Small Apps (Poke), Big Protocols (Oscillator)

Inspired by essays by Li Jin and Packy McCormick

The life-cycle of new apps is getting shorter and shorter.

Social media creates violent spikes of adoption, before the attention-cycles move on to something else.

We saw this play out with AI apps and filters last year, where some products would quickly gather millions of users before the hype moved onto something else.

In crypto, we speed run this phenomenon even faster.

Apps will do millions of dollars in volume one day, and almost zero a month later.

You’ll find this pattern in the metrics of almost every major crypto product of the last four years — Fantasy Top, OpenSea, SuperRare, FriendTech, Pump-dot-fun etc. etc.

This is not a failure (quite the opposite - they are phenomenal apps that captured huge revenue and attention). It’s just a reflection of the speed of the internet and the short-attention span of the average internet user.

This isn’t just crypto, it also applies to consumer apps broadly. Investor Li Jin noted this in a recent essay:

“In a sense, consumer products now resemble entertainment, with users regularly wanting to try out the latest thing and then quickly moving on.”

Packy McCormick also went deep on this topic:

“It’s harder than ever before to sustain great apps, to grow them into enduring companies … users are like kids in a candy store, sampling everything, even paying for the sweetest, and then moving on to the next.”

Gone are the days where a social network spreads slowly through college campuses.

It’s everywhere, immediately.

With this ephemeral lifecycle in mind, how should we build apps going forward?

Option 1: maximum revenue extraction - One option is to accept that your app will burn bright and fast, and try to extract as much revenue as possible in a short period of time. Nothing wrong with making a short-term viral app that lots of people are happy to pay for.

Option 2: build alongside protocols - The second is to build apps collaboratively alongside protocols. Capture users through viral mini apps in the short-term but drive value back down to a protocol with shared ownership level for the long-term.

This second option is the model we've chosen.

It's the best of both worlds — we can find success and monetize through small apps while simultaneously building a defensible moat for the long-term with an underlying protocol.

Again, Packy McCormick has written extensively on this:

“Small apps will burn brightly and explode. Smart protocols will do whatever it takes to ensure that they’re the Dyson Sphere capturing the energy in the process.”

You can see this play out on Ethereum. An app like OpenSea burned brightly for a short-period, but it was the Ethereum protocol that captured the energy and momentum in the long-term. Much of the activity, mindshare, data and capital stayed in the Ethereum ecosystem and continues to grow.

This is the original "Fat Protocol" thesis, originally written by Joel Monegro at Union Square Ventures in 2016. And it's the model we've chosen — albeit on a smaller scale and hyper-optimized for music.

Last week we launched Poke — a fun little music app with viral, memetic potential. Our beta launch on Farcaster picked up hundreds of early users, and we'll continue to roll it out far and wide.

We think it will be a huge success as a standalone app, however, the secret sauce is the gravity it adds to the underlying protocol, Oscillator.

Oscillator captures the data, identity, social graph and relationships from Poke. Think of it like adding weight to the foundation … or adding gravity to a planet.


The more apps that build on top of the protocol, the better.

Every new app makes the protocol more robust, lindy and valuable long-term, even if the apps themselves are ephemeral. New apps can come along and build on top of the data and social graphs already captured by early apps like Poke.

Not only that, but every new app makes the experience better for subsequent products. Your username, social graph and data can be ready and waiting for you on the next one.

It's incredibly hard for one single app to force change in the music industry. With the exception of TikTok, no new product has made a dent in the status quo for over a decade.

But what about dozens of apps, all contributing to an underlying protocol — all adding gravity with millions of users, innovative apps, shared data and network effects?

That might.

Of course, this only works if other apps also come and build on Oscillator.

“Collaborating on shared infrastructure is our only defensibility against incumbents” - Jack Spallone.

Obviously, that means aligning incentives. Why would you come and contribute to Oscillator when you could build alone and capture your own value?

Reason one is skipping the cold-start problem. By plugging into a protocol hyper-optimized for music, you can plug into existing network effects and bootstrap the early stages of growth.

The second incentive is co-ownership.

Through tokens, we can all own a small part of the underlying protocol, aligning incentives for everyone that participates.

We'll have more information on the protocol soon.

But if you haven't tried Poke yet — go give it a try.