TV Timeouts and NBA Top Shot
We're almost through the first quarter of the NBA season, and I think it's time for a huddle up with the Top Shot team
It’s mid-November and we are 15 games into the NBA season. The Washington Wizards are at the top of the Eastern Conference and the defending champ Milwaukee Bucks would be on the outside looking in if the playoffs started today. It’s safe to say “We’re EARLY!” in the 2021-22 NBA Season. Hell, we haven’t even gotten to the TV timeout of the 1st quarter.
Top Shot is in lockstep with the NBA. Less than a month ago, the Series 3 roadmap was released which included a ton of exciting details regarding common, rare, and legendary pack drops between now and July 2022. We are officially two weeks, and two base pack drops, into this 9 month roadmap, but man does it feel like Top Shot is in dire need of a TV timeout of their own.
Roham announced yesterday that he’s doing a community update and an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) in the Discord on Saturday morning. I appreciate the accessibility of Roham, the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, and his willingness to get out there and chop it up with the homies.
I am excited for this community update, it’s been almost four months since we had an ol’ fashioned Office Hours, and that feels way way to long. However, I can’t say that I’m stoked to have to navigate the bottomless pit of the #general channel of the Top Shot Discord on Saturday morning.
I started this blog almost 8 months ago, and those of you who have followed me since the early days know that it wasn’t out of the norm to see “The Daily Data” hit your inbox EVERY morning. Since then, #ShowMeTheData has really taken on a life of it’s own. We’ve got an amazing Discord community with some of the sharpest minds in Top Shot and the Google Sheets have made a name for themselves as one of the best tools in the industry.
Partially inspired by the Packrip Media post earlier tonight, I thought it sounded like good idea to fire up the typing machine and send out a blog post into the depths of the internet. Just like the good ol’ days. Headphones on. Press play on “2014 Forest Hills Drive”. Here we go!
Get Back to Our Roots
It’s irrefutable the impact that Top Shot had on the crypto/NFT/digital collectible landscape in the spring of 2021. One could argue that being active on the Top Shot platform was the most fun you could have with your pants on in February/March. It was absolutely electric!
Let’s get back to that.
There is nothing that galvanizes Twitter and Discord like Top Shot. Literally nothing. All-Star Week last season was a “20 hour/day” screen time kinda week. Can’t miss internet. Since then, the community has grown up. People have figured out MetaMasks, NFTs, Ethereum/Polygon/Solana/DeFi, and most importantly gotten exposure to other projects that have taken the internet by storm (remember the 12 year old who maybe wasn’t a 12 year old who did those whales? wild).
I am sure there are lessons learned from the Office Hours last summer, but that doesn’t mean we should completely nix them from the gameplan. Look how Cole Anthony is doing this year after an up-and-down rookie season. While the blog posts are always a welcome sight, I can’t help but think about the positive impact it would have on the community if these were only posted every Thursday at 3pm PST. There’s something to be said for a repeatable cadence with which people can expect to receive information.
Picture this, Thursday at 10am PST - old challenge ends, two hours later the new challenge starts, three hours later the weekly blog post goes live. Friday 11am PST - Base Pack queue opens, then one hour later Office Hours start while everyone is queued up. Starting to sound like can’t miss internet again.
These Expectations, Their Getting Higher
When a majority of the current user base joined last Spring, the Top Shot platform was already lightyears ahead of the competition. You could argue that there is still no other project out there who has as robust of a product as Top Shot currently does. The problem is, we all have seen the massive funding rounds that Dapper Labs has received, making it a multi-billion dollar valued company. These funding rounds lead to increased expectations of what is already considered a top-tier blue chip project.
But that’s to be expected. The Top Shot community is far too passionate to hold this project to anything but the highest of standards. We expect the best of the best, and it’s hard to fault us for that.
Here’s three ideas that I’ll quickly rattle off, which may help appease some of these expectations:
Have a few more people within the Top Shot leadership team be public facing. The job that Jacob, Luke, Alan, Candi and others (can’t forget Usman back in the day) do on a weekly basis is monumental. It’s been extremely refreshing to see Austin Kent get out and about and share more about his role as Head of Content. Let’s see the same from the Economist, the General Manager, the Head of Marketing, the Lead Engineer, etc. We don’t expect that the community reps will have all the answers to every question, but it would be nice hearing more often from some of the people who might.
