Behind the scenes of First Draft Club

Welcome to the First Draft Club newsletter!

First Draft Club is a writing community with a financial incentive system.

Members join by paying upfront and earn when they write each week.

You can learn more & join at firstdraft.club.

I've used my personal Paragraph publication to make announcements in the past, but I figured it's time to "spin out" a publication specifically for the project.

For now, you can expect casual updates every month or so.

First Draft Club is built on the Farcaster protocol. Every participant needs an account and posts in the /firstdraft channel. So far, all of my communication about First Draft Club has happened on Farcaster.

However, not everyone is regularly checking the network – and like all social platforms, every post is competing for attention, at the whims of algorithms.

Email is a reliable way of delivering messages to a wider audience. As the project grows, I believe it makes sense to have an additional channel for communication.

I've been pretty transparent about my journey with First Draft Club so far, but this newsletter is an opportunity to go a step further.

In addition to announcements, I plan to share detailed metrics, upcoming priorities, and my honest thinking about what is and isn't working.

I hope this newsletter can be an interesting look behind the scenes even for those who aren't planning to join First Draft Club themselves.

• The major piece of infrastructure is the /firstdraft Farcaster channel. All writing that participants share must be posted in the channel to be counted.

  Channels on Farcaster just underwent a major update that turned them from "hashtags" to "communities". Before, anyone could freely join and post in a channel; the recent update created a membership requirement for posting.

  Personally, this update is a big improvement for First Draft Club as I can tie channel membership to actually being a member of the community.

  

• Membership is handled by Hypersub. As I explained in my launch post, the benefit of an onchain membership is the ability to power multiple experiences:

  Beyond streamlining participation, using Hypersub has another benefit: an onchain membership allows for more experiences to be built on top of the core structure.

  Given the integrations that Hypersub has within the Farcaster ecosystem, it now becomes easy to create polls, events, group chats, and other content that are exclusive to First Draft Club members. I look forward to organizing these myself, but I’m also excited about others building for this community as well.

  For example, if I were using a different membership system, it would have been much more tedious to manage the new Farcaster channel updates.

  There are still some kinks to work out with the end-to-end user journey (I wish I could send custom notifications), but overall I'm extremely happy with the amount of work that I don't have to do thanks to Hypersub.

• I track participation in a Google sheet. Each row is a person, each column is a week.

  I track some topline metrics like active members per week, but at some point I'll probably want to get more sophisticated, especially as I identify some North Star metrics.

  

• I have a website using Notion (and a cheap domain registrar) – but it's mostly a cool domain that redirects to a static FAQ (firstdraft.club). Not sure anyone has visited it, but it's nice to own a site that I can customize.

  It's not a priority to build anything out yet, but down the line I'd love to have the website be a place where someone can sign up and participate without even realizing they're interacting with Farcaster or Hypersub.

  I also have never built a real website before! So that'll be a fun learning experience.

• For weekly payments (5 USDC to each participant that writes), I've been using Disperse by Smoldapp. This lets me input a bunch of transactions at once and save a few minutes each week. Previously I had been doing individual payments with Coinbase Wallet, which was quite tedious – although it's what I use for ad hoc transactions.

  Disperse is still a tad more manual than I'd like, but it's not a burning problem yet. I have been chatting with some people working on what I would call "programmatic payment" space – so perhaps I'll have an update here next month.

• For communicating with members, I mainly use Warpcast Direct Casts. There's a group chat for members, but I imagine many people have it muted or don't check it often. When I need to check in with individuals, I'll occasionally send private messages.

  At some point in the near future I'd like to explore programmatic messaging tools for sending reminders and feedback requests.

• I experimented with a weekly "First Draft Friday" cowriting session using Events.xyz, but not enough people showed up to make it worthwhile. (However, the EU-friendly timed sessions seem to be sticking – thanks to @kbc for hosting these!)

  Especially now that events.xyz supports recurring events, I might try bringing them back sometime soon!

Thanks for reading! Please let me know if there's anything you'd like to hear more about in future issues.

Make sure to stay up to date with First Draft Club by subscribing to this newsletter. You can also follow the /firstdraft channel on Farcaster.

Cheers,

Mark