• Audience development: growing followers and engagement on all social platforms, aimed at driving awareness and affinity for our brands.

• Lifecycle comms: using low-cost channels, like email & product notifications, to communicate with our "owned" audience to drive engagement & revenue.

• Paid media: as long as the CAC : CLV math made sense, we'd scale spend across Facebook, Google, and all other ad platforms to bring on new subscribers.

• Partnerships: building relationships with all sorts of strategic partners, YouTube channels / podcasters / etc., with the goal of driving awareness, acquisition, and engagement & retention.

We weren't unique in how we were structured. Lots of consumer companies had a similar makeup. You definitely needed some art, especially in creative and brand functions. But the playbook was well understood and success was, to a large extent, dependent on execution.

Here comes the noise

A friend of mine always comes back to the central thing LLMs are really good at: "more". They ship a lot more code, make a lot more media, and broadly bring a lot more noise (and some value & signal) into our world. Like a tsunami, all of that noise has been gradually taking over all the channels we depended on for growth.

Email, text, and voice calls are all being crushed by spam. When was the last time you actually paid attention to a DM, email, or text from an unknown number or person?

Bots and automated posts are taking over social feeds, with platforms rotating whimsically between whack-a-mole to protect the UX and finding ways to make money on the flood of AI-generated media. You have to wonder whether DAUs & time spent on these apps continues growing as their feeds become more bot- and ad-centric.

Bringing all this together, the growth channels we depended on for quite a while are becoming way less effective. This is happening at the same time the amount of consumer products are exploding, whether they be vibe-coded, VC-backed, or everything between.

Attention wars boiling over

All these channels have been growing in noisiness for some time. We've been reading the same story for a while: "attention is all that matters". That's why we've seen text -> image -> video, and those videos getting shorter & punchier, and broadly hot takes getting hotter, all for the sake of grabbing someone for more than a millisecond as they scroll their feed.

The "more"-ness of AI is taking this noisiness into the stratosphere. Some implications I've been thinking about recently...

The incredibly obvious one is the noise will make it really hard for any new consumer products (and, to a lesser extent, B2B / enterprise products) to breakthrough and gain traction. If that plays out, then AI may be much more of a sustaining technology than a disruptive one. All the existing winners will just become WAY bigger, and there won't be many new consumer companies / products that gain traction.

This is less applicable to non-VC-aspiration consumer products. It could actually be really cool if we see a huge ecosystem of people building their own hyper-niche software products and earning a comfortable living from their work. But based on what we've seen so far in online ecosystems, there's usually a power law dynamic, where less than 20% capture over 80%+ of profit. So, I'd love to see it, but a touch skeptical it'll happen.

Another implication is that the nosiness leads to new growth tactics & playbook. After all, growth channels are ALWAYS evolving and changing. Really good growth teams are the ones that find the new opportunities and leverage them to drive awareness, affinity, and bring on new customers.

But I have no clue what those new tactics look like, or where the new channels will come from.

Based on what we've learned from the internet over the past few decades, social media in particular, I'm not sure everyone wants to be in the same room with each other. Will we ever have new hyper-scaled platforms like Instagram / TikTok / Twitter / YouTube, with billions of users? If not, how do the new VC-aspiration consumer products get attention if NOT by using at least a similar growth playbook?

The Lumière Brothers problem

A somewhat related idea I've been rotating around is how we may be in a temporary phase with new AI products, where everyone is working on very similar "AI for X" ideas. Further, these are all trying to apply AI to existing problems, not so much coming up with radically new, audacious ideas.

The classic example: the first filmmakers simply pointed a static camera at stage plays. Initially, they weren't thinking of what films could actually be from first principles. The new technology, which was definitely amazing, was only used as an additional delivery mechanism for something that already existed.

A quick scan of YC's recent batches and you have to scroll for a LONG time before you get to a startup that isn't "AI agent for [insert existing job / task]" or "AI-native [insert existing SaaS category]". In a way, this is contributing to the noise! If you're working on an idea that other startups are working on, and you have to fight through mountains of AI-generated media and swarms of bots, it's going to be pretty hard to get attention.

BUT, there is hope. We seem to be inching our way out of this phase, with a rotation away from the too-plausible ideas and more software-only products, toward physical products (robots, drones, wearables, space hardware, biotech), and some truly novel ideas (first hotel for the moon).

Paul Graham

@paulg

The startups from the spring YC batch that I did office hours with today have some of the biggest ideas I've ever encountered. There is so much more going on now than just "AI for x". Just as there was more going on during the microcomputer revolution than "software for x".

1,670

9:47 PM • Jun 2, 2026

These ideas are audacious and definitely hard! They're also inherently attention-worthy. Similar to SpaceX in its early days, the idea is so profound (e.g., reusable rockets), and the story around it so captivating (e.g., "colonize Mars"), that it's WAY easier to fight through any noise. These ideas and stories are way more likely to spread than the 100th version of AI law firms, AI CRM, AI billing.

So what?

For anyone running growth right now, the channels we leaned on for the past 15+ years are getting noisier & more crowded at the same time. Everyone is doing the same thing: publishing the same launch video, trying to be provocative or witty to stand out, leaning into mass comms in a spray & pray hail mary. More than any point in the past decade or so, it's important to search for new channels, new tactics, a new playbook.

This has always been true: marketing channels are always evolving. The great marketing and growth teams are continuously on the hunt for arbitrage and new opportunities.

The other pretty obvious thing to do is try to align yourself with truly unique, audacious ideas and stories, ones that are inherently worthy of attention. Of course those are extremely hard to execute against. But if you can nudge your way toward that north star, your story will be naturally exciting & shareable, and you most likely won't be swimming in the flood of folks vying for attention.

