The parallel burden of Onchain Creators

I hope all 7989 of you are having a great week so far 🔥

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1. Onchain experiments so far

2. Passive analytics vs Active distribution

3. Taking a page from 0xDesigner's book

4. Doodles, Dune, & the Zora App

I've been actively thinking about onchain distribution since I quit my job in 2022 to be a full time creator.

The whole point of being a crypto native creator is to be proactive about using tooling that brings a new dimension to your content. Ideally, this fresh creator stack encourages your audience to engage in unique ways not possible on Substack, Youtube, Twitter, etc.

In the last 1.5 years, I've tried a variety of onchain experiments. I think they worked out well as a start, but I have mixed feelings on how they're going now - overall it's starting to feel too passive.

Let me explain by giving some context first.

Context

For starters, making the decision to have Terminally Onchain on Paragraph was a big one. I knew at the beginning of my creator journey I was taking a hit by not using Substack's feature-rich platform. But me choosing Paragraph was a long term bet that even many folks in the crypto space didn't fully understand.

Features like collecting posts, token-gating parts of my articles, wallet subscriptions, and having my writing saved on Arweave are all novel use cases for crypto-native creators.

I mentioned this in my post about Paragraph back in February:

"For me, the most exciting part about Paragraph is that the definition of subscribers moves beyond traditional e-mails. Up until recently, subscribing could only be done by providing your email. Now, with tools like Paragraph, you can engage with a creator with your crypto wallet as well.

This makes it possible for creators to understand and engage with their audience better than ever before.

Why? Because wallets serve as a portal to help creators better understand who their community really is. Onchain social graphs, dapps they interact with, etc."

I took all the wallets subscribed to my newsletter and organized them in a Once Upon group. This helped me understand where my readers were active onchain.

Note: Once Upon is no longer active as of August, the team is moving onto new things :(

Then, I also set up a pro community on Hypersub that served as an "Onchain ClassPass".

Hypersub let folks buy into the Terminally Onchain community and subscribe with their wallets.

To better understand my "true fans" (aka paid subs) I set up a TOC Dune dashboard to analyze the onchain health of the community. My thought is that it would be a great selling point to other partners I would want to work with.

So what's the issue?

Well, it turns out I don't actually use the Once Upon group and Dune Dashboard as much as I thought I would have.

Every now and then I'll remember, but there's not much I've gotten out of the wallet analytics after the first week of building them. To be clear, I still think the general concept is sound and creators should try it, but it'll realistically only be useful when onchain activity itself picks up!

And as I mentioned above, my whole flow right now feels too passive.

In terms of being a creator, I've been using the "onchain" for behind-the-scenes analytics not active distribution.

I'm waiting for people to subscribe. And then if they subscribe, I can see if there's anything interesting about their wallet activity (which I stopped doing because there wasn't much to gain).

Additionally, people rarely ever collect my posts on Paragraph. The only time I noticed a spike was when frames launched on Farcaster and people had an excitement to collect anything and everything in their feed. In fact, I've been requesting the Paragraph team to give creators the option to share posts as normal links instead of frames on Farcaster because it attracts low quality collectors.

And I have yet to see anyone ever collect a highlight on my newsletters.

In regards to the hypersub, the flow has too much friction. For any drop I do, I have to make a flyer as a Zora mint and then add the drop on Hypersub. And if I need my audience to engage with the drop, I have to pray they click on the Zora link in the e-mail and see the description on the top right corner of the mint page.

And as for the "ClassPass for OP Stack" model: it's too dependent on other creators and founders being able to execute with me. Usually, it's possible to make a push when markets are pumping and projects are launching left and right (i.e. Feb - April of this year). But for the most part, I can't be dependent on providing quality "perks" every month at least in this stage of crypto.

Okay, so what do I do?

Well, I don't think "I messed up" or anything like that.

In fact, on a recent podcast I was asked how I think about being an onchain creator and I said that my job is to try everything! Use all the tools, experiment with the different features, and iterate on what the best flow is for me.

The onchain creator world is still so early. No one is sure how this will all play out. And to be clear, I am still using Paragraph and Hypersub as my core tooling for Terminally Onchain.

But I'm itching to try something else as well. Something that lets me use "onchain" not just for metrics/subscriber purposes, but also active distribution 🤔

I've already discussed this in length in a previous post, but I really do think I found some signal around daily minting with the "BeOnchain" game I set up in the TOC Client back in June.

In 1 week of a bear market...1300 mints from 300 people! And I know it was a game with a prize, but it seems to me that there are people ready to mint once a day. Just look at these testimonials.

But here's the thing, I don't even necessarily care too much about how many people are minting. For me, it's the sheer act of putting up my work onchain daily that really stands out. That's what TERMINALLY actually means!

The person doing this the best by far in the crypto space is @0xDesigner with his project Design Everydays. It's in the name - he shows up everyday, creates a creative design/UX figma, mints it on Zora, and posts to socials. He's been at this for over 500...consecutive...days!!

I've been following his journey since the first week he started and even wrote a post about his work last December.

To me, there's something beautiful about his process. Just focus and improve on the craft, give your audience something high quality to consume daily, and distribute on socials (X, Farcaster, & Zora).

