GM frens,

Builders help shape the past, the present & the future.

Take a moment to look around the room you're currently in — every object that inhabits this space began as an idea in the mind of one such builder who succeeded in bringing their idea to life.

In today's edition of The Ground Floor I sat down with two of the most brilliant builders in Web3, Chris Maddern & Christine Brown, the co-founders of the popular Floor app.

The Future of Floor

What was the initial motivation to build Floor?

Chris: NFTs have so much promise, but using them and understanding them is hard and it was clear it didn't have to be this way. At the time, I was on my personal journey of trying to find out what was at the core of this new exciting thing? 

I started gathering enough NFTs to fuel some of the challenges such as keeping up with multiple communities, understanding the value of NFTs as ETH and the need to open 25 OpenSea tabs in order to actually understand your collections value.

It was one of those – “there has to be a better way” moments.

As a maker at various different altitudes, having been an engineer, a product manager, and overseeing groups of them, I was interested in just jumping in and using the opportunity to put together my passion for this interesting new promising space, while also solving a problem that seemed very concrete.

(The famous 1st Floor Tweet that went viral)

Floor has changed significantly since you shipped the first version of the product.

How would you describe the problems floor is solving today, and how successfully is Floor solving these problems for consumers?

Chris: It's something we think about a lot.

Somewhere along the way building Floor we went from what I'd call a widget, which is something that solves this very discreet, tangible, but often relatively small scoped problem, that showed you the value of your NFT collection to something that's much broader and much more mission driven.

As we developed our own vision on where we think the space goes, where the financialization of tokenized asset plays versus where utility plays versus, loyalty reward etc, it became clear to us that we needed to zoom out first and foremost to understand all of the challenges that people faced in getting into the space, particularly people who weren't the predominantly white males that in inhabit our technology industry today.

We wanted to start to reduce some of those barriers, and to push in a direction where those people can start to find Web3 welcoming, and interesting, both because their voices will make the space richer, and to allow more people to benefit from early mover advantages.

The biggest shift though has been moving from Floor as a portfolio tracker to the Floor as your homepage for Web3.

What we've proven with Floor today is that people keep coming back, and that gives us the first right of refusal to become that homepage for Web3.

What’s the biggest benefit that is accrued to Floor from building publicly?

Christine: I came from a role that was in a very different space (FinTech), and as much as FinTech is on the cutting edge of the financial industry, it’s heavily regulated.

Working at a post-IPO company, you have shareholders and you have a lot of obligations and regulations, and full compliance teams, full legal teams, all for good reason, right? 

It's a very different kind of approach, than building with a community where the default is to share early, share often, and share primarily when you don't know what the answer is.

People become more bullish when you're really transparent and when you say, “Here are the things we're thinking about – we haven't quite figured out how to solve A, B, and C, so let's have a conversation.

What would you wanna see? How would you approach this?”

What makes you most excited about the future of Floor?

Chris: The idea that all the work that we've done at Floor to bring all the data together, to bring a community together, and to curate the right content can actually have a material impact on who gets involved in Web3 in 2023 or 2024.

The idea of onboarding tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity, the confidence or the exposure to come and be a part of this industry so early is what makes me most excited about the future of Floor.

Christine: I think the moment that I'm most excited about is the moment that someone who has never had an NFT, has never participated in Web3, uses Floor to get started in the space and is able to go from downloading an app on the app store to buying their first NFT to using that NFT as part of their digital identity, or unlocking the NFTs utility.

This is the next chapter of NFTs that I’m excited about.

The 3 co-founders of Floor, from R ~ L Siddhartha Dabral (CTO), Chris Maddern (CEO) & Christine Brown (COO)

What makes you most excited about the future of Web3?

Chris: There’s no chance on Earth Floor would be where it is today if a group of hundreds of people hadn't felt like we were all shaping Floor together.

We [the Floor community] all had these tokens that made this motivation partially financial, but primarily focused on the community and utility that bound us together as a group of people who were off on a mission to make something that was both good for us, but also something that we thought could be a good product for a large group of people.

Without this support, Floor never would've happened.

Web3 has that opportunity, not just for building software products, but creation in general, whether that’s in art, in community, in products, in government, and in all sorts of places. 

Fundamentally it's the idea of being included and being able to be participatory and not just an observer — that can mean financially, that can be in terms of voice and direction, DAO’s and voting, however, it’s the way that we're involved in the things that we use.

At the core of it, users are stakeholders in some way, and not just statistics to be experimented on – I view this as a fundamentally different view of the world which is why I think Web3 is going to bring an incredible amount of opportunity. 

💡 Web3 Roundup

1) BMW Is Adopting NFTs 🚗

2) Commercial Rights vs CC0 NFTs 📝

3) NFT Photography Sales Reach $47 Million 📸

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See you next time! — OB1👋

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or business advice to any person or entity.