Now I'm pretty sure that people who say they "vibecoded an app in 30 minutes" are either building simple copies of existing projects, produce some buggy crap, or just farm engagement.

And it’s not because I am AI skeptic. Actually, quite the contrary.

Where do I come from

At my previous startup we started using AI to code in late 2023, before it was even called 'vibe coding'.

It was controversial because LLMs weren't that good and we were an Open Source project, so it made people reluctant to contribute to our spaghetti codebase.

But Tim was early to recognize AI’s potential and while he used gpt4-preview via gpt-cli, I literally pasted my code to ChatGPT app. We used it for simple stuff (like putting new content into the app's layout) and as the AI got better, we started shipping more complex features that way.

Later we moved on to Cursor and Claude Code and that early AI embrace gave us an edge. This made me believe that AI can be a coding superpower.

But - as of March 2026 - there are limits to that.

Choosing the idea

And I wanted to test these limits.

Aside from vibecoding at Kiwi, I had some experience with "real" coding. Did a 100 day Python course, built JS weather apps, deployed some Cryptozombies smart contracts. and so on. And of course vibecoded plenty of local apps with Claude.

Now was the time to solo the full process of shipping an app to the public, which was supposed to make me a better PM.

Since my main goal was to learn, I decided to do it "the right way". This means I didn’t want to rely on Replit or Lovable where the infra part is obfuscated. I wanted to deal with that complexity myself.

To make the process more pleasant I decided to build an SLC of something fun.

From a few ideas I had on the table, I picked Cryptosaurus. The app would be simple - you pick a dino, the app takes your pfp and creates a dino styled as your pfp. Simple, Lovable, Complete.

I had the high-level vision in my head and I knew how to build things "by the book". But I thought: "Okay, let's embrace the hype and 'just build' like some Twitter influencers say".

And this “just building” took way longer than I expected.

Working prototype

I started by describing my idea to ChatGPT (5.2 Thinking Extended). We discussed it for a while, narrowed down the scope and I was ready to start. I sent the scope to Opus 4.5, turned on the Plan Mode, and waited for the outcome.

In the meantime I got my API keys from Gemini, added them to the .env and… bam! In the first hour I had my working prototype.

Wow, I'm going to publish it soon, right?

Non-crappy prototype

Not right.

I didn’t like the boilerplate design.

So I played around with Coolors to find the palette I liked. Picked something, tested it on the UI, changed some colors. Wash, rinse, repeat. After a few rounds I got the colors right.

Then I noticed that Claude overly complicated UI and UX. So I started simplifying it. If I used Figma I would’ve made 10 different variants in 10 minutes and keep a pixel-perfect control over the outcome. But I wanted to "just build", right?

So I asked LLM to build a new UI. Didn't like it, so asked Claude to rebuild it. Some important details were not there, so had to reprompt. Then I figured out I could simplify the UI way further so asked to rebuild it completely.

Then I had some weird container that broke the front-end. Then something didn’t render well on mobile. Then it added some weird outlines I didn’t want. And so on and so forth. Every iteration took a few minutes: my prompt, LLM building it, checking if I like it, reprompting.

The clock was ticking. If I "just used Figma", I’d have prepared my UI 10X faster. But whatever, let’s “just build”.

And it was the tip of the iceberg.

Since the main Cryptosaurus "product" were dino pictures, I had to make sure they look good. These pictures looked good with my pfp but would they look good with others?

I picked a few edge case pfps to check if the outputs are going to work. And they didn't. Some changed the frame, some rendered a random prompt text in the background, some changed the picture completely.

Started discussing it with Gemini, Codex (it just launched) and Claude (4.6 just got out). Change prompt, upload an image, wait until the new image gets generated. Now the background is out. Now it misses the headgear. Now it shows some weird text and the beard doesn’t look natural.

I went through this process at least 200 times. The clock was still ticking - I was way over “building an app in 30 minutes”.

And I still didn’t get out of localhost.

Setting up infra

Once I figured out the prompt, now was the time to put it out there.

Bought a cryptosaurus.app domain on Cloudflare, set it up on Vercel, and now was the time to put my back-end on a server.

After a longer chat with an LLM I decided to use AWS since it was pretty cheap and I always wanted to learn it. Once I opened the panel and saw the vast ocean of AWS services, I knew it’s an overkill. But instead of using simpler infra, I decided to follow through and set up my S3 and Lambda.

After a few tries it seemed to be working. But no, some things broke down. Didn’t make my bucket public. And now some .envs weren’t shared with Vercel or AWS. Okay, found what was wrong, let’s go!

Soon I discovered AWS CLI and got excited that my LLM could set up things for me.

But after I asked it for help, my app stopped working again. After an investigation I found out my Claude started automatically creating new S3 buckets instead of using the one that I set up myself. Okay, fixed that, but another “unknown unknown” hit me in the head.

After a lot of back-and-forth my infra was fine. Now I had to make it work as a Farcaster Mini App because FC users liked collecting pfps and I already had distribution on that network. But... I couldn't fully test my app in Developer Mode because the notifications didn’t work there.

Okay, have to add manifest and include noindex so the app isn’t public. Okay but then I need another account to test it because people might see I do something on my main account. Okay, let’s set it up.

Now although the mobile UI seems to work in the browser, something breaks in the mini-app UI. Another front-end fixing, this time I was smarter and just inspected code in my browser and sent container screenshots to my LLM.

Okay now let’s mint a dino NFT. Ah, but testnet doesn’t work on these wallets. Redeploy contract to Base Mainnet. Now need to change .envs everywhere. Eh…

Okay. Did it. Everything works.

Then I thought… Okay if I’m trying to learn how to do it the "production-grade way". I should also protect my smart contract from being called via CLI.

So now I needed to ensure that only my app can create dinos. To achieve that I had to change the smart contract and set up onlyMinter with a separate Ethereum address that would mint NFTs on behalf of the users.

Also didn’t want it to be the same as Owner in case the private key leaks, so I had to set up Safe that’s a contract owner and can change onlyMinter in case something happens.

Then I was like… Okay but what if 100 people want to use app at once. Will it manage to serve them? My LLMs told me it would not. So I spent 2 days figuring out different edge cases, rate limits, and things that would prepare the app for potential users’ spike. I also moved to Paid versions for some of my apps.

I went through a long checklist and now was the time to launch.

Launch

Two weeks before sharing an app I did a pre-launch so had about 500 people who ‘installed’ the app on Farcaster.

I shared the launch post, sent the notifications and people started opening the app...

...and the app broke down. Together with my carefully manufactured virality.

Although I used Codex 5.3 Extra High and Opus 4.6 to prepare the app and the API for usase spikes, both LLMs forgot about nonces. So when two people wanted to get a dino at the same time, their payment went through but their request didn't reach the API to generate the image and mint an NFT.

I told everyone affected they’d get their money back and started fixing the bug.

Late in the night most problems were fixed and I wrote a script that found everyone whose payment got stuck. I sent them money back (+ extra $1 as a ‘thank you for your patience’ note), and let them know via DMs. People were pleasantly surprised with my swift response and most of them decided to get their dinos anyway.

Eventually, despite all challenges, many people minted and shared their dinos in the feed:

And we could say that the v1 of the app was finished. Took way longer than 30 minutes, right?

Zooming out

Now let’s zoom out for a second.

As I said in the beginning, I created a prototype in an hour.

But since I didn’t want to put out a vercel215810.buggyslop.com type of app and didn’t want to take a Replit/Lovable shortcut, setting it up for production took way longer. In this case, about 100X longer.

If I was a masochistic person with 0 coding experience who wanted to follow my "let's just build, but also let's do it the right way" approach, I imagine it’d take them even more.

On of the most time consuming elements was the UX, UI and the end-product (dino outputs). The reason I decided to invest time in these was because we have enough unpolished software out there. We had that even before AI, when people just cloned open source repos and changed a few parameters to build their own apps.

At the end of the day, you can build a weather app like that:

Or you can build Windy:

My app was of course nowhere near the Windy league, but you get the idea.

Good thing is that I achieved my main goal - built the app without working tightly with a staff-level engineer (like I did in Kiwi) and learned a lot on the way. And although the goal was to learn, the app’s performance was decent, too. 1,000+ people downloaded the app, 180+ paid $2 for a dino and the app got to TOP3 in Farcaster Mini App store in its first week.

It is ofc a simple app that didn't make a dent in the universe. But that was part of the "just build an SLC" plan. Later on I want to deliver Stage II, where you can use your dino to play a game and compare scores with your Farcaster friends.

The limits

Over time I learned how to get better at using these tools.

I carefully scoped work for my LLMs so I could have 3-4 agents simultaneously working on the same codebase without getting in each other's way.

I noticed that Codex overcomplicates things compared to Claude, so I asked it in my agents.md to always looks for simple, elegant solutions with a few LOC.

I spent more time on architecture, asking LLMs to create flowcharts and iterating on them before my agent spent 30 minutes shipping the plan.

And later on I ditched this "just build" philosophy a bit and used Figma to polish the design instead of waiting for an LLM, which made the whole process less frustrating.

I noted down these and many smaller lessons in my Obsidian so I would remember them and sometimes just pasted these lessons into my prompts.

Although vibecoding in my case didn’t live up to the "build an app in 30 minutes" hype, it was a 10-100X speed improvement. And if I used Replit or Lovable, the acceleration would be even more dramatic.

It was a different experience, though.

When I used to code by hand, I got into a pleasant creative flow. Now I am just a manager who gives tasks to digital employees and gets frustrated when they don't deliver what I wanted. But... it's still worth it because now I can focus on building things instead of fixing syntax.

And engineering experience still matters. Especially when you want to get the details right.

There was a moment when Brave started showing weird colors, overriding my light theme. I wanted to disable it in the app and tried 3 different LLMs to crack it. After an hour, nothing changed. Asked my friend who’s a senior design engineer for help and he fixed it with one line of code.

There were many similar problems, which - if I had an experienced engineer by my side - I could've solved 10X faster. So highly recommend asking your senior dev friends for help as LLMs still have their limits.

Summary

This whole experience reminded me of the timeless Tom Cargill's quote:

“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”

With AI, it’s easier to get the first 90 percent out there. This means we can spend more time on the remaining 10 percent, which means more time for craftsmanship and figuring out how to make your users happy.

The "remaining 10 percent" is a difference between slop and something people enjoy.

Because vibecoding takes the boring part out of coding and creates more space for craftsmanship, I think we will end up with more cool digital experiences. And the ability to create these cool experience is what brought many of us to tech.

So all in all, before agents become better PMs than humans, product building should be fun.

PS: And if you want to check out Cryptosaurus, you can click this link and it should launch the mini app in your Farcaster account. If you mint a dino, you're going to be able to use it the app's Stage 2 which should be out soon(ish).

PS2: Huge thanks to Pugson, Kris Kaczor and Sayangel for sharing protips along the way.

You have 3 minutes until the water gets boiled.
You spend 10 minutes in your Uber ride.
You sit for 1 hour at the airport's gate, waiting for the boarding to start.

What do you do in the meantime?

Well… your options for doing something meaningful are limited. There’s too little time to start a bigger thing (boiling water), you’re not comfortable enough (Uber) or need to be aware of your surroundings (airport).

But these short stretches of time between our main tasks - a.k.a. meantime - fill our and our users' lives.

How apps filled my meantime

When I was a teenager, I lived in the suburbs. Every weekday I spent about 2 hours in buses and subway to get in and out of school.

I had to be at the bus stop about 10 minutes before the schedule because the bus never arrived on time. When it did arrive, it was often so tightly filled with people that I couldn’t get in, let alone dream of finding a place to sit. The overcrowded bus crawling through a traffic jam was how I spent my mornings and evenings.

Despite these obstacles, I read. Almost every day I had a book under my arm and found a way to read it in the bus. It wasn’t a high-focus environment so I couldn’t read a math textbook, but it was good enough for novels and less complex learning material. Trying to read in this environment was a high-investment/high-reward thing to do.

Today, when I’m on a crowded bus, my instinct tells me to check some app on my phone.

The apps managed to replace books in my meantime slots because they are designed that way. Even if you wait 3 minutes for an elevator, you can check your e-mail and get a feeling that you are up to date. Or make 30 swipes on Tinder and feel as if you made progress in your dating live. Or finish a Duolingo class and get some sense of accomplishment.

They are what I call meantime products. Products designed to squeeze into these short breaks in our lives. And our fast-paced lives are full of these breaks.

There’s one research showing that average student used their smartphone for 6 h 53 minutes per day and picked up their phones 113 times. That means an average session lasted 3 min 39 seconds. If you have an iPhone, take it now and check your daily Pickups in the Screen Time app. I bet it’s at least 40 per day.

But meantime products don’t need to be meaningless.

6 meantime products that changed the way we spend time

If we look at the last century, there’s been a few products that tried to fill our short breaks.

In 1913 a man named Arthur Wynne published a new puzzle in supplement of the New York World. It later became one of the most Lindy products ever - a crossword.

It was a well-designed product. You had one puzzle to finish (crossword) divided into a series of microtasks (answers) and you could see your progress in real time (by filling the gaps on the crossword). You could stop anytime and return later (and watch the printed ads again!). And it was often a social product - you would ask friends for help when you couldn't figure out an answer.

***

In the 1920s we saw the rise of Reader’s Digest. In first editions, most articles were only two-pages long, so you could read them in a few minutes. Perfect for commuting, short breaks in the kitchen or bathroom.

First edition covered many subjects, from health (“Advice from a President’s Physician”), profiles (“Henry Ford, Dreamer and Worker”), politics (“Is the State too Vulgar?”), war (“The Future of Poison Gas”), science (“The Firefly’s Light”) and many more. This meant that you could buy one Reader’s Digest and share it with a whole family.

***

In the 1930s and 1940s we saw the rise of the pocket books.

These books became popular among soldiers fighting in the World War II because soldiers had a lot of meantime slots - as the saying goes, war is mostly waiting.

Publishers knew that pocket books are more likely to get dirty, so they found a way to make them more affordable. The books were not only smaller but also used lower quality paper. They also used different distribution channels: on top of being sold on bookstores, they were also available in high-traffic spots like railway stations.

Fun fact: Penguin - one of the largest publishers in the world today - started by selling pocket books.

***

Four decades later, in 1979 we saw a huge revolution - Sony Walkman has arrived.

It was a revolution because Walkman was hands-free, eyes-free and you could take it anywhere. You could listen to music and radio while moving, commuting, and doing chores. And man, people did that a lot.

Sometimes the device was even used in a multiplayer mode - I remember that in the Walkman era we often shared headphones with friends so we could listen to the music together.

***

A decade later, in 1989 we saw a new revolution coming in. Now we were able to play games more complex than newspaper’s crosswords or Tetris. We had Game Boy.

Game Boy's legendary, brick-like design was chosen to help the console survive hardships of travelling. And the games were way simpler than PC games and had shorter loops as they were designed for meantime gaming, not intentional gaming like on PCs.

Pokemon - an IP empire that since 1996 brought more revenue than Star Wars, Harry Potter, and GTA combined - started with a Game Boy game.

***

Then in 2008 we saw the rise of the iPhone that packed everything in one device - crosswords, articles, books, music, games and much more. And with the new device we saw the rise of new meantime giants - Duolingo, Angry Birds, Twitter, Tinder, TikTok and other apps.

Since smartphones are handy, they replaced my - and other people's - habit of reading physical books on the bus. And it’s easy to look at our phones today and assume that a "meantime product" must be some digital junk food. But our phones are vending machines. It’s up to product designers and users what they put inside.

They can put there candy bars or they can put apples.

The archetypes of Meantime Products

We already saw some digital products that became our "apples in the vending machine".

We have Wordle with the promise of one high-quality puzzle per day. We have Duolingo with daily lessons. And Readwise’s read-it-later, where the goal is to finally read all our bookmarked content.

We have Accuweather with clear weather dashboards. And Apple Notes with inbox to dump our thoughts. There is Chess.com with micro-drills to practice our skills. And Techmeme with its daily digest newsletter. There's even Headspace to do nothing and relax.

And then there’s audio. Audiobooks and podcasts let us consume long content while doing our chores or working out. We might not spend 30 minutes reading an essay but we’d easily listen to a 30-minute podcast while driving to work.

If we want to enter this space and create ‘next Wordle’, we need to start by really understanding the context in which our user is going to open our app.

Design constraints

Our user has 10 seconds as they are waiting for an elevator. Or they have 3 minutes in the kitchen, waiting for the microwave to finish its job. Or they have 25 minutes on a playground, but they need to stay aware of the surroundings because they’re looking after their kid.

We can’t serve this busy user if our app takes 10 seconds to load. The session time can’t take too long either - user needs to get full value in a short, 10-300 seconds slot. Or if it takes longer, there needs to be an “Instant Resume" feature like on Kindle or Spotify, placing our user exactly where they left off.

Then the question is, do we care much about the total session time per day? World’s biggest apps are media apps where more time in the app means more ad revenue, so many PMs became obsessed with session time.

But your app doesn’t need to do that. You open Amazon, buy what you need, close it. You open Obsidian, check notes, close it. You open Chess.com, solve your daily riddle, close it. Your app could be a product where you “do something” and then get out.

Then what do we want our user to feel? Competence because they solved a Chess puzzle? Clarity because they checked the weather and know what to wear? Or a relief that they captured an idea that would otherwise go away?

Many social media apps invoke rage, jealousy and FOMO. But if you don’t need to join the ‘session time maxi’ religion, you can focus on positive emotions that would make your user happier.

There are even apps - like Freedom - that help people use their phones less.

And doing less can be very beneficial. There’s a reason why walks and shower thoughts are so fresh - our mind doesn’t consume much new information, so it processes what it already gathered throughout the day.

Okay, so how could you adapt some of this meantime angle into crypto?

Meantime in crypto

We already have some meantime products in our industry..

Most popular ones would be Coingecko and Polymarket, where you can check the prices and odds you’re interested in and leave. There are also some digest newsletters like ETHDaily. And I’d argue that popularity of Pump.fun could come from being able to open the app, see if you vibe with any meme, invest with two clicks and close it.

But this design space is way bigger.

Let’s say you run a vaults aggregator. You ask users for their risk appetite and show them 3 vaults per day. You do it in a Tinder-like fashion: dashboard + short description explaining where the yield comes from + swipe left to discard, swipe right to bookmark. After 20 days users have seen 60 vaults and can make more informed decisions about their investments.

Or your wallet shows users 3 permissions per week to review. They can revoke or whitelist them and they used their Uber ride to secure their assets rather than scrolling Twitter.

Or let’s say you are a CEX and you want your users to feel safer. So you build an Anti-scam training game, where users see different e-mails and have to pick a sketchy one.

Or your portfolio app tells you in December: “hey, you have 27 coins that went to $0. If you sell them before the end of the year, you can generate $80k in tax loss”. And you show the coins via a Tinder-like UI: swipe left to dump, swipe right to keep. In 3 minutes you can go through all of them.

There are many options to think about. What I want to stress here is that you don't need to rebuild your product, you can just add the meantime angle to what you already have.

Summary

Life isn’t just "big rocks", it’s mostly "water".

It's full of those short 3 minute gaps and while they used to be filled by paperback novels, they are now dominated by smartphones. But smartphones aren't inherently bad, they are just vending machines.

It’s up to builders whether they stock them with candy (TikTok) or apples (Wordle, Readwise, Duolingo). And if you think that all good ideas have already been explored, it's probably what someone in 1912 thought, before they saw a crossword, Reader's Digest, pocket books, walkman, game boy and iPhone.

So if you’re a product designer, don’t add another candy to your users' vending machine. Think how to add some apples. And always ask yourself "Can they use this app during the bathroom break?".

PS: And if you need my help in the process, I have some new slots to work with teams. You can read more here.

This time i'm building something fun. I will also treat this project as a playground to test some GTM strategies that I described in my last post.

You can join the waitlist via the link below:

https://farcaster.xyz/macbudkowski/0x0fdd1ffc

Would also really appreciate any likes, recasts or comments 🙏

PS: If you don't have Farcaster, you can also go to cryptosaurus.app and click 'join waitlist via email'

PS2: Added some new Office Hours slots!

If you look at successful crypto projects, they don’t grow the same way.

Ethereum spread through Bitcoin community.
Tether spread through BD deals with CEXs.
Polymarket spread through Twitter.

As the classic goes, finding the channel that works for your product is 50% of building a startup:

So how do you do it in crypto? Which paths could lead customers to your product? And what can we learn from successful projects like Aave, Polymarket, Lido, and many others?

Let’s start. 

Best product doesn’t always win

The sad truth is that people don’t always use “the best” products.

For engineers who like to rationally compare features, this looks unfair. Why would a worse product win? 

But products don’t compete in a rational vacuum. They compete in a complex web of people’s social feeds, habits, social pressure, concerns, and limited time to decide which product to choose.

Sometimes people use Google Docs because they never heard about Obsidian. Sometimes corporations force employees to use Teams instead of Slack. And sometimes it’s just more convenient to pick a Coca-Cola than searching through shelves for a better soda.

All these products didn’t win because they were better at what they do. They won because they had a better Go To Market (GTM). Which means they were better than competitors at reaching their target users.

It also happens in crypto. That’s one of the reasons why people keep using MetaMask since 2017 and why airdrops are used to override this reluctance to try new things. 

This is also why a marketing strategy based on giving away T-shirts and tweeting 'gm' might not be successful. As everyone in Silicon Valley says, you need to have a good product AND good distribution to win.

And Uniswap is a great example. It’s often remembered as a technical breakthrough, but it was also a great GTM execution.

A year long Uniswap campaign

You might think Uniswap became a multi-billion dollar DEX because it was the first one that worked well. But when you look closely, you notice that Hayden started a marketing campaign a year before he launched his product. 

How come?

Hayden built the first Uniswap PoC in late 2017, inspired by the famous Vitalik post about AMMs.

This PoC was presented at Devcon 3 by Karl Floersch, giving Uniswap some initial attention.

Then Hayden spoke about Uniswap at NYC Mesh and discussed the concept with Vitalik. He did 3 days of demoing Uniswap at Edcon 2018, promoted it at NYC blockchain week, and let the whole EF know about Uniswap existence by applying for and winning a grant.

He also spent weeks working on Uniswap at Balance and MakerDAO offices where he discussed the project with crypto natives, went to ETHIS conference in Hong Kong, and Shanghai blockchain week. He also reached out to anyone who expressed interest in providing liquidity at launch.

So a big part of Uniswap promotion was one-to-one interactions with the founder at conferences, crypto offices and via DMs. A GTM channel perfectly tied to the revolutionary nature of Uniswap, as it gave a lot of space for educating the end users.

So when Hayden launched Uniswap at Devcon 4 in Prague, the project was already well-known in the space (and the space was way smaller than it is today).

As Hayden says:

"I spent about an hour sitting alone on a bean bag, writing and re-writing the launch tweets. Fortunately, my friend Ashleigh walked by and helped review my tweets.

I clicked the button, nervous but excited for what the future would hold. What followed was a huge outpouring of support, ideas, and collaboration beyond my wildest expectation."

As you can see, the history of Uniswap isn’t the history of a “dev building in stealth who launches his app and becomes an overnight success”.

There’s been a lot of promotional work done before the product even launched. And I would be surprised if Hayden actually thought about his actions as a ‘Go-to-Market campaign’. I’d bet he was just talking about his product because he found it interesting.

But Hayden was aware that he needs to think about marketing:

"Up to this point, I considered my role in Uniswap to be mostly a technical one. When someone asked how it worked, I often started by telling them the mathematical formula behind it. Many people walked away confused.

Richard [Burton] helped me understand that people not understanding Uniswap it was a me-problem, not a them-problem. Developers were just a small part of a bigger picture. If I wanted people to use my project, I needed to talk about it on their terms, in ways they understood. Uniswap’s biggest outstanding challenge was a social one."

Okay so if even Uniswap launched in cozy 2018 needed GTM, then probably your product launched in noisy 2025 needs it, too. 

So how exactly do you do GTM? Do you just talk about your product with people you randomly meet at conferences? Well… it's a bit more complicated.

Channels don’t work in isolation

I sometimes speak with the founders and they ask me:
“So should we do Twitter? Or KOLs? Or maybe just go to conferences?”.

And it’s hard to say which channel is best for your product unless you set up the fundamentals right.  GTM is not about going all in into the 1st marketing channel you thought about.

