hey everyone it's duaovy here with vibecheck and i have decided on the name the name of the podcast is vibecheck which i'm very excited about all about finding tribes communicating with them and building them definitely a farcaster coded podcast and i couldn't be more excited to have you you wanna go by colin or kojo what's what's
let's go kojo now that we're in the farcaster world
okay cool i'm here with kojo and i couldn't be more excited i saw you actually like this the first time at farcon i think when you you had to dial in but we've we've talked a lot since then and i think you know when i think about people who've who've honestly been extremely successful at sort of building tribes and building vibes on farcaster you are you know in sort of a rarefied air there so i will let you introduce yourself briefly just for people who don't know kojo who are you
cool briefly yeah yeah so i'm kojo dadde founder of ponder along with ben adamskeen we've got matthew moore on the team as well before this i founded a company called freeport while i was on farcaster as well there we sold fractional fine arts we actually had a collection of warhols we went through sec approval did all that stuff that's a whole story we can get into later but before that i was at apple so i was in product marketing at apple the apple pay team for two and a half years and before that partner marketing and then i was at american express before that so i have kind of a finance corporate finance background payments background marketing background but i have always been kind of a die hard crypto fanatic since 2013 when i first used it to do some illegal things on the internet
nice well we we won't dig into that too much that's awesome you're you're not the only person i feel like i've run into a lot of people on firecaster who have these sort of like i wouldn't call them hyper traditional but like it did exceedingly well in their like former lives so to speak and then decided like what what was it for you i couldn't take it anymore
it could've run better but no it was so it's really fun to grow in your career and to have a ladder right when you're at amex the ladder is really clear do these things you'll get promoted you'll do x y z apple's a little more difficult right so it's like a a higher degree of it's a much faster learning curve and much much stronger responsibility very very early but then you you get to a point where you start to think maybe you get a little bit cocky and you're like i can do pretty much anything because if i can be successful here at apple and manage you know a $5,000,000 a year marketing program for apple then i can probably go do anything so there's a little bit of like self confidence that grows over time in those places but also there's an opportunistic element where it's like do i have something valuable else to go do right like i'm not just gonna quit my job at apple if there's not something
to do
and for me we actually had a pretty good opportunity arise when you know a close family friend said i've got a bunch of warhols can you put them on chain and i said you know what that's the kind of opportunity that i'm gonna go after so it was it was a mix of things getting confidence in the career and myself and having a good opportunity
yeah i love that i think i think you're probably not alone in that sort of journey it's always sort of random it feels like at times but then but then once you're in it it could it couldn't have happened any other way okay cool so that's the background i really want to dig into punder because i'm honestly a little obsessed i've been i've been making i've been trending i'm pretty confident
you're over touching you're positive
this is something that we talked about before where i'm looking for validation that my follower count is not indicative of my follower strength strength or something like that i got i got to get like kbc or someone to do an analysis so that i can prove that out more more dynamically but ponder was really interesting to me i think because for a couple of reasons first it's just like people like people love polls right people love like the only thing people love more than like answering questions is like finding out if other people think the same way they do this is like i think a lot of what like reddit like kind of rallies around as well that's why uploading works and i think most of the value of reddit comes out of those types of things so it's it's always felt like a missing feature to me but i think one thing that has been interesting to watch you guys do is like try to see what that means in like a native web three format right so like this is something where i feel like a lot of people can actually learn from you guys where you start from sort of this first principles idea right of like what polls are and and what make them interesting and what make them important but then taking it a step further and not just being like okay and like you get tokens the answer right not not that that didn't exist but like there's there's more to it than that right so if you wanna just take me through what ponder is how you guys came up with the idea and then we can dig into sort of like what's worked and what hasn't i think that'll probably be super interesting to hear about
yeah yeah okay that all makes sense i think what it is so if you look back historically there are a bunch of companies or platforms that do q and a quora is a good example you just mentioned reddit that's a good example there's something about humans telling other humans their perspective on things that's really valuable and that is intriguing to us it's like it's storytelling right like yeah we tell me what happened next in the story in this person's specific point of view so so you can do that from a qualitative or a quantitative perspective which is what we've done to date although we had a little qualitative earlier on until frames came along and kind of forced us to be fully fully quant but we'll get back into qualitative as well and what we wanna do is sort of emerge that concept of i wanna understand what other people think especially what other capable capable people think who are building similar things as me or who are going through a similar sort of phase in life as me or who have other similarities so how can i understand what's going on on the cutting edge of crypto as quickly as possible from the people that i respect right and that's kind of like the emotion that ponder emerges from is if you could just have some master dashboard that showed you exactly what all populations on earth thought about any topic at any point in time you'd find that really useful right now we're not there but but it's that same sort of emotion so that's what we're trying to bring to life we started ponder though as just survey caster so back in the olden