Intro The Idea Potential Market Progress To Date Competition Revenue Model Operations The Team

What are we building?

Setu will be the preferred aggregator for NFTs, providing creators with a single application to manage the entire lifecycle of their NFTs.The app would allow users to create NFTs on the fly and be a full-fledged platform to create, mint, distribute and market the NFTs.

Using Setu, creators can upload their art on mobile and distribute it as NFT assets on different marketplaces like OpenSea, Rarible, etc., in easy steps even without having any crypto wallet or knowledge.

The Problem

Creating, minting, and selling NFT is a multi-step process and involves using multiple tools and sometimes even needing to code. The current process to create and distribute NFTs through various markets is complex and requires technical knowledge.

Setu solves these problems by creating a simple mobile-first platform that addresses the following challenges,

It solves problems like easy availability, marketplace portability, and NFT marketing ( refer to application questions).

Sai is a mid 20s professional who has heard that people’s art is being sold for 69 Million dollars. His favorite players like Kevin Durant have changed their profile pics as bored apes. His day-to-day friends are involved in conversations about stocks, crypto, or NFTs. He claims he is not artsy but loves to be engaged in current trends.

He is unable to find a single reliable mobile app that allows him to create NFTs that he can sell outside of the marketplace too, and setu can solve this with the app, which allows him to take a picture of his art and allows him to sell it on multiple marketplaces or even directly on his Instagram or Facebook.

You may also consider Setu to be similar to a combination of Buffer+Shopify where users can create, distribute, sell and market their digital assets (NFTs).

Potential Market

2021 saw the most significant rise in the NFT market, and customers are finding new avenues to learn and earn. The biggest driver to the growth of NFTs this past year has been the combined effects of the pandemic, Bitcoins’s bull run, the emergence of institutional investors(Nearly 8 in 10 investors surveyed felt digital assets have a place in a portfolio), etc. We hope to utilize the massive interest to provide a unique way for artists to express themselves. Setu wants to give creators and artists a simple platform to create and mint NFTs without knowing the underlying technology and help them sell those assets.

One way to size the NFT market would be a bottom-up approach – looking at the current market cap of Topshots, Cryptopunks, Art blocks, etc., and projecting their growth. Nansen estimates the market cap of the top collections to be greater than $4 Billion, that is the market cap of the top NFT. Overall monthly Sales of NFT are about 2-4 Billion, and In January, ‘22, we saw more than 700,000 Unique buyers 5 Million unique transactions.

But projections based only on current market growth could yield a significant underestimation considering specific subsectors (Memes, Video Game Moments, etc.) have yet to cross the chasm. For example, Bored Ape, which stands at a $2B market cap, could be thought of as an early manifestation of a fractionalized NFT, yet primary market sales of meme NFTs have barely reached eight figures; we expect the recent advent of fractionalization protocols to accelerate this trend.

Progress To Date

We started working on setu in Jan 2022 and are focusing on technical feasibility (POC) and customers. We have completed a proof of concept to understand the app’s creation, minting, and distribution and working on analytics and marketing POC.

We recently started to interview artists and creators (see appendices) to help us identify their challenges. We continue speaking to more people for customer discovery and MVP. We plan to identify partners and influencers to add marketing services for our creators.

We are planning to complete the remaining proof of concept by February and launch our first MVP beta for our early adopters by April.

Competition

Setu is a platform for new NFT artists to create, distribute to marketplaces and run campaigns for NFTs. While few minting apps and marketplaces offer some features, they have limitations.

Marketplaces (OpenSea, Rarible, Mintable.io):

Offer a platform to mint and sell NFTs exclusively in their market. They are our competitors as well as partners. Challenges: Most of them do lazy minting, which makes one unable to sell NFTs anywhere and is bound to their platform. We solve this by minting first and distributing it to all marketplaces.

Future competition and competitive disadvantages:

Blockchain and NFT technology are new and rapidly changing. The new marketplaces every day would help our creators have more selling platforms, but that would also create opportunities for people to create new consolidation platforms similar to setu. And with the growing traffic of marketplaces, user retention could be a challenge to solve. Existing marketplaces can also upgrade to provide multi-chain support, mobile minting, and portability to be a future competition.

Mobile Application:

Another pain point is the complex process of minting, connecting wallets, etc. We solve this by creating on-the-fly wallet addresses and providing a mobile app for create-to-sell flow. No app allows you to mint through mobile with on-the-fly wallet sign-up. (Variable has a mobile app but works only with rainbow wallet)

Mint Ones Sell Anywhere Advantage:

As we would create our smart contract for the minting and would mint before publishing, our users would get the advantage of mint-once-sell-anywhere and sell their NFT created through setu on Instagram or social media, which they can not do with marketplaces.