It only works when three things line up:
1) The right market
2) The right segment in that market
3) The right channel for that segment

If you have the wrong market and wrong segment, even the best channel might not work.

For example: It would be way harder for Uniswap to take off if instead of promoting it to Ethereum devs & OGs, Hayden spoke about his DEX to consultants running enterprise blockchains in Europe.

You need to set up fundamentals before you set up funnels.

So how to do GTM the right way?

Step 1: Which market are you after? 

First you start with the market.

Startups are all about finding Product-Market Fit. Yet most founders spend 99% of their time thinking about the Product and only 1% thinking about the Market.

They talk to a few people, something sort of resonates, and boom: that’s “our market!”. It’s like marrying the first girl that you liked. It might work (if you are lucky or have a great intuition), but most of the time, it’s not a good way to make such a decision.

So what else could you do? Closely evaluate options and double down on the best fit for your product.

Look at Coinbase. They started by being exclusively focused on the Bitcoin market.

If Coinbase supported Litecoin, Namecoin, or Dogecoin instead, they'd never become as big as they are today. They picked the right market and it paid off. And they remained solely focused on Bitcoin for 4 years until they added Ethereum in 2016.

Blur is a similar story. They focused on pro NFT traders who generated over 90% of OpenSea volume and by putting all efforts to onboard them to Blur, they reached escape velocity. If they focused on Average Joes who stopped trading after the 2022 crash, it wouldn't work.

Another good example is Rainbow. They focused on Ethereum users who were looking for a mobile wallet that's useful yet doesn't look like a banking app. Rainbow was fun, colorful and NFTs were first-class citizens there. That's how they captured a significant part of the mobile Ethereum market.

A good framework for choosing your market is answering three questions:
Where is the pain? Where is the money? Where are the battles?

Choosing the market

No pain, no gain.

If users' problems aren't painful enough, they won't care enough to look for a solution.

When Coinbase launched in 2012, storing BTC was hard - Trezor and Ledger were not around yet and many people stored their coins on hard drives. That's why the first version of Coinbase was a Bitcoin wallet. Then they figured out that purchasing Bitcoin was hard, too, so they let people buy and store their Bitcoins and later trade them, too.

These were all hard problems to solve and that's exactly why this market was attractive.

Money talks.

But if people feel the pain and can't pay for the solution, it's not a good market. They need to pay you for the product, so you can build a sustainable business. If they have enough money, you don't even need that many users to make it work.

Here's a good example from my previous post on building in consumer crypto:

"Last month on Ethereum Aave charged over $60M in fees with about 25k monthly users. That’s over $2,400 in fees per user per month. And that's because some whales borrow and lend millions of dollars. Of course not all fees go to Aave treasury but it's still a wild number."

Choose your battles.

Some markets have a huge need, people ready to pay, but there are many obstacles on the way. The best markets are the ones with some challenges (so others don't enter easily) but you know how to overcome them.

Polymarket decided to go through the SEC regulatory hell. zkSync chose to spend 6 years on R&D to build the right tech. And Sorare faced the complexity of closing deals with Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. Although these battles were hard, knowing what you're signing up for can help you decide if this is the type of challenge your team is ready (and qualified) to face.

***

In other words, you want to be like XVI century Portugal. Thanks to Vasco da Gama, Portugal set up a highly profitable spice trade with Asia (a painful problem with people ready to pay) and kept the monopoly for decades, because only they knew the sea route to Asia (a big obstacle they knew how to overcome).

Step 2: Who exactly are you after?

Once you have the market, you need to double down your focus.

Your market is like watermelon. If I asked you to eat it, you wouldn't put a whole watermelon in your mouth, right? You would (hopefully) slice it. These slices in marketingspeak are called segments and - when picked right - they amplify all your growth work.

There are many ways to segment the market. 

If you picked a 90s marketing book they’d tell you that you segment people based on demographics, geography, and some basic psychography. So you'd target "Boomers living in New York who like being outdoors".

And this is a great way to segment your customers when you have a 139 year old brand with distribution in almost 200 countries and a $5B annual marketing budget like Coca-Cola. It’s also a terrible way to segment your users when you’re an unknown startup with $5k for marketing.

It’s like trying to copy the US Army strategy when you’re just a pack of rebels with AK47s, hiding in the jungle. You can’t just send F-16s and B-2s to dominate the battleground. You need to be way more scrappy and precise.

You need a beachhead market.

How Satoshi got his first users

When Satoshi launched Bitcoin in 2008, he didn’t buy a SuperBowl ad.

He sent the whitepaper to cypherpunk mailing list and discussed it with a few thousands privacy & tech nerds. This was his GTM - the way he found the first users (and partners) for his project. Very narrow, very targeted. 

Even on HackerNews - which is a nerdy place compared to Twitter - Bitcoin whitepaper got shared over half a year later.

This narrow way of promoting your project is an example of a beachhead market - the concept inspired by World War II. 

When Dwight Eisenhower wanted to liberate Europe in 1944, he needed a good place to land the Allied troops. But there was a problem. Germans already built the Atlantic Wall - a 2,600 km chain of beach fortifications, minefields, machine gun nests and steel obstacles that went from Norway to Southern France.

Thankfully, the Atlantic Wall was uneven. Although it was heavily fortified in places like Pas-de-Calais, it was weaker in Normandy. And this is why Allies chose these beaches for D-Day.

Allied forces knew they couldn't win the war in one strike. Their only way to win was securing a small strategic foothold to send more tanks, soldiers and supplies to liberate France and whole Europe. They had to win this small piece of land at all costs, so that's why - if you watched "Saving Private Ryan" - the soldiers went on, despite heavy losses.

In startups, this Normandy-like strategy is your beachhead market. You want to secure a foothold where it’s going to be easiest to enter (for Satoshi it was a cypherpunk mailing list, for Hayden it was Ethereum devs & OGs at the conferences), and then expand from there. 

So just like Allies didn’t go directly for Berlin (they actually never did!), you don’t go directly for the whole market. You find one segment, dominate it, and then go further.

So how do you choose the right segment?

Finding your Normandy

There’s this groupchat where I hang out called Cryptotesters.

Since the chat is full of DeFi OGs, we often trade notes on different crypto products. And whenever someone asks for a tool for farming APY, people bring up Vaults.fyi:

So when you look at Telegram and see the same product being brought up in the context of APY, you get the feeling that "Vaults is the tool that all pros are using". Especially since you know that these people are not paid shills - they just like the product.

Is that the right segment?

Well... That groupchat is pretty small - there are around 700 people hanging out there. But if Vaults decided to go after "advanced DeFi users looking for maximizing risk/reward ratio on their yield who hang out on Telegram and Discord groupchats", that would easily be a few thousands users. Enough to move the needle, especially if you onboard some whales.

So a good segment for a startup is a group of people who:
- have similar painful problems that your product can solve (how to find the best APY?)
- experience these problems in similar context (I'm an advanced DeFi user looking for advanced product)
- are reachable in a similar way (hanging out on 10 specific groupchats, following the same 20 people on Twitter, going to the same 3 conferences each year)
- talk to each other (they meet at all these events and groupchats and trade notes so you get organic word of mouth).

Good segments are often geographical ("Let's dominate crypto meetups in Argentina!"), vertical ("Let's target DAO treasury managers with $1M+ AUM!"), or focused on social clusters ("Let's get popular on these 5 DeFi groupchats and conferences!"). 

Zapper is a good example of the power of picking the right segments.

Their biggest user growth during DeFi summer did not come from integrating blue chip protocols like Aave or Compound.

It came from integrating small yield farms with tight knit communities and no good tools to track rewards. The Zapper team found these farms, integrated them ASAP, and whenever these communities discovered they can see all claimable rewards in one place, they became heavy Zapper users.

One caveat here. Sometimes the segment that looks the easiest to enter isn't the best one.

Our first segment for Kiwi was "Farcaster users who are looking for long-form content". This channel seemed to work as we got our first 1,000 users from there but... most of these people churned. And that's because our Ethereum-first content wasn't the right fit for most of them.

So the fact that you know many crypto devs in Buenos Aires, doesn't always mean you should start from this segment.

The right segment - just like the right place for troops on the French beach - should not only be relatively easy to win but also help you expand further. And sometimes order matters a lot.

Starting from the high note

It is easier to start from a more aspirational market (advanced users, exclusive access, expensive product), and then enter the wider market, than the other way around.

Gnosis multi-sig was initially a tool for ICO teams. When they expanded to normal users, it was easy to convince them that if Golem can hold 400,000 ETH on a Gnosis multi-sig, it's probably good enough for Average Joe's $5,000 portfolio.

Farcaster started as a gated SV & crypto builders community. When they opened up for normal users, it was already a desirable place to hang out, so the initial onboarding was easy.

Pudgy Penguins started with expensive NFTs. When they added Lil Pudgies, Rods, and PENGU memecoin, they already had a prestigious brand, so many fans wanted to join the community.

Now imagine starting with a normie segment and expanding to an aspirational segment. Would be way harder.

Okay, since we covered the fundamentals, let's get to the most important GTM question - where do you find these people?

Step 3: How do you reach these people?

Let’s say you want to learn programming. Do you learn a bit of C++, a bit of Java, Python, Assembly and Rust? Probably not. 

In most cases you either do a course focused on one particular language or pick a project you are excited about, and learn whatever language you need to ship it. 

Same with GTM.

You don’t “enter the market” by doing one tweet, one podcast, one YouTube video, sending one DM to a potential partner, and one TikTok vid. Your efforts - just like with programming - need to be way more focused.

You need to find the right channel.

Wtf are channels

Channels are basically paths that can lead customers to your product.

There are many channels to choose from - conferences, BD, ads, billboards, SEO, and so on. A canonical list was described in the book called Traction.

Here are some examples of channels from the crypto market.

For Ethereum the main channel was Bitcoin forums, groupchats & conferences.

Vitalik was already well-known in the Bitcoin community as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine and he discussed Ethereum whitepaper with many people from the space. Later he shared information about Ethereum on Bitcointalk.org and revealed Ethereum at Bitcoin Miami. Even the ETH pre-sale was denominated in BTC. (look how focused they were on this segment!)

For Tether the main channel was BD deals with Centralized Exchanges.

In 2016-17 CEXs had problems with access to banking systems, so they were happy to implement an alternative dollar settlement. That's how Tether has grown 1,000X in 2 years.

For Polymarket it was a world-class Twitter game.

Polymarket is about the current thing so they are a perfect fit for Twitter. They post memes. They share news. They share screenshots of interesting bets. And they are great reply guys. And they have Shayne who knows how to tweet.

For Snapshot it was Product-Led Growth.

During DeFi summer almost everyone was in multiple DAOs. So when they saw Snapshot working well for Balancer, they were like "Hey, let's use it for my DAO, too!". When they implemented it for their DAO, other people were like "It's cool, I'm gonna share Snapshot with three other DAOs I'm in!".

For Zerion wallet it was NFTs.

When Zerion launched their wallet, they created a Zerion DNA avatar which was a dynamic NFT, evolving based on what assets you held in your wallet. The more money you held inside the wallet, the more "advanced" the NFT became. So many people started sending money to their Zerion wallets and for a long time their NFT was the 2nd largest NFT collection on Mainnet (just behind ENS) with over 300k holders.

For Lido it was DeFi integrations.

To make Lido work, they needed staked ETH to be convertible to vanilla ETH. So they spent millions of LDO tokens to incentivize liquidity for Curve stETH:ETH pool. Later they added a strong stETH integration with Aave since people who staked ETH were also looking for extra yield, so that helped to further promote the project.

For Echo it was KOL(s).

It was tricky to promote Echo because the regulations didn't let people share information about the investments outside the platform. But Cobie has been one of the most influential people in crypto.

So he built in public on his private and project's profiles and described the early-stage funding problem (that Echo solved) on his Substack. Also, group curators (who were typically well-known crypto investors) would send Echo invite codes to people who wanted to co-invest, onboarding new people to the app.

For SushiSwap it was a vampire attack.

In 2020 SushiSwap forked Uniswap and offered high SUSHI rewards to users who staked Uniswap LP tokens. With APYs reaching ~1000%, liquidity providers moved their funds, and in a few weeks SushiSwap amassed about $800M in TVL (about of 55% of Uniswap’s liquidity). This vampire attack jump-started SushiSwap into a top DEX and forced Uniswap to respond by launching the UNI token.

For ZORA it was DMs.

Back when ZORA was very art-oriented, Dee Goens started DMing people on Twitter and Instagram. He looked for sneaker customizers, illustrators and artists and cold outreached, trying to pitch them why they should mint NFTs. Despite a lot of inbound from big brands during the bull market, years later Zora team was still DMing potential users.

For Safary it was building a community.

In early 2022 Safary launched their community for crypto marketers. It worked in batches that you had to apply to and then learn about crypto marketing together with your 60-100 people batch. In 3 years they received over 10,000 applications, and when they built their product for onchain marketing analytics, they already had a lot of marketers they could easily reach.

For Aave it was tapping into an existing community.

Back in 2020 Aave made a bold move. They integrated Chainlink (which was on Mainnet only for about 7 months) as their oracle provider and let people use LINK as their collateral. That move turned (very vocal) LINK marines into big Aave cheerleaders who helped promote the product.

For Fluidkey it was Farcaster.

When Fluidkey announced the product, he set up a Frame where people could sign up for the waitlist. They got about 6,000 signups, but they knew that not all of them are high-quality users.

So when the product was ready, Moritz started manually onboarding users who were among the first 20,000 Farcaster users (which meant they were a pretty curated group of people). After they got the first few hundred users on the app, they built a bot that would DM about 100 users from the list every day and share an access code.

For Rainbow it was a React library.

Rainbow built a clean React wallet-connect toolkit and gave it away for free. When devs implemented RainbowKit, by default their dapp shown Rainbow as a first-class wallet. Although devs could freely choose which wallets to display, most didn't bother to change the defaults, so it helped build a strong Rainbow brand and onboard new users.

For POAP it was live onboarding.

POAP launched at ETHDenver 2019 and Patricio would go person to person asking for people's addresses and mint the POAPs manually for them (which was hard). But this channel still works for them and since 2021 over 7,000 real people got the "I've met Patricio" POAP.

***

Of course, mature products typically have more than one channel.

Lido has been very active on EthResearch, EthStaker, and r/ethfinance. Fluidkey got support from ENS & Safe. Polymarket closed partnerships with top media companies. And so on and so forth.

But if you are a startup with limited resources, it's way better to master one channel and only then expand further.

How do you choose the channel

A canonical way to pick a channel is:

• going through the list of channels,

• coming up with ideas that might work for your startup,

• scoring them by cost, ease of testing, time to signal, and fit with their product,

• picking 3 channels to test,

• choosing which channel do you start with.

If you want a more elaborate description of the process, just ask your favorite LLM for "Bull's Eye framework by Gabriel Weinberg".

Testing the channels

Once you pick the channel, you need to find out if it's going to bring you users.

And here's bad news - just like most product features won't improve retention, most channel experiments won't drive more users.

In other words, growth is probabilistic, not deterministic. It's a game of bets. So you need to find the surest (highest Expected Value) bets you can take.

When I did growth for Kiwi, I decided that our best bets were newsletters, r/ethereum and BD.

We thought newsletters were a good bet because we saw many blogposts on Kiwi. So if someone reads newsletters, they might also like our app as they could discover more interesting things to read.

With r/ethereum the logic was that these redditors liked discussing Ethereum content. And since they cared about decentralization, they might find Kiwi (a decentralized Hacker News/Reddit-like app) interesting. So I shared weekly recap posts there and tried to invite these people to our newsletter which later would educate them about the app.

For BD, we organized writing contests with Gnosis, Nouns & Lens. We asked Kiwi & our Partner's community members to write blogposts, submit them to Kiwi and compete for a few thousand dollars prize pools. It was a lot of work, but co-marketing with much bigger projects elevated our brand and let us reach new people.

My personal approach to choosing these bets is picking ones that - even if we don't eventually reach the growth goal - would still leave us with better brand awareness, connections or understanding of the user needs.

In our case, newsletters and r/ethereum experiments didn't deliver much growth. We reached new people, though, and it resulted in one podcast invitation and a few new users. Writing contests on the other hand worked well, so after the first experiment, we doubled down on this channel and we organized 6 contests in 8 months.

You can typically see if the channel is working after 2-4 weeks of honest effort. So in a year you can test 12-24 channels which is a lot of new information to work with.

If you pick a channel, speak with someone who had some success there.

Imagine you wanted to test Twitter but never tweeted before. How good would be your tweets? Probably not great. So you might think "Ah, Twitter doesn't work for our startup!" when the problem is your poor execution, not poor channel fit.

The same applies to BD, podcasts, KOLs, TikTok, DMing people, and so on.

Examining the channels

When you examine a channel, there are small details that can make or break it.

When we tested if podcasts can work for Kiwi, it turned out that most of our appearances didn't move the needle. But there was one ENS Ecosystem Call that ended with 10+ new paying users signing up right away. When we dug in, it turned out that - since Kiwi integrated ENS - their community wanted to test and support our product.

There are many small details like that and that’s why testing channels “by the book” is basically a full-time job.

Once you have the results in, a simple way to examine your channels is to answer three questions:

1) How much does it cost to acquire one right user through this channel?

By cost I mean not only how much money you spend, but also time, energy and other resources.

By right user I mean someone who is not a bot, is not farming airdops, and is not "just looking". In other words, the right user is someone who could become a long-time product user and is the right fit for your product stage. Product stage-fit is important because you don't want a flood of normies when your product is in alpha and still needs some crypto expertise to use it.

2) How many users are reachable via this channel?

If you have 10,000 users and need to onboard at least 100 new users per week to meet your goals, then a groupchat with 500 users might be too small for you. But if you're just starting, it could be just about right (like it was for Satoshi).

3) If this channel works, does it scale without blowing up?

Can you double down on this channel and go from 10 users per week to 1,000 users per week while still geting “right users” at roughly similar cost and effort? Or does it saturate and get worse fast? It tells you whether the channel can become your main growth engine, or if it’s a small, spiky or quickly-saturating channel.

Sometimes you know you’re going to quickly saturate the channel but just want to ‘add gas to the fire’.

When BAYC started using CollabLand in 2021, the CollabLand team decided to strike the iron while it’s hot. So Anjali (one of fhe Co-Founders) just started DMing all new NFT communities she could find on Twitter and saying: "Hey, would you like to get all your collectors to join a group together?".

After a few weeks everyone was using CollabLand, so there was no point DMing users anymore, but this extra effort helped to speed up the adoption.

Step 4: How to make them understand they need your product

Once you pick the market, segment and channel, you need to pick the message.

Message is basically what you tell (or show) to your users to convince them to try your product. Your message is what users see in your ads, DMs, your landing page, your blog posts, presentations and BD calls. What should you keep in mind?

When someone hears about a new product, they silently ask themselves three questions:
- does this solve any immediate problem I have,
- does it meet the requirements I have for this type of products,
- and how do I know I can trust it’s going to work as advertised.

If you don’t help users find answers to these questions, you end up confused why people “don’t get it”. 

I wrote a separate guide on messaging, so I won’t dive deep into this subject - you can read the guide here. What I will say though is that messaging is not just what you write on your Landing Page (guide is focused on that) but it's what you say via your channels.

When L2Beat launched, they immediately got attention from different teams asking “why our project hasn't been listed among L2s?”. 

This spurred a lot of debate about what L2s actually are. Then Polygon tried to convince everyone they’re an L2 and L2Beat team pushed back. By having this discussion on Twitter they educated the crypto community about the differences between a sidechain and L2 and how L2Beat can help everyone stay informed. 

Another example of messaging via channel is educating users about your product through podcast appearances like EigenLayer did. Or you can be like Hayden who personally explained why Uniswap makes sense.

That being said, it’s safer to assume your users know nothing when they land on your website and educate them from the ground up. Remember, Coinbase used to explain "what is Bitcoin" on their 2013 website.

Step 5: Dealing with the emotional part

One note before we finish - GTM is often emotionally hard. 

And it's hard because you have to make hard decisions and 'get out there' to face the cold feedback from the real world.

Here are a few things to bear in mind:

When you pick your market, it will often feel too small. It’s fine. 

It's typically the signal it’s just about right. But remember that a good market should be the one that’s growing - the faster, the better - because when the pie is growing, it’s easier to get a slice. That’s why VCs love ‘high CAGR’ markets in pitch decks.

When you pick the segment, you will doubt if it’s the right one. It's normal. 

Remember, you are betting - assume you might not get it perfect at the first try. So when you coin your segment as: “DeFi whales in Hong Kong who do $100k-$500k OTC trades” your instinct will tell you to broaden. Resist that. A real beachhead always feels too narrow - that’s what makes it conquerable.

When choosing channels, you might want to do many at the same time. Don’t.

It takes some skill to verify if a channel is the right fit. If you spend 5X more time on doing one channel, you obviously will become better at it compared to dividing the same amount of time on 5 channels. Also, if you can wrap up the tests in 4 weeks, you will still have plenty of time to explore other channels.

When doing messaging, you’d feel that you’re dumbing down. You’re not.

Ask your favorite LLM about the ‘Curse of Knowledge’. It’s really important to make your messaging idiot proof. Not because your users are idiots, but because they are busy. And if they skim through your message in an elevator while running for a meeting, they should be able to "just get it". You can always expand more in the Docs or on your website.

Your GTM work might feel awkward, slow, or uncertain. That's okay.

That’s okay because it should feel awkward (as you’re doing new things), slow (as you’re learning new channels) and uncertain (as you’re making bets). Good news is that you only need one channel to click to take your startup to the next level.

What's next

I know it's a lot to digest, so remember to bookmark this post and come back here from time to time.

And if you’re building an Ethereum startup, I’d love to hear what you’re working on. I run free office hours for founders and I also work directly with teams on strategy and operations. If you're interested, you can find more details and book your office hours call here.

If you wanted to get better understand the mechanics of GTM, here are some materials for each stage:

Step 1: Picking the Market - “Where to Play” by Marc Gruber and Sharon Tal
Step 2: Finding the right Segment - “Obviously Awesome” by April Dunford
Step 3: Testing the Channels: “Traction” by Gabriel Weinberg
Step 4: Messaging: “How to talk about crypto products without confusing the users” by me :) 

PS: I’m also working on a talk version of this post. So if you wanted to do a GTM-focused Q&A for your community or invite me for a talk at a conference, hit me up.

And if you liked this post, you can subscribe for my newletter below.
Don't worry, I won't spam you - in 2025 I sent 7 e-mails.

If you like my writings, run your own project, and ever thought “I’d love to get Mac’s take on this” - now you can.

For free.

Just sign up for my Office Hours:

• You can book a call here,

• And see what I can help with here.

The slots typically disappear quickly.

Why am I doing this?

First, because I'm looking for inspiration.

I always liked chatting with builders - that's probably one of the reasons why I've enjoyed Kiwi community so much. So happy to learn about your projects, challenges, and visions for the future. Especially if you have been reading this blog for a while!

Second, because we might end up working together.

Crypto industry is small and you never know if a guy who gave you a beer at Devconnect Istanbul 2023 wouldn't become your business partner in 2026. But to do something together it's important to get to know each other and the call might be the first step.

At the moment I'm only doing part-time projects. But if there's right chemistry, maybe we will decide to work together full-time. Or do some BD partnership one day. Who knows.

Third, because it just seems fun.

My last 8 years of work included a co-founder’s death, 80h workweeks as a CEO, leading a company through COVID chaos, recording so many podcast episodes I couldn't even look at a mic anymore, stress of closing one hectic last-minute M&A, and working on Kiwi in the crazy crypto environment with little funding.

I felt like I did enough to prove myself I can hustle. Now it's time for some fun (before my obsessive mind starts hustling again).

So if you are looking for my two cents, feel free to book some of my time here.

***

I spent the last few years among crypto founders. I was interviewing them in my podcast, hung out with them at conferences, and became one while building an Ethereum Hacker News startup called Kiwi.

Since I left Kiwi in June, I had some time to step back and reflect. And I do think that consumer crypto is different than normal consumer startups.

And here's why.

Looking for water

We all know that startups look for Product-Market Fit, this magic combination of features and distribution that make them grow fast.

And looking for PMF is like searching for water with a magic rod.

