Welcome to our panel discussion led by Rachel Golden, Senior Integrated Marketing Manager at RECUR featuring Jeremy Levitan, the pioneering CEO behind Dew Drops, and Max Wilson, VP of Product at RECUR. Dew Drops is revolutionizing the art and collectibles space, creating a unique platform where artists and collectors can converge simply and seamlessly.
Built on the RECUR Builder platform, Dew Drops innovatively combines art, technology, and communication, introducing a seamless way for consumers to collect art. With art drops accessible through daily text messages, the platform transforms the consumer experience, making minting and collecting digital collectibles a breeze.
In this transcript, we talk about the journey of building Dew Drops, their mission to enhance the consumer experience in the web3 space and their upcoming exciting art drops. In addition, we delve into how RECUR Builder has been instrumental in bringing this vision to life, making art collection not just easy but delightful for all. So, join us as we unfold the fascinating stories of artists, collectors, and the future of digital art.
Jeremy: Absolutely, Dew Drops has been a little over a year in the making, and we're super excited to peel back the curtain this week and reveal what we've been building.
The idea behind it really is to remove all of the friction of discovery and collecting from the art and collectibles space. Having been in the NFT space for a bit now, it's hard to find high-quality art, digital collectibles, and other things. It's even more difficult for the mass consumer to come in and figure out, “How do I purchase that? What do I do with it? How will I enjoy it?”
So, we started this business with a mission to solve that discovery problem and remove Most of the friction around the collecting experience.
We have a tremendous team that's been building. We have some amazing investors that have backed this and believe in this mission. And more is going to be coming out over the coming weeks.
I’m really excited to peel back and reveal what we're doing and talk about how all of the web3 technology that's powering this is built on the RECUR Builder platform, what the actual backend is going to look like, and how that's going to empower the consumer experience.
Jeremy: Absolutely. Let's talk about what the actual experience on Dew Drops will be, and then we can take a step back and talk about what's happening behind the scenes, which is part of the magic of the RECUR Builder platform.
So the consumer is going to come in and sign up on dewdrops.co, they're going to attach a phone number, and they're going to give us the ability and consent to send them text messages with amazing art. They're going to attach a credit card. And then, every day at around noon, they'll get a text. And it will say, “Do you want to collect this amazing piece of art?” And in order to collect that art, all the consumer has to do is reply, “Yes,” or the number they want to collect. And then we'll handle all of the web3 magic behind the scenes.
So, the consumer interface is as simple as, “Do you want to collect this?” And if they respond, “Yes,” it's all done. It's all minted. It’s held in their wallet. And sort of that's the magic.
And then behind the scenes, what's happening on RECUR Builder is all of this weird new functionality that we've been working on over the last couple of months, which is “minting on behalf of.”
So, it's this idea that we now have the authority to go in and charge the credit card that's been connected to the account. At the end of the day, we collect all the orders between noon and 11:59pm, then do the minting to send everything out to everyone’s wallets at once.
Max: Yeah, sure. I can give a quick overview of RECUR first and then get into that.
RECUR is a web3 software platform that offers a unified toolkit for enhancing both existing products with web3 functionality, as well as building brand new experiences from the ground up.
As you see, in the case of Dew Drops, this is done in an incredibly simple way where the end result feels authentic to the brand. And I don't know if you've had a chance to visit the Dew Drops website yet, but it looks gorgeous. They've done an incredible job with the tools available.
So yeah, you can think of RECUR as a box that you can plug into your experience to power everything from minting to payment processing to custodial wallets to gamification systems that you use to drive a web3 experience. And businesses can get this going in a matter of weeks.
But what excites me is seeing a business like Dew Drops using the software to do things that haven't been done before. It's challenging to think of any other example of a product that's approaching things like casual adoption and finding new ways to collect and enjoy art as Dew Drops is doing.
And in terms of functionality behind the scenes, what's happening here is this experience is driven by a product called RECUR Builder, which we released in the last few months. You can think of RECUR Builder as a tool or an admin panel for handling the creation and distribution of NFTs, managing gamification and economy, and deploying that application. The format feels very akin to using a traditional analytics or marketing product, which is what our customers are already accustomed to.
