VILLAGEx 2022 Founder Friday: Iconic Moments
Founder Fridays is a series that spotlights VILLAGEx founders and their startups
When COVID-19 hit, Chris Cummings, CEO and founder of Iconic Moments, recognized that museums were one of the many institutions that would be most impacted and forced to shut down throughout the pandemic. Realizing that many museums relied on in-person ticket sales and events to survive, Cummings started looking at NFTs and the metaverse as a way to not only help museums diversify their revenue during the pandemic, but also as a way for museums to embrace the tech era by curating their art digitally.
Today, Cummings and his team, including COO Wendy Overton, are using the metaverse to impact the global museum industry through their startup, Iconic Moments.
“We're going to help museums create a digital metaverse that will allow them to engage citizens digitally and enhance their reach, increase their ability to fundraise and in a lot of ways modernize one of the world's oldest industries,” said Overton.
Iconic Moments, a 2022 VILLAGEx startup, is already working closely with 450,000 museums across the globe. Iconic Moment's team has eight full-time employees and several part-time employees. The Baton Rouge-based tech startup won runner-up in The Idea Village's 2022 IDEApitch competition and received a $175,000 investment prize. Recently, Iconic Moments was the only U.S. company to receive a World Summit Award from the United Nations, in recognition of their work in creating a robust NFT marketplace that can light a path for the future of museums.
Q&A
(Answers have been edited for clarity)
How does it work?
Wendy Overton: [Iconic Moments is a] curated marketplace, where museums and cultural institutions will be able to offer NFTs for sale while the buyers are able to come and visit. It would work very much like an e-commerce site. From the museum standpoint, because we're curating it, that means that the products offered for sale have been vetted, and we know they are legitimate. This gives a sense of security and assurance to any of our buyers – they know that they're buying something legit.
What is your top advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Wendy Overton:The first thing about any idea is that ideas are a dime a dozen. There are things you can do to move that from just an idea to something that's actually actionable. So the first thing that you need to do is really figure out: What problem are you actually solving? And do [customers] actually want to solve [that problem] so much so that they will pay you for it?
What’s one piece of advice you can give someone who's pitching?
Wendy Overton: Practice with a timer. Absolutely. Also, make a list of all of the potential questions that the judges could ask you, so that you've got answers already prepared and you can quickly respond on the spot. A third thing is evidence – VILLAGEx is not going to allow this, but in general, I've seen a lot of founders have an appendix to their deck. So not everything belongs in your main pitch deck; some things you can briefly cover, and then when you get the question (because you will, because you have laid the groundwork), you have additional slides to show that go in depth on those further points.