of Loom videos to pitch the concept of NFTs to our creators.

18 creators signed up, and we launched 30 NFTs.

Our pitch to creators:

  • Make royalties from your work.
  • It’s easier to sell your NFTs with us than OpenSea. You don’t need to make a Metamask wallet or pay any gas fees.
  • You get paid in Fiat.

Our pitch to customers:

  • Get a digital lovelock on the blockchain, a message that will be there forever. We would carve your message for your loved one into the blockchain.
  • You can get an NFT in Fiat.

Our goal was to make the UX simple for Web2.0 consumers, and to attract new creators and new customers who were not familiar with the Web3.0 world, and by giving them a “real-world” experience.

What’s a Sendjoy NFT greeting card? → Our explainer page to the customers.

The Christmas collection sold out quite quickly, it was a positive sign, and we doubled down our efforts on NFTs, thinking that it would be a great way forward for the creators. We want a bigger project for Valentine’s Day.

Over the next 6 weeks, the team worked hard, our operations team scoured creators to participate in a Valentine’s Day NFT greeting card launch, and our tech team built 3 websites in one month.

We made our own drag-and-drop NFT minting platform:

forever.sendjoynow.com for Creators

A customer login page where they can view the NFTs that they have purchased:

members.sendjoynow.com for Customers

A site for customers to view and purchase NFTs:

www.sendjoynow.com

We have 30 creators, making 57 NFTs. The artworks look amazing, we even curated a story around the collection: View the Valentine’s Day collection here

However, Valentine’s Day sales flopped. Were we just lucky for Christmas?

Failure was due to following reasons:

  • Creators charged a premium for the NFTs as compared to their usual Sendjoy creations. Again, the amount of money a consumer was willing to pay for a “greeting card” didn't measure up to what the creator was willing to charge.
  • Again, creators were shy to market the NFTs to their followers. They reposted the Instagram stories that we posted, but that’s all. They failed to “sell” the NFT product to their followers.
  • Customers minting their names into the blockchain forever, seems to contradict with the pseudonimity that blockchain promises. They were uncomfortable with the product, yet this is the feature we promised.
  • For creating the platform, providing the tech, and marketing etc, Sendjoy’s commission of 25% also didn’t fare well for us economically when each NFT greeting card only costs an average of $50.
  • Perhaps, Sendjoy is also not an established NFT marketplace, and the Web3.0 customers were unsure of us. The way we sold NFTs seem like halfway between Web2.0 and Web3.0. We used a Web2.0 wrapper for a Web3.0 project, it’s not ideal. It looks like we were just trying to get into Web3.0 too quickly without fully understanding why, and it’s missing the spirit of Web3.0.

We had to pivot again.

Helping creators become asset-owning businesses (Another attempt)

We realised that a creator in 2022 would assume multiple roles to be financially successful. Not only would they create the work, they would also need the entrepreneurial skills to market it, and make money from it.

But we don't think a creator should go down that path alone. Instead, a creator needs a multidisciplinary team and a way to share the profits fairly among contributors.

If Web2 enables a creator to easily collaborate with others and gather followers, Web3 lets them compensate everyone who contributes to their success, including their community.

Put simply, creators can now turn followers and subscribers into owners and customers.

Ultimately, the decentralised ownership of a creator's success will galvanise practitioners and aficionados into investing in bigger, more ambitious IP-building projects by creators they trust. Instead of making 75% of a $100 video, creators should aim for 10% of a $1m project, and invite collaborators and supporters to share the rest.

Rather than market each and every creator like an agent, we do what producers do:

  • Build a community beyond the creators' fans. We welcome those invested in building world-changing IPs together with our creators;
  • Present creators to this community. We can advise and manage expectations, but the community decides what goes up;
  • Connect creators with distributors interested in the resulting IPs. We want our community to see the projects they invest in go somewhere.

We also want to address these are the common challenges teams often face when selling NFTs:

  • Lack of Tech Capabilities: A lot of resources are needed to write smart contracts that prevent security breaches;
  • High Marketing Costs: Launching even one project is becoming expensive in an increasingly crowded NFT space;
  • Varying Community Quality: Teams spend a lot of time distinguishing 'Paper Hands' from 'Diamond Hands';
  • Low Trust in Team: Similarly, supporters spend a lot of time verifying projects and doxxing team members, in order to gauge the likelihood of delivery;
  • Unexecuted Roadmaps: Teams often fail to develop projects beyond the initial NFT sales due to a lack of volume as judged by distributors;

To overcome said challenges, we propose a vertically integrated model of sourcing, verifying, launching, growing and serving NFT projects, akin to the studios of Hollywood (eg. Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures), except, in true Web3 fashion, we want to build a decentralised network of studios.

This is the beginning of the birth of Mecenia.xyz.