Creator’s Bizarre Adventure — Recap
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GM,
A lot has happened since…Monday.
So here, a little later than usual, is a recap of my most recent Twitter space. Somehow Twitter rugged and didn’t record, but I managed to capture enough of the conversation to share some key insights here.
Thanks to the amazing speakers for turning it into a very insightful discussion, the audience for great questions, Shitzu for sponsoring, and Shard Dog for setting me up with a POAP!
What is the creator economy?
It’s a very wide range of things people refer to when using the term. It includes visual content like art, video, but also music. And then it also encompasses those writing online, on platforms like Substack, and even people selling physical goods through things like Etsy. It’s pretty much anyone making things online.
It definitely opened up opportunities and gave people ways to be more independent.
NFTs have also given digital creators more ways to be acknowledged and monetize.
In web3, creators are also those that build dApps, even though we tend to forget about them under the umbrella of creators. Tech is definitely a big part of it.
Many tools are available now to build your own business. Paul shared an example of his brother building a calculator turned chatbot within just 6 hours which he started selling.
Challenges
💡Going private helps you get unshadow-banned for those.
There’s a lot of noise; the big people stay with the big people. Spaces have opened it up a bit more for others to interact with even big accounts, and there’s room for growth.
And artists as one-people teams are faced with the challenge of trying to cut through the noise, run all of it by themselves.
Deplatforming is one of the biggest downfalls with existing platforms, but web3 has some promise to solve that with decentralized networks. However, then you run into the question of how you moderate the content to give users the experience they seek (for example, see explicit content or not).
AI in art yay or nay?
It’s not going away, so you either accept it or probably be left behind (one way or another).
Art is in the eye of the beholder; if AI creates something someone finds beautiful and wants to collect, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
There will also be co-creation with AI, and some NFT projects have started embracing AI as part of their process, adding midjourney to their servers and encouraging their communities to explore.
AI won’t replace creators because the aspect you can’t forget is people enjoy making art. It’s fulfilling.
What is missing in web3?
We’re on the right track, but we still hang out on web2 platforms, and discovery happens a lot on those. We might always have some of those to explore and find new things.
Recently, manifold has empowered many artists to create things (on Ethereum) where you can just collect, no whitelist, no grinding. It’s very straightforward.
What we also still need is small things like, for example, music players where you can listen to audio directly, and the same for other mediums such as books.
A lot of opportunities for established artists to jump in and explore new ways to leverage strong IP.
DeSo is still pretty inaccessible for those who don’t know anything about web3 yet.
Mintbase launched Affiliate direct, empowering anyone to curate NFTs and sell them while receiving a share of the fee — breaking up marketplaces and pushing discovery toward micro-influencers.
Does chain really matter?
If it’s a great artist and people want to collect the art, it won’t matter which chain it’s on. They’ll go there. It’s also a testament to an artist. When Damien Hirst sold NFTs on Tezos, people scrambled to get set up and scoop them.
But it’s still very hard when people are very used to one ecosystem and set up with wallets and native tokens in one. Jburn is a very interesting example because he started out on Tezos and built a community there, then went to Solana and Ethereum, and each community treats his art differently and has different price points.
Tips for newbies
Reputation is everything. Don’t interact with scammy accounts in the DMs.
Have an open mind, and don’t think too narrowly about being a creator.
Be authentic. It’s easy to fall into emulating the already successful ones, but the ones who do best are those genuine to themselves.
Carve out your niche.
Experiment with tools and platforms. Go multichain.
Thanks for joining. Shoutout to the guys from Ready Layer One who created Shard Dog and set me up with a way to give POAPS to people (and they don’t have to pay)!
Watch out for the next space, and don’t forget to embrace your creativity.
