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Creator Economy 3.0 - TikTok Creators, NFT's, Metaverse, and more...

• Kyle Kaplanis / Duke McKenzie / Dillon Smith • Episode 75

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Content Creators are taking over the Web3 space and are launching some of the biggest Metaverse events and bringing their fans and communities along for the ride. 

Dillon Smith, CEO of Team Checked, and Creator Industry Expert, is on the show today. 

Dillon shares his expertise in Crypto and partnering with the Solana based metaverse company, Portals, to build and utilize the metaverse space for his content creators and their fan communities. We also discuss how Gen Z have already emerged themselves in this new Web3 space without even realizing it, and how we can learn from this generation. 

For more Web3 / Crypto insights and information, follow the Tomorrow Today Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.

Guest:

Dillon Smith
CEO of Team Checked
Creator Network of over 200M followers

Instagram: @managerdillon
Twitter: @managerdillon

Website: teamchecked.com

Come check out and play in my Portals Ivory Room (Maybe under construction) 

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Kyle Kaplanis:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of BizTok for TikTok. Today in the studio, I have my boy, who's been a guest on this show in the past Dillon Smith over from Team Checked and my colleague, my business partner, Duke McKenzie. In this episode, we're going to be talking about all kinds of stuff. And I know this is not a TikTok. Focused episode. But Web3, NFTs and the metaverse are all coming up that , will involve TikTok in one way or another. If you don't follow me over on social media, you can follow me on TikTok as @theweb3guy. I love to talk about all kinds of things, web three related . And we're going to be talking about what's the important things that we should look for in the NFT and metaverse spaces and how it is being utilized today by creators. I have a theory that in the next five years, we're going to be seeing a lot more content like this over on our four U page over on TikTok. So it's important to understand this information early. So you could be ahead of the game. I hope you enjoy this episode and let's kick this off. Dylan Smith. We have you in the studio today. Some of the listeners might not know who you are and what you do in this space. So give us a little origin story of who you are and your importance in this industry.

Dillon Smith:

Well, thank you. I don't know if it's important in this industry, but it's an amazing, amazing job that we have. We represent, in collaboration with you guys almost 20 creators, and focus on honing in on who their fan base. Uh, rather than just helping them grow a fan base, it's identifying who those core fans are, who will spend on them, who will spend the most time trying to access them, and then building an economy around those fans, for them through merchandise, live events, digital streams, metaverse meet and greets. We're very focused on bridging the gap, between large successful creators and economies, such as NFTs brands, partnerships. And all that comes with that. So that's the nutshell overview.

Duke McKenzie:

Here's the thing I work with creators as well. I love creators. Kyle works with creators, he loves creators. How did you even as part of the origin story, get in and start working with creators? And just add that. Cause I get that question all the time,

Dillon Smith:

it's such a great question. I want the answer from you guys too, because I love that question, but I started, in the touring space in the music economy, built some early high school tours, focused on mental health and anti-bullying and brought in artists from shows such as American Idol, the X Factor, America's Got Talent, who had the early concept of social influencer or social following, figure it out. Right. These are the early days. When the social economy was new. So for us to be able to bring those into schools and put on concerts, high level high-production concerts, in front of half a million students over a course of three years was a real powerful entry from being in the space. And I really developed a passion, one for helping communicate important messages to audience members, but to giving them experiences that they never had before. So that grew into working with those artists and finding those creators who had these Beatlemania type fan basis, but didn't understand how they could meet them or how to interact with them. No one was putting those pieces together. So it evolved into hardcore creator economy and not just, music, artists and it's grown exponentially ever since.

Duke McKenzie:

That's exciting. That's exciting.

Kyle Kaplanis:

You talked about riding the bus with these creators and really being hands-on with them in the beginning when you didn't even know where their potential was , for some of these. And now they've grown into household names, some of these creators, which is , pretty amazing to see.

Dillon Smith:

It's very exciting and cool to see and yeah. Being able to TM, some of them are my early days on some of the bigger tours, gave me an early relationship with these creators. So I got to watch them grow and evolve and develop into, smart business individuals that gave me an appreciation for my experience and skills in the marketing world, 15 years in marketing and my different industries. So it's, there's a lot of symbiotic, opportunity here between the creators and what I do. And I love it.

