Inspiration
The original intent for what I wanted to build was a stock market for individuals, I found that oftentimes people invest in companies not because of the company's vision sometimes because they can be farfetched for the times, but rather whoever is behind the vision (Tesla and Elon Musk). So I wanted to create a platform for users to directly invest in those people. However, I figured I would have to attack a certain verticle, that being influencers. I found there was a real issue with how influencers monetize themselves as when they take roles, brand deals, etc... they often lose creative freedom over how they are presented to the public, and people whose public perception is everything I thought this was an important thing for them to control, and I believed a stock market model would be able to solve that issue. Upon doing more research on this I figured I would run into a lot of legal issues due to the nature of people selling "shares" within themselves. I then began searching for an issue to this and that is when I got my first look into NFT's, this was the solution to my issue as they were things that could be tied to a person and fluctuate based on market perception due to how the public sees them. Upon doing more research on the space I realized it was still in its infancy and saw some major issues that I felt I could be the ones to solve. That's when Fancoin was born (the first version of souvenir) The basis of it was a platform where users could buy sell and trade NFT's backed by their favorite influencer's careers all in the format of a social media platform. I went on to build this for around 6 months however I found there was a bigger issue at hand, that being their was a major issue with the social medias of Web 2 such as privacy issues and not owning anything you create, as well as a lot of issues in the web 3 space such as barriers of entry, and no way to connect those who grew up over the internet with other people who grew up over the internet, and thus souvenir was born.
What it does
Souvenir is the leading Web 3 platform where users can own everything on their accounts and everything they post rather than “rent” everything which is the current nature of all social media as we know it today. In addition to this, we are offering the simplest way to create NFT’s to allow everyone to participate. What I mean by that is currently your accounts on social media you do not own all your content they are property of where they are posted, therefore if the social media platform is taken down so is all your content (vine). Also, the only way to make revenue off your content is ad revenue on all other social networks, you cannot sell the rights to your content because you do not own it. But in the world of Web 3 and the age of digital ownership, this problem can finally be solved. For the first time, users will be able to own everything they post whether it was a video or a picture, and tokenize it turning them into NFT’s and having them displayed for everyone to see. By turning all your posts into NFT’s you will finally fully own them. In addition, these posts can be turned into tradable commodities that you can buy sell and trade. For example, if you create a video on youtube you don’t own that video you are renting the space on youtube to host it, you cannot sell it or move it, with Souvenir you can. Also turning posts to NFT’s makes it fully interoperable with all other social media that accept Souvenir, removing the whole idea of networks being one-dimensional and allowing them all to work in conjunction with each other. Every user will also have full control over how they monetize themselves, due to the fact they will be able to sell their posts and other users would be able to have them migrated to their profile showing off their new purchase. By also owning your content you will also be able to put ads on your content as opposed to the network such as youtube being the one that places ads so you will directly which puts a whole new meaning on being able to monetize your content.
A unique feature Souvenir will include is a camera feature, so when you take a picture users will be able to instantly tokenize the moment they encapsulated in that photo and have it uploaded to their Souvenir account where other users can view it and if they like that moment enough they have the ability to purchase it. This also allows for full digital ownership as if you attach your image/ video to the blockchain you as an individual will own it. Currently, when you like something on most social media platforms the user has the ability to share that moment via stories but on Souvenir, you can buy it. You will also be able to import select NFT’s onto Souvenir to maintain a level of exclusivity that we currently do not see in the NFT space.
We will also have a revolutionary tagging feature users will be able to tag each other and if their NFT sells they will be able to allocate a certain percent of the NFT sales to whoever they tagged. The allocated percent will be 2.5% of lifetime sales of the NFT. The reason a user would want to tag someone is that then it is an authentic product of the person that is tagged as they own a piece of it per se oppose to if you just took a picture of them without the tag it would not be authentic. An example where this can be used is if you attend a certain event and you take a cool picture of one of your favorite athletes you can post this on Souvenir, it will be tokenized and through tagging that athlete you are almost making content on their behalf as if someone purchases this they will make a constant stream of revenue.