The majority of the web3 teams we interact with are not Solidity engineers or Rust developers. They're mere mortals like the rest of us. So it's key to us that we're abstracting away the complexity of web3.
Jeremy: So, about a year and a half ago, when I was incubating this idea, I surveyed all of the available web3 technology platforms (this is sort of where we start to see an evolution from companies hiring large amounts of Solidity developers and building things in-house, so like manifold and a bunch of things emerging for the commodification of this space.) and when we looked at the pillars we needed to build within Dew Drops, there was this need to implement large-scale custodial wallet and payment technologies. So we did a traditional SWOT analysis, and RECUR rose to the top. I Don't think there's a better custodial wallet technology out there.
And if you want to build a mass market consumer adoption platform for digital collectibles, I always come back to the example of my parents. My dad is 76 years old, lives in South Florida, and every single one of his passwords is written on a yellow legal pad in his office. I could never see him onboarding NFTs or digital collectibles in a major way. And writing a 12-word super phrase on a sheet of paper? That's just never gonna happen.
So, for the people that have been left out, if you want to drive mass adoption, you have to remove all of the friction to sign up; how do I actually pay for something? How do I create a wallet? How do I make sure that it's secure? And when we did that analysis, there was nobody that rose to the top even close to what RECUR is building. And this is in the early days of product ideation, and with RECUR Builder, the platform's a lot farther along now. But I don't think we could have picked a better partner as we started out on this journey.
So they have everything there to enable us to help tell these stories—our stories—within Dew Drops, the stories around the artist and why they're creating. The message is that they're trying to build a collector base, and we can do that in a way right now where we don't have to worry about any of the web3 pieces. Really, It becomes magic behind the scenes because it's all powered by RECUR.
Jeremy: Absolutely. What we saw was that artists always have stories to tell. What's becoming harder and harder in this space is finding outlets to tell that story and how to identify and attract new collectors.
Discovery has been harder for both the artists' side to find new collectors and for collectors to find new artists. So, we've found this weird intersection between what Dew Drops is building and the time that we're coming to market with this ability to start to uncover mass consumer adoption.
So, the idea of how you create a frictionless platform where we send out that text somebody looks at and says, “This is an amazing piece of art that I want to collect!” The price points are all approachable, so nothing's a huge barrier to entry.
The response from the artist community has been tremendous. There's going to be a lot more coming out on this next week. But I can say that the first drop will happen mid-week next week. There will be a lot more information coming out about that.
So, I've seen a lot of the artists coming to the platform. I've seen a lot of the finished art. It knocks my socks off every time I look at any of the pieces coming to the platform. We're starting to have conversations with larger brands about bringing some of their IP to the platform. But what it always comes down to is that we have stories to tell. Dew Drops, as a brand, and artists have stories to tell. And we want to help connect artists to audiences to allow audiences and collectors to resonate, discover, and enjoy.
What I tell my team all the time is that collecting should be fun.
Jeremy: I think first and foremost, it's been something that's been missing from the space forever. If you look at the evolution of a lot of other things that are being sold, and it's not hard, but it's things like if you buy shoes, or sneakers, or limited edition drops, these are things where notifications are going out by text. There's not a frictionless way to buy, it's not reply and tell me your shoe size, and something's going to show up at your door.
But we see a lot of movement, especially if I came from the ad tech/mar tech world. We talked about digital identities eroding. There are a lot of privacy headwinds in the space. This last immutable identifier, your phone number, everybody carries around their mobile device. They're on it, whatever, 14 hours a day. Somebody doesn't want to go back to their laptop or desktop and connect to some site and make sure it's secure, and double-check links and all of those things.
And artists, what we're hearing over and over again, is that it’s been a giant barrier to bringing on collectors. They're selling to the same group of people over and over again. And it's been tremendous. But expanding out and finding new collectors, finding people who really enjoy art who can start to tell those artists' stories, and expanding the audience. That's something everybody struggles with.
It's not just the art community, but every industry that we talked about, every industry that I've ever worked with in the mar tech and ad tech space, that's always the struggle.