Duke McKenzie:

When you say building a business and an economy around, your talent and creators, just talk to the audience a little bit more of what you mean, because, when I talk to brands most of the time, and we do that, one of the biggest things I keep on saying is I'm like, You look at this TikTokers or this YouTubers or whatever. And they just seem very silly, like this little TikTok video, whatever, but yet they're building, as you just mentioned, these are business people. These are some of the most entrepreneurial people that you know. So just elaborate a little bit on what you mean when you say you help them and you work with them to build business and economies around them..

Dillon Smith:

The way I like to describe that to somebody who asks, let's start with TikTok, for example, you're a TikTok creator with a million followers. The average algorithmic response you're going to get on TikTok is 7% to 8% on a good day. So you're talking 70,000 to 80,000 people interacting on a post. If you got a million followers. Of that, maybe 5% click through. So now you're in the 15,000 to 20,000 range. So with a million followers, you, as a creator, only have the opportunity to tap into, 15,000 of them to really do some damage. So how do you grasp those 15,000 and how do you keep them excited and keep them accessible where you don't have to work through algorithms. So what we do is build those tools, text message databases has been a huge tool for us, where we give our fans and followers, the opportunity to personally text creators, and those creators will then send early releases or exclusive content, discounts to tickets, things that they wouldn't get on social media. So that encourages these fans to stay subscribed. We then ended up taking that outside of social media and to meet and greets and tour, environments where these fans have an opportunity to hug their favorite creator, which they couldn't do in our social world. We've built out digital livestream platforms and membership platforms for creators where fans can be on a subscription basis and get exclusive lives off of social media. A lot of these tools develop an economy where these fans get to hang out. They're accesible, instantly on demand. And then we get to incentivize them and reward them for doing so. So all of a sudden these creators have instead of a million followers with 15% click through, they've got a million followers with 15,000 spenders.

Duke McKenzie:

Right, right, right. That's a great way to look at it.

Kyle Kaplanis:

You mentioned things like meet and greets and things like that, but as we're shifting to a web three, space, there's going to be a lot of changes, and bringing in this new technology to be able to advance what you're doing. Give me some ideas of how you looking to leverage the new web three space with your creators.

Dillon Smith:

Web three exciting for us. Particularly because we've got such a powerful Web 2 e-commerce presence, we've jumped into the webs three as a tool to give people an experience in the metaverse, but also have a familiarity shopping transactionally as they would on 2.0. We looked at that we were like, Hey, we have an opportunity to bring creators into a space and not require in-person attendance. And be able to reward attendees with discounts, incentives all without ever leaving their sofa at home. That's a win-win. We really began an initiative to develop our 3.0 engagement as a company, that led us into investing in one of the big Metta versus out there Portals. Most are familiar with Decentraland or, Sandbox, , which are built on the Ethereum chain. Portals is built on Solana. So for us, that was cool for one of two things. It's cheaper for users. It's URL based, which means no VR required. So any user can access our spaces via URL. But there's all sorts of Web3 components to it. What we're doing now is taking those spaces and bringing in creators and doing meet and greets with fans. We're building out the spaces to be utilized as fashion exhibits, album showcases, NFT drops with partners. You name it? So we had developed a full venue economy and in the metaverse.

Duke McKenzie:

Have you actually done any virtual meet and greets yet in Portals? And how are they going? Describing a little bit more for everybody and like how their going.

Dillon Smith:

If you're not familiar with Decentraland and Sandbox. Sandbox you can access with a computer. You can type in a URL. It's going to be a little slow and buggy, unless you drop the minimum requirements to have the full game set up. Both VR accessible, that's where you really experience the full gist of what it is. Portals gives us an opportunity to give users that without requiring the VR. So all you do is type in a URL and just as you would a website and our digital space pops up on your screen. We then jump in as an avatar. You can dress it, choose gender, whatever you want and you drop in and you then are in this world, hanging out with other users, jumping around through the spaces we've built with full mic capabilities, chat capabilities, et cetera. For us, it brought the physical meet and greet experience into a virtual world. And that's what web 3.0 has been for us. The advantage for Portals over Decentraland, beyond just Solana versus Ethereum. Is Decentraland and Sandbox are built horizontally. So as space is bought up, it just gets wider and wider and wider. So sooner or later you spend 24 hours in a game, and have only gotten halfway through the map, right? Portals is built like New York city, downtown high rise, much more dense, a lot more users in a certain area. And that's important for us because of brand partners who want traffic. And it's important for us for creators who want to bring in new users and traffic, just from the outside downtown experience that happened to be there. So we, we love it. We're excited for it. And it's proven it's we're well in to doing these events and to continue.