In the world of Web 3 people are already changing their profile pictures to their NFT’s that they own, this is because they identify with their NFT’s, however, you cannot put any sort of personal touch on them. Now with Souvenir’s camera feature you can take pictures and upload them to your NFT’s as a sort of “attribute” which will add a certain level of authenticity and personality to your NFT’s something we haven’t seen before. We believe this will also get NFT’s to a broad audience of people because they turn more into digital avatars as appose to just expensive jpegs.
Souvenir is the first NFT platform that is combining all of the best aspects of a social media platform, those being the ability to follow your friends and favorite influencers and view their activities, with the rising interest in NFT’s. At the moment when wanting to discuss NFT’s people often start discord chats, which is inconvenient to go to another app, as well as the fact that discord has a very user-unfriendly interface. Souvenir is the only platform where users will have the ability to display their NFT’s to all who view their profile, their users can purchase goods, and place offers of request trades for said NFT. We believe that there is no point in spending thousands if not millions of dollars on NFT’s only you can see. Souvenir believes NFT’s are going to be the mainstream strategy for the social currency of the future. This means that currently in society you are put subconsciously into a certain social category based on how you present yourself via your physical good, for example, what car you drive, your watch, your house, etc… But as the world becomes more digital and your digital image is more important than your physical image, we believe that the NFT’s you own will take dominance on how people view you in society.
Our Marketplace will also be completely internal, different than other Web 3 social networks that just become a feeding ground into Opensea, which has a variety of issues, some of which are a difficult UI for non-tech savvy people to use, lack of exclusivity which lead to an oversaturation of the NFT space. Also, a lack of the ability to follow people is also a problematic issue they have in addition to their constant crashing (Brokensea). There is also a culture in the NFT space to discuss things on discord, I strongly oppose it because discord hosts a very difficult and intimidating user experience something non-tech-savvy people have difficulty using which is also a barrier of entry. Having all the communication about NFT’s hosting on one app will solve that. In addition to that having the wallets autogenerated will greatly increase the number of first-time buyers that will participate in addition to getting around the barrier of entry that is figuring out how to create an NFT, with us it is as simple as taking a picture.
The UI of all NFT applications are also not designed for content to be consumed but rather they are simply designed to be a marketplace, we are trying to combat this at Souvenir. Having a UI that will allow users to watch videos, create content, create posts that are all tokenized for digital ownership will put a whole new meaning behind giving an NFT utility.
Souvenir will also put an emphasis on Functional NFT’s, what this will do is open a whole different demographic of people from beyond only a tech-savvy audience. Currently, on the platform, only people heavily involved in the tech scene can justify paying the crazy amount of money for NFT’s that oftentimes you can see for free. when you introduce a level of real-life tangibility a whole other audience of your everyday people will start understanding why NFT’s have the value that they do. For example, people keep tickets from their favorite events displayed in their house to only a certain amount of people to see, however, if that ticket was tokenized on a platform with a public wallet for everyone to see, it adds another level of value to the ticket as now not only can everyone see you went to an exclusive event, putting you in a social category based on it, people can try to buy or trade it from you, as now it becomes a tradable commodity. In addition to that with our camera feature users will be able to attend events take pictures at that event and upload the pictures they took as NFT’s to that ticket as a certain “attribute” of it. In the future using AR technology, we want to bring your NFT’s in the real world when you snap a picture of something and add it as an attribute. With our camera feature as well, people would be able to attend events and meet and greets and add images to those NFT’s as attributes adding a personalized touch to everyone's NFT.
Another feature we will, later on, add that will make us much different than anything on the market is to give users the ability to have a closer connection with anyone who holds their NFT’s. These closer connections can come in the form of being airdropped by another NFT, having a closer conversation, getting exclusive content, or being invited to a exclusive event. What this will do is it allows a never before seen connection between content creators regardless of popularity and the fans of those people and will give the creator an incentive to join in addition to the fan.
