3 Things: NFTs for Time, Home Vending Machines, Auto-FAQ for Communities
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-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
NFTs for Time
Home Vending Machines
Auto-FAQ for Communities
1. NFTs for Time
NFTs come up in conversation approximately 12 times a day for me at this point 😆. Whether it’s people seeing $$$, wanting to be a part of the hype, or truly believing that this is the future, it feels like every creator, influencer, entrepreneur, startup, and enterprise is trying to figure out what they can turn into an NFT. Aside from the myriad art, music, content, and gaming NFTs, people are getting creative with how this concept of digitally verifiable ownership of unique (non-fungible) goods can be used. A few of my favorites include membership to a sushi restaurant, a Croatian tennis player selling a patch of skin on her arm, a digital fragrance created by Look Labs, a couple whose marriage involved an NFT ring exchange, and a Charmin toilet paper NFT that sold for over $3,000. When Charmin is getting in the game, you know we’ve reached peak hype!
There are so many use cases outside of collectibles and gaming items where NFTs could transform industries and these are personally some of the areas I’m most interested in such as: supply chain/provenance of physical goods, home and car titles, software user licences, and death certificates to name just a few. One other area I’ve been noodling on is how NFTs can represent time. There is the old saying “time is money” and when you think about it, your time is broken up into distinct, non-transferable blocks. When you schedule a meeting with someone, that is taking up a slot which is unique and ultimately non-fungible. A company can create a calendar product where your time slots can be turned into NFTs. This could also force people to stake tokens to hold the slot and lose them if they fail to show up. Use cases for this could include office hours, feedback sessions, speaker slots on podcasts, webinars, panels or events, and other things where you are doing favors for people with discretionary time. Companies in the past like wrte.io and earn.com have offered products where you can charge a fee for people to email you and Gated enables you to have senders donate to charity to get into your inbox. Leveraging NFTs, tokens, and smart contracts could enable you to set custom rules and prices for different time slots, and could make a lot of sense to help align incentives and protect your precious time.
2. Home Vending Machines
It’s pretty shocking how little you can move when you are at home all day. While early in the pandemic we saw a surge in demand for things like weights, Pelotons, and fitness apps to combat the “Covid 15”, as time has gone on, people have gotten comfortable and used to their new lives and a lot of that enthusiasm has waned. Work from home also means it’s all too easy to constantly grab snacks during the day between meetings, and if you’re anything like me, your pantry is filled with not always the most healthy of choices, and definitely not anything that is pre-portioned (my new obsession are the Hot Buffalo Wing Synder’s Pretzel pieces and apparently that tiny bag has 12 servings 😳) . By now, most of us have tried some form of meal delivery kit service like HelloFresh, Blue Apron, Home Chef or Sunbasket which focus on lunches or dinners. At the very least, you’ve probably ordered delivery from a restaurant and online groceries. Ultimately, we’ve gotten comfortable with ordering food for home on the internet. When it comes to offices, there have been numerous companies like Snackmagic and Snacknation that provide snack boxes for startup offices and many of them have also started offering gift boxes and employee home boxes during the pandemic while offices were shut down. This is a nice perk but tends to be a lot of items that you either don’t want or shouldn’t eat, and is never at an optimized cadence.
When you think of vending machines, you often think of places like office buildings, motels, and airports. They are usually stocked with chips, candy, soda, gum; not the best options for an afternoon snack. There are now even smart, wallet-less vending machines like Stockwell that use AI and an app to provide access, handle charges, and manage re-stocking. I want a smart vending machine for my home where I can create my own bundle of snacks and set specific controls and parameters such as a limit on how many grams of sugar a day I want to snack on, or windows during the day when I can and cannot access the contents (ie literally lock you out and protect you from yourself), etc. It could cater to all types of food restrictions, diets, and other food-related goals or behaviors and would integrate with fitness trackers, calorie/food trackers, and other digital products related to overall diet and exercise. Each member of the family could have their own settings and customized snacks and could access the vending machine with an app, or biometric sensor. This could be both a direct to consumer product as well as a benefit that employers offer remote employees. The service would enable the item selection, custom control setting, and re-ordering/fulfillment to your house. Feels like a great addition as we move closer and closer to the “smart home”, and given the $40B valuation and imminent IPO of GoPuff… we clearly like our snacks!
3. Auto-FAQ for Communities
Whether it’s a Facebook Group, Discord server, Slack workspace, Subreddit, or other form of digital group or community, there is always the cold start problem when you first join the community of trying to find relevant information or answers to your questions among the giant archive of conversation. Inevitably the same questions get asked over and over and over. Admins often try to jump in and point people to the existing threads where the discussion has already taken place. Sometimes there is an FAQ doc that gets pinned somewhere which is manually and painstakingly updated by organizers. As humans, we tend to both suck at and not enjoy documentation so this is never one of the most fun parts of running a community. On top of that, if you analyzed all conversation among digital communities, my guess is that it follows close to the Pareto principle where 80ish% of the content is related to the same 20% of topics/questions.
With more and more talk about “community” each day, we are seeing groups form around literally any and every thing from more corporate/work related circles to hobby/affinity groups that truly run the gamut. A software product could scan all group chats and content and automatically generate FAQ documentation that is constantly updated based off of the most recent conversations. When someone joins and asks a question that has been asked many times before, a bot can immediately point the user to the FAQ and/or previous comments and hide the post so it doesn’t clog up the feed without adding value. Over time, as new topics start to gain popularity, the most useful information and threads will get added to the FAQ and become a new pointer. You can leverage engagement metrics such as likes/reactions, comments, and references to help determine what to highlight. Starting with business communities, paid communities, and DAOs would make it easier to offer a paid SaaS product and monetize quickly.
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