Kyle Kaplanis:

you did have a successful event, share a little bit about what that event was or how it was successful.

Dillon Smith:

We've had three different events that we've run the most recent we did with one of our creators. Who built out one of our spaces as his dojo. He's got an NFT series called the NFT ninjas, and it's an educational series that also includes exclusive access to white lists and all sorts of high projects. All NFT ninja owners can go in and out of this dojo space anytime they want. And what the creator does is biweekly drops in himself for an hour and interacts with them. While he's not in there, he just leaves it open to the current holders. And we regularly update the NFTs on the wall. There's poker in there there's, Pac-Man arcades. A lot of experiences for users to just go in and enjoy. And we've seen real success with that. We've had up to a hundred people.

Duke McKenzie:

When I talk to people they have a hard time wrapping their head around it saying, are people going to really hang out in Portals, , in one of these spaces? And I say, okay, I have a 13 year old son, my 13 year old son, until I cut it off, I was getting these mysterious$500 to $600 a month charges on my credit card from the thirteen year old son. At first I thought I'm like, what is this? Like, you know, but what he was doing was once I've made sure it wasn't any bad stuff, what he was doing was he was basically paying to, get extra skins and all those things when he's hanging out in Fortnite. And he was the one, you read about when, Fortnite did the Travis Scott concerts and they've done others. I remember watching him and it wasn't a hundred percent like a real concert, but it wasn't zero. It was like the real thing big showed up on time. They're excited. So I'm like there's a whole group of people that are being trained. And not trained, that this is normal. This is normal to go hang out in one of these places. And there's people who want to learn to hang out. And it's funny. Cause I just got a Peloton today. It just delivered. But for virtual reality, even when I give people examples as in, well, what is it? I'm like, well, when you were taking a Peloton class you're in a virtual experience, it's just, it might be. a version 1.0, a very limited one, but you're in a class, people are all over the world. You all are focusing on one point of a thing and you're following along and you can take the time. So we are actually much farther along than we think. It's just when people are wrapping their head around. Well, what does this all mean? So that's exciting because when I'm in the business and I'm excited to hear what you're doing, you know what I mean? I'm wrapping my playground. Yeah,

Dillon Smith:

yeah, absolutely. That was an incredible reference. And if people are just scared of Meta, the concept, right? They think it's another monopolized evolution of web technology, which has burst this de-centralized world that is competing to make sure Meta doesn't own, web 3.0, so the amount of people like, I don't get this, I can't even begin to comprehend the metaverse. It was like, well, just click this link and hop in. Wait a minute. So

Kyle Kaplanis:

exactly it is., and, you know, what's funny Duke, you made a good point, but some people still disregard Gen Z, which my kids are gen Z, but some of them are as young as eight and 10 who still make a huge impact in our buying purchases as a household. They're making massive impacts on our decision-making. And, they are conditioned, they've grown up with this. So to them, the metaverse is like, what are you talking about? We've been doing this our whole life with Roblox and Fortnite, the exact same concept.

Duke McKenzie:

A hundred percent. When Zuckerberg did his announcement, the Meta announcement. So, you know, you go into that, Dylan, it's funny. Cause my kids, they're like, we're doing all these things. what's the announcement. Their going to build more places like Roblox? Basically. Yes. With the VR thing. What's the announcement. That's so true.

Dillon Smith:

Yeah.

Kyle Kaplanis:

I've been conditioning my son, because he's 10, and I'm like, look, Jace, you love gaming there's capabilities to actually earn and play now. There's people making a living, playing video games in the web three space. And that blows my mind and he's like, show me the game and I'll play it. So I might start training him so he can be making money for me.

Duke McKenzie:

Yeah.