There's no side quests or short term distractions.

And the cool part is that he's always finding new folks interested in his ideas (online & onchain). I mentioned this on Farcaster yesterday, but I've definitely been slacking on the distribution side of my work.

So what's my plan?

Well, simple. I've already been consistently writing deep dives every Tuesday & Friday.

Now, I'll also be creating 2-3 "atoms" from each post and minting the screenshots on Zora.

I'll do 1 / day and then also post the mint on Farcaster & Twitter just like 0xDesigner.

I made a collection today and created the first 3 mints for my posts from a few weeks ago. Check it out (and mint) here!

Overtime, I'll see which kinds of screenshots get the most engagement. I'll need to experiment with variables such as screenshot length, highlights, type of content to focus on, etc.

But wait YB...isn't this all pretty straightforward? Why is making a mint a day such a big deal?

Well, because of a trend that I think will seriously start to take-off in the next year.

I finally got around to testing the Zora mobile app the other day and have to admit that I was very impressed with the flow.

Some thoughts:

• It was honestly great to see that they replicated the Instagram UI - nothing unnecessary or overly complicated. I didn't feel like I had to "figure out" anything new, most of it was muscle memory.

• The Privy linking was next level. I didn't need to sign in with Farcaster or connect my wallet. By simply entering my e-mail address, it connected the mobile app to the web app.

• When onboarding to the app, Zora automatically made a new smart wallet for me and linked it to my main wallet. And using Paymaster gets the gas fees covered (thanks Coinbase!)

• The "buy sparks" feature with Apple Pay and "double tap" to mint features felt so clean to use

It was pretty damn cool to think that someone new to crypto could make a wallet, buy Ethereum, and mint their first piece all in a few minutes without having to worry about any complex infra. Just the app store and old fashioned e-mail like any web2 app.

Phil mentioned this a few weeks ago, but I do think the change from eth denomination to "sparks" does make a huge difference as you're using the app. It feels more natural to mint and the mental barrier is much lower probably because many of us will overthink giving up x number of eth.

Okay so why do I bring the Zora app up?

Because I believe onchain content, distribution, & traffic will start growing exponentially in the next year as we start seeing large brands and top creators actively crossposting (online & onchain). And the Zora app will be a key catalyst pushing this trend forward.

For example, in just the last two weeks, the Doodles and Dune team started minting their own content onchain as well.

Doodles created a Certified Viral collection where they mint their cute animations from the past few years on Zora. The first two pieces alone resulted in 179k mints and ~8 eth of creator rewards! Of course, it's worth noting that Doodles has a large following, many of the mints were probably repeats/bots, etc. But even considering those points, to me, just the fact that a prominent team in the space thinks it's worth putting their content onchain shows strong signal as to where we're headed. It won't be crazy to see other teams such as Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, etc. following their path.

TPan had some fantastic takes I wanted to share with you all on the pros of Doodles mints.

And Dune announced Mint Moments, which allows data wizards to mint their dashboards onchain. It makes complete sense and I'm a huge fan. Think about it...how many times do the top dashboards get shared on Crypto Twitter, Farcaster, news pieces, etc. There's no reason why onchain data sleuths shouldn't be treated as creators - it's no different than sharing this paragraph post or citing a podcast.

“Onchain data is living, breathing, and always updating, but certain moments in time represent something special. With Dune's new Mint Moment functionality, anyone can forever capture and collect the data of the moment while also paying their gratitude to the creators behind the insight.” - Fredrik Haga

Collect NFT

The point is that today I'm discussing both of these brands minting their content onchain as a big deal...because it is! But I don't think we'll have to wait that long before others companies catch on to the trend and realize they want to grow their onchain CRM and be proactive about their onchain distribution.

That's why I'm locking in on my own Zora activity. If I'm already cranking out 5000 word deep dives every week, why am I not making the most of minting bits and pieces for onchain distribution?

It would be pretty stupid for a Youtube creator to only post 1 hour videos and not at least get 2-3 shorts out of it right? I'll spare you the random metric about how attention spans are decreasing.

I still have a ton to say on related topics about onchain content, but this post is getting long so I'll wrap up with one final point.

The title of this post is The parallel burden of being an onchain creator. As I was writing this piece, I realized how it really does feel like the wild west for onchain creators. There's so many new tools popping up, endless new strategies to try out, uncertainty with what works, etc.

Anyone aiming to be an onchain creator not only has to nail down the traditional newsletter + Twitter format, but also navigate through the maze of new crypto creator tools that barely even make sense.

But as I said earlier, "my job as an onchain creator is to try everything! Use all the tools, experiment with the different features, and iterate on what the best flow is for me".

Today's Zora screenshot strategy was simply another experiment I proposed to join the dozens of ideas I've tried this year. I'm sure it won't be my last as well.

At times, it can feel so exciting to be able to try these tools out before 99.9% of creators, but can also feel overwhelming in the sense that I have to still figure out what works best without much guidance!

In the next few weeks, I'll keep all of you updated on how the Zora TOC mints are going.

That's all for today's post!

Have you tried the Zora app out yet? Would love to hear any thoughts on your experience in the TOC channel 🤝

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

- YB