#238: Seed Club's 'The Event'

PLUS: 🪙 Coinbase's activation in DC and free NFT SF tickets

SC06: The Event

Earlier this morning I attended SC06: ‘The Event’ — Seed Club’s Demo Day for its 6th cohort of consumer crypto startups.

I haven’t really attended Demo Days before, but I can say this was a creative, entertaining, and informative experience and I look forward to attending more Seed Club Demo Days in the future.

Before I go over The Event, what is Seed Club?

Seed Club is crypto accelerator that invests and provides resources to startups in the space. Over the past 3 years, the organization has gone through 6 cohorts and supported 100+ projects. Each cohort goes through a 10-12 week program with funding, mentorship, and a founder community. Each cohort concludes with a Demo Day event.

The Seed Club Network is strong with a mix of notable individuals, project alumni, and funds.

A sample of the Seed Club Network

How did Seed Club promote The Event?

I’m not sure what Seed Club has done to promote past Demo Days, but SC06 easily caught my eye as I scrolled through X on August 22nd, the day the accelerator first publicized their Demo Day:

Why?

• The format of the posts, which were prepopulated for attendees to share

• The content of the posts, which are based on memes from the industry that were modified to promote SC06

I had to check out The Event myself and sign up, attracted to the meme energy like a moth is attracted to light.

A few weeks later, Seed Club added another twist to promote The Event. They took inspiration from captchas and friend.tech, adding another layer of creativity to attract attendees.

What did they do?

Added a fake captcha playing upon events in tech, crypto, and web3

From L to R:

• Touch grass: A term used in the space to encourage people to go outside since we’re chronically online

• Show us where the chart hurt you: No explanation needed

• Real store of value: Poking fun at Bitcoin and Milady, a (in)famous NFT collection and community

Once the captcha is answered, the screen goes to a friend.tech inspired modal, ‘referral.tech’.

To me, this fun activation served a dual purpose:

• Reminded people who already RSVP’ed that the event was a couple weeks away through a fun interactive activity. Much better than a calendar or email reminder.

• Created an invite mechanic à la friend.tech to encourage more RSVPs.

Needless to say, I was intrigued and committed to attending The Event.

What made SC06 unique?

I knew Seed Club’s Demo Day would be different based on their promotional tactics, but wasn’t quite sure how. It was immediately evident when I tuned into the live event.

Opening music: The event opened up with live music to set the vibes

Polls: Every minute or so, there was a poll that the audience responded to

Chat: Usernames were based on the wallet address that connected to the Seed Club website. If you had an ENS address, that showed up.

Mint feed: The chat also populated minting activity from the audience, encouraging the chat to mint NFTs related to event or from the projects in the cohort.

Dynamic notifications: As each of the 10 projects in the cohort presented, the notification modal in the top right corner changed to a CTA that was appropriate for the product.

Team slide wasn’t a slide: Instead, it was a modal at the bottom of the stream that had links to the product and the team. This allows the team to focus on showcasing the product while the audience can visit the website and team profiles in parallel or afterward.

Raffles: Throughout the event, the Seed Club team held several raffles for NFTs, which served as an intermission and bathroom break for the audience. Each of the raffles was for a Tokenbound NFT, which incorporates ERC-6551. These NFTs stored multiple NFTs in them, which is an emerging use case that is gaining traction.

Each raffle had a different theme and the winner had to respond with a specific tagline (eg: “I am a Zora disciple”) within a minute of the winner being announced. Even though there was only one winner for each of the 3 raffles, the audience made the tagline a meme that many people typed in for fun.

One of the ERC-6551 NFTs that were raffled off contained multiple NFTs inside

All these elements made SC06 go from a series of presentations into an interactive event that made the 90 minutes fly by.

Who was in SC06?

In order of appearance:

Mintstars: OnlyFans meets Opensea

• The platform addresses issues that the adult content creator industry faces: chargebacks, piracy, censorship from payment providers, high platform fees, and waiting periods to withdraw funds

• Fans can resell content and creators can earn royalties for those secondary transactions

Senspace: A Tokyo-based Character Collective

• Team has extensive creative experience (Bape, Hypebeast, etc.)

• Each character is a key into the Tokyo creative ecosystem and serves as a platform for creators to build their respective brands

• Launching a PWA (progressive web app) in early 2024

Slow Rodeo: A network of onchain consumer brands based on emergent subcultures

• Consists of 2 functions

  • SR Studio: The incubator for onchain consumer brands

  • SR Labs: R&D department that tests new tech and ideas

• First brand that will be launched is Court Date, a tennis brand

Fini: Digital characters that combine art, culture, and tech

• The 10k collection is split into 10 families, each representing a different blockchain. Finiliars change depending on the price of the crypto they are tied to (eg: finiliars are happy when the price goes up)

• Future activations will include an interactive weather experience and an art exhibition in London hosted by Sanrio

Pods: Podcasts as NFTs

• The collectibles can also be used for insights into who’s listening and engaging, and eventually a social graph

• Collectors can earn status and rewards based on their engagement

Vessel: Launchpad for onchain media

• Onchain media = Advertisement + Product

  • What if you could mint and collect ads?

• Building out an onchain media dashboard and product creation platform with wallet and collector insights

• Building Vessel app for native discovery

The World's Largest (TWL): Building a brand within a brand

• TWL Technologies will power the TWL brand which is public-facing

• Will have product drops every few weeks

• Consumers will earn points that can be redeemed for rewards and experiences

Sofamon: An emoji companion for your onchain activity

• Unique customizable emoji characters with tradeable wearables

• Your transaction activity is personified through your emoji character. In the screenshot below, a wallet sent ETH to the presenter

• Building a mobile app and working on social platform integrations

Revel: Collect and trade personal trading cards

• Buy, sell, or trade personal trading cards

• You can stake or play games with the cards

• There are in-app generative AI tools to help creators make their own personal trading cards

Interface: A mobile onchain social feed

• Follow wallets and see their activity on a social newsfeed

• You can find users you follow on other social platform or discover other accounts based on assets you hold

The future of Demo Days

SC06’s The Event was an event that I hope other accelerators take a closer look at, especially for consumer-focused startups. B2C startups need users for traction and Demo Days can be more than an investor-facing event, but an investor and customer-facing event, which I believe Seed Club has done.

The event was engaging and encouraged the audience to participate in a variety of ways beyond listening and reading slides:

• RSVP’ing to The Event

• Listening to the DJ play music before the event started and after the event ended

• Participating in polls

• Typing in chat

• Participating in raffles

• Minting NFTs associated with the projects

Kudos to the Seed Club team and the SC06! I look forward to attending the next cohort’s Demo Day.

Coinbase goes to DC

Yesterday, Gary Gensler (SEC Chair) testified before Congress. Coinbase saw this event as an opportunity to promote their own platform while fighting the good fight for crypto in the US.

A couple days ago they put out an ad making the point that money is slow with a Brinks-like truck driving through rush hour traffic. Watch it, it’s good.

The money truck made its way to DC to meet Gensler and served cold brew with crypto stats instead of nutrition facts. Great concept.

And lastly, the #standwithcrypto movement made a guest appearance during Gensler’s testimony 🫡

Free Tickets to NFT SF

For anyone in the Bay Area, NFT SF is at the Palace of Fine Arts from November 6-7, and tickets are free with the code FRENS.

If you go give me a holler, I’ll be there.

See you next week!