https://twitter.com/Showtime_xyz/status/1544667745731563520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.notion.so%2Fshowtime-xyz%2FIntroducing-Showtime-s-superfan-vision-5b8efb3f0d1249d1bd50d06621c1967d

Removing the financial aspect out of collectibles changed the game. Since each collector is counted as a follower on Showtime, creators began to use drops to grow their audience on Showtime. Collectors can showcase their taste on their Showtime profile and any app that displays your collectibles like Instagram, OpenSea and Rainbow.

To our own surprise, we noticed the sudden rise of AI art creators happen at the same time of our launch: thanks to tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, we collected artworks from creators such as Lazul, Sunset (read her Showtime story here), ghosty and many more. Some created new drops every day and attracted dozens of thousands of followers in a just a few months – way above their other social network performance. For AI artists, Showtime is a home to experiment their craft without the pressure from “selling” to marketplaces.

Five months later, over 1 million free drops have been collected on Showtime. (source: Dune Analytics).

After interviewing hundreds creators, we realized most were excited to grow their audience in web3 with consistency, instead of dropping a paid NFT every now and then. On Showtime, many creators started to create new drops every day (sometimes called drop “series”) to increase their follower count, where collectors compete for the longest collection “streak”. How many drops you have determines how much of a fan you are of a particular creator. We quickly realized the need to formalize the strong connection to a creator and their most engaged fans was starting to surface. Creators want to get to know their community deeper and reward them for their loyalty. Organically, we noticed creators used Showtime drops to have collectors follow them on Instagram, buy their (paid!) NFTs on marketplaces, join their Telegram groupchat and more.

By the end of January, free drops will be replaced by Superfans drops: collectibles for your top fans.

This change will let people prove they’re your top fans. Those collectibles will be labels that they can take anywhere to prove they are one of your biggest supporters.

Note for current Showtime creators: nothing is needed from your side!

• Creators will still be able to post daily on Showtime, via Posts. Posts are not collectibles – simply the old regular social media post type you know and love, that people can add to their collection.

• By adding a post to their collection, creators will still earn followers, just like free drops you know and love. Each new collector becomes a follower of yours.

There are three types of superfan drops:

• Music Drop: save or pre-save a song on Spotify to earn a free collectible

• Event Drop: mark yourself present at a live event to earn a free collectible

• Private Drop: fill out a password (given away by an artist at their discretion) to earn a free collectible.

We believe this change will enable you to get to know who most loyal fans are and engage with them in a more intimate way. Soon, we will build for you to reach out to your top fans.

So if you're a creator looking to connect with your top fans, or a fan looking to support your favorite artist in a more meaningful way, stay tuned for our future releases, and come try us out at showtime.xyz to start collecting drops today!

With superfan love, The Showtime team ✦

So far in 2022, we’ve been quietly rebuilding our entire platform from scratch. This hard work paid off and from now on, it’s showtime, literally: expect features you’ve never seen before to launch soon.

To get yourself up to speed, here is some context on the state of our project until today:

• Last year, Showtime showed a strong interest towards less financial and more socially-driven web3 products. Since our original website (also known as tryShowtime) last year, we learnt a lot. Back then, NFTs had just gone viral. Dozens of thousands of digital art creators used Showtime to curate, customize and showcase their art collection from all NFT platforms – all in one user-friendly interface. Although today’s NFTs are still mostly collectibles, tryShowtime was a sneak peak into a very bright future for web3 social networks.

• From now on, we will be testing out many web3 social features, starting with Free NFTs. This past month, the NFT landscape has drastically shifted away from mindless speculation, and as always, we’re thinking ahead. We are launching Free NFTs imminently, letting anyone claim a free NFT from their favorite creator (more details later in this article). Next, we are excited about non-financial primitives such as creator tokens (read our CEO Alex Masmej’s on a16z Future) and soulbound tokens.

• We are committed to building bleeding-edge web3 social features. Despite the extreme market environment, we stay true to our mission: make web3 accessible, friendlier and social. Success for us means that people tell their friends to use Showtime. Thanks to our world-class investors including Paradigm, Dragonfly and Naval, we are fortunate to be playing the long game as a healthy company; in fact, we are currently hiring! Check out our open roles here.

Now that we caught up, let’s breakdown the major changes coming with Showtime 2.

From digital artists to all content creators.

