Wife made handcut fries and coincidentally they looked just like how my grandma used to make them. She thinks they're burned but it gave them character and texture, also, wabisabi bro.

We celebrated our huge Series D fundraise at the office and it wasn't a lavish thing. It was mid-day, there was a big delicious cake few ate and most people appeared to still be processing the meetings they had just come out of. But I've been on enough roller coasters to know that sometimes these small non-events become memorable for what they aren't. Nothin big, no extravagant food or venue or ceremony, just a handful of busy folks in an old soho building focused on whatevers next. I guess I got better at recognizing the good old days so I took some pics and enjoyed some cake.

This sign at a bagel shop in New York. I like everything about it, the sign it was written on, how it was hand written, the way it was worded and the fact that they bothered doing it when they didn't need to.

I bought two new dumb phones. These are minimalist phones with some or no smart features, the one I'm most excited about is the Mudita Kompakt. It's e-ink! Which has important properties to me: it's great to read on, the battery lasts a while and because its black and white and sucks at video it encourages the behaviors I want by default.

Seeing Mia ride her first merry-go-round in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Pure nervous excitement.

I had an oreo inspired pastry at a cafe in Dumbo. Cookies very soft, filling not too sweet. Why don't more cafes riff on Oreos? Macarons don't count.

Some water pipes exploded at a station in Brooklyn and when we arrived there was already an inch of water with more tumbling down the stairs. I wouldn't say I directly enjoyed the flood but something about how fast it happened and devolved reminded me the default order is decay. So I was thankful to all who work to make just a bit of order out of default chaos.

We saw Pixar's latest Hoppers at Nighthawk in Brooklyn. A few things, at Nighthawk you get served at your seats by servers whizzing about quietly, very nice experience. It was Mia's theater debut so I would have been a bit nervous of her acting up but Saturdays have special kids screenings. It was full of kids. Easy. And last, Hoppers surprised me, it was very good and actually made me laugh. We've been rewatching all of Pixar's movies and it's now our favorite. Pixar is back?

There was a blizzard and within 24h we went from a spring like day to white out and aggressive winds. I had an urge to go outside and try to survive the elements (primal?) so I did, and I did. The next day Mia and I went out with a flashlight and played explorer.

Mia and I started doing Wednesday night "bob ross night". We pick a 24m Bob Ross vid and crayon along with bob ross. I can only describe the experience as nutritious.

Our stuff from Japan finally arrived and my wife started playing the keyboard again. I like the sound of her voice.

Happy Spring.

Bonus shower thoughts Can we give car horns more emojis please? It's like the old version of iOS where they can only heart things. We need an open standard for horn frequencies so we can say more than "HEY." and instead things like "excuse me?", "thanks", "trunks open"

Autoplay is so so evil man. They just stuff you with more cake before you can even finish your last bite. No concern if you're still hungry, no respect for the food already in your mouth, just stuff it. Taste that sugar. Engage monkey brain.

This espresso from Devocion, Williamsburg. I have an espresso about once a day and every so often its good enough to zap me out of whatever I'm thinking about and pay attention. This was one of those, a paper cup no less. The last time was in Zurich back in September.

I watched Win, Win (2011) and recommend it. Its a sport comedy drama about life being messy. A by the book family guy gets into financial trouble and has to bend his moral compass to make things work. It's a Tom McCarthy movie with great acting and mature writing that somehow skates close to every trope in film without falling into it.

I started using Obsidian in place of Apple Notes and Notion. It has the speed of Apple Notes and most of the features you want from Notion, but it has one major difference, its entirely based around Markdown and Files. Every note you make, including this one, is just a file. Which means you can send it around, back it up, put it elsewhere with no effort and no vendor lock in.

We saw fireworks at midnight in Prospect Park, Brooklyn and it made me feel like a local. There was some live music and a crowd of about 400 right up until midnight. Mia was the only toddler I saw, out way past bed time.

I got a fun little ereader that attaches to my phone. It's light and thin and I loaded it up with public domain books from Project Gutenberg. It's an imperfect device but I've been reading the Scout's handbook and Steinbeck's Cannery Row on the subway instead of bouncing between apps.

