Beyond digital art: how NFTs can be used to build communities - An interview with Meta Angels Founder Alex Cavoulacos
Beyond digital art: how NFTs can be used to build communities - An interview with Meta Angels Founder Alex Cavoulacos
People often equate NFTs with digital art - but there are so many other uses for NFTs, which ultimately are just unique digital tokens. One of the more interesting use cases I’ve seen lately is the use of NFTs to authenticate membership. I wanted to learn more about how people are building these NFT-based membership communities so I interviewed Alex Cavoulacos - CEO and Founder of Meta Angels.
Alex’s background as a Web 2.0 Founder (Founder and Former President of TheMuse) gives her a unique perspective on building communities in a Web3 world. In this interview I ask her why the Meta Angels community needs to be NFT-based and what are the challenges for broader adoption of NFT-based communities.
The Interview:
Tell me the story about Meta Angels, why did you start it?
Before I really got into Web3, I was someone who was aware of the space and owned some cryptocurrency, but I didn't have a wallet or own NFTs. I was initially turned off by the space because a lot of the people I knew at the time who were really into it represented the parts of Silicon Valley that had not been as inclusive, and for lack of a better phrase, “weren’t my people.” So I stayed away from the space, despite being curious about the technological possibilities.
That changed when Ally, my co-founder for Meta Angels, shared the Curious Addys’ Trading Club project with me, inviting me to their mint pre-sale. Ben and Mai, the founders, are building Duolingo for crypto: a place for people to learn safely and onboard new people into Web3. Until then I had only been aware of NFTs as digital art, which it can be of course, but this view into how it can also be utility and community - all of that really clicked for me.
Meta Angels came from us thinking about the gaps in the market, and some of the conceptual things that could be tokenized, improving upon the web2 standard. Ally had started thinking about one of the most valuable things in our lives: the networks that we have. We’ve been part of valuable networks such as universities (Yale and Columbia Business School) and tech accelerators (YCombinator, Techstars) as well as a network of female executives and changemakers. All of those are places we can go and get access, knowledge, and support – all of which have had real impact on our careers and personal lives. Yet most people don't have that; these networks are gated and often impenetrable.
The genesis of the idea behind Meta Angels is how do we break down those barriers to create a community of members who want to help each other in the same way - but didn’t necessarily go to the same school or attend the same program. There isn’t a centralized gatekeeper and authority on who can and can’t participate – instead the community is made up of people who share the same values and opted into being a part of it.
What is an NFT membership community?
We're a community centered around the values of generosity, transparency, and accessibility. What that means is when you purchase a Meta Angels NFT, you get two things. One is you get beautiful art created by Māori-Australian artist Sarana Haeata. Second, that art is also your membership card to the Meta Angels community, currently housed on Discord.
Right now we have a vibrant discord community where we have groups of folks in different industries and different locations, helping each other and connecting and supporting each other professionally and personally in whatever they need. For example, we’ve got a parents channel, where new parents are supporting each other at 3am during a night feed. We have a NFT builders/launchers channel for people launching their own projects. We have a science and medicine channel where people talk about biotech and the intersection of Web3.
You also get access to member benefits: high resolution printing, pre-sale access to other projects, special programming, and our first-of-its-kind lending program. And much more rolling out in the coming weeks and months. Our goal is to really provide value for members in ways that help them IRL.
What has made this click for newcomers to the space is that you don’t pay annual membership dues like you would with a web2 membership community; once you buy the NFT you have lifetime membership including anything new that is released. And if at some point you no longer need it, you can sell it at the market rate.
If anyone can buy membership via NFT purchase, how do you create alignment to the mission and community goals?
We did a lot around the initial mint to attract and select people who are acting with those intentions within the community. Instead of grinding for pre-sale spots – which rewards all the wrong behavior - we gave access to our pre-sale to members who had helped others in our community.
We're also the first project to develop a membership lending technology. We understood from the beginning that as we deliver what we know we can for our community, that could lead to a secondary market that is inaccessible to those who may need our community most. What to do when achieving your goal would price out people who could benefit the most? The answer: innovate using our smart contract. We build a lending mechanism that enables holders to lend their NFTs (particularly if they hold more than one) extending those membership benefits to others while the owner retains the underlying token and corresponding value. With a community of givers, we’ve already seen mentees, family members, non-profits, artists and more who our holders have shared membership with through this program.
Why does this need to be a NFT based community to succeed? What’s preventing you from creating a traditional community group?
NFTs in this context have advantages both for the holders and for the project. First is the ability to verify who members are. It's the core tenant of anything being on chain. We can use that to verify on Discord who gets access and if they sell they no longer have access and that the membership updates immediately. It also allows us to have a global membership community and take currency from around the world. In a traditional web2 model, that would be a lot harder to do right away; with an NFT membership, we were able to launch with 40% of our members overseas.
Financially speaking, proceeds from the sales of a 10k collection like ours fund the organization for several years (even with taxes taken into account), Members only pay once, so you get that lifetime membership instead of it being annual fees. When a Meta Angel is sold on the secondary market, a percentage of that goes back into the organization and to the artist as well, which is really important. That makes the business model much more of a win-win where it's not about how we as a business can extract as much as we can out of our community as often as possible, which is essentially what most web2 businesses are set up to do, but instead about how we create a membership of value and thriving, engaged community.
Finally I talked a bit about this earlier, but our smart contract also allows for people to loan their membership to a friend and to retrieve the NFT when that loan period is over. I will be loaning a membership to the director of a non-profit I’m involved with so they can benefit from the community for a period of time. That would be impossible to do in Web2.
What do you think are the biggest challenges for broader adoption of these NFT member communities?
In terms of adoption, some of it will certainly be education - the fact that it exists. But candidly, one of the challenges for Web3 onboarding is how terrible the user experience is. As a product person, it makes me cringe on the daily.
The sheer number of steps from being crypto curious to buying an NFT can be overwhelming, not to mention waiting 7-10 days for your first purchase of ETH to clear. Then you need a Metamask or Coinbase wallet, etc. That’s a really long onboarding without a lot of help. It's not a pleasant way of onboarding. So better onboarding is a big piece of more adoption.
I’m really bullish on membership-based communities that are truly focused on connecting people because I think humans crave connection. Not just ones who say they have a community, but who are invested in building a valuable community.
We saw that in our discord from day one that people wanted to talk to people, and help people to feel supported and to support others. An early post was from a teenager in India who was interested in going to college in the US and wanted to learn more about the process. We had people who were on the admissions committee from many schools reach out and offer their help; he would have never had access to them through traditional channels. That gets me the most excited, people realizing the magic of being able to connect with other people. It reminds me of the early AOL chatroom days and the advent of the internet. It feels like we are at the start of a new frontier with web3, and I’m excited to be building with impact and purpose to shape the space for the better.
Learn more about Meta Angels or connect with Alex on Twitter (@acav)
We’re still in the early stages of NFT based communities, what do you think are the challenges for adoption of NFT based membership communities? Comment down below, I’d love to hear from you.
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About Me
Hi, I’m Andrew Chang - I created the Web3 Roundup to share what I’m learning in this space. I’ve spent my career at the forefront of the technology industry in areas such as crypto/blockchain (Former COO @ Paxos, co-founding partner of Liberty City Ventures), video and adtech. I learn by meeting with founders, investors and other thought leaders and approach Web3 with the same enthusiasm – and skepticism – I had about crypto/blockchain technologies 10 years ago.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter (@DigitalDrex)