Launchpool AMA Recap — NOWwhere
Launchpool x NOWwhere AMA Summary
Place: Launchpool Official Telegram Community
Date & Time: March 10th, 18:00 UTC
Guests: Drew Lightfoot, CEO & Matt Hinkley, President
Host: LaserSheep (Launchpool Team)
Launchpool was excited to host CEO Drew Lightfoot, and President Matt Hinkley of NOWwhere for an interactive Ask-Me-Anything session with the Launchpool Community. This AMA was a followup session to provide Investors and the Community, with the latest project updates. The session lasted approximately 1hr, and consisted of questions from the Launchpool Team as well as questions from the Community.
Questions from the Launchpool Team
LaserSheep:
Hello and Welcome all LPOOLers, as many in our Community already know, today we have an AMA session with NOWwhere’s CEO Drew Lightfoot, and President Matt Hinkley. NOWwhere is an intelligent NFT marketplace utilizing a “Netflix-style” recommendation engine that indexes, scores, and ranks assets, connecting collectors with creators and vice versa.
As always, the chat will be muted for roughly 30 mins whilst we ask the pre-prepared questions. After this, we will open up to questions from the Community for another 15 mins. We will also enable “Slow Mode” for all questions.
Welcome!
LaserSheep: Let’s start things off, please introduce yourselves.
Drew Lightfoot: Good Day! I’m Drew, one half of NOWwhere. CEO and Co-Founder. Happy to be here. Excited to get into it.
Matt Hinkley: Heeeeyyyyy! I’m Matt, the other half of NOWwhere. President and Co-Founder.
Drew Lightfoot: We have much to report. Let’s get this party started.
LaserSheep: Cool. For those who are new to the Launchpool Community can you give a quick explanation of NOWwhere and how it’s interacting with both the crypto world and the art world?
Drew Lightfoot: NOWwhere bridges the gap between the worlds of traditional art and NFTs. We elevate artists, musicians, animators, designers and filmmakers as well as facilitate the transfer of their talent to the NFT realm.
We’ve launched NOWstudios, a creative studio with an experienced team to guide artists through the creation, collaboration (among artists on NFT projects) and marketing of their NFTs on NOWwhere.
NOWwhere is a marketplace showcasing works by creators in physical and NFT formats. The NOWwhere marketplace is revolutionary, with AI, gamification, learn to earn, metaverse galleries in the works.
LaserSheep: Could you tell us about the main developments since the raise?
Drew Lightfoot: Yes. We’ve completed the first two phases of our roadmap by launching NOWstudios and getting the Artist Storefront MVP up.
We’ve ramped up marketing and the community is growing rapidly.
Our storefront is improving daily with features being consistently added from additional payment methods, drop functionality, to partnerships with secondary marketplaces.
We are designing the virtual galleries, the gamification and making it as easy as possible for Artists to curate their own experience.
LaserSheep: That sounds awesome! How are you tracking against your roadmap? Please talk us through the next steps.
Drew Lightfoot: In terms of development and products in the market we are actually ahead of our roadmap. We wanted to launch the storefronts as soon as possible to gather feedback and to get to work designing and building the most complicated part which is the wallet, gamification and the interaction between them.
The next steps are implementing the gamification model into the storefronts and aligning this to the features and perks we want our wallet to hold.
LaserSheep: This sounds really good. What are the potential barriers to the project hitting its roadmap targets in 2022? And how are you preparing for these challenges?
Drew Lightfoot: One of the biggest challenges in the Web3 space is finding skilled tech talent to jump in and assist with the build. We are entering a new recruitment phase, bringing additional members to the team, while pulling all stops to make this as quick and smooth as possible.
Matt — anything to add?
Matt Hinkley: Sure. We’re looking for experienced product individuals, if you would like to be a part of our exciting growth, please reach out.
Join the NOWwhere Discord Server!
Bringing Premium Creativity And Design To The NFT World.
discord.com
What we’re building is very new and exciting to the NFT and crypto space that will accelerate Artists into the space.
LaserSheep: That sounds like an exciting place to work at! Both crypto and art are super interesting spaces to be in right now. What marketing plans do you have in store for 2022?
Drew Lightfoot: It’s growing…We’re currently working with external marketing companies to assist in building our brand and awareness across social and legacy media that will continue to grow throughout the year.
We are also taking a different approach to marketing internally and focusing purely on Artists and not necessarily NOWwhere. We are consistently growing the marketing team internally to focus on creating as much content across different mediums to tell Artist stories and highlight what makes their work so special and inspirational.
We have an in-house studio creating the majority of our marketing material for video and podcast content. We have some truly revolutionary innovations for the Art world that will be backed by informative videos or walkthroughs.
It’s happening.
LaserSheep: That looks epic 🤩🤩🤩
Matt Hinkley: It’s not just an image either…🤫
LaserSheep: I can’t wait to see all the things it does. Speaking of the NFT Key, can you talk us through the longer term vision for the token, how it interacts with the NFT Key and what are the uses within its own ecosystem?
Drew Lightfoot: This is Matt’s baby…
Matt Hinkley: Ok you ready? I will try to keep this simple…. but expect lots of great questions!
We have designed a token release program for Explorers that coincides with the amount of keys that have been minted and that are released over a certain period of time. The earlier an Explorer purchases an NFTkey, the larger their airdrop.