This is certainly a starting attempt to actually feel out my own thinking. I'd love to hear what you think! Reply to this email or send me a note.

Thanks as always for reading,
Reid

I've spent my career at the intersection of media & tech, watching the wave of streaming video build during the 2010's, then seeing that wave crash into another wave of everyone picking up their phones & starting their own media business.

As I was trying to start another business a couple years ago, I felt really stuck.

All the ideas felt the same: how can we use LLM's to turn some type of media into even more media. All the major social platforms were becoming more insular, more fortified walled gardens each day. Many of our smartest people were working on fine-tuning similar social feeds on different platforms, each one searching for some spark of network effects.

What made me excited about consumer crypto was the possibility of building a better internet, one with more interoperability, more distributed ownership, a better economy for all participants. Chris Dixon's book Read Write Own articulates this vision well - what he and others call the "Computer" vision of consumer crypto.

On the flip side, there's been a ton of effort aimed at building out the "Casino" vision of consumer crypto. And so far, this side has gained WAY more traction.

It's always important to understand why people are using or paying for your product. It should inform what you build, your marketing & growth strategy, and the long-term story you build around your company. Understanding your customers motivation can also help you gauge market sizing and whether you can build a viable business.

For the sake of this post, let's assume:

• "Casino" = the reason the user opens the app is >90% to speculate, gamble, and ultimately try to make money.

• "Computer" = any attempt at building better consumer apps, products, ecosystems, etc. using crypto rails, where the reason people use them is NOT to make money (or it's less than 10% of their motivation).

The Computer vision drew me in not for some moral reason, but more so because it seems like the bigger market opportunity.

Both my parents were stock brokers & I majored in Finance, learning about credit default swaps as the Great Financial Crisis raged on in the background. One early thing you learn about trading is the "vig": the built-in fee that a market maker charges for each transaction. For any ecosystem that encourages active trading, the vig bends things toward three likely outcomes:

1. Platforms are guaranteed to make a ton of money (which may attract competition).

2. A small group (~10% of participants) will find unfair advantages and capture most of the economy (~90% of the value).

3. Most people will gradually lose all their money over time if they continue to participate & trade.

This is why I'm allergic to Casino crypto apps: you can only lose money for so long before you churn out.

On the flip side, we see thriving economies on the internet, bolstered by non-speculative motivations, many of which we wrote about last year:

• patronage and wanting to support creative work so that it continue to exist & maybe even flourish

• expressing something about yourself & trying to find others that share in your interests

• a desire to learn, expand your professional network, access valuable insights, and become better in your line of work

These motivations feel more durable, less zero-sum. The promise of consumer crypto is that, with better underlying infrastructure, we could radically expand these existing economies and build a better internet.

Yet, while we've seen several "Casino" consumer crypto apps gain significant traction, we haven't really seen any "Computer" apps break out. This used to be because onboarding, commerce flows, and broader product ux was clunky compared to existing software products, but this has become much less true over the past year or so.

Who knows why the Computer is having a hard time competing with the Casino, but I'd throw out a few theories:

• Branding problem. People's general perception of crypto aligns more w/ Casino than Computer. If you're building a Computer product, at some point you have to explain what it does, and your target audience may be allergic to the pitch.

• Network effects are hard to overcome. Instagram, X, YouTube, etc. have incredibly strong network effects, with 90% of users stuck in habitual loops, just wanting to waste some time scrolling. Since the 1% who post are dependent on the 90%'s attention, it's really hard for them to move to a new platform (and convince their audience to come too).

• Crypto's primitives may be better suited for Casino products. It's possible the underlying technology is better suited to speculation and we shouldn't expect too many Computer apps built on crypto rails.

• Too much funding creating unrealistic expectations. Some Computer products may have actually gotten traction, just not the growth trajectory their funding requires. Many of these ideas might work better as sustainable niche products built by smaller teams with longer runways.

I have an enormous amount of respect & admiration for the teams that have really tried to fulfill the Computer vision: Mirror, Rodeo, Farcaster, just to name a few. These teams and many other operators, builders, and entrepreneurs have fought the inward pull toward the Casino, which is certainly hard when you're trying to build a business, watching explosive revenue growth from your Casino app peers.

It's pretty clear the Casino has won the early rounds, but I continue to think it's the smaller, less durable market opportunity.

What I'm hoping for is that the Computer vision finds its footing. Maybe that's a breakout app that reaches massive scale. Maybe it's a growing constellation of smaller, idiosyncratic products: each weird in its own way, built by small teams, serving specific communities, quietly interoperating beneath the surface.

Either path would be a win. What matters is that we don't let crypto fall inward toward the Casino. The Computer vision is too valuable to give up on.

• Part 1: Rethinking How Writers Get Paid

• Part 2: Why Will Readers Buy Coins?

We got a lot of great feedback on how we're thinking about coins at FarCon & beyond. Below is the first in a series of posts that explores the best critiques on coins as a way to help writers get paid, and how that dovetails into some compelling opportunities and areas we'd love to experiment.

Let us know what you think — your feedback helps shape what we build and the kinds of experiments we run.

One of the most common (and fair) critiques of coins I heard at FarCon: if the goal is patronage, why not just let readers pay writers directly?

With early versions of coins, there are two primary levers in driving earnings for writers:

1. A small revenue share on each transaction (~1%).

2. The potential appreciation of the writer’s coin value over time.

The small revenue share is a very indirect way to support patronage. Further, the small revenue share will only generate meaningful earnings for coins that go viral. Echoing part 1, I don't think we want an internet where people have to go viral to earn a living. We'll likely see experimentation on the transaction revenue share, but the higher this revenue share goes, the more we'll bend away from the benefits of coins: liquidity & being easily tradable.