The rod shakes when the water is near. But it’s easy to believe it shook, when it was just your trembling hand moving the rod, desperate for some water.

And in crypto this search gets even harder, because the environment is full of false signals that make your rod shake. So you can waste a lot of time going in one direction just to realize that there’s no water there.

Let's start with an example.

When $1M in revenue provided little signal

You probably heard of Farcaster. It’s a decentralized social app and this year they launched Farcaster Pro, which is kind of similar to Twitter Premium. During launch it didn’t offer many premium features yet.

But in 24h since launch they made over $1M in revenue. In consumer crypto! Seems like a moment to open champagne and dance, right?

But... when you look at the details, almost half of the people who bought this Farcaster Pro subscription had less than 100 followers. Which is weird given that Farcaster Pro was a power user product (that’s why it’s named ‘Pro’).

So why do you think these low-followers’ users decided to pay $120 for the subscription?

Some probably bought Pro to get a badge so their profile stands out and they can get some new followers. But many bought it to speculate. And it worked. First 10,000 users who bought Farcaster Pro for $120, ended up with $600 worth of airdrops the next day. 5X in 24 hours. Not bad.

Funnily this post above is not written by an airdrop farmer. It's written by Chris, a long-time Farcaster power user and early believer.

Which shows that at least two groups of people bought Farcaster Pro - speculators and believers. And this is first thing that distorts signal in crypto. When you're looking for PMF, you want to get market validation from people who just want to use your product. But - as we saw here - you can make $1M in 24 hours and still not be sure if you validated the market.

And this is not really Farcaster team’s fault. They want to build a genuine consumer product and the token that got airdropped hasn't been launched by them. But this is the environment where they - and all of us - operate in. Which makes it much harder to understand if you’re ‘building something people want’ as Paul Graham would put it.

And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Not all that glitters is airdrop hunting

When we launched Kiwi, you had to buy a $10 NFT called Kiwi Pass to fully use the product. In the first 3 months over 100 people bought it, including some high-profile users like Fred Wilson. It was 100% organic growth.

I remember thinking:
"We are getting paying users from Day 1 in the middle of the bear market? Aren't we onto something?"

But very soon we realized the story was more complicated.

We learned that some people bought the Pass because they were friends and wanted to support us. Some did it because they liked that we stood for decentralization and open source. And some paid these $10 because spending 'magic Internet money' feels easy, so why not give it a try?

This means that, even though we didn’t have airdrop hunters among our user base, only some % of our paying users actually wanted to use our product.

And that's pretty crazy if you think about it.

If you asked web2 founders, what are some vanity metrics they'd probably say 'Twitter followers', or 'page views'. But I don't think any would say 'revenue', because it’s the most fundamental startup metric.

Apparently, it's not that clear in crypto. You can see revenue growth and still not be sure if you’re heading in the right direction - either because of speculators or well-meaning supporters. So one of the best signs that you’re “on track to PMF” can lead you astray.

And the market structure is not helping.

Why crypto consumer market is so hard

There are about 45M monthly active addresses on Ethereum, if we count Mainnet and all L2s.

Even if we assume there's only one address per person - which is not true - it means that on a global scale Ethereum has less than 1% market penetration.

So - using classic Geoffrey Moore’s terms - most users (in the West, because it's different in Turkey or Argentina), are Innovators and Early Adopters.

These users are interested in the space so much that they will test your product even if the UX is bad. And that's nice, but this blade cuts both ways. Because these users are so open to testing new products, it also means that your usage chart may skyrocket in one week and next week your users could start looking for the next shiny thing.

So that's problem number one. These users are less sticky than “normal users”

Also, crypto market is very diverse.

At Kiwi our userbase was full of devs, founders, artists, VCs, and researchers, and their expectations of what content should we cover was diverse, too. Some wanted more technical content, others wanted more art, others wanted more essays. It was hard to make everyone happy without losing focus.

And this diversity is true for whole crypto, where you also have speculators, philosophers, cryptographers, TradFi people and so on. This means that this - already small market - is further divided into these subgroups, which are further fragmented across different L1s and L2s.

This is a challenge for growth (how do you even get these users if there are so few of them?) and for product design (how do you sort out feedback from multiple user groups who are here for different reasons and their requests are mutually exclusive?).

In big markets like coffee, you have space for many niches. There's even a multi-million dollar business run by veterans who want to serve coffee to people who love America.

But in crypto market it’s easy to pick a niche that’s too small and then, although people keep using your product, you can’t build a sustainable business because you just won’t find enough users to cover your costs. 

As pmarca said
“In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup”.

But - outside stablecoins, speculation, and some niche use cases like prediction markets or collectibles, we don’t have ‘lots of real potential customers’ yet.

So on top of people who distort the signal, userbase that goes after ‘the next shiny thing’, we also have a very small market. And this is critical if you want to find PMF.

PMF is not just growth

Most people think that PMF equals growth. 

App is suddenly getting 100k downloads in a week? PMF!
All your friends start using the product? PMF!
Protocol starts making $10M volume in a month? PMF!

But PMF is not only about growth. It’s also about retention.

If customers came to your shop, looked around and left, would it be a successful shop? Of course not. Yet we often think that the app getting many downloads already has PMF, forgetting about counter-examples like Clubhouse that died after its short-lived virality.

And there are many stories like that. When the Twitch team built the early versions of their app, they generated 16M downloads in 4 months. And - according to their founder - still didn’t have PMF.

If you want to hear the story, go to 7:30 in the video below:

And they didn't have PMF because their retention was so low, that their app was basically burning the market. People came to their shop, left and never returned.

We all know this high growth/low retention stories in crypto, because we all have seen airdrop farmers.

Rudy

@rudykadoch

It’s time to pull back the curtain on Web3, and unmask all the projects bragging about their "hundreds of thousands" of users

Before I dive in, let me say this clearly: we live in a time where anyone can be labeled a racist for anything. So to be absolutely clear: I have

709

12:58 PM • Jun 6, 2025

But it goes beyond that.

There are also waves that your product can surf. If you built an NFT marketplace in 2020, you got a lot of attention. Now try to build it in 2025, and see how it goes. These waves come and go, and you might believe that you made it, but then the meta changes and your product goes down with the wave.

If you'd like to dive deeper into retention, here's a good blogpost by Andrew Chen and a good video by Chamath where he explains why meteoric growth typically doesn't work.

How tokens impact the users’ attention

There are also two other factors at play.

In crypto there are dozens of zombie projects which suck out retail’s attention and capital. Since it’s taboo to proclaim the project dead, founders ‘exit to community’ and their users stick around projects’ Discord channels believing their tokens, NFTs or points will one day pay off.

And this is is a brutal zero-sum game. If users still believe that Cardano is going to win, they won’t spend their time learning about Ethereum or your dapp because they are already in the propaganda content pipeline of their favorite network.

Another factor is that crypto token prices may impact your retention.

In 2024, during Base memecoin mania, we saw Kiwi usage going down. And why wouldn’t we? 

When someone can spend 15 minutes reading an essay about decentralization or 15 minutes finding the next 100X coin, many people - even those who are here for the right reasons - will choose the second option.

If the market is so challenging, what can you do?

So to sum it up: we have speculators, users who support you but don’t use your product, small and diverse market, challenges with getting retention, and token prices making the attention game harder.

When I started writing this essay, I just wanted to describe the reality as I saw it. I didn’t mean to discourage founders from building in consumer crypto.

So I owe you some solutions. None of them turned Kiwi into the ‘next big thing’ (yet!) but they definitely made our lives easier.

Problem 1: Speculators

Don’t add distortion

If you start a points, or referral program it will be harder to understand if people like your product or they just expect some money in return. So don't do it if you're looking for early signal. It’s a trap!

We once launched a referral program at Kiwi, but the results where underwhelming. Until one day, we saw a big influx of users. Once we started digging, it turned out that most of them were from Korea.

We quickly learned that one Korean influencer shared his referral link saying that people would get airdrops. We got many signups but few longterm users. And since we were looking for a signal and not extra $200, we just killed the program.

BTW not adding distortion is one of the reasons why our Kiwi Pass used to be non-transferrable - we didn't want people to speculate on it, as it would add more noise.

Reward good user behavior

At Kiwi we rewarded users with karma. Like on Reddit, the more people upvote your posts, the more karma you got.

You could see the most active curators on leaderboard and we also credited them in our weekly newsletter, so they got some recognition in return for their work. It was a positive social Scooby Snack for being a good user, not a farmer.

We also had clear guidelines, explaining what type of content we are looking for. If someone shared low-effort spam, we could easily kick them out because their links didn't comply with the guidelines.

If we were in doubt, we checked onchain history to decide if they were a normal user who just didn’t read the guidelines or a farmer. You can’t add guidelines to every product, but there are many ways to reward good user behavior.

Problem 2: People don’t use the product

Talk to your users

When you minted a Kiwi Pass, we invited you to our Telegram groupchat. This is an amazing thing about crypto - most people use the same communicator app. And it's 10X easier to get casual feedback on Telegram than through e-mail .

So on Kiwi groupchat we shared product updates, discussed crypto news, gathered feedback to our feature ideas and so on. And it also gave us access to DMs of our most engaged users.

We spoke with a few hundreds of these users, either on Telegram or video chats, and learned what could we do to make the app more interesting. Sometimes I felt like a Jehovah witness asking if they wanted to speak about Jesus, but it was worth it.

Segment your feedback

If you get feedback, it’s critical to understand where it comes from.

There's this 90/9/1 rule of social apps that says that 90% of your users are just readers, 9% interact with the content and 1% users who post a lot. At Kiwi it was kind of similar.

We collected feedback from different types of users and then worked on features to fix our current bottleneck.

When we didn't have enough content, we built a Chrome extension for Creators that let you submit links with one click. When we didn’t have enough comments, we focused on features for Contributors like improving our comments editor. And when we wanted more readers, we focused on features for Lurkers, like apps' loading time, feed algorithm and so on.

Understanding which group of users you are talking to might help a lot.

Talk to ex-users

When we saw someone becoming inactive, we reached out, and tried to understand what happened.

People often tried to be polite so they said they were “busy”, but we dug more, and some people became brutally honest.

Some said that they “Got logged out a few times and got tired of logging in again” or “Didn’t get enough upvotes for their links”, or just “Felt like reading our links is a bigger investment than scrolling the Twitter feed” and that was some information for us to work with.

Problem 3: Small and diverse market

Find high ARPU market

Which Winnie the Pooh would you prefer to serve? Normal one or tuxedo one?

When I doubt, choose the tuxedo one, as he has more money to spend. You can have a few users but still make a lot of money if your Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is high.

Last month on Ethereum Aave charged over $60M in fees with about 25k monthly users. That’s over $2,400 in fees per user per month. And that's because some whales borrow and lend millions of dollars. Of course not all fees go to Aave treasury but it's still a wild number.

So you don’t need many users, you need the right users.

Similarly, Blur focused on a very small niche of pro traders and also did great numbers when everyone thought NFTs are dead.

Expand the market

If your niche is too small but you believe it’s significant, you can also grow it or wait until it grows itself, like sensei from Ninja Turtles.

In 2022 privacy on Ethereum was a tiny niche. But in 2025 it is already big enough for Raligun to generate $5M in revenue. And since they’ve been around for 3 years, they became a top-of-mind solution when the market has grown. Same with OpenSea that built its presence before the NFTs became "the next big thing".

Cross the chasm

A more radical way to expand the market would be crossing the chasm and bringing normies in.

This is what NBA Top Shot did - their NBA partnership made collectibles appealing to average Joe and gave them an easy way to buy their first NFTs. And it worked!

Another example is Polymarket. They pushed prediction markets to mainstream - part of it is god-tier social media game, part of it is correctly predicting the US presidential elections, part of it is getting creative with their bets like.

If you decide to follow this path, I’d suggest staying focused on a 100k-1M users' niche. You can read more in my essay criticizing efforts to onboard the next 1B users to Ethereum

Problem 4: Hard to get retention

Build a toothbrush product

Larry Page says he's looking for toothbrush products - something you use once or twice a day and it makes your life better.

If you focus on one core thing your product does and it can be done daily, it helps you in two ways.

First of all, it's obvious what's your product about. For Kiwi it was "finding great Ethereum content". And when we had great content in our feed ,we saw our usage numbers go up - because that's what people came for. It's also much easier to get feedback from the users when you do one thing - you have 20 conversations about one thing instead of 20 conversations about 20 different things.

Also, when you focus on daily problems, you get feedback daily. So you can correct your action more often than if you focused on monthly problems.

It doesn’t mean you can’t build a great product around weekly or monthly problems. Most people don’t stake their ETH everyday, and Lido is still very successful. But looking for daily interactions might help to get more signal.

One great thing about such toothbrush simplification is that you stop wasting time on non-priorities. So e.g., one day we noticed that our profile pages were slow. We could’ve spent some time on fixing it, but because people didn’t come to Kiwi for elaborate profile pages, we just deleted a lot of features from profiles. They started working fast and we could focus on improving our toothbrush.

Improve Time to Value

If I prepare instant noodles, my Time To Value is about 1 minute - I just pour hot water and I get a meal. If I order something at the restaurant, my time to value is about 30 minutes, but the food is more tasty so the value I get is higher than with noodles.

In our case, our Value came from content. But the problem was that most of our content was pretty long, so we were like a restaurant - you had to spend a lot of time to get a very nice meal.

But we found out that on Hacker News many users don't click the links - they just read the discussion below which is way faster to "eat". That motivated us to make comments more popular - we added comment previews, emoji reactions, better way to write them on mobile and so on.

We also experimented with more instant noodles content like memes or charts, that might provide less value but you get it right away.

Focus on high Product-User Fit

If your mom downloads your DeFi aggregator app, the Product-User Fit is low. She’s like a bird at the meeting. But if you onboard some DeFi veteran who makes 5 txs a day, the Fit is good. So the better ‘Product - User’ fit you get, the higher retention you will probably get.

When we went to Ethereum conferences, many people were interested in Kiwi and downloaded the app right away, and some became long-time users. That’s because ‘Product-User Fit’ was high, and that’s also why it costs $10k+ to get a sponsorship at top conferences - all products want this kind of userbase.

Get a decent mobile app

I know that Ethereum is full of desktop-first Harolds.

And yes, Figma and Cursor don’t need to care about a mobile app, but consumer apps need to. So please have a decent mobile app. We tried PWAs and they are fine for some time, but it's not good long-term because analytics is not good, push notificiations don't work as well, and it crashes more often because people use different mobile browsers.

So just get an iOS or Android app.

Problem 5: tokens and dead projects hijacking attention

Explore Little Channels

Andrew Chen has this concept called "Little channels". When your app has 100 users, and you get 10 more users in a week, you've just grown 10%, which is great.

So when your product is small, you can focus on smaller, high-signal channels like subreddits, forums, niche podcasts and so on, instead of trying to get viral on Twitter. This is how ZORA got their first users - they just DM'ed artists on Instagram.

When you're small you can even be like this guy on a meme, explaining what you do to people, one by one.

We went with Kiwi to specialized podcasts like Dev N Tell, became visible among Gitcoin projects, onboarded people one by one and so on. Some of these ideas didn't work, but some did well, like going to an ENS ecosystem call where 50% of attendees signed up to Kiwi right away.

Thanks to that laser-focus, you can find people who actually care about the tech more than the token price. Plus they will probably retain better.

Go to ETH conferences

Great thing about ETH conference is that you barely hear anyone talking about prices there. People are in it for the tech.

This is btw a pretty non-bullshit way to gather feedback.. This is how we learned what to improve in our onboarding and why mobile Ethereum wallets don't work. It was also useful to see how our app interacts on different browsers, operating systems, and wallets. 

This is btw how Railgun learned how to improve their Docs. 

You never know before you launch

So this was the last piece of advice from me.

All this advice is focused on early projects.

And by early I mean: ‘You just launched, and are looking for a signal to understand if you go in the right direction’. If you need to pump your numbers to raise the next round, or already have some PMF and just want to scale, it might be better to trade some noise to get more growth.

Speaking of early stage projects, my final point goes without saying, but I will say it anyway. All these ideas won’t work until you get your product out there. So it’s better to launch early.

When Tim launched Kiwi, you had to download Kiwi’s GitHub repo, set up a node and submit your link via CLI. It was - from the consumer product POV - overly complex. But it was enough for some users to get interested (including me), and this is how we started working with Tim. 

And looking for signal is tricky. The way I see it is that startup founder lives in a 24/7 casino, playing a game. In this game, if you put the right features and distribution pieces in the right order and click “Ship!”, you might hit the jackpot. But even for experienced founders and VCs it’s hard to tell if the combination is right before you click the “Ship!” button.

It's more like arts than science. In arts you can build your taste and feeling for the trends, but it doesn't mean you can always predict which song will become the #1 Billboard hit.

Black Sabbath’s biggest hit - "Paranoid" - which they choose to end their band's last performance was an album filler written in 20 minutes. Quentin Tarantino and his director friends thought that “Pulp Fiction” was going to bomb. “Shawshank Redemption”, the #1 movie of all time on IMDB did - in fact - bomb before it became a video rental hit and built its legacy.

It's similar with startups - it's hard to predict what's going to work. In the end, consumer products and consumer culture have lots in common.

So please don't get discouraged by all challenges I mentioned, get your product out there, and good luck!

If you're building in crypto and need help with product, growth or community, let's chat.

If you liked this essay you can subscribe to my blog - I typically post once in a few months,
so I won't spam you:

Explaining crypto products is hard.

Users are:

Confusing one category with another:
– “Oh, so if you provide yield, you must be a lending platform?”
– “No, we are a liquidity pool.”

Not seeing the difference between you and the competition:
– “Oh, so you’re like Axie Infinity?”
– “Well, our game also has NFTs, but it’s totally different…”

Expecting features that don’t make sense in your product category:
– “Why your web3 social doesn’t let me import my e-mail contacts?”

And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Some time ago even pro-crypto Lex Friedman showed some knowledge gaps when he asked Brian Armstrong if Coinbase is a Layer3 technology.

Before crypto, I spent 7 years making complex products easy to understand, so I started looking for a way to make crypto less confusing.

I’ve talked with 100+ web3 founders, both as part of running my builders-oriented podcast Web3 Talks and through casual conversations. I also went through top web3 projects of the time to find examples of great product communications.

I filled this guide with 40 examples of Good & Bad product communication from projects such as Zapper, Dune, Arweave, Royal, Ledger & many more. To make the lessons easier to understand, I created alternative versions of their websites (you’ll understand what I mean in a second).

The whole guide is organized around 5 simple rules:
#1: Make them care.
#2: Make it easy to understand
#3: Show why your product can solve their problems
#4: Help them believe you will deliver on your promises
#5: Convince them to try it now

Let’s go!

***

Rule #1: Make them care

How to make them care tip #1:
Address the users, not the investors

One confusing thing about crypto is that your users are often your investors. They buy your token or NFTs, and part of them do that for pure speculation. So some projects decided to turn their Landing Pages into pitch decks. 

For example, the project says they’re a “Tokenized metaverse platform to empower next generation of creator economy.” 

And I agree that for VCs, it might be okay. They must explain to their LPs why their “Metaverse fund” wants to invest in this product. Also, speculators who look for coins that will go up when #Metaverse is trending on Twitter are also happy to see this keyword on your website.

But most users don’t. They only care how your product can make their lives better. 

Alternative Arweave website focused on investors:

Real Arweave website that’s user-centric:

How to make them care tip #2:
Start with “What will you get” instead of “How will you get it” 

Another confusing thing about crypto is that tech is extremely important. 

For users, it makes a difference if your product is built on Ethereum, Solana, or Polkadot.
It might be crucial for them to understand what consensus mechanism your protocol uses.
And it matters if your wallet is secured by MPC or Multi-sig.

But… You can leave it for the second sentence. And FAQ. And Whitepaper. 

First, you need your user’s attention. As Guy Kawasaki says: “We live in a Tinder world. Interesting? Swipe right. Not interesting? Swipe left."

So it’s worth following the good old advertising mantra: Use the first 3 seconds to buy your next 10 seconds. Use your next 10 seconds to buy the next 30 seconds. And when they’re hooked, you can go on with your message.

Users need to get excited by your headline. And when they understand why they should care, they can go on to learn more.

Alternative Royal website focused on “How will I get it”:

Real Royal website that starts with “What will I get”:

How to make them care tip #3: 

Talk about their priorities

We all know that Satoshi started Bitcoin for a bigger cause. But it doesn’t mean that a user investing his life savings in CumRocket shares Satoshi’s vision. And we sometimes forget that.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with a business developer from a web3 project that offered a product for DAOs. He summed his experiences with: “They were laughing at our big vision of democratizing security”.  (2025 update: they figured it out, and their project is one of the top DAO toolings out there :))

But aren’t DAOs here for a bigger cause? Some of them are. But they have more pressing, tangible priorities.

They care about their smart contract not getting hacked.
About contributors not disappearing during the bear market.
About their token not getting dumped so that people start thinking they’re a scam project.

So if you come with a Sinek-style Start-With-Why big vision, they won’t care. 

Big visions are good for bull markets and a small subset of users (mostly – early adopters) who really care about them. But most users don’t care. And the more mainstream crypto gets, the fewer of them will care.

That’s why we need to understand our users’ priorities, a.k.a. their most pressing selfish interests* before we start talking about our product.

*If you think addressing selfish interests is against crypto ethos, think about Bitcoin. Bitcoin works because it uses game theory to efficiently address the selfish interests of miners, investors, developers & users.

Alternative LearnWeb3 website focused on its big mission:

Real LearnWeb3 website addressing developers’ priorities:

How to make them care tip #4:

Be specific

Web3 startups, just like web2 ones, love to sound cool. That’s human nature. But it’s often counter-productive.

It has been observed by advertising legend David Ogilvy in 1985, years before the Internet:
“Some copywriters write tricky headlines – double meanings, puns, and other obscurities. This is counter-productive. In the average newspaper, your headline has to compete with 350 others. Readers travel fast through this jungle. Your headline should telegraph what you want to say.”

Although in culture & arts-oriented projects like NFT collections playing games with your audience might work, in most other web3 projects, it doesn’t.

Alternative Ledger website tries to sound cool: 

Real Leger website is much more specific:

 ***

Rule #2: Make it easy to understand:

How to make it easy to understand tip #1:
Adjust your communications to the level of novelty

Most crypto products are new to the average Joe. But not for us as we have already been using them for months or years. So it’s easy to forget that we need to explain how it works.

So sometimes the new product is communicated in a vague way. And there are so many scams in crypto that if something is unclear, people take a mental shortcut: “if it’s unclear, it’s shady.” 

Adjusting the communication to the level of novelty is not limited to web3, of course. The first iPhone commercials were walkthroughs that explained its features step by step. Now with over 2 billion iPhones sold, they just show how cool photos it takes.

Same with Amazon, who had some really weird but informative commercials when their product was new.

Web3 is no exception here. OpenZeppelin, in 2018, had to explain to developers how it works. Today as a de facto standard, their team can focus on other things.

Real 2018 OpenZeppelin website:

Real 2022 OpenZeppelin website: 

How to make it easy to understand tip #2: 

Write like you talk

This is a thing that happens in both web3 and web2. Copywriters really like to use words like “cutting-edge,” “state-of-the-art,” and “supercharge” because they think it makes the startup look innovative.

But do we really scratch our heads in front of computers and think, “Hmm, maybe I just need a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art blockchain infrastructure to supercharge my dapp?” 

Probably not.

And the goal of your copy is to naturally enter your user’s thinking process. So the rule of thumb is: “If this phrase could be found in McKinsey report, it’s probably not clear enough.”

We should aspire to one-liner phrases such as: Tap the app get a ride. Three clicks and your holiday is booked. And so on. If you find it hard, you might use GPT4 or ask people on Reddit’s ELI5 for help.

Alternative QuickNode website is full of useless buzzwords:

Real QuickNode website explains what they do in layman’s terms:

How to make it easy to understand tip #3:

Provide the relevant amount of tech explanation

Web3 has been blessed with interoperability. This means that developers can build on top of your protocol. But sometimes, it means that when you address both developers and users, you can overwhelm users with tech. Or starve potential developers with too few tech details about your infra project. 

We talked about not starting with tech in the first sentence. But it’s also important to balance the amount of tech information in the next parts.

