MarTech Interview with John Payne, CEO of Croquet

Hi, John. Welcome to our Interview Series. Please tell us a little bit about your journey and what inspired you to start at Croquet.

I’ve been involved in early stage technology companies, both publicly traded and private, my whole career. Every once in a while you see a team and a technology that could truly change the way things work. The success of those companies is often determined by timing. According to GlobalData estimates, the metaverse industry will grow from USD 22.79 billion in 2021 to USD 996.42 billion in 2030 at a CAGR of 39.8% from 2022 to 2030. Croquet’s timing with its Croquet OS Operating System For The Metaverse that is the foundation for Web Showcase couldn’t be better.

Tell us about the Metaverse plugin you’ve just announced.

It is a WordPress Plugin that allows developers to quickly deploy Croquet Metaverse Web Showcase, a 3D, immersive, multiuser Metaverse gallery, in any WordPress website or blog. It is free, no-code, easy to use and gives anyone using WordPress a quick and easy way to engage customers and visitors in a fully immersive, multiuser, social 3D world in less than five minutes. Web Showcase first launched in December 2022 and quickly rose to the #1 spot on Product Hunt, the leading technology review forum.

What is the opportunity for marketers now that brands can add a Metaverse world to a website or blog?

Croquet is a platform for building fully immersive multiuser Open Metaverse worlds embedded interoperably within the navigation in any 2D brand website. It enables highly social in-site activations, games and promotions, improved engagement, collaborative browsing, dramatically enhanced site experience and visitor satisfaction, while keeping customers close to home and not sending them away to 3rd party platforms.

These brand activations are social and encourage customers and visitors to invite their friends to join them in an immersive world inside the brand’s website domain and browse together, conversing with Dolby Spatial Audio. Brands can customize the Web Showcase world delivered by the no code WordPress Plugin or extend it with Microverse World Builder, a development and deployment environment that lets brands completely customize the user experience in every way.

 

What’s the end-value for developers, outside of being able to offer new capabilities?

With the WordPress Plugin for Web Showcase, it’s being able to very quickly deploy a highly customizable gallery world in any WordPress site or blog without writing any code. For developers who extend Web Showcase with our Microverse development environment, it’s the ability to design and develop infinitely customizable multiplayer worlds with customizable Ready Player Me avatars to completely match any site design or brand campaign. Web Showcase takes any site beyond simple menu navigation and scrolling to include another dimension in powerful, social and voice interactive immersive navigation and engagement.

Are you seeing early interest from any specific types of businesses? What industries will be the first to deploy Metaverse worlds on their websites?

For small businesses such as consultants, designers, lawyers, web developers and anyone else who sells their services, Web Showcase and the WordPress Plugin are a great way to build a Capabilities Gallery featuring Sales and Product presentations, customer testimonial videos, industry awards and other assets.

A great example is Jim Jonassen, Founder of JJA, an executive search firm serving growth-stage tech and digital companies and early user of Web Showcase. JJA and its agency Root Marketing added Showcase to the JJA website quickly and easily, creating a Client Spotlight immersive gallery, customized to highlight client testimonial videos and logos, presentations about their search philosophy and a call to action for clients wanting more.

There is clearly demand in ecommerce and we are seeing interesting experimentation by brands there. Unlike in the remote platforms, the brand owns the entire experience within their web properties and can integrate the ecosystem of the web, including their own existing payment, shopping cart, identity and security systems.

And we are even seeing bloggers embed a world in a blog post and announce a time for readers to meet there to comment, discuss and even debate the most current post using Dolby Spatial Audio Chat.

How long do you think it will take for this to catch on with developers, and until we start to see Metaverse worlds on websites commonplace?

It’s taking off now among small businesses and bloggers with shorter adoption cycles. We are seeing lots of demand there. And there is testing and evaluation going on in the big brands, who have a very specific set of problems to solve.

There is also a tremendous amount of activity right now with brands experimenting in the Metaverse, but most of it is in remote, centralized worlds locked up behind the login credentials of those sites. These are interesting experiments with marketing and promotions but the reality is that brands can’t accomplish what they want to accomplish there. They don’t own their customers or their data and can’t do transactions the way they want to. The evolution of immersive Web properties will allow these brands to build exciting activations, promotions, sponsorships and transactions right in their existing web properties while maintaining ownable control over customer relationships and data, economics, intellectual property rights and compliance.

We often ask the question “What if the Web were immersive and multiuser?” The answer, of course, is that it would be the Metaverse. We all know the Web will be immersive and multiuser. It’s the evolution of the Web to the Metaverse in more than 200,000,000 active websites.

It’s starting to happen now.

Do you foresee any challenges brands will deal with as a result of adding a multiuser Metaverse world to their website?

Too much traffic? Sorry, though that could be true. There are a couple of challenges to consider. Most of the web runs on menu navigation and scrolling and adding immersive navigation brings an important set of new dynamics to that. Croquet worked hard to make Web Showcase and our other tools completely interoperable to the existing site navigation.

It’s more social. Being able to go browsing with your friend when you are across town or across the country is a very compelling experience that creates opportunities that the best brands and their agencies will figure out over time. It encourages invites to get your friends to join in real time conversations, contests, games or learning. And while the addition of social voice is great for those visitors it’s also a very interesting opportunity for brands, who can integrate Generative AI in a controlled manner to facilitate audio conversations with groups of site visitors.

How did the pandemic change the metaverse landscape?

It normalized the acceptance of the kinds of interactions that occur in the Metaverse. Whereas for many years people leaned back at the thought of entering a virtual world, after two years of Zoom they are all leaning forward to what is new and improved.

What are your other core offerings? What is your vision for the company and the industry in general? What is Croquet planning next?

Last year, we launched Croquet OS, the Operating System for the Open Metaverse. It underlies all of our products and the offerings of other Metaverse destinations, apps and games. We also offer Microverse World Builder, a development and deployment environment that is a collaborative live programming environment platform for the Open Metaverse to extend the next generation of Web and Mobile.

It enables developers and designers to work together to create and refine Metaverse worlds within existing web properties using JavaScript IDEs and other tools they use today. Worlds are decentralized, natively multiuser, low latency and can be published to any web server while developers and creators control their economic and IP rights.

Our vision is that there will be an evolution of the web to the Metaverse over the next five years. No one will throw away their old website and build a new one in immersive 3D. Instead, the portions of the site, contents and products that derive the most value from immersive spaces will evolve quickly within the framework of existing 2D sites. They will become more social and collaborative among visitors and engagement will increase markedly. Traditional web properties have largely been information distribution systems, whereas Metaverse spaces and worlds are communication platforms and as the evolution occurs, a revolution of open, social communication on the web will emerge.

We have several things coming that will enhance Web Showcase and Microverse World Builder, including an ecosystem of partners delivering content, models, technology and services that can be added to any of our products… and any brand’s site.