For those of you who donāt know me, my nameās Ren. Iām one of the founders of Senspace, a crypto startup based in Tokyo that I founded in 2022. After over two years of experimentation and a major pivot, weāre in the process of launching an app in the coming weeks.
Before we publicly announce details on a new app this Friday, I wanted to take the time to reflect and be self-critical around the journey that Iāve taken as a founder and achieving my mission of trying to bring the communities around me onchain.
This app will also be called Senspace, but it will be unrelated to the character IP that weāve built over the last 2 years.
What did we do in the last 2 years?
Senspace was built as an attempt to create a better onchain world than the one we saw available to us for the creative communities that we were a part of IRL. I had run an indie hip-hop label in Japan and my team members were members of the Tokyo streetwear community and we felt that the dominant model for onchain brand building at the time (launching PFPs) was not sustainable, as floor price was greatly outpacing true brand equity (we were largely correct on this).
We created a fictional world called āSenspace,ā with the main characters being characters created for our team members and our collaborators (different artists from the Tokyo creative community). We released NFTs inspired by the lore in the world we created, the thesis being that as more characters (and in turn, more members of real world creative scenes) entered into our world through sequential successful NFT drops, having a character in Senspace and collabing with us on an NFT drop would become an aspirational goal for artists around us. On the longtail, we also believed that participating in Senspace would inspire the artists around us to explore onchain primitives in their own careers.
Our first NFT drop did sell out, but we didnāt see compounding results (in sales or social metrics) and ultimately ended up stopping additional development on the IP earlier this year to go back to the drawing board.
During this soul searching process, we launched multiple games on Farcaster, a gashapon-inspired game called āWhatās in the Ball?ā and a card game called āHouse of Cardiansā, which both did decently well in short spurts with close to 60K mints across the two games but didnāt see sustained success. We also helped found Tokyo DAO, a DAO connecting Japanese and global builders and launched a $JAPAN meme coin on Base, both created with communities we met on Farcaster.
Now onto the good partā¦
What I Fucked Up
I take full accountability for our lack of success in the first two years. As the leader of our small team, itās been on me to shape the direction of our company and what we build and ultimately create a positive outcome. This isnāt to say Iām proud of what weāve been able to achieve but a reflection on the things that I can improve as we begin our new chapter and launch the Senspace app.
Being too clever
The Senspace IP was four products in one. This was an extraordinarily clever product design and I even remember the moment that I first drew it on a whiteboard in the summer of 2022, but it was too clever for both the artists we were working with and the end users buying NFTs to understand.
Product 1: IP
We created extensive original content around the Senspace world including full character backstories, a 12 part video series inspired traditional Japanese āKamishibaiā style storytelling, 32 pages of manga content, music videos and fictional commercials, and several original illustrations featuring our characters.
I love all of the content that we created and am quite frankly, sad that we wonāt be creating any more of it in the foreseeable future.
Linking to a few of my favorite pieces of content that we created below.
Product 2: Talent Agency
Our pitch to artists that entered the Senspace world was that we would a) create a character for them in the Senspace IP that we would co-own commercial rights to, b) curate an NFT drop based on their character lore, and c) be there to help the artists pursue their onchain journeys, if they had interest. Effectively, whether it was inside or outside of the Senspace IP, we would help the artists manage their rights onchain.
Though the demand to just be the talent agency for onchain rights has not emerged at the rate that weād like so far, I am proud to say that we did put together a project with Keisuke Saito, on a collaboration with Nouns and Purple DAO earlier this year.
Product 3: NFTs
We released a series of music NFTs for fans with rappers, beatmakers and singer-songwriters from the Japanese indie music scene, each released by a fictional record label we created in the world of Senspace. Our first drop sold out but we struggled to drive sales in the subsequent drops.
Iām a huge fan of all of the music that our artist collaborators made, which you can find on Sound.xyz. However, I do think we should have focused on dropping more lightweight NFTs that expanded on the lore earlier in the project lifecycle.