And you can’t do it well if you don’t know how technical your users are.

So if you address crypto OGs who understand the difference between optimistic rollups & zk-rollups and you talk about basic stuff, they’d think, “Where’s the beef? Is the tech weak here, and that’s why they don’t talk about it?”.

But if you address newcomers who send their seed phrases to fake Twitter MetaMask support, then they’d think: “What is this consensus mechanism? I just want to buy some crypto!”

Coinbase, for example, always targeted less tech-savvy users and they used haven’t focused too much on the tech side.

Real 2013 Coinbase website even explained what Bitcoin was:

Real 2022 Coinbase website is still very simple:

Ethereum, on the other hand, targeted cryptography-fluent devs. Imagine reading their website in 2014 without having a clue what Ethereum might look like in practice.

Real 2014 Ethereum Foundation website is very technical:

As Ethereum became more mainstream and its explanation evolved, it started reaching also less tech-savvy audiences.

Real 2022 Ethereum Foundation website:

One note. Understanding “How technically advanced are your users?” is going to impact all your communications. Your landing page. Twitter posts. FAQs. Blogs. Memes you share. Copywriters you hire. And so on.

The marketer who shilled Logan Paul’s NFTs might not be a great fit for an infra project. And vice versa.

How to make it easy to understand tip #4:

Find good metaphors and analogies

We all know blockchain explanations that start with “Alice & Bob want to make a transaction.” 

We also know zk-proof explanations that start with “How could you prove you know where Waldo is without revealing his position?”.

And we remember them because they work. They stick to our minds. 

So whenever you’re building a new product, think about a metaphor or analogy that might work (try not going for a “Uber for X” shortcut).

Alternative MetaMask website that doesn’t use any metaphor:

Real MetaMask website that’s focused on the gateway metaphor:

How to make it easy to understand tip #5

Find the right visuals

We all love beautiful, memorable websites and purple gradients here. And that’s great. So let’s make our visual explanations stand out as well!

They say one image is worth 1000 words. But only the one that cuts to the bone of phenomena and explains it in seconds. 

Alternative NiftyComedians website:

Real NiftyComedians website

***

Rule #3: Show why your product can solve their problems

How to show why your product can solve their problems tip #1:

Use knowledge levers

As most of our peers are excited about web3, it’s easy to forget where this excitement comes from. And it typically comes from understanding certain things.

You won’t value Bitcoin until you see the FED’s money printing and authoritarian governments seizing the citizens’ money.

You won’t value decentralization until you understand that relying on Big Tech APIs is risky, and you can end like Zynga.

You won’t also value Zapper until you try to track your DeFi portfolio with Spreadsheets and Etherscan.

Every product has prior experiences or knowledge that’s mandatory to really appreciate its value. That’s why crypto is so popular in African countries where people are unbanked and don’t have cheap and easy access to USD.

So think about 1-3 key things your users need to understand to appreciate the value of your product. And educate them – sometimes via your landing page, sometimes via Docs and FAQ

Alternative universe IPFS website where they don’t pull any knowledge levers:

Real IPFS website that educates their users:

How to show why your product can solve their problems tip #2:

Show your product in action

“Add more screenshots” is the most common Landing Page feedback I’ve seen.

Our users also prefer to see the product in action. So show your screens and gifs!

Alternative Zapper website where they don’t show their product:

Real Zapper website where you can see the product in action:

How to show why your product can solve their problems tip #3:

Show many sides of your product

Many web3 founders aspire to Uniswap’s cleanness and simplicity. But most products must highlight more features to grab the user’s attention. 

That’s because most users have a mental product checklist in their minds.

Is it safe? Can I connect my wallet? Does it integrate with my favorite dapp? Can I do this thing? And what about that thing? And what if this terrible thing happens?

Different user segments might have a different mental checklist – your mom might be less interested in hash functions than Vitalik. But it’s still there in some form.

So it’s important to understand what questions your users are asking (best way: by talking to them) and smuggle the answers in your website’s copy. Then you can expand your answers in Docs & FAQ.

Alternative NFTfi website would have a decent but limited description of the product:

Real NFTfi website shows many sides of their product:

Rule #4: Help them believe you will deliver on your promises

How to help them believe you will deliver on your promises tip #1: 

Map objections and disarm them upfront

Web3 builders community is supportive. But sometimes, it means they don’t share objections to your product. So it’s easy to forget that users have their doubts.

And your users are going to have objections. Especially since you’re operating in a space that’s full of scams. So you need to ask users about their concerns, think through all “What could go wrong,” prepare your arguments and elegantly add them to your copy.

Alternative Dune website ignores most users’ concerns:

Real Dune website is addressing potential users’ concerns:

How to help them believe you will deliver on your promises tip #2: 

Map user opinions to your users’ situation

Your users start with different experiences, expectations & beliefs about your category of products.

They might think that DEXes are not safe. That crypto accounting software is unreliable. Or that NFT swaps are scams for stealing Bored Apes.

So opinions you share on the website shouldn’t just be generic “Cool product, highly recommended”. They should address your users’ objections. 

Alternative Gilded website shows a shallow opinion from an unknown company:

Real Gilded website is focused on deep opinions from reputable companies:

How to help them believe you will deliver on your promises tip #3: 

Use Sinatra tests

Most crypto builders hang out in Telegram chats, Discord channels & conferences. And we basically know which products are leaders in their category. But many users don’t. That’s why you should use Sinatra tests.

It’s a copywriting idea inspired by Sinatra’s song “New York, New York,” where he sings, “If you can make it here, you can make it everywhere.”

So you need to show examples that will show that “If you made it there, you can make it everywhere”

An example from my life:

My friend told me her mom worked as a cleaning lady. And she added, “But you know, not a normal cleaning lady. She was like a manager of other cleaning ladies.”.

A few years later, I learned what kind of a manager she was. It turned out she worked at Marriott as a staff manager. And she was known for organizing things perfectly, so when Bill Clinton stayed at their hotel, she got a written “Thank you” note from the president of the United States.

So if “She could make it during Bill Clinton’s stay, she can make it everywhere.”

Your web3 product might also have stories or facts like that. It can be a referral from Vitalik. Or providing infrastructure for OpenSea. Or being a #1 choice for some great niche zk-proof researchers.

Alternative Wintermute website is not using Sinatra tests to highlight their market position:

Real Wintermute website shows raw, powerful numbers

Rule #5: Convince them to try it now

How to convince them to try it now Tip #1:

Show clearly why you’re different 

Web3 is a very collaborative space, and we sometimes feel bad comparing our products to a competition being run by our friends. But our user still needs to understand why they should use your product and not the other thing.

DeFi degens may prefer a platform with the highest yield, even when it means bigger risks.
Newcomers may prefer the biggest DEX, even if it means fewer features than the specialized ones.
Sophisticated NFT collectors may prefer a more niche marketplace, even when it means higher costs.

Alternative ZenGo website is describing their wallet without highlighting what makes it different:

Real ZenGo website compares the product with other wallets:

How to convince them to try it now Tip #2:

Surf the trend waves

Your product can surf trend waves. Sometimes the wave can take you really far, just like dissatisfaction with financial systems gave extra speed to Bitcoin.

So – although it’s being overused – it’s sometimes useful to relate to “creator economy”, “ReFi” or “open protocols” on your website.

Alternative Moss Earth website isn’t too exciting:

Real Moss Earth website shows how they are part of something bigger:

How to convince them to try it now Tip #3:

Make your users feel good about themselves

Most crypto products do it, but I’m going to mention it anyway.

Your product needs to say something positive about the user. Just like using a Tesla tells “You care about the environment” or using an iPhone tells “You’re trendy and doing well financially.”

In the web3 example, your users might feel like a patron when they’re buying an NFT directly from the artist (see: the NiftyComedians example we shared before). Or they will feel like a good person when they’re offsetting their carbon footprint via Moss Earth. Or they will feel like the smartest kid in the block when they’re maximizing yield.

Alternative Code4rena website is okay but it doesn’t make me feel supersmart:

Real Code4rena website shows that by using their product, I get into “If You Know You Know” club:

How to convince them to try it now Tip #4:

Add some FOMO in a classy way

I think airdrops made us all lazy. As users expected to get them, they were more eager to cross the chasm and try new services. 

But in the bear market, there are fewer people out there. And they are more hesitant to try new stuff as most airdrops will be worthless. So we got to do something to move our users from their mental couch.

We need to give them a little push. Show the number of NFTs already minted. Show that they can book the cool username on a new web3 social platform. Present how their competitors or other people are already using you. 

Alternative PoolTogether website doesn’t induce FOMO:

Real PoolTogether website gives me an extra push to try it out:

***

Last thing

So after 5 rules, 19 protips & 40 examples, we’re almost done. 

Creating a good copy sometimes feels like solving a multi-variable maths equation. It takes time, and you'll probably need to rewrite your material multiple times before it's good enough.

But it is worth it because - as someone smart once said - 'copywriting is sales at scale'. Every time someone goes to your website, they will read the story your share. The better the story, the higher the chances they will convert. Every single time.

Of course, it’s just one part of the equation. Communication makes a promise that a product should fulfill. So please don't use this guide to overpromise and underdeliver :)

So good luck!

If you're building in crypto and need help with product, growth or community, let's chat.

BTW if you liked this post, you can subscribe to my newsletter here:

PS:

This article stands on the shoulders of giants. 

The 5 rules have been heavily inspired by Peep Laja’s insights on messaging. Landing Page protips have been inspired by YourLandingPageSucks.com, & MarketingExamples Landing Page guide.  

Also, Thanks to 0xElle, sterlingb.eth & other members of the Farcaster fam for the feedback!

It’s a peaceful departure - Tim and I had different ideas on how to run the project. After long discussions, we decided that it’d be better to go all-in with one razor-sharp perspective instead of searching for lukewarm compromises. This means that Kiwi will be continued by Tim and I’m going 
to support the project from the sidelines.

Looking back, I’m proud of these two years as we took the road less traveled.

We bootstrapped and stayed independent, even when it made us scrappy. 
We prioritized open source and decentralization, even if it meant much more work. 
And we didn’t chase short-term trends that could distract us from our goals.

In 2023, when we met with Tim in Farcaster comments section, Kiwi was a bare-bones MVP. To share a link, you had to download our GitHub repo, buy an NFT on Mainnet and write a specific command in the terminal.

From then on, a lot has changed.

Our app has gone through countless iterations (OGs may remember Editor’s Picks and Banana News) and is now available on web, as an iOS app and Farcaster Mini App.

We hosted multiple writing contests with Gnosis, Lens, Purple, and Nouns, creating a space for communities to discuss their most pressing challenges.

These contests became quite a thing. Some of the winning submissions were printed in ETH Investors Club magazine, and one of the contests even got a prompt from Vitalik. A few months ago, when 
I saw Celo announcing they became an L2, they referenced the blogpost that Marek, Co-Founder 
of Celo, wrote for our contest.

In these two years, Tim and I also authored posts that made waves in the Ethereum community and gave talks at conferences - Devcon, Dappcon, Farcon, and others.

Since Kiwi is a social app, we’ve been very focused on building a strong community. We managed to gather a great group of Ethereum devs, founders, and operators, and many of them have become friends.

One of my favorite memories is our community dinner in Bangkok. 30 minutes before the event, 
a heavy tropical rain started. The traffic became crazy, and I worried that no one would come, especially since there were so many other side events to chose from.

But then, little by little, people - soaking wet - started coming. We had a great night, ate fantastic Korean food and when the meetup ended, a few of us kept talking outside the restaurant and on our way home, because we had so many shared interests to explore.

And although Kiwi has not reached millions of users (yet!), whenever I told people at an ETH conference that I work at Kiwi, at least a few said “Oh, I know Kiwi! Look, I have your app on my home screen”. And they were always surprised that “we are just two guys”.

It’s been an intense two years, and I’d like to thank everyone who helped us on the way. Building in consumer crypto is hard, especially when you’re bootstrapping, but this path became much more enjoyable with all amazing people who supported our journey.

And although I won’t work on Kiwi anymore, I’m always going to support it, too. And I am confident that Tim will keep developing Kiwi until it becomes a household name.

What’s next? I have a few ideas, and some friends even shared some offers. But I haven’t made any decisions yet. So, if you have any good ideas, DM me on Telegram.

Mac from Kiwi

"Are you in it for the tech or the money?"

— goes an old question.

But is it even the right question to ask? I don’t think most people are in Ethereum just for tech. Not even Vitalik.

How is that possible? Well... imagine Ethereum got magically overtaken by the Solana team. Or Cardano. Or Justin Sun.

What kind of projects would be built on top of Ethereum now? Would it still make hard decentralization trade-offs? And would we still want to work on growing this ecosystem?

Probably not.

So if it's not tech, what is Ethereum actually about? Why are we here?

Why are we here

There are many ways to answer this question.

• "We're building a world computer,"

• "We're creating a new form of money,"

• "We're creating a permissionless financial system for everyone."

We all know those lines. But they only tell us what we build, not why we build it.

So here's a 2014 take on "why" from Gavin Wood:

“Web 3.0, or as might be termed the "post-Snowden" web, is a reimagination of the sorts of things that we already use the Web for, but with a fundamentally different model for the interactions between parties.

Information that we assume to be public, we publish. Information that we assume to be agreed, we place on a consensus-ledger. Information that we assume to be private, we keep secret and never reveal. Communication always takes place over encrypted channels and only with pseudonymous identities as endpoints; never with anything traceable (such as IP addresses). 

In short, we engineer the system to mathematically enforce our prior assumptions, since no government or organisation can reasonably be trusted.”

So Gavin says "We build an alternative system because we don't want to be spied on by governments and companies". Ten years later the job's not finished, and privacy still remains an important motivation for pcaversaccio and other Ethereum cypherpunks.

If you asked Vitalik in 2025 why he's here, he probably wouldn't mention Blizzard nerfing his World of Warcraft character anymore. But the answer could be much broader:

If you asked me, I'd probably say something less ambitious, like "I'm in Ethereum because I want a better alternative to financial system and social media."

There are also other motivations. Some might want to help artists make money online. Others want to help people in developing countries preserve their wealth. And some are here because it gives them the wild west vibes of the early Internet.

And of course some ETH builders got nerdsniped by the decentralized networks tech. But if you dig deeper, for many of them tech is just a tool to solve some of the humanity's most pressing problems. Take a bigger vision away, and tech instantly becomes less interesting.

Of course not everyone comes to Ethereum to change the world.

My first contact with crypto was when my OG friend told me I can buy ETH when it's low and sell when it gets higher. Many people enter crypto for the same reasons, but then some "come for the money, stay for the network", as described by a16z's price-innovation cycle. "Believe in something" is contagious.

So we are here because we have some big problems to solve. And how we solve them matters, too.

The Ethereum way

A few months ago I was at a garden party and met a friend I haven't seen for years. So we sat down near a bonfire and he asked me what do I do now.

So I told him about Ethereum. I told him that we want software and data to be more open and decentralized. That we want more privacy, and personal liberty. That stablecoins are already helping millions of people, and so does DeFi. That we build alternatives to Big Tech social apps. That the community is so meritocratic that Danny Ryan - a guy from the Internet - led its most important project. That we have conferences around the world, and everyone is so welcoming that if I got teleported to Taipei, Nairobi or Buenos Aires, I'd find "my people" there.

He looked at me, visibly sad, and said:
"Man, I'm jealous. I'm just working on a CRM app I couldn't care less about."

It made me realize that we take for granted that Ethereum is ideologically driven. But after 30 years of mainly soulless Silicon Valley projects, it's an exception, not a rule.

So what's the Ethereum way of doing things?

I think we all believe that critical software should be open source. That devs should be compensated for maintaining public good software. That code can take over some parts of the security and law enforcement. That free speech should be protected. That composability should be incentivized. That critical infrastructure should follow the "voice & exit" rule. And so on and so forth.

And this ideology doesn't stop at words. Satoshi hasn't written a WSJ op-ed to criticize financial crisis. He hasn't given lectures at Harvard about corporate socialism, nor has he founded an NGO to lobby the government. He just built an alternative to the system he didn't like. And so did Vitalik when he realized he can't build his vision on Bitcoin. This focus on action is part of our ethos.

The Ethereum approach is also focused on cooperation. We believe that many smart people working on the same problem might reach better results than one creative genius. That's one of the reasons why, contrary to other projects, the community is so open, and our L2s are independent like the United States.

Without people sharing and acting on this "why & how", Ethereum wouldn't be Ethereum. These beliefs define our roadmap: how we approach problems, what we focus on, and what we deliberately ignore. Take them out and we might become another centralized blockchain with closed source smart contracts, memecoins dominance and more hype than substance.

And sure, not everyone who builds on Ethereum will follow these ideas. But this is the point of permissionless networks. Someone wants to build a socialist coop, and someone wants to build a libertarian wild west memecoin launcher. And that's fine!

As in famous quote, attributed to Voltaire:

"I wholly disapprove of what you say—and will defend to the death your right to say it."

In other words, giving people freedom to do what they want to do is also part of our how.

And these beliefs totally change the output of what we actually build.

So what do we build, exactly?

So let's say we build this world computer. What kind of computer is it?

Because our computer is dealing with money and identity, we need it to be protected from manipulation and unexpected changes or - as Josh Stark would say - we need it to be hard. That's why Ethereum needs to stay decentralized. If there was one CEO, company or nation state who could control how much ETH you own or where you can transact, it'd not be much better than TradFi and Big Tech.

We need to build castles without kings.

And this decentralization has consequences. Because no single entity can control the network, and Ethereum has an open source culture that believes in code overtaking important parts of the security, our smart contracts can protect billions of dollars. This also means that the contracts are composable, so builders can tap into our collective intelligence and build on each others work. And because we want the network to stay open to everyone, we work on things like inclusion lists, to ensure that people have a freedom to transact.

This computer is one of a kind. And this means that people can build one of a kind applications on top of it.

So yes, Ethereum has DeFi, just like other chains now. But because we build it on a different computer, our DeFi is different.

Marc Zeller said it best:

At this point it's only DeFi when it comes from Ethereum region of blockchain, otherwise it's just sparkling CeFi.

We could also say that Ethereum has stablecoins. But because of decentralization, our stablecoins provide much better security guarantees than for example Tron. So although you can exchange Tron USDT to Ethereum USDT on Coinbase, our stablecoins are different than Tron's. Just like a gold coin bought from a royal mint is different than the one bought from some shady guy on the street.

And thanks to this decentralization ETH - although volatile - is definitely a new form of money, too. And there are prediction markets, onchain art, tokenized stocks, decentralized identity, and social networks, which work differently when they're built on Ethereum.

This is why "Built on Ethereum" badge makes sense. It's as if the app was built with titanium instead of wood or plastic. And sure, you can still make something useless or fragile with titanium, just like you can produce a scam website using https. But at least you know it’s the designer who failed, not the material.

No wonder why Ethereum dominates in basically all use cases where hardness is key.

And these are just dapps. But Ethereum is already larger than that.

When we started Kiwi, we wanted to curate Ethereum-related content. But then we faced a dilemma: what actually is Ethereum-related content? Are public goods Ethereum? And how about privacy? Or network states? Or DeSci? Or d/acc?

There's a whole myriad of Ethereum-adjacent ideas which create our ecosystem. And this eclectic group builds on each others ideas - just like XVIII century scientists and philosophers who believed in empiricism, rationality and personal liberty and ended up building the foundations of modern science and democracy.

What we build here may eventually go beyond dapps you can use with your wallet.

Path forward

So this is why I think we are here.

Because we believe in something, and despite 10 years of people ignoring, laughing, and fighting Ethereum, the mission stayed the same. And the hard trade offs are still being made, despite all Crypto Twitter dunks, and ‘Ethereum killers’ showing up every year.

This is a beautiful culture and I think we should cultivate it. That being said, I hope we will also evolve.

In the last 9 years, we've been in the infrastructure phase, where we had to work out how to build and scale this new type of a computer. We all had moments when we paid $200 in gas for a simple Mainnet transaction, and solving that was a #1 problem. The regulatory environment was also more predatory, and EF chose to be more hands-off and focused on infra to stay safe.

Now the sentiment changed, Ethereum grew up, and we are ready for consumer adoption. So we have to make some changes.

I love open source but we can't show consumers 57 wallet options. Dev-first culture is what built Ethereum, but we can't limit our communications to PeerDAS, Verkle trees and MEV, because 99.9% people don't care. I think it's great that each L2 has their own BD team, but we should have some entity to represent Ethereum (and that's why I cheer for Ethrealize).

We also shouldn't only speak about defensive attributes of Ethereum like censorship resistance or self-custody. These lines might cater to Turks and Argentinians who crave freedom to hold and transact assets, but they don't move people in the US or Europe. No one cares about building bunkers in peacetime.

So on top of d/acc, we should also speak about eth/acc. How stablecoins are 10X better than TradFi, how Aave helps people lend and borrow money, how global prediction markets are better than walled garden betting platforms, how we helped digital artists earn money, and so on and so forth.

There's also a larger question of integrating newcomers.

(How to not make them horrified when the first thing they see is Crypto Twitter, is a material for another post)

There are many crypto founders who just want to build something successful and make a lot of money. We can't just try to teach them about Ethereum values and hope they'd override their selfish incentives just to be seen as a good person. How to solve that is an important challenge, and I hope we'd find a way.

There's also PR. It's nice that people build apps on top of Ethereum, but if some of them are scams, grifts or get hacked, and get most of the media attention, we need to find a way to react. One way to solve it is moving the spotlight from casinos to quality projects, to make Ethereum "obviously useful".

There are many challenges in front of us, and they are all hard-earned problems that we wish we had 5 years ago. And since we have the new EF leadership, I really do hope that now is the great time to remind everyone why we are here, what's the Ethereum way of doing things, and highlighting projects that make it useful.

Fingers crossed.

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What does he think about capitalism?

And what does he think about gun control?

You probably had some answers in your head. How could you make an opinion about their beliefs with so little data?

Say hello to memeplexes.

What are Memeplexes

I learned about Memeplexes about 10 years ago thanks to my friend Arthur. 

The idea is simple: 

Memeplex is a set of ideas that are most often seen in groups, even if they’re not logically connected.

So for example being supportive of Queer movement doesn’t need to mean you’re anti-capitalism. Or believing in God and living in Arizona doesn’t mean you support guns. Yet, many people share these ideas. 

Because beliefs often coexist together, we start thinking things such as: "He supports LGBT rights, so he probably votes for Kamala", "He listens to Joe Rogan so he probably supports Trump", and so on.

And very often, we are right!

So aren't memeplexes just stereotypes? Only on a surface.

Memeplexes are like a weather that is objective and has some patterns that occur in the real world. Stereotypes are like weather forecasts that are subjective and try to simplify the patterns we have observed.

And just like weather forecasts, stereotypes can be a hit or miss. Especially when they're not based on beliefs that everyone can freely choose, but things beyond people's control such as sex, age, or skin color.

In other words, if you want to understand why people around you think what they think, it's better to focus on memeplexes than stereotypes.

And memeplexes can change history.

Age of Enlightenment memeplex promoted ideas such as rationalism, empiricism, and liberty, that helped us develop scientific methods, political institutions and economics we use up to this day.

Globalization memeplex promoted ideas such as free trade, open borders, and cultural exchange which shaped the modern economy and made a world more interconnected (for better or worse).

And we all know more negative memeplexes such as Nazism or Communism.

So how do end up following such ideologies?

How do we get into a Memeplex?

It usually starts when we meet people whose single idea resonates with us. 

Let’s say you’re a young American.

On a rainy Friday evening you go to a bar with your Norwegian friend named Thor. Over some beer and chips he tells you a story of how he got injured in a car accident, but thanks to universal healthcare he didn’t have to pay for the hospital and deal with insurance providers. You got intrigued.

So you come back home, open your laptop and spend a night in the universal healthcare rabbit hole reading essays, wikipedia, reddit, and papers. You invest a lot of effort to understand this idea and - all things considered - you decide that universal health care makes sense to you.

Then you meet with Thor again, and something subtle happens.

Having accepted one idea from Thor, you lower your cognitive defenses toward his other beliefs. Maybe because you trust his research capabilities ("Well, he was right about healthcare..."). Maybe it's simple intellectual laziness (“I don’t have time to verify all that data again…”). Or maybe it's because you want to be accepted by your cool Norwegian friend.

