3 Things: Docsend for NFTs, Match Me Models, Weather App for Covid

Happy New Year and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• Docsend for NFTs

• Match Me Models

• Weather App for Covid

1. Docsend for NFTs

If you work in the tech startup or venture capital worlds, chances are you’ve seen more than your fair share of Docsend decks. Docsend provides a secure document sharing platform that lets people send decks and docs and see who has accessed them, when, how many times, etc. You can create access controls so only certain people have permissions and you can revoke access to individuals, entire documents, or data rooms at any time. As the owner, you have discrete information on who has forwarded your deck, how long people spend on each slide, and much more valuable data. Docsend rethought the everyday concept of sending attachments and replaced them with links that can be granularly controlled by the sender. The company was acquired in 2021 by Dropbox which makes a ton of sense given the nature of Dropbox and the pre-existing integrations that Docsend had with the platform.

In a seemingly unrelated space, we’ve all been hearing about NFTs nonstop for the past year. Whether it’s the digital artist Beeple’s $69M sale of his “Everydays” work, or celebrities like Snoop Dog, Eminem, Lindsay Lohan, and Quentin Tarantino launching their own NFTs of scripts, beats, and more, it seems that everyone is trying to cash in on the NFT craze. NFTs allow the creator to mint a specific number of unique digital items that can be sold and tracked on a blockchain. Royalties can be baked into the smart contracts when an NFT is created, so let’s say you want to earn 10% every time your work is resold, you can now do that automatically. Critics often point to the fact that anyone can just right click and save a copy of the digital image, making the ownership of an NFT somewhat irrelevant. If NFT holders had the ability to control all of the ways that their item was used and viewed, there would be a lot more power to owning these digital collectibles. A wrapper could function like Docsend and enable owners to control where an NFT could be displayed (ie which sites, virtual worlds, etc), who has access to view it (you could need another NFT as a key to unlock viewing privileges as an example), and provide the ability to revoke access at any time. You could start to do some really cool and complex things with NFTs and continue to empower creators by giving them both more control and more to offer their fans.

2. Match Me Models

Ecommerce has exploded over the past 2 years, and a lot of the growth has been in fashion sales. In 2018, the online fashion industry was already worth $439B and that number has ballooned to over $758B in 2021. For years, dozens of startups and fashion giants themselves have been building solutions that enable shoppers to virtually try on clothes and use AR to visualize how the garments will look on their body. During the pandemic, big brands have been snapping up companies to fast track their initiatives in this space like Walmart’s acquisition of Zeekit or Gap’s purchase of Drapr. There are also companies that allow brands to use traditional models and photoshoots and then change skin color and features using AI to showcase more diverse images on product pages.

I’ve looked at numerous companies in this space and to be honest, the tech just isn’t quite there yet. No doubt that we’ll get there and that this is the future of retail, but for the time being, I anticipate ecomm merchants will still mostly rely on model images for their sites and apps. The one space where this actually does work today is with shoes as that is the least heterogeneous and most forgiving area to focus on… and I have to say, playing with an app like Wanna Kicks is pretty fun :) There has also been a huge push over the last few years to use much more inclusive models and move away from showing only tall, stick-thin, white models. You can now see images with all kinds of body types and skin colors which are much more relatable to a diverse set of shoppers. The problem is, we each see all kinds of models when shopping on merchant sites. Using myself as an example, let’s say I select that I’m 5’2”, size XS, and white, I would ultimately want to see models that reflect my body type and likeness to best approximate how the items will look on me. GAN technology can be used to create incredibly realistic looking people (if you’ve never looked at This Person Does Not Exist, I highly recommend going through a few images to see how insanely good they are) that could be leveraged to hyper-personalize ecommerce listings. A cool additional benefit is that users would be willing to give away significantly more data to get a highly customized shopping experience, giving mechants (or more likely the underlying platforms like Shopify) extremely valuable data that they can use for marketing campaigns, product development, and more.

3. Weather App for Covid

Last year during the holidays, a lot of us were saying a collective “good riddens to 2020” and fully expecting 2021 to bring a return to normalcy. Obviously that did not happen and if I had to wager, I’d say we’ll be sitting in a similar position next holidays. Maybe Omicron will continue to rip through the population, becoming the dominant variant and infecting enough people to bring herd immunity. Maybe there will be new variants that keep us going between cautious optimism to hibernating resignation. After 2 years of fear and isolation, most people are still longing to socialize, travel, and engage in pre-pandemic behaviors which is why 109 million Americans planned to travel for the holidays this year, up 184% from last year. While weather and Omicron may have put a damper on some plans, many people chose to go see loved ones which will likely cause continued spikes of Covid across the country.

Most of us rely on some form of weather app to both tell us how to prepare for the day when we are at home, and help us plan for any upcoming travel. Just as I might check my weather app in the morning to see if I need a jacket for my run or if it is still going to rain in the afternoon, I want an equivalent app to show me realtime, localized data of Covid cases. I’d like the ability to see what is going on in my town/city as well as look at the trends anywhere I plan to travel or track places where my family or friends live. You should be able to add as many cities as you want and see charts on cases, hospitalizations, deaths, variant spread, and any other data that is being collected by the city, county, or state. Since, unfortunately, I don’t think we are about to be done with this virus, it could become a viral app that people check daily and rely on for vital information. I’m not sure anyone would be willing to pay for this but I can see a world where this gets snapped up pretty quickly by some company and the app is used to track other things in the future.

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine