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Dark StarThe Consumer Crypto Paradox
Saw this tweet the other day laying out how Zuck thinks about launching products at Meta. He simplifies it in a way that makes sense: Step 1: Spark Step 2: Retention Step 3: Growth and Scale the Community And then, only then, comes Step 4: Monetization The last part hammered a feeling I’ve had about consumer crypto products for some time: by measuring an applications success by volume, fees or revenue from the get, a product is choking its ability to capture a larger customer base. Basically,...
Dark StarBuild for Humans, Not Hashrates
Optimizing for users — not bots, vanity metrics, or protocol worship — is the only way this works. Behavioral economists often state that markets are made of people, not rational agents. Human factors like emotion, biases, and social influences impact our investment choices, which breed irregularities and inefficiencies. We experience this daily, even outside of markets. It creates perfect imperfections and keeps the world interesting. Crypto markets are no different, in that Housecoin can pu...
Dark StarAmerica Onchain: "You've Got Scale?"
press “play” before you begin… It’s not very helpful to make direct comparisons between the evolution of technologies. Other than broad similarities in the way new inventions evolve and are adopted, the unique way a technology interacts with a culture at a particular moment in history is so specific that such comparisons likely miss more than they predict. But there is something resonant in analogies between the dissemination of the ‘original’ Internet (in, say, the 1990s), the social compone...
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Dark StarThe Consumer Crypto Paradox
Saw this tweet the other day laying out how Zuck thinks about launching products at Meta. He simplifies it in a way that makes sense: Step 1: Spark Step 2: Retention Step 3: Growth and Scale the Community And then, only then, comes Step 4: Monetization The last part hammered a feeling I’ve had about consumer crypto products for some time: by measuring an applications success by volume, fees or revenue from the get, a product is choking its ability to capture a larger customer base. Basically,...
Dark StarBuild for Humans, Not Hashrates
Optimizing for users — not bots, vanity metrics, or protocol worship — is the only way this works. Behavioral economists often state that markets are made of people, not rational agents. Human factors like emotion, biases, and social influences impact our investment choices, which breed irregularities and inefficiencies. We experience this daily, even outside of markets. It creates perfect imperfections and keeps the world interesting. Crypto markets are no different, in that Housecoin can pu...
Dark StarAmerica Onchain: "You've Got Scale?"
press “play” before you begin… It’s not very helpful to make direct comparisons between the evolution of technologies. Other than broad similarities in the way new inventions evolve and are adopted, the unique way a technology interacts with a culture at a particular moment in history is so specific that such comparisons likely miss more than they predict. But there is something resonant in analogies between the dissemination of the ‘original’ Internet (in, say, the 1990s), the social compone...
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
People underestimate the desire for consumers to buy into products & experiences that are unpredictable. A lot of it has to do with a craving to be entertained. You don’t want to know the ending to a movie and you fucking hate spoilers. When you see a concert, you don’t want to know the set list beforehand. You chase songs that are rare (real g’s know), and you’re lucky if another artist sits in at your show. When you see your team play, you hope they win. Sometimes they lose. You get that feeling. It’s still worth it.
Consumers spend a lot of money without knowing what they’re going to get and it unlocks a feeling they can’t grab elsewhere. Priceless for many.
I think about this a lot because the surprises are the catalyst for much down stream media and community discourse. Without these moments, we have nothing interesting to talk about. Or in another vein, if things were more predictable, they’d be boring. The feeling of winning and losing are one in the same, because both are a result of reacting to something presumably unpredictable at its start. When you aren’t satisfied, you want to figure out how to compensate for that feeling. And when you win, you want to win again and again.
Crypto weirdly captures this feeling across its products. Whether trading, or regulating, chasing the meme — what’s for certain is no one really knows where we’re going but everyone is trying to shift your attention through surprise. Today, the surprise is you can make money (or lose it, again still a feeling to chase!); or someone buys your shit; or you are trying to change primordial industries like finance – anything goes, really. But through this, comes fresh ideas and realizations that certain things work & work really well.
I’ve always felt that the best products aren’t judged by what they do, but how they make you feel. Evoke feeling from a product and experience, and people will crave it. The more crypto can push on an element of surprise, the more we’ll find reasons why people can’t help but come back. Here we are now, entertain us.
People underestimate the desire for consumers to buy into products & experiences that are unpredictable. A lot of it has to do with a craving to be entertained. You don’t want to know the ending to a movie and you fucking hate spoilers. When you see a concert, you don’t want to know the set list beforehand. You chase songs that are rare (real g’s know), and you’re lucky if another artist sits in at your show. When you see your team play, you hope they win. Sometimes they lose. You get that feeling. It’s still worth it.
Consumers spend a lot of money without knowing what they’re going to get and it unlocks a feeling they can’t grab elsewhere. Priceless for many.
I think about this a lot because the surprises are the catalyst for much down stream media and community discourse. Without these moments, we have nothing interesting to talk about. Or in another vein, if things were more predictable, they’d be boring. The feeling of winning and losing are one in the same, because both are a result of reacting to something presumably unpredictable at its start. When you aren’t satisfied, you want to figure out how to compensate for that feeling. And when you win, you want to win again and again.
Crypto weirdly captures this feeling across its products. Whether trading, or regulating, chasing the meme — what’s for certain is no one really knows where we’re going but everyone is trying to shift your attention through surprise. Today, the surprise is you can make money (or lose it, again still a feeling to chase!); or someone buys your shit; or you are trying to change primordial industries like finance – anything goes, really. But through this, comes fresh ideas and realizations that certain things work & work really well.
I’ve always felt that the best products aren’t judged by what they do, but how they make you feel. Evoke feeling from a product and experience, and people will crave it. The more crypto can push on an element of surprise, the more we’ll find reasons why people can’t help but come back. Here we are now, entertain us.
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