First, we realized that digital artists didn’t need tryShowtime as much as they used to. Since last summer, NFT marketplaces consolidated, OpenSea became the clear category winner, thus making “aggregating NFT marketplaces” not as relevant as it once was. Plus, art collectors represent only a dozen wealthy people per artist on average, a dynamic far removed from social networks like Instagram or TikTok, where popular creators engage with immeasurably larger audiences. Instead of facilitating the occasional expensive trade, we focus on building lightweight, repeatable user interactions that feel familiar to people.

So we asked ourselves: if not digital artists, who today would benefit the most from a web3 social network? Our answer fits into what we call “web3 content creators”. Here are two examples of users we think may benefit from Showtime:

• Web3-curious musicians. Musicians are infamously struggling to live off their passion. Not only do streaming services like Spotify don’t pay well, but their complete lack of transparency prevents artists to communicate and engage with their listeners. And unlike the dozen hobbyist collector per digital artist, musicians have thousands and even millions of hardcore fans (“NFTs and a Thousand True Fans“, Chris Dixon). Music NFTs are nice collectibles, but what tool can we build for the millions of dedicated listeners who can’t afford expensive NFTs? This is what we at Showtime want to figure out.

• Tech-literate content creators. Content creators also have a hard time monetizing their content, and tech-centered creators are more eager than ever to experiment with novel ways of engaging their communities. For example, Adam Levy is the host of Mint, a podcast discussing the web3 creator economy. Mint audience is crypto-native, so it wouldn’t be hard for his audience to experiment with new ways to create value and reward engagement. Adam gifted listeners “Participation NFTs” as a proof that they were early fans of the podcast.

Those kinds of people who are willing to experiment provide a unique opportunity to go beyond buying and selling NFTs, and instead experiment with features that do not require existing capital, like earning digital assets for free.

With that in mind, we are proud to announce our newest feature: Free NFTs.

Free NFTs: Claim a free NFT from your favorite creator.

Free NFTs provide the easiest way for the average internet user to own their very first NFT. With Free NFTs, a creator can easily drop a NFT to their community via a shareable link. In details:

• You guessed it: entirely free! Free to drop, free to claim, zero gas fees.

• Grow your web3 audience: each claimer will automatically follow you on Showtime, so creators will be able to engage with their holders.

• Creators make money only if fans make money: thanks to EIP-2981, secondary sales on OpenSea and any Polygon-supported NFT marketplaces will earn royalties for their creators.

• Owned by creators: each drop is a collection minted via Zora Editions, meaning that a creator has total control over their drop. They can display and sell it outside of Showtime, and even add features via tools such as such as Guild.xyz (NFT-gated group chats) or Coinvise.co (NFT-gated airdrops).

The rationale for Free NFTs is simple: most people are currently priced out of NFTs, so we need to kickstart their web3 journey in a way that doesn’t involve money. We want people to engage with their favorite creators and access experiences they couldn’t have before thinking about perhaps gain value someday. On the other hand, creators don’t want their web3 campaign to be seen as a cash grab, but are always eager to engage with their audience in new and meaningful ways. And since they can add features to their NFT drop, they can create their own exclusive membership pass. Possibilities are endless for creators to make their drop a fun and attractive giveaway. And if the NFT ever resells, both the creator and their earliest fans make money together.

We can’t wait to see how creators will use Free NFTs. Tag us @Showtime_xyz to let us know and we may share your drop if we like it.

A universal app (iPhone, Android, web) powered by our open-source design system.

As we announced earlier, we took some time to make Showtime the most accessible web3 platform. Following that vision, our new app is available on web, iPhone and Android.

And we’re open-sourcing our app: our frontend lead Axel Delafosse published our design system live at the App.js conference. You can watch Axel’s talk here. Openly contributing to React Native pushes forward the most popular web3 mobile framework: React Native, also used by apps like Rainbow Wallet, Coinbase Wallet and MetaMask. This benefits the entire ecosystem as a whole.

The end(?) of marketplaces aggregation: focusing on Showtime NFTs

As part of our changes, we took the difficult decision to stop aggregating NFT marketplaces, and solely display Showtime NFTs on our app. This includes our current marketplace and our new Free NFTs feature.

