The Buildup
Note: this is alpha only for the TOC hypersub paid community members. Please do not take screenshots and share or publish. It defeats the whole purpose of ~alpha~.
gm! Those of you who are reading this are part of the Terminally Onchain community. First off, I just wanted to say thanks to all of you for supporting me in my creator journey. Launching this hypersub ~2 months ago was just a fun experiment and it's turned out to be an awesome experience so far.
My job with Terminally Onchain is to continuously create content, curate useful partnerships, and try cool experiments with all of you.
With that being said, recently I've been working on a fun idea that came to my head last week and I decided to go all in and at least ship a v1 as fast as I could.
The next day, I got on a call with Dylan since he had been thinking of building a client of his own. After some jamming, we decided to partner up on this TOC app idea for at least v1 and see how it goes. Dylan is fantastic developer and already deep in the weeds of Farcaster building so it was a no brainer for me to have him on board. There's no way I could have shipped this thing out in a week myself...Dylan's coding speed is 10x faster than mine.
Initially, I started out thinking this would be a token gated client of some sort with a feed that people would spend time on. But throughout the first day of thinking about this product and iterating on ideas, at 1 am something finally "clicked".
The truth is, it didn't make sense to me to compete with Nook, Supercast, etc. Those guys are cooking up amazing products and the last thing I wanted to do was convince people to scroll through another app.
To me, it seemed more interesting to create a Farcaster app that was aligned with terminally onchain vibes.
So what's the idea???
Time to BeOnchain
Simply put, the TOC app is an "onchain BeReal" game.
For those of you that don't know what BeReal is, it's a social app that came out in 2020. Everyday, the app gives you a notification at a random time to take a selfie and send it to your friends. You have a 2 minute window to send it or else you miss that day's moment.
So for the TOC app, instead of selfies/pictures, everyday the app will send out a notification for the "Mint of the day". After the notification is sent out, you'll have 1 hour to mint it in order to keep your streak.
People love streaks...think back to the Snapchat glory days in 2016 when everyone was trying to flex their friend streaks and see how high they could go.
To me, the daily minting habit this game encourages is the perfect way to lean into the idea of being "Terminally Onchain".
It takes 30 seconds to a minute, you build the habit of being onchain daily, support artists, collect cool work, etc.
For season 1, I was able to get a group of 7 artists to collab with me for the game. I gave each of them the following prompt:
Capture the feeling of what being terminally onchain means to you
Though season 1 is art, that doesn't mean the others will be. My goal is to switch up the multimedia...maybe season 2 is screenshot essays and season 3 could even be podcast clips. I don't know but there are a ton of possibilities here.
Starting next Monday May 27th (day 1 of the game), I'll blast out a notification to everyone playing at a random time during an American friendly time zone. They'll go on the app and mint the art work of the day. If they're able to do it within the 1 hour time frame, their streak goes up. If not, they can still mint and support the artist but will lose their streak.
The app will have a leaderboard where you can see who has the highest streak.
The players who have the highest streak by the end of season 1 will receive a reward...[redacted] amount of higher tokens.
BUT WAIT....
Community Perks
One important thing about the way I'm thinking about this game for v1 and ahead is how to make sure folks within the Terminally Onchain community have strategic advantages and incentives.
For v1, I'm keeping it simple. Only those who are in the hypersub by Sunday night will be eligible for the Higher reward at the end of the season.
In the future, you can imagine other perks for TOC members such as (examples, not confirmed)
2 hours to mint, while regular players only get 1
"Lifelines" so you don't lose your streak even if you miss a mint day
A share of the Zora referral rewards
Access to a token gated deform to submit mint entries to be blasted out for the day
Getting Ahead of Myself
As most of us technologists like to do, this past week I spent a ton of time daydreaming about the possibilities of this app if I can retain a strong DAU metric.
There's so many routes this can take, only time will tell. But some ideas:
Ad billboard where brands can share anything they want on the daily mint page. Can even find market pricing through onchain bidding
Points for keeping up streaks and sharing the mints on WC - these points give you access to the TOC ecosystem. Let's say I partner with brands for merch or other ClassPass perks then these points can enable you to purchase just by playing the game
Anyways, I'll keep this section short because who know how the experiment will work out.
The main focus is to play ship the v1 and see where this next week takes us.
Coming Up
Phase 1
Friday - Sunday
Make the announcement, build a ton of hype (Will need the help of TOC community)
Get people to go on the website and download PWA (aka save bookmark to home screen)
Read the rules, understand the game
Do a sample mint to make sure functionality is working
Test first notification on Sunday ("game starts tomorrow!")
Take snapshot of Hypersub members on Sunday for the Higher reward
Season 1
Monday May 27th - Sunday June 2nd
A mint a day, notifications at random times from 9 am PST - 9 pm EST --> this covers everyone in America time zones
Continue building hype, flex the leaderboard, artists, mints, etc.
Check metrics, see what's going well and not going well
With that being said, time to get back to finishing up my long ass todo list 😂
See you all tomorrow and appreciate all of you :)
Let's have fun...it's time to BeOnchain!!!
