Top 5 Profitable Web3 Business Ideas for 2023

The great resignation 2.0 is upon us. 50%of employers want workers back in the office and 70% of millennial and GenZ regret quitting their jobs a year ago during the original great resignation and looking to quit again. With so many people about to quit their jobs for a second time, I thought we should talk about business ideas. specifically, highly profitable businesses that use web3. Starting a business is not the de facto answer if a 9-5 isn’t for you, but hey, it’s an option. I got laid off from my corporate job in the middle of 2020 and that forced me to turn my web3 side hustle into my full-time job and I haven’t looked back since.

Top 5 List

1. Crypto Payment Gateway. I’ve seen a few startups attempt this but none have executed perfectly, but it’s another billion-dollar idea for whoever can figure it out. Right now regular businesses need to pay vendors, suppliers, partners, and so on in fiat. A lot of web3 companies would rather be paid in crypto because they don’t necessarily have a bank account. So, if someone could figure out a payment gateway that allowed a vendor to invoice in fiat, but get paid in crypto, that person is going to be really busy figuring out what to do with all their money for the next 10 years.

2. D-App Dev Shop. Decentralized apps or D-app development is a hot new topic and it seems everyone wants one but doesn’t have the bandwidth to build one. It does take that long to learn the coding skills required to make simple d-apps and it would only take a few months to stand up a d-app agency. D-app could include things like DAO setups, decentralized social media platforms, or decentralized finance apps.

3. Decentralized Voting App. With all the controversy around voting in the last few years, I don’t want to hear about it anymore because we have the technology to have a secure and unhackable voting system - it’s called the blockchain. We just need someone to build it AND that someone(s) has to be able to navigate the politics required to get it implemented.

4. Blockchain Carbon Capture DFY Agency. This business is essentially a company that helps bigger corporations buy and manage crypto carbon credits. The world’s carbon-producing corporations all engage in carbon credit schemes, some of which are not the most transparent, but they aren’t savvy enough to buy decentralized carbon credits on their own. There is a multi-million, maybe billion-dollar opportunity here for a company to swoop in and take care of that for them. The beauty of this one is that this startup wouldn’t even need to create their own platform, they can use existing ones like Toucan protocol or projects life NFTree Haus. and just have this portfolio of carbon-neutralizing tools that they can pick from for each client.

5. NFT Investment Fund. This is probably the weirdest idea on the list but it’s actually the most straightforward. For this one, you build a fund from investors, whether that is individuals or institutional venture capitalists, and use that money to buy hot NFTs that are likely to go up in value over time. This sounds out there, but DAOs are already doing this. Yield Guild Games raised $1.3M from VCs last year and bought some Crypto Punks, a Bored Ape, and some other assets. They have a competitor called FlamingoDAO which is doing something similar, but even so, this market is basically completely untapped. You are investing people’s money so if you go with this one, make sure you understand all the regulatory requirements that go along with it.

What to Do Next

The internet is rife with articles on using blockchain for supply chain management, shipping and logistics, and smart contracts and while I think that these are billion-dollar ideas as well, I don’t think 2022 is the year for them, it’s just too early. So, what now? If you decide that you want to build something in web3, I highly recommend learning Solidity, even if you have no interest in coding. It helps to understand the capabilities of what is possible today and it’s something you can do in a 30-day coding bootcamp - perfect if you are about to tell your boss to shove it. Like I said earlier, entrepreneurship isn’t the answer to everyone’s job problem, but it will be for some. If one of these ideas inspired you to start building something, let me know and if I missed a big opportunity for 2022, let me know that as well. If you’re interested in more tech info, check out my YouTube channel for more great content. I’ll see you next time.

Microsoft in the Metaverse: What the Acquisition of Activision Blizzard Means for the Future of the Internet

If you have played Candy Crush, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Starcraft, Diablo or Overwatch you may be familiar with the company behind those games, Activision Blizzard. If you’ve never heard of these and want nothing to do with gaming, keep reading as well because this news is going to affect everyone. Activision was in the news again this week because Microsoft made a move to acquire them for $70 billion.

That number is staggering for a lot of reasons but the most prominent reason is that Activision does not have the best reputation right now. The company is facing allegations and lawsuits galore. Despite that, If this deal goes through, it could be the biggest tech company acquisition in history. Ever.

Why Microsoft is writing such a big check for a troubled gaming company?

What does this has to do with the metaverse and Facebook/Meta and how it will affect the fate of Activision Blizzard's game portfolio?

Gaming Industry

Activision has had nonstop bad press for the last eight months or so. But you wouldn’t know that based on the sale price. And that’s because that price reflects just the scale of the gaming world in 2022 and the growth potential that people think lies ahead for gaming companies. This acquisition is not as simple as placing a calculated bet on growing Microsoft's gaming sector. If you CNTRL+F the acquisition announcement, Microsoft mentions gaming 19 times but they also reference the term metaverse twice. They spell out that they think this acquisition will give them access to the building blocks for the metaverse.