NOWkeys all release a weekly 100 token airdrop. The last keys bought will have a one week airdrop of 100 tokens, while the keys being offered through the Launchpool AME, gets 256 weekly airdrops of 100 tokens. THAT’S NEARLY 5 YEARS!!!
There are 340,000 keys eligible for a token release for Explorers that we expect will take several years to be minted and released, hopefully sooner.
Explorers have the most functionality with the token as they can use it to purchase NFTs, build their own virtual galleries and a lot of future in-app play.
Artists are rewarded a lot easier: for simply signing up to the platform, and dropping an NFT series. The rewards that Artists receive, remain on the platform and are used for promoting their work to a curated audience that will learn about the Artist and rate their work, with the intention to increase purchases or followers.
The token release program works very nicely in that there are only a certain amount of tokens in circulation in relation to the number of Artists and Explorers; meaning that a regular drop schedule and high Explorer engagement, increases the utility of the token.
LaserSheep: WOW this is a lot. I like how the project is progressing so well in such a short period of time. Do you have any upcoming news or partnerships you would like to share?
Drew Lightfoot: We do, let me dig up some links
We’re on the FLOWVERSE:
Partnered with Moonpay to provide payment services in over 80+ cryptos:
Recently featured in Influencive:
LaserSheep: Great to see! Now our Community has some homework to do! Where can we join your Community to stay updated?
Drew Lightfoot: Here are our Community links
Discord — https://discord.gg/tJRwUQkH
Telegram — https://t.me/NOWwhereart
Twitter — https://twitter.com/NOWwhereart
Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/explore_nowwhere/
YouTube — https://youtu.be/3FF0EkYoEdM
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/company/nowwhereart
Website — https://nowwhere.io/
LaserSheep: Excellent! Your Community has always been rather inviting to newcomers and artists.
Drew Lightfoot: Absolutely.
LaserSheep: Alright now it’s time for the Community to ask their burning questions. I’ll open up the chat in slow mode to give you guys time to respond.
Matt Hinkley: Sounds good, let’s go!
Questions from the Launchpool Community
Question: Why have you chosen to use the Flow blockchain and not others: like Elrond or ETH?
Drew Lightfoot: Flow was designed for NFTs. With NBA Top Shots and Crypto kitties, Dapper Labs learned what worked and what didn’t.
Flow is environmentally friendly and better catered to our platform and the data within each NFT.
Matt Hinkley: I can add a little, in regards to the gamification (learn-to-earn) the way we can interact with the meta-data and reward explorers whilst creating an experience to push Artists and build communities for them, really made sense on Flow.
To be honest there are lots of great protocols out there right now and we aim to be agnostic in the future, we just wanted to start with FLOW
Drew Lightfoot: Also a lot of major players are bridging to Flow — including OpenSea which will be good for us.
Question: Can we get a look at the NOWkey anytime soon?
Drew Lightfoot: YES! We’ll have a demo as early as next week. It’s big. Looking incredible.
Matt Hinkley: Remember the Key is not just a key, its a membership to the learn-to-earn, as well as a portal to your own virtual gallery.
Question: Can the keys be sold on secondary marketplaces, like Blocto Bay or OpenSea?
Matt Hinkley: They sure will be able to. We are working with BloctoBay first and aim to have that functionality in the next couple of weeks. When OpenSea release more information we will look to work with them too as well as all other secondary marketplaces on FLOW.
Question: With uncertainty in markets and the world in general… how does this affect the NOWtoken and your platform in general?
Matt Hinkley: Well we are built for Artists, and with all of the uncertainty in the world, Artists are looking of explore ways to make additional sales. Our token model is based around bringing explorers to the platform looking to be rewarded as well as Artists coming to the platform to sell their work.
We currently have Artists queuing to get onboard which means more rewards for Explorers to earn.
Question: Are we going to have another financing round of NOWwhere on Launchpool?
Drew Lightfoot: Absolutely. We are getting everything ready for that. We want to be clear on the communication and how everything connects on the next round. In the mean time I invite everyone to come explore the platform and see how easy transactions are.
Question: Are you planning to partner with other IDO platforms as well?
Matt Hinkley: No, we are loyal to the Launchpool Community. We are only doing a limited edition Key to the Launchpool Community as well as a one month exclusive period of earning rewards when the gamification is live
That opportunity also closes with our last round with Launchpool.
LaserSheep: This AMA was great. Thank you to Matt and Drew! Thank you to everyone that participated! Have a great day.
Matt Hinkley: Thanks, appreciate the time.
Drew Lightfoot: Our pleasure. Look forward to the NEXT!!
About Launchpool
Launchpool leverages communities, knowledge, expertise, contacts and capital to provide crypto projects with the best possible start to life, maximising their chances for success in this fast moving & dynamic space.
About NOWwhere
NOWwhere is an NFT marketplace designed for Artists, Explorers and those simply browsing and buying premium NFTs or learning about art. NOWwhere leverages the data provided by Explorers to connect Artists to Fans most interested in buying their Art through a proprietary recommendation engine. NFT collectors are recommended Art that is most relevant to them, Artists connect to their most likely buyers, and Explorers earn tokens that can be used to purchase and upgrade metaverse galleries or purchase NFTs. This creates a full-cycle, community-built NFT ecosystem for Artists and Collectors.
