Nick Confrey, 28, began his career at Facebook. Now, he is building a new social-media experience — Seam Social — from the lessons he learned at one of the largest social-media giants.
“I was an intern on the Groups team in 2016 and I saw the best parts of the internet there,” from meme groups to support groups, Confrey told Business Insider.
After working on the Groups product, Confrey moved on to Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team as a software engineer, where he worked on new apps like Whale (a meme creation app) and Collab (a music remix app).
But Confrey said that while at Facebook, he also observed several gaps between what consumers wanted from social media and what Facebook could deliver with its scale and ads business. For instance, he said, users wanted to customize their profiles more, but Facebook’s website was a closed source, meaning you couldn’t customize the code or profile details as you could on other platforms like Neopets, MySpace, or Tumblr.
The way people were interacting was also evolving.
“A lot of the sharing that we’re doing online is shifting into these smaller, more curated private spaces,” Confrey said.
Confrey saw an opportunity to build a social-media experience for smaller-scale interactions. He left Facebook to launch Seam in February 2022 — months before Meta began its rounds of mass layoffs and ultimately scaled back the NPE team Confrey had been on.
Seam describes itself as a “Web3 social platform bringing back the customization of MySpace and the community of Facebook Groups,” per its LinkedIn page. Users can create profiles for the web version of Seam (it’s launching its mobile app in 2024) and even code their own mini-apps and digital experiences.
“We like to say that Seam stitches the internet together,” Confrey told BI.
He also described what Seam is trying to accomplish as “remixing” the internet.
“It’s not just like we’re going to build this fun platform that everyone’s going to be able to use and share photos on,” he said. “If we do our job, people can come in and actually build the platform with us and have some level of ownership over that experience, too.”
The startup announced a $2.5 million seed round in December, which was led by Web3 and crypto investment firm 1kx.
Raising capital as a new social-media platform in 2023
Reflecting on the long fundraising process, Confrey admitted that he began raising money a little too early.
About half of Seam’s seed round it announced in December came from the summer of 2022, Confrey said.
“I kind of thought of that as the thing to do because I was this new founder, I was an engineer inside of Facebook, and so I didn’t have any sort of connections to the larger, broader startup ecosystem,” he said.
What ended up being more helpful than a flashy VC-led seed round in Seam’s earliest days, however, was building relationships with angel investors who were excited about the product Confrey was building — particularly people he used to work with at Facebook, like Jason Toff who founded Things Inc.
Meanwhile, in the time between launching, beginning to raise, and finally closing its seed round, Seam remained small and lean. The startup currently has two employees — Confrey and a founding engineer — but plans to use its seed round to hire a full-time designer and community marketing lead to help grow the platform.
Read the 10-page pitch deck that Seam Social used while raising its $2.5 million seed round:
Note: Some details and pages have been redacted.
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