Product 4: Onchain Identity
Our goal was to eventually create a public identity standard on top of the world of Senspace for people outside of our Tokyo creative communities to be a part of. This identity standard would allow fans of the Senspace world to contribute directly to the Senspace world and establish close connections to artists from the Tokyo creative community that they may not have the chance to connect to otherwise (due to geography or cultural differences).
We announced our plans around this at our Seed Club Demo Day in 2023, but ultimately had decided to push this back as we didnāt feel we had enough attention around the Senspace world to launch this.
The 4-pronged nature of Senspace also created internal confusion around what positive long term outcomes would be.
KPI | Positive Long Term Outcome |
Social engagement | Anime deal, Game deal for IP |
Lots of character clients | Package for major projects outside of Senspace IP |
Sell NFTs | NFT Supreme |
Accounts (Onchain Identity) | Social network |
In my mind at the time, the fact that all of these outcomes could occur separately or concurrently was a positive, but in reality, it created less alignment in the team and negatively impacted execution. As end users started to understand the depth of what we were building, it also left them more confused than enlightened.
We ultimately should have anchored ourselves around 1 of the 4 products. Itās hard to say which one in particular and I will say that the maturing nature of markets and technology also makes GTM today very different than it was in 2022-2023.
Senspace now is building an app, full stop. This will be a much clearer value proposition for communities around us and help us maintain clarity of mission.
Trying to achieve too many things at once
Fairly self-explanatory if you read point 1.
Note: In the new Senspace app, we have honed in on servicing end users vs. artists, though bringing artists onchain is an ongoing mission for our team.
Not solving a clear problem for the community around me
My goal for the last three years has been to get the Tokyo creative communities around me onchain as I firmly believe that being early will open up outsized opportunities for global collaboration, distribution and creative expression for people that I care about deeply. Itās a set of communities that has embraced me despite being an outsider, coming to Tokyo as a salaryman via New York in 2016. Senspace was supposed to be a vessel to do that, but I failed to take a more product driven approach to building Senspace early on. Maybe this wasnāt necessary when PFPs were flying off the shelves so to speak in 2021-2022, but was definitely necessary in late 2022 into 2023 when they were not.
I think of the problem/solution statement from a few angles.
What is the biggest barrier to helping Japanese artists get the notoriety I believe they can get in the west?
Answer: Getting their stories packaged and told to fit within the western content and memes of the day.
The Senspace character world abstracted the artistsā stories and instead inserted our own. Even though we felt that this āpackagingā could help bring our collaborators to new audiences, we ultimately didnāt solve the core problem we intended to face. This also made the project feel more work for hire at times than a true collaboration as it was meant to be.
Whoās dream is it for the artists to be big in crypto?
Answer: Mine.
Ultimately, it was my dream for the artists who we collaborated with to be big in crypto, even more than their own. The early focus for Senspace should have been on Japanese crypto-native or highly crypto-curious artists, no matter how much I believed in the onchain potential of the collaborators that we worked with. Such artists would have derived more meaning from our collabs and ultimately helped make Senspace a stronger community for people to want to be a part of.
In the near term, weāve decided to move away from the goal of onboarding new artists into crypto as the Senspace appās core purpose until we feel that there is greater market demand for entering the space. However, we do feel that creating an aspirational, fun and useful onchain application that anyone can use can help pave the way for refocusing around this goal in the future.
What were the major improvements on a conventional brand experience that we were creating with our brand design?
Answer: It had the potential to be, but we didnāt go onchain hard enough: both for end users and our collaborators.
End Users: Say what you will about music NFTs, but ours were definitely cuter than most others I have ever seen. However, there was no utility outside of the music itself, which made it no better than buying a physical cassette or listening to music on Spotify. In fact, when we made physical cassettes for friends and family, they were a bigger hit than the digital cassettes we released.
Tying the NFTs to something worth predicting about the character whoās music you were purchasing or some sort of points system within the world would have created added dynamism to the experience outside of purely listening+digital scarcity.
