FIRST DOWN
Poparazzi Pops (+ Growth Hacks) To The Top Of The App Charts
If you follow startup/VC twitter, then it's likely that you saw a lot of posts and congratulations floating around this week about the launch of a new social photo sharing app called Poparazzi. The app was launched by the social app developer TTYL, which raised $2 million in funding back in 2018, and officially launched on Monday. Shortly thereafter it rocketed to the top of the App Store charts. Now, the company is reportedly riding the hype wave to a new funding round at a valuation north of $100 million.
So what is Poparazzi, and what's all the hype about? Poparazzi is a new photo sharing app that looks to shift the social media paradigm from being about selfie culture and "look what I'm doing" to one in which users are encouraged to take and share photos of their friends. It does this by eliminating the front-facing camera and requiring you to tag the subject of the photo before posting. There are no filters, editing tools, comments, or hashtags, and in addition to photos, the capture mechanism enables you to capture short bursts of photos that are stitched into looping GIFs.
Upon downloading the app, it's clear that the team building the app is highly talented in both design and UI/UX (user interface / user experience). The onboarding flow leverages the iPhone's haptics to the hilt, turning your phone into a live buzzing machine each step of the way. The company also uses seemingly every user growth/viral hack from the social media playbook in an effort to engineer for user growth. For example, you are required to import your entire contacts list to use the app--something that has some serious privacy implications and gets thorny around issues like exes or stalkers--and requires you to tag someone in a photo, thus creating inherent sharing and virality (and in some cases, annoyance). From a "grow really fast hack" approach, it's quite smart--and has clearly worked--given the rapid rise in the App Store charts and attention from top VCs. From a user perspective though, it's a bit off-putting and at times feels a little spammy--and there are also currently no built-in options to turn off or tone down the notification frequency. It's an early-stage start-up though, so it has time to adjust the "virality" knobs to find the right balance, and it is likely that other peoples' feeds will have more subject matter diversification.
Poparazzi is also the latest in a long line of social media apps that burn incredibly bright and skyrocket to the top of the app charts on the promise of becoming the next big thing in social. Most recently, we were writing about fellow much-hyped photo sharing app Dispo, and its $20 million Series A round of funding back in February (before running into some trouble with its founder). Dispo rocketed to a top 10 app store position, before falling back down to a low 80s ranking within the Photo & Video app store category (and out of the top 1,000 apps overall).
As we wrote about in our coverage of Dispo, it's far too early to tell if Poparazzi is just a niche fad, or has lasting potential. For now, the feed is mostly dominated by investors in the app and other tech "influencers" who you tend to see around the new app launch water cooler--I'm looking forward to seeing how my feed evolves as the app grows. I'm well aware that in the history of great social networks, many times the initial use case seemed odd or downright stupid at first glance. (Sharing just photos...don't we already have Facebook? Sharing pictures that disappear...how do you build a social network with ephemeral content?). So for now, we'll keep playing with the app and and see if it becomes the next big social network--or the latest star to burn bright and quickly fade.
(more here)
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SECOND DOWN
Whatnot Raises $50M To Sell Collectables (And Whatnot)
This week, Los Angeles-based live-streaming platform and marketplace to buy and sell collectables, Whatnot, announced a new $50 million Series B round of venture funding. This brings the two-year-old startup's total funding to just shy of $75 million.
When we last covered Whatnot back in March, the startup had just closed a $20 million Series A round of funding. As a refresher, Whatnot is a marketplace that enables collectors and enthusiasts to connect, buy, and sell verified products. From Pokemon cards to Funko Pop figurines, sellers of products can go live on the Whatnot platform, and members of the community can hang out, watch the video content, and ultimately purchase the products if they so choose. The company recently added trading cards to its platform, and reports that cards have rocketed to become the number one category, accounting for millions of dollars in sales each month.
If it feels like sports cards and collectibles are everywhere these days, that's probably because they are. They are part of a new wave of interest in investing into alternative assets that range from trading cards to Funko figurines, to Be@rbricks to classic cars, and more. And yes, this also includes NFTs like the digital collectibles from artists like Beeple and NBA Top Shot.
We could go deep down the rabbit hole on the recent collectibles boom, but to save time, here are some of the startups we have covered recently that are looking to capitalize on the latest gold rush:
Trading Cards Marketplaces
Collectibles
Fractional Collectible Ownership
As you can see, the market is getting increasingly crowded--and that's not to mention the behemoths in the sector like eBay, Facebook groups, and StockX/GOAT (not to mention overseas players). There is sure to be some consolidation and shake-out in the coming months, but one area we are particularly paying attention to is the differentiation between those focusd on providing a pure marketplace, and those looking to lean into live streaming and other forms of content to become the QVC or HSN of this new generation.
