Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
Why would you build on Farcaster — frames, actions, clients — if Merkle / Warpcast will just clone it if successful? 1. Outside of trading (Coinbase, Uniswap), there's no successful (at-scale, revenue generating) crypto-based business today. 2. The biggest constraint for all crypto app growth is users. There are not enough people using / "in" crypto today. The market needs to expand based on increasing the amount of consumer utility provided. 3. Our goal with Farcaster (and Warpcast) is to get enough scale where developers are able to build meaningful businesses without having to onboard more people to Farcaster and/or crypto themselves. 4. Separately, if your product is really a just a feature of another product, your best bet at building as a business around it is finding the Top 1% power users of said feature and giving them as many bells, whistles and knobs so they are willing to pay you. 5. We actively try to support other Farcaster apps in the ecosystem...
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nintynick.eth
@nintynick.eth
Option 1. Ruthlessly build for users, including bulldozing developers Option 2. Treat developers like customers, and help developers reach users as the first party interaction I don’t think you believe in the ecosystem developers enough to trust them with (2), so you are alienating them with (1) I get it, but it seems to rely on a strategy of high short-term developer churn, and growing a loyal developer base again once you hit scale
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
We aren't doing 1? Examples? Developers will always be interested in Farcaster if: 1. Large number of valuable, daily active users 2. APIs and data are actually permissionless We're not perfect and some stuff is still in progress (channels, DCs), but we've delivered on our commitments and been transparent on how we're thinking both on FC and at the bi-weekly (open to anyone) dev call.
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nintynick.eth
@nintynick.eth
I meant that you are doing 1 but not 2 I agree with your reasoning about what attracts developers to farcaster With (2) you could build more *with* developers, but it seems to me like “it’s okay we’ll get more developers later, because users are more important right now” It makes sense but feels shitty as a developer
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Dan Romero
@dwr.eth
> With (2) you could build more *with* developers What would this look like to you?
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nintynick.eth
@nintynick.eth
Less product-led protocol development, more doing what is best at the protocol level for the ecosystem (channels and DCs are a good example of this) We were building a whole suite around decentralized channels and then they got removed from the roadmap with no timeline Generally, not advantaging Warpcast over other clients. The ecosystem is big enough that a little less agility and a little more decentralization is appropriate imo And 1155-gated group DCs please. Generally, leaning more into Ethereum composability and less into workaround solutions for pure UI benefits Thanks for the thoughtful discussion
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