#355: jellyjelly and the Rise of the Startup Coin

PLUS: 🦠 Infected.fun's onchain pandemic simulation game

jellyjelly and the ‘startup coin’

So, I knew I was onto something when I published my VINE piece earlier this week, but I didn’t expect the ‘startup coin’ meta to pick up that quickly.

Thanks to another startup with an established founder launching a token via pump.fun, we’re seeing another potential meta play out and stick around.

What is jellyjelly?

jellyjelly is a social media platform that allows creators to post clips from a video chat, or as Sam Lessin (investor in the company) describes it, a ‘podcastless podcast’.

jellyjelly was founded by Iqram Magdon-Ismail, co-founder of Venmo (🚨credibility alert🚨), so when Sam and Iqram launched the jellyjelly coin yesterday the degen trenches swarmed all over the token.

Shortly after the token launch, Sam launched a Spaces with 80k listeners tuning in to figure out what the hell was going on, leading the token to shoot up to a $250M market cap at its peak (currently at $83M).

Sam and Iqram were inspired by Vine’s approach of launching a token, and figured ‘hell, why not do one ourselves and figure it out from there’, and it certainly worked thanks to their established credibility, doxxed identities, and willingness to speak about it on a public forum with video on.

If VINE was a data point, jellyjelly makes this a (very) early trend. Notable folks shared thoughts on what the space was witnessing:

The startup coin meta?

As it became clear that startup coins are a thing, more have popped up, many of which have been outright scams.

My favorite of the day is TakeMeOut, an app that ‘makes anybody bookable’. The founder even created a pitch deck to show they were serious 😂

The founder, Anais Rahmani followed jellyjelly’s playbook and went on Spaces immediately after launching the token. 3 minutes in, a monkey joined the stage and ‘attacked’ the founder, and she subsequently dumped her holdings on speculative degens hoping to catch the next big startup token. Gotta give them brownie points for the extra effort and theatrical rug I guess.

Thoughts and considerations as the startup coin meta takes off

Assuming this new startup coin meta gains steam in the coming days/ weeks/months, there will be much to observe and learn. Some themes I’m thinking about:

NFTs are for brands, tokens are for products

To be clear, I’m not saying this in an absolute sense, but categorizing where there’s a better fit from the outset. NFTs can build products for additional revenue streams, and products are brands in their own right.

As we’ve seen and will continue to see artist-led NFT collections launch, we’ll see more founder-led startup coins launch as well.

During the jellyjelly Spaces, some speakers asked thoughtful questions, namely ‘As a holder, what do I get?’ Although jellyjelly was an experiment, Iqram and Sam already had some ideas to make the most of the opportunity:

• Holders get early access to the app, which is currently waitlist only

• Holders (I assume of X amount of the token or more) get free premium access

• The token could become a form of tipping payment to creators

Not bad for off-the-cuff ideas and they are all good examples of how these startup coins could be used for immediate and/or eventual utility.

Startup coins transform the AAARRR funnel

If you’ve been around, you already know that tokens and airdrops are one of the most notable marketing innovations of the past decade. With the right incentives, products and ecosystems in crypto/web3 are able to bootstrap from 0 users to thousands or more in an instant.

For non-crypto founders, this is an exciting world, as traditional paid acquisition costs have skyrocketed.

In less than a day, jellyjelly created a community of 50k+ token holders, generated several organic press hits, and millions of views on social media and other closed channels (Discord, Telegram, etc.)

With the AAARRR funnel, Awareness and Acquisition are now in easy-mode (at least for now). The tradeoff of an easy top of funnel is a relatively more difficult bottom of funnel.

With so many users coming in due to a token, how many of them are sticking around beyond the financial incentives? How many are actually interested in the product?

Community management difficulty mode: INSANE!!!

And with an influx of community members token holders who are interested in the product price going up, managing and retaining a community turns into 10-sided Rubik’s Cube.

A simple example of this is Sam Lessin’s post earlier today responding to questions about why he deleted other posts regarding yesterday’s launch, probably due to legal reasons. Unsurprisingly, the post received lots of engagement and a lot of flak:

Welcome to the world of community management Sam!

Launching a startup coin is simultaneously a gift from the acquisition heavens and a curse from retention hell. NFT founders, community managers, and community members know what I’m talking about 😬 .

So where does the startup coin meta go from here? Does it accelerate, or does it sputter away into irrelevancy as the shortest meta that ever lived?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see the next one launch!

Infected.fun

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an interesting onchain social game pop up in my feed: Infected. What is it and how does it work?

• Infected is a hyper-speculative (at least they’re being honest about it lol), pandemic simulation game

• 30 deadly viruses compete to infect the most wallets on Base

• Each virus is a token

Details are fairly sparse at the moment, which is partially why it caught my interest. Because of the mechanics that could be possible, I’ve occasionally reposted their content as a fan of what it could be. And today, they sent an interesting reply.

Infected doesn’t have a website yet and they don’t have my wallet, so I’m assuming the account is seeding 'Patient Zeros’, and I’m not the only one.

Based on this mechanic, Patient Zeros will connect their wallet, claim their virus tokens, and then spread them (TBD on that mechanic).

And if that’s the case, I’ll be sure to spread some COVID to y’all. Just like the good ol’ days, right?…RIGHT?! 😷

See you next week!

PS: I still have some Vector codes! Download the app and enter the invite code. If you don’t know what Vector is, I wrote about it here

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