First Draft Club started earlier this summer as a four-week experiment to incentivize myself to write more.

Mark Fishman on Warpcast

First Draft Club v1: a writing accountability group with 4-week commitment - Buy-in is $20 via /daimo - Share new writing in /firstdraft before Monday 9am ET each week - Each week you ship, you get your $5 back - Groupchat for mutual support Have a few slots left, DC me if you want to join!

Farcaster

I ran two additional four-week cohorts, and I’m proud of how it’s gone. Group size increased 50% each cohort, and there have been 87 total posts from participants. More importantly, people are enjoying it! And it seems to be working.

I’ve also had some key learnings that encouraged me to continue iterating on the structure:

• People should be able to join and get writing immediately. When I used a sign up form for people to be notified of the next cohort, there was significant drop-off in the number of people who actually joined at the beginning of the next cohort. Waiting two or three weeks is a suboptimal experience.

• There’s an appetite for more structure, support, and community programming. For example, I hosted a few “First Draft Fridays”, which were co-writing sessions for people to get started on their writing for the week. People wanted to give and receive feedback on each others’ work.

Given these insights, I’ve decided to move First Draft Club to Hypersub.

New structure

The core of the experience stays the same: stake some money upfront, and receive $5 back every week you publish.

However, instead of distinct cohorts, First Draft is now one continuous program. Participants can subscribe for $25/month at any time.

To keep the “cohort” feel, I’ll be running campaigns each calendar month. For example, posting each week in a month might win someone a share of the unclaimed funds from other participants. (Keep your eyes peeled for new perks and partners!)

New opportunities

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.

Some participants have mentioned wanting to token-gate their writing to other members of the community – this becomes much easier with an onchain membership like Hypersub.

New challenges

Introducing a “permissionless” signup experience means there is less friction to get started, but it also means there are fewer opportunities for communication, especially around deadlines.

For example, the weekly deadline for publishing is on Sunday. If someone signs up for First Draft Club on a Friday, they might not understand that their first post is due in two days. It also means people can subscribe without me knowing the Farcaster account associated with their subscribed wallet address.

I think these tradeoffs are worth making, though. As the program continues to scale, I’ll be working out the kinks and trying to make the experience smooth for everyone.