Kyle Kaplanis:

Tokenize games.

Duke McKenzie:

Let me ask you a question. One of the blessings that you have in your business is that you get to work with creators, you're working with a lot of young people. You're seeing a lot of these changes. You've just hosted an event. A hundred people came through your event in Portals , , and you're seeing all these things. What have you seen over the last, I don't know I would say since the beginning of the year, that's got you excited? Anything interesting that's wow, this is different or whatever that is.

Dillon Smith:

We're deeply involved in the music side. We've got a record label in Nashville. A lot of the artists and clients I've had are primarily from music that just happened to build successful followings on the social side. That is really exciting to me from an intellectual property standpoint. From a royalty standpoint, I'm seeing some really cool technology for music drops and I'm seeing independent creators and creators in our roster we're working with, dropping music as NFT's and making, $150,000 to$200,000 up front on their drop. Which a traditional label deal you'd make probably $60,000 to $70,000 off of that, by the time you're done with their expenses and split. So that economy to me is super exciting. And then being able to bring music into the 3.0 experiences. I think it's a whole new world that we get to create the rules as they go. So that's very exciting for me. I think the interactivity as a note is a no brainer. That's, what's drawing everybody to it. You're going to see creative things. You can imagine you just walk around Decentraland or Sandbox and you can see the infinite ideas people have constructed, that really excites me. It's giving artists and creatives and opportunity to compete with infrastructure in a world that, you know, traditionally grid locked them. I think for me in the position we're in between brands and businesses and creators, to be able to build that bridge between 2.0 commerce and a 3.0 space is, three days a week is what I wake up thinking about and going to sleep at night, thinking about, it's a really exciting aspect.

Kyle Kaplanis:

What do you think, web three specifically for the way e-commerce is going to be moving towards, what are your early thinking thoughts of what's going to come next?

Dillon Smith:

I think you're going to have a mixture of things. So with our utility, you've got the fashion spaces that we build out, catwalks and you can place all sorts of different NFTs or digital images visuals throughout the walls. Those are clickable from within the space, right? So we can link those exclusively to discounts and only have the discounts apply when they click within the space. So that there's that scarcity, that incentivizes attendance, which is important to brands. And we. So I think you're just going to see some cool events develop around the fashion economy there. I think you're going to see some augmented reality integration with this VR, and it's going to soon be where any avatar that you choose and any outfit that's available digitally as well as phyiscally. You can select among, and that avatar will walk out in a VR experience and you can see a full 360 mock up of what those clothes look like, order it, boom. They show up at your doorstep next day via Amazon or whoever's fulfilling. Right. So that's where I see that going. and I think that's going to bridge a whole new gap for people who have to try things on first. That's going to be a huge thing for companies that struggle with returns.

Kyle Kaplanis:

Absolutely.

Dillon Smith:

I see that evolving and evolving very quickly.

Kyle Kaplanis:

I shared an article with Duke and I wanted to mention this because this is a good point, but American Eagle announced that they will be partnering with Roblox and developing their technology for the avatars be able to have American Eagle clothes. And that is a really , big deal. That people need to pay attention to because we're going to start seeing that a lot. And their target is gen Z, who my daughter plays Roblox on a daily basis. So she's going to, see these new skins and be like, I want to go to American Eagle and wear my avatar's clothes.

Dillon Smith:

That's exactly right. You saw that with Nike acquiring RTFKT. RTFKT was one of the early developers of the NFT sneakers, right. So Nike acquired them for an undisclosed sum. We always know what that means to something astronomical. Um, so they're moving into the digital space. Beyond ordering product and getting the tangible product after. You're also in a world where on blockchain, you buy an outfit and the outfit remains on your avatar. As long as you want. We're moving into that digital fashion space where you're owning, tangible clothing in the metaverse. So that's very cool.

Duke McKenzie:

And the thing is, when people say, will someone buy a shoe or a shirt or something like that. It's happening now. Like the moral today it's happening today. It's something right now. I have the credit card bills to show and it's, and it's even worse because it's happening now, but he can't even resell the garbage he's buying. Right. At least on the block, you know what I mean? Like all those skins, all of those, special knickknacks and whatever he's buying that were bought in all of these video games. So how Fortnite has made billions of dollars, Robox billions dollars, that has all been goods that has not provided any value to the user. Whereas you go now and you buy an American Eagle, authentic piece of clothing NFT, you could trade it. Even if you buy it, sell it secondhand or something, it adds value versus all of the billions of dollars in the gaming before hadn't had no value.