Help the community understand the metrics and data that Dapper Labs uses. How do you measure how many new users are joining the platform each month? Are the current measurements aligned with expectations? How do you decide how many base packs to add to the queue every week? How did you decide on the criteria for the last few showcase challenges? People don’t need to necessarily agree with the information you put out, but it would at least give everyone a basic understanding for how decisions get made. Right now it seems like a lot of these questions are turning into a very poorly run group-think-Twitter-guessing-game. Simply providing the information for the people to digest on their own would be hugely beneficial.
I can understand that overpromising and underdelivering is not something that Top Shot wants to be known for. And I can also understand the willingness to keep some things close to the vest to help ensure the element of surprise isn’t completely removed from the collector experience. However, I still think there is an opportunity to provide more roadmaps to help supplement the “Pack Release & Set” one from last month. A few that come to mind: “Marketplace Mechanics”, “Hardcourt”, “Collector Score and Baller Status”, and “Challenges”. It doesn’t really matter if these roadmaps are conservative as all hell. If accountability is something that is a struggle internally, add an extra 6 months on to everything. Just help us understand what the priorities are.
In summary, I think it’s better to overcommunicate certain things rather than leaving us Top Shot collectors to our own devices. I’ll continue to say that it doesn’t really matter if people don’t agree with information that is being put out there. I’ll probably always side with the facts presented in the formal Top Shot communications rather than the anonymous egg profile pic on Twitter, but hey I can’t speak for everyone. At the end of the day, we are all inherently betting on the Top Shot team anyways, and we all have a sense of “trust the process” when it comes to this platform. Just help make us privy to a little bit more of the process.
Grab the Low Hanging Fruit
I don’t think it’s worth recapping some of the recent oversights that have arisen on the communications front over the last few weeks. We all make mistakes, and in Top Shot’s defense, when they make a mistake they almost always overcompensate the ones who were affected by it the most. In the grand scheme of things, some of these recent blunders are incredibly minor. On the same token, they do seem incredibly easy to clean up as well. I hope this is simply a case of “run bad” and this isn’t the new normal.
Thinking about some of the easy stuff, let’s talk about blog posts for a second. It doesn’t seem like a big ask that when a blog post gets updated, there’s a clearly labelled “Edited on _____” section with a summary of what was edited. And for the love of god can the edited blog posts then get cycled up to the top of the timeline please? It would definitely help provide sanity for some of the crazy people like me who have damn near memorized these blog posts.
Can we please have a page on the official Top Shot website that outlines all of the current collector scores for each series along with the active team/set bonuses. (UPDATE: This exists!!! It’s not the most straightforward thing to get to, but I’ve updated the words above with the appropriate links) I have to admit that I feel like a third baseman trying to remember where to set up for the shift when I pull out my cheat sheet CS notecard sitting next to my computer. If it’s that hard for someone like me who lives and breathes numbers, I can only imagine the hurdle that brand new collectors face when they join the platform and need to piece together multiple blog posts to understand Collector Score.
Maybe this one isn’t a low-hanging fruit, but it seems like ideas.nbatopshot.com could really be a pretty dang useful tool if more people were engaged with it. Maybe that’s on me for not hanging out in Top Shot #general enough, but this thing could have some serious firepower if the community knew this was a way to let our voices be heard.
I think that’s where I’ll end this post tonight. Thanks for listening to the brain dump of one of Top Shot’s most passionate collectors. Anybody that knows me knows that I generally like to take the zoomed out view on things. Top Shot isn’t going anywhere. Not only does it have access to some of the best IP and partnerships in the NFT space, but it’s by far and away got the strongest and most passionate collector base. While it’s easy for us to get frustrated along the way, it’s just as easy for us to get fired up and going full throttle in the positive direction. I am confident that we’ll start to see some improvements to the overall collector experience. We’ve got a lot of ballgame left folks!
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It's good. Love the comment about CS