Marketing Platform:

The biggest challenge of the creators of NFT is to market and sell. A lot of marketplaces are available to sell, but there is no support for marketing after listing.

Revenue Model

Setu relies on a three-part revenue model, which is unique from competition to allow new adapters to integrate with their existing behavior seamlessly.

There would not be any fee to install and use the platform/app. We are planning to use chains like Polygon, Solana for minting and transactions to make sure our users pay low or zero gas-fee (it is the fee blockchain network charge for signing transactions)

Business Risks

Technology in the crypto and NFT space is still relatively nascent. It should be expected to evolve continuously as the world learns to securely and sustainably use blockchain technology. As an idea winging the massive tech tide, below are certain business risks that Setu is aware of: ### Economic trends: NFTs is a relatively new concept, with only a handful of tech and investment savvy internet users owning NFTs (<5%). The lack of diversification of clientele in the space indicates a high dependence on the market opinions of a few handfuls of people. NFTs at this point are valued based on rarity and the perception created by the hype that cannot entirely be rationalized, making them vulnerable to devaluation. Hence it’s necessary to keep close tabs on market opinions, which directly correlates with the economic trends in the NFT space. ### Legal and Compliance: NFT space is new and complex to decipher. As more and more countries get involved in the game and gain knowledge in this space, we expect various government regulations about NFTs. How governments tax and impose restrictions on NFT trades is a significant concern to Setu. ### Competitors: In the last three years, NFTs have proven to be an extremely lucrative space leading to a high influx of start-ups in this space backed by VCs pumping millions in them. Setu faces a threat from new competition rising in the space fueled by talent and funds. We have decided to partner with marketplaces for distribution, another source of competition. If these marketplaces decide to expand their offerings to customers, they could eventually become competitors. Setu needs to distinguish itself meaningfully from marketplaces to maintain its relevance. ### Technology: The best minds in the world are currently at blockchain. It would not suffice for any company in this space to create a product and plan to remain that way. There is a risk of technological improvements occurring quickly, and Setu must anticipate these moves and stay ahead of these developments to maintain superiority. ### Security: As a tech company in new technologies like blockchain, Setu is prone to cyberattacks and online fraud. Wallet hacking, compromising assets, NFT frauds- are a few of the many security concerns that can directly impact operations and cause immense reputation damage. ### Operational Risks: The NFT ecosystem exploded last year, and interest in NFTs skyrocketed. OpenSea’s transaction volume increased over 600x in 2021, which prompted growing technical pains. Recently an outage affecting OpenSea’s API shut down NFT sales for more than 2 hours. An occurrence of this kind can cost the firm in the monetary term and terms of reputation.

Operations

Development Phases,

For blockchain, we are using web3 tools and APIs for market integration. MVP launch would be on ethereum, polygon, and Solana, but multichain architecture would help to add more chain support. As most NFT transactions happen on blockchains, the infrastructure cost for setu is to store NFTs in IPFS pinning services. Low-cost networks like Filecoin can reduce that cost.

As react-native would have significantly fewer backend services, serverless cloud infrastructure would work fast and be affordable for connecting to marketplaces (for development, and (AWS startup credit would cover it for MVP).

Team: The core team of setu would build the MVP by themselves initially (check team section).

Partnerships:

As marketing NFTs for creators is an integral part of Setu’s value proposition, we plan to integrate with technology platforms for art creation and social influencer networks to promote our creators.

Cost and Finances:

We believe in the NFT is not just a novel asset class but a technology that would change how digital art is valued. Setu conservatively estimates after the first year,

The Team

Our team has a diverse skillset to build and run Setu.

Bharat Bhate, the CEO, has over 11 years of experience as a founder and CEO of a technology consulting company with 35+ million annual revenue. His technical and leadership experience would help Setu in operations and execution.

Siddharth, CTO, brings technology experience and has 16 years of experience working in software technologies and products. He is working as COO and CTO with Bharat in the tech consulting company for the last eight years, and they also founded an event ticketing platform in the past. He is Working on POC and MVP of Setu and would work as a leader to the future tech team.

Arpita Das, Head of Product Management, has a total of 5 years of experience in portfolio and risk management with Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. Her experience in risk modeling and algorithm designing put her in a unique position to identify Setu’s challenges at the macro and product levels and steer the firm accordingly.

Steve Yang, Head of the strategy, has worked as an investment analyst covering tech companies and a product manager for fintech products. He has a comprehensive understanding of business strategies for tech startups to compete in fast-changing markets like the NFT market. He is joining setu from February 1st.

We are currently looking for a Head of Blockchain security and a set of advisors/Mentors for our team.