Founders

live with Justin Kan:

“I actually recant that tweet [attached]. If you don’t have a great product, you’re fucked and distribution doesn’t matter. The more accurate is second time founders care about product AND distribution but that doesn’t sound as good.”

Product + distribution > product > distribution

/ted | exploring the onchain frontier | surfing @ venice, ca | eating @ gjusta / gjelina

did dan or varun found a company before farcaster?

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

Stay Curious // iixii // Lazer Technologies // Prev: CoinDesk, Roc Nation // based

idk! ask @dwr.eth @v, did you guys?

why are you curious or asking? :)

Most of what I’ve seen called “growth” from dev day is really product and not at all about distribution 

i understand focusing on building a product that has clear differentiation/PMF but FC/WC disregards distribution   to an extent that’s pretty surprising for a social product

I gotta say you really don’t understand how growth works. Distribution before retention is a death sentence and your paying money and time to increase churn. Without stable trailing daily actives and features that retain users then growing the user base (short term) is the opposite of progression.

growth @teller coming soon @clarity





























































hosting /kieran /usdc /loans 

Agreed! Also didn’t mean my message to sound rude. I just re read that haha <3 

I think you’re right on where the issue is here. The friction of the current onboarding is too great for 99% of normies. 

There are 2 arguments here though: 

1. They already made it free before and a large majority of those users eventually churned out, vs way less churning of those who paid. This highlights the retention issue = there aren’t any amazing wowo features that are keeping normies. 

2. The current model isn’t working and won’t work for scale most likely. Normies aren’t gonna pay to try something new and especially when they have similar options. (Unless there is a revolutionary reason). 

It’s a chicken and egg issue. If you make it free the users suck and leave. If you charge they don’t join. 

I still have to agree with V here though, the features are what is going to cross that chasm of both reason to join and reason to stay.

There’s a lot of nuance here. Totally hear you and I agree with this approach but the friction to onboard is a barrier to distribution and network effects 

I’m really advocating for the onboarding to be made easier so that network effects could potentially flow rather than a total shift in focus to distribution