There could be many reasons but now, when Thor tells you over whisky how great it is to get support from the Norwegian government, you start to think that maybe this whole American capitalism is not so good…

Why memeplexes are problematic

Is it a problem that you start questioning some parts of American capitalism? Well, maybe not. But what makes memeplexes problematic is their tribal nature. 

Sharing beliefs connects people. If you go to a random bar and shout: “Bitcoin is freedom”, or “We should protect the Earth from climate change”, you would definitely make some enemies, but also make some friends.

And the more polarizing the beliefs, the stronger the bond. If you lived in ancient Rome and met a fellow Christian, you'd feel he's your best friend because you both risked getting eaten by lions. (And yes, religion is a memeplex - literally a set of ideas and beliefs glued together).

The part where it gets tricky is when you don't like one belief that's a part of a bigger set.

So let's say that after meeting with Thor you started supporting universal healthcare. Then you start thinking that a social safety net is nice. But when Thor tells you that actually communism is the answer, you start to have doubts.

So you tell him: "You know Thor, I liked your other ideas, but communism... I don't know. It's been tried in Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela and many other places and it never worked."

But because memeplexes consist of multiple beliefs, it means that if you question one idea, you might be treated as an enemy of the entire memeplex. Just like when you question some religious dogmas. So now the conversation with Thor gets heated and emotional. After a few rounds, he ends the discussion by saying that you should read Piketty and Marx.

This tribal nature of memeplexes creates a strong social incentive to accept all ideas of my group in bulk rather than examining each one critically. Most of us don't want to be left behind by our peers.

What makes a careful examination of each belief even harder is that ideas are not only accepted based on rational debates, but also based on vibes. Some things are considered cool, some things are considered ewww. And you might dislike something without even understanding logically why it’s not great. 

For example, I always thought that Cardano and Ripple were useless. But to be honest? Never even dug in. My tribe (Ethereum builders) always made fun of them, so I discarded these networks as something not worth my attention.

Maybe it was a good decision, maybe it wasn’t. But running on a Memeplex autopilot can be problematic.

If you were part of a tribe that said that “Bitcoin is just a scam”, you might have missed a chance to make millions of dollars. 

If you believed that “Twitter is just for sharing pictures of your lunch”, you probably lost a chance to become an early influencer and have 100k+ followers today. 

If you accepted the common belief that 'you need to get married by 30,' you might have rushed into marrying a partner that won’t work for you long-term.

And there's also this 'memeplex creep' where you accept one idea and the tribe pressures you to accept the others, like your friend Thor.

You might have come for beautiful Enlightenment ideas of liberty and ended up beheading aristocrats in 1793 Paris. Or maybe you supported Globalization's cultural exchange, but now you can't openly criticize Mexican gangs invading your neighborhood. Or you supported an economic recovery of the 1930s Germany, and you ended up shouting "Heil Hitler".

Being aware of the memeplex you are in can literally change your life.

So what can you do?

Escaping the memeplex

Most thoughtful people are mosaics of beliefs. 

This means they don't squeeze their worldview into boxes such as “Democrats”, “libertarians” or “e/acc”. They have diverse opinions that - on a surface - might seem conflicting. Their perspective is, as Vitalik would probably call it, pluralistic.

But it's not easy to cultivate it.

Social media algorithms understand which ideas you find interesting based on your likes, shares and things you watch. So then they show you more of it, and after some time they start the memeplex creep.

They take you from one memeplex idea ("Universal healthcare is nice"), to another ("Communism is nice"). And at one point you might become an NBA player that believes that the Earth is Flat. If you want to test it, just like a few strong political statements on Twitter or YouTube and watch the recommendations.

So what to do?

If I wanted to give a bs answer to a hard question, I’d say: “You should follow many different sources and carefully examine the information you consume”. 

But what exactly can you do?

First of all, you should not be limited to things you see on one social app, because all social apps (minus Reddit and crypto social apps) limit links' reach. And, as I wrote in Rise, Marginalization & Return of the Niche Internet, links matter:

In other words, niche communities rely on people who have a deep understanding of the subject and stay up-to-date with these ever-changing domains. These people are rare and are typically scattered across different social media, blogs, forums, and group chats. 

The chances of getting them all on one platform are probably not much higher than Google or Microsoft employing all the brightest engineers in the world. As Bill Joy said: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

If we wanted to adapt Joy’s law to social networks, we could say: "No matter what platform you are, most of the smartest niche people don’t publish there.” 

This means that to reach a satisfying depth of conversation, the niche community can’t rely only on content published on one platform, such as Facebook or Twitter. The community needs links. Links to the best tools, videos, blogs, or websites covering a certain subject that can enrich the conversation and provide more depth.

So, if you run social media and you want to serve niches, you can’t penalize links because the niches will eventually run away, looking for deeper conversation in a place where links are welcome.

Having that in mind, there are a few things I try to do and work for me:

• Following many sources of ideas and news.

When I was a teenager, there was this newspaper in Poland called "Angora". They barely had any original content: 90% was just reprints from other newspapers. So you had an essay from an ex-communist politician next to an essay from a hardcore libertarian guy. You could read articles from Le Figaro, New York Times and Die Welt, tackling the same issue. It was a really good eye-opener to different opinions.

You can recreate that online by following multiple newsletters, YouTube channels, podcasts and so on. It takes some time to find the right sources and consume all that, but it might be worth it.

• Having a carefully curated Twitter follow list.

Twitter - with all its flaws - can sometimes be a great idea Colosseum, because people like to dunk and debate each other. If you have a good follow list, the quality of these debates can be high. Especially with the Community Notes that might fact check some claims.

The challenge is that since people talk in public, they might focus less on substance, and more on entertainment. Especially when they're seeing they're losing the debate. Plus Twitter penalizes links. But with some effort, Twitter can be very useful.

• Being a part of multiple groupchats.

It’s easy to follow different viewpoints when people in your groupchat actually have different perspectives on the news, essays and data being shared.

You just need to follow the dialogue and add your two cents here and there. It’s not easy to find or create the right groupchats (took me years to do it), but it’s worth it. One thing to keep in mind is having a really diverse set of people there, otherwise it's easy to stay in a bubble as no one from outside can easily join your conversation. Or just hop between different bubbles. I sometimes share the same link in a few chats and follow very different reactions.

• Link aggregators like Hacker News or Slashdot.

Aggregators are great because they give you exposition to varied content that's discussed by many different people. The challenge is that such a community can also end up building their own memeplex, and Hacker News def has an anti-crypto one. That's btw why we built Kiwi.

Path forward

So, all in all, there are many methods to cultivate independent thinking, but there's no one perfect solution.

The goal here isn't to eliminate tribal thinking entirely – that's probably impossible. Rather, it’s about identifying the memeplexes you follow and putting yourself in a place where you will naturally see many different ideas.

Just like joining a book club ensures that you read books, and joining a running club ensures you do your runs, regularly opening the right apps and pages on the Internet helps you build your intellectual autonomy.

And in a world of increasing polarization and algorithmic echo chambers, I believe that being able to look outside the memeplex can be more valuable than ever.

So, good luck!

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You might ask, “Why?”.

Doesn’t targeting big markets and expanding beyond our crypto bubble make sense?

At the end of the day, going after 1,000,000,000 users just reflects the size of the market you’re after. So, instead of building a product for, e.g., the collectibles market, you go after payments or ticketing because more people use these. So if you win, you win big, and both you and the VC signing your checks are happy.

So where’s the problem?

Let’s start with the facts.

When is the right time to launch a billion users app 

There are a few apps that reached 1 billion users, and we all know these names:
Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, WeChat, Microsoft Office, YouTube, Google, Google Chrome, Google Maps, Gmail, and so on. 

Every single one of them targeted a mainstream problem and delivered a 10X better solution with the support of world-class distribution. 

Some of the initial distribution was primarily viral (Facebook), some was via partnerships (Google being a search engine on Yahoo), some via upselling other products (Google Maps), or huge on-the-ground salesforce (Microsoft Office).

When you step back and look at these apps, one thing becomes clear: they became really successful when the underlying technology had already been adopted.

Microsoft Office was announced in 1988 when IBM PC sales were over 10,000,000 per year.

Google started in 1998 when 26% of all Americans had the Internet at home (and probably more at work):

Instagram started in 2010 when over 20% of the US population had smartphones:

And Bezos has a similar story.

"In 1994 I started Amazon.

All of the heavy lifting infrastructure needed for Amazon to exist was already in place.

We did not have to build a transportation system to deliver packages, it existed already. If we had had to build that it would have been billions of dollars in capital. But it was there, it was called the US Postal Service and Deutsche Post and Royal Mail and UPS and FedEx. We got to stand on top of that infrastructure.

The same thing with payment system. If we had to invent a payment system and roll that out that would have been billions of dollars and many decades. But no, it already existed it was called the credit card.

Did we have to deploy computers? No, they were already in most home. Mostly to play games but they were there, that infrastructure already existed.

If we have to build a telecom network that would have been billions of dollars, but we didn't. It was in place mostly to make long-distance phone calls and built by global telecom carriers like AT&T and their equivalents around the world.

Infrastructure lets entrepreneurs do amazing things"

So, is Ethereum ready for the launch of a "1B users product"?

According to crypto.com research, there are 136 million global ETH owners.

But how many of them made a transaction on Uniswap, bought an NFT on OpenSea, or borrowed money from Aave? When I look at my non-crypto friends, most have ETH on Robinhood, Revolut, or Coinbase but never even made an onchain tx.

And it’s not surprising - according to Etherscan, there are only about 500k daily active ethereum addresses. Even if we add L2s, this number is not too big. And to calculate how many people actually use Ethereum, we'd have to exclude those with multiple addresses, bots, etc.

Of course, most people don't transact daily, and you can, e.g., use Farcaster or Kiwi without doing any onchain tx, but it shows that we are probably not at the “20% of all Americans are active onchain” level.

So if we aren’t at the stage where we have enough technology adoption, should we just wait until ‘devs do something’? 

Thankfully not.

How technologies get adoption

If the history of tech teaches us anything, it’s that adoption is driven by killer apps. And it’s “apps,” not “app". There are typically many of them.

These killer apps provide something users really need and they can be used only with a particular type of technology. We had to buy a PC to play Wolfenstein 3D, we had to get a modem to send an e-mail, and buy a smartphone to use Google Maps. 

Here’s an example of VisiCalc that made Apple computers popular:

“Financial modeling spreadsheet.” 

Does it sound like a “billion users app”? Not really. 

But it was enough to drive tens of thousands of people to Apple computers. And once these users were in the Apple ecosystem, devs who shipped Apple computer apps could reach these new potential clients. And they built other apps that onboarded new users, like Aldus PageMaker focused on the publishing industry.

That created a virtuous circle where every new successful app made some new people want to buy Apple computers. Same with iPhones.

Here’s a piece from my 2021 essay, "Why it's hard to understand blockchains unless you see it as a new type of computer?":

"The iPhone case was a little bit different. Steve Jobs was very customer-oriented. So he made sure that the first iPhones had iTunes, Google Maps, e-mail, and a browser, to make the device useful for non-hacker users.

iPhone hasn’t been understood by journalists from TechCrunch, AdAge, Bloomberg, Guardian, and of course, Steve Ballmer, who famously said: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.”

This pattern repeats itself with every new computing platform. That’s because it sometimes takes years until a few of the 1000s apps becomes a ‘killer app’ that makes the computer worth buying. (For me, in the 90s, this killer app for PC was video games. First Wolfenstein 3D, then Diablo.)"

So, first, iPhone apps onboarded some people, primarily geeks. Then new apps, like Instagram, Uber, or Tinder, catered to millions of existing Apple users and onboarded new users. I actually bought my first smartphone to use Uber - I lived in the suburbs, and taxis were super expensive.

Same with the Internet. First, it was e-mails. Then it was reading the websites. Then it was e-commerce. And then a million other things.

Early apps are much simpler than the late ones. That's also because the infrastructure is not ready yet for more complex use cases - you wouldn't be able to play Fortnite on iPhone 1 or use Salesforce on a 56kbps Internet. But these early, more narrow use cases push the boundaries of infrastructure that the late apps can take advantage of. In other words, apps force infrastructure to grow and adapt, as described in this USV blogpost.

My thesis is that Ethereum - being a world computer - is no different from other computers. It doesn’t need one app targeting 1 billion users. What Ethereum needs is 100s of apps targeting 100k-10 million users.

Once these users join the ecosystem and get through the first onboarding hoops, they will be more open to trying other things.

This happened in the 2021 bull market when NBA Top Shots onboarded people who wanted a collectible sports card. It’s not a “billion users market,” but it was big enough to impact Ethereum. Once these people bought the first NBA NFT, they looked around and checked other collections.

Same with people who decided to play fantasy football on Sorare, bet on Polymarket, and just hold stablecoins in high-inflation countries like Argentina. They start with a narrow use case, and afterward, some explore Ethereum, buy NFTs, trade on DEXs, and join DAOs.

I think we win with 100s of narrow, extremely well-executed use cases, not with 1 mainstream use case.

The power of focusing on the next 100k-10M users

There are also other advantages of this focus.

First, it’s a hundred times easier to build a 1M users app than a 1B users app. This is not only because, statistically, you have higher chances of success but also because by being laser-focused on their needs, you can create something uniquely delightful for this targeted group of users, just like Brian Chesky says in this clip.

"It’s better to have 100 customers that love you than a million customers that just sort of like you."

Paul Graham

Think about Apple and VisiCalc for a second. In 1979, some people paid $1,300 for a computer to use a computer program. That's $5,350 in 2024 dollars. Now, that's what we call building something people really want.

Also, if you decide to build a mainstream product from Day 1, it’s easy to fall victim to some version of the Tyranny of the Marginal User. This means your product gets blander because it needs to cater to more users - kind of like Pop music that’s “okay” but very seldom “amazing” because everyone needs to “kind of like it.”

And in blockchain, switching costs are lower than in web2, so you just can’t afford the luxury of enshittifying the product that Facebooks and YouTubes of the web2 world had.

Second, you don't need to think about infrastructure challenges that much.

As Recmo rightly pointed out in the debate, you must solve hard tech problems when building for 1B users. But most apps and infra don't need more scalability. They need more users.

It’s like building a 16-lane highway for a village - not really efficient.  Even if you decide to build infra for the next billion users, you’d go bankrupt because there’s not enough demand for a long time.

Here's a good comment from yuga on that subject:

Also, this space is moving fast.

In 2020, we didn't even know if these L2s would really work. Today, we have optimistic rollups, zk rollups, alt-DA layers, P2P networks, and so on. If you couldn't predict in 2020 that these options could help you scale your app, what makes you think in 2024 that you can predict what options we would have in 2028?

Worldcoin, of course, doesn't have the "will people want it?" problem because it gives away free money, which is a product with infinite worldwide demand, so that's probably why Recmo focuses more on scaling challenges.

Third, UX becomes less of a problem.

Here's a quick story:

In 2021, my friend, who barely knew how to use his online bank, bought an NFT.

The process was as follows:
1. Create a Binance account
2. Send money to Revolut
3. Find on the Binance website the number of their Seychelles Binance bank account
4. Send money to the account
5. Buy ETH
6. Create a MetaMask wallet
7. Send money to a wallet
8. Connect the wallet to OpenSea to buy an NFT
9. Approve tx

They jumped through all these UX hoops to buy an NFT that would (hopefully) make 10X. The value they expected to get was much higher than the time investment they needed to make.

Of course, you should make the app’s UX as good as possible.

But - as I said before - UX is often a distraction. If people could buy a $1,300 Apple computer to use a product, they can make two extra clicks in your app. But only if you build something they really want.

Mac Budkowski

@MacBudkowski

take: The biggest web3 problem is not the UX. It's the low number of apps that are actually useful and better than their web2 counterparts.

42

9:33 PM • Jan 19, 2023

In other words, focusing on UX when your app doesn't solve users' problems is like focusing on public speaking skills when you have nothing to say.

And when you actually have something interesting to say, people will listen, even if your speech is not perfect. Just like they coped with the 1995 Internet:

At the end of the day, the UX hurdle is the delta between the value users get from the app and the time/energy/money investment they have to make.

You can work on lowering the investment by improving the UX (and that's also necessary), but you can also work on increasing the value they get from the app.

So, by focusing on the next 100k-10M users, you will probably build a better product, won't need to care that much about infra, and can get away with imperfect UX. And if you succeed with 10M users, in many cases you can scale horizontally and try to reach 20M, 50M, 100M and maybe one day 1B users.

Summary

So, to sum up, I think the best way to onboard the next billion to crypto is to give them something they really want but can’t do elsewhere.

That’s why ‘banking the unbanked’ works.

That’s why DeFi works.

That’s why NFTs for digital artists work.

And if we do it via 100s of extremely well-targeted apps, we will eventually grow the user base to 1 billion.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

If you're building in crypto and need help with product, growth or community, let's chat.

PS: If you liked this post and don't want to miss my new essays, you can subscribe to the newsletter below:

• Only one Noun per day?

• Shared treasury with holders voting on spending?

• And they're building a brand but don’t plan to make money on licensing? 

Since then, I have learned more and started treating Nouns as a brave R&D project in governance, brand building, and treasury management.

But one thing still bugged me - if Nouns create so much brand value, how could they capture a bigger part of it so the project becomes sustainable long-term? How could it become an infinite machine that can produce a positive culture, possibly forever?

Here are my two cents.

Why IP matters

Let’s start with the classic approach to making money on IP (Intellectual Property).

The story of creating a successful IP has been pretty standard for years:
- design the characters,
- present them in the comic book/game/movie/book,
- once fans fall in love with them, produce new stories and license products.

This is how Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, and Harry Potter started — as well as the king of all IPs: Pokemon.

The story of an adorable yellow Pikachu and their trainer, Ash Ketchum, has been around for almost three decades. It’s been not only highly popular but also very profitable - since 1996, it brought around $100B in revenue - more than Star Wars, Harry Potter, and GTA combined.

But what actually is Pokemon? 

Is it a wildly popular 90s GameBoy game that started everything? Or maybe the list of 1000s creatures? Or their logo? Or a trading card game? Or an animated TV Series that reached 192 countries?

In a sense, it’s all of these things. Pokemon is an Intelletual Property which means that their logo, characters, and all things around them are protected by the law.

For those unfamiliar with Intellectual Property, it’s - in a way - similar to normal property. Just like people can’t use your car without your approval, they can’t use Pokemon characters and brands without the approval of their creators. Otherwise, they’d be sued.

And just like you can lend your car to earn money, Pokemon can lend their IP to earn, too. Most of us know it by the word “licensing,” and it lets companies produce toys, t-shirts, and games with Pokemon characters and logo. These companies, of course, pay The Pokemon Company their share. 

It’s estimated that over 75% of The Pokemon Company's revenue comes from this type of licensing.

So Pokemon built a fictional world, introduced it via GameBoy games, anime TV series, and other media, and now earns money from people who build on top of their established Pokemon universe. This income might not be 100% passive because they have to review the licenses, run co-marketing campaigns, and so on, but it is as passive as it gets. 

A beautiful business model that’s a gift that keeps on giving. And a few years ago, our crypto world showed a different approach to building new IPs.

Creating IP in the crypto world 

I started the previous paragraph by saying that the path to building the IP is as follows: 

- design the characters,
- present them in the comic book/game/movie/book,
- once fans fall in love with them, produce new stories and license products.

But in the crypto world, this process has been unbundled. 

When NFT collections like Pudgy Penguins, Bored Apes, and Clone X launched, people bought just characters. There were no stories, no movies, no games. The idea was that holders would create these things themselves because the more popular their characters get, the higher their NFT price.

And although this incentive alignment has been very useful, it has also led to speculation. People were betting on “the next Pokemon,” thinking that since Pokemon is worth billions, this new NFT collection might also be worth that much one day.

This is part of the reason why the pfp NFT market pumped so much, and why it was dumped when it turned out that creating a great animation or game is not easy. It shouldn’t be surprising - Netflix & Amazon spend billions every year, and most of their shows are crap. Same with experienced game studios, where most games are flops. So, what are the chances that a few chaotic groups of NFT holders would do a better job?

So, crypto created this new promise of easier creation of new multi-billion-dollar licensing machines. 

But Nouns? 

Nouns said:

“f*** it, let’s ignore all licensing money and let anyone use our brand and see what happens. CC0 ftw!”

And a few things happened.

The Nouns way

The Nouns approach helped to spread the meme far and wide.

The idea was simple - if you want to create, e.g., a Pudgy merch, you need to have a Penguin or do a licensing deal. So, the creative machine is limited to 10,000 holders & some professional partners. With Nouns, everyone could create their Nounish things. The creative machine is open to 8,000,000 people. And if their creations are cool enough, it’d bring more people into Nouns.

So there have been Nounish NFTs, merch, events, and whole communities facilitated by the Nounds dot build. Even we at Kiwi had a Nounish NFT some time ago. That, combined with the handsome treasury funding brave ideas such as a Super Bowl ad, $400,000 Protocol Guild animation, and giving glasses to kids, is the reason why most people in crypto have heard about Nouns.

I think we can agree that this part of the experiment worked well. What is also worth noting is that most of Nounish content is high quality - there’s very little garbage, which is amazing.

Thanks to the 'let's bet on CC0' decision, Nouns can be seen as an open-source brand. But how many open-source companies are good at capturing the value they generate? Not many. Most are struggling to survive, and that’s why the crypto community has been working so hard to fund public goods.

And I do think that Nouns aren’t good at capturing the value they create, either. This is also part of the reason why some people dunk on Nouns and treat it as a DAO that’s just throwing money around and will eventually get to 0.

So how could Nouns keep their open nature and still generate more revenue?

How Nouns could become more sustainable

Let’s take a step back and look at Nouns through the lens of capital allocation.

Nous have a certain amount of money in the treasury. As of this writing, 3,873 ETH (about $10,000,000). 

And Nouns want to:
1. Make their brand as visible as possible.
2. Get more people to join the project and co-create it.
3. Have a positive impact.
4. And do some crazily creative stuff on the way.

If Nouns were sustainable, which means that they’d generate more money than they spend, it’d be a never-ending cycle of creating cool stuff. It'd be an infinite culture machine.

So how could it be done?

When I look at Nouns, I see one major challenge:

The only way to generate revenue is to get mints via Nouns or Nouns-related collections like Lil Nouns. This means that if someone wants to show their support for Nouns, they must spend at least $7,000 or $100 respectively.

This means that we leave out a lot of people. 

And it reminds me of a business concept called a Value Ladder. It's a product strategy where you have multiple products in different price tiers. Someone wants to buy a $1 Pokemon sticker, someone wants to get a $20 mascot, and others want to buy a holo Charizard for $4,000.

You could argue that Nouns also have that, with multiple NFT derivatives starting from a few cents. But this is basically recycling the same concept, not providing new or more unique value like Pokemon stickers, mascots, and cards.

I can imagine people saying that it's not true. Nouns don't leave out people. There are ways to buy Noggles (or get ones for free). You can also buy some merch. Or a sticker. 

The difference, though, is that since Nouns are an Open Brand, the money doesn’t flow back to the Nouns. It flows back to the people who produce the merch. Nouns capture only the last - most expensive - step, whereas traditional licensing companies capture every single step.

And it's not a bug; it's a feature - Nouns want to stay open. But it'd be great if they could also stay sustainable so they can keep creating great stuff.

So what if Nouns took a totally different approach and still tried to stay Nounish? I will riff on some ideas shared by Auditless in his "Reinventing the Nouns" essay.

How to get more capital flowing back to Nouns

Right now, independent teams get funded to do Nouns-related projects. We could say that this is the core of the Nouns operations - funding interesting props. But what if we treat this funding just as a market research tool? And then, once we validated there's a real need for Nouns merch, NFTs, or projects, we would do it all the way?

What do I mean?

For example, doubling down on successful projects.

It's hard to do things perfectly on the first try, so the second iteration should be better - regardless if it's a high-budget animation for Protocol Guild or some merch. It already happens to some extent but to keep the capital flowing back to Nouns, it would be useful to build a culture of voluntary royalties. If I got funded by Nouns and my project made some money, I would share some of this money with Nouns, like Patagonia shares 1% with the planet or Lil Nouns shares 10% of supply with Nouns.

We could also take a totally different approach.

