Outverse and the future of online communities
Announcing our £1M preseed round with Seedcamp & Connect Ventures
There’s a certain magic in online communities. At their best, they are places we can find joy, learn from others and even discover a sense of belonging.
A global health crisis only further highlighted the importance of internet-based community, with the ability to connect over shared interest & passions a refuge for many.
It truly feels as if we’re at a generational moment for online community building. More than two-thirds of us actively participate in online communities and that figure is only set to rise.
Yet the options at hand are poor — with people building communities on apps originally meant for workplace communication like Slack, legacy-feeling forum software or more chat-focused tools. There’s a better way.
Escaping the noise
The gathering places of the early 2000s Internet — forums & IRC channels, ‘the open prairies of the early web’ — had a special charm and neighbourhood feeling to them: each a little different & unique.
There’s been a turn against this in recent years with people flocking to closed communities & groups for both work and play: the likes of Slack, Discord and group chats rather than large social media sites. While these products were transformational in their time and have broadened out from their origins, there are drawbacks for communities.
A huge issue we see with synchronous chat platforms is the noise and loss of context which they invite. While great for casual connection, the format of instant, short-form response & lack of overarching thread-based organisation means that discussions are easily lost within the noise. Important topics & questions are buried under an avalanche of messages and notifications. As a result, people lose track of the conversation. And they churn.
There’s certainly a place for realtime chat, which can be great for kickstarting conversations, but we believe there are better primary foundations for connecting communities.
The other big issue with existing platforms is their lack of flexibility. Community forums of old, clunky as they often were, felt authentic and special places to gather. They looked and felt different because surprisingly enough the tools they were built upon often permitted much wider customisation.
There’s a creative energy and personality this unleashed — one that feels missing in the identikit Slack communities with their incessant notification overload which we all know too well.
Building better online spaces with Outverse
If you were building a platform for communities to gather & interact today, how it would look? Our answer is that it should be focused on enabling much richer, more thoughtful & better structured discussion — which is why we’ve built modernized forums as a key foundation of Outverse communities.
Rather than the free-for-all that is synchronous chat — where every message ‘shares the same compact shape, and worse, the same level of urgency’ — the result with structured, thread-based discussion is much more intentional community spaces where conversations are better organised and more discoverable.
In addition, through draggable text blocks, shortcut commands & native embeds, we are making it much easier for people to better express themselves when composing & contributing to threads — levelling up the forum experience massively.
The second important foundation for us is empowering people to better personalize their communities. That’s why we enable custom spaces within Outverse. Here users can add advanced functional blocks to their spaces, enabling real-time collaboration, content embedding and more — all as easy as editing a document. This reduces the need for using too many tools & means more holistic control for community builders.
It’s impossible to ignore the importance of live video for communities too. Especially since 2020, realtime video has become a cornerstone way that communities are connecting. There’s an amazing serendipity in live interaction and the chance connections it offers up.
For that reason, we’ve also built live video spaces as a major foundation of Outverse. Without the need for additional tools, using Outverse communities can connect either via scheduled sessions (with seamless calendaring) or drop-in ‘spaces’.
Ultimately, we believe in offering communities the ability to configure their spaces in a way that’s unique and right for them.
Our partners & the journey ahead
We’re delighted to be backed by a stellar set of investors who bring phenomenal expertise in building and scaling communities.
We’re excited to share that we have raised a £1M preseed round led by Seedcamp and joined by Connect Ventures. We’re also supported by Nicolas Julia (founder and CEO at Sorare), Foreword.VC and The Fund, as well as founders & executives from the likes of Revolut, Dropbox, Airbnb, Songkick, Grabyo, Lyst & more. All share an immense passion in empowering the next generation of community builders.
Over the past months we’ve been working hard on our closed beta and we’re excited to be opening that up to more communities. We have huge plans in store for the rest of the year.
If you’re interested in building a better space for your community, signup to our waitlist for early access!
Team Outverse 🪐
