Strategy

In the future — we can all imagine a fully immersive metaverse with avatars as digital representations of ourselves. This is not very interesting. What’s interesting is what we can do today to position ourselves as the eventual winners.

I believe the biggest moat is owning the IP behind avatars. There will be many avatars created in the future. We need our avatars to be the official digital representations of everyone used everywhere. How?

Step 1: Build a utility — avatar creation

We want to allow people to create a fantasy version of themselves. I think the key here is ensuring that the optionality and fidelity of these avatars are insanely good. Imagine downloading an app where you can create a sick avatar that represents you — most avatars are limited with low fidelity. People spend hours filtering their IG posts to look good. We can go all the way here with 3D renders that look incredible. (Shader, Lighting)

Couple of business moats that we need to build around to ensure this is the ultimate destination for avatar creation:

1. Celebrities (Genies) — let key influencers participate early in creating and promoting their own avatars
2. Marketplace — let brands & fans participate in creating skins, etc to sell

I actually think #1 is easy through bizdev if we can just create an avatar for each celebrity that look incredible. People like pretty things. This will also be our viral marketing campaign — imagine BTS with their own avatar being promoted.

#2 will grow naturally if #1 follows.

We should also make it easy for people to download videos/photos/gifs of their avatar creations to be used outside of the app. (제페토, Genies) This will create free media + word of mouth.

Step 2 — Build a network — Killer use case via video chat

Step 1 was to focus on the utility — a reason for someone to use our app as a single-player.

Single-player mode allows us to acquire users quickly, but it’s limited on how big it can grow. It gets boring quickly. We eventually want to build a multi-player mode for people to spend more time, generate word of mouth, and build network value.

I intuitively feel that the best app experience we can own is to build a video & chat app using avatars. As far as I know, there are no apps like this where the technology allows users behind camera controlling the motion of avatars in real time. That would be bonkers. No Gen Zs would use FaceTime or zoom or anything like that when they can be avatars behind screen.

The sequencing of steps 1 & 2 are important because of the nature of building a network-oriented business. All marketplaces require a sufficient volume of liquidity in place for the network effect to take off. They self destruct until they reach a min liquidity threshold — ie. churn. We can’t grow avatar-based video app without step 1.

Here’s an illustration of why: