Within the decade, 1 million people will earn their living from the metaverse and 100 million will build for fun. Small teams will launch virtual events, solo entrepreneurs will make games, others will be fashion designers, and opportunities we’ve yet to even imagine. All these people are Builders and they work in the Builder Economy.

The Builder Economy is not another word for Creator Economy. How creators work and the support they need is completely different. That’s why we launched bildrs.io, a decentralised community, token, and technology stack. It empowers builders to team up, make money working with the world’s biggest companies, and secure investment for their next big idea.

Twenty years in the making

We launched bildrs.io this year but the story starts 20 years ago.

I dropped out of university aged 19 to create an online community where teenagers could meet, explore as avatars, play games, make friends and have fun. Today we call this the metaverse, and it’s not just for teenagers!

I was the lead programmer. With no prior experience, we managed to launch our world in 1999, wrangled our way onto national TV, and we grew rapidly. We started to make money and pioneered some of the first in-game sponsorships. I fondly remember Red Bull sponsoring our virtual skatepark.
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Then came the dot com crash.

Our revenue dried up overnight. Having never raised investment or run a business before, we had to figure out how to survive. Quickly.

It wasn’t easy. Almost twenty years later, dubit.io builds metaverse experiences for the world’s biggest brands, incorporating many ideas we pioneered twenty years before.

History is repeating in other ways too. In the last two years, I’ve worked with teams of talented young people making hugely popular Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite worlds. Like my talented team twenty years ago, most of these young people have not run businesses before (or even had a job) and don’t have investors to support them.

Bildrs.io is the community I wish existed 20 years ago. I made many (many) mistakes, didn’t know how to work with big companies, or raise money. I want bildrs.io to help this generation of metaverse entrepreneurs succeed.

Why now?

I see three huge trends converging:

1. Amateurs beating professionals
2. Generative AI
3. Web3

All signs point to a massive, vibrant metaverse built by small teams of builders. Analysts predict a trillion-dollar economy. $trillion or not, the Builder Economy should work for the people, not just the elite, billionaires, and politicians. It’s time to build the metaverse we want.

1. Amateurs beating professionals

I believe the metaverse is inevitable.

BTW, metaverse does not mean VR, AR, or crypto. They can be involved, but they’re not required. The metaverse is just real-time 3D internet. The same 2D internet flywheels that drove YouTube and TikTok to over 3 billion monthly users are driving the metaverse (3D internet) to billions of users.

Let me explain…

We started warning TV execs about YouTube 15 years ago. They laughed. They weren’t worried about a website that streamed an annoying talking orange. They should have been.

Under 18s now watch as many minutes of YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch as they do Netflix, Prime, Hulu, and Disney+. This is remarkable. The streaming services are spending billions, it’s a golden age of video content, and yet amateur creators are capturing 50% of the viewing minutes.

How did the execs get it so wrong?

Years and years of experience taught them that making good video content is expensive. The two keywords are good and expensive.

Good is subjective.

Execs overestimated the importance of production values. It turns out people have an almost insatiable appetite for content that feeds their interests AND there are millions of different interests.

At the time, no one really understood how little production values mattered. Distribution through satellite and cable limited the number of available channels. So the logical choice was to make “middle of the road” content, propped up by high production values, in order to appeal to the most people. But that left lots of interests unserved.

Everything was fine for years. Then Apple created the smartphone. Faster than anyone expected, creating great videos became easy and cheap. Soon millions of amateur creators started producing content (that could never be created by traditional broadcasters) to feed those unmet interests. And that’s how we end up in a world where amateurs command 50% of the viewing time.

Metaverse is on the same journey

Technology and bandwidth have improved to the point that ‘amateurs’ can compete in the $200b video game market. Roblox is the canary in the coal mine. Every month 200m people visit experiences created by ‘amateurs’. It sounds like a lot, but three billion people regularly play games. If history is anything to go by, the ‘amateur’ builders are going to take more and more minutes from the traditional games industry, and they’ll do it by creating new kinds of experiences, many won’t even be games.

When I call Roblox builders amateurs it’s not an insult. Amateur distinguishes from the people working in big companies, and how those big companies think about small teams. I use it affectionately, the same way a hacker is a complement when used by a programmer.

We’ve seen this story before

Youtube was not the first time that professionals were disrupted by ‘amateurs’. Remember Newspapers? Possibly not if you were born after 1990… Nonetheless, newspapers were a great business. Revenue grew steadily for 50 years, reaching $65b in the early 2000s.

Ten years later revenue was down 75%. What happened in the early 2000s? The internet.

In truth, the internet had been around a lot longer. It was the early Web2 era that started the decline for newspapers. Enabled by tremendous database improvements and faster bandwidth, in the early 2000s the world was introduced to blogs, dynamic websites, and social networks.

Anyone could publish content. No more buying servers or database licenses. No learning Perl or PHP from an O’Reilly book. Just open the web browser and start typing.

Of course, millions of people started writing, and many many millions more started to read what they wrote. Newspapers, limited by real-world printing presses, could not compete. Billions of dollars of shareholder value disappeared.

Where did the billions go?

Value is shifting from the professionals to the amateurs. Business leaders and politicians don’t realise what’s happening.

The press focuses on the handful of creators making tens of millions of dollars. The reality is, there are 10s of millions making enough to never need to join the traditional workforce. And why would they? Who wants to wait tables if you can make $60k a year from TikTok or Roblox?

Gary Vee gets it, the world is changing and it’s not going back.
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There are some downsides to working the way Gary describes, chiefly a lack of support, infrastructure, and technology provided by a larger organisation. But that’s where decentralised communities like bildrs.io come in.

2. Generative AI

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that the metaverse is following a path we’ve seen before:

1. Technology innovation makes creating and distributing content easy enough for amateurs.
2. Amateurs begin creating content that would never have been made by professionals.
3. Consumers love the new content, it begins to steal time from the professionally made content.
4. It starts slowly but soon becomes self-fulfilling: content attracts consumers, consumers attract money, and money attracts more creators. More creators produce more content that brings even consumers, and so the flywheel spins.

The speed the disruption happens is almost entirely dependent on the first step; easier creation means more people can participate and more content is created.

However, creating metaverse experiences is not easy. It’s much easier than it was when we started Dubit twenty years ago, but still requires coding, artwork, and a great idea. Guess what. It’s about to get a whole lot easier.

I was told ideas won’t make me rich, execution matters more

I don’t remember who told me, but for the longest time they were right. I think it’s about to change. Or at least the balance is changing…

In last 12 months the world got to play with DALL.E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. Suddenly anyone (even me) could create amazing 2D artwork from a short written description. This is mind-blowing.
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A month ago Google published two projects that generate videos from written ‘scripts’. The examples are remarkable.

We are at a turning point in history. Creating all types of content is about to become 100x easier. Within the decade there will be hugely popular feature films created from a written script with no crew, filming, or animators.

This is a profound change. For the longest time investors and business leaders believed that ideas don’t make you rich, execution wins. AI is starting to make execution easy. The idea just became way more important.

3D models are next

Nvidia are working on creating 3D art in the same way. Quoting the CEO of Nvidia interviewed in Stratechery:

Instead of building a fort completely piece, by piece, by piece, you might be able to give it an outline of the fort that you’re think thinking about, and then just say, “Create a fort”, and this AI goes off and generates this amazing 3D fort. Then from there you get to modify it, or you keep it. “Show me another one,” or, “Show me another one,” and, “Show me another one,” and then, “Populate, surround this fort with a forest.” And, “Show me another one. Show me more tall trees, more this kind of tree. Add a lake.” So you want this environment to be a living, breathing thing and that foundation of the future of computer graphics and the future of games, is what RTX is all about.”

Very soon millions more people will be able to create amazing metaverse experiences that look like they’ve been made by teams of ‘professionals’. Its not just amazing graphics, Github’s Copilot points to a future where coding becomes 10x easier too.

Building the metaverse is about to get a whole lot easier, and the Builder Economy a whole lot bigger.

(As an aside. Think about what this does to the traditional AAA games industry. As game engines improved and processing power increased, the cost of making art to take advantage of those capabilities also increased. It’s common for art to cost tens of millions, or more than half the production budget. That could all change too.)

3. Web3

I think it’s obvious by now; I’m certain the metaverse is a big deal, and it will become a $trillion economy. But, there’s no reason it needs to function like our ‘real-world’ economy. Web3 enables the creation of a fairer, decentralised economy. An economy that works for all the people, not just the elite, the billionaires, and politicians.

This is our dream: a thriving economy of builders with the value shared fairly between the platforms and the creators.

We’ll publish our roadmap soon, but for now, bildrs.io strives to do three things:

1. Run a decentralised community and token
2. Create technology that helps builders make money
3. Empower builders to form teams as DAOs and raise investment from the community

BTW. We’ve been doing this quietly for the last 8 months. Our community of builders have created metaverse experiences that are played hundreds of millions of times a month and have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars working with the world’s biggest brands.

We’re slowly opening the community to builders who also share our vision. Come join us, and help make the next $trillion economy work for everyone.

Matt, CEO dubit.io and bildrs.io

P.S. Check our podcast where we interview some of the world’s best and most interesting metaverse builders 👀