Playground

Deck: Here (passcode = Playhere)

Fundraise: $3m ($500k remaining allocation)

Founder: Jia Ling Yang

Existing Investors

Edoardo Gentili, Investor

Founders Factory

“We’re incredibly excited to invest in Playground, a platform designed for creators, by creators, to help people access a vast array of communities all-one place without the need to get out the platform. Jia thanks to her domain expertise in this field has created a platform that enables community discovery, live events, and discussion forums, creating opportunities for meaningful connections and lasting relationships. I'm looking forward to working with Jia and the team as they scale to more communities globally

My Insights

Playground stands out as an inventive community-centric platform, looking to solve a current friction point in the community space – the difficulty of forging genuine connections on traditional social media platforms. Jia’s expertise, coupled with a product designed to accentuate meaningful community interactions, presents a compelling proposition. Here are my insights:

Strengths:

1. Founder's Track Record: Jia Ling Yang boasts an impressive background in advertising and social media sectors, providing her with unique insights that inform the platform's design and functionality.

2. Mission: The platform emphasizes real, meaningful connections, differentiating itself from the myriad of other social platforms focused on passive engagement.

3. Growing Traction: With 900 communities onboard, spanning various sectors like art, music, sports, and film, it’s evident that there's an existing demand for Playground's offerings.

Questions:

Why does a Web3 solution solve a Web2 problem? While I understand the advantages of active vs. passive community engagement and the allure of community drops, I have questions surrounding the actual necessity of a blockchain application here. Ultimately, this is a longer-term thesis question boiling down to whether we see a future at the intersection of social media and blockchain.

Conclusion:

Playground's vision and the problem it seeks to address are clear. Whilst I have reservations about the necessary marriage of the problem and the Web3 solution, given Jia’s track record and the platform's current traction, there's genuine potential for it to be a frontrunner in redefining how communities interact online.

Sharing this deal with my network for those interested in pioneering ventures at the intersection of social media and blockchain.

My Notes

Founder

• Jia started her career in advertising as a creative director

  • Activating brands on new media and social platforms

    • Worked on YouTube as a client

    • Consulted internally at Facebook

    • Worked on gaming projects

      • Activision launch of destiny

      • Version 5G innovation lab

      • Collaborated with Niantic

  • Cultural Projects:

    • Worked on the global rebrand of Converse by Nike

    • Shot social for E! Entertainment at fashion week

Team

Problem & Solution

• No way to make real connections on legacy social media platforms as they are for building audiences rather than communities

• They are designed for passive rather than active engagement

• Solution => Community-centric social media platform based on active participation that incentivises meaningful connection

Product

• Web3 community activation platform

  • A place for users to discover communities and people to connect with

  • A place for creators of communities to manage experiences, content and memberships

• User Side

  • Centralises the ticketing, and rewarding of community events

    • Eliminates the need to drop links to other things in the description/chat

• Creator Side

  • Allows creators to track their most loyal fans/members in order to design tiers of the community and reward people with token-gated events

• Front end: one place to discover communities over art music and film – Spotify of communities

• Back end: Tools for token-gated events and chat

• Lightweight creator tools that help to track CRM/engagement

  

Vision

• Social media needs to be reinvented

• Experiences are what bring people together so we need to prioritise them

• Real-life experience is the most important but we can reward and augment this virtually

• By centralising community activation communities will collaborate more

  • Including subgroups collaborating with parent groups

Traction

Business Model

• Free to create a community

• $30/month to use more creator tools e.g. multi-tiered ticketing and rewards tooling

• $199/month for brands as an alternative to ad tools on legacy social platforms

  • Also charged an integration fee

• 7% of ticket sales sold on playground