Let's say Nouns make a call for brands that want to open themselves to Nounishness. A clothing brand with a non-crypto distribution that already generates money and might want to print Nounish merch. Or a media company that would be happy to plug Nouns. Or a bakery that will bake Nounish cakes. Nouns could start some profit-sharing deals with these businesses or even buy some of their shares.

They could also do a call for artists who want to do Nounish art. For artists, it's a good deal because if they create good art, they could make a name for themselves thanks to the Nouns support. And making it voluntary to share a bit of revenue with Nouns shouldn't be weird.

Also, Nouns has supported many projects such as Agora, Stand with Crypto, and Protocol Guild. But most people aren't aware of that because social media posts about these fundings are very ephemeral. If you haven't seen the tweet about Nouns supporting Agora once it was posted, you'd never see it.

It'd be good to make it obvious when Nouns have funded some projects. ZachXBT gave a good example by adding Nouns to his Twitter background picture, creating a constant promotion for Nouns.

Of course, all this doesn't mean Nouns should stop doing bottom-up props. Actually, the reverse - it could eventually do even more of them, given that it would have some new revenue streams. More ETH in the bank means more money to do more experiments and good projects such as glasses for kids.

Would that be Nounish? I think Nouns could keep their project's CC0 nature and - at the same time - do these deals. And yes, competitors or artists could copy the Nounish designs without getting sued. But you can also right-click save NFTs and buy a fake Louis Vuitton bag, and it doesn't mean that people don't want to buy originals.

I think Nouns have created a lot of value, and now there are many ways to capture a piece of it. The hard part is, of course, not turning a fun experiment into running a serious (and boring) business. But I am sure that if it became a priority, it could've been figured out.

Summary

I think Nouns have been a very brave brand-building and governance experiment. And I think it was - generally speaking - successful. Some people say that Nouns "fund a lot of dumb shit," but so do VCs and R&D departments that need to find their way out of the idea maze.

Since I am an IP guy (I even wrote the IP Protocols series), I find this experiment fascinating. And I do hope that Nouns would figure out how to stay 100% open and still earn some money on a regular basis beyond NFT mints.

I am not a longtime Nouner, so there's a chance that most of these ideas wouldn't fit well into the Nounish culture. But if any of them do, I'd be happy to brainstorm how to make them happen.

If you're building in crypto and need help with product, growth or community, let's chat.

PS: If you liked this post and don't want to miss my new essays, you can subscribe to the newsletter below:

That Ethereum Mainnet is the lightweight federal government that:

• sets the rules (how EVM works),

• ensures security (how the code won’t be changed unless there’s social & economic consensus),

• and enforces the laws of the system (through a decentralized network of validators and nodes).

And L2s here are like independent states.

They have to follow the Mainnet rules to ensure everything works well. They have to use federal currency (ETH) for transactions. And their users have to pay federal (Mainnet) taxes, which are collected by L2 and sent to the Mainnet.

This analogy to the United States, of course, has its limitations. Ethereum doesn’t have a President, general elections, or army. But thinking through this lens can help us generate ideas on how we could solve the most pressing L2 dilemmas.

Let’s start with understanding this analogy a bit better.

Why is the United States designed this way?

The United States AD 1789 was a very pluralistic country.

Americans, a little over a decade before, gained independence from Great Britain. They didn’t want another monarch or a strong, centralized government that could take away their newly acquired freedom.

They also had a big, diverse country to manage, from snowy Massachusetts to subtropical Georgia. Some states made money on whale hunting, others were selling fur, and some were focused on metalworking.

“One size fits all’, centralized strategy could limit the potential of a newly minted country. So, they created a federal government for diplomacy, defense, and interstate commerce and left states a lot of freedom.

Giving each state a lot of independence was like building a portfolio of 13 startups. Each had a different economy, governance, and culture, and they could learn from each others’ successes and mistakes.

And if one state faced problems, the others could carry the portfolio.

In the XVIII century, Virginia was the darling, generating about 20% of the US economic output thanks to its vast tobacco fields.

In the XIX century, it was New York, with its financial centers, shipping, and manufacturing.

In the XX century, California - which didn’t even exist until 1850 - carried the country with its Hollywood, aerospace industry, Silicon Valley, and oil.

While some states had their ups and downs - like Michigan, which was big in the 1950s but went down with the fall of Detroit’s General Motors, Ford & Chrysler - they were balanced by the rise of other states.

This pluralism wasn’t limited to states. The US was open to immigrants from all walks of life and became a magnet for people who wanted a new beginning.

Some nations, like the Irish, came because they starved in their own country. Some nations, like the Dutch, came looking for religious freedom. The English came because they wanted to find new business and farming opportunities.

Embracing pluralism and giving both the states and citizens freedom to pursue their goals in their own way was the code that helped to build today’s power of the United States.

And this design is similar to Ethereum.

Why the Ethereum is designed this way?

Ethereum AD 2024 is also a very pluralistic project.

Ethereum community, just after gaining independence from centralized Big Finance, Government, and Tech entities, didn’t want another strong, centralized governance.

Just like the US was diverse because of its geography, so is Ethereum because of its people. Since 2015, we have brought cryptography experts, distributed systems engineers, economists, TradFi traders, philosophers, web2 consumer apps veterans, artists and many many more.

Because these people have different backgrounds and priorities, they have different perspectives on how to scale Ethereum. And thanks to L2s, everyone can create their own “state” because the digital land is not limited like the physical one.

This is why L2s differ in how they work (are they optimistic or zk rollups?), what kind of users they’re after (are they after artists like ZORA or after DeFi like Arbitrum?), and what kind of laws they want to have (token-weighted governance or some other forms consensus?).

As Vitalik puts it in the L2s as a cultural extension of Ethereum:
"for a subculture, a layer 2 is the ultimate playing field for action"

And there's more to that.

Just like with states, having many independent L2s is like building a portfolio of dozens of startups. Each L2 has a different tech, economy, governance, and culture, and they could learn from each others’ rises and falls.

Remember when, in 2021-2022, Polygon was the place where most projects were looking for scalability? Most L2s weren’t fully fledged yet, so Polymarket, the Starbucks loyalty program, and Reddit NFTs found their home on an Ethereum sidechain.

Today, Base is leading the adoption, and in 3 years from now, it could be ZkSync or even some L2 that is not established yet.

One good thing about this design is that it limits the downside. Even if one of the L2s makes a fatal mistake, the damage would be limited to only this one project, contrary to more monolithic designs.

And just like the United States, Ethereum’s decentralized design was the promised land for many people.

We didn’t have starving Irishmen, but LATAM & African users, experiencing high inflation in their countries, came for stablecoins that gave them a more stable financial life.

We didn't have Dutchmen escaping religious oppression, but we had journalists from authoritarian countries such as Russia and China, who could use crypto to finance their operations.

We didn’t have trading Englishmen, but many startup founders were drawn by the decentralized network design that opened a window to compete with the web2 Big Tech.

In other words, we all live in the United States of Ethereum.

What does it mean for us?

How do the main concerns about L2s appear when you examine the ecosystem through the lens of the U.S. analogy?

#1: Are L2s part of Ethereum?

Are states part of the United States? Of course, they are. But it’s not unconditional.

If Texas decided to ignore all federal taxes, it would be hard to consider them part of the US. Taking aside all possible civil war scenarios, they’d probably leave the United States and won’t be secured by its military power. The US would probably also limit its free trade laws with Texas.

Same with L2s.

They are a part of Ethereum because they use Ethereum’s security (DA), count on its laws (EVM & proofs), and even use the same currency (ETH). But it’s not unconditional.

Let’s say the L2 decides to keep the laws (EVM) but uses its own gas token and settles on another blockchain. Would we call it a part of Ethereum? I don’t think so because their transactions wouldn’t be secured by Ethereum’s technical and financial power.

Such blockchain could be a close Ethereum ally and a part of the broader Ethereum ecosystem, just like Gnosis is (which is technically not L2). But it would be to Ethereum what the UK is to the US - a strong but primarily independent friend.

This could be a feature, not a bug, as these EVM allies could run experiments that Ethereum can learn from - for example, Gnosis did a Dencun hard fork before Ethereum, and if something went wrong, the EF could learn about it before they forked the Mainnet.

So yes, nothing is set in stone. L2s could stop settling on Ethereum, especially since it’s easier for L2 to leave Ethereum than for Texas to leave the United States. It’s fair to say it’s a real risk for the network. But until L2s settle on Ethereum, they are a part of Ethereum. And it’s true until - if ever - they decide to leave.

#2: Are L2s parasitic to Ethereum?

Is California parasitic to the United States? Of course, it’s not.

People living in California have to pay a state tax, but it is about 3X lower than the federal tax, so most money goes to the federal government.

When it comes to the L1 x L2 relationship, it’s a lot different now because most of the money is captured by L2s. So it’s as if we had high state L2 taxes and very low federal L1 taxes. That’s primarily because of the blobs, which helped scale the network.

But it can change very fast because the blobs price is based on the network’s usage. So if we manage to get more Ethereum citizens to tax, or they start generating more activity, a lot of money will flow to L1.

And we are pretty close to that point.

There’s going to be a lot of experimentation here. The Rome United States wasn't built in a day and their tax system evolved multiple times.

The same probably would happen with Ethereum—we have a lot of things to figure out, and there are always going to be some trade-offs involved. Sometimes—like at this moment in time—most money will flow to L2s. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t change as we continue onboarding new users. It will change, and this is a part of the plan.

#3: How do we make L2s work together?

It’s true that the number of Ethereum users is limited, and it’s painfully obvious in the current ‘pre new retail’ bull market. This could make L2s focus on competitive zero-sum games.

So how does the United States deal with that?

The number of American taxpayers is limited, just like the Ethereum ones. States indeed compete for tax revenue by offering lower costs, better quality of life, and tax breaks. That’s why Oracle's HQ is in Texas, and Palantir’s HQ is in Colorado.

But when you zoom out, you can notice that Americans only make up about 4% of the world's population, and they used to make much less. So, the way they grew was by promoting the country and making other smart people come to the US to build, work, and pay taxes.

This is why onboarding new users to Ethereum is so important for L2s. Millions of people use Tron, Solana, and BSC, and they could - just like the US immigrants - join the Ethereum community. I believe this could be a big project ran by an alliance of L2s, with support from the Ethereum Foundation.

And it’s only the tip of the iceberg - there are billions of people who don’t even use crypto that we could onboard, and this could be the goal shared by all L2s.

Another way to increase cooperation between L2s would be to make them interconnected, just like the states are.

Ohio sells coals to Michigan, and there’s no need (or even an option) for every state to run its own coal mines. At the moment, although most L2s want to ruthlessly copy the successful projects from other chains, we can see some early examples of L2 specialization, like Synthetix on Optimism and GMX on Arbitrum.

I think this L2 specialization will continue as both liquidity and users’ & devs’ attention is limited. So why would someone build a sophisticated DeFi perps market on ZORA L2, where users come to mint an NFT?

As we said at the beginning, the L2 diversity comes from its user base and devs. So, just like New York imports high tech from California, so can OP Stack ‘import’ privacy-centric solutions from zkSync and Starknet.

And if we build the equivalent of the interstate highways and make the communication between these L2s smooth and almost invisible to users, then I think we can achieve the best ROI on a rollup-centric roadmap.

In the end, most users probably won’t even know with what L2 they interact, just like they don’t know in which state the company that produced their favorite beer is based.

Summary

So, to sum up, looking at Ethereum through the lens of the United States analogy can be a useful exercise. Although this analogy has some limitations, it helps us understand why we follow the rollup-centric roadmap and what the potential paths forward are.

There’s also one thing I haven’t mentioned in this essay.

Whenever I speak with my American friends and ask where they live, they say things such as:
“I was born in Colorado, lived for a few years in Florida, then in California, and now I moved to NYC.”

They are a very mobile nation, looking for the best opportunities they can find. Onchain, being mobile is even easier as moving between L2s is much easier than moving between states. Since L2s will be developed and follow different paths, I think we can expect a lot of mobility from Ethereum users in the upcoming years, and the L2Beat charts AD 2028 will look much different from now.

And if Ethereum is the United States, what are monolithic blockchains in that analogy? I will leave that exercise to the reader :)

PS: The cover photo of this article uses the first design for the Great Seal. It has an interesting story and you can dig in here.

PS2: If you liked this post and don't want to miss my new essays, you can subscribe to the newsletter below:

And TikTok, just like its competitors will eventually lose to the new thing.

This is the ruthless nature of social apps. One of the Internet’s main value propositions has been connecting people, and startups are always looking for ways to do it better. 

MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, TikTok, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, Threads. In the last 21 years, we had 12 social apps that reached over 100M users. And I don’t count local products like WeChat or VKontakte and smaller Western apps such as BeReal, Truth Social, or Gas.

So if there is an opening to build a successful social app, how can we - as a crypto community - respond to Ryan’s question?

I think there are two main problems with web3 social apps. Most of them either overfinancialize social interactions or are just straight-up clones of web2 apps.

To exit this unproductive maze, we need to look at social media from first principles. Understand how this design space looks, and what’s possible. And then we can come up with some fresh ideas. 

But first, let’s try to understand why people even try new social apps.

Why try a new social app

There have been many successful social apps so far. But why did it happen? Weren’t they supposed to be guarded by strong network effects, making it hard for competitors to come in? 

Apparently, there are more openings for new apps than people think. 

Here’s why I started using different apps:
- I wanted a place to hang out with tech people, so I started using Twitter.
- I wanted to add filters to my photos, so I started using Instagram.
- I wanted to have private conversations with my Facebook friends, so I started using Messenger.
- I wanted to passively watch online videos, so I started using YouTube.
- I wanted a more intimate app to chat with my closest friends and family, so I used WhatsApp.
- I wanted to learn more about some niches so I started using Reddit.
- I wanted to spend time in a dunk-free zone and hang out with fellow crypto builders, so I started using Farcaster.
- I wanted to start making money, so I started using Twitch. (Nah, I didn’t. But I would if I wanted to!)

Every single app I started using, satisfied one of my needs that other apps couldn’t satisfy. 

This line is so important, that I will say it rephrase it, and say it again. Every new app I tried made my life better in a very tangible way. So tangible that I can easily describe it (as I did above).

How do you translate these anecdotes into your social app mental model (a.k.a. Social App Canvas)?

A social app consists of a few levers such as:
- social graph: who you can interact with within the app (that’s why I started using Twitter),
- features: what you can do there (that’s why I started using Instagram),
- proof of work: how do you interact with other people (that’s why I started using Messenger),
- activity: how much work do I need to do to use the network (that's why I started YouTube),
- intimacy: how intimate is the app's experience (that’s why I started using WhatsApp),
- niche: what is the app focused on (that’s why I started using Reddit),
- vibes & culture: what it’s all about (that’s why I started using Farcaster),
- exchange: how can you convert social capital into other things (that’s why I have (not) started using Twitch).

Let’s analyze these 8 levers, one by one.

#1: Social Graph

Years ago, I spoke with a friend who used to run a few high-end clubs. I asked him what was the signal that the club’s popularity would fade. He explained that whenever the club became full of women with badly done botox lips, it became uncool in the next few months.

In other words, the club’s social graph has been dominated by people, that the “cool kids” didn’t want to spend time with. This club’s analogy also applies to social apps.

A Social Graph a.k.a. “what people you can meet there” is often as important as the app’s features. Imagine Twitter without tech CEOs, journalists, and politicians or Instagram without stars and influencers - these would be totally different apps.

We can divide the Social Graph into two sections.

Stars:

Stars are people who are hard to reach, and the social app lets you interact with them.

Can you interact with Elon Musk there (Twitter)? Or Kardashians (Instagram)? Or maybe Donald Trump (Truth Social)?

Some of these apps are exclusive - you can’t chat with Musk on Facebook, you have to use Twitter. And some just offer a more intimate relationship with the star. This is why some people use AirChat to hear Naval, Farcaster to chat with Vitalik, or Lens to interact with Stani.

But of course, a Social Graph is not only about the stars.

Peers, Friends & Family:

On social apps, you want to have peers. These could be your friends with whom you share funny videos and discuss stuff in the comments. Or just cool potential friends you can meet online.

A rule of thumb is that the more your friends use a particular social app, the higher the chances that you are going to try it. Same with people who you might not know yet, but they seem to be cool.

Your social graph (people you meet online) can be built based on different vectors such as:
- interests: you discuss a subject you’re interested in (e.g., r/programming, r/GameofThrones or r/crypto) and meet people who share your hobbies,
- shared experience: you together live through a thing that’s happening (e.g., news on Twitter),
- identity: you feel connected because of your religion, geography, or worldview (e.g., Mastodon users who left Twitter because of Elon),

and a few more.

Social Graph is also about people who you won’t meet in the app, like the women with badly done botox lips from the high-end club anecdote.

When boomers joined Facebook, Gen Z left. And that makes sense - who wants to stay at the party with their parents? When Instagram was about to ship an Android app, its users protested because they didn’t want people who were "not cool enough". When you join Farcaster or Lens, you know you won’t meet midwit crypto haters there. 

So the social graph is both about who is there as much as who is not there.

If you think about web3 social apps, most of them are primarily focused on the social graph: “Twitter but for crypto”, “Reddit but for crypto”, “Instagram but for crypto”. 

Ship the same features, and give access to different people. But there are more ways to build something fresh.

#2 & #3: Features & Proof of Work

Most successful social apps had some unique features. 

On YouTube, you could upload your video for free.
On Instagram, you could add filters to make your photos look cooler.
On TikTok, you had a database of songs to create a dance video. 

These features let users come for the tool and stay for the network. This means the app was useful even in the single-player mode, without its social features. The apps of course primed users to share their content and try the multi-player features as well.

These multi-player features were the apps' Proof of Work.

What is it? Think of each user as a node in the social network. To stay active, they produce content via posts, comments, and DMs - their Proof of Work. Sometimes the media they produce are photos. Sometimes tweets. And sometimes videos. 

But Proof of Work is not limited to that. It is a vast design space, and - together with a social graph - it impacts the nature of your social network.

If you give people 280 characters to express by default, you get Twitter. If you give them an unlimited amount of characters, you get Substack. 
If you give users the ability to send pictures, you get Instagram. If you make the pictures disappear, you get Snapchat. 
If you let users share videos you get YouTube. If you let them share only short, vertical videos, you get TikTok. 

So just like the most successful apps had unique single-player features, they also had unique multi-player features - Proofs of Work. 

It’s hard to overstate how important it is. 

New Proof of Work applied to the same social graph would generate completely different results. Imagine LinkedIn with 60s vertical videos only or Twitter with disappearing pictures. We already saw a glimpse of it in crypto, with alternative clients for Farcaster and Lens, where the same people (social graph) could express themselves through a different app. 

On the social network we run (Kiwi), the Proof of Work is finding a valuable, crypto-related link and sharing it with the community. It’s more demanding than e.g., posting a short tweet. But it’s also a natural filter for engaged users.

Since our Proof of Work is different than what you have on Twitter, Farcaster, or Lens, users from all these networks come to our app - we give them something they can't get anywhere else.

Of course, your Proof of Work can evolve. TikTok used to be about lib dubs and dances, and today it offers diverse content. But it started with a very specific Proof of Work, much different from other social networks (and been ridiculed for it!). 

All in all, features and Proof Work design spaces are huge and my soul crashes whenever I see another web3 social app just cloning Twitter or TikTok. There are hundreds of options here, and following the most boring one is probably not the way.

In crypto, killer features and Proofs of Work can also be explored by independent developers. Founders from the social protocol ecosystem can test hundreds of app and client ideas and see what sticks - something Facebook or Twitter couldn't do.

It already happened with Farcaster Frames - many ideas were tested, and most of these Frames are not used anymore. But a few - like Frames to claim airdrops - stuck and became a part of the web3 social experience.

#4: Activity

Another way to look at social networks is how much activity they demand from the user.

If most users just passively consume media, it’s social media (like e.g., TikTok, YouTube). If most users are active, it’s a social network (Telegram, Discord, Farcaster). Activity has a lot to do with Proof of Work. 

The easier the Proof of Work, the more active people will be. The harder the Proof of Work, the more passive most users stay. It’s easier to share your thoughts on Discord than to record a TikTok video, and that's why an average Discord user is more active than the average TikToker.

You can also lower the Proof-of-Work bar by design - this is what BeReal did by asking people to take a photo wherever they are. Or you can have multiple Proof of Works with different levels of difficulty.

On Facebook, people used to support posts by leaving comments. But typing a few sentences each time was a pretty demanding thing to do, and it also spammed the feed with comments such as “Congrats!”. So the FB team invented the Like Button which was a much smaller effort and it made people - and network - more active.

A rule of thumb is that people are busy, so you want to make it easy to engage with your network.

One interesting experiment in the crypto space is Interface, where Proof of Work is passive. To show up in the feed, your blockchain address has to do something onchain (swap/mint/transfer, etc).

#5: Intimacy

You can also look at your app through the lens of intimacy.

Is it about people you know, like WhatsApp? Or is it broadcast like Twitter? This is a mix of Social Graph & Proof of Work, and it further changes the behavior of your users.

Let's say you chat with your friend at their house. You are probably free to discuss whatever you want, however you want. Now let's say you meet at the cafe. Would your conversation change? And what if you met at work?

The same effect can be found on social apps, where you interact differently with the same friend on WhatsApp, Discord channels, and Twitter. And that’s because intimacy guides your actions in the digital world just like it does in the physical one. 

The more intimate the app is, the less professionalized the content gets. This means that the bar to produce Proof of Work will stay low because users don’t need to compete with professional influencers to make their posts seen in the feed. This is why group chats can stay so engaging for years - you just need to send the reaction to people you know, a very small ask.

One way to make your app intimate is to gate it. To connect on WhatsApp, you need to know someone’s phone number. To join the Discord channel, you need to have an invite. To join Facebook AD 2004, you had to be a Harvard student.

In crypto many apps use allowlist, but you can also gate access with the paywall.

Thanks to Netflix, Substack, and Patreon, people learned that not everything on the Internet is free. So some social apps like Farcaster or Lens - ask you to pay $8 to join. This is a very simple way of gating access.

You can combine it with other methods. E.g., to use Kiwi you need to mint an NFT on Optimism Mainnet, which filters people who are OG enough to either have funds there or know how to bridge.

#6: Niche 

Is your app niche or mainstream?

Even if you want to go mainstream, it’s typically better to start with the niche (see: beachhead market). But some apps decide to stay in their cozy corners. Behance has 50M+ users and stays focused on creatives, contrary to a more universal LinkedIn. 

Discord historically was focused on gamers, but during COVID it expanded beyond that. Lately, it decided to return to its roots and bet more on gamers-focused features.

Niches are why Farcaster started by focusing on Ethereum builders, while Lens was closer to DeFi users, given their Aave provenance.

One interesting web2 social app case is Nikita Bier's Gas app. It relied on the US high schoolers (niche social graph) answering polls (proof of work optimized for activity) about their friends (intimacy). This hyper niche approach was one of the reasons why it has been growing so fast.

Your app can also try to become a home for different niches. This is what Reddit did with subreddits - everyone can run their own small kingdom. If you find niches interesting, I wrote an article diving deep into this subject.

#7: Vibes & Culture 

Another important point is what is your social app really about?

Is it about being natural like on BeReal? Or showing how cool you are, even if it’s staged like on Instagram? Is it a fun app like TikTok? Or an idea like Twitter (picrel)?

Your Vibes & Culture determine the way the Social Graph (creators and users) do the Proof of Work (posts, comments, DMs).

Farcaster did it with Twitter, where they cloned most of the features, had a similar Proof of Work, and some people from Crypto Twitter social graph. But they had different vibes and culture, which were more positive and welcoming than CT. That resulted in totally different types of content being shared there, compared to Crypto Twitter. 

Vibes & culture can also differ between clients. Orb is a Lens client focused on artists and visual content in general. and it’s more about discussing art and supporting people by minting their work, than the latest Bitcoin price swings.

#8: Exchange 

The last question to ask is “Can you exchange your social capital for something else?”

Instagram users can convert their popularity into dating opportunities.
Twitter users could convert popularity into money from Substack subscriptions.
LinkedIn users can convert their reach into job opportunities.

Sometimes this exchange is subtle. E.g., by joining a group chat you may one day get some job or investment opportunities. And sometimes it’s very straightforward - like on Twitch where streamers can easily convert their popularity into money. 

