What was on your mind this week?

I spent most of Wednesday to Sunday thinking about how to better facilitate FarCon* attendees meeting each other IRL and how to extend that facilitation to all of the network's users even after the conference.

Jacob (@jrf), a new connection I've made on Farcaster, pinged me on Wednesday asking for the conference's brand assets - he wanted to use them in a feature idea he had for his app, Ornamental, that would help FarCon attendees discover other users going.

As I'm writing this, 5 days after first hearing this idea, I'm now officially building my first ever product. And I'll be doing it in public! And officially launching it a week before FarCon! So stay tuned for the first edition of this new standup series, where I'll share the story of how Jacob's feature idea became the first app I'm building. I'm a product designer with a fun idea in an area I've already designed a 0-1 product in, some frontend coding knowledge, and a publicly-declared deadline so it's totally feasible I can get this done in 94 days...right?

*FarCon is an unconference conference for FarCaster users organized and run by the community

What challenged you this week?

I have a particularly difficult client I'm wrapping up with soon, and it couldn't be soon enough.

If you looked up "nightmare client" in the dictionary, it would be them. Every single "working with clients" difficulty you can imagine, I've experienced with this one. Increasing scope, "can you make this pop more", missing deadlines, not providing content they said they would, trying to negotiate on pricing for work you've already completed, asking for a 45% discount off your hourly rate because they're "giving you a lot of work" (25 hours a month), "my last designer charged $X, why can't you do it for $X?".

I won't go on.

Mainly because I'm getting frustrated just writing this 🙂

What new thing did you learn or do?

I created my first ever NFT!

To get back into practicing graphic design consistently, I decided to do a poster design challenge 1-2 times a month:

https://warpcast.com/heavygweit/0x31eb624b

Zora's interface was so simple, it's no wonder they have double the monthly transacting wallets as Open Sea.

However, man did it show me how little I know about NFTs. Why do editions have a "Token 1" label on them? How long should I leave the mint open? Price it or keep it free? What's the benefit of different edition sizes, to limit mints per address?

But then I remembered I was supposed to be doing this for fun. To learn something new and practice design.

So here's my poster NFT for the $DEGEN community on Farcaster:
Mint is still live 👀

(And honestly, huge shoutout to the $DEGEN community - y'all made my first NFT way more successful than it ever would have been otherwise. Hats off to ya )

What are you grateful for?

Seems to be the theme of my life right now, but Farcaster. It's cold and cloudy here in Montreal - there was a 10 day stretch the sun didn't come out once. The winters have been getting progressively gloomier with climate change, but the warmth of this community has made this frigid season more than tolerable. A delight so far, I'd venture to say.

Here's to community and resonance ✨

What are you most excited about right now?

• All of the coffee chats I have lined up with awesome Farcaster connections this week 💖

• Continuing to build a way to make the above happen more naturally

• A storytelling event I'm performing at on Saturday where you have to tell a real story (about you) in less than 2 minutes. Wish me luck!

See y'all next Monday,
Erica