The Startup Studio Newsletter | ED32
This week's newsletter features stories from Oleg Netepenko, Holly Quin, Ryan McDaniel + news from Impact X, Taazaa, Klick Health, Hub71, Lean Fintech, & Blockchain Labs.
Welcome to the Startup Studio newsletter - let’s dive in!
A few newsletters back I wrote about the importance of building community for Venture Studios.
In all my years of experience within the Studio ecosystem, it’s been consistently clear to me that the winners in this space are the Studios with strong brand recognition, organic word of mouth, and a culture of inclusion when engaging with builders and innovators from “outside” the Studio.
The ROI of community is clear, but the h-o-w of community is not.
My advice on this is similar to my advice on all strategic Studio efforts: be authentic.
Every community is unique to the audience your Studio is best suited to serve. You cannot simply adopt a cookie-cutter approach and expect it to work.
At Metaversal, a leading web3 Venture Studio, we’re focused on becoming the world’s most impactful community in web3.
Big mission, I know, but also one that excites us and empowers wild creativity.
To pull this off, we’re pushing all the limits.
We started at the very beginning— literally defining the word “impact”. Then we worked on deciding who we’re best suited to serve as a Studio (a hypothesis we’re still testing). Next, we got a dedicated team together and strapped it with support, resources, and permission to try crazy things. After a few rounds of iteration, I’m proud to say we’re well on track to accomplishing our big mission.
Now, while success is great, the most important takeaway here is to note the extreme lengths gone to build in an authentic way — both for us and our community.
We didn’t just take web2 principles and tape them over web3 protocols.
Instead, we took the time and effort to strategize about what building an impactful community in web3 would really look like. The outcome of all of this work was a decision to deploy Badges as tokens of our community touchpoints.
If you meet one of our team members in person, instead of getting a business card you’ll claim their Badge. If you join one of our Twitter spaces or read the weekly newsletter, you get access to a unique Badge.
These Badges are free to claim and stack up to unlock priority- and sometimes even exclusive- access to what we’re building and investing in at the Studio.
Last week we interviewed THE Jack Butcher about his latest NFT project and crafted that week’s Badge as a tribute to his work. You can claim it here until 5pm today.
I hope I underscored the importance of not only creating a strong and engaged community, but also building it in a way that works for your target audience and leverages your unique strengths as a Studio.
Get innovative, put in the effort, and deploy the resources necessary to build community in an authentic way— I promise you it will pay off.
Studio Stories
📝 How Startup Studios Can Help Founders Find Success - Oleg Netepenko, Forbes
📝 ‘Access is easy, but access to capital is hard’ - Holly Quin, technical.ly
📝 First in Venture Studio Takes Aim at the Opioid Crisis - Ryan McDaniel
Studio Events
Studio News
Impact X Partners with Microsoft to launch Impact X-Venture Studio
Taazaa Launches Venture Studio to Help Startups Grow and Secure Funding
Blockchain Labs Web3 Venture Studio on a Mission to help Brands Tokenize
Studio Jobs
Founder in Residence, Clean Energy Homes - Platform Venture Studio (Remote)
Co-founder, Stealth Startup - Alpha Studios (Remote)
Product-Manager-In-Residence, Web3 - Atomic (Remote)
Growth Marketing Manager - Mechanism Ventures (Remote)
Metaversal is looking for a Content Designer, let me know if you would be a good fit!
That’s all for this issue, if you enjoyed it consider sharing with friends and fellow Studio folk. To connect with me, I’m always available on LinkedIn or Twitter!