Having the opportunity to exchange your social capital for things you want is important. One Kiwi user told me that he’d be more prone to use our network if they could show their project’s banner on their profile page. And that's because he could justify being active on Kiwi as contributing to his project’s success. 

In crypto, there is a bias to make things too overfinancialized. This means a strong focus on exchanging social capital for financial capital (see: friend tech and its clones). I think it’s very short-sighted, especially since there are ways to integrate money in a smoother and more fun way - see what Unlonely is doing.

Summary

You can think of these 8 levers as a "Social App Canvas". It's a tool to help you analyze your social app ideas from different perspectives, and although I can't guarantee that you'd invent a breakthrough app thanks to that, your chances would be much higher.

And a great thing about social media is that it has a TAM of 5.45B people who are connected to the Internet. 

This means there's almost unlimited space for niches and sub-niches, and in turn, for new apps. There are always new people coming. Sometimes these are younger people looking for their digital home. Sometimes these are people who are looking for some new feature they can't get elsewhere. And sometimes these are people who feel like the game is rigged on the other apps, and they want to - like American pioneers - start fresh on a new land.

This is why - despite the powerful network effects of the Old Guard, I believe we will always see new social media emerging. There will always be an app that offers access to a new social graph or has some unique features, proof of work, makes it easier to stay active, keeps it more intimate, reaches a niche you want to reach, has better vibes & culture or just makes it easier to convert popularity into things you want.

That makes me confident that in the next 5 years, we are going to see a breakthrough web3 social app. And if you decide to follow this path please, don’t do another “Twitter but for crypto” app. You have so many dimensions to explore!

If you're building in crypto and need help with product, growth or community, let's chat.

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From Defiant saying that Farcaster has only 10% of their reported DAUs:

Through Peter Szilagyi saying that FC users are primarily bots:

Up to the usual suspect crypto hater Liron saying that FC valuation is overblown:

So is Farcaster dead or overhyped? 

I’ve been active on Farcaster since 2022 when there were maybe two hundred active users. The last few months, were intense, to say the least. But what actually happened?

Here are my 2 cents.

Hard to build

Tens of billions of individual steps have to go right in the correct order to create a human. But only one thing has to happen to cause its demise. 

After just five weeks a human embryo has a brain, a beating heart, a pancreas, a liver, and a gallbladder. By birth, a baby has 100 billion neurons, 250 trillion synapses, 11 cooperating organ systems, and a personality. It’s staggeringly complex. Death, on the other hand, is simple. Most deaths—trauma, heart disease, stroke, some cancers, infections, drug overdoses—are caused by blood and oxygen deficiencies. That’s it. A disease itself might be complex, but the fatal strike is not enough blood and oxygen getting to where it’s needed. 

Making a human: incomprehensibly complex. The death of a human: really simple.

- Morgan Housel,"Same as Ever”

The human body is hard to build and easy to destroy and so are our relationships.

• An amazing house party can be ruined by one asshole.

• A lifelong group of friends can break with one big argument.

• And a supportive community can be destroyed by a few bad actors.

And Farcaster, as a social network, is not immune to these dynamics. But before destruction, there was creation. So let's start with building.

Farcaster took a long time to build. The company was founded in 2020, and since then - just like in the creation of a human being - many things have gone well.

The team has chosen the right niche (Ethereum builders). They have picked the right people (Dan spoke with the first 10,000+ users). They created the right culture and enforced it (friendly vibes contrary to Twitter dunking culture). They also iterated quickly and were brave enough to drop the ideas that didn't click. And it paid off.

In early 2023 Farcaster felt like a cozy small-town community, where you recognize all faces pfps around you. It was a perfect mix of founders, devs, investors, artists, and writers. And when I say mix, I mean it in the literal sense - people really engaged and mixed with each other. Some founders started building projects together, some artists co-created art with their audience, and I know even one couple that met on the Purple app.

It felt less like a social app, and more like a scene:

“Before there is a subculture, there is a scene. A scene is a small group of creators who invent an exciting New Thing—a musical genre, a religious sect, a film animation technique, a political theory. Riffing off each other, they produce examples and variants, and share them for mutual enjoyment, generating positive energy.

The new scene draws fanatics. Fanatics don’t create, but they contribute energy (time, money, adulation, organization, analysis) to support the creators.

Creators and fanatics are both geeks. They totally love the New Thing, they’re fascinated with all its esoteric ins and outs, and they spend all available time either doing it or talking about it”.

- David Chapman, "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution"

Even a few months later Farcaster was so niche that when I mentioned it to cobie, he thought it was merely a blip on the radar:

So just like in a human body, tens of thousands of individual steps went right to create the Farcaster scene. But only a few things had to happen to cause problems. 

Easy to Destroy

The scene was great but Farcaster didn’t want to just create a scene. They wanted to build a network for 1B users. And they had to grow.

So in October 2023, Farcaster went permissionless. This meant that everyone could create an account. That meant that the Eternal September began and we are going to see more MOPs

If the scene is unusually exciting, and the New Thing can be appreciated without having to get utterly geeky about details, it draws mops. Mops are fans, but not rabid fans like the fanatics. They show up to have a good time, and contribute as little as they reasonably can in exchange.

Geeks welcome mops, at first at least. It’s the mass of mops who turn a scene into a subculture. Creation is always at least partly an act of generosity; creators want as many people to use and enjoy their creations as possible. It’s also good for the ego; it confirms that the New Thing really is exciting, and not just a geek obsession. Further, some money can usually be extracted from mops—just enough, at this stage, that some creators can quit their day jobs and go pro. (Fanatics contribute much more per head than mops, but there are few enough that it’s rarely possible for creatives to go full time with support only from fanatics.) Full-time creators produce more and better of the New Thing.

- David Chapman, "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution"

Many people were concerned about how going permissionless would impact our vibes. Would Farcaster lose its magic? Wouldn't we get flooded with low-quality posts? The Farcaster team was worried about it, too.

Some of us discussed the potential impact of the Evaporative Cooling effect:

Openness is a major driver of Evaporative Cooling. If anyone can join your community, then the people most likely to join are those who are below the average quality of your community because they have the most to gain. Once they’re in, unless contained, they end up harming the health of the community over the long term.

Communities that are allowed to select their members in some way are much more immune to Evaporative Cooling. Unfortunately, most viable internet businesses have no choice but to set their business model to open. The nature of most Web 2.0 businesses is that they depend on extracting a tiny bit of value from a large number of users and are betting on their fuck you exit from massively exploding in scale. Building a thriving community that tops out at 10,000 members over the course of 10 years isn’t going to pay the bills.”

- Hang, "The Evaporative Cooling Effect"

And the beginnings were indeed challenging.

Some people didn’t get the Farcaster culture. Some people were airdrop farmers posting "wowow" under each post, which were labeled "low effort replies" (which later became a meme). Some people weren't even people as they were bots.

So we did what all small towns do, to keep their identity - we taught immigrants about our culture. And it worked. Some people put more effort into their casts. Many low-quality posts just moved to channels. And bots weren't seen that much in the main feed.

After maybe 2-4 weeks, the situation felt under control.

And then Farcaster introduced Frames.

Many devs were excited about the new playground, and a handful of blog posts covered this primitive, including the one by Antonio Garcia Martinez. Many apps used the Frame frenzy to grow their user base. Frames have been the first in what has been aptly dubbed as programmable social.

Unfortunately, many Frames went viral by asking people to repost them. This meant that our feeds got flooded with a lot of content we were not looking for.

Coincidentally with the Frames launch, came the people who wanted to make money.

And when I say "making money", I don't mean builders who charge a reasonable fee for using their apps. These people were different.

A subculture at this stage is ripe for exploitation. The creators generate cultural capital, i.e. cool. The fanatics generate social capital: a network of relationships—strong ones among the geeks, and weaker but numerous ones with mops. The mops, when properly squeezed, produce liquid capital, i.e. money. None of those groups have any clue about how to extract and manipulate any of those forms of capital.

The sociopaths quickly become best friends with selected creators. They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively. Geeks may not be completely fooled, but they also are clueless about what the sociopaths are up to.

Mops are fooled. They don’t care so much about details, and the sociopaths look to them like creators, only better. Sociopaths become the coolest kids in the room, demoting the creators."

- David Chapman, "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution"

Many of these new people focused on memecoins.

The late 2023 Farcaster's memecoins were primarily pretty innocent jokes. $POINTS was just a random experiment that went out of hand, $SPAM was Borodutch testing the boundaries of protocols, and $FART was about helping PurpleDAO raise funds. Even Jacek treated $DEGEN as a fun side project and didn't predict it'd reach $1B+ FDV.

But then came people who tried to exploit the Farcaster network. Bot makers who decided to farm $DEGEN and other coins. Veteran rug pullers. And other typical crypto shenanigans. It felt like the whole Crypto Twitter was crashing our party.

And although many people made money on memecoins (including me), the app quality got worse. Some new users saw a spam shitshow in their feeds and coined an opinion that "Farcaster is overrated". Some old feed conversations moved to group chats because our responses were full of airdrop farming replies. Some regular users started using the app less.

Although this increased activity was net negative for most users (Geeks and MOPs), the DAU numbers went up.

And it was something that made people even more negative about Farcaster. When Dan shared DAU numbers, without the caveat that a big % of this traffic might come from bots, it generated a lot of pushback from the crypto community. And why wouldn't it, when we got PTSD after so many protocols artificially inflated their numbers to generate hype?

In a one-two-punch fashion, at the same time, Farcaster made a $150M raise. This turned Farcaster into the main character for a few days, which also meant that some people got angry. Some because they were jealous, some because they didn't understand Farcaster's business opportunity, and some because they had fair questions about the numbers.

In the meantime, slokh, who ran a popular alt client for Farcaster, decided to quit.

So all these things together - spam, inflated DAUs, and pushback after the raise, resulted in a big hit for Farcaster. The network that was being built for 4 years, got almost crushed in 4 months. After all, it wasn't immune to the hard-to-build/easy-to-destroy dynamics.

But it’s not the end of the story. 

Path to resilience

Farcaster was experiencing growing pains and trying to find a way to scale. Thankfully, it could check how other social networks dealt with that.

"I joined Facebook when it was less than a million members. Since then, it’s managed to grow by a factor of 500 but the quality of my experience has dropped by only maybe 50%.

The reason why is because when some random person is participating in Facebook from Brazil, it has an absolutely negligible effect on my experience. Because every user only ever see their tiny corner of Facebook, every user is in direct control of their own experience.”

- Hang, "The Evaporative Cooling Effect"

And this was a big bet that Farcaster made.

They created channels that divide the user base and do not let bad actors destroy things for everyone. The channels existed before the network went permissionless, but since then the FC team doubled down on them.

In other words, Farcaster created "warrens":

“There are two fundamental patterns of social organization which I term “plaza” and “warrens”. In the plaza design, there is a central plaza which is one contiguous space and every person’s interaction is seen by every other person. In the warren design, the space is broken up into a series of smaller warrens and you can only see the warren you are currently in. There is the possibility of moving into adjacent warrens but it’s difficult to explore far outside of your zone. Plazas grow by becoming larger, warrens grow by adding more warrens.

These are the two fundamental patterns of social spaces. Every social space can be decomposed down to a collection of plazas and warrens. In Facebook, your profile, friends and newsfeeds are warrens but fan pages, groups & events are plazas. Twitter is mostly a warren with the exception of trending topics which is the one plaza. On forums, the front page and topic listings are plazas but each forum thread is a warren."

- Hang, "The Evaporative Cooling Effect"

And - in a way - it worked.

Even at the peak of airdrop bots mania, channels helped to keep some spaces clean. Each channel's moderator took care of their small warren, which was more scalable than the Farcaster team analyzing each post on the network. Moderators could set up their posting guidelines, use tools like automod, and ask users to pay a small sum before they post.

What about the plaza? On Farcaster, it was the Trending Tab. Since it aggregated the most popular casts from the network, it was my go-to place to check what was going on.

And for a long time, it was terrible.

Because the Trending Tab included posts that were popular, it was very susceptible to engagement farming by bots and users. So for a long time, it was full of Frames where you had "recast to use the frame", $DEGEN airdrop farmers, and just bots.

Since the Trending Tab was often used by new users, who had empty-ish feeds as they hadn't followed the "right people" yet, it had far-reaching consequences. As we said before, many new users thought that the spammy Trending Tab represents Farcaster and just left the network without exploring it too much.

Since then, the Trending Tab has been fixed and now it surfaces relevant content. But what about the responses from bots that swarmed our notifications?

The team introduced Priority Mode which means that - by default - you only see the most relevant notifications:

It definitely helped to reduce spam but it came with a price. And this price was the new user experience. My friends who used FC last year received quite a lot of engagement. Now most of their posts aren't too visible unless they have a Power Badge. Apparently these are not isolated cases.

The good thing is that Power Badges are not only distributed to the "old guard". Many new users (with FIDs 250,000+) already have one. So hopefully after some time the valuable users are going to be rewarded with more distribution.

And what about sociopaths trying to extract value from the network? Since the memecoin mania ended, most of them went elsewhere. Or maybe they stayed but I don't see their posts because of the channels and priority mode? Either way, they don't seem to be a problem anymore.

And although the engagement went down by a lot, it now feels more organic:

We could say that these hard few months were Farcaster's path to adulthood.

What's next

Frames, memecoins, channels, bots, power badges... The last few months were very intense for Farcaster.

The team made some mistakes on the way (like not fixing the Trending Tab earlier), but all in all, I think this period made the network more resilient. It's also a great lesson on how to deal with bots, airdrop farmers, and low-quality posts. Everyone working on an app that uses social features should take notes. We at Kiwi definitely do.

For sure it's not the last time the network is being tested. If they want to grow to 1B users, there are many challenges ahead. But this story made me confident that the team will be able to handle these problems. And whatever comes through those gates, will be taken care of.

PS: if you haven’t tried Farcaster in the last 3-4 weeks, give it a try. It should be much better than what you remember.

PS2: If you read this post and are an FC user, we can get in touch - my handle is @macbudkowski.

PS3: If you liked this post and don't want to miss my new essays, you can subscribe to the newsletter below:

“Privacy is a public good. When I say that, I don’t mean that in a “feel good” way. I mean that in the literal sense that the more people use privacy solutions, the more privacy each one of them gets.”

Vitalik, during his Dappcon fireside chat

Vitalik says that privacy is a public good.
Juan Benet says that privacy is about security.
United Nations says that privacy is a human right.

So why do so many people still treat privacy as something for hoodie-and-sunglasses-wearing hackers from the 90s action movies?

I think we have some communication problems here. 

We all agree that privacy is useful, but it’s hard to convince skeptics who counter with the “but what about criminals?” card. Especially when Tornado Cash devs end up in jail, legitimizing this stance.

So what can we do?

A few years ago, when John Oliver recorded the episode with Snowden, he faced a similar challenge. So Oliver asked people what do they think about the government’s “dick pic” program“

And although it’s a comedy, it highlights something subtle yet important. 

It’s hard to imagine online privacy unless it has ties to the physical world. And physical and online privacies are very different.

We live in a public world

In the physical world, as soon as you leave your house, everyone can see you.

Everyone in the street can see what car you drive.
Everyone in your presence can see what emotions you feel.
Everyone in the shop can see what you spent your money on.

The physical world is - by default - public. The only fully private space is our house (and other private properties). And that’s also only partially true because if you stay close to the window, some nosy neighbor can watch you.

So why are we not appalled by the lack of privacy in the physical world?

First, because no one cares about you. Unless you’re a neighbor, a celebrity, or look very distinct, people don’t look at you at all.

Secondly, if someone followed you, you’d know. You’d feel someone’s eyes on your back. You’d see the car following your every step. You’d feel that something is wrong.

Thirdly, it’d be weird to maintain privacy IRL. Imagine a guy walking around the city in a mask. Would people feel comfortable around him? Probably not.

Wearing a mask is so weird that even celebrities don’t go beyond wearing sunglasses. Despite the fact that some of them - like Cristiano Ronaldo - dream about being able to go out with their friends like normal people.

Why the government isn’t spying on your house

But thankfully, although the outside world is default public, you can maintain some privacy in your house. And there are things you’d rather do behind closed doors - like dressing up, using the bathroom, or having a date with your partner.

No one would say it’s weird that you like to do these things privately. And no one would suggest you are a criminal because you don’t want to let the government install CCTV cameras in your house.

But who knows? Maybe in this house, you are actually laundering money, producing meth, or killing people? That wouldn't be surprising as, according to the FBI, most violent crimes happen in houses.

And because houses are private, these crimes are harder to discover and investigate. In other words, our house privacy facilitates crime. And yet governments are okay with that. So why do we let people stay private in their own houses? Well, probably because it’d be weird not to let them stay private. 

The outrage from people accusing the government of following Orwell’s “1984” playbook would not be worth finding a few more criminals. It’s just a tradeoff that governments do.

But online, it’s different. Online, we don’t have our cozy houses.

Online world is full of ninjas

We said that the lack of privacy in the offline world doesn’t bother us. And that’s because people don’t care about us, it’s easy to find if someone is following us, and it would be weird to try to maintain privacy by wearing a mask.

But in the digital world, people care about us.

There are companies—smartphone producers, apps, Internet providers—that want to follow your every step. Sometimes, they do it to optimize their app, and sometimes, they do it to sell more ads. Whatever their intentions, they care about following you.

And it’s not hard to do it because, in a digital world, you don’t feel that someone follows you. You just browse the web as usual.

How do you know if anyone analyzes which article you read? How do you know if someone tracks what supplements you bought? Or even if you have a real spy app or keylogger installed? Most people couldn’t tell.

And that’s why many people don’t care about their digital privacy. It’s just hard to notice that it’s being compromised.

Now, let’s say you buy an oldschool newspaper, and in a package comes a real ninja. He’s impossible to notice (he’s a ninja, right?), but you might sometimes feel his presence. He looks over your shoulder to analyze which articles you have read, and which ads you look at. Another ninja analyzes what products you buy online. And another looks behind your shoulder to check what anon identity you use on Reddit.

That would feel weird, right?

But this is how the online world works.

A team of ninjas is watching you all the time. They follow your every step and record it with GoPros. Sometimes, their cameras can’t catch all the details because of some privacy policy. But most of the time, they do follow you.

And some of these ninjas talk with each other and trade notes to get a better vision of your online behavior. And the most powerful ninja - the government - can ask all of them for reports.

This “Snowden” scene catches the (dramatized) gist of it:

But there’s also one more important difference between the online and offline worlds. Remember the weird idea of wearing a mask on the street? 

Thankfully, in the digital world it's less weird. If you use a privacy-centric phone or a VPN, it’s just another app that works in the background. Other people don’t notice it. And you don’t even feel that you protect your privacy. It’s much more convenient and normal than wearing a mask.

So, although being followed online seems less weird, so does maintaining privacy. 

And most people aren’t privacy maxis. They don't want to hide every step they take online - if they did, they'd not have social media accounts. What they want is to have a way to stay private, if they feel like it. They want digital houses.

Would that mean that some people would commit more crimes in these houses? Probably yes. But if the alternative is the government installing metaphorical CCTV cameras everywhere, it’s a trade-off worth making.

So what should we do about it? We could start by educating people about three big truths, to make them start caring about privacy.

Privacy is about tradeoffs

These three big truths have been masterfully communicated by Apple.

First truth is - there are people who care about your data.

Second truth - there are people who are following you.

And third truth is - that it’s not weird to want to maintain your privacy.

As you can see by watching these ads, Apple has spent millions of dollars to teach an Average Joe about privacy. So why can the iPhone be private, and things like e.g., crypto cannot? I think that's because the iPhone is a universal tool that doesn’t touch money outside the banking system. So you can’t say that iPhones are used for money laundering (though you can claim iPhones are used for terrorism)

Also, the iPhone’s privacy tradeoff has been accepted because their smartphones are used by millions of people around the world. If iPhones were used only by tech people, it’d be easier to say that this privacy is used only by hackers. But because your mom has an iPhone, and so do US senators, they understand why it’s important not to have your messages leaked.

And if it facilitates crime in some edge cases? So be it. So does https, that's accepted as a core part of the Internet infrastructure.

If we zoom out, we notice that humanity has a long history of accepting tech that facilitates crime.

Banks made money laundering at scale easier. And we still use them. 

The Internet made hacking easier. And we still use it.

Social media has been used by ISIS to coordinate terrorists. And we still use it.

We still use all that tech because we — as a society — accepted the trade-off. We weighed the benefits of the tech and decided that they were more important than the costs of facilitating crime in some edge cases.

So, one of the best ways to get more people to support crypto privacy is to get more people to use it. Then, they will understand why - for some of their transactions - they might want a cozy, private digital house.

It doesn’t mean we should stop advocating. We should definitely keep doing it. But I think until we get enough adoption, it will be an uphill battle, like convincing people in 2010 that iPhones should be private. Doable but hard.

Thankfully, sometimes the current financial system is so bad, that it makes our jobs a little bit easier:

If you're building in crypto and need help with product, growth or community, let's chat.

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or get in touch with me on Twitter.

It’d be tempting to define it as:

“Media in the form of text, audio or video that’s put onchain”

But that would be a very naive definition that probably wouldn't stand the test of time.

Online media domino

Imagine it’s 1997, and I’m about to write an essay about online media. What would I say? 

Probably something like: 

“Thanks to the Internet, we now have two types of media. 

Offline media that we know well - like newspapers, TV stations, and radio. And online media where you put text, audio & videos on the Internet, a.k.a. online, hence the name “online media.”

But that would be a pretty shortsighted definition. Because it’s not only about where the media is stored (online vs. offline) but also about the new format this storage unlocks.

Online magazines aren’t just PDF scans of offline magazines - they offer an entirely different format. Articles are longer because they’re not constrained by the newspaper’s length. They have more images for the same reason. They have videos. And hyperlinks that connect them with other sources.

That’s definitely more than just “putting text on the Internet.”

And, as we know from “Creator Economy 101,” it was just the first piece of the domino.

Online media not only changed the format but also changed distribution. Since everyone had a digital printing press, ideas could be distributed more permissionlessly. For the first time ever, you didn’t need to work your way up in a newspaper, TV station, or radio to reach millions of people. Everyone - with enough skills, work, and luck - could become a writer, YouTuber, or podcaster. And some outliers like MrBeast get more views than Superbowl. 

In the meantime, social media arrived, which made online media interactive - people could comment on every piece and the discussion became often more important than the original content. It gave even more power to the people, as everyone could now share their opinion on the posts by journalists, scientists and politicians. 

This move also opened the golden era of free speech, where Twitter threads, 4-hour podcasts and 40-page long articles let us share our perspectives without being cut off by the TV presenter. And although the media world is still imperfect - we all heard about YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter censoring and shadowbanning users - our media sources are way more decentralized than they were in the 90s. 

So, an innocent move such as “putting text, audio, and video on the Internet”, changed the world.

Skeuomorphic phase of onchain media

Okay, so let's get back to onchain media.

If I were to reiterate the definition, I would say that:

“Onchain media takes the form of text, audio or video that’s put onchain and uses blockchains’ strengths to create a new format of content.”

And what could this format be? What would be the “hyperlinks, printing press, unlimited length & interactivity” of onchain media?

Hard to tell.

We have already explored obvious paths such as token-gating access to articles and videos, following the content edits onchain, integrating seamless payments, creating memes around the idea by the memecoin holders' communities, and increasing support of citizen journalism. But I think we are still in the “Let’s put this PDF article online” era.

So please experiment, try and break things. Let's see how media can change based on your onchain history. Let's use tokens to design incentives for journalists to stay objective. Let's use ledgers to track the provenance of ideas, so we know who started the chain of thoughts.

The onchain terrains are still wide open for trailblazers. Who knows, maybe you will be the one who discovers a format that will define the next decades of human communication.

So let's end the skeuomorphic phase of onchain media.

Thoughts based on the Broadcast panel we had at Dappcon ‘23 with Kat, Phillip & Rafa.

PS: And if you do it, please share your discoveries on Kiwi.

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But why do Niches even matter? What makes them so special that they are worth our time? I hinted at my perspective at the end of the last essay, but here’s a more elaborate answer.

Niches move the world forward

What XV century Florence, the Manhattan Project, and Silicon Valley have in common? 

