This is the first in a series of posts I’m calling “The Idea Maze,” where I’ll share about my Farcaster journey thus far. I hope you enjoy it!
If you've been around Farcaster for >18 months, you're likely aware that I've been toying with various iterations of an idea that started as a Farcaster Investment DAO.
Coming up on 18 months later, there is nothing public to show for it.
All ideas, no execution? Perhaps... let's see.
Here's why I've taken the approach I have, and some tools I've found helpful. In later posts I'll share more about "the what" and "the how". Stay tuned.
So many great ideas are well - intentioned visions that lack the full context of what already exists, what's been tried, and what works/doesn't. I believe in following the idea maze until you reach the end - before beginning something new.
While I'm all about experimenting and shipping fast, I want to ensure that I'm experimenting on the true unknown problems to be solved in a particular domain. I don't want to pursue an idea beyond the idea stage if it doesn't actually move the ball forward for the world.
So, at the risk of public perception of "all ideas, no execution," I've continued down that maze with tremendous input and guidance from so many of you. Farcaster is special that way. It's its very own contained venture ecosystem / habitual startup studio. I'll get into this in more depth later on.
Fast feedback loops, learning, and iterating from an in-market product are great. Particularly when you've taken outside capital and need to report on progress and speed-run the process to PMF.
But some ideas take time. Growth is context dependent, and often the current context calls for intentional slowness v not building at all and waiting for the market to catch up.
When you have the luxury of self-funding with nearly unlimited runway to experiment (i.e., you have a day job), you can afford to be more targeted in the rifle shots you take in public. This happens to be my situation.
The danger here lies in over-analyzing an idea without connecting with potential customers/users/community members and not moving fast enough to stay one step ahead of the market once demand does emerge.
However, not publicly shipping and evangelizing a product does not mean you cannot talk with potential users, obtain feedback, and iterate rapidly.
Once again, Farcaster is fantastic for this. The concentration of high-signal early adopters and the social incentive mechanisms engineered to promote net positive engagement, significantly decrease the costs of early ideation and user feedback.
"You should just ship and see what happens." This is the easiest way to wake up in 10 years, find yourself continuing to bang your head against a wall on something you don’t enjoy and the market only sort of wants, and not really know how you ended up there.
This becomes more poignant the moment you're tempted to take outside capital - whether from a fund, or the community via a token.
In theory, investors wouldn't give you capital if it's not a strong idea, right!? In reality, most pre/seed stage investors, while smart, are generalists and are taking a bet on you, as well as on the full merits of the idea itself and the market's readiness for it.
So if you're an ambitious high-performer with a track record of success, you may get that initial seed capital to test and refine an idea.
The challenge comes when you've taken that capital and the idea you were exploring, is clearly a dead end. You understandably feel pressured to continue pivoting, testing, and iterating on new product ideas until you find something that actually works, allowing you to raise another round at a higher valuation.
Now this isn't to say that early stage VCs put undue pressure on founders. Not at all.
Most (all?) founders I know put that pressure on themselves. Its what makes them great. Its a big reason they got the money in the first place.
"Isn't that the point of pre-seed / angel funding?" Well, maybe. If the point is to build something and get to an exit.
But suppose you want to build something that you want to be creating, and you're not yet convinced that the goal should be to sell in 10 years.
If you take outside capital, you must be more driven by what the market currently demands of you rather than sharing with the market your unique insight and what you find exciting about it, seeing how the market responds, and tweaking it to find something that works for both users, and for you.
This second point is lost today in builder lore.
If you don't take capital early on while you're searching for something that is life giving for you and valued by the market, and you find there's too large a gulf between what you want to spend 10+ years working on and what the market says they're interested in enough to grant you the privilege of spending 10+ years working on, you can more easily capture your learnings, close shop and wait for the next opportunity.
"I'm lost. How is this related to your Farcaster journey?" Two ways, (1) Farcaster today is a place to ideate, experiment and learn alongside others doing the same. What I've shared here are some of the reasons behind the approach I have taken to date. Hopefully it stimulates public discussion, and (2) all this relates directly to my journey to date building within the Farcaster ecosystem.
Thousands of new people join Farcaster every day. At least a handful of you are considering how to leverage the ecosystem to speed up your own go to market.
Here's my Farcaster tech stack:
WePonder.io: collect broad potential user feedback and target it based on the channel you post in. Excellent for both early concept testing and feature testing before you begin to write a single line of code.
Sure, there's no demographic data today, but there are lots of rich psycho-social data (i.e., one’s social graph, channel activity, channel followers, etc.).Bountycaster: identify and hire talent for micro-engagements (much more cost-effective than an FTE!)
Hypersub: identify potential awareness/distribution partners (i.e., TOC), and easily align incentives between early supporters.
Paragraph.xyz: share your long-form thoughts with the world, and see how the world reacts.
Channels: cultivate a minimum viable community and potential first users. They should be used to foster community around a shared interest and as a captive testing ground for potential concepts and features.
Neynar: pull and leverage social data from day -1
Group Chats: engage super-fans from day -1 for faster, direct feedback loops on your vision. If operating in a more regulated environment, use this to screen eligible participants. GCs allow you to take the growing community a level deeper
Frames / Actions: Trial and refine what amounts to a pre-MVP ‘app’, without the costs of building a full app.
Buoy: track relevant discussion topics to identify potential new users
I am positive that there are more tools that I have been using. These are simply the first that come to mind.
To be continued…
