Although I began my crypto journey in 2014, it wasn't until the beginning of 2022 that I truly began to navigate the crypto idea maze. I've now been working in crypto for for over two years. I took some time over the holiday break to reflect on our journey and the many lessons we've learned. I wanted to share an overview in case it's helpful to anyone. If you are working on any of these areas, feel free to reach out — I’m happy to share learnings.

Launched

Here are the crypto projects we launched and the lessons we learned.

• Sweetheartz.xyz — Send Valentine's Day NFT

  • A quick side project to learn

  • Onboarded 100s of YC alum to NFTs

  • Most users wanted to send them to people without wallets

• Maindrop.xyz (1)— Venmo for sending NFTs to phone/email 

  • Infrequent behavior

  • Lots of decent free and more convenient alternatives (Wallets, OpenSea)

  • Pain and frequency are not high enough to change behavior

• Maindrop.xyz (2) — Create and send NFT cards & gift cards

  • Infrequent behavior

  • The market is too small right now

  • Solution in search of a problem

• Maindrop.xyz (3) — B2B tools for creating and sending NFTs

  • Didn’t want to get into spam

  • Unclear who second b is in this market

  • Several decent tools in the market, none winning

• Launchcaster.xyz (1) — Product Hunt for sharing and discovering crypto projects

  • Launched as a side project to solve own problem. Explored focusing on it and learned…

  • Product Hunt is awesome but wasn’t a big biz

  • Tough to see path for a niche of a niche to become a big biz

• Launchcaster.xyz (2)— Steam + App Store Connect for crypto apps

  • Not enough apps and not enough with PMF

  • Apps in crypto are assets (I.e. ERC-20/721/1155, ABCs)

  • Although not a big thing, Launchcaster is a great public good that should exist 🤝

• Launcher.xyz (1) — Studio + Kickstarter for consumer crypto apps

  • Us building each app takes too long, not enough for users to do

  • The Howey Test is a tricky one

  • Crypto apps are extremely ephemeral, ROI is a challenge

  • Many users just want to play the metagame

• Launcher.xyz (2) — In-progress

  • Stay tuned 💪

Prototyped

Here are crypto app ideas we explored and prototyped but decided not to launch.

• Allthing — Front page for every smart contract

  • Tested on Launchcaster

  • The content is not that interesting

  • Didn’t make sense for the future of smart contracts

• Topic — Buy/Sell interest-based groups

  • Didn’t feel unique enough 

  • Difficult chicken and egg dilemma

  • Earnings are not meaningful enough for the average member

• ABC Fun — Leaderboard + marketplace for bonding curve-based assets

  • Unclear path to PMF on assets/behavior that lack PMF

  • Heavy reliance on Friend.tech, which dominates ABC market

• Basetune — BasePaint for music

  • Tested on Twitter

  • Collab audio canvas is less participatory and interesting as pixel image

  • Would be a great side project

First appeared on Farcaster.