🚪 How to build product in web3

A collection by Mac Budkowski

William Mathews & Frontdoor
April 20, 2023

We're excited to share that we've now launched! 🚀 Frontdoor is an AI librarian that lets you curate knowledge on the internet, automatically organise it, and explore a rabbit hole of content from the best builders around you

We're gifting some pretty special NFTs 👀 to our earliest curators - join the club: https://www.frontdoor.xyz/

Background

For those of you who don't know, Mac Budkowski is the creator of the podcast- Web3 Talks. It's a product focused podcast where he interviews web3 founders to find out: How they built their product, What worked and What didn't.

He also works as a consultant for web3 projects and helps them in growth, product & biz dev. You can also check his free guide titled 'How to explain what your web3 product does and convince users to try it'.

Heres what he gave us 👇

3️⃣ Tweets

1/ @Sebaudet26 - The trick to building great products in web3

Easiest trick to build great products in web3 is to actually be a user. Not an investor. Not a speculator. Just an active user. You'll probably stumble on hundreds of problems with great product potential.
Crazy how many people fail at this step.
— sΞb ⚡️ (@sebaudet26)
May 27, 2022

Mac: This mini-thread by Seb covers a simple yet powerful truth.

2/ @pedrouid on product design

"You should literally write down every single step that the user needs to take before you even design or develop code."
@pedrouid on @WalletConnect product design process https://t.co/81mrQJvKPQ
— Web3 Talks: Stories & Tips from the Builders (@web3talks)
Jan 7, 2023

Mac: Pedro Gomes shares the product design process they use in WalletConnect

3/ @ranjan3118 on the Farcaster ecosystem

The quality of ecosystem apps built on your infrastructure is dependent on how good a product builder you yourself are.
This is the reason why I'm bullish on apps that are being built on @farcaster_xyz
These builders will be well guided by the Farcaster team themselves.
— Ayush Ranjan | Huddle01 (@ranjan3118)
Sep 17, 2022

Mac: If you want to convince people to build on top of your protocol or ecosystem, you should show them amazing MVPs you built yourself. They will draw users to your ecosystem, making it more attractive and inspiring the next builders to tap into that userbase.

2️⃣ Articles

1/ Josh Elman: “How will they make money?” is the wrong question

Mac: Founders & PMs are often trying to monetize their consumer products, and Josh Elman (who managed products at LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Robinhood & Apple) shares his unorthodox framework for thinking about this problem.

“How will they make money?” is the wrong question

Seems like every year we hear about a few new consumer networks raising large amounts of money at high valuations. And right on cue, we hear cynics asking, “But how will they ever make money?” let…

https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/how-will-they-make-money-is-the-wrong-question-a5890c2c2cc0

🤖Frontdoor Summary: The article emphasises that the primary challenge for large consumer networks is not how they will make money, but rather how they will become long-standing, durable networks and define new behaviours or verbs. The author considers four key questions to evaluate whether a network is durable or just a passing fad: 1) Is there a new behaviour that can attract 100M+ users? 2) Is the product evolving to increase user engagement and commitment over time? 3) Will the growth be sustainable? and 4) Can the key behaviours be monetised at scale? The author argues that once a network can answer these questions positively, monetisation will likely follow, making high valuations worthwhile.

2/ Jason Shah: A product manager's guide to web3

Mac: Comprehensive PM’s guide highlighting the differences between building in web2 and building in web3.

A product manager’s guide to web3

How PMing in web3 is different, the pros and cons of going web3, how to break in, and how to be successful—by guest author Jason Shah, head of product at Alchemy

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-product-managers-guide-to-web3?r=gnlqy&s=r

🤖Frontdoor Summary: Web3 product management differs from traditional product management in three ways: it's more versatile, more art than science, and more public. PMs are not yet common in web3, and most successful web3 projects do not have PMs. In web3 0-1 phase, PMs are not as necessary, and the core skills required for web3 PMs are different. However, there are situations that create a need for a PM in web3 startups, such as when engineers become inefficient, the product experience is complex, or there's a mix of externally facing activities that a versatile PM can handle.

1️⃣ Podcast

Web3Talks #38: Colin Armstrong

#38: Colin Armstrong, Founder @ Paragraph | How they combined web2 & web3 features to create a Substack alternative that’s already used by over 5k creators

Listen to this episode from Web3 Talks: Stories & Tips from the Builders on Spotify. Colin Armstrong has been in crypto since 2011 and has spent years working at Coinbase and Google. He built Paragraph to create a more neutral and web3-friendly alternative to Substack. The project has already amassed 5k+ creators and 100k+ subscribers, and Colin shares how they made it happen. >>> Never miss an episode and check how Paragraph works in practice by subscribing to our newsletter: https://paragraph.xyz/@kanfa <<< TIMESTAMP: 0:38 How to make sure you get info about the new web3 talks episodes 1:27 Why Paragraph is a great example of web2.5 Substack 2:22 How Colin’s experience at mining Bitcoin in 2011, building decentralized Kickstarter in 2014, working at Coinbase with the founder of Litecoin, spending 5 years at Google, and being dissatisfied with Substack led him to build Paragraph 13:37 What were the most interesting Paragraph use cases Colin has seen so far 16:24 How do they manage to ship features so fast, and why waitlist doesn’t make sense in most products 19:40 How do they decide what to include on their roadmap 21:12 Why they’ve been integrating with web3 social and how it works in practice 23:17 How they acquired their first 10 users via cold outreach on Twitter, and why they didn’t implement any crypto functionalities in v1 25:16 What they’ve been doing to acquire 5k+ users and how they used the market situation to their advantage 28:40 How do they measure success in their product and why just looking at the number of writers or readers wouldn’t work 30:34 What do they do to protect newsletters from landing in the spam box 33:09 What are their plans for integrating wallets and why is infra not ready for it yet 36:43How does wallets x Paragraph x Farcaster integration work technically and why do they use Searchcaster 39:20 How a developer built a streaming payment with Superfluid on top of Paragraph without needing any permission 40:51 How getting developers to build on top of their APIs was easier than he thought 44:13 Why choosing the right feature set for their niche was so hard and why web3 UX & e-mail limitations led to design challenges 47:10 What would Colin build if he wasn’t building Paragraph 50:00 Why would he get rid of airdrop hunters and speculators with his web3 magic wand and add new useful dapps with great UX 52:33 Colin’s favorite web3 projects (spoiler alert: he mentions Farcaster) 56:00 Where can you learn more about Paragraph 57:01 What other builders would be a great fit for the podcast

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0MU7k8cVCPrLQ4GJz9Obof?si=22edf28e1d5f4929&nd=1

Mac: In this episode, Colin Armstrong, Founder & CEO of Paragraph, tells how they developed their product used by 5k+ creators. It’s a great story since it shows how starting with web2 features and integrating web3 on top of them might be the right way to build.

Want to find out more? You can find Mac at the below links

Macs Twitter

Web3Talks Twitter

Web3Talks Podcast

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