This is what it will take to be successful in Web3

This article was initially published in Fast Company with Soula Parassidis.

The vast majority of technology is a distribution system. PayPal and Stripe connect merchants and customers; Facebook and Twitter distribute content across societies; Microsoft and Apple build hardware and software that form the infrastructure for the digital economy.

While idea generation for these companies and many others is a creative process, the technology actually serves very basic and fundamental needs. Creators need to build things that are so simple to understand and use that even their grandparents would buy the product or service. That same principle holds in the Web3 era.

But each of us thinks and builds differently. And one of the hardest things for artists is that we are not taught to go past the step of creativity into the operations and business development that is needed to build a profitable and sustainable business. We are fantastic at coming up with creative ideas that captivate an audience, but not necessarily for seeing it through. That’s been a big lesson for me, Soula, to learn throughout the process of launching Living Opera.

The biggest differentiating factor that we artists bring, however, is the focus on people. Our focus is often around people, and we’re often discouraged from thinking about profit. Neither extreme is good. Just focusing on people without operations leads to a cute idea that never takes off, but just focusing on profit produces a transactional and transient technology that at best is here today and gone tomorrow.

We believe that the solution is to focus on creativity, then people, and then profit.

Let’s unpack that. Artists do not think of their customers as “users.” Rather, they are our audience and even our patrons; we perform and produce to serve them. In fact, at the end of an opera, the audience renders a verdict about the performance by applauding (or not).

That accountability and transparency is not available in many businesses, especially the areas of the economy where there are monopolies, and consumers have only one or two choices.

THINK LIKE AN ARTIST

When you finally realize, as an artist, that you have to build something to sustain your livelihood, then you’re faced with a choice. Either to partner with people who can take the kernel of what you’re doing and make it profitable, or, take a nonprofit model where you find really passionate patrons who can support you.

Although most artists take the former path, especially in pop culture, the business operators end up focusing heavily on narrow metrics, especially follower counts, at the expense of connecting with and learning from actual people.

Metrics are great, but not when they get so narrow and disconnected from the lives of producing transformative and uplifting experiences in the lives of individual people. Economists call this phenomenon multitasking. It was a term originally used to describe a class of “principal-agent problems” in organizations where a manager measures the performance of an employee according to a narrow set of metrics that ultimately incentivize employees toward unintended and often perverse behaviors, even if the initial metrics are satisfied.

That’s arguably why the arts and entertainment industry is larger than ever, but society has become more tribal and transactional. Society, in many ways, has become more siloed and our taste for quality has been dulled because of the focus on products and services—especially in music—that are made for the masses, not for improving individual lives.

The tendency to focus on the masses has emerged since artists are often forced into these dual extremes of “partner with a big label and go commercial” or “align with a nonprofit and focus on donations.” Sadly, there is not much middle ground for artists to simultaneously hold onto their intellectual property and earn a meaningful wage. But Web3 is changing that.

The central thesis in the Web3 movement is decentralized ownership: In other words, consumers should own their data, and content creators should own their intellectual property. When the individual has ownership, they are empowered with the freedom to make choices without being held as an economic hostage. For example, artists today routinely sign deals with record labels, but many of them would choose differently in a different competitive landscape.

The scientific literature also has found that more decentralized countries and organizations perform better than their counterparts. We are entering an era where there is collective appetite for real community—not more of the same mass media—and Web3 has the potential to fuel it by endowing creators with the technological tools to generate sustainable income.

BUILD LIKE AN ENGINEER

Engineers are architects who help design the process and ensure that every part of it is working as intended. Whether writing statistical code to analyze data or building a website, an engineer focuses deeply on operational details and processes.

That’s good when you know why you’re building and who you’re building for. But it’s bad when you don’t have answers to those fundamental questions. No amount of venture capital funding is going to enable transformative experiences for your audience of interest if you have not thought of people first and actively built relationships with them.

In fact, one of the challenges today is that we’ve become so data-savvy and focused as a society that we have sometimes elevated engineering skills—or at least the quest for metrics—over other skills and the “why” behind what we’re doing. Engineering skills are undoubtedly important and one manifestation of creativity, but they’re different from the artistic kind.

If we can bridge the gap between thinking like an artist and building like an engineer, we believe that we’ll see an explosion of profitability and value-creation through true creativity that lasts generations. As entrepreneurs, we need to be so in love with the audiences we’re serving and willing to accept feedback that no fancy technological gadgets or prospect of funding can throw us from our “true north.”

Remember, you’re building for people. A great idea cannot scale into a profitable movement unless you are truly passionate about helping people flourish. That means using technology as a tool, rather than an end in itself. NFTs, and the Web3 movement, have the potential to create tremendous value, but they must be centered around specific use-cases that address peoples’ needs. The approaches of both artists and engineers can play a complementary role in unlocking a flurry of creative activity to do just that.

Soula Parassidis is the CEO and lead founder of Living Opera. She is also an international opera singer, speaker, and passionate advocate against human trafficking.

Christos A. Makridis is the CTO/COO and cofounder of Living Opera. He is also a professor, writer, and adviser.