While the revenue share is direct, the other benefits are more abstract: buying coins can increase the value of the writer’s coins and boost the post’s visibility, both of which may help drive discovery.

These challenges present a valid question: for those motivated by patronage, wouldn’t it be more efficient to just pay the writer directly?

Our existing internet has no shortage of attempts at enabling patronage:

• Instagram, YouTube, X, and Twitch have tested various forms of tipping, paid subscriptions, and various forms of direct payments.

• Patronage is a driving force behind commerce on Patreon, Substack, and other creator platforms.

• Standalone apps like Buy Me a Coffee enable one-off tips for patrons.

These features & products have greatly expanded the creative economy, but it still feels like we’ve only unlocked a small fraction of what’s possible. And perhaps there are ways to leverage the benefits of being onchain to provide much more compelling experiences for people to support creative work.

Open edition NFTs are a great experiment at further enabling patronage, with the added benefit of also tapping into self-expression and community by being able to show off collectibles. But so far, open edition NFTs haven't really moved the needle on earnings for most writers, or brought waves of new people onchain.

While coins offer a new sandbox for experimentation and have distinct advantages over NFTs, in their current form, it's hard to argue how coins would be better at enabling pure patronage. I remain optimistic that we can test our way toward finding a way to use coins in new, compelling ways that enable patronage.

I don't have any answers, but below are threads we've discussed wanting to experiment with to create a differentiated, compelling experience relative to what's on the internet today:

• Experimenting with economics and incentives (e.g., increasing transaction rev share).

• Bending the product experience toward patronage & other more durable motivations.

• Designing incentives for long-term holding.

• Combining coins with limited-edition NFTs (or other monetization features).

• Finding the right relationship between coins at a post-, writer-/creator-, and/or project-level.

In this post, we look at how coins and limited-edition NFTs could combine to find the right balance of patronage and self-expression in a new, compelling way.

Here are the previous four posts:

• Rethinking How Writers Get Paid – why open editions haven’t worked and what coins could unlock.

• Why Will Readers Buy Coins? – a breakdown of motivations behind why readers support writing & creative work.

• Are Coins Better at Enabling Patronage? – a valid critique on how coins, in their current form, have a hard time at supporting patronage.

• Can Microtransactions Work? – exploring the decision fatigue of post-level coins and how that may evolve over time.

Let’s dive in.

Mixing Coins & NFTs

Despite the cool down over the last few years, I've always been a fan of limited-edition NFTs as a powerful tool for self-expression and forming community. A digital symbol that signals what you care about & helps you find new friends who feel the same, bringing people together around shared values and interests.

As we've covered in this series, I also really like the idea of making coins feel more approachable and less transactional, mostly aimed at tapping into non-speculative motivations. For example, hiding numbers in the purchase flow as much as possible, avoiding "buy" & "sell" verbiage, minimizing "coins" and other crypto references, and so on.

Bending the experience in this direction may be a little more off-putting to pure speculators. But based on what we've seen drive Patreon, Substack, and even the large social media platforms, the market opportunity around patronage, self-expression, utility, and other non-speculative motivations feels much larger than betting & pure-play speculation.

Brining both threads together, maybe there's a way to combine coins and limited-edition NFTs in the same purchase.

Imagine a tiered purchase flow that lets readers choose their level of support (at a post level, maybe that's $1, $5, or $10+). The lowest tier could be for pure patronage, a little tip of appreciation. The middle tier could tap into a little signaling value, providing a 1 of 20 limited-edition NFT. And at the highest tier, we could really lean into badging value, providing a 1 of 3 NFT.

In both cases, the NFT could serve as a powerful, shareable badge to signal that you were early, that you were a top supporter, and some other form of self-expression. Compared to a coins purchase, NFTs are much more likely to be shared, which helps bring more attention, readers, and commerce to the writer.

Yes, the reader will also receive coins based on the price of the coin and their level of support, but that's somewhat secondary to wanting to support and the badging value. (Of course, we’ll need to strike the right balance on copy in the purchase flow, clearly communicating what’s happening without overwhelming readers with crypto jargon or technical details.)

This specific example could be a totally dumb idea. But the broader point is there may be an opportunity to mix different monetization features, tapping into the unique benefits of each, while obscuring the crypto-ness of it from the reader. I think this could be a compelling problem space to play in.

Can patronage & good vibes coexist with speculation?

The section above lightly tip-toes around a common critique in crypto: ecosystems struggle when they mix speculators and non-speculators.

This is a totally valid concern and the tension is real. We’ve all seen what happens when the wrong crowd shows up to a good party: the energy shifts, the good vibes disappear, and people start heading for the door.

Speculators can do the same thing. If our goal is to enable some kind of special relationship between readers and writers, speculators can commodify that magical bond, totally ruining the vibes and shifting the gravity of the ecosystem from goodwill to transactional.

BUT, a couple of opinions to consider:

• It's possible for people to have more than one motivation in one purchase.

• It matters a lot what motivates them the most vs. what is more tertiary.

The best examples usually come from some type of collectibles within various fandoms.

Being a Phish fan, an example close to home are show posters, specifically Jim Pollock prints. Fans arrive early to Phish shows to buy these prints & go through the annoying experience of being at a Phish show with a poster tube.

Most people buying these prints do so out of fandom & show them off in their offices, homes, etc.

But, some folks end up selling them, and there's a decent secondary market for these posters. Financial gain is not a primary motivator for people buying these prints (there's much easier ways to make money!), but the opportunity for the price to appreciate may encourage more people to buy them and/or pay more for the prints, both of which grow revenue for these prints & expand the broader Phish economy.

