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Investors are not customers
This will probably sound a bit basic, but…
- Customers knowingly pay money for a product or service.
- Investors invest money, expecting a return on that investment.
The key here is knowingly. Someone buying an NFT for your Metaverse, with the expectation of that NFT gaining value, is not a customer, they are an investor.
You might account for the sale of that NFT as “revenue”, you might account for the secondary market creator fees as “revenue”, but the relationship is that of an investor. If they believe themselves to be investing, they will have expectations of an investor. They’re not going to be happy when they find out they’re a customer.
With customers, you build Customer Relations. You maintain such relationships by making sure they are happy with the product or service you are providing, so that they want to keep paying for it.
With investors, you build Investor Relations. You maintain such relationships by building trust that the investors will be getting a return on their investment.
Investors are not gamers
Investors and customers are distinct target groups. Sure, there will be some overlap, but investors and gamers are generally different people. Those who spend 50 hours per week scouring NFTs or analysing crypto trends today (or maybe even have a real job), are not suddenly going to spend that time playing your new computer game because they invested in it.
Just because you’ve launched a massively successful NFT drop, with tons of investors throwing money at you, it does not mean you have found a single person who actually wants to play your game.
As you keep growing your “community”, it will be easy to forget that the people hanging around your Discord, and attending your Twitter Spaces, are not the people who will be paying for your product. They are there because they want to invest in it.
If you have community of investors, you might trick yourself into doing things that makes it look like their investment is growing, rather than to go out and find someone willing to pay for something you’re making.
When a company spend more time thinking about their investors than their customers, they have a problem.
For example, you will have the incentive to provide investors with new NFT’s, new tokens, new rewards, rather than focusing on building your product and actually acquiring real customers — those willing to pay, not invest. These new “drops” are often nothing more than inflation in fancy packaging.
Investors are not even investors
The final problem is that these “investors” aren’t, of course, not even investors. Web3 do have real investors. They own stock.
The “holders” of the Web3 Metaverse own nothing more than hypothetical utility inside a product that’s not been built yet, by a company that’s never actually built a product, for a market not yet identified. Add to that: the company makes quite a lot of money selling even more such hypotheticals.
A parallel can be drawn to the MLM world. When a company makes more money recruiting “investors”, than it does selling its actual product, it starts looking more and more like a pyramid scheme.
The problem is that sooner or later investors find out that they were in fact, just mere customers.
Conclusion
No, I’m not calling every Web3 Metaverse project a scam.
I’m suggesting that many incentives are aligned to encourage non-sustainable business models.
I‘m suggesting we need to be mindful about building community relationships centered around the hopes of getting rich.
A Metaverse built investor-first will be a ghost town.