(more here)
Bonus Coverage: startup Infinite Objects raised a $6 million Seed round of funding this week to create physical displays for digital art and NFTs. Interestingly the round was led by other blockchain/digital asset companies. We met with CEO/Founder Joe Saavedra several months ago--the actual products are pretty slick if you're deep into NFTs.
Disclosure: Noah is a formal advisor to NTWK and is admittedly biased toward the company!
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THIRD DOWN
See Spot Run. See Spot Raise A $5M Seed Round Of Funding
This week, Chicago-based startup Spot Meetings announced a new $5 million Seed round of funding to help reimagine the traditional business meeting. This brings the less-than-a-year-old startup's total funding to just under $7 million as it looks to put some pep in your step and get you walking when you're tired of staring at the Zoom screen all day long.
Spot is looking to re-imagine the meeting from the ground up, with a focus on an audio-only environment. To do this, it requires the team to solve for key meeting behaviors like scheduling, note-taking, and follow-ups, but packaged in an audio-only form factor that you can take with you while you're on the move.
This is where Spot looks to (ahem) hit the spot for meeting attendees. Spot solves for these challenges in an audio-only environment through a slick suite of tools. To begin with, to host a Spot meeting, you simply enter the Spot meeting link in your calendar, the same way you would for Zoom. Importantly, recipients don't have to have the Spot App installed to utilize the product. To capture key notes from the conversation, the app features a "fetch" feature where you can either press a button or say "Spot Fetch" and it automatically pulls the last 40 seconds of conversation, transcribes it, and saves it into the meeting's notes. Meetings also feature a collaborative notepad that gets shared with participants post meeting, and gets emailed out to attendees after the call. Finally, it looks to optimize audio quality with "Smart Mute" technology to blocks out distracting background noise.
I first met the founder Greg Caplan over a walk-and-talk Spot Meeting back in March, and it was a welcome break from sitting in my home office staring at a screen all day. I've long been a fan of the walk-and-talk as the best way to catch up with employees, partners, portfolio founders, or really anyone that wants to have a more invigorating conversation than simply sitting across a table for an hour. But at the same time, I'm a voracious note-taker, and often struggle with taking certain types of meetings as calls, since I want to be able to capture key points and set reminders for later.
The product is still in private beta, and there are still kinks to be worked out and features to be build to enable users who rely on note-taking and multi-tasking to be able to use the service for all types of remote meetings. People have their own particular work-flows and processes, and Spot will need to find a way to fit within these confines, or reduce friction for adjusting existing behaviors. And once the core product is humming and out of beta, one area I think the app may shine is in its potential ability to gamify meetings. People are obsessed with their fitness trackers, and if Spot can find a way to straddle the worlds of business meetings and consumer health/fitness, there is potential to build something that is truly unique.
(more here)
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FOURTH DOWN
Gridware Powers Up With $5 Million To Smoke Out Wildfires
This week Silicon Valley-based emergency response technology startup Gridware announced a new $5.3 million Seed round of funding to help create a future where suburban wildfires and smoke-filled cities are a thing of the past. Good timing, as the US Forest Service predicts that 2021 could be a severe fire season "like armageddon," coming on the heels of the worst fire season on record for states like California.
So what exactly is Gridware, and how does it plan to help tackle the climate change-fueled increase in severe weather and resulting power failures (or in some cases, the power grid causing the fires and severe power failures)? Gridware provides a grid monitoring system of sensors and software for the power distribution grid. The system centers around a low-cost hardware platform that is easily and permanently deployed to power poles with just a few screws. It's almost like a Fitbit for power poles. The platform detects and predicts faults that ignite wildfires, expedites repairs during a power outage, and helps utilities demonstrate risk reduction to regulators through comprehensive asset health profiles.
Gridware is just part of a new wave or emergency preparedness and response companies trying to bridge the gap between massive government agency budgets running on pen and paper, and technology-driven modern software solutions. The money is there for new solutions, but finding ways to sell into the hellish government-run procurement processes has scared off many a founder and investor for decades. But, as ice storms shut down power grids in Texas, faulty power lines spark devastating wildfires in California, and whole swaths of the West Coast become uninhabitable for days on end each summer due to unbearable smoke, something's eventually got to give. Or at least that's the hope for Gridware and it's investors.
