I hope all 9348 of you are having a great week so far 🔥
Welcome to the 117 new members of the TOC community.
If you're enjoying my writing, please share Terminally Onchain with your friends in Crypto!
It feels like forever since we did our last roundup! Mainly because there was an extra 2.5 weeks this time because of the holidays.
For those of you that are new to Terminally Onchain, I do a roundup every 10 posts to highlight recent content, provide TOC brand updates, and discuss any notes on my creator journey. Here was the October roundup in case you're interested.
Sections below:
Metrics Overview
Sponsorship Update
Shutting Down TOC Pro (Hypersub)
Last 10 posts (ranked by page views)
Let's dive in.
Metrics
Overall, I was happy with the TOC growth since my last roundup.
Most visibly, there was a huge jump in my Twitter following.
I was also much more intentional about advertising my newsletter on X which helped gain a ton of new subscribers and fresh page views from crypto twitter.
For those of you who are early TOC subscribers, you'll probably remember that I only used to post on Farcaster but eventually decided to start X-posting as well. That's been super helpful in terms of reaching more of my potential audience so I'll definitely double down on my tweeting.
In fact, since I got back from vacation, I challenged myself to tweet once / day for a whole year. The first day was January 6th and so far I've been sticking to it and am feeling good. Some days it's easy and I'll fire off 5 tweets. And other days I have no idea what to say but the daily deadline serves as a nice forcing function for me to post more half baked thoughts. Not everything needs to be perfectly drafted...sometimes even a simple question or bullet point list can surprisingly resonate with people.
Before my next roundup (mid-February), I'm setting some goals for TOC metrics:
Subscribers should be around 11,000
Twitter following around 25,000
Average page views should be comfortably over 4k
We'll compare these numbers to the actual results in roundup #4 next month!
Sponsorship Update
Right before Thanksgiving, I decided to try a new experiment called Sponsorship Splits.
The idea was that for every new sponsorship contract, I would split a % of the revenue to my TOC pro subscribers on Hypersub.
For my first sponsorship deal with Splits, I decided to give all 100% of the earnings to my subscribers!
And although the community enjoyed the experiment (who doesn't love money), I personally wasn't a fan of the sponsorship model. To be clear, I think the experiment was cool and remain Splits Protocol's biggest fan, but I found the sponsorship itself ineffective.
I don't think the little blurb I had at the top of my posts were meaningful and it just seemed like the ad was there for the sake of being there.
And maybe this next part is a bit dramatic, but I really obsess with the aesthetics of how my posts look. All the little parts such as the banner image, headlines, intro sentence, divider placement, etc. all mean a lot to me! It's my belief that those individual pieces all add up to give my subscribers (you all) a pleasant experience.
So for that reason, I'll be ending the sponsorship deal early and will be paying back the funds to the Splits team out of pocket (since I already distributed the revenue out to my subscribers).
Write me down in the books as the first creator who lost money from doing a sponsorship 😂
And in terms of making revenue going forward, the honest answer is I'm not sure how that will work out. Right now, I'm fortunate to have some savings from previous investments so I'll be continuing to use that as my runway. For the near future, I'm laser focused on increasing the growth metrics we discussed in the section above.
My belief is that as long as I stick to sending out two deep dives a week and market TOC as much as a I can, the money will figure itself out later down the road.
Shutting Down TOC Pro (Hypersub)
After 9 months of trying different ideas for my hypersub community, I've decided to convert it to an "onchain patreon" here on out.
In March of 2024, I launched my Hypersub and since then have shipped the following experiments for my pro subscribers:
But after implementing all of these projects, I’ve decided that I no longer want to continue the effort of trying other things and have been finding a lot more joy and interest in my research & writing.
For all of 2025, I'm going to do the hard thing and say no to anything that is not directly related to my newsletter writing.
So here on out, I'll be making the TOC hypersub my onchain patreon. Anyone who finds my writing helpful and informative can buy me coffee as a thank you :)
Last 10 Posts (ranked by page views)
That's all for this roundup, I hope everyone enjoyed the updates!
See you all on Friday for our next deep dive 🤝
If you're enjoying my newsletter, PLEASE share Terminally Onchain with others in the crypto space who might enjoy the topics covered :)
We have to hit the 11k subscriber goal by next roundup together!!
- YB
