[Thoughts #102] More Starbucks + The End of Lazy Things

🔮 What could be and what could have been

A Second Cup of ☕️

Yesterday’s piece on Starbucks came out pretty quick due to the timing of the announcements and me live-typing what I think. There’s a beauty to it, and at the same time it’s not fully formulated as everyone is developing their own POV and opinions.

It doesn’t mean I live-puke my thoughts, but rather there is so much up to interpretation! Frameworks are meant to be challenged, modified, and evolved. The same goes with mine.

Sometimes it feels like this lol

If we aren’t speculating what the true value of a monkey jpeg is, we’re speculating what X company might do based on news headlines. I mean A and I have an ongoing bet on who will acquire Peloton:

We bet on a lot of things, it’s one of the many activities we have to keep our relationship interesting 😂

That said, I got some feedback in various channels yesterday about my Starbucks thoughts. The first came from someone in the WW3 Discord:

They meant “Web2 is not”

If you were about to pull out the bucket of popcorn to see some screenshots of a heated debate, you can stop right there. They’re right!

If you spend $100k at Gucci and they fly you out to Italy to go shop for an all-expense paid trip, isn’t that a form of experience-based loyalty? Yup.

Wow, the X is so blown up that you can see the pixels lol.

So the above model isn’t quite accurate. What is more appropriate? Maybe something like this?

The second circle on the left is smaller and in dotted lines because IMO the vast majority of Web2 loyalty programs are:

• Contingent on transaction-based activity

• Are not as dynamic what could be possible in a Web3-enabled loyalty program

So even if there is a larger surface area in some Web2 loyalty programs, I would argue Web3 loyalty programs have more possibility.

Someone else (smarter than me) in another Discord server shared their thoughts as well:

More of a pessimistic take, and I also agree! My response:

That is what loyalty programs are for after all. To continue winning your attention and dollars.

Lastly, the gigabrain Jon Wu dropped a banger thread yesterday evening about the Starbucks announcement:

jonwu.(🗽, 🍎) @jonwu_

The Starbucks x Polygon loyalty announcement is so boring it's revolutionary. A non-speculative, 1:1 drop-in replacement for typical loyalty programs. That's exactly why it's a huge deal:

TLDR for the thread: Starbucks is betting on building an open system for loyalty.

And I agree that they’re building a more open system for loyalty, especially since this was mentioned in yesterday’s Techcrunch article.

Will Odyssey members be able to actually cash out from their NFT sale proceeds? Will there be a conversion rate for the existing loyalty program’s ‘Stars’ to ‘Stamps points’?

Guess we’ll find out.

RIP Lazy Things

How about we continue with the ‘TPan is wrong’ theme today?

A few weeks ago I wrote about Lazy Things and how I analyze NFT projects. I broke down several factors to consider and why I was interested in the project (not convinced it would be successful though. there’s a fine line as nothing is guaranteed in this space 😉)

As the title states, Lazy Things is 🪦. What happened?

Sept 8 - Mint going live as scheduled, but the website had issues so many users could not mint.

Minters were refunded and team decided to regroup and redeploy the contract at a later date.

Sept 9 - Status update of project and a video apology from the founder. Nice touch as apologies are often insincere in the space. Also probably because by this point, many people were expressing negative sentiment and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about the project.

Sept 10 - Details provided for the second attempt along with a Twitter spaces later that day.

Sept 11 - Mint day take 2! Uh oh…there are a lot of fake links and scam sites pretending to be the Lazy Things project…

Holy crap a fake Lazy Things overtook the original Lazy Things, leading to more FUD and confusion.

Sept 12 - RIP. I appreciate the integrity that the team had in refunding purchasers.

What can we learn from this?

• Projects with a strong following and even a great strategy can only have so many attempts before losing the trust of the community. It doesn’t matter if you’re Chris Brown or if you’re a company with a huge audience like Lazy Things. Enough mistakes or a poor rollout will result in the effort being DOA. This is pronounced in a bear market and with thousands of pseudonymous community members that take pleasure in creating chaos when the opportunity arises.

• QA + Security continues to paramount in the space. While the market is down bad, scammers will continue taking opportunities to insert themselves where possible. In this case, the revised mint date gave scammers more time to insert themselves and fool unsuspecting minters to a fake version of the project.

We won’t know what happened behind closed doors that resulted in the decision to sunset the project, but I wish the team well. I think they’ll be fine considering the parent company runs several social media accounts with tens of millions of followers.

So technicallyyyy…I’m not wrong because this project never had a chance to prove me right or wrong. Who knows, maybe they’ll relaunch if/when a bull market comes back. And my point was how to build a framework to identify projects with potential. Whether they go to the moon or not is anyone’s guess.

I’ll be pouring one out for Lazy Things and all the NFT projects that could have been.

See you tomorrow. 🫗