We saw Jerry Seinfeld at the Beacon Theater. He's still funny. What was unexpected was when the show opened and he yelled "Alright! Friday night in New York City!". Something about this made living here feel official.

It snowed, a lot. Viren and I had a snowy patio espresso in Soho. Mia got to try snow sledding for the first time.

I bought garlic pickles at a sweetpicklebooks and a cool copy of Catcher in The Rye that oozes teenage boredom.

I created Adventure Game. An evolved version of "the floor is lava" with objectives, power ups, and a killer soundtrack. It's like Super Mario in real life and Mia loves it.

I bought a Ukelele song book and play and sing a few songs every night. My family mostly ignores me but it takes the edge off and helps transition the day from work to sleep. Currently playing Hotel California and Imagine.

Happy new year.

I want this year to be about depth, not breadth. Deeper work and relationships.

A big part of this is increasing my attention span so I can consume and create great works. Twitter, Farcaster and the likes are about short form, ephemeral content, I want the opposite: longer, durable content that a human put effort in to writing.

I don't want to know about "the current thing" for a while. Minnesota daycare fraud is a non-actionable Christmas activity, for example. And to be fair, I never wanted to know. Despite my effort keeping a tight follow list, training and nudging the algorithm, either a new PM gets hired or I have moments of weakness that mess it all up.

The reality is I'm a proper adult with real, concrete interests, I want to read about them. I want my stated preferences, not the revealed ones. My stated preferences are what I want to be, who I want to surround myself with, its my aspirational self in many ways. The revealed ones, the things I engage with, tend to be more self destructive.

So how will I get content I want? RSS. I'll spend this year building up sources of content from folks I really like, favoring longer form, less frequent content sources, like blogs.

I'm aware I'll miss some things this way. That I'll sacrifice a bit of discovery and timeliness, that I may open my own curated feed and be bored, but I'm cool with it. Boredom is preferable to the infinite stream. I want the finite, scarce stream.

Of course I still want to write things and quips and share them so I made this little blog. It's minimal and a collection of markdown files I'll write from Obsidian. I'm excited to have a web site again and take part of a growing movement to revive them.

As for Farcaster and Twitter, I'll likely setup auto posting when I write something new but the accounts will be read-only, only a friend will know the password.

That's all for now. See you on the slow web.

First, some quick background:

• I built 6 or so products on Farcaster, an twitter-like social network.
• 2 made revenue, glass ($400 MRR) and automod ($600 MRR)
• Glass: no code tool for creating Farcaster Frames. Frames are like embedded widgets inside tweets.
• Automod: content moderation service for channels. Channels are like if twitter had subreddits.
• I spent a majority of the 9 months working on Automod which had the most engagement and showed the most promise.
• In September 2024 I shut down automod and stopped building on Farcaster after failing to monetize well.

Building an audience on Farcaster

I had 0 followers in January and 27,000 in October. My approach was the following.

Be interested in others - Without having genuine interests in others nothing works. It's the glue that holds everything together. It's also one of the easiest to execute on and in part why I keep my follow list small.

Play with new APIs – In February, Farcaster was releasing new apis and primitives nearly weekly. I would integrate whatever they released into an app or a new toy in the fastest and most creative way I could think of.

This created a ton of resharing. People love creative use of things on Farcaster.

Make things for other people – In the early days, anytime I would see a cast like "I wish I could do X...." or "Has anyone built a Y...?", I would build it as fast as possible (hours) and reply with a url that they could use right away.

They would often share, follow and give me a chance to connect over DMs.

Share frequent, small updates when you're building in public – The lifespan of a good cast in Farcaster and most social networks is about 24h which means there's not much point bundling a bunch of features into one big release. It will just disappear. If you have a release with 10 features, make 10 posts spread over time. Certainly not 1.

This is especially important when you're in the early stages of building an audience, its better to be consistently putting things out so people can get familiar with you and your work. You'll also get better at posting in the process.

Why?

