#24: Anton Bernstein, Co-Founder @ Pocket Worlds | How they built and grew Metaverse apps with over 3 Million Monthly Active Users

If you're a Metaverse skeptic, this episode might change your mind. I talked with Anton, whose apps have built metaverse since 2016, so long before this word became popular. And they make $30M/year. How it's possible? Check out the episode! Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/web3talks Follow Anton & Mac: https://twitter.com/antonber https://twitter.com/MacBudkowski 0:37 Intro 1:27 Quick history of Pocketworlds and HighRise 2:30 How did Anton get into web3, and why did they add web3 to their web2 app making $100M/yr in transaction volume 5:10 How Mac got hooked to HighRise 5:55 Who’s the typical user of Highrise and Everskies apps, and why do they use them? 8:04 Why avatar chats and Second Life didn’t take off and why people might get into metaverse now 11:15 Monoculture vs. Subcultures in the Metaverse 13:08 Why focusing on subcultures might work 14:19 Why their first two apps didn’t work out, and how did they use paid acquisition to get the first HighRise users 17:00 Why their retention curve goes against common knowledge 19:37 How they learned who was the 5% of the most engaged users and why 10% of their employees are former users 21:10 Why web3 is a good fit for their users and how they convinced them 21:35 How they sold out their NFT collection in 30 seconds by making millions of $ and becoming top5 collections on Immutable X despite the UX hurdles 23:40 How Mac realized that Metaverse makes sense 27:20 Metaverse is like Burning Man - focused on self-expression and interactions where you can be who you want to be 29:30 Two methods of letting users generate the content in Highrise and Everskies 32:55 How Anton’s friend makes millions of $ a year by making content in Second Life 34:30 How they want to let people earn revenue and why he’s more interested in this world than Axie Inifity’s model 35:15 How do they make their $30M revenue/year, and how it’s going to change with web3 <36:10 cut how they’re transitioning into web3> 37:40 Is Anton scared about risking their current business model during the transition 39:46 Hardest things about running a consumer app 42:45 Why they didn’t give up despite the two failed projects 43:45 What would Anton fix about web3 46:16 The most mind-blowing projects Anton has seen 48:00 His experience during Axie Infinity summer 49:29 How would he fix Axie Infinity to make it more sustainable 51:05 People spending time vs. spending money on the games 54:27 Guests ideas - people from Immutable X & MiniRoyal FPS game on Solana 55:30 Why it’s hard to transition to a sustainable model for STEPN 56:30 Where people can learn more about PocketWorlds