Spotlight is a new product that serves as a “Farcaster Attention Network”. Each person on Farcaster is given one spotlight per day that can be purchased at a price that is programmatically determined by the historical demand for that spotlight.

MJC on Warpcast

/spotlight is live. Spotlight is the farcaster attention network. It’s a social app. It’s a creator monetization platform. It’s a media protocol. Spotlight is a new business model for the internet, designed to efficiently monetize the work you do and the attention you command. https://www.onspotlight.app It is *not* a friend-trading app. It is *not* a tipping protocol. This video introduces the project and demos the app. Some more details below 👇 https://www.onspotlight.app

Farcaster

When I first heard of Spotlight and got a demo from Michael, I was immediately intrigued. I really like the idea of using constraints for attention and monetization.

To illustrate with an example: I have considered starting a Hypersub for freelance services, but that creates an equation with multiple variables to solve for: the price, the number of people I could serve, the length of time I’d serve them for…

The genius of Spotlight is its simplicity. There’s one unit per day, and the price is determined by the demand. The business model is fixed; now you just figure out what to sell. Because Spotlight is set up as a daily offering, it constrains what you can offer. The challenge –and opportunity– is to figure out what your atomic unit of value is. (I'm trying 30-minute product feedback calls.)

Next Steps & Recommendations

The current priority for Spotlight is bootstrapping activity on the network.

The product already has important building blocks in place; everyone on Farcaster already has a profile and a wallet built in. This makes Spotlight “permissionless” – someone can book another person’s spotlight without them even knowing Spotlight exists.

However, I think this streamlined onboarding that actually presents an issue for Spotlight. For people to feel confident booking spotlights, they will want to know that someone is actually active on the platform. I don’t want to just send someone money without knowing if I’ll actually get what I bought.

1. Highlighting Active Profiles

While it is nice that someone’s profile already exists, it should be clear whether that person is active on Spotlight. One simple way to do this would be to show an icon that indicates that a person has “set up” their profile.

• Does the user have a description of their spotlight use case and booking policy?

• Have they opted into DCs for booking notifications (not currently a feature, but something I expect to be built)?

In the future, I could see something like reviews being part of Spotlight – but that’s a longer play. There are some small tweaks here that I think would increase consumer confidence and boost conversion.

2. Add Categories for Discovery

Conversion is just one factor for demand; the other is discovery. Assuming Spotlight can onboard enough active “supply”, they will need to help users find the right spotlights to book.

One way to do this is with categories. There are some initial use cases that the team has identified, and I think there are ways to lean into these in a lightweight way without overly committing to building out specific workflows.

For example, allowing users to append a single tag to their profiles (ie. “Advertisement” or “Consulting”) would give Spotlight an opportunity to curate different spotlights across the app. This is similar to how Bountycaster scaled their discovery on their marketplace. Right now, the search/discover page on the Spotlight app has a list of “trending” users – bringing categories here would help with discovery.

3. Streamline the booking process

Finally – and I know the team is already working on this – the booking flow should be simplified.

Right now, booking a spotlight requires publicly sharing an image, message and a link. This is used to generate content for the feed, in addition to serving as a communication channel for the booker to send information to the receiver. However, reducing friction for consumers is key; only the information necessary for booking should be required.

A @spotlightbot can certainly exist as a way to drum up attention on Farcaster feeds, but this shouldn’t be the responsibility of a booker. (I have had people tell me they didn’t want to book my spotlight because they didn’t want to publicly share what they were working on. Of course, they didn’t need to share that specific information on the public booking flow – but I understood why asking for a message & image during the booking process would be confusing.)

My recommendation is the booking flow should be treated as a transaction split into a few simple steps:

1. Confirm spotlight information (category & service offered, booking policy)

2. Choose a date and confirm transaction

3. Send requested information to spotlight owner

Parting Thoughts

I have shared some of this information with Michael already, but I wanted to do a writeup partially to share my excitement about Spotlight. As an angel user, I want to support products I want to see in the world.

But also, I'm trying to scale up my Angel User practice, and I want to demonstrate the type of feedback I like giving to builders.

If you'd like to get your product on my radar, you know how to reach me 🙂

Mark Fishman on Warpcast

Being an angel user means using & supporting products that you want to exist – even if they aren’t the best products at that moment

Farcaster