Gm Nouners. It’s been an incredible first month for the Nounspace team, and I’m excited to share an update on our progress. If you’re not familiar with Nounspace yet, check out our proposal to the recent Nouns x Farcaster prop.house round, where our journey began.
Groundwork
First we’ll get the boring but necessary housekeeping stuff out of the way:
frfr incorporated - labs entity that contracts team to build nounspace, but does not own nounspace. Nounspace will be owned by its community.
3 month budget planned, multi-sig deployed, payroll and expense tracking implemented
Team emails, g-suite, discord, notion, 1pass, and a dozen other accounts set up
We also aligned on some S.M.A.R.T. goals for July 1:
Release a functional MLP (Minimum Lovable Product)
Sign up 10,000 Nounspace OGs
Generate at least $350,000 in revenues
While aggressive, we’re playing with a strong hand, and each of these is attainable if we play our cards right.
Design
Thanks to a ton of support from the other @willywonka, Benjamin Latsko, the creative direction and branding for Nounspace has come together splendidly. I’m stoked to present for the first time ever, Nounspace’s logo along with some very special inaugural swag that we’re bringing to Farcon.
For mediums and touchpoints where nounspace is the product and the key narrative, we use the handdrawn brand == 10-15% usage
For all mediums and touchpoints where we are the platform, we use the pixel perfect version in black&white or use the typeface as the window with dynamic backgrounds. == 85-90% usage
On this note, we have a question for y’all. What do you think our primary domain should be, Nounspace.wtf or Nounspace.com? Keep in mind that while Nounspace is building for Nouns first, the vision is much bigger than Nouns.
Vote in frame:
If you’re coming to Farcon, come find the Nounspace team to score some of our first swag ever, designed by Benjamin Latsko. If you’re not coming to Farcon, stay tuned for this swag to be available on Benjamin’s store https://regardless.wtf/ soon.
Introducing Nounspace Tom, my new favorite t-shirt. This is the nounspace team’s new uniform, but we made a few extra that we can give away as prizes at Farhack and the skatepark takeover in Venice Beach happening Monday (stay tuned for more deets).
One of our next major milestones is to open up registration to our first user and drop the Nounspace OG NFTs.
Nounspace OG NFTs will grant earliest access to customize spaces on Nounspace and include free Nounspace functionality for life to their holders.
Here's an early concept we're exploring with a few examples of Noggles as masks to art and photography.
Current thinking is to cap supply at 11,111, and mint 1,111 ourselves to gift to communities and thought-leaders especially those that are nounish. The other 10,000 will be sold for .0111 ETH each to generate 111 ETH in revenues we can use to build more faster.
Product and Development
The team is aligned on the roadmap and feature requirements for MLP, technical architecture, and has already made some initial progress on development.
After forking an open source farcaster client OpenCast to get a headstart and avoid the need to rebuild a lot of core Farcaster functionality, @moreReese suggested we take a look at Herocast, an open source farcaster client inspired by Superhuman. Herocast was a better fit, and after a great convo with the lead developer, hellno, we aligned on an architecture + collaboration plan to enable us to continue pulling in upgrades from eachother.
Hellno and Herocast are awesome, and they’ve already added some valuable functionality to Farcaster, such as the ability to easily create and manage multiple Farcaster accounts as well as the ability to create and manage shared Farcaster accounts powered by Hats Protocol. Considering web3 communities are our initial target users for Nounspace, these features are super valuable, and we’re grateful we don’t have to build these ourselves on top of the other work we have mapped out these next few months.
Another big focus on the engineering side this past month has been on Fidgets, the core innovation and killer feature of Nounspace. A lot of thought has gone into designing the optimal Fidget Architecture, and we think we’ve nailed it. Before finalizing it and going into too much detail, we’re testing it out by asking interested developers to do what they do best, build. We’re offering an unofficial bounty during Farhack to build a Fidget, and we put together some draft resources that have everything a developer needs to build a Fidget and more. Check out the details on the Fidget bounty here:
Last, but not least, I’m excited to share the MLP Spec and Feature Requirements that the team has aligned on. We’ll continue polishing these docs, finalizing UX, and breaking it down into Github issues, but the outline is all there. We’re very excited to build these features, and we hope you are too.
Homebases and Spaces are composed of the following elements:
All of these docs are open for comments. If you have any ideas for how we can make Nounspace more awesome, we’d love to hear it!
Up next:
Make a big splash at Farcon with a small budget. Plant lots of seeds and make magical connections. There’s no better place for Nounspace to be.
Swag ✅
Event ✅ (gonna be lit, details coming soon)
Hackathon Bounty ✅
Vibes ✅ ✅ ✅
SHIP!!! Now that we’re aligned on the roadmap and have clear specs, it’s time to build. I’m expecting daily progress from the team as we knock out the necessary issues for MLP one-by-one, kanban style
Finalize UI/UX for all MLP functionality
MORE SHIPPING!!!
Release NFTs for early access to customize spaces on Nounspace as well as OG NFTs for free Nounspace functionality for life.
Announcing details on Nounspace’s fair launch on May 8th. The future of social media is community-owned. Lots more details to come, but note that staking won’t begin for at least a month after announcement, and then it will be another few months before the token is transferable. Make sure you’re following /nounspace.
Ask:
If you love what we’re building and think you have what it takes to help us build this rocketship while flying it, we’d love to hear from you, especially if you’re a rockstar developer. My DMs are open.
Whenever you see content posted by or about Nounspace, please smash that like and recast button! It means the world to us as we try to establish ourselves in the noisy, crowded space we live in.
Thank you to everyone who read this far! As a token of appreciation, I made you this “free” NFT:
