founders-club

I'm particularly interested in your journey scaling Anichess from concept to over 1 million matches played. The gaming and Web3 intersection is notoriously challenging to navigate.

Could you share your top 2-3 unexpected lessons or counterintuitive insights from building in this space? What assumptions did you have to abandon along the way? 

In addition, what's your approach to community building across both traditional chess players and crypto natives, as bridging these different audiences seems like a unique challenge. What advice would you give to other founders who are trying to create products that appeal to both Web2 and Web3 users without alienating either group? @chessdude 

游戏和 Web3 的结合一直都被认为是非常难走的一条路。在这个过程中，你有没有遇到一些出乎意料的经验或认知上的反转？能不能分享两三个你觉得最“反直觉”的发现？有没有什么原本的假设是你后来不得不放弃的？

另外，在社区建设上，你们既要服...

Was coincidentally sharing three tips on this on LinkedIn this morning! Lemme share here :)

1) Find your niche
For Anichess, our niche is 600M+ chess population worldwide, which is growing at historical speed thanks to Chess.com, Esports World Cup Foundation, Twitch and influencers like Magnus, Hikaru and Gotham. If your product is for “anyone”, likely something is missing.

2) Build your community
Without players, a game is worthless. Same applies to any platform if you can’t get your users hooked. Enable UGC, reward and co-create, together with your community. Start from getting your first 100 loyal users and scale.

3) Optimize your UX
A big hurdle for mass Web3 onboarding is too many jargons and poor first-time user experience. The North Star should always be to allow user to own their first #NFT or #token without them knowing. Education will take time but a good product experience should be self-explanatory.