gm creators!
I hope all of you are having a great week 😎
In case you missed it, in my last post I discussed a new blockchain explorer I've been obsessed with: Once Upon. Here's the key takeaway:
It's clear we are currently in the HyperCard days of block explorers. Forget the "chrome of block explorers"....we have yet to see the "netscape of block explorers". Most of the world did not interact with HyperCards. Similarly, most will probably never end up using Etherscan but rather some mainstream block explorer you and I can't even imagine today.
Check it out here!
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Today's Takeaways💡
Today, I want to discuss a product and team I'm really bullish on....Bello! I've seen Bello on Twitter here and there but never bothered to look deeper until a few weeks ago. Though the product is still in its early stages, it's clear to me that they are going to be making a huge dent in the web3 and creator economy space.
Here's the one liner they have on their job page:
Bello 🍄 is transforming blockchain data into actionable insights for the new generation of creators.
Bello was co-founded by Adam Levy (CEO) and Ellie Farrisi (CTO). They both hacked together the first version of the product, which was called creatorsight, back in April 2022 at ETH Amsterdam. They ended up entering the final round at the hackathon which gave them the motivation to continue iterating on the product in the months after. Eventually, in August 2022, the team publicly announced Bello and they were off to the races.
(@bellosights)A no-code blockchain analytics tool that teaches you more about your collectors and their on-chain behavior through a simple search.
It's helped me strategically grow my audience and monetize my creatorship, and today it can help you too.
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Most recently, they were part of the first cohort of a16z Crypto's startup school. Side note: if you are interested, the website has recordings of the guest lecturers. The team is now 6 people and they are more than a year into development.
In the short time the company has been around, they have already hit some impressive metrics and it's clear the web3 community is taking interest.
Let's dive in 🚀
For the Creators, By the Creators
Before discussing the product, it's worth taking note of Adam's creator background. The inception of Bello starts to make a lot more sense.
Adam started off his blockchain career as the host of the Blockchain & Booze podcast which was were weekly digital meetups led by Tim Draper's venture studio and LA Blockchain Summit. Afterwards, he decided to start his own podcast called Mint which covers the story of creators in a web3 native fashion. Podcast sponsors use NFTs rather than wires to pay Adam and subscribers can collect a free NFT pin at the end of each season.
In just the last two years, Adam has recorded hundreds of podcast episodes and is now on the 7th season of Mint. Alongside the pod, he also has a newsletter with over 30k subscribers! Every week, he shares a variety of links related to creator news. It's fair to say that Adam is a prolific web3 creator and has gained a ton of insight on what's missing in the creator economy space right now.
The primary problem he saw was that even after distributing over 15,000 podcast NFTs to his community, he still had no idea who his audience was. Though the pitch for creators in the web3 space is that it's an "open garden" and ruthless web2 platforms can't hoard any data, the reality is that we're far from that point. What's the point of an open web3 garden if we can't navigate it?
Through Adam's creator journey and Ellie's work with web3 communities, they both realized that it was difficult for web3 native creators to understand anything meaningful about their audience.
Heck, I face this as an early creator myself right now. A ton of my subscribers connect their wallet to The Bigger Picture newsletter. I'm fortunate they find my content interesting enough to do so, but I know nothing about the individual or why they want to be part of the community. Yes, I could technically go through each subscriber and check their wallet history out on Once Upon, but it's neither efficient nor fun to do so.
*Bello enters the chat *
Bello started with a simple idea – empower the new generation of creators with onchain data.
You might be wondering...how much does this onchain data actually matter? Is it really that big of a deal? Why will these insights convince more people to create in a web3 native way?
Well, let's get into our history lesson for the day to help understand.
In the next section, I'll compare Bello to the launch of Google Analytics (GA) back in 2005. GA, a tool we all take for granted today, was revolutionary almost 20 years ago.
At its core, Google Analytics played a critical role in the transition from static, brochure like web1 sites to dynamic, user-focused web2 sites.
Similarly, I believe that Bello, leveraging the open & transparent nature of blockchain data, will propel us from an era of isolated, platform-centric social networks to an integrated, creator-centric web3 universe.
If you can't measure it, you can't improve it
Today, 55.49% of all websites use Google Analytics (GA) and 86% of all websites that use traffic analytics tools use GA. That number comes out to around 37.9 million websites actively tracking metrics using Google's tools.
I was surprised to learn that the origins of GA actually goes back to 1995, before Google was even founded! Urchin Software Corp, a small consulting business based out of San Diego, eventually ended up specializing in web analytics services. They built a product called "Urchin on Demand" which was a tool to analyze web server log file data and to report traffic information. The uniqueness of Urchin’s software lay in its ability to process data locally, on a company’s own servers, which was a novel concept for the time.
Paul Muret and Scott Crosby, the founders of Urchin, slowly decided to start offering their tools to hosting providers in order to track analytics on their websites. Over the years, their market share continued to grow and by 2005 had caught Google's attention.
