3 Things: Surprise NFTs, At Home Diagnostics for Pets, Developer Intercom

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:

• Surprise NFTs

• At Home Diagnostics for Pets

• Developer Intercom

1. Surprise NFTs

The NFT (non-fungible token) market has exploded over the last 18 months. The first “killer app” for NFTs was CrytpoKitties which launched in November 2017 and got so popular by December that it caused the Ethereum network to essentially stall to a stand still. At this time, OpenSea launched as the first peer-to-peer NFT marketplace to capture this wave of interest, but after the CryptoKitties hype died down, between 2018 and early 2021, there was little talk of NFTs. During this “crypto winter” an average day would see around 100 users on OpenSea compared with the ~30k users/day right now. In early 2021, NBA Top Shot launched and put the concept back on the map, quickly going from a few hundred users to over 100k at its peak in May. There are now thousands of creators/projects and dozens of NFT marketplaces where people can mint, sell, or purchase NFTs.

While the concept has definitely grown in popularity, most NFTs still do not have a lot of utility. The lion’s share of NFTs that have been minted and purchased represent digital “art” or goods like in-game skins or virtual land. People are experimenting with token-gated access/communities, NFTs for ticketing, or new ways to do artist royalties. In the future, we may see NFTs with other kinds of utility such as representing fractionalized real estate or tracking provenance and authenticity of physical goods. One area that I haven’t seen explored is what I’m calling “surprise NFTs” which combines aspects of a scavenger hunt with the concept of digital token-gated access. Individuals mint NFTs that hold some kind of utility, but they have to figure out what it is. The NFT will give them access to something and when they figure it out and use the NFT, it will unlock access to the next utility for the user to discover. This digital hunt can function as a multi-player game where people are working together to figure out how to unlock the next “level”. Would be really fun, could easily go viral, and it is a cool way to have a bunch of groups collaborate as each level could unlock access to different brands or creators, interactions with different artists, and more. If someone wants to work on this, let me know!

2. At Home Diagnostics for Pets

In the US, the healthcare system has slowly been shifting the point of care from the hospital or clinic to the point of the patient, which typically means the home. Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes allow for reimbursements of remote patient monitoring and new codes introduced in 2022 focus on Remote Therapeutic Monitoring (RTM) designed to track non-physiologic data related to musculoskeletal or respiratory conditions which has spawned numerous startups helping physicians and practices take advantage of them. The pandemic forced a massive shift to telemedicine which has proved effective for many types of care. Additionally, there has been an influx of companies providing a variety of at-home diagnostics to test for everything from food allergies and STDs to colon cancer and infectious diseases like Covid-19. Even large health systems as well as payors and practitioners are pushing towards more home diagnostics as it is not just more convenient and accessible for the patient, it closes the gap in testing for clinicians, streamlines lab workflows, and improves member experience and engagement with payors.

It’s not just human health that people are spending a ton on. 70% of households in the US now own a pet. 69 million households own at least 1 dog and 45 million households are cat owners; up from 48m and 32m respectively in 2018. The joke now is that pets are the new kids and it’s reflective in how much people spend on their animals. The US companion animal health market is currently around $4.8B growing at over 10% CAGR. Most pet care is out of pocket with only 3% of down owners having pet insurance. As at-home diagnostic tests have become both cheap and ubiquitous for humans, a company could sell tests focused on animals. You could hone in on on common areas of spend such as allergies, UTIs, and glucose monitoring (related to obesity) which can be done via urinalysis, fecal matter testing, or saliva. There are already companies doing home genetic testing for dogs just like 23andMe did for humans. The next opportunity is to build the Everlywell, Cue or MyLabBox for pets.

3. Developer Intercom

In 2011, Intercom pioneered the now omnipresent chat popups that exist on most company websites. By 2018, the company had raised $240m and numerous competitors came onto the scene including Drift, LiveAgent, Help Scout, Freshchat, HelpShift, Front, and many more. They created the category of customer communications and today have over 25,000 customers with over 600m users and did just north of $200m in revenue in 2021. The vision was to build stronger relationships with customers, originally with what they called a “Business Messenger”. The general idea is that it reduces friction and time from customer or prospect inquiry to resolution; be it a question about product functionality or specific help desk question related to a bug or a user’s account.

While Intercom and the other customer communications platforms provide comprehensive tools to manage customer interactions, they are generic enough to capture needs of all types of customers. We’ve seen a new wave of companies that focus on a very specific type of user, and in particular, ones who cater to developers. Documentation is an incredibly important aspect of any developer tool or open source company, yet most humans are absolutely horrible at documentation. Despite most companies pouring a tremendous amount of resources and time into their documentation, discovery and the ability to easily query is still lacking. With the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-3, there is now the ability to build semantic search engines on top of things like documentation bases so a company could create a developer-facing “Intercom” to answer questions, find the right code snippets, or automatically create tickets in a tool like Jira instead of Zendesk. Even OpenAI could use this on their own documentation site which is just a bunch of text-based pages. They already offer solutions for text or code completion so the flipside is to also help companies auto-create documentation based off of developer inquiries and questions.

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 subscribe and share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine