I'm 2021 I spoke with a friend who's a very sophisticated TradFi investor.
I told him how TradFi is going to buy our bags and he just laughed and said:
'Do your really think these guys are stupid? They have so much capital that they will short you till you all get liquidated so much that you don't want to think about crypto again. And once the prices are so down that even you don't want to buy the dip, they will start getting in.'
Many Twitter influencers are writing stuff such as:
"AI capex is bigger than Apollo program, and Manhattan project, and it's the most ambitious capitalism project of all time."
And I'm like:
Chill bro...Oil&Gas companies have been spending $500B+ per year on CapEx for the last 10 years.
3 minutes until water boils. 10 minutes in an Uber. 1 hour at the airport's gate.
A big part of our life is spent in that “in-between time”. And since it's "just two minutes", it's easy to start scrolling Twitter.
But it doesn't need to be like that. Our phones are vending machines - they can serve candies like TikTok, but we can also stock them with healthy snacks like Readwise.
Today is a great moment to build a new generation of meantime products and improving existing ones by asking ourselves "Can they use my app during the bathroom break?".
If you find it interesting, you can read more in the essay :)
https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/meantime-products
if Epstein and his buddies were using Signal, we would never learn any of that.
as much as I'm pro privacy, I can't wrap my head around it.
whats your take @cassie? I guess you have thought about it way more than most of us.
It looks amazing, but still needs world-class storytelling & game mechanics.
If you open Steam, there are countless games available but most are not too interesting.
Same with movies btw.
Good news is that now 100X more people will be able to produce games, which - by sheer statistics - will result in more bangers.
Some reflections after the pre-launch:
1) In less than 24h I have 200+ people who 'downloaded' the Farcaster app and turned on notifications.
Conversion was around 40%: the post had 500+ views and it translated into 200+ mini-app 'downloads'.
2) Doing the pre-launch was the right decision.
When Cryptosaurus launches, I'm going to have 200 users who I can notify with one click. This should make it way easier to get viral vs. starting from 0 users.
Also, dividing the scope into stages was good from the product POV.
I had to work out the mini-app setup, test Farcaster and email notifications, figure out small details on the front-end and so on. It took way more time than I expected, but since in pre-launch I could focus exclusively on them, I didn't have a familiar feeling of "there's so much to do, I won't be ready for the deadline!".
I would have to do figure all that anyway when I launch, but now it's already done, so I can just focus on adding new features to the frame I already built and tested.
3) Farcaster ecosystem is still small but mini-apps are cool.
All things considered, having 500+ views for a launch post is nothing compared to Twitter. But... see point 1): 40% conversion is a great number.
When we were building Kiwi, we had some very popular posts on Twitter, but I can't remember a single post that would deliver 200 users.
That's the magic of mini-apps - as they are integrated into Farcaster, 'downloading' them is just one click away, which can yield great user growth numbers (even though the userbase is pretty small compared to Twitter).
PS: Since some friends asked, I did a mix of Neynar Score and manual analysis of people who signed up. At least 50%+ of these accounts are legit users.
PS2: Thanks to everyone who signed up and shared the app :)
One thing I hated about programming was translating what I want into code. It felt like compressing my thoughts into Latin and I'd have to spend years learning rigid grammar and logic with zero tolerance for nuance.
This is why I never went deep into the software dev path.
Thankfully we have Claude now 🥰