• Sometimes posts don't take off for any number of reasons: important folks are absent, people missed it, there were other more interesting things happening that day or whatever else. Increase your chance of good things happening by posting more.
• People won't remember you or what your product does from 1 post or sometimes even 10. You need to be constantly reminding them and sharpening your storytelling and narrative.
• You don't know what will go viral, in part related to #2, but in the early 0 to 1 stage its harder to know what people will find interesting.

You have more content than you think – You can create a lot of content from a single feature if you wish:

1. The launch and announcement post
2. A bit of background on the product decision or customer that informed it
3. Code snippets or tutorials that explain the implementation. I would often share a snippet and some times a screencast that walked through it.
4. Any random side story, meme or thought you had building the feature

These can all be separate posts that reference each other. Most only do #1 and bundle many features together. It's not optimal for audience building.

Getting over fear of publishing half baked stuff

I struggle with perfectionism with things I make. Often I'll overoptimize or not share them at all. One trick that worked well for me this year is publishing and shipping more often.

When you know you're going to publish something else again tomorrow, it takes the pressure off. You can focus on smaller improvements and rate of progress rather than a huge artifact that feels like it has to be perfect. It forces you to take on a smaller scope and break things up and it applies to casts, articles, code, product, and most other things.

The net result is strong momentum, fun and progress. Those are worth optimising for as a solo founder.

Consider support and operational burden in your products

Both automod and glass were suboptimal as they had important real time components that increased the support and operational burden.

As an example from Automod, early in the evolution of channels Automod had to like a post for it appear in a channel feed. Some channels would receive more than 10,000 messages per day, anytime their message wasn't displayed in the channel feed immediately, complaints and support issues would come in which would lead to paranoid and doubt in Automod.

Glass was also in the critical path. Customers would use it for time sensitive drops and they or thousands of people trying to access raffles and drops would complain immediately if there were any issues. The operational burden of extremely spikey traffic on saas-like paid tiers is also difficult to schedule and cost for.

Since Farcaster is a decentralized protocol, the network isn't always in sync, so even a delay of 2 minutes was frustrating for customers.

The real time requirements of both products aren't ideal for a solo founder or indy hacker. It meant more support, packing my laptop with me and monitoring.

Cost structures and pricing

Value based pricing is the ideal for most folks building products. Its the idea that you price your product according to how much value the customer receives as oppose to "whatever the cost is + X%".

But its hard to do.

It's not immediately obvious what your customer values at first. That takes time and its constantly in flux as you change your product. Pricing based on costs is much easier and at least means you won't run out of cash.

Being value based also puts you at greater risk of being undercut by competitors. If you compete on cost, its more of a technological war: can you build it cheaper or more efficient? That's often easier to control for and understand, at least for me.

Variable costs complicate pricing. With Automod, I had multiple providers for NFT and Farcaster data that charged based on API usage. That meant customers that had busier channels, which used more of these api calls, costed me more. So the variable cost model greatly influences the pricing model.

The most straightforward thing to do is charge a markup on usage and pass that cost through to the customer, but your costs don't always scale with value the customers receive. With Automod for example, one night channels received 100s of thousands of spammy posts from Korean bots. Automod has to pay its vendor for that, should, and more importantly, will, the customer?

The good thing is you can often make variable costs fixed with a bit of effort, assuming you have the technical ability. Its also usually easy to estimate the point when variable costs become more expensive than "doing it yourself". You can use that to negotiate with the vendor or to justify spending time and money making them fixed.

The art and science of monetizing is knowing what you can charge, how you can charge, and where customers get value, but I've found there's a lot of gravity to charge "cost plus" that you actively have to fight to make sure customers pay for what they actually value, especially if you're bootstrapped.

Getting the first customer

Last time I tried indie hacking, I didn't get any customers. This time, I set a rule: no building unless I had someone I could reach out to as soon as it was ready. Anytime I had an idea or saw a pain point, I'd follow up, ask questions and create a Notion page to pitch and gather evidence of pain. They often have screenshots from text messages, links to tweets, photos, whatever.

That doesn't mean they'd actually use it (stated vs revealed preferences is def a real thing), nor that they would pay for it, but it was a start and it worked well for me. Everything I made had users after I launched. Glass and Automod even had preorders.