This was a tough call: Showtime got its rapid start last year because it pulled NFTs from Opensea, Hic et Nunc and more. But as we noted earlier, the market has changed and instead of displaying collectibles, we believe that doubling down on our in-house web3 innovation is the best way forward. We may aggregate other NFTs again in the future, but for now, we believe it’s best to reduce our scope.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

We as an ecosystem have a generational opportunity to break free from platforms like Facebook, and give the enormously valuable data they profit from straight to users. Primitives like NFTs, social tokens, non-transferable tokens and more will help us get there.

See y’all in the metaverse,

The Showtime team.

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Discord to stay tuned for our upcoming announcements.

Here are the App Store links to try out our open beta:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/gK6e2Kn2

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.showtime

This is a big milestone for our team, and we’re excited to hear your feedback and suggestions to improve the app and release novel features you will love.

In this piece, we will do a breakdown of the app features, disclose bugs we’re aware of, tell you how to give us feedback, and how to reach out to us directly.

Features to try

Create a NFT with your phone, not with gas.

On Showtime, creating a NFT is as easy as posting a photo online. We pay gas fees for you so that the entire process as easy as possible.

Pictures and videos are uploaded to IPFS and the NFT itself lives on the Polygon blockchain. Note: your media is immutable and cannot be deleted – please keep that in mind when uploading content.

Swipe through trailblazing art creators. Follow them in one tap.

Showtime comes with two feeds to swipe on: Following, made up of creators you follow, and For You, where we learn about your taste and suggest NFTs we think you will love.

On the Trending tab, you can discover popular creators and NFTs and connect with them, whether by liking, commenting, sharing or following their content.

Connect wallet, show off collection.

Thanks to WalletConnect, you can sign a transaction on your to Rainbow or Metamask (for free) to automatically create your Showtime profile and showcase your NFTs.

No wallet? Use your phone number.

No wallet, no worries: simply use your phone number and confirm your one-time password. We’ll create a Showtime account for you alongside an Ethereum address that you control. Magic!

Known bugs

We are aware of the following issues:

• the app may slow down or crash when loading large media files.

• when minting a NFT, you may need to refresh your profile and wait a few minutes until it shows up.

• You may not have all your NFTs appear on your profile, or may see undesirable ones such as malicious or unwanted airdrops.

We are working on all of those issues and invite you to help us improve the app by doing the steps outlined below.

How to help us improve the app

Report bugs and app crashes on TestFlight

First, make sure to always update the app, and kill it regularly – this triggers our OTA or “Over the Air” updates which automatically updates the app, in between TestFlight updates.

On TestFlight, you can report bugs directly from the app by taking a screenshot and tapping “Share Beta Feedback…” alongside your experience (see images below).

Reach out to us directly

1. You can reach out by joining our Discord community for any questions, especially on the #mobile-app channel: click here to join our Discord server.

2. You can follow us and message us on Twitter and Instagram.

3. Lastly, feel free to book a call with Deborah from our team to schedule a time on how to improve your experience!

Give us suggestions and feature requests

We always love to hear from you, and we have built many features based on your feedback in the past. You can use Nolt.io to suggest and upvote feature requests from our community: click here to suggest what we should build next.

That’s all y’all! Reminder: try our app today on iOS TestFlight & Android:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/gK6e2Kn2

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.showtime

I’m excited to see how this app evolves thanks to your support, and want to give a shout out to our amazing team for pioneering web3 mobile.

We’ll see y’all in the metaverse,

-$ALEX Masmej

We are excited to announce that we transitioning from our current web-only infrastructure to a unified iPhone, Android and web app (coming out soon – stay tuned!).

As a result, we will no longer be supporting Tezos wallets and NFTs (specifically, Hicetnunc and Kalamint NFTs). Querying and displaying NFT data in real-time is no easy feat, so we had to make a choice: going forward, we will prioritize Ethereum-based blockchains. We thank the Tezos NFT community for their continued support to Showtime. As an alternative, we recommend creators to use Polygon PoS — used by our current marketplace — as their primary minting blockchain. Social links redirecting to your H.E.N. and Kalamint collections will remain available to showcase on your Showtime profile.

Thank you for your understanding and words of encouragement. Last year, your excitement for our original web app blew us away. We are thrilled to unveil the next chapter for us – the easiest way to create and discover NFTs, and new features you’ve never seen before – very soon™.

See you all in the metaverse, Alex Masmej Founder, Showtime

PS: if you’re reading this, you might be eligible for our Showtime Genesis Drop NFT. We wanted to celebrate all early Showtime users that signed in before August 23rd. Claim it here for free:

https://claim.tryshowtime.com/