GM. I've been slowly immersing myself in Nouns and learning as much as I can as fast as I can. I'll be exploring different facets of Nouns that I personally find interesting. Nouns are in such an interesting position and are constantly pushing boundaries of what it does onchain and Nounish Software is one of those things I wanted to explore deeper. So grab some coffee and buckle up mfer.
The ⌐◨-◨ Hole
This whole idea started from this prop, Prop 678. I had interacted with nekofar (lulu) before and when I saw this was something they proposed and I had no idea what it was. I had a sense what it was after but figured id hear from the source (thank you Nekofar for teaching me).
Legit was blown away by how Nouns operates and how we got here. If you are curious like me, read this. The gist is, Nouns will pay a % of revenue for those who create apps to interact with the Nouns. If you build a great Nounish app, you can get rewarded for your work. It sounds great and here I am just joining Nouns and I get to vote "yes" on this for a new app. I of course voted yes, the cost is gas, this wasn't a commitment of funds, it was letting someone explore something new.
The Problem
I truly thought that was the end of it. Nekofar gave me some valuable background, I learned something new and voted yes. Once again, I was taken out of my realm of what I know and Nouns showed me there was a better way. Pinnacle of onchain decentralized community. But later I saw a new prop and I got confused.
Now I am not here to argue over compensation, retro giving or any of that. I am too new for politics I am here to explore a future where Nounish apps can prosper. There are three instances I see that have triggered me to go down this rabbit hole.
1. Purchasing and Voting Clients
This image showed me there are way more apps out there than I knew. I got really lucky that I saw NounSwap and they developed a cool frame to buy a Noun in a frame and well I decided to be that mfer that would buy a Noun via a frame haha. This shows me there is a rich ecosystem but it also shows me a sad fact or truth, and that is most of these projects are not earning enough money to continue development.
2. Farcaster x Nouns
I became extremely bullish as I was going down the rabbit hole that Nouns saw Farcaster a while back and wanted to tackle what a Farcaster x Noun software/app would look like. A couple of things stood out to me when reading some of the comments and the props. One is people really don't know how much it costs to develop apps or to entice people with day jobs. Two I do agree with some users that there is a nice middle ground somewhere, maybe paying an obscene price to get a dev from SF to work on Nouns isn't the way but maybe someone from Poland or Spain the price we pay is lower (but probably still not 50k). Lastly, our requirements were kind of washy which makes building even harder as someone who works in tech and has to deal with stakeholders daily to get shit done as a liaison between devs and business folks, not having clear requirements from the go is an easy way to spin your wheels and waste money.
3. General Nounish Apps
That brings me to this prop, when we do finally find a team that came from the two props above and is now coming back with a clearer vision of what V2 looks like aka graduation from the trenches of building quickly, we shoot them down. Building clients or apps is not easy and again, since we did not have clear desire of what a FC x Nouns app would look like, you get complaints of apps not being "Nounish" enough or apps that support other groups more but not Nouns enough, or how will this proliferate Nouns more? Essentially we throw all of our baggage of issues we have with Nouns software into the current team.
A New Way
Whenever we have tech being presented to Nouns, we bake too many hopes and desires into one thing. This is not sustainable. I've read before that the expectation is that the new clients/software is supposed to attract new buyers but I think that is wrong. Nouns should be doing that job, Nouns should be proliferating in a way that there are buyers out there and they want in, there is no way I can expect a Nounish client/app to make the price/desire of Nouns go up, that seems nuts. Let devs be devs and let Nouns do the marketing. Instead my hope from these clients are innovative ways of acquiring Nouns (via Frames, via an AI agent aka meeting our clients where they are).
When speaking with a creator of one of the clients and if it is working they said "Generally, I think client incentives have been net positive. But, if the goal is to incentivize new clients and innovative features, I think the client incentive parameters need to be increased, and nouns.wtf auction needs to be sunset." Right now we are cannibalizing the growth of all auction clients we have. And maybe we are okay with that but the way I see it, we say one thing and are doing another. Also do we really need 10+ clients if nouns.wtf is the one we want? Blur isn't really that different from OS/Foundation/SR and others so what are goals?
Even if it is mostly performance based, having to submit a prop to get a revenue split seems a bit dated to me. We are a bottoms up headless brand. One of the devs I spoke to on why they developed a client was "so they can learn to code". That is okay, but submitting a prop for that seems like a waste of peoples time. We should also remove those types of boundaries. We should make it as easy as, here is a split address, go tinker and build. If it fails, that is okay most ventures do. If you somehow find a way to make microservice like Microsub and want to revenue split with Nouns you can. Vrbs DAO currently does this with art, why can't we do this with software? I hoping we can incubate some microservices with flows.
We should approach our software needs and desires with purpose. A really good example of this to me is flows.wtf. It is reimagining what props and money can look like with Nouns. Explore new tech and how it can fit into our ecosystem. Even if Flows does not stick, we had a clear north star of what we were after.
Another example to me is Nouns Naming Service. Again it is easy and clear for me to articulate what we are experimenting with. ENS x Nouns, let's have it resolve in apps we have. Even if we don't know every single possible future issue or if it will be sustainable, teams/devs have a simple mission to achieve. The great thing about NNS is that not only is it getting funding, but they are also sharing the upside with Nouns treasury. Which alleviates the issues many express, which is lots of money goes out but not enough comes back in.
This isn't to say every project needs to be like this, if we want to build a well in Africa I don't expect nor do I want money back. But if Nouns can get exposure to potential upside to continue funding other awesome ideas, why not? The world does not operate on hopes and dreams.
Nounish software to me is exploring, tinkering onchain in new innovative ways. Our very own Chris Carella, created Scout Game, a new way of gamifying devs who contribute to open source and all I can think is, why not Nouns? It is genius idea and also one that closely aligns with our ethos. It reminds me of Drips. Same with Aether and other AI agents, why do we not have our own? I think we can get there we just need to tweak some of our operations.
Closing
We need it to be easy and seamless for folks to get involved and tinker with us. A Farcaster client sounds interesting but without a goal of what kind of client we want it makes it hard to evaluate. It is also an extremely space to be in at the moment.
Again, this post isn't to single out a single person/team. The goal of this is to have us start thinking more outside of the box but also to really look in the mirror and ask ourselves what do we want from our software and the devs working in our ecosystem? Do we want them to leave with a bad taste in their mouth and swear off DAOs forever or do we want them to look at their time more positively. Do we want to incubate builders and grow with them and share upside.
Or do we just want a functioning prop house, auction house that is well maintained and keeps working? Whatever the answer may be, let us decide and move in the direction instead of all the directions at once.
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