On a personal level, this is a topic I find particularly interesting for two reasons. First, because in a previous life I became a certified wildland firefighter and spent a summer working the front lines of forest fires in Oregon. And secondly, because the first startup I co-founded back when I was 21 was in the emergency and disaster response sector. So I can empathize with the massive opportunity paired with frustrated sales cycle challenges the Gridware team face.
But as climate change continues to play a significant role in larger and more impactful natural disasters, expect to see power grids featured in the news in the coming years. Perhaps Gridware will be part of the wave of startups that can finally break through.
(more here)
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EXTRA POINT
Athletes + Entertainers in Tech: Eco
As hot as the crypto markets have been in 2021 (recent slippage notwithstanding) one of the biggest challenges the sector has had is in finding the right onramps to onboard everyday consumers into crypto. That is the goal behind Eco, a digital global cryptocurrency platform promising to replace banks, credit cards, and checking accounts altogether with something new and better. The company has now raised around $35 million in early-stage funding.
Most of the innovation in fintech has been around layering a shiny new interface on top of traditional banking infrastructure. Robinhood makes it easier to purchase stocks, but it's still a brokerage using traditional brokerage infrastructure. Chime offers you simplified mobile banking services, but ultimately it contracts with a traditional bank on the backend. In other words, they are not reimagining the banking infrastructure system from whole cloth--just making it easier to use, more convenient, and at times squeezing out slightly better economics through technology-driven efficiencies.
Eco wants to blow it all up and start from scratch, using the blockchain as the foundation. BUT, its goal is to design the consumer experience in such a way that the user doesn't ultimately care if it uses traditional banking rails or is built on the blockchain--so long as they can earn a higher APY on their account balance than traditional checking accounts, earn more cash back than credit cards, and gain rewards for sharing with friends.
Eco's marketing has done a good job of positioning itself as David fighting the banking system Goliath on behalf of the average consumer. Its blog does an admirable job breaking down how banks make more money from your money than you do, how it will flip the financial system on its head, and it helps demystify the banking system in a way introduces the concept of the blockchain and the transition from traditional banking to a future of blockchain-based digital banking in a way that feels reassuring, logical, and gradual. It's an inspiring vision to be sure (and note, they are certainly not the only company setting its sights on a crypto-based alternative to the traditional banking infrastructure) and they are working hard to make #takeyourcashback their calling card.
That said, the company is asking consumers to take a leap of faith to go on this crusade with them. First of all, Eco is not FDIC insured, meaning there is no $250k backstop for consumers that you traditionally find with banks (it addresses this in the blog as well). Secondly, the company touts a plan where your actions earn you a new kind of currency called "Eco." The idea is that every activity from saving and spending to friend referrals will earn you "Eco Points," which the company promises "don't do much today, but one day they will."
While the company doesn't talk much in its consumer marketing about the infrastructure used on the backend to deliver these great consumer benefits, the way Eco delivers these higher returns is by storing consumer deposits in either traditional USD or in a US dollar-backed stablecoin--which is a cryptocurrency that is pegged to to the US Dollar, and designed to maintain a fixed price (unlike a more volatile coin like Bitcoin). Eco lends the stored funds to crypto trading desks like Genesis and lending platforms like BlockFi in order to generate the high yields that in turn enable the payment of reward to Eco consumers. While crypto-enthusiasts would argue that this is a safer and more effective model than traditional banks, the idea of taking a US Dollar and converting it to something called a "stablecoin" and then lending it out to relatively new crypto platforms to generate a yield doesn't sound quite as good in marketing lingo when you're trying to be the onramp of the everyday consumer onto a new set of financial infrastructure :)
The Money Quote: “Consumers don’t really care what rails payments are going on or the underlying technology and interactions between issuers and acquirers...but they do care about the benefits to them. When they are being offered 5 percent cash back and rewards for saving and spending, maybe they didn’t care before, but all of a sudden, they say, ‘Well great, I care now.’ And that’s powerful.” -- Eco CEO, Andy Bromberg.
The company is still in private beta, but I like the marketing approach of focusing on "what you get" over the "how it's done" as Eco looks to become the onramp for everyday consumers into crypto.
Athletes + Entertainers involved include: Entertainers Sean “Diddy” Combs, Tiffany Haddish, and athletes Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Larry Fitzgerald, Keisuke Honda, and Kelvin Beachum Jr..
(more here)
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