A browser-based Metaverse, Portals is an immersive social space where you can explore, make your own, and gather with others. You don't need to have any coding skills to build your own experience there. And that was the idea on which Portals were built.
I am talking with Adam Gomez, co-founder of Portals. We've talked a few times, and I found Adam very passionate and inspirational on how always to keep moving forward.
Before founding Portals, he worked with brands like Sega and Sony, and being a gamer gave him a unique opportunity to build something he believes in.
Please tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came up, you know, with the idea to do something in the space.
I've been interested in games for as long as I can remember. Since I was a kid, at 3 years old, I was already gaming. I was very interested in games and had questions like how the games are made.
And that's what led me down the path of coding. And I've continued to follow that interest my whole life. Started learning to program around 7 or 8 years old. Just making simple games.
I followed that interest through to about 2007, when I got more introduced to the holistic picture of games and business and how they all fit together. Worked with brands like Sega and Sony through their early digital marketing campaigns.
So, how did the Portals start?
The first idea that came to mind was basically the foundation for Portals, and that was in early 2020 when we, with other co-founders, started exploring different ideas.
We knew that Facebook was working on things in the space, but taking our expertise and software in the browser, we thought that that would be a really interesting concept to do something really high quality.
We started building full-time in 2021, and then around the end of 2021, we launched an early version. Started with just a blank space of a virtual world that you could walk around.
It's also not just a game that we're creating. We are creating the tools to create experiences. And we make those tools available to other developers too. So, we've taken a different approach there.
Even if you don't know how to code, you can go into Portals, drag and drop, create an NPC, and give it dialogue.
And we're right at the beginning of our next phase, where many more of those tools are being released. So, for example, if you wanted to have currency and daily items and those types of things in your space, you could do that.
There are more tools for creating obstacle courses and escape rooms.
We love getting our community feedback and seeing what kind of tools they want.
Metaverse Gaming is now like social gaming in a way. Because people tend to come to different metaverses to meet others and join the community. Do you feel Portals already has a strong community, and how is that community helping you?
It was awesome that people that have typically never done coding just jumped in and created things like NASA launch center rooms. And this was all just using the limited set of items they would combine in interesting ways and create these super fun experiences.
So those are a very core group of users that have spent 20-25 hours a week in Portals and have been building spaces for 6-7 months.
Many fashion brands are trying to get into the metaverse space right now. So we see a lot of big brands collaborating with various games in the space. What about Portals?
There are a few, we still have ongoing partnerships that aren't public yet.
But we're always trying to ensure that the brands we're working with there are really clear awesome use cases and experiences that can be possible through those brands.
So through that, you know, we've done things with Atari - we've had some really cool experiences with them, where you'd go back in time to a 1970s Atari office. There were a bunch of puzzles that you needed to solve, and you hacked into the computers and those sorts of things.
Another example that we're working on now is Tomorrowland. So when we launch the Tomorrowland experiences, it's gonna be on another level. It's not just gonna be a dance hall. There's gonna be things to do when the event is not going on!
And what about the ownership? Do users have ownership, for example, of their avatars or some other in-game assets?
So the portal's world map is owned by the players, who are building with us through the portals and NFTs. We started out on Solana. But we've always been looking towards a multi-chain future. So that's our next phase.
We've started partnering with some great names in the Ethereum space too.
In terms of ownership, it's gonna be exciting to see how that evolves. Avatars are a really big thing, and we support avatars on Portals, and we've seen those active and strong communities have 3D avatars. They absolutely love Portals because they can bring in their 3D avatars here.
Those who own the Portals NFTs can be visible on the portals world map. Such brands like Atari have a lot of prominence on the map.
It'll be really interesting to see how that evolves over time with more adoption and Web3 assets across different games, being able to bring them from one place to another.
We also have our own avatars that will be interoperable, and you'll be able to take them to any other games or metaverse platforms.
So what is next for Portals? What are you working on right now?
It really has been about this awesome onboarding experience.
We call it "a story mode," where you're essentially guided through an experience. Then, it teaches you how to build. You can start collecting items and unlocking new ones.
It opens up the whole world and guides players to other places to explore. You visit the Atari City Center and collect some Atari items and those sorts of things.
But we're super excited about the next phase there as well. Things like a Survivor Island experience where teams can play against each other. And you know, you can vote out the losing team member of the island. So that's where we combine these multiplayer social experiences.
Who's behind the team who's working with you?
Not including the community of builders that is quite large at this point, the core team is 20 to 30 people now. We've decided not to raise tons of money and just expand like crazy before it's too early.
We've seen throughout history that some of the best products are made by smaller and more passionate teams.
So, for the last question: What is the future of the Metaverse and Web3?
In our case, we've kind of taken, I guess you can say, a conservative approach when it comes to like fully diving into Web3 and creating tokens and decentralizing everything from the very beginning because we want to make sure that we have a focused team that can create a great product as a foundation.
I think only some people will want to build and sell. People might just be coming into the Metaverse wishing for a good experience. So not requiring a wallet, not requiring having to purchase tokens, and allowing anybody and everybody to come in is very important.
So we're always looking at what are the things that long term we think are gonna make sense for Web3. A smaller percentage of your user base that's going to be really, really interested in that.
Adam, thank you so much for your time, and congrats on Making such a great product!