3 Things: On Deck for Web3, Meal Kits for TikTok Food Trends, Podcast Resource Links

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:

• On Deck for Web3

• Meal Kits for TikTok Food Trends

• Podcast Resource Links

1. On Deck for Web3

What started back in 2016 as a series of underground dinners for people who were thinking about starting something new (I always described it to people as “Fight Club for Wantrapreneurs”) has evolved into a massive community with over a dozen programs for founders, tech professionals, and investors across a variety of sectors. In a record breaking time frame, On Deck has built programs for everything from folks interesting in becoming Chiefs of Staff at startups to founders looking to build products that combat climate change or helping mission-driven edtech entrepreneurs change the future of education. They have become a talent magnet for top tech talent who are building companies or looking to join early stage startups across a wide range of Web2 sectors and provide programming, expert guidance, community, and resources to help them achieve their goals.

Also in 2016, I became obsessed with Ethereum after listening to a podcast describing the vision for decentralized applications built using smart contracts. After jumping into the space fully in 2017, it was clear that while many top engineers were flocking to the industry, there were not a lot of Product or GTM professionals available to build user-friendly products. I started a Blockchain Marketing Meetup and expected around 20 people to show up to our first event and was shocked when we had over 200! Pretty quickly we entered a subsequent crypto winter from late 2018 to mid 2020 but now there is a renewed interest that is orders of magnitude bigger than the previous boom with an insane amount of talent clamouring to get on board; all looking for education, guidance, and most of all, community. There is a perfect opportunity to build the On Deck focused solely on Web3. The sector is as broad as covering the current state of Web2 internet companies so you could launch cohorts/programs in Finance (DeFi), NFTs, Solidity engineering, gaming, healthcare, logistics, and many more areas that crypto is trying to disrupt. Find experienced leaders to support or own each cohort and help build the curriculum, recruit talent looking to get into the space, and launch each vertical and an overarching master community. The entire company can be set up as a DAO and tokenized so that every member is incentivized to continue to participate and give back to the community as well as make it grow.

2. Meal Kits for TikTok Food Trends

What do baked feta pasta, corn ribs, nature’s cereal, and pasta chips all have in common? They are all viral TikTok food trends of 2021. Videos of Cloud Bread had over 3.2 billion views in the past year. Dalgona Coffee and Pancake Cereal had 2.8 billion and 1.6 billion views respectively. Since launching in 2016, the TikTok app has garnered a truly unbelievable 3 billion downloads; 1.36 billion of those coming between Q1 2020 and Q2 2021. TikTok was the most downloaded app in 2021 and there are currently over 1 billion monthly active users! While TikTok is known for showing highly personalized feeds to keep users engaged, a significant portion of videos are food related (food is a universal human interest) and these videos have the ability to drive consumer behavior in offline settings.

TikTok recently announced that it plans to open up TikTok branded ghost kitchens doing delivery (via Grubhub) of the viral food trends that pop up on the platform, very similar to the MrBeast Burger concept. While I think this is an incredibly smart move by TikTok and will likely do quite well, I believe the bigger play is actually doing meal delivery kits. Pretty much every food trend tends to be something that is simple enough for anyone to make at home with ingredients you can get from local markets. New emerging trends pop up all the time so there is the opportunity to add plenty of variety and keep users engaged and retained. Ordering delivery is a one-off decision that happens ad-hoc but meal delivery kits are a subscription product where users pay monthly and (hopefully) continue to use the service repeatedly. The added benefit of allowing customers to make and assemble the dishes themselves is that they can film and post on TikTok adding to the virality of the food trend and also letting them participate and not just observe. The company can do really cool challenges and offer prizes around videos created while making or consuming the meals.

3. Podcast Episode Resource Links

Anyone who has been reading this newsletter for a while knows that I’m somewhat obsessed with podcasts. A former colleague once asked me what type of music I listen to and my 100% honest answer was “podcasts” 🤣. Podcasts are a fantastic way to learn almost anything from history lessons on Genghis Khan or the Civil War to business topics like startup growth and cybersecurity best practices. Many impressive people who might not have time to write a longform piece of content or speak at an event are often willing to record a quick podcast episode which means that there is truly a treasure trove of wisdom within the depths of the podcast content catalogs. Each episode of most nonfiction podcasts ends up referencing a bunch of resources; things that would normally be hyperlinked in any form of written content so that the reader can easily go and learn more. These resources range from articles, videos, movies and books to companies, apps, and people. How many times have you been listening to an episode and think to yourself “oooh remember the name of that [book/movie/song/product/etc]” and then totally forgot and were unable to find it again?

Current podcasting apps like Spotify (whose big bet in the space led them to become the top listening app in 2021 with 31% market share) Apple Podcasts (which still has 27% market share), and Google Podcasts (which is quite the laggard with only 2.9% of all downloads) allow podcasters to add show notes that can contain links to references but almost no one actually does this due to the time and effort involved. To timestamp and provide resource links, it requires a human to manually go through each episode and painstakingly create a list of references and corresponding times within the podcast. Speech-to-text products like Otter.ai or Descript have improved significantly over the past few years and can do an excellent job of turning episodes into a block of text with timestamps. A product could take this further and allow a podcaster to create trigger words like “book”, “article”, “startup”, etc and the app would use search to find the referenced item and add a link and a bullet with timestamp. For every person’s name (easy to identify since they don’t look like common words in the dictionary) a similar bookmark and link can be added. This would probably get you 80-90% of the way there but if you want 100% accuracy, a services layer can provide a human who goes through and cleans it up to get to perfection. Since podcasts all have their own websites, there can be a master list of resources aggregated from all episodes and categorized by type of reference.

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