So it's been a tremendous response we've heard from the artist’s side, where they're like, yes, this solves that absolute need. My reach on Twitter is decaying. My discord has turned toxic. How do I find those net-new collectors going forward? We think we are going to bring on board a large set of net new qualified collectors that all they have to do to collect is just respond back with the number of additions that they want to buy. And that's tremendously exciting for artists and brands that we're talking with.
Jeremy: We really want to create a diversity of voices and archetypes on the platform and a diversity of media and really represent the broader space that's out there. The number one pillar is it has to be good art. Which can mean a lot of things, but there's always a story that's being told.
There are static images and fine art paintings. There's photography coming down the line, there's animated pieces coming down. I think if you are a digital art collector, What I like to say is you build a durable business not by selling something every single day to every single person. But by having everybody, the moment that they get that text on a daily basis, they open it, they smile, and they say that's a really good piece of art. And then maybe people once a month, twice a month are like, “I'm going to collect that. That's durable. Right? It's not durable if you're hitting everybody over the head and you're expecting every day, every single person on the platform to buy.
So we have a giant range of styles of art. We have a range of price points. There'll be some things that are timed editions, meaning we send out the initial text at noon, and as long as somebody replies by 1159 at night, they’re going to go into that pool. There are going to be things that are limited editions where all the orders that come in over the course of that 12 hours will go into a randomized and democratic process to receive their art.
We really tried to remove a lot of the barriers to collecting. We really want this to be an open-access platform where we help artists tell stories, and we help collectors uncover their stories and really find meaning in what they're collecting. And then, along the way, we hope everybody just smiles when they see what they're getting in the text message. And even if they don't buy, they walk away going, “I really like what they're building there. I really liked the quality of art they're bringing. I like the quality of the artists they're bringing. I like the quality of the stories that they're bringing to market.”
Jeremy: Well, it's never going to be my art. There aren’t a lot of crayon doodles which, unfortunately, is the medium I typically work in. But there's going to be some amazing pieces. I'm trying to walk gingerly around talking about what's coming up because I know who we have coming up, and it is. It's good. I smile when I look at the inaugural set, and I'm like, “Oh my god, I can't believe that these are on our platform.” I look at what's coming up in July, and I can't believe these are on our platform. And some of it is artists I've already collected and some that aspirationally I've wanted to collect and have never been able to approach due to a particular price point, or I've never been able to time it where I'm on the site at the 30 seconds with the right gas to be able to mint. And all that falls by the wayside. None of that matters anymore when we have a platform like Dew Drops, and collecting is as easy as just replying to a text message saying I want to buy two of this edition by artists, “blank.”
Jeremy: That's correct. So, in the early part of next week, we'll have a lot more information about the inaugural set of artists that are coming on, the first drop, and when that's going to happen. The first artist is insane. Like, I wish I could say more. This entire set of inaugural artists is amazing. And again, Julian and the rest of our team just knocked it out of the park making sure that we have a diversity of viewpoints and art styles represented in this inaugural collection.
Jeremy: Absolutely. So I'll say that the signup process—because we are sending text messages to consumers and we want there to be a payment method that's attached to the account—it’s a little bit more steps than I think a lot of people are used to. It's very different from a traditional web3 signup. The benefit of already having a RECUR account is that in order to sign up for Dew Drops, there are basically two steps: You log in and give us permission to text you, and then attach a new payment method.
Because we did build on RECUR Builder, on sign up, every single collector, not just the RECUR community, every single collector that signs up; we've built a set of characters on our side—the initial character is a character called Dewey, he’s a dewdrop obviously. He's a character made of water, and we're excited to start telling his story, what he does behind the scenes, and how he helps uncover and unearth art and bring storytelling to life.
Every single collective that signs up is going to get a Dewey collectible sent to their wallet. No purchase is required. Just sign up, opt-in, attach a payment method, and then, starting next week, we're going to start to have this interactive dialogue with collectors over text message just to introduce them to the mechanism of how the platform's gonna work and RECUR collectors, RECUR community, when they interact with those messages, are going to get a different version of that interaction collectible as well. So there are going to be TWO special edition collectibles available, at no charge, to the collector community that's already on RECUR just for signing up and starting to interact with our tech this week and next week.
Check out the full recording here and learn more about how like Dew Drops, you can get started with RECUR Builder.