Currently, in the NFT space, there are quite a few barriers of entry, the biggest ones being people aren’t sure what an NFT can be and how to make one, secondly, people aren’t sure how to make a third party wallet to attach to an NFT marketplace. At Souvenir, we can solve all of these issues. By simply letting people take a picture and tokenizing it and turning that into an NFT rather than going through the process of creating all sorts of different art you are letting a whole different audience of people who are not artistic people to participate. Also by creating a wallet for people, we would eliminate the whole problem behind people making third-party wallets, I believe we would see a lot of first-time NFT buyers like how Coinbase saw a lot of first-time crypto buyers due to them creating a wallet for their users.
Currently other platforms are attempting to make make Web 3 social networks however they are failing to do the main thing that people go to social networks for, that being connecting people of similar interests. What facebook did well was connect people with similar interests in the real world, however most people in the Web 3 space grew up over the internet, and a Web 3 social network has to connect people who grew up over the internet with similar interests. This is something that we understand and will make it our goal. What NFT’s give us a major advantage over typical Web 2 social networks is NFT’s let us group people based on interests with a item to prove that they are part of that group and can help us branch off and find more people of the same interest, somewhat like a digital fan club where your ticket is a NFT. This would also help us gauge peoples interest even though most people remain anonymous.
Why would people do this? Firstly a lot of people want to participate in NFT’s but are not sure how (23% of which have expressed interest in collecting NFTs in the US). Allowing them to just turn any picture into an NFT and remove the sort of stigma around the aspect they have to be all kinds of art will greatly improve this. Now a lot of people must think people would not want to do this due to the idea that you would have to pay to post, but with lazy minting, if anyone wants to purchase the NFT’s off a person they would be the ones to pay. It wouldn’t just be for people who want to sell their content but anyone who just wants to own it. We also see the continuing growth of reposting becoming a more and more prevalent feature on social networks such as Instagram VSCO and Twitter, so we believe that owning posts is the clear-cut next step in the adoption of social media. Also, we see platforms like Patreon and Onlyfans sell exclusive content that people will most likely be able to see for free, however, we as people are attracted to it due to parasocial relationships and I believe that owning the content is the next step in the evolution of this.
This would also benefit the whole NFT community as a whole and get it to mass adoption because when someone already has their foot in the door and owns an NFT they are more likely to continue to participate in that space. The major issue is once again people do not know where to start so keeping it very simple and having them participate by doing something as simple as taking a picture will be an easy place to start.
There are around 15,000 NFT buyers every week and the average price on an NFT is around $900. That is around 13,500,000 in weekly transaction volume - this is an estimation of the current market in its current context. Our platform aims to expand past the current early adopter market, and open up the NFT space to the broader general public so that anyone can buy, sell and trade NFTs of their favorite influencers. A proxy estimate we use is looking at the exclusive subscription market, and its consumer population. We believe that as NFTs gain mass adoption through our platform, they will be likened to the subscription markets of people selling exclusive content. As a crude benchmark, the average price of a patreon subscription is $9.99. The average NFT is currently sold at $900 USD. Assuming that the price of NFTs will tend towards the mean of these two (a decrease in price on average relative to the current NFT markets as it gains mass-market adoption, but increase in price on average relative to the subscription costs per se of the person selling). Hence as a crude benchmark, we assume $500 per customer. Regarding the numbers, there are 72.1 million millennials in the USA 23% of which have expressed interest in collecting NFTs. We believe that as NFTs become more accessible, this proportion will increase significantly. Assuming 16 million buyers (>23% of 72.1 million), the market size is ~$8 billion USD (16 million * 456).
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We just got Andy Ruiz Jr, as well as David Benividez to sign up. We are also looking to work with Al Haymon to start producing tickets for NFT boxing events
How we built it
Front end is done completely on react, backend algorithms all in python, payment processor is done on stripe, data is currently held on AWS, Hedera is done using solidity.
What's next for Souvenir
Next is to go live and start gathering users, and show them the benefits of using us apposed to other social networks!
NOTE
Please use tryout link on mobile for best results
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