The Metaverse

When we talk about the metaverse today, most people are describing an interconnected virtual world or worlds, that form this digital mirror reality. A lot of people see the metaverse as the next big thing in tech, the next iteration of the internet, and the medium upon which web3 operates. It will be a place where we socialize, work, learn and play, use digital avatars, collect digital possession and use digital currency. Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is the counter move to Facebook changing its name to Meta and announcing their ambitions to control the metaverse. A Queens Gambit Accepted move for the chess players out there. Reading between the lines, this announcement is a very clear statement that Microsoft also has ambitions to control the metaverse.

If you hear metaverse and you think SIMS or Second Life and aren’t that impressed, I implore you to do more research because those applications are like prototypes compared to what we are looking at now.

The Interoperability Problem

The grand vision for the metaverse is this common digital universe where all these different companies, brands, and creators can build immersive experiences and we seamlessly move from one experience to another. I this ideal state we are all individual companies playing in the same sandbox. But Right now what we have looks more like individual metaverse bubbles that might one day be connected but for now, are islands.

The problem with what Microsoft and Meta are doing is that it doesn’t facilitate true interoperability or the ability to seamlessly connect these digital worlds. The Indicator Podcast brought this up and I think they are 100% correct. If we go back to web1.0, we needed to come up with a set of protocols that allowed anyone to build on the worldwide web. These are things like hypertext transfer protocols or HTTP, and URLs and as the Indicator pointed out, these are all things that anyone can use. And they weren’t created by a corporation, but by nonprofits.

As of right now nobody, nonprofit, DAO, or otherwise has created a common set of protocols for the metaverse and we probably won’t have that any time soon.

Metaverse has become a tech buzzword. Companies are tacking metaverse onto their names and product names because VCs are throwing money at anything that makes metaverse moves. My company, Future Sight AR has been building mixed reality app that live in the metaverse for three years now and usually when we speak to investors, we have to explain what this digital world is and why it’s valuable for companies to join it. Now I just say “we make software that brings your organization into the metaverse” and VCs can’t write a check fast enough. And while we are building as one of these island bubbles of metaverse we building in such a way that when the ability to connect to other digital worlds is a reality, we can very simply plug in. But right now that is just a vision on our product roadmap because to make it a reality, all these different companies, some of which are massive like Microsoft and Meta/Facebook will have to build infrastructure that works together to create this interoperable realm.

So I’m skeptical about Facebook or Microsoft building this holistic metaverse. I think what they’re actually building is immersive iterations of their products which will be one of these metaverse island bubbles, that is self-contained.

The Gaming Connection

Getting back to the acquisition, what does this countermove by Microsoft have to do with Activision Blizzard and their game portfolio? In Microsoft's announcement Satya Nudella said that "Gaming is the most dynamic and exciting category in entertainment across all platforms today and will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms.”

The Activision portfolio includes some games that already let people have a limited metaverse experience. These are games like Call of Duty, World or Warcraft and Overwatch. and yes, people are there to game, but they are also there to socialize, whether that is natively over the game or talking on Discord while playing. To put this in perspective some people meet up at a persons house to play poker, chat and have a beverage. Others get in a gaming chair, spawn into a game, meet up with friends avatar and get on Discord to chat. It’s sort of like a new social network but I’m hesitant to call it that because it doesn’t quite fit the profile of a social media network. It’s something else, that’s kind of its own new category and I don’t have a label for it yet.

For Non-Gamers

Even if you aren’t into gaming or internet culture, you should care about who ends up building the metaverse and deciding how it will work. We don’t want history repeating itself. When social media and web2.0 began appearing around 2010-2012, no one really cared who controlled social media or if there were any global standards social media companies should be adhering to. Facebook and Twitter were still new and it was only early adopters that were on the platforms. Now we all use social media. Maybe not every platform - for the sake of your mental health, I hope you aren’t on every platform. Gaming is heading that direct too, where even if you aren’t a gamer, you might still use the platform for socializing and entertainment and it is just becoming ingrained into society and culture. The same way that right now most of us aren’t content creators or influencers, but we still use Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter. When used in this way gaming is just one of the gateways that is onboarding people into the metaverse. Whether you are a gamer or not, you will probably end up on one or more of these platforms where companies like Microsoft and Meta will have access to scary amounts of your personal data.

Next Steps

I hope that this post motivated you to continue to educate yourself on what these massive companies are up to since they will probably control a good portion of our lives. I hope that maybe someone out there feels inspired to be the nonprofit or DAO to set up metaverse-wide protocols that allow everyone to participate in this next iteration of the internet. Stay safe out there.

xoxox LL

Go Solo - Inspiring Ambitious Solo Entrepreneurs to Turn One Day into Day One with Lori-Lee Elliott

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Lori-lee Elliott, CEO of Future Sight AR, located in Houston, TX, USA.

This week I sat down with the team at Subkit to talk about what it takes to Go Solo and start a business. Check out the interview here on Subkit.

2022 Gift Guide for Crypto, Metaverse and Web3.0 Geeks

Welcome to the 2022 gift guide for web3.0, crypto, and metaverse geeks! We’ve got VR headsets, EEG bands, DeFi Wallets, NFTs, Books and even jewelry. And before you ask, yes, these are for both men and women…and anyone in between.