Dillon Smith:

Exactly, exactly. A hundred percent. And those games aren't cross platform. Yeah. When you spend an enormous amount of money game and what good does it, do you, in the other games, , a hundred bucks you buy it. You can hop in any metaverse that supports Eth assuming they have the infrastructure for the avatars to use that. And you can use that clothing infinitely across all worlds. So, yeah, exactly. I

Kyle Kaplanis:

own some metaverse shoes, and I'm so excited to wear them in the metaverse because it was really cool.

Duke McKenzie:

They're really cool. That's funny. If you guys don't mind, let me just take this back one second you mentioned that you purposely made a bet and a partnership, leveraging Portals. And one of the differences with Portals is that it is built on Solana, the cryptocurrency, talk to me a little bit about, and just back up with everyone listing is in. Basically the two main sources of NFTs right now are Eth and Solana. Right. And the differences that I talked a little bit about the differences and a little bit about why you need that bet and all , those things. And it could be, it can be very elementary because we're all talking about learning. We're bringing everyone on board.

Dillon Smith:

At this point, I'm sure most people know that there are multiple cryptocurrencies, right? Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. Solana is a cryptocurrency. Each cryptocurrency is built on its own blockchain and has its certain rules and coding and requirement's right. The way Ethereum is built. The minors, and a minor is someone whose computer processes a transaction, right? When you use a credit card at Walmart, Visa processes that transaction for you. So it goes to one spot, right? When you use a Ethereum somebody's personal computer, that's logged into the network and mine's processes that transaction. So it's not just a company, it's now millions of users around the globe. Both Ethereum and Solana work in that way. The difference is Ethereum because of its demand and cost of use has much higher gas fees than Solana. And a gas fee is basically a transactional fee. So you pay two point whatever percent on a credit. Okay. 10 to 15% sometimes, Duke McKenzie: I want you to continue. I just bought my name. I am Duke McKenzie dot eth. The price of the I am Duke McKenzie was like, 0.001 ETH. It was super cheap. I paid, the equivalent of like a hundred dollars or $150 in gas. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Solana, and people can do their research, right? I'm not going to go through all of the pros and cons of each. They each have them, but Solana's gas fees are, less. It's a 10th of a percent of the Ethereum, my most' Duke McKenzie: cause in, And I know this is not a show about recommend. We're just, we're all here learning, but do you think it's because it's how it's mined or is it because it's less popular right now? Mixture of both. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. As things get more, utilized the demand increases the price increases. But you look at , the war in Russian Ukraine, for example, a lot of the early Ethereum miners came from Russia. And then when Russia shut down cryptocurrency, they all moved to Ukraine. So now that Russia's moving into Ukraine, I mean, it's a reality that's affecting Ethereum gas fees and Bitcoin gas fees, because when your miners are plugging and unplugging, you're losing support in your network. It's volatile from world events. Solanas just not as volatile quite yet. And just the gas fees are not as astronomical. So for us, it's more feasible for the average user.

Duke McKenzie:

Interesting

Dillon Smith:

was definitely. Every cryptocurrency has its issues and growing pains, but Solana is great support, great structure, great technology. Great security. Ethereum is still trying to catch up with its evolved security standards, the new ERC standards and traditional Ethereum isn't even up to its current standards now. So there's just a lot of things you've got to weigh when you make these decisions.

Kyle Kaplanis:

Just shows we're still so new into this space. It's so fun.

Dillon Smith:

Yeah. Just getting started, just getting started.

Duke McKenzie:

That's actually my theme for 2022 is how early we are on everything. And it's all getting started, which is crazy. Well, that's

Dillon Smith:

good. That's very exciting. Well,

Duke McKenzie:

listen, I appreciate you, man. Thanks a lot for the time. And We'll see you on the business side. There's a bunch more deals coming through, so we'll keep going, man.

Dillon Smith:

We're working it and excited. Love this. This is fun.

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