1. Lack of focus is kills startups; the number of things you can work on pre-product market fit is finite
2. Settings after often (but not always) a sign of underdeveloped product thinking
3. Most users don't want settings; they don't want to do work; it should just work out of the box; finding the right default is critical
4. Giving power users a setting means you'll get less feedback if the default isn't working, since average users don't complain, they just stop using the app
5. Power users often want very different things than average users
6. 99% of new features should be focused on the solving the existential problem. Farcaster existential issue is growing daily active users, which means figuring out the right defaults. And upstream of growing daily active users is growing the supply of interesting and entertaining content.
7. Part of prioritization is making the right investments in scalability, e.g. why we have some people working on Hubs right now
There has been discussion recently about bring your own algorithm (BYOA) for social networks. Here are some challenges:
At-scale, world-class consumer apps in 2024 use machine learning (AI) based feeds. This is overwhelming consumer revealed preference in terms of time spent.
Making a good machine learning feed is hard and requires significant resources to make performant and real-time.
If you want to do a feed marketplace with good UX, you'd likely need to create a backend where developers would upload their models and the client runs the model in their infra. This obviously has privacy concerns, but maybe possible.
TBD if consumers would be willing to pay for your algo, though.
The likely outcome is a marketplace of clients, where each have a different algorithm that uses inputs (both public from the protocol and private from app usage) to tailor a model for each user.
PS — here are two data points from a developer who was building a Farcaster client: 1) feed performance is a challenging engineering problem and 2) running the backend is expensive (the client had a few hundred active users).
Kartik on Warpcast
1. building a mobile app, we rebuilt it 3x before we grokked it 2. feed latency/performance, much harder problem than we initially realized, hence scrapping custom feeds beyond lists
Kartik on Warpcast
~$2k/month
A functioning app is a necessary condition, but one you have 100% control over. It is not sufficient. You then have 4 difficult problems to solve—at the same time. In increasing order of difficulty:
Awareness
Onboarding
Retention
Interesting and entertaining content
Awareness
How do people know about your app?
Also known as distribution. This is hard, for people who are naturally more building-oriented. It's almost always hand to hand combat early on. Good essay on the topic:
https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-9-notes-essay
Onboarding
How much friction to get started?
Congrats, you got someone to hear about your app. How easy is it to go from hearing about it to getting set up? How many steps? Can they do it on their phone, i.e. immediately? What is the first screen they see after a successful sign up? How are you building habit?
Retention
Does the person come back?
They've downloaded the app, signed up and used it for 2 minutes. They close the app. For most apps, 50% of people never come back. Do you have their email? Do they push notifications enabled? Did you think a web-first app without any contact method is going to retain?
Interesting and entertaining content
Your app's energy source today and every day, forever.
Is it getting less interesting? People will just switch over to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or Twitter for an endless stream of algorithmic content. (People love algo feeds despite stated preference.) If you have a growing and sufficiently large pool of interesting and entertaining content, however:
Retention — people will stick around for the content
Onboarding — they will jump through rings of fire for it
Awareness — they will hear about it from friends
Your app — can be rough around the edges
So one big advantage of building on Farcaster is if the network continues to grow the number of interesting and entertaining people and channels—esp. outside of crypto—then your app starts with interesting and entertaining content for free.