Collaborators: We had discussed creating a royalty mechanism for our artist collaborators around Senspace NFT sales, but ultimately didnāt execute on this. There are some legal complexities on how you might structure something like this, but adding DAO-like elements to Senspace would have made it much clearer as to why community members should promote their characters.
Though itās trying to achieve something quite different than the first iteration of Senspace, the new Senspace app has a much simpler value proposition and problem solution statement that itās addressing. Iām confident that this will help us drive stronger initial traction than we saw over our first two years.
Being too selfless
Senspace was built as a brand that collaborators could directly participate in, but this also in many ways made it the antithesis of a brand. 13 different fictional stories built by 13 different people for 13 different characters diluted a level of mission-driven clarity necessary for the brandās early success. 13 original characters, especially when we were working with independent artists, was too few to feel aspirational, but it also felt like we werenāt doing enough justice to each character in regards to telling their stories.
We would have been able to create more clarity and accelerate the growth of Senspace by focusing on a single character, likely my character, Senmaster, a basketball coach (basketball is the fastest growing sport in Japan) or Eko, a streetwear-inspired shopkeep, built with our Creative Director. Greater focus would have created higher clarity of brand purpose, eventually leading to stronger collaborations.
Wanting to do something for everyone from day 1 as opposed to focusing on our own brand equity was a major reason for why we couldnāt drive enough attention to Senspace.
Going forward we will be focused on growing the Senspace app and servicing its users: nothing more, nothing less.
Marketing to myself
Not to toot my own horn, but I am a very dynamic person. I grew up in the US, but spent summers throughout my youth in Japan and am fully bilingual. Iāve worked in venture capital, while running my own hip-hop label before founding Senspace. Today, Iām crypto-native but very much have one foot in off-chain creative scenes at all times. Because of my diverse background, I can appreciate content from several different contexts.
However, our end users were not going to be exactly like me and we should have focused much more acutely on creating IP and NFTs for a specific audience. Despite our efforts to market to Japanese and Western audiences who were both crypto native and non-crypto native, we ultimately ended up whiffing on all.
Western (non-crypto native): Senspace creative was heavily American comic-inspired, which worked well in Japan, but didnāt feel as differentiated for the west.
Western (crypto-native): We were selling a collectible but foreign audiences lacked context on our collaborators to feel the hype.
Japanese (crypto-native): Japanese audiences want utility NFTs, PFPs and onchain gaming and we gave them none of these things.
Japanese (non-crypto native): We pushed Instagram as thatās where our artists were most active, but NFTs were too esoteric for Japanese artistsā non-crypto native fans (even if we had credit card payment set up).
For the new Senspace app, we are starting by targeting very specific onchain communities to use the app, which should allow us to drive much deeper engagement with our initial users.
Waiting to hire a technical cofounder
We launched Senspace working very closely with a highly skilled dev shop in Japan, but ultimately having engineering in-house was crucial to our growth as a team and company. Prior to hiring Ryoma, our CTO and my co-founder, we couldnāt tinker and experiment around product ideas in the same ways that we can now. Iām not an engineer and not having ample room to iterate, especially when we were an early stage startup trying to build interesting and exciting product was not conducive to building and shipping fast.
We went through tons of ideation before landing on the new Senspace product, something that weāve built from scratch in less than two months because of the tinkering that preceded it. Gg Ryoma (and the rest of the team as well).
Underappreciating that I am the artist
I brought in members of the streetwear community into Senspace thinking that they could help us replicate the same excitement surrounding physical world fashion drops to our NFT drops. This was a good idea on paper, but onchain utility and hype creation are so closely intertwined with each other that I donāt think my team members were properly armed with the right knowledge to lead ideation around what NFTs we were creating.
As someone who had been in and around streetwear/drop culture along with being onchain/offchain native, I was the only person on the team capable of doing this. I should have gone into founder mode more aggressively in the early ideation phase of our NFT drops and let the team focus on design and IRL community building.
