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Wrapping up my builder arc

For those of you that have been subscribed to Terminally Onchain for a while now, you may have noticed the last 3 months were more different than usual. I've only sent out 4 posts this summer...totally an opposite vibe compared to my usual 10 posts / month 😂

As I mentioned at the end of May in my Farcon Reflections piece, I really wanted to take a stab at building a product in the Farcaster ecosystem.

Let's quickly recap everything the TOC community accomplished with our product (The Terminal)...

Terminal v1 (Mid May - Mid June)

In June, I built the "BeOnchain" game which was basically BeReal for minting. Players got a random notification for the mint of the day and had an hour to collect and keep their streak.

That week long game drove 1300+ mints on Base and led to ~340 user sign ins with Farcaster on the TOC client.

Overall, I got amazing feedback on the concept and even more praise for going from idea to execution all in under 2.5 weeks!

Terminal v2 (Mid June - End of July)

Then, for all of July, I worked on v2 of the terminal which was a community curated client. For 30 days straight, I featured underrated casters & channels as well as interesting casts folks may have missed (like a morning brew for Farcaster).

Users got a daily notification which led them to the home page where they would check-in to collect TOC points and read the feed for the day. These TOC points were then used to claim perks for partnerships I set up.

What went well with v2:

• Showed up everyday and did the daily curation (FC follow + 3-4 casts with a blurb from me)

• Shipped an entire app with home feed, archive, members hub, streaks, points, check-in, etc.

• 400 people sign-ins with Farcaster at least once on the app

• Got great feedback on the curation --> many people DMed saying they discovered awesome new users/channels and enjoyed the context I provided on links + casts I shared

On July 1st (v2 launch day), we had 176 users sign up and by July 31st had 407 users total that had at least logged in once.

That's good right? BUT... the # of daily check-ins (north star) was stuck between 60-70 users the whole month. Meaning that users were only checking out the terminal on web, not actually taking the extra step to download the PWA & enable notifications. The only people actually using the app as intended were users who probably had kept the Terminal installed on their phones from v1.

Reflections

I saw two options forward:

1. Make a full on react native mobile app and take the option of browser usage completely so users would be forced to download the test-flight and enable notifications

2. Go back to focusing on the writing, curating, etc.

After talking to many folks in the community, it was clear that people were more excited to see me get back to full time writing and ~YB thinkboi mode~.

I'll be honest, the past 2 weeks I was a bit disappointed that The Terminal didn't work out as I had hoped it would. As many builders tend to do, I started daydreaming that this app would become the next big thing in the Farcaster ecosystem. I thought I had nailed the idea and was sure that people would be using the app as much as I was.

But the hard truth is that everything is a competition for attention. And attention is scarce. So if you're not nailing your sign-up process, user flow, retention mechanism, quality of content, etc. then there's a very low chance that folks will stick around. At times, when you're working on something, you tend to think the world revolves around the project...but that's simply not true.

I'm proud of the fact that I shipped two ideas from start to end in just a few months. Many folks tend to have ideas, but very few actually take the agency to execute. At least I proved to myself that I got something on my iPhone home screen! And just because it didn't work out now doesn't mean that I can't retry in the future 🧠

Building both versions of the terminal let me get my hands dirty:

• Tons of excalidraw wireframing

• Endless "customer support"

• Dozens of user interviews

• Identifying, measuring, & prioritizing key metrics

• Brainstorming user flows

• How to work fast with a developer

• Learning how to effectively market a product

• Thinking of product feedback loops

In fact, let's get started right now with 1 piece of news that came out last week 👀

Farcaster App Store

Last Friday, the Merkle team announced the explore page. tl;dr is it's the Farcaster app store where you can discover apps (sign-in with FC), cast actions, & frames.

Initial thoughts:

• I enjoyed the design of the store! Was pretty wild to see how many different tools/apps devs in the ecosystem have built

• My concern is that it will be forgotten in a few days just like trending casts --> there's really no incentive or reminder to go back for active casters

• What's Merkle's north star metric here? Is it # of clicks on "view" across all apps? Or the number of apps in the explore feed? Or maybe the rate of new submissions indicating strong developer activity?

• If the analogy here is the app store, then it seems unlikely that people will go to the explore page unless prompted to do so...how often to do you casually go on the app store?

• As it stands, the explore page is mostly a means to onboard new WC users to all the cool things in the ecosystem they missed

Some ideas:

• I was doing this in the terminal, but think the explore page would be fantastic real estate to have weekly highlights of underrates user & channel follows...not just tools

• Can have a weekly notification to remind folks to check out the updated content on explore (new user follows, channels, apps)

• It would be cool to have "reviews & ratings" that users can submit --> creates a feedback loop of engagement and also helps reduce friction for new WC users (maybe gift 10 warps for a review? idk how to avoid spam though)

• This idea by Links was interesting: "The way to drive traffic back - make it a configurable “desktop” for your fav frames - so when you go there you go thru every frame you might go thru daily (ie hit it up to claim my $moxie, yoink, distribute tips, etc)" --> not sure how the UI would look like though

What do you all think of the explore page? Curious if there are any ideas or changes you'd make!

That's all for today's post!

See you all on Sunday, hope everyone has a great rest of the week :)

- YB