Since the last small and big products update, we’ve grown a lot.
In the last three months, we broke records in monthly readers (2,000+), paying users (1,200+ all-time minted NFTs), and Monthly Active Curators (140+)
Here are the most important product improvements & events that helped to make that happen.
Product improvements:
1. Kiwi users can now comment on links.
Almost every user that we spoke with asked us “wen comments”.
It was also an important piece of our vision - we already had great content for crypto builders, but we needed to become a place where people discuss ideas shared in essays or podcasts.
We founded Kiwi News at a time when bullshit reigned the conversation during the last bull market. We want Kiwi’s comments to be their anti-bodies.
To do that, our comments needed to optimize for depth, so we’ve chosen a Reddit-tested 10,000-character limit. It took some time to implement since we needed to add them at the protocol level. But comments are here, and their popularity is growing.
We even have a separate Comments Feed:
2. Web and mobile apps are much faster thanks to caching.
As the app gets more active, we wanted to make its loading time smoother. So we introduced CloudFlare caching, and now many pages load faster.
3. We made our app more visually consistent.
Since we shipped fast, we generated quite a lot of ‘brand debt.’ So, we’ve been working on making our app, link previews & social accounts more visually consistent.
4. It’s much easier to connect with Kiwi community members and check your karma.
We rebuilt the Community page so you can find everyone’s linked socials right away. We also added Search so you can look for people you’re interested in chatting with.
A great thing about this feature is that it’s been primarily built by Alya - a contributor of ours - which shows that our Open Source approach makes sense.
We also added an easy karma score preview inspired by Rainbow points.
5. Our onboarding is now divided into 3 small steps
We divided our onboarding into 3 levels: Kiwi Reader, Curator & Link Hunter.
It’s consistent with the 90/9/1 rule, so users can onboard into Kiwi at the level they’re comfortable with.
6. We made Kiwi easier to use
We observed that when people don’t need to sign each upvote and can use Kiwi as a web2 app, engagement goes up. We set up our contract to enable automatic message signing when users are minting the Kiwipass NFT, but it didn't work when someone minted an NFT on ZORA instead of our website.
So we’re now nudging users to set up automatic message signing. Since then, we have had 100+ users delegating.
And the % of messages (submissions, upvotes & comments) using delegation (a technical term for this feature) went up:
7. Kiwi Weekly got better
We heavily improved the style of our Kiwi Weekly and grew the newsletter to over 700 subscribers.
Important events:
1. We received 28,000+ OP in RetroPGF
Kiwi got allocated 28,000 OP in Optimism RetroPGF3. Tim summarized our perspective in this post, and a long story short, it matters since we have so far declined VC offers and decided to keep bootstrapping the project.
Now, we have more financial stability and can make bigger, riskier bets.
2. Tim gave talks at ZuSocial, DevConnect & Protocols Labs talks
We got invited to speak at 3 events during DevConnect.
One was ZuSocial, where Tim introduced crypto devs & founders to P2P network architecture. The second one was at Web3 UX Unconference, where Tim talked about the wallet-app dilemma. And the third one was a Protocol Labs event, where we shared how we used libp2p to build Kiwi.
We also had hundreds of casual conversations and met many of our users during the conference.
3. We met IRL in Istanbul!
We hosted a Kiwi meetup at a cozy Istanbul cafe, where we ate, drank, and chilled.
It was a great moment to see each other in real life and build stronger connections. One participant even said, “It’s the best event I attended during the whole week.”
4. We hosted a Roadmap community call where we set up the plan for Q1.
We planned our Roadmap with the community.
The call was full of people and good energy. We started with a quick retro of our previous Roadmap and planned the most important bets in the next 3 months.
5. Yacek ($DEGEN founder) promoted Kiwi via his project.
At the end of 2023, in a cast, Yacek announced Degen Tips on Farcaster. Since he had been a Kiwi user for some time, we asked him if he could add Kiwi as one of the multipliers of the airdrop.
He said, "Yes" and added us as a multiplier in the "How are points and boosts calculated" section of the FAQ:
Since $DEGEN airdrop farming really took off at the end of the year, within 2 weeks, we got a few hundred new Kiwipass mints. This resulted in a lot of revenue generated for Kiwi.
We also spoke with 100+ new minters from this period to learn who they are. Some just wanted a bigger airdrop and weren't interested in Kiwi. But many either learned about Kiwi through this airdrop or followed us for some time, and $DEGEN was an extra push to mint an NFT and become curators. So, this informal partnership was very beneficial for the network.
6. We finished voting on the second round of Kiwi RetroPGF and announced we would share 10% of our OP Grant with Kiwi contributors
The voting has finished, and we will distribute ETH as soon as we get the paperwork done by the contributors. We also decided to distribute 10% of our OP RetroPGF grant (2,831 OP or about $10,000) to the contributors.
That's all for now. If you'd like to learn more about Kiwi or contribute (we are open source), visit this page or DM @timdaub or @macbudkowski on Telegram.
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