Part of why I did this was because I underappreciated the fact that I was truly the brand/creative director alongside being the CEO. My team members were much more senior when it came to T-shirts and hoodies but NFTs and onchain assets were my medium.
This changed with our new Senspace app. Iām deeply responsible for the end user experience that weāve created and the philosophy behind it, alongside our team (also quick shoutout to our new product lead, Apollo, along with our product designers Joe and Cecilia).
Being more realistic about scaling timelines
Considering we were building a product that was not playing into an obvious speculative bubble, Senspace as an IP not was not going to scale at remotely the same pace as its PFP predecessors, no matter how much I wanted it to.
I remember the night of our first drop. Our whole team was sitting around a table at 10pm, after months of world building leading up to it. We watched as only a few sales trickled in. The air in the room felt thick and it was hard to hide how defeated I felt at that moment (though we did eventually sell out the drop later in the week).
I should have expected this. If we really were going to focus on onboarding the masses, this was going to be a slow burn and in retrospect, holding off on dropping NFTs until we had greater traction on the IP was likely a wiser decision.
Itās a bit afield of what we were doing but looking at new L1s and L2s raising millions of dollars and creating lots of hype before even launching a testnet, we could have taken similar approaches to them.
Step 1: Story: Build the lore, vision, brand (no protocol yet)
Step 2: Onchain character launch (Protocol launch)
Step 3: Character experiences: Content, Apps, NFT Purchases, etc. built from Lore (Applications come online)
Instead, we jumped to step two without a clear or strong enough value prop and left ourselves in no man's land.
Hopping onto metas
After slowing production on the Senspace IP in early 2024, we ended up building exclusively on Farcaster from March-August of this year. I donāt regret this decision, but what I did learn was that by committing to building exclusively on a third party protocol instead of using it purely as a go to market strategy, we left ourselves exposed to the ups and downs of said protocol.
One of the games that we built on Farcaster, House of Cardians, was a consummate example of this. We initially built House of Cardians in April as an experiment for Deploy on Degen Week, going from idea to shipping on testnet in a week. It was a herculean task from our team and the effort got us fourth prize in the contest. However, as we locked in a collaboration with the $CRASH meme coin for the āWhatās in the Ball?ā gashapon game for Farcon around the same time, we ended up tabling House of Cardians until after the conference.
By the time we ended up actually launching, $DEGEN was down to less than half of its peak, Degen Chain activity had also greatly decreased along with Farcaster protocol usage was also decreasing. Ironically, I do feel that the specificity of Degen chain and Farcaster did help us drive early traction for House of Cardians, but after Degen tipping rules changed mid-game and users needed to vault their $DEGEN instead of using it in our game, our daily gameplay decreased by 90% and never came back.
Ensuring that the product you create is set up to either withstand bear market cycles is crucial. You can be a big believer in something, but if others run away with the liquidity, you can be stuck holding the bag with your morals.
The new Senspace app is not reliant on market cycles for success and weāve also thoughtfully designed the experience to make it as farmer resistant as it can be.
Not taking enough moments to reflect and appreciate the journey
Itās been a rough year at times getting Senspace to where it needs to be and that took a toll not only on me but also the team. Taking more moments with the team to appreciate the journey and time together is something that Iāve made a priority over the last quarter. Itās something that we didnāt do enough of from 2022-2023.
Weāve made going to Yokohama, a 30 minute train ride from Tokyo our team ritual for deep brainstorming sessions. We grab more meals together, we sometimes have a few too many highballs together and find out that Kasper, our lead creative, is a ridiculously good karaoke singer and for our last meal together before Devcon, weāre having a celebratory yakiniku meal to pump ourselves up for the conference.
Yes, I could have done better, but the āFuck upsā along the way were also likely a necessary evil to get us to where we were today. Iāve learned so much, found new friends and supporters and feel reinvigorated to launch our app and impact usersā lives in positive ways.
I hope you all enjoy using it as much as we have loved making it.
See you at Devcon,
Ren
P.S. to look out for the launch of the Senspace app, follow us @senspace_studio on X!
