Spotlight

some truths about building in crypto social

- dropping a project without a token launch dooms it to failure
- even with a token launch, attention spans are very short
- this structural ephemerality creates some poor incentives

we've been building Spotlight - a social product studio - for over a year and have learned some lessons about how to build products in this space

we're relaunching the studio shortly with some of these lessons and some new solutions baked in to our approach

more soon

"dropping a project without a token launch dooms it to failure" 

The most successful crypto social projects I can think of did not launch with a token (Zora, Pump, Polymarket). What examples are you thinking of in this example?

building @dau and @boostxyz to help mini app devs grow onchain with token incentives. prev dapper, opensea

from my pov - it's better to have people talking to you than nobody at all, and I think most builders feel this way and can easily just tune this people out

more common doesn't mean that it's working to the benefit of the project. As the attention being lavished on a project with a token are too often versions of, "why aren't you tweeting more?" "why is token price down?" "why did you rug?". It's hard to find your people and footing this way.

think it's also fair to say that the market has drastically changed in the past 12 months and it's much more competitive now: tokens are great at getting early usage and becoming the norm to have at launch. was more of a cultural thing that market had to overcome but now see it become more common

a few things:
- it *is* a double edged sword, i agree 100%
- building for *this* audience (onchain crypto social) is different from building for other audiences
- zora and pump have both been about trading nfts and tokens from day one. if anything they're proof that you need to build strong native speculation from the getgo to build for this audience. most projects generate this dynamic via a project token
- polymarket is kind of its own thing and in its own space

They all took years to launch their own token. and many still don't have them (Polymarket). My point is more that it's a double edge sword. launching with a token at the jump can also blow up a project before it has time to grow. It gives the founder two conflicting jobs. Like doing an IPO for your startup on day 1.

being a bit dramatic, surely, but i think you are conveniently missing that all three of those projects are heavily token-centric even if they didn't launch immediately with a project token