Oculus Quest 2

I felt like this was an obvious one, so I wanted to talk about it first. the oculus quest 2 is a must for any virtual reality enthusiast. You do need a Facebook account to access the apps, so keep that in mind. But the Quest 2 is arguably the best untethered virtual reality headset on the market. Some standout apps on the Quest 2 include Beat Saber, The Room VR: A Dark Matter. Not to mention all the apps you can sideload such as Sport Model, Helium, and Gorilla Tag.

Oculus Quest 2 — Advanced All-In-One Virtual Reality Headset — 128 GB

Oculus

Buy on Amazon

EEG Headband

Don’t let the name fool you, this is not a hair accessory but a wearable EEG sensor that measures your brainwave patterns. So how does this relate to the metaverse? More and more apps are using biometrics such as your brainwave patterns to customize your experience within immersive apps. The Healium meditation app even has the option to add in an EEG headband to bio-feedback your mediation session.

Interaxon

Buy on Amazon

Cold Wallets

Ledger

Buy on Amazon

Any crypto investor looking to step up their game will appreciate this gift. Cold wallets are considered the most secure way to store your crypto because they aren’t connected to the internet. My two top choices for 2021 are Trezor Model T and Ledger Nano X.

Trezor One + Billfodl

Buy on Amazon

When ordering a cold wallet be sure to order directly from the brand, and if you can have the item shipped directly to the recipient to reduce the chances of it being tampered with in transit.

Books

I have a mix of fiction and non-fiction in here. First up is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This is the first novel to use the term ‘metaverse’. It is a dystopic novel set in a future version of Los Angeles where the Federal Government has been taken over by corporations and people move between the real world and a virtual one, where they are represented by avatars. It’s eerie how much of that novel came true given that it was written in 1992.

Snow Crash

By Stephenson, Neal

Buy on Amazon

Next up we have The Augmented Workforce by our own Cathy Hackl. In this book, Cathy goes over how business leaders can use 5G, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and other emerging tech to scale companies and grow revenue.

By Hackl, Cathy, Buzzell, John

Buy on Amazon

She also published Marketing New Realities if you are shopping for a friend in marketing or sales.

By Hackl, Cathy, Wolfe, Samantha G.

Buy on Amazon

Again I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Ready Player One. It’s really the quintessential virtual reality book of this generation. There are some collectors editions if you’re looking for something a little *extra*.

By Cline, Ernest

Buy on Amazon

Finally, this one is actually best consumed as an audiobook, but you can buy the print version as well and that is we are legion, we are bob. it’s a sci-fi novel written by Dennis Taylor. This series is about a software developer Bob Johansson who agrees to have his consciousness digital preserved, should he die. And you guessed it, he dies and wakes up a century later to find that he has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. Casual. It’s a great series, again it was written to be an audiobook so you could always bundle this gift with an Audible subscription.

By Dennis E. Taylor

Buy on Amazon

NFTs

NFTs might just be the trendiest gift option of 2021. NFT stands for non-fungible token and is a digital asset such as an image, animation, music, domain or collectable whose ownership is secured on a blockchain. You can learn more about NFTs here. NFTs can be thousands, sometimes millions of dollars so definitely go into this one with a budget in mind. If you’re just starting I recommend taking a look on OpenSea, as they have a bit of everything. If you’d like a step-by-step breakdown on how to gift an NFT, and more options for where to buy them, be sure to subscribe because I will be going over that in a future video.

Digital Clothing

For the lifestyle influencer or fashionista in your life, we have a Dress-X subscription. This app is available to anyone with a smartphone and allows you to try on digital clothing and share the resulting images. It drastically cuts down on the carbon footprint associated with manufacturing and shipping real-world clothing and is perfect for those who wear an outfit once but won’t or don’t outfit repeat. I have a video on my experience with the app here if you want to take a closer look. Some of the designs on Dress-X are also NFTs so you could do a combo gift and get someone the app subscription and a collectible digital outfit.

Credit: Vogue.com /Dress-X

The Pokemon Ring

I think it’s really difficult to do geek jewelry well without it looking gimmicky or cheap, so I was so happy when I found this Pokemon ring by Geek Jewelry, that is offered in both mens and women's sizes. If you know a Level 40 Pokemon Trainer they could seriously love this gift. It’s available in silver, white gold, rose gold, platinum and palladium and looks like a piece of fine jewelry (because it is).

Pokeomon Ring from Geek Jewelry

ICYMI, Pokemon Go is one of the most successful augmented reality games out there, available on Android and iOS. The creators of Pokemon Go, Niantic, recently raised $300M to build infrastructure to support a metaverse and help to power the next evolution of the internet.” Niantic didn’t specifically mention blockchain or NFTs, but they main backer, Coatue, is known for bankrolling major crypto projects including Chainalysis and Fireblocks. So it might be a good idea to stay on the good side of your pokemon trainer friends as their pokemon could be worth some serious real-world cash in the near future.

That is all for this year’s guide. I hope this gave you some ideas for gifts! Have a happy holidays and don’t forget that you can save this as a pin for later: