After 6 startups, 12 months, and several thousand hours of marketing, business development, community management and all round grind, I was going to write a list of learnings and observations from 2022 in web3. However, I got distracted and decided to enjoy a few days off over Christmas.
Instead, here are 3 random observations from the past year:
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The quality of founders and operators was far higher in 2022 than in 2021. There are more smart people with great ideas tackling big problems than a year ago. As a result, the bar to starting a startup, reaching customers and raising funding is much higher than ever, without considering the economic challenges in the wider world and crypto.
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Separation of art and utility in the NFT space. Art is a valid and thriving use case for NFTs. However, pure “utility” projects are far more hit-and-miss, with only a handful of examples of successful utility NFTs, and fewer again that combine desirable artwork with genuine utility. As a result, I don’t think we’ll see many startups and projects trying to do both at once in 2023, which for a while was where I thought the space was heading.
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Finally, I’m seeing a divergence between crypto-native, experimental, boundary-pushing solutions, vs mass-market, web2.5 solutions. VC-backable web3 products in 2023 are expected to solve problems and do so in an end-to-end manner - hence the shift to web2.5, where the burden of onboarding and understanding is largely taken away from the customer. The rest of the market right now looks either very niche or experimental. However, that’s not to say those areas are irrelevant, merely that the pure web3 solutions are still far from mainstream adoption and will take longer to reach the popular consciousness.
So that's the rundown from the past year. It's been a wild ride, let’s see what the next thousands of hours have in store.
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