sari

Many early DTC companies that got big quickly contracted out the manufacturing of the physical products they were branding and selling. But that didn’t serve them well in the long run.

4. Personal attention optimization

Building these types of environments isn’t easy. Unlike an app, your members can’t be programmed to consistently deliver valuable experiences for one another. That’s why it’s critical to thoughtfully design your community’s social architecture to maximize the value that gets exchanged between members.

For the time being, though, the bulk of users will continue to rely on the preëstablished attention economy for the bulk of their digital consumption. “Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, those are just as dominant as ever,” Jin said. “Today, no one finds a person on Patreon; you go there after you’ve found them.”

Over the last 4 months I've written 32,000 words and talked to over 90 VCs across 70 different firms (seed, venture, growth, and crossover) about the future of venture capital. Here are the 5 things that came up again and again...

Customers win slightly - they have more choice on the surface, but we’re all offering the same thing, and because we’re paying so much to acquire them, we don’t have room for major discounts now that venture capital isn’t bankrolling us as heavily.