Hello there 👋🏻

This is Akhil - I'm a Product/Design person, currently sherpa at /fbi and you'll usually find me building fun things on the cozy corner of the internet. Have actively built for collectibles space over the last few years, especially at an intersection of 'Fandom x Crypto'.

In this piece, I'd like to talk about my learnings from building for this niche and why I think building for fans is an opportunity for cool consumer applications.

Fans across sports, music and movies love to use a product that reflects their personality as it showcase that they belong to a subculture on the internet.

Love for something is shown in 3 ways on the internet :

• Do they spend lot of time on it?

• Do they spend their hard earned money on it?

• Are they willing to share it with their friends?

Let me share an experiment I built that taps into these behaviours - A Music Quiz where you can guess songs of your favourite artist and compete with other fans/friends.

Fun part?

Crypto wallets get created when user tries to save their scores onto the leaderboard using google and gets a sharable score-card as a collectible minted on Base.

Idea was to just build a fun experience that people can play with and keep coming back - but have the crypto layer built underneath the product from day 1 to introduce later when needed but make people come for the sole product offering.

Targeted towards nice music fan sub-reddit's with 1M+ all time game plays with 500K+ users (all of them onboarded to web3 without having to deal with anything related to the space).

FYI : The music quiz experience was inspired by a behaviour that I observed by music fans across IG and TikTok, they like to show-signal their fandom for an artist based on how invested they are. So you replicate that experience with share + reason to come back loops - BOOM it works.

Look at some of the behaviours that exist today :

• Spotify Wrapped comes once a year, but it triggers every music fan on the internet to share and signal it - as it shows their fandom for that song/artist and want their friends to know that.

• Here's a sub-reddit filled with fans flexing their wrapped and trying to find similar people and also for apple replay.

Here's an app that tapped into this behaviour and building a big consumer product is Spotistats - with around 19M users, it shows your in-depth stats about your music listening behaviour built on top of Spotify.

But after growing beyond a certain user-base, what they've unlocked here is a behaviour of connecting these fans with one another. (Come for stats, stay for find people to date who vibes with same music? :P)

While the above examples are solid use-cases, they're still built centralised and dependent - the day spotify cuts their API access, you're gone. (Another reason why fandom needs to be decentralised).

I like how Jack is trying to solve this dependency problem with Oscillator (A protocol for music).

So, where's this leading?

• Fans understand what it means to own/collect something intrinsically.

• IMO, building consumer apps with 'collecting as a core behaviour' for 'activity based behaviours' can bring them into the space.

• Onchain collectibles saw a significant rise in 2020, driven initially by financial incentives and quickly expanding into various use cases centred around ownership. 

• Transactions were primarily on mainnet which came with high gas fees, but the L2 solutions like Base and OP have made possible for people to do onchain transactions with almost 0 gas fees opening the market to make anyone experience onchain.

• With Coinbase smart wallet subsidising the gas fees, it's totally possible to build consumer experiences without any $$ involved to claim/collect something.

Here are some of the apps already being built for fans :

1. Nook.Social by slokh

   • We all discover new movies, music and books from our inner social circle. Nook is building a review/tracking/sharing app for this layer of data. Can totally see this evolving into a niche fan app built on top of Farcaster.

   • Data is connected to my decentralised social graph.

2. Sonata by Seb

   • Music discovery platform built on Farcaster.

   • For Music Fans - to discovery new music shared by your friends and global audience. Could also become a platform for artists to launch their music.

3. Bracket.game by tldr

   • Bracket is an app for trading votes for your favorite sport teams within various sport-leagues.

4. Shelf by Jad

   • Shelf is a cool new app that puts together all your different interests in one clean place.

   • It collects data from other services you use—like your Spotify music history, Netflix movie binges, or even the latest book you've read from good reads —and puts it into a sleek profile.

   • You can invite friends to join, look at each other's Shelves, cheer on shared interests, and maybe even start a talk over a shared love for something.

5. Momentify by Jack

Takeaway from this :

• Fans as an audience invest time and money, and are willing to share/invite friends.

• Existing centralized platforms have shown the potential of fan-centric apps, but they come with limitations.

• Opportunity to tap into this niche and build something decentralised.

• L2s like Base and Wallet options like Privy and Coinbase smart wallets have made it possible to build simple UX.

Thanks for reading.

If you're founder/builder exploring in this space, happy to jam. DC me on Warpcast.