The main idea behind all of them was simple:

- Get all these niche-obsessed (art, physics, and tech) people in one place.
- Create an environment where they can cooperate and compete.
- Let them bounce off their ideas, build on top of each other’s projects, and move the domain forward.

In other words, these projects created spaces for niche communities to flourish. In return, these communities helped to take humanity to new heights.

Connecting people interested in a particular niche is, of course, not limited to history-defining projects.

Every university degree is a Schelling point for people interested in a particular subject. Schools use tough admission criteria to filter for students who are the most passionate about domains such as computer science, literature, or medicine. Then, they put these carefully selected students in an environment where they live, learn, and do projects together. And although undergrad students rarely move science forward, some of them later stay in academia and compete for the Nobel Prize.

The same idea fuels events such as conferences, meetups, and festivals. It’s typically much easier to get into an event than into a top university, so you can just buy a ticket and get access to thousands of like-minded individuals. 

All these niche environments can be the beginning of something big - most professional friendships start at the university, and some big companies can track their origins to small meetups - like Apple, which began at a small Homebrew Computer Club. Bringing niche-obsessed people together can have a huge impact on the world.

And sometimes, we don’t even need to bring the people physically together.

Niches work even if they are distributed

Some niche communities have been distributed from Day 1, long before we had video calls and group chats.

A few hundred years ago, one such community started in Europe. It was focused on building things in stone, which, in the era of castles and cathedrals, was a very valuable skill. Members of this organization traveled across Europe offering their services, guarding their craft's secrets, and teaching new apprentices. 

This movement was called Freemasonry and, through the years, evolved into a powerful organization, with 15 US Presidents having ties to this group.

Most religions and trade organizations evolved in a similar manner. Although their members were distributed around the world, they managed to keep the group together by focusing on things they had in common.

So, when the Internet came, it made it easier to build and connect a distributed community. This is how the Niche Internet was born.

And a few of these Internet-first groups have already made a lasting impact on the world.

One of the most famous ones is Cypherpunk mailing list. Their niche (700 subscribers in 1994) list was a world-class forum for cryptography, mathematics, and computer science enthusiasts, and we can thank them for making the Internet more private. Among their subscribers were people like Marc Andreessen, Julian Assange, and Satoshi Nakamoto.

An even more impactful group that got connected via the Internet is the open software community. The movement can be traced back to the floppy disk era, years before the Internet became a thing. But with the extra connectivity (like Usenet, mailing lists, forums, and blogs) and tools (like SourceForge and later GitHub), the once niche group of coders made a real dent in the universe - today, 99% of new software projects rely on open source components.

The online-first group that might be the most recognizable by the non-tech reader is the crypto community. Bitcoin whitepaper nerdsniped tech, cryptography, and economics experts, and that eventually led to building a $2T+ industry that’s challenging the world’s finance and tech. 

And these are just a few tech examples. There are countless others - from DeviantArt, which connected artists, through Bodybuilding.com, which connected gym fans, up to Raverly, which helped to educate thousands of people about knitting.

So, niches can have a huge impact on our world. And they also work if people are distributed and connected via the Internet. But they’re not only useful. They’re also pleasant to be in.

Niches are natural

We evolved in tribes. This means that we like to belong, have some common background, and bond over shared experiences.

In the early homo sapiens days, we didn’t have many hobbies other than hunting, eating, sleeping, and procreating, and most groups were just tied by their blood or geography. 

Today, there are many ways to spend our free time, so we started forming mini-tribes based on our interests and passions. This process got accelerated with the Internet, as we are always just three clicks away from finding “our people,” and we might have more in common with a League of Legends player from Hong Kong than our cousins.

Satisfying this need of belonging is even more important in the era of the Mainstream Internet.

Mainstream Internet is like a noisy, crowded club - it's hard to get noticed here. And even if you become the center of attention, you might not like it because it can be overwhelming.

Niche Internet, on the other hand, is like a house party. It has many cozy spaces where you can be heard, build your reputation, and - if your content is good enough - you might even move this micro-domain forward.

Also, you are free to nerd out about your favorite domain. Your friends and wife might not want to listen to another rant about cars, cooking, or fantasy, but there are people out there on the Internet who would love to hear your thoughts!  

I experienced it firsthand as I joined Farcaster in 2022, when it was a niche community for crypto builders. It was the first space where I could discuss crypto all day long. And this niche community was really impactful - this is where I met Tim in 2023 and joined him to build Kiwi

So, niches are naturally pleasant to be in. And they are also easier to shine in.

Niches are easier

The business cliche says that “riches are in the niches.” It’s true that it’s easier to build a business that’s a big fish in a small pond than vice versa. And it’s also true for our passions, where we can stand out if we choose the niche carefully.

Some niches are based on scope. For example, you might not become the best programmer in the world because there are 20 million other programmers competing for this title. But… you can be the world’s best expert in a particular open-source library.

Some niches are based on tribes. For example, you might not become the world’s best biologist, but you can be the best biologist among your friends or in r/BiologiaBrasil.

Some niches are also based on intersections of different domains. For example, it’s hard to be the world’s electronic music DJ. But you can become the world’s best person who combines the love of anime, music, and podcasts like Akira The Don. 

Finding your niche means you can focus on what you do best and stand out easier. You'll face less competition, become a part of a more cozy environment, and really make a mark in a specific area or community. 

And yes, you might not become the leader of the next Project Manhattan. But your expertise in programming, parenting, or woodwork can help people solve their real problems. And it’s a valuable contribution to our society, that gives people a sense of belonging and pride. 

And I think that in the era of algorithmic feeds where everyone consumes a different content, this kind of connection is particularly important.

Come and explore niches

So, to sum up, niches are important. They move the world forward and give people a sense of belonging and pride. 

The power of niches is one of the reasons why we built Kiwi News. 

We’ve been in crypto for some time, but we longed for quality content and conversations. So we decided to build a tool that helps to find and discuss content about crypto tech, products and culture. And also build a community around it. If you’d like to learn more about our project, the best place to go is our Docs.

If you're building a niche-focused project and need help with product, growth or community, let's chat.

PS: If you liked this post and don't want to miss my new essays, you can subscribe to the newsletter below:

Probably, it depends. 

If you need to ask, “How long is the flight from New York to LA?”, then Google would do.

If you need to ask, “How to repair a broken dishwasher?” then YouTube would be great.

If you need to ask, “What are the top tools for product management?” then ChatGPT would handle that.

But what if your question falls outside of the mainstream? What if you’re looking for an underground rap song, a niche JS library, or an honest review of crypto wallets?

Then you would probably chat with your friends. Or ask on some specialized forum. Or open Google and type in “{keyword} reddit”.

You would be looking for answers from humans. You would be looking for answers from the Niche Internet.

What’s Niche Internet

What’s Niche Internet? Let’s start with the Internet itself. 

We can look at it as two networks connected with each other:
(1) content network that lets us read and react to content such as social media posts, blogs, and videos,
(2) community network that lets us connect with people through chat, follows, and likes.

On the Mainstream Internet, the content is focused on subjects you might discuss at a family dinner, such as the economy, presidential elections, or the Super Bowl. The community there consists of celebrities, sports figures, Big Tech CEOs, and normal people.

Niche Internet, on the other hand, is focused on deep interest in one particular subject. These smaller-scale communities can talk all day about rationality, mathematics, or geo investigations. Although the Niche Internet creators might have some local fame, if you mention their (nick)name to your normie friends, they’d have no idea who these people are.

I believe that - in the last few years - Niche Internet has faced significant problems. 

Our digital space has been dominated by Big Tech, where Google, Facebook, and Twitter algorithms decide what content to surface and what content to hide. 

Big Tech leans into the mainstream content at the expense of the niche since this is where they can make the most money. It means that niches have less distribution, and it’s hard for these small communities to reach new people.

But there’s hope. 

I believe that - thanks to recent changes in tech & business models - the Niche internet can return stronger than ever.

And just like Netscape’s bundling and unbundling and Packy’s centralization and decentralization trends don’t repeat but rhyme, so does Mainstream & Niche dominance of the Internet

So, I’d like to invite you to examine the past, present, and future of the Internet through this lens and see what the future might hold.

Let’s start from the beginning so we can understand how we got here.

Rise of the Niche Internet

In the early days, the Internet was a very niche place. It was full of academics, Department of Defense employees, and hardcore geeks.

If 80s Internet users wanted to find some content, they typically asked their friends or strangers for advice (Do you remember sending emails with interesting links and jokes, anon?). And if they wanted to find some people to chat with and maintain their digital friendships, they typically used Usenet & email.

Later on, after we got the world’s first website, people could also “browse the web” by reading websites and clicking links that took them to other, sometimes very obscure and niche websites.

The Niche Internet was growing, and people  - via e-mails, Usenet, or personal websites - were natural brokers of the content.

***

The years passed, but the Internet was still in its early stages. It also became more popular, as did interactive services such as IRC, forums, and web chats.

Those tools made it easy to find people with similar interests, and instead of writing electronic letters, we could have a more back-and-forth conversation.

IRC, forums, and web chats were typically subject-oriented (cat lovers, PC geeks, football fans) or location-oriented (NYC, US, Europe). That meant that, by joining a forum, people naturally segmented themselves into these niches, so it was easy to have a focused conversation.

These were also places where we exchanged interesting content to consume or even programs to test. The Internet was still pretty niche, and we still learned about new content, primarily from people who were geeking out on a particular subject. 

***

But the Internet grew, and we needed to find our way around it. 

So, two Stanford students started curating a list of the most interesting websites:

“There were no commercial search engines back in 1993. But a Stanford student named David Filo compiled a list of his 200 favorite websites.

His buddy Jerry Yang helped turn this into an online list. They called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Worldwide Web.” Filo and Yang added new websites every day to their list—and classified them according to categories.

This turned into Yahoo.”

It has been a great place to discover interesting websites. And although we learned about new websites from a service, not from individual users like in the Usenet/chat/e-mail era, it still had a strong human touch and “browsing the web” experience.

Filo and Yang even included a “Search only in Forums” option.

But as Yahoo grew and became the Internet’s wunderkind, it needed more users.

So they did what all businesses do when they need to grow—they turned to bigger markets and showed more mainstream content and websites to generate more traffic and sell more ads. 

It wasn’t Jerry sharing the coolest websites anymore. If you look at their website from 2003, it also looks very different from the 1996 Niche Internet-Yahoo.

The Mainstream Internet was on the rise.

***

And then, as the Internet grew even bigger, a new way to find content gained popularity. 

Found by two other Stanford (PhD) students, Google allowed us to find websites faster than ever. Instead of asking a friend or even Yahoo for a recommendation, we started asking Google. If we did otherwise, it was even sometimes ridiculed (“Just Google it!”), and people’s role in content discovery became even more limited than in the Yahoo era.

Since the World Wide Web was much smaller and less SEO-optimized then, we could use Google to find both mainstream and niche content. Niche, interest-based communities were easier to discover and, as a consequence, got many new members. 

There were even Yahoo-like Directories and Groups back then.

Google website in 2003

Early 2000s Google was how I found most places I hung out online back then. Thanks to its search I found the Jedi Knight II game forum to look for new Star Wars comic books and spent time on Wolfenstein-related IRC channels to learn about the new metal songs.

So, although the websites were not picked by Yahoo employees and users but by Google’s algorithm - it was pretty easy to find niches. The Mainstream Internet was growing, but the Niche Internet was doing fine.

2003 Google even had Yahoo-like categories

Marginalization of the Niche Internet

Then, social media entered the chat. 

MySpace was something between the old websites and the new ones. 

You could customize the look and feel of your pages like on old, personal websites. And there were many conversations on forums and blogs, creating a new, tight social network. 

But if you look closely, there’s a subtle difference here. MySpace didn’t point to external forums & blogs. They wanted to have all the content on their website. And these tactics worked - their engagement was skyrocketing.

At some point, MySpace got so dominant that Google paid $900M to provide search results and ads, and some journalists started asking if MySpace monopoly could ever be broken.

Although MySpace was a much more centralized solution than a myriad of old-school forums, it was still a pretty good way to discover interesting content from real people. Primarily because - for the first time ever - we had so many people in one place.

Soon after MySpace’s peak, Facebook took over. Back then, their feed was also a good source of content. Yes, sometimes my feed was focused on what my friends had for lunch, but I could also discover tons of interesting stuff.

An obscure YouTube love song that my friend posted so that her crush “just get it.” A niche blog post about the 2008 financial crisis that generated heated debates. Or a DeviantArt gallery by my amateur photographer friend. 

Since my friends were there, it was pretty easy to find niche content - I could just check the wall of a friend who was into a particular subject or DM them. 

Although MySpace and Facebook started to gate content and centralize Internet engagement, the Niche Internet was doing fine. 

This was primarily because these networks created a space for millions of people to discuss things they found interesting and share links to articles, websites, and videos related to these subjects. Once again, people were brokers of content, creating a counterbalance to algorithm-driven Google.

Until something changed.

***

Soon, social media executives started receiving memos from the investors. The message was simple: “You need to finally start making real money.”

Since their platforms earned money by distributing ads to their users, almost all social media decided to limit the reach of external links. The goal was simple - make people stay longer in the app so they watch more ads, so social media would make more money.

So, if you posted your thoughts on Facebook instead of linking to your blog post, you reached more people. This is what some users started doing, and the era of “social media influencers” went into full swing. 

This move had a subtle but important consequence.

When you think about all the previous eras - e-mail, IRC, Yahoo, Google - it was all about helping you find some external content. Even early MySpace and Facebook were full of links.

Now, these social networks have closed the gates and stopped being a good tool for discovering external content. In the meantime, Google search results got more populated by ads and SEO-optimized content. That meant that many niche websites, blogs, and forums couldn't be found as easily as before. 

And in this new era, people didn't explore the Internet the way the 80s & 90s users did. 2010s users relied on Google and social media, which was like taking a guided tour through a huge, wild Internet forest. They were only shown what the Big Tech algorithm guides wanted them to see, missing the vastness and diversity off the beaten path.

In other words, Niche Internet became marginalized. But there was one way to reclaim its spotlight.

Links to the rescue

One lesson we learned from Yahoo, MySpace, and Facebook stories is that ad-based business models have one thing in common. When companies relying on ads need to grow, they look to bigger and more profitable markets. In other words, they lean more into the mainstream.

And that makes economic sense. 

Consumer brands with the biggest budgets, such as P&G, Mercedes, or Emirates Airlines, must reach millions of people to achieve their marketing goals. So, if a tech platform wants a share of this budget, it needs to provide access to millions of people.

And although niche ads can generate a lot of money - that’s how podcasters make a living - it’s not enough for a $100B+ business (it's one of the reasons why Reddit’s revenue is 150X smaller than Meta’s).

Relying on displaying ads to the mainstream population has a pretty predictable outcome. As we said before, when ads become the platform’s primary source of revenue, it needs users to stay on its platform to show them more ads. That means it’ll eventually have to penalize external links, just like most major social platforms did before.

We said that penalizing links can make it harder for niche websites to get discovered, but it has much more far-fetched consequences.

Niche communities - by definition - are looking for depth. Whether the niche is focused on fishing, IT security, or New York restaurants, people are looking for specialized knowledge that can’t be found on the first Google page.

And niches often move fast. There is always a new fishing rod, new malware, or a new small restaurant opening in NYC. 

In other words, niche communities rely on people who have a deep understanding of the subject and stay up-to-date with these ever-changing domains. These people are rare and are typically scattered across different social media, blogs, forums, and group chats. 

The chances of getting them all on one platform are probably not much higher than Google or Microsoft employing all the brightest engineers in the world. As Bill Joy said: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

If we wanted to adapt Joy’s law to social networks, we could say: "No matter what platform you are, most of the smartest niche people don’t publish there.” 

This means that to reach a satisfying depth of conversation, the niche community can’t rely only on content published on one platform, such as Facebook or Twitter. The community needs links. Links to the best tools, videos, blogs, or websites covering a certain subject that can enrich the conversation and provide more depth.

So, if you run social media and you want to serve niches, you can’t penalize links because the niches will eventually run away, looking for deeper conversation in a place where links are welcome.

And there’s one social platform that got it.

Return of the Niche Internet

When other social platforms got a memo about making more money through ads, there was one rebellious enough not to sacrifice its links. It was geeky and sometimes even weird. And it was as close to Internet culture as it got. This platform was Reddit. 

What made Reddit different from Facebook or Instagram was its long-tail strategy, with thousands of niche subreddits.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-the-number-of-subscribers-of-subreddits-The-largest-subreddits-in-the_fig2_333085087

Reddit understood niches inside out and knew that penalizing links would be the beginning of the end for them. So, they kept them intact, and many online communities migrated there.

They also remained the only major social network on which you don’t need to log in to read the content. It soon turned into a symbiotic relationship with Google, where we started adding “Reddit” to our keywords to find niche answers.  And - although Reddit sells ads - they try to fund themselves with alternative sources such as Reddit Premium, Gold, or Collectibles.

But Reddit isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and Niche Internet growth wasn't confined to one platform. So, in that era, it felt as if Niche Internet plants started growing in all parts of the Internet forest.

Niche content stormed podcasts, YouTube videos, group chats, and newsletters. Some STEM-oriented communities were growing on StackExchange, which welcomed world-class scientists, including Nobel prize & Fields medal winners. Some culture-oriented communities were growing on Wikia (a.k.a. Fandom), where they learned about books, movies, and video game lore.

New platforms also became more open to exploring business models that are not ad-reliant. Partially thanks to Netflix, Substack, and Patreon, which taught consumers that not all content on the Internet is free.

In addition, Substack revived the Niche Internet idea of people, not algorithms, recommending content. And it worked—some newsletters like Lenny’s get 70% of their growth through recommendations from other writers.

Patreon, on the other hand, gave birth to countless Slack, Telegram, and Facebook groups for niche-obsessed users who pay $10/month just to be a part of the community.

Also, our casual group chats on Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram became the next incarnations of the mailing list. And since the chat and messaging apps are not feed-driven, they don’t penalize link sharing.

In the same period, we got the podcast boom. 

Few people would read three-hour-long materials about gardening, martial arts, or parenting. But listening to a three-hour-long niche podcast? No problem, it just makes the workout or a traffic jam more pleasant. What's made the podcasts even better is that they rely on RSS feeds, which means the distribution is less centralized.

YouTube was also helping the cause. Although it is centralized like Facebook or Twitter, its wildly efficient discovery algorithms and generous ad revenue split with creators helped niche content creators reach the right audience.

All these things together made the tech community dive deep (again) into the ideas of the creator economy and 1,000 true fans. I think it’s fair to say that the Niche Internet has returned to the public consciousness.

There's still one barrier in front of us, though.

But how to find Niche Internet content

YouTube, Reddit, and Substack are great for niches, but they are still centralized platforms. This means that if they decide to bet more on the mainstream content, it can come at the expense of the niches. To make Niche Internet more independent, we need better discovery.

How do we discover niche content today? Typically, we ask a friend or an Internet stranger who’d tell us, “This community/podcast/newsletter is really cool; you should check it out.”

Although this idea of people being manual brokers of content has a nice retro vibe, it doesn’t feel optimal that our content discovery in 2024 works as if it were 1994.

So what could we do?

1) The most battle-tested idea is link aggregators.

HackerNews has been around for over 15 years, and it’s still the prime source of tech-related news. Although there is some mainstream news there, you can also find obscure blogs, niche GitHub repos, and eccentric websites.

I believe that more niches should adopt this way of discovering interesting content. This idea is close to my heart because Kiwi - the project I’ve been working on with Tim for almost a year - is about aggregating links. We curate top content and discussions in the same way HackerNews does, so we can keep the discussion quality high, like on old-school forums.

The difference is that our product is decentralized, which means that if you don't like our app, you can build an alternative app with your own moderation design and algorithm. And it can access all links, upvotes, and comments that we display in our app, so you don't need to build the content & community from scratch.

At this point, the content is focused on crypto, but we plan to scale horizontally and, in the future, cover other subjects in a subreddit-like manner.

If you’d like to learn more about it, here's a good link to check.

2) The second idea I find interesting is boutique search engines. 

These engines are focused on a particular niche. For example, we use DoorDash to find a good restaurant, Airbnb to find a good place to stay, and Behance to find a good graphic designer. What makes these engines different from Google is that they combine search with curation, typically through likes and 5-star reviews. 

So, the idea is to use the same concept but for different niches like programming, parenting, or gardening. 

Of course, the examples provided above are centralized in the sense that you can’t use Airbnb to find hotels on Booking. And these marketplaces make money by selling products and services, which might not be the perfect model for an open search engine. But this is definitely an interesting idea to explore, especially given the recent advancements in AI and Chatbots in general.

3) The last idea is SaaS-based social media.

I think it has the potential because of my old Facebook experience, which I recalled before—my feed was a source of different links from the niches my friends were interested in.

One fast-growing project in this area is Farcaster, which uses Reddit-like channels to segment people into niches. Since it charges users and not advertisers, it doesn’t penalize links, which means that some of these channels are good sources of high-quality information.

There are also other projects, such as Mastodon, Nostr, and BlueSky, that are even more popular than Farcaster. From what I know, they don't use SaaS-based pricing and rely on hobbyists and donations, but I have to admit I haven't checked them in a while.

***

All these three methods have their superpowers and limitations. Some of them can also be combined (e.g., link aggregator & boutique search engine), and I think we have just scratched the surface of what's possible.

So, generally speaking, the future of the Niche Internet is bright (if we do the work to make it bright).

Niche Internet matters

This has been a longish post. We started by examining Internet history through the lens of Mainstream and Niche. 

For decades, these worlds grew harmoniously. Mainstream products, such as Yahoo, Google, and early social media, supported the discoverability of niche content and communities. In the last few years, the Mainstream Internet has started growing at the expense of its Niche counterpart.

Since most users learn new content and people via search or social media, Google, Meta, and Twitter have gained huge power over niche creators. As these platforms relied on ads, they eventually had to limit the external links' reach, which decreased the potential of niche communities.

Happily, we saw the renaissance of the Niche Internet, with Reddit, Substack, Patreon, and many others helping niche creators and communities blossom. One big challenge is discoverability, which I believe can be solved via link aggregators, boutique search engines, and SaaS-driven social media. There are already some promising projects in these areas, and I think we are on the right track to reclaim the attention that was taken by Big Tech's algorithms.

And I believe it's an important problem to solve.

Niches are what make the world go round. Hardcore geeks and enthusiasts are the ones who explore new ideas and move their domains forward. Eventually - once their ideas reach mainstream - we all can reap the rewards of the new technologies, frameworks, and methods these people came up with.

So, let's keep pushing to give niche communities their own spaces that can be easily found by anyone who's interested. If we do it right, everyone gets to find their tribe and share what they love, making the internet - and the world - a cooler place for all of us.

Thanks to Tim Daub & freeatnet for feedback on the early drafts of this text

If you're building a niche-oriented project and need help with product, growth or community, let's chat.

PS: I wrote a follow-up post called "Why Niches Matter". If you got that far, you will probably enjoy it.

PS2: If you liked this post and don't want to miss my new essays, you can subscribe to the newsletter below:

PS3: If you'd like to dig into the Niche Internet lore, here are the articles and talks I recommend (in no particular order):

1) "Boutique search engines" by Saria Zout

2) "What happened to my search engine" by Honest Broker

3) "Why do news aggregator apps keep failing" by Baekdal

4) "The human medium is the human message" by Simon de la Rouviere

5) "The Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet" by Ruby Justice Thelot and Rue Yi

6) "The tyranny of the marginal user" by Ivan Vendrov

​​​​7) "Content Liquidity and Protocol Lock" by rafa

8)"The Internet's distribution problem" by Kyle Chayka

9) "Death of the follower" by Jack Conte

We often discuss phrases such as censorship-resistant, decentralized, or immutable. But, for the average Joe, these ideas resonate differently:

• When they hear censorship-resistant, they think of hiding Nazis and child porn.

• When they hear decentralization, they think of a chaotic college group project.

• When they hear immutable, they think of the stress in a world where "CTRL+Z" doesn't work.

So, how could we prepare for the "next billion users" and make core crypto values more appealing to the general population?

Let's embark on a 10-minute journey through the realms of crypto, marketing, and psychology to find out how we can make the core crypto values more sexy.