In these types of cases, maybe 90% of the motivation is patronage and self-expression, and 10% is speculation. This feels sustainable and grows the long-term Phish economy. If the inverse is true, and 90% is driven by pure speculation & making money, I think that bends back toward cyclical, zero-sum economies (a la memecoins) that are comparatively smaller.

So yes, I believe you can mix patronage, self-expression, and other motivators with speculation. But to grow the long-term economy around creative work, it's incredibly important to keep the good vibes and bend the outcomes, as much as possible, toward more durable motivators.

In this post, we look at the challenge of coins at a post-level, and scratch the surface on the types of experimentation we may see moving forward.

For reference, here are the previous three posts:

• Rethinking How Writers Get Paid – why open editions haven’t worked and what coins could unlock.

• Why Will Readers Buy Coins? – a breakdown of motivations behind why readers support writing & creative work.

• Are Coins Better at Enabling Patronage? – a valid critique on how coins, in their current form, have a hard time at supporting patronage.

Let’s dive in.

Most coin models today are centered around the smallest possible unit — usually a single post.

One of my concerns with post-level monetization is that it puts a lot of decision fatigue on the audience and patrons. Every post asks the reader to make a choice: do I support this and buy coins? How much? How should I think about price? Even after buying, there's decisions around whether to hold or sell.

This is in part why it's hard for any transactional model, especially microtransactions, to generate meaningful income for creative work over time. (Unless you crack the code on consistently going viral, but that's a whole separate issue.)

In contrast, paid subscriptions require a single purchase decision, and then inertia becomes quite powerful. The decision on whether to cancel is much less burdensome than whether to keep buying. For the writer/creator, it's nice to have a more predictable source of income, and it places some good accountability to show up and provide value over time.

The results are clear: paid subscriptions have unlocked significantly more money for creators than courses, tipping, or any type of one-off payment.

But paid subscriptions also have limitations. Paid subscriptions force writers into full-time publishing, a path that isn’t feasible or desirable for many. Further, there's pressure to use paywall or restrict access in some way, which usually limits readership/engagement and audience growth.

Perhaps most important, while potentially more lucrative, launching a paid subscription is a heavy, intimidating action, and definitely a vulnerable moment for writers. At Yem & Substack, we worked with several writers that hesitated, delayed, or gave up before turning on paid subscriptions (this is in part why we shipped Pledges).

On the reader side, subscription fatigue is real. People are more mindful now about stacking up recurring payments. They want to support writers, but not at the cost of managing another mini-portfolio of subscriptions.

Further, there have been some compelling experiments around micro-transactions:

• Through clever UX, Farcaster bundles the decision of a bunch of $1 tips into a single action.

• Turning social gestures (that were previously not monetized) into microtransactions (e.g., @tipn turns likes on FC into a small USDC tip to the caster).

Bringing all the above together, there are compelling opportunities to improve our current models:

• For full-time writers, how could you leverage coins to bring together loyal readers and writers in a much more compelling, differentiated way than paid subscriptions? (We may need post-level coins to tie into project- or writer-level coins?)

• For writers publishing infrequently, how can we unlock post-level monetization without creating tons of decision fatigue? How can we finally crack the code on leveraging transactional monetization to radically increase the amount of funds flowing toward creative work? (Perhaps we can learn a thing or two from free-to-play gaming?)

• For readers, how can we enable them to better connect and support creative work, writers/creators, and the community around it? How can we let them express who they are and find new friends that share their interests?

We haven’t found a reliable way for microtransactions to create meaningful income for creative work. But with new payment rails, perhaps this is a problem space we need to continue to explore, especially as we experiment more with coins.

We'd love to hear feedback — what do you think?

Because human nature is stable, the reasons people buy things tend to stay the same over time. Let’s explore a few reasons why a reader may want to buy coins on Paragraph (or elsewhere).

A few things to keep in mind as we go through the various motivations:

• How much better suited are coins (or other blockchain-enabled commerce) to enable each motivation compared to what exists today (e.g., paid subscriptions, sponsorships, etc.)?

• How speculative is each motivation? In other words, how likely is each motivation to lead to a large, sustainable economy around great writing?

Utility & Access

Utility is usually the most obvious and logical starting point. People will pay to access paywalled posts, gated discussions, and member-only events.

Often, the underlying motive is to gain insights that will help them make more money, like becoming a better engineer, a better manager, or a better investor. Many of the top performing writers on Substack, mostly across tech, finance, and business, lean into this dynamic (e.g., Lenny’s Newsletter, The Pragmatic Engineer, ByteByteGo, Doomberg).

Could coins be used to gate posts, events, or functionality (like commenting)? Absolutely.

But don’t paid subscriptions already do this pretty well?

Unless coins offer something better than a simple paywall or gating function, they’ll likely feel like a roundabout way to do something that already works. This may be part of why token-gated writing and NFT memberships didn’t gain much traction on Paragraph.

So while utility-based monetization has low speculation (there’s plenty of precedent for it), it’s not yet clear how coins would outperform paid subscriptions in this use case. That doesn’t mean we should ignore utility, but it probably shouldn’t be the only motivator, or even the primary one we focus on.

Patronage

Sometimes, people spend money simply to support creative work they admire or want to see more of in the world. It may be less common than utility-based spending, but it does happen — and when it does, it can be powerful.

Some of the highest-earning writers on Substack, like Letters from an American and Popular Information, don’t paywall anything. Similarly, many top Patreon accounts rely on patronage alone, offering little in the way of gated media or tangible benefits.

We’ve seen this dynamic on Paragraph, too. While far less common than speculation-driven collecting, some readers collect posts purely to show support for a writer.

As long as the experience isn’t hyper-financialized (like, say, pump.fun), coins could offer a simple and clear way to say: “I appreciate this work and want to see more of it.”

