You might not know it, but Kiwi was one of the first channels on Farcaster. It was June and when Dan told us we were going to get a piece of our Farcaster real estate, we were excited!
We had an ambitious vision of what we wanted to achieve:
And so we started… We asked our users for feedback and ideas, we posted some links to kickstart discussion and shared our newest features.
Since we were one of the few channels, we got some initial engagement, and then… it died.
We quickly learned that our users preferred to discuss the product on our Kiwi holders' Telegram chat. We got some comments, but much fewer than when we shared the links on our personal profiles. Features were doing quite okay though the engagement was still like 4-6 likes the most.
We also knew that the channels-feed algorithm was going to change, so we parked this idea and focused on other things. And when we returned, we decided to do it differently.
The main insight behind the change is that channels are products. We might argue they are media products (or to be precise: social media products), but they behave like products indeed.
It took some time to learn how to properly use our channel. And there’s definitely tons of lessons ahead of us. But if I had to share some piece of advice we’d say:
“Understand what the expectations of channel subscribers are. What type of content, people, format, and vibes are they looking for. And then deliver it.”
So, it’s not that different from the role of a Product Manager who needs to understand their end users and deliver the right experience.
PS: What’s interesting is that with Kiwi we basically created this mini-product (a bot that sends top-quality crypto links directly to your feed) inside the Farcaster product.
And if we look at channels from a “product inside the product” POV, we can imagine FC channels one day having features like Telegram. With in-channel bots that add new functionalities inside Farcaster - from a “virtual coffee pairing” through social betting up to text-based games.
This is a potentially interesting design space to explore.
