3 Things: .nft TLD DAO, Github Contributions for Other Apps, B2B Waitlist Software

Happy Sunday 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-promotions so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• .nft TLD DAO

• Github Contributions for Other Apps

• B2B Waitlist Software

1. .nft TLD DAO

Whoa nelly, that’s a lot of 3-letter acronyms 😅. A TLD or top-level-domain is a domain at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System (DNS) of the internet. The first group of TLDs, deemed “general purpose domains”, were created in October 1984 and contained .com, .edu, .gov, .mil, and .org with .net following shortly after. When you see a 2-letter TLD like .ca, .in, or .au, those are reserved for country code domains (so when tech startups use the trendy .so domains they are actually using the country code TLD for Somalia 😂), and as of January 2012, ICANN (the nonprofit organization that is responsible for help ensuring a stable, secure, and unified global Internet) has allowed individuals or groups to register new domains through their gTLD program. These include things like .club, .design, .xyz (which the crypto community has now adopted), and many more. Theoretically, any group could have applied for a domain extension of their choosing through the program.

The process for registering a new gTLD is nontrivial (to say the least), expensive, and was essentially a one-time window of opportunity. This past year, the GNSO Council, ICANN’s policy body, unanimously approved a New gTLD Round 2 Program, though it’s unclear when they will start accepting applications. Since it seems imminent, the time is perfect for a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) to come together and pool funds/resources to purchase the .nft gTLD. In a similar fashion to the ConstitutionDAO which attempted to buy a copy of the constitution, a group excited about Web3, and in particular the applications of NFTs, could not only launch the domain but also control how it is used. While it may seem somewhat hypocritical for people focused on decentralization to participate in something as centralized as the domain name system controlled by ICANN, especially when the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) exists, I don’t see traditional internet domains going away anytime soon and with the absolutely insane explosion of NFT-focused startups, I think there is a pretty large opportunity right now to capitalize on the .nft domain.

2. Github Contributions For Other Apps

In 2013, Github launched Contributions, their way of showing what users have been doing on the platform. They visualize this activity in a cool grid-like calendar graph which shows a user’s activity across all projects such as committing to a (public) repository's default branch or gh-pages branch, opening an issue or discussion, answering a discussion, proposing a pull request, and submitting a pull request review. It’s both a public status symbol that is displayed on a user’s profile to indicate which projects they’ve contributed to and how how active they are, as well as a personal accountability mechanism to encourage people to continue contributing to the projects they care about.

This type of visual reminder can help motivate and gamify certain behavior and could be used across many other types of apps to promote specific activities. Say you want to exercise 5 days a week consistently. Maybe you want to meditate for at least 10 minutes a day. Or, maybe you are trying to limit your social media usage to under 30 minutes a day. Having a visual graph like the Github Contributions Calendar could help you see how you’re tracking and also become a public display to hold you accountable. Maybe some weeks you do really well and then others you see some gaps. You can allow users to annotate the graph to mark off anomalies and also connect your wearables like an Apple Watch or Fitbit for fitness goals, apps like Calm/Headspace to track mediation, or screentime as a few examples that can pull data and incorporate automatically to the graph. To add some spice, the app could also have betting or staking functionality where you commit to a certain goal or competition and lock up funds that either get released or returned depending on how you do with your goals. The calendar can visualize how close (or far) you are to hitting them and create a fun, gamified environment.

3. B2B Waitlist Software

Many founders have been told over and over to test for demand before you actually invest in building a product. The act of creating waitlists to get early/first access or join a beta is used across companies ranging from B2B SaaS to DTC ecommerce. It’s often used as a barometer of customer demand and is also used frequently for fundraising purposes as an early “metric”. One company that is famous for successfully using waitlists to create virality (twice in fact) is Robinhood. When they were first building their commission-free trading platform, they were able to acquire 1 million users on a waitlist before the product even existed. Fast forward a few years and they repeated the process and have been able to build a waitlist of over 1.6 million people for their crypto wallet which is supposed to launch in Q1 2022. Spotify, Superhuman, Clubhouse, and many other wildly successful companies have also leveraged waitlists and the ensuing FOMO that they create.

There are a bunch of products out there to help you build a pre-launch landing page/website using prebuilt templates to capture demand such as Carrd and Launchrock, or you could use a marketing automation system’s landing pages with embedded forms to hack together a simple page. The problem is, for the vast majority of startups just throwing up a waitlist page does little to nothing to drive actual usage and customers. Many a startup has accumulated thousands of signups only to convert less than 1% to actual users (paid or free). A company that is pre-launch has extremely limited bandwidth and employees and typically isn’t able to leverage signups in the best possible way. A relatively simple solution could offer waitlist landing pages that integrate with startup CRMs, Marketing Automation Systems, social accounts, Slack channels, Discord servers, and more to continue to engage the waitlisted audience in an automated fashion. The platform would send emails, create social engagement, get feedback through surveys, drive people to community spaces, and post continual updates to the group. When it’s time to launch, it can weaponize the signups to help promote the launch and drive further virality.

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