my learnings from building on farcaster so far:
1. the community is top-notch, and i love coming to farcons, such a beautiful bunch of friendly people
2. farcaster team is great, very responsive, very friendly, super clever and ships really fast
3. taking into account that farcaster's current goal is to grow number of users, one can place a bet for or against them succeeding
4. partnerships with other platforms are clutch
5. airdrops are fire, should be used by every product built here
6. composability + socialness of the protocol is the best out of bluesky, x, decentralization, ethereum, etc — amazing how i can tip with every like (twice!) with @tipn and @noiceapp; or how @ampsfun makes it easy to monetize and promote (with a better model than stupid ads that get ignored)
7. toolkit is getting super simple to use (which is great!), e.g. building a miniapp on farcaster is simpler than ever (albeit, still v hard to make your mini app available in other clients)
8. the ecosystem is still very young, e.g. devs have a choice between neynar and self-hosting snapchain nodes, psql, replicators, etc—i expected more cloud providers by now (like airstack)
9. number of long-term builders on farcaster is astonishing, nowhere else do i see so many devs BUILDING everyday and shipping so much not for the quick-buck but for the long-term revenue streams
10. it is super simple to "win" farcaster game if you're a semi-decent dev (and read my book lmao wdlaty.com on how to make simple products) and listen to the team's advice on how to win; i.e. anyone can be #1 on mini app leaderboard straight after launching their product
now, i've spent the last few weeks building pigeon.trade and i have some more thoughts on... well... building outside of farcaster, sadly
11. farcaster is still smol in regards to dau (it's growing, the team is trying their best to grow it, the crypto market is stagnant, not many people are coming to the space, anyway, MANY factors contributing to it)
12. if before i could imagine launching a $100m project on farcaster, sadly, today i think the cap is like $15m; i do not foresee a new $degen blowing up the internet and bringing hundreds of thousands of crypto people here anymore (again, the reason is that MARKET has shifted, nobody's to blacme for this)
13. which puts vc-funded startups in a pickle: e.g. we raised $4.4m, and we can't be valued at $15m (this would be... well... a lot less than what we're actually valued at right now); this has consequences for the dev and project flywheel—i.e. less funded projects build for farcaster, more bootstrappers with (:puke: REVENUE-based businesses), even lesser valuations of their projects, even less funded startups
14. which is why i don't foresee any more cool announcements anytime soon like "we raised $50m to build a NEW FARCASTER CLIENT INFRASTRUCTURE" which is probably why there's only one neynar currently
15. when building pigeon, i can see how much more we can do with the people outside of farcaster than inside of it; which is VERY logical (again, it is not the team's fault that not everybody is using farcaster yet, it's many factors)
16. again, pigeon is *not* a farcaster-native product or a product built for farcaster (hence, it's not an "our product doesn't fit farcaster" rant, it's just a project that tickles my brain right now)
now, this ALL can change DRASTICALLY very soon, e.g.
1. new "leg" in crypto market blowing up btc to $1m, eth to $40k, etc, bringing more people to farcaster
2. another $degen blowing up and bringing more people to farcaster
3. coinbase wallet bringing more people to farcaster with money
4. anything else that happens organically or due to the team's efforts that blows up the userbase
5. a lot more capital flows into farcaster ecosystem
unfortunately, the reality of the market right now:
1. vc money is more expensive and more difficult to get
2. markets are volatile and money is conservative
3. people are out of money (ffs, people should've simply invested in btc come on), both retail and funds
4. which makes the new tokens... sigh... cap out at $15m slowly dying to 0
this is also why people like @briang pivot to solana from base 🤔 less capital, less liquidity leads to even less capital and to even less liquidity
again, IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: this is not a rant, not a criticism (there's no one to blame or criticise for anything said above), it's just what i feel like where the market's at and why my next product is pigeon, and not a farcaster mini app
another crucial part: i still love farcaster and i still intend to build heavily here :) and i still will! in fact, i'll probably use programmable DC's right now to add pigeon.trade bot that you can talk to
just sharing my thoughts and experience to whoever can benefit from them, tytyvm
don't forget to tip me at borodutch.eth 23 replies
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