Patronage isn’t speculative — there’s plenty of precedent for it — but it’s still unclear whether coins provide a much better way to support patronage over what exists today (perhaps especially open edition NFTs!). It’ll come down, in part, to how coins are framed in the product and how the incentives and payouts are designed.

Still, there’s real potential here. If we get the product experience & incentives right, coins could make patronage feel more personal, more visible, and more rewarding, for both writers and readers.

Identity, Self-Expression, and Finding Friends

This is where things get more interesting.

We’ve barely scratched the surface on how owning digital assets could help people express who they are and, on the flip side, find others that share their interests.

At Crunchyroll (where I worked for 7+ years), this was central to why people formed such strong emotional bonds with the brand (and why they paid for our products). We saw a steady stream of fan art, waves of fans coming to conventions, and even the ultimate sign of devotion: Crunchyroll tattoos. But more importantly, we saw fans coming together through Crunchyroll — we were helping turn total strangers into friends.

We’ve seen similar motivations drive profile picture projects (CryptoPunks, BAYC), the broader NFT boom in 2021, and modern media brands that lean into self-expression & community (Doodles, Pudgy Penguins).

But there’s still so much opportunity to help people show off the music they love, the writing that moves them, the videos that take them to different worlds. To help people create their home on the internet, their internet bedroom.

Coins — maybe paired with limited edition NFTs — could open up new, meaningful forms of self-expression and (on the flip side) help folks find friends on the internet.

From the examples above and beyond, there’s lots of precedence for self-expression and finding like-minded communities. And here I actually think digital assets (coins, NFTs, etc.) can far outperform what exists on the internet today.

But it’s hard to get this right. We'll need to give people digital assets they actually want to show off, and then find high-trafficked and/or high-signal places where those assets are shown (this is why the PFP was so effective — they were all over Twitter).

There’s a lot more details to figure out, but helping people express themselves and find new friends through digital assets feels like one of the most exciting, high-upside bets for onchain apps.

Being Early with a Pinch of Speculation

I’ve gone on quite the journey in how I feel about speculation in the context of onchain apps. My initial instinct was that most plays on speculation were too zero-sum-y, too vulnerable to rug pulling & malicious behavior, and generally unsustainable.

For products that aspire to be more than betting apps, I still think leaning too hard into speculation is risky — it can give teams a false sense of traction and lead to near-term cash grabs. But I'm open to the idea that speculation can be a source of differentiation relative to what exists on the internet today and help products gain early momentum.

In my opinion, the key is to support speculation in a way where it’s not the primary motivator, but perhaps a secondary or tertiary motivator. For example, if you believe in a writer or an idea early on, you might buy the corresponding coin early. If others come to appreciate the work later, your coins may become more valuable.

But I think for this motivation to become sustainable, the financial upside should feel like a bonus — not the primary reason for buying coins.

Making speculation a tertiary motivator is where thoughtful product design is critical. Language, framing, and UX design must clearly prioritize primary motivations like community, identity, or genuine belief. Financial upside, if present at all, must remain in the background. Otherwise, we risk creating another short-lived, zero-sum crypto game.

I especially like the idea of coins at the writer or publication level in enabling speculation. When I was working at Substack, I started a paid newsletter as a way to dogfood our product. Seeing people actually pay for what I was writing was so much more meaningful then the actual dollar amount. It’s hugely motivating and gives writers confidence that they’re on to something, helping them battle through the early slog of writing on the internet when virtually no one cares.

With paid subscriptions, early supporters provide enormous value to writers, but don’t necessarily get anything in return (other than gratification). If there were a way to do the same thing — provide support to early writers — but also have a small chance of upside if the writer does well, would that lead to more people supporting early writers and, by extension, a larger economy around writing?

Coins as a Way to Combat Slop

I’ve been chewing on this one since listening to Jackson Dahl interview with Jacob Horne, which I strongly recommend checking out. One of the points they discuss is how coins could serve as a way to value ideas, media, art, and so on, and drive discovery. And how that becomes incredibly important in a world with mass-produced media and “AI slop”.

Having readers buy coins to drive curation and discovery feels more speculative than anything above. Will people help drive signal for others with their hard-earned dollars? Are they actually bothered by AI slop?

BUT, the more I thought about it, the more it felt familiar. On Substack, there are cases where readers pay to amplify a writer’s work and turn up the volume on ideas they care about. Again, Popular Information is a great example — there’s no paywall, and Judd frequently leans into readers helping him increase the impact of his reporting.

Coins could offer a much stronger signal layer than paid subscriptions. When someone buys a coin because a post or writer resonated with them, that purchase becomes more than support — it becomes a visible marker of value in the marketplace of ideas and media, something paid subscriptions can’t do.

Will people buy coins?

We know the current internet restricts the ecosystem & economy around great writing:

• Paywalls limit reach & slow growth.

• Ads & sponsorships dilute authenticity and distract from creative work.

• Platforms maximize ad impressions, not discovery, quality, or thoughtful discourse.

• Subscriptions force writers into full-time publishing — a path many can’t or don’t want to take.

As far as I can tell, the open edition meta hasn’t really generated a sustainable business for any onchain apps, and it hasn’t really expanded the economy for creative work on the internet. So we need to find something better.

Coins will not be a panacea and there’s plenty of reason to remain skeptical that people will buy coins for creative work. But coins feel like a worthy experiment, a way to explore new ideas and better understand what truly resonates with readers and writers.

Hopefully it’s the first step of many toward a better internet — one that values creative work more deeply and makes it easier for readers and writers to find each other, support each other, and build something lasting together.

As part of that, we’ve been considering how we could use coins to help writers make more money. We’re not committed to launching anything yet, but we wanted to share a few early thoughts — partly to clarify our thinking, mostly to hear what you think.

