Although I began my crypto journey in 2014, it wasn't until the beginning of 2022 that I truly began to navigate the crypto idea maze. I've now been working in crypto for for over two years. I took some time over the holiday break to reflect on our journey and the many lessons we've learned. I wanted to share an overview in case it's helpful to anyone. If you are working on any of these areas, feel free to reach out — I’m happy to share learnings.
Launched
Here are the crypto projects we launched and the lessons we learned.
Sweetheartz.xyz — Send Valentine's Day NFT
A quick side project to learn
Onboarded 100s of YC alum to NFTs
Most users wanted to send them to people without wallets
Maindrop.xyz (1)— Venmo for sending NFTs to phone/email
Infrequent behavior
Lots of decent free and more convenient alternatives (Wallets, OpenSea)
Pain and frequency are not high enough to change behavior
Maindrop.xyz (2) — Create and send NFT cards & gift cards
Infrequent behavior
The market is too small right now
Solution in search of a problem
Maindrop.xyz (3) — B2B tools for creating and sending NFTs
Didn’t want to get into spam
Unclear who second b is in this market
Several decent tools in the market, none winning
Launchcaster.xyz (1) — Product Hunt for sharing and discovering crypto projects
Launched as a side project to solve own problem. Explored focusing on it and learned…
Product Hunt is awesome but wasn’t a big biz
Tough to see path for a niche of a niche to become a big biz
Launchcaster.xyz (2)— Steam + App Store Connect for crypto apps
Not enough apps and not enough with PMF
Apps in crypto are assets (I.e. ERC-20/721/1155, ABCs)
Although not a big thing, Launchcaster is a great public good that should exist 🤝
Launcher.xyz (1) — Studio + Kickstarter for consumer crypto apps
Us building each app takes too long, not enough for users to do
The Howey Test is a tricky one
Crypto apps are extremely ephemeral, ROI is a challenge
Many users just want to play the metagame
Launcher.xyz (2) — In-progress
Stay tuned 💪
Prototyped
Here are crypto app ideas we explored and prototyped but decided not to launch.
Allthing — Front page for every smart contract
Tested on Launchcaster
The content is not that interesting
Didn’t make sense for the future of smart contracts
Topic — Buy/Sell interest-based groups
Didn’t feel unique enough
Difficult chicken and egg dilemma
Earnings are not meaningful enough for the average member
ABC Fun — Leaderboard + marketplace for bonding curve-based assets
Unclear path to PMF on assets/behavior that lack PMF
Heavy reliance on Friend.tech, which dominates ABC market
Basetune — BasePaint for music
Tested on Twitter
Collab audio canvas is less participatory and interesting as pixel image
Would be a great side project
First appeared on Farcaster.
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