At a conference Urchin was presenting at, the Google team approached Scott and asked to learn more about the product. The Urchin team ended up pitching their product to a group of 20 senior Google engineers and a few weeks later, Google sent them the acquisition paperwork.
Post-acquisition, Urchin's software was rebranded as Google Analytics and immediately released for free. This resulted in a massive surge of interest. In fact, Google had to temporarily halt new subscriptions just one week after the launch! After improving their infra, they finally opened up Analytics for everyone in August 2006.
Over the years, Google introduced a variety of features to fine tune visitor segmentation and funnel visualization. This allowed businesses to analyze their traffic data in extreme detail. Dashboards now had deep insights into visitor behavior, website performance, timings, real time analytics, multi-channel funnels, visualizations, etc.
In the last ~20 years, Google Analytics has been absolutely revolutionary in the way web developers, e-commerce businesses, hosting providers, etc. use the internet.
Up until these web analytics tools went mainstream, anyone that was running a website was basically shooting into the dark. They had no idea who was visiting their sites, what channels their sites were discovered from, how long they were spending perusing, etc.
Sounds a bit familiar to how web3 creators & communities are operating today right?
There are 5 things GA did that changed the game:
Data collection - encouraged people active on the internet to collect and utilize web data (a concept that we take for granted now but was foreign back then)
Insights - GA didn't just help collect data, it also generated actionable insights through a suite of reporting tools
Accessibility - web analytics tools were expensive before GA, only large brands could afford them. And even they weren't taking advantage! Scott Crosby even mentions in this video that Hyundai was spending millions on ads yet had no idea how effective they were.
Integration - GA could be easily integrated with other Google products like adWords providing a more comprehensive web offering
Customization - users could set up custom dashboards and alerts
I believe Bello is going to do the same for the web3 landscape. Through their efforts to make sense of obscure and complicated onchain data, Bello will open up a whole new world of consumer insights we couldn't have ever imagined. Here's the catch though...not only will Bello be following the Google Analytics playbook, but also that of Youtube Insights, FB Analytics, and every other platform out there.
That's the beauty of using dapps over apps, all the data is on the ledger and interoperable. It's a whole step function above the platform gated insights we rely on today.
Bello is going to be the glue between all the dapps and provide creators with a logic layer to understand what the heck is going on with consumer behavior throughout the open garden.
Let's dive into the product and check out what's brewing!
Community Intelligence & Sponsor Matching
Before we get into product features, it's worth mentioning key stakeholders involved. Of course, the founders of communities and NFT collections are going to use Bello to understand who their holders are.
However, this is also a perfect chance for companies and brands looking to market their products to find which communities their target users are active in. In fact, Adam gives a pretty good example of this use case on the Infinite Money Glitch podcast. Through his Mint pod NFTs, he realized that a good percentage of his audience were fans of Zora and were active on Lens. He ended up doing a few episodes on Zora and got Aave (Lens parent company) as sponsors!
Over the next decade, as we start to see consumers migrating over to web3 dapps, we'll be able to collect and intertwine insights from data throughout a users activity on all platforms. Furthermore, the data will be available to all stakeholders including the people who use the apps in the first place.
Okay, onto the product!
After you connect your wallet on Bello.lol, you can see:
Past queries you ran that have been processed
Trending collections
Recommendations based on your wallet
Simple and to the point, I'm a fan 👏
For the examples below, I'll be using the Doodles query I ran.
Here are all the sections you can see on the dashboard. I'll post screenshots of my top 3 features.
Wallet Breakdown
This was really cool to see. The average net worth of Doodle wallet holders was $288k while the median was $15.5k. Obviously, this delta is because of the few whales supporting the project.
I loved the the cute little mushroom insights. Feels relevant and helpful for project creators. However, even with these insights, it can get a bit tricky. For example, it could be the case that many people have different wallets for their NFTs and eth holdings. In that case, it could be that the average crypto experience is higher. Of course, that's definitely nit picky but the point is that even these insights are early and are going to be iterated on a ton.
It turns out that many of the Doodles holders have ApeCoin. The team can bring this data to the Yuga team and try to see if there's some sort of collab they can do.
Web3 Social - great way for the team to understand where to push their social efforts.
Collector onchain activity - awesome dashboard to understand when the community is active onchain and when to launch their next drops and announcements.
The team is also working on "Interests" to help tags with wallets on what kinds of things they're more receptive to. Check out the announcement post here.
I highly recommend checking out the site and messing around with the metrics yourself! It really shows how early we are in understanding the capabilities of web3 communities and what they have to offer.
I'm rooting for Adam, Ellie, and the Bello team - they are clearly crushing it at changing the way we think about creator insights.
This product takes the capabilities of digital communities to the next level. Just as we look back at Google Analytics today and think of it as an obvious part of the internet, we're going to do the same with Bello.
That's all for today's post - if you enjoyed, I'd love for you to share with your friends :)
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