For this section I’m going to assume some level of open-ness in the Metaverse, not an entirely walled garden but some kind of environment where users can intermediate between what is provided to them and their own experience.

Imagine things like browser extensions, not used by everyone but used by enough people that they have their own eco-system, and extensions can range from the simple to the complex and you can write them for yourself, or install them from a curated store. You can find tools that block ads, add functionality to websites, or all kinds of other things.

Regardless of how you experience the metaverse(more on that later), I think there is going to be a booming business on how users tailor their experience, taking the best that the Internet/Metaverse has, and shaping it to be the experience that they want. If you want to run a metaverse startup, I actually think this is one of the most compelling areas, because it offers a low cost and low barrier to entry way to offer a product either to end users or to create something that a larger internet company will see value in, and offer you an exit through acquisition.

Let’s talk about what a good idea would require, something where being first and being reasonably competent gives you a substantial and sustainable advantage against a competitor with similar resources (I’d argue that you can fight out a 10x difference in wealth, but 100x difference is probably overwhelming). You need:

• Sticky - something people want to keep using, so not a one-time trick

• AI friendly - the data from using your product should drive increasing the value of your product

• Value - clear value to at least one side of an experience, enough value they would pay you

So let’s talk about 2 pretty obvious options to help you imagine your own unicorn idea. (If you have one, I’d love to hear about it).

The Virtual Virtual Mall. As mentioned before (prior post), what if you wanted to experience a shopping mall style VR (or website) experience that was built just for you. Imagine pulling together all of the stores (websites just as easily as VR) that you like to shop at, and curating them for just your needs. Giving you one reasonably seemless experience to go hunt for either something specific or to just browse for physical or virtual good that you want right now. Sticky: If this makes your shopping experience better, wouldn’t you always want that? AI: Learning from your habbits and needs make it better, learning from the habbits of thousands of people makes it vastly better, highlight what people like you have found interesting can provide incredible value to the shopper. Value: this oozes value because it is not just good for the shopper, but the data collected is also valuable to the stores, and although you need to be careful how you monetize it, the options are plentiful.

The Anechoic Chamber. A lot has been made of the eco-chamber nature of the internet, something magnified by just about every system that tries to drive engagement, and that is that it will feed you information that keeps you engaged. That engagement doesn’t come from being bored or challenged, but from hearing views like your own, or more frequently slightly more extreme views than you entered the room with. So what if we provided a service that was designed to reduce the eco in the chamber, an AI on your shoulder to help you deal with some of the more challenging bits of human nature by looking at your content stream, performing either automated or perhaps human curated analysis of the information and helping to quell (or just highlight) some of the more extreme influences. First you would be offering the service a position between you and content, so it would need to be trustworth as well as trusted to provide you an honest view, a difficult but not impossible situation, although one used as easily for evil as it would be for good. Stickyness - If it doesn’t interfere (much) with the experience and you sell the value proposition to the user, it should be a positive. AI Friendly - between semantic analysis AI, and economies of scale if you can re-use the analysis, as well as the ability to learn from the patterns of multiple users, this should be a scalable technology along several dimensions. It would likely be better to implement for each content provider, but clearly the market here is for people that consume from several sources or don’t trust the largest providers (FB, YT, Twitter, Reddit, etc). Value - harder to monetize because it hurts the metrics of the content providers, but possibly a subscription users would pay for on their own. There might also be groups willing to help fund this, as the democracy you save could be your own.

Just 2 examples, but I think that there is a lot of transformative opportunity to be had in standing between the users and the major content providers, providing seamless integrations between different aspects of the metaverse and in selling lenses through which you can view and interact with all of the different offerings. This is where relatively low cost systems can spring up, and make the really exciting things happen that will highlight the value in an open or federated system of different service providers. If the metaverse turns into a walled garden (or a few of them), there will be vastly less opportunity in this space as the different systems will be incentivized not to interact with each other and not allow the user to place a layer between the content and themselves.