The Challenges with Open Edition Mints

Today, the most common monetization on Paragraph is open edition collecting: writers publish a post, readers mint it as an NFT, and the writer receives a small payment per mint.

While it’s certainly unique, there haven’t been a lot of examples of writers, artists, musicians, or any type of creator that’s turned this into a consistent, durable income stream. On Paragraph, the only use case we’ve really seen work is leaning into speculation, allowing readers to collect with the hope of an airdrop, token allocation, or some future financial gain. Here are a couple recent examples: Apiology DAO (over 31,000 collects over the past few months) and Ink the future (one post with over 46,000 collects).

There’s nothing wrong with this use case. But we feel there’s more we can do to radically expand the amount of writing and creative work on the internet, well beyond company’s sharing updates and announcements.

Other platforms like Zora and Rodeo have experimented with adding secondary markets after open editions, aiming to spark more speculative activity. These have been worthy experiments and show promise, but don’t seem to have generated too much growth in sustainable commerce. Switching from an open edition to a secondary market for each post, and all that comes with it, is a tricky product experience to get right.

Why Coins Might Be a Better Model

Speculation, whether we like it or not, is one of crypto’s strongest features. Removing speculation or only making it accessible in convoluted ways makes it much harder for onchain apps to gain traction.

So how could coins (ERC-20 tokens) offer a better alternative to open edition NFTs (ERC-721)?

• Compared to open edition NFTs, coins give readers the opportunity to sell or trade, introducing the potential for financial upside.

• Compared to limited edition NFTs, coins offer much better liquidity and are far easier to buy, sell, and exchange over time.

• Writers get paid from every transaction — not just an initial mint.

• Writers can hold their own coins, benefitting as their work gains value.

• Readers can participate in upside when they support a writer early.

• Coins can reward other valuable behaviors, like sharing, editing, or remixing a post.

Further, coins are a little more flexible and interoperable. There’s a good shot the core benefits above open up new opportunities and lead to a lot of compelling second-order effects that are unimaginable right now.

Growing the Economy Around Creative Work

Compared to open edition mints, coins feel like they have a better shot at growing the economy around creative work.

But there are certainly still big risks to consider.

First, coins introduce more mental overhead and complexity around the purchase behavior. You have to decide how many coins to buy and when to buy them. After buying coins, there’s an ongoing decision burden of whether to hold or sell. Easy purchase decisions are part of the reason bundles outperform a-la-carte products, and why subscriptions outperform micro- and one-off payments. With coins, decisions are more abstract and unintuitive, all of which are amplified by this being a totally new type of purchase behavior.

Going viral should be incentivized and rewarded. BUT, if it’s the only way to make money with coins, we’re right back to the internet of today. Ideally, we have an ecosystem that helps you go viral to get discovered and find new audience. But then for some of that audience to be loyal and stick around, providing foundational support for any ongoing creative work.

Another risk is the requirement to sell to profit from a rising coin price. This is no problem for speculators, but hard for readers that care about the writer. There's quite a bit of psychological risk here for writers — having readers unsubscribe is one thing, canceling a paid subscription hurts a little more... but selling a coin associated with your work? That might sting even more. Even more problematic is requiring the writer to sell their own coins to profit, which may signal loss of faith in their work (or, worse, evoke scar tissue of past rug pulls).

Finally, speculation. Coins may be better at tapping into speculation, but if that’s the only reason people (or bots) are buying coins, we may end up in another short-term cash grab. Speculation needs to play a supporting role, not the primary motivator, for coins to be a durable monetization feature.

I’m hopeful some of the risks above can be chipped away through product design, marketing, fine-tuning incentives, and broadly trying to guide the overall experience toward valuable, durable behavior.

But sitting above all of this is the central question: will people actually buy coins for creative work?

We’ll explore that in Part 2.

For a long time, I kept memecoins at arm’s length. I was dismissive — a common reaction to not understanding something.

But as we’ve been discussing unique ways we could help writers build relationships with their readers and make money on Paragraph, it's been hard to totally ignore memecoins. Then, I finally got around to watching Murad's presentation on memecoins from TOKEN2049.

Murad's insights into why memecoins outperformed in 2024 are super compelling. But what struck me most were his frameworks for understanding why the motivations behind why people were investing in memecoins. We saw these same types of motivations in more “traditional” media, across Hulu, Crunchyroll, HBO, and Substack — those same basic motivations are what drove people to become fans of brands, shows, writers / creators, and so on.

One of the key points Murad makes is that retain investors don't care about the software behind blockchains, onchain apps and products, or any crypto project. They mostly care about making money, but also having fun and wanting to be a part of something.

I love how Murad breaks these motivations down into specific percentages (e.g., 70% of their motivation is driven by wanting to make money). People’s decisions are driven by a mix of motivations. People make decisions for a mix of reasons. If you're building a product — a SaaS / enterprise product, a consumer app, a newsletter, paintings — one of the most important things to do is develop a deep understanding of why people are buying your product, which is often a mix of various reasons.

Hyper-speculation and the desire to make money are undeniably powerful forces in crypto. But as someone building products in this space, I get nervous when financial gain is the only motivator. It feels too zero-sum, like a house of cards waiting to collapse.

That's why I found it especially compelling that Murad introduces motivations beyond purely seeking financial gain: fun & community.

Taking this a step further, Murad offers several ways memecoins provide utility. This is where things really click for me — these are all the reasons why people fall in love with anime shows or the Crunchyroll brand, writers or pieces of writing on Substack, and IP universes like Game of Thrones, Marvel, or Star Wars.