After a 1000 hours what you're working on starts to matter more

Getting paying customers was a big breakthrough for me but after working 60h weeks on them for 9 months I realized some things:

1. For automod, I'm not a community person and don't love the customer problem.
2. For glass, the dominant use case was spammy and questionable giveaways for promise of future tokens or entries into raffles. I don't care much for these use cases.
3. Building a product for people on Farcaster, a social network, meant it was wise to be online all the time, constantly engaging with twitter-like short form ephemeral content. It wasn't healthy for me, messed with my focus and meant I was on my phone constantly while out.

Maybe its obvious but building a proper product you spend 1000's of hours and make many sacrifices. Missing social outings, family moments, staying up late to support or meet with customers and partners on off hours. You spend a lot of time talking with customers, understanding what they need, and using every spare brain cycle thinking how you can best help them.

If you're not aligned at some level with what they're doing it makes a hard thing harder.

It's hard to know total addressable market up front

TAM is number of customers multiplied by the average revenue per customer. The average revenue bit can be difficult to guess at. It's hard enough to know if users will find the thing I'm building valuable, then if they'd be willing to pay for it at all and still yet, how much. Often your initial idea isn't monetizable and you have to monetize further downstream or pivot into another area.

Regardless, I wasn't able to capture enough value for either of my products. They combined for ~$1,000/mo but without much natural growth in sight. Since both products depended on users already being on Farcaster, I was limited by the 30k DAUs. Many of Farcaster channel communities were not monetizing or run in a serious way, so they didn't have extra funds to spend on community tooling. Business accounts active on Farcaster were also few.

So, the subscription model I was pursuing wasn't going to work. With the total number of users largely fixed, I would have had to switch where and how I was monetizing, like taking a cut on transactions for channel memberships or mints with glass. Both of those approaches to revenue are very different and harder to predict and model.

Overall the last 9 months went extremely well.

I hit a lot of personal milestones: getting 1000's of users, selling preorders, getting paying customers, getting business customers like Coinbase, getting offers for investment, and meeting new friends and cool people on Farcaster. It reinforced a lot of confidence in my ability to build, execute and sell product.

Now, to take a bigger swing.

The story of great v0s being built in a couple days is laughably common.

• Gmail - "1 day"
• Viaweb – "a couple days"
• Ebay - "one long weekend"

And they were simple too: Paul Graham's viaweb, an e-commerce platform, launched without the ability to process payments. You couldn't process a credit card transaction until 2 years after launch.

eBay launched without the ability facilitate payments, it couldn't even guarantee the buyers paid the sellers, just list and bid. Reviews were in a forum, separate from the bidding experience.

Many founders in the dotcom era allowed professional CEOs to come in around IPO time. For example: netscape, yahoo, ebay, google to name a few. That's a big cultural difference given how essential the role of founder CEO is now.

I wonder what changed this so strongly, maybe Scully, Jobs and Apple?

The Manhattan project was yet another example of how effective it is to get folks of different disciplines in a single space to collaborate from zero to one. I've found the same repeatedly throughout my career that specialization and silos don't lend well to innovation.

Growing up there were AOL free trial discs in random drawers and piles all over my house. I knew it was a common shared experience of that era but I understand why now. Their direct mail campaign was insanely successful: 10% of people received the disk, put it in their computer, signed up, and entered their credit card number. This is pre web too where I would have expected many to be cautious with their credit card information.

Based bill gates to Steve Case of America Online: "I can buy 2% of you. I can buy all of you. Or I can go into this business myself and bury you".

A lot of CEOs have these aggressive streaks earlier in their careers. In my brief time at Microsoft, elders spoke of famous "bill reviews" where they'd get absolutely wrecked by a well prepared and sharp Gates. Jeff Lawson had the same reputation at early Twilio and so did Jobs (relatively speaking) but it seems those days are numbered.

Maybe they get older and have less energy for conflict, maybe they find better strategies or whatever else but my corporate experience has mostly lacked high conviction, intelligent people willing to speak their mind directly without fear of hurting other's feelings. Instead it optimized more for consensus building, harmony, and not offending people.

