It's Time for SC06

What crypto needs right now is consumer applications with millions of users. Applications that prove the broad usefulness of this technology, and lay the cultural and technological foundations for an onslaught of builders to follow suit.

At Seed Club, we bring critical resources together to accelerate this timeline. Our Consumer Crypto Accelerator lies at the core of our mission, and the next batch starts now.

We’re aiming towards visions of a dramatically more interesting Internet. One where users are empowered owners of the networks they participate in, where millions of communities leverage newfound coordination and economic superpowers to achieve incredible things, and where digital objects and permissionless creation make the Internet a culturally rich place worth exploring and inhabiting.

But we have so much work to do to get there. We need way more consumer products that people actually want to use with the infrastructure we have today. It’s good enough, it’s time.

Builders clearly agree. We had over 250 applications to SC06, and we were blown away by the quality of the founders and ambitions of their projects. We’ve spent the past months doing the impossible work of narrowing this down to the 10 we’re most excited by, and the cohort is going to be a banger.

Looking at the projects we’ve selected, some clear themes have emerged. They highlight the intersection of what we’re excited by and what we think the market is ready for. Let’s explore these while introducing the projects that will make up SC06.

NFTs as Platforms

We’re coming from a cycle where buying and selling were the core of the NFT experience. Sure, projects attempted to attach collectible, community, membership, IP, identity, gaming, metaverse, etc narratives but this was largely a guise or an afterthought.

This is cool, we enjoy speculating on digital objects, but they have so much more potential. This batch will showcase a handful of projects that are blowing the design space open and using NFTs as enablers and distributors of a compelling product experience instead of the experience itself.

First up we have Patrick's New Thing. They’re keeping the details under wraps for now, but are building what they describe as a “pop-up digital circus meets luxury meme factory”. NFTs will be used in a variety of interesting ways throughout the experience, but you’re just going to have to wait and see.

Or take Fini. Fini is a social product that uses ownable creatures to deepen our experiences around the data we care about. Instead of just checking ETH prices, you’re checking in on the emotional state of your digital friend. The NFTs are interfaces that reveal and enrich the emotional bonds we have with data and the personal relationships that they give rise to. Fini combines narrative and role play with real-world data to fashion a fantasy realm that’s intimately entwined with our everyday lives.

Then we have Senspace, a digital goods brand founded by veterans of the Tokyo streetwear and hip-hop scene. Many NFT projects have aspired to build streetwear-like brands, but few have had the talent, experience, and long-term perspective to pull it off like these guys do. They understand the importance of grassroots community building, and are creating custom soulbound characters for highly aligned people as a digital form of it. These characters can’t be bought, a stark contrast from projects of the previous cycle, but will be foundational to the storytelling that will be the platform for future and more broadly accessible releases.

Finally we have Slow Rodeo, a software and brand studio changing the way brands get built. The D2C industry is overrun with heartless cac-driven brands and the industry as a whole is well past being sustainable. Slow Rodeo believes that deep community participation and ownership, enabled by NFTs and tokens, can alter business models and unlock new consumer experiences to create more engaging and compelling brands. They’re experienced builders and will be incubating brands with this ethos while building the tools to power them.

Onchain Media is Social Media

Onchain is proving to be a distinctly new place on the Internet, and fundamentally new cultures, behaviors, and ways of being online are emerging from it.

While much of today’s crypto-related social activity still happens on legacy platforms, this clearly isn’t going to persist. The physics of this place are too novel to be contained by old models.

We’re excited to have a few projects in this cohort that are building native social applications specifically for the onchain world.

First we have Interface, who are building the onchain social feed. It allows you to follow your friends and get their onchain activity in a clean mobile feed, as well as explore their constantly evolving onchain identities. They’ve barely opened the box on all the social features they’ve been dreaming up, yet already have people checking in on it daily like they would Instagram. The product makes it clear that onchain is a deeply meaningful new social context.

Then we have Sofamon. They’re creating browser companions (think clippy) that evolve and accumulate digital goods as you perform actions onchain. Not only do they make interacting onchain more fun, but the legibility they provide to your onchain identity forms an interesting foundation for new social experiences.

And finally we have Vessel, who is building a branded onchain media aggregator for creators and brands. Vessel sees the distribution superpowers onchain media is unlocking, but also the risks of narrative and brand fragmentation that come with it. They think it’s possible to have immense reach and broad discovery while maintaining brand cohesiveness, and are building the product to facilitate it.

Creator Superpowers

After a decade of heavily intermediated relationships between internet creators and their audiences, creators are finally being empowered to connect with and monetize from fans directly.

NFTs are playing a growing role in this. They’re not only unlocking novel revenue streams for creators but doing it in a way that creates economic alignment between them and their fans.

Pods, a platform for podcast collectibles, is a great example of this. The podcasting medium is creating people of massive influence and audiences that feel a deep connection to them. However, the business models remain largely ad-driven and only accessible to top creators. With collectibles, podcasters of any size can monetize directly from their true fans with high granularity, and use them as a foundation for deeper engagement with their biggest fans.

MintStars, an NFT subscription platform and marketplace for adult content creators, is building on a similar premise. Crypto helps them increase creator earnings and fan engagement, reduce piracy, and solve the financial discrimination problem that’s rampant in the industry.

And finally we have Revel, a collectibles-centric social media platform. Posts on Revel become digital trading cards that followers can collect, trade, and socialize around. These embedded games create a meaningful context for the digital assets to exist in, an often underlooked but critical component of their value and usefulness.

And there we have it, SC06. The next 3 months will be filled with ups, downs, and sidewayses as we work relentlessly to help bring these ideas to market and grow them into things people really want to be a part of.

Our network of incredible founders, investors, collectors, and early adopters will play a critical role in providing the connections, insights, and distribution that can often make or break an early-stage project. We’re lucky to have them.

If you want to raise your hand to support these founders on their journeys you can apply to join our freshly launched TestFlight Club. It’s a community of passionate early adopters that get early access to products to provide feedback and insights. This community will be at the heart of making consumer crypto a thing.

Otherwise, you can subscribe here for periodic cohort updates. Either way, we better see you at demo day. We’re going to have 10 products ready for you to touch that will blow your minds.

The beginning.