These elements of value helped me understand why people would invest in (buy? participate in?) memecoins. It's a helpful framing for clearly separating out the more software-driven altcoins vs. media- / community-driven memecoins. To be successful, memecoins don't need intrinsic cash flow or revenue share to satisfy investors — they're providing "services", like buying a ticket to a movie.

Now, you could easily make the argument that people aren't driven by the desire to make money when they buy tickets to movies, subscriptions to streaming services & Substacks, and so on. Yes, true, but I think introducing the desire for fans to make money could actually lead to some really interesting creative projects, works of art, and new worlds & forms of media.

And perhaps just a larger economy for creative work — wouldn't that be cool?

This is ultimately why I think that percentage allocation across motivations is important. If people invest in memecoins purely for financial gain, many will lose interest quickly; but if they see memecoins as a way to make friends, express themselves, or support ideas they care about, the memecoin cycle / trend becomes more durable — and far more intriguing.

A quick aside: I've been thinking about how memecoins might be part of a broader shift in how younger generations approach "investing".

My parents & other boomers were all about buying a house, the 60/40 portfolio split, and were pretty skeptical of businesses that didn't generate nearly-immediate profits. My generation was among the first to deeply embrace growth stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other riskier alternative investments. Now, younger generations seem to be leaning even harder into asymmetric bets.

With inflation driving up costs and affordability declining, the difference between a $1,000 and $2,000 net worth feels negligible. But the possibility of turning $1,000 into $100,000? That’s deeply compelling.

This is one of Murad's central points in why memecoins have outperformed altcoins: memecoins enable poor HODL’s to get rich, turning them into unpaid evangelists; altcoins only allow a small group of insiders to make money at the expense of "retail" investors.

Don't get me wrong — I still think chasing 100x returns investing in memecoins is incredibly risky and, echoing from above, on of my main concerns is that those purely seeking financial gain are building a house of cards.

What do you think? Are memecoins here to stay? Where do you see product opportunities, if any, to support the continued growth of memecoins (? What do you think of Fred Wilson's "provocation" below?

TikTok turns all videos into memecoins that can be traded on decentralized exchanges all over the world.

For anyone skeptical of memecoins, but open-minded, I highly recommend checking out Murad's presentation. It introduced me to a new way of thinking about memecoins and ultimately made me much more optimistic about their durability — maybe it'll do the same for you.

Talk soon,
Reid

For our second episode of Rough Draft, we’re thrilled to welcome Packy McCormick of Not Boring.

We discuss Packy's unique writing style, his rather frenetic approach to writing 10,000+ word essays each week, the business behind Not Boring, and why Packy focuses on great writing over any intentional growth efforts.

Optimism actually shapes reality… If you have to choose optimism or pessimism, you’re more right if you’re optimistic about how things are going to go.

I love talking to Packy because I always learn something, but also because of his infectious optimism and enthusiasm. Whether you're an aspiring or experienced writer, you'll enjoy this conversation with Packy.

Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Let's dive into a few highlights from our conversation.

A pivotal moment in the origin story of Not Boring came when Packy signed up for David Perell’s Write of Passage course. The key idea Packy learned during the course was nailing the “monopoly of you”.

The idea is to bring together a few things that make you unique — your distinctive passions, areas of expertise, or personality quirks — and then write at the center of those things.

For Packy, he wanted to write about a business strategy. The problem was Ben Thompson’s Stratechery was already one of the best newsletters on the internet.

Packy felt there was an opportunity to write about tech and business strategy but in a fun, less serious way. He drew inspiration from being a fan of Bill Simmons, who mixed sports journalism with pop culture references in a novel way. Packy’s optimism and enthusiasm would also become distinctive characteristics of Not Boring.

Most importantly, none of this was manufactured — this is who Packy is: optimistic, enthusiastic, and humorous with a deep appreciation and interest in tech, building the future, and business strategy. Packy talks about how hard it would be to “fake it” because he’s always online, writing the newsletter, tweeting, and talking to founders. It would be exhausting if he were playing a character.

It’s really hard to do this every single week if you’re not being yourself.

If you’re early in your journey, or maybe even experienced but in a reflective state, think about what makes you unique and how to form your own monopoly of you.

In the early days of Not Boring, Packy had a list of 100 ideas for how to grow the newsletter. One early experiment was posting to a Kardashian subreddit about a relevant post, after which he was effectively shadow-banned.

Any time that I would be spending on growth, I really want to spend on writing.

There were other experiments, but ultimately Packy ended up focusing all his energy on writing great posts, and then hoping readers would share it. There may be a cost to this approach: Packy mentioned falling behind other writers who are more intentional about growth, especially writers with backgrounds in product, engineering, or marketing that think about growth systematically.

But Packy didn’t seem to care as much about growing his email list these days, echoing a similar theme from our discussion with Doomberg — no doubt, a luxury for writers that already have a large, owned audience.

While Twitter was massively helpful in building Not Boring, it doesn't drive much value anymore, and Packy expressed little interest in developing a presence on TikTok or Instagram. He seems to care more about delivering value to a small group of readers he respects than, say, reaching a million subscribers.

I would much rather write something that in group chats, smart people in a particular category are sharing with each other because it helps them think about something in a different way.

We discussed how writers starting from scratch today can’t follow the same playbook as Packy and other writers with large audiences. Platforms like Twitter and Instagram were once powerful tools for building an audience, but changes like limited external linking, in-feed link throttling, whimsical moderation, and other restrictions have turned these platforms into more closed-off, siloed environments.

For new writers, rather than spend a ton of time on general audience growth, Packy suggested focusing on developing your personal monopoly and getting a small group of the right people to read in a narrow niche. Looking forward, Packy suggested more opportunities to build reliable income around smaller, niche publications (i.e., < 25k deeply engaged readers vs. >1M subscribers).

