The Investment
Rewind to March 2023, Lens had 66k MAUs, Farcaster had 3k MAUs.
Orb was a hackathon project that gained traction on the Lens protocol.
We were surprised by its quick 100x growth over a 6mo period, and the increasing engagement and retention on the app reflected in their screen time. Even though they didn't dominate the user share, they dominated the attention share. Users were more engaged than other Lens clients.
From our memo back then:
"On the surface, Orb looks a lot like traditional web2 social. A customizable user profile, a social feed, social interactions, and different media types.
Interactions are smooth, and the difference with a web2 social product can be only felt in terms of content and recommendations.
The big product breakthrough is in the creator tooling. As a creator on the platform, one can easily upload a piece of media as an NFT, and mint it on the platform. Users can collect it, and creators have a stream of revenue, while Orb monetizes a small rake on it.
Patreon can be easily replicated using token gating, the same with Cameo and other tools. Orb has the potential to embed them into the experience, while also having space for new innovations using the technology."
We were pleasantly surprised by the shipping speed and product quality that Nilesh and Kimmo brought to the table. As deep builders with a small team, being able to ship a complex product like Orb is not an easy feat. This gave us the confidence that the team was able to execute under stress and low resources.
It's been more than a year, and Orb has kept its grip on the leadership in terms of retaining and engaging Lens' power users, while growing more than 3x. All thanks to the team's relentless focus on user experience, shipping speed, and iteration. Some of our favorite features are Cross chain mints, Multimedia consumption, Tipping and Clubs.
Back then, SGV was starting as a Hydra incubation and it didn't have a multisig. One of our cofounders had to take out a loan in USDC and send it to Orb, and warehouse the deal on SGV's behalf.
We're eager to see progress from Orb keeping the #1 spot in attention share of the whole Lens ecosystem. We hope to see them striving forward and innovating with Open Actions, and launching in zkSync.
Founder Q&A
Like we mentioned, we’re impressed by the sheer execution energy and technical savviness that Nilesh and Kimmo bring to the table. We want to share some insight on how the journey was.
Q: Reflecting on this past year, what are the top 3 internal company processes or practices that have let you be the top mobile app for Lens?
A: First. Building a dynamic, hardworking team allows us to prioritize and continually improve user experience (UX) in our design and features. We’ve shipped more than 100 App Store-Approved features, fixes, or improvements in the past 100 weeks.
Second: Focus on solving problems for real users, taking feedback seriously, and being engaged with our user base & community.
Third: Maintaining our focus on disrupting Web2 social platforms with Web3 features and creativity.
Q: Which are the ‘technical expertise areas’ that founders building in web3 social need to cover in their team?
A: Having two technical founders in different areas has been a huge advantage. Nilesh is excellent in mobile development, UX/UI, and user feedback, while my expertise is more focused on backend systems, data, and AI. In terms of technical areas:
User onboarding and wallet integration: Streamlining the process of onboarding users in a Web3 environment, including easy-to-use wallet setups, is critical for reducing friction and driving adoption. We knew this was a critical point and solved for it well before account abstraction was widely-adopted.
Mobile app performance optimization: ensuring the app runs smoothly on all devices, minimizing crashes, and ensuring fast load times, is the most crucial expertise from Web2 that applies to Web3 social apps. Optimizing flows for data indexing, transformation and delivery also addresses solutions to latency, performance and compression issues.
Q: What have been the best practices to make sure you’re shipping features that users actually love and use?
A: The Orb team aims to ship quickly and learn from users' adoption and interactions with those features. Users in the app have a few spaces to provide a feedback loop where they know the team will respond. Actively engaging with and listening to users is key, as we see it can help uncover patterns or needs they might not even be aware of. We also try to educate and inform on new features as they ship, highlighting any tech partners along the way. We’re still growing, so we ship what makes sense and resonates with the user base.
Q: What’s next for Orb?
A: After testing other directions, we’ve decided our unique strength is to double down on content monetization and creating tools to reward creators for their contributions. This shift gives us freedom to innovate in the social space to make it fun to contribute to the creator economy even as a fan. We’re shipping even more game-changing features at the end of September that we’re really excited about.
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