How Netscape making the Web easy to use and rich with images was controversial as it would let the non technical "riff raff" in and degrade discourse. The pattern of early adopters resisting expansion and change is old as time but reminded me much of the crypto space and some of the cultural tendency to cling to overly technical UIs and concepts like networks and bridging.

"What got us here won't get us where we need to go."

"The computer will never be as important to society as the copier."

Said by a Xerox higher up about Xerox PARC's revolutionary personal computer, the Alto. Both funny and bizarre to read now as a millennial. I'm impressed a company as large and successful as Xerox could thrive and depend so much on copying physical paper. I can imagine the quarterly earnings reports discussing the proliferation of business and paper and how Xerox was at the center of it all. The idea that all this would be digitized must have felt so far fetched and idealistic. Technology is unforgiving.

He had been replying to messages all morning on a social network called Farcaster and was mid response with a customer before getting stuck on what to say. He stared down at the message as he walked before giving up and flipping back to the feed. A post about crypto prices and volatility rose to the top.

Why do people talk so much about this crap in crypto.

He began tapping out a scathing response. "Too unhinged", he thought and debated vague posting it to the timeline before his sense of civility and sensibility kicked back in.

The podcast he started when he left home buzzed back into his awareness, suddenly irritating.

What episode is this? ...Tarantino? Ah right, the one on biographies.

He restarted the episode and then opened up Telegram and saw 4 unread messages from group chats, some business, some personal.

Right, I still haven't responded to them...what did they want again?
Tap.
Shit, does this thing have read receipts?
It does.
God damn it. How do I turn those off?
Google confirmed you cannot.
Why? That's stupid.

And then an all familiar itch entered his brain.

I should post about this. Messenging apps should never...

He cancelled that post too. Some wiser part of J.'s conscious reminded him that there's no better way to appear clinically mad than to complain publicly. And that also, nobody fucking cares.

Some new notifications came in. Tap.

Nothing happened.
Come on...
Tap.
Cached?
Tap tap tap tap.

A second later the screen flashed and stuttered as the notifications flowed in.

Great. More emoji people followed me. Thanks Warpcast.

A screen time notification popped up and J. dismissed it, his thumbs impatiently tapping faster than the phone could render the buttons.

A background process kicked in and told him he was approaching a crosswalk. He must have cached its location in an earlier snapshot. He didn't mind waiting at crosswalks that much, he could use his phone guilt-free. Sometimes he'd even wait an extra lap of lights.

When the crosswalk went green he started tailgating a man in a suit, delegating his eyes to him while he continued catching up on his notifications. He opened Messenger to remember he hadn't got back to his friend who asked for lunch recommendations 2 days ago.

Damn it. Sorry Kyle.

In another chat Kate sent him a link to Instagram. He uninstalled it a year ago after spending too much time there but he had a policy to open her links. He wasn't logged in.

He opened 1password and scanned his face. It didn't work.

Scan again. Search Instagram username. Tap fill password. Tap. Copy. Close. Tap. Paste.

"You're accessing Instagram from a new location, enter a short code to access."

Here we go.

The code went to his disabled American phone number.

Settings. Cellular. T-Mobile. Enable cellular.

The man in the suit J. had been tailgating had tapered off by now. J. was taking periodic mental snapshots of the sidewalk he walked on but mostly gambling others were paying more attention than himself.

A message welcoming him to Japan streamed in as his network came online. His voicemail filled with calls from area codes he'd never seen before, but no short code.

Notification center. Airplane mode on. Airplane mode off. Pause. Nothing. Rerequest code.

A mother with a stroller pulled over to let J. pass. He was finally logged in but the link to the original content was lost.

Fucking classic.

He did notice 6 direct messages waiting for his response. Some family member was coming to Tokyo and asking for things to do. The rest were viral videos. His brother sent one of a japanese girl throwing fastballs in high heels.

She's actually got great form.

He watched 4 more before closing Instagram and remembering Kate had sent him a link. He tapped it again and was asked to sign in.

Fucking embedded browsers man.

He was 5 minutes passed his destination already.