In the early days, despite nearly all his peers launching paid newsletters, Packy kept Not Boring free. He did this in part to focus on growing his reach and readership, choosing to avoid paywalling any of his writing, and kicking the can down the road on how to generate income.

Eventually, Packy would start to dabble with sponsorships and would come to redefine the sponsored post. Before Packy’s spin on it, “sponsored content” mostly meant brands paying Buzzfeed for listicles. Packy flipped that on its head, writing 15,000-word deep dives on startups that he found fascinating.

Like other aspects of Not Boring, the sponsored deep dives came about organically without super sophisticated thinking. One example: pricing. The cost of the sponsored deep dives came about naturally by having conversations with readers who wanted Packy to write about their company. From there, Packy set a minimum price in his mind for a 15,000-word deep dive, and then normal supply/demand mechanics helped shape the pricing over time.

Packy has had incredible success with the sponsored deep dive model. Today, for every 1 sponsored post, 20 more companies are asking Packy to do one of them. This allows Packy to choose the companies he's most excited about and to ensure he’s threading the needle in delivering value to his readers and sponsors.

A huge thank you to Packy for joining.

We hope you enjoy the conversation — let us know what you think!

We’ll be back with you next Thursday. :)

As always, thank you for your support,
Reid

I recorded a handful of conversations with some of my favorite writers earlier this year and excited to share them with you.

We’re calling this little experiment Rough Draft and our goal is to provide listeners with a mix of inspiration, motivation, and guidance.

Our first episode is with the one and only Doomberg, the #1 Finance publication on Substack.

You should begin with what you love to do that doesn't feel like work and then eliminate everything else from your life and wonderful things just magically happen.

Doomberg stands out for its intentional approach to their newsletter, with deep thought given to their audience, branding, marketing, editorial, pricing, paywalling, and every other aspect of building a successful paid newsletter.

The conversation is full of valuable insights and lessons from Doomberg’s journey. Below are a few of the major topics and takeaways I’ve continued to chew on after our conversation.

Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Before launch, the Doomberg team invested a lot of energy into nailing their ideal customer profile (“ICP”) — the types of people that would ultimately pay for Doomberg. They wrote a handful of character sketches, which were detailed descriptions of fictional people answering questions like:

• Where do they work?

• How much are they worth?

• How many cars do they have?

• What’s a hypothetical day they go through?

Equipped with a better understanding of their specific target customers, they were able to make important decisions including:

• Charging a premium price for Doomberg and avoiding discounts.

• Focusing on paid subscriptions and avoiding sponsorships. 

• Keeping a high-quality bar for each newsletter post.

A pattern we’ve seen with many writers is that it can be helpful to have worked in the space that you’re going to cover. Doomberg’s experience working with writers that targeted Wall St. and high-net-worth individuals gave them a strong intuition for their ICP.

Usually, there’s an interplay between what you publish and your ICP, both evolving relative to each other over time (within reason). But in Doomberg’s case, aided by their previous experience, their ICPs have remained mostly unchanged.

Like other large publications, Doomberg took a systematic approach to building its audience. Starting from scratch, they developed a large following on Twitter and were able to build a large email list. 

Since the team worked on growth for other writers before launching Doomberg, they knew the importance of marketing and being self-promotional. They also knew a lot of people were uncomfortable promoting their work, and how that often condemns their writing to the “bin of great writing never read.”

Often, the people who are the most successful on YouTube, social networks, or Substack are the best marketers, not necessarily the best writers, artists, or creative talent. Marketing and selling is a crucial skill (or function if you want to outsource it) for anyone pursuing this type of professional pathway. 

We love when the numbers go up and we celebrate it, but it doesn't consume us.

When things are going well, there can be a temptation to push for more: more followers, more subscribers, more revenue. There’s a delicate line between pushing for growth and staying true to your worldview, your moral compass, or what initially motivated you to pursue your craft.

I have yet to speak to a writer that doesn’t enjoy “watching the numbers go up”. The writers and creators we see with a healthy relationship to growth seem to view it with some level of detachment: a puzzle they enjoy working on, or a game they enjoy playing. 

One of the big questions Doomberg is exploring this year is whether they can find ways to profitably invest in paid marketing. But they will only grow their audience within self-imposed limitations — ways that don’t harm the brand or come off as inauthentic. If they can’t find ways to invest in growth within those limitations, that’s totally okay.

The team behind Doomberg has found “the work of our lives” and feels as though they’ve “caught lightning in a bottle”. They have a deep appreciation for being in that position and won’t put it at risk for the pursuit of growth.

A huge thank you to Doomberg for being gracious enough to spend a few hours with us. We hope you enjoy the conversation — let us know what you think!

And if you’re one of those angels walking on earth, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast player.

As always, thank you for your support,
Reid

Below are timestamps for each topic we discussed:

00:00 Introduction and Background
00:42 Doomberg's Origin Story
08:33 Consulting for Finance Writers and Newsletters
11:25 Launching Doomberg
16:48 Character Sketch of Ideal Customer
21:10 Pricing Strategy
24:25 Never Want To Succumb to the Disease of More
28:58 The Doomberg Brand and Defensive Pessimism
36:38 Launching Paid Subscriptions
44:36 Throw-up Moment After Turning on Paid
52:15 Systematic Approach to Building a Media Business (The 5 Pillars)
55:50 Diving into Demand Generation
01:03:57 Guest Appearances on Podcasts to Grow Audience
01:05:12 Exploring Other Social Platforms
01:06:57 Using Social Platforms to Grow Audience
01:09:42 Searching for Profitable Growth Investments
01:18:18 Barrier to Entry is Zero, Barrier to Success is High
01:22:06 Surfing the Sea of Abundance