days and i think you were there for our our first unlonely live cast when we when we had the survey or nft drop that was that was actually a massive moment because a we got a little bit of funding that convinced us we could do this but b it showed us that we could develop a tribe by by utilizing some sort of live video and engaging with the platform in the native ways that other people on the platform sort of wanted to be engaged with but anyways we launched those nfts we had a lot of excitement and we just had this survey bot at that point in time the survey bot was just sending out questions that we thought would be super relevant to builders right the very first question was about purple and purple used to be the name of both an app and the purple public goods dao and we had a vote we had a public vote as to who should change their name and it ended up being the app that should change their name so purple public goods state the purple that we know and love but that was the very first survey that we sent out and then we sent out others along the lines of like hey how should you authenticate in your web three app should you implement twitter and google sign in as well as sign in with ethereum things like that so that we could all just get on one sort of get on the same page together and understand how we should be building and it's since emerged or sorry evolved from there into something that's much more sort of comprehensive and and i guess empowered by the new tools that the farcaster team is developing
yeah i mean i i do remember surveycaster i remember the bot it's funny how emergent is a really good word actually i like it just as much if not more than evolve because we sort of have i've been talking with this about a lot of people and i think this is gonna keep coming up it's like sort of how do you evolve with the protocol right like the the the ground is shifting underneath you and it's very like normally you do that inside of a startup right like we've we've at least i've been a part of and i know a lot of other people have bought our you know seed series a sort of start ups where you're in there you're all working together everything's shifting around you but you're all working together right and i'm sure it's happened in other sort of like blockchain ecosystems where like you know there's forks and upgrades and things of that nature but generally speaking i i don't think i think this is sort of a unique moment where dan and vy have sort of created this this sandbox effectively right and we're all sort of like building and like figuring things out inside but at the same time they have the sandbox they're like chucking new toys in every friday oh
i'm just
gonna shake
it up a little bit today yeah
exactly everyone's there like building their sand castle and then they're like oh you guys have water to break it to us oh jeez okay i could technically build the mode right so there's all these different things happening and i think you guys navigated it really well but yeah bot the bot was great and and i guess my point here is that like it's been interesting to see you guys like those first surveys really were for like they felt like they were for all of farcaster because of the the community because they're small
twelve thirteen people
yeah exactly yeah and now i ask about saws vehicles and i think i hit like a hundred i didn't people had really strong feelings about that
it's an important topic
i i think so maybe we'll see a serious question for sure but tell me more about some stuff that you guys did that didn't work because i i've been talking to a lot of folks and they i i feel like there's we always say like ship in public build in public whatever and like it's just everyone keeps yelling it because the fear is so innate right like the fear of failure the fear of rejection is so innate i wanna bring some of that to light because you guys have failed a
lot yet
i'll i'll share my let
me i can go before that
i'll share my first misstep because you're talking about the unknowingly stream my first misstep was minting only one of those surveyors at a time and usually getting rugged with shitty cards
i paid like i don't know whenever i paid like $50.60 bucks or cards like $30.40 bucks in gas i was like you know what i deserve it i still just believed in the product i love ben and colin he makes
me feel better though dan romero popped in and he this is the most he's engaged with our product by the way but he popped in and he minted one and he got the worst card in the deck like stats support one most generic possible card and then bounced and i'm like man that's not a great impression i'm the founder of farcaster but that's okay that's okay they
sold i remember ever you guys like ben was like shocked people were getting these crazy rare pulls like one of thousands like in a row from different people and i opted nothing a row nothing yeah
not everyone made that alive yeah i still but but to your point like what's gone wrong we had this i especially had this like childish enthusiasm around even those cards so you know you get excited you get excited about new capabilities that that come up and i just got a notification here i don't know if you got that also
was it from me or from you
you run out of free disk space i think it's from zancaster but anyways let let me start that over
yeah yeah yeah we can we can chop it up
so anyways we we had i had this childish sense of wonder around just creating nfts so i because i ruptured my achilles like an absolute idiot playing pickleball i had a lot of free time just sitting in front of my computer not going out anywhere so i developed this surveyor nft sort of passes as a way into the surveycaster ecosystem at the time but we didn't have any plans for like creating a frame right that that will allow people to create polls at that point in time i thought we would have a card game in association with the surveys and the quality of your cards and your stats would actually impact the amount of rewards that you got for your answers like all kinds of stuff that you sort of you wanna leave the white space open for it to like be imaginative but in retrospect you're also like what what was my strategy like that's ridiculous but but you keep sort of navigating and seeing and seeing what works we you know we we did a lot of other things we just retired the the ponder tokens as an example and we retired the ability to have us submit surveys on your behalf through the through the app punder handle we liked the idea theoretically but then in practice we saw only a few people were using it and they did love it i will say but only a few people were using it and it like added endless complication to our back end we had to make sure that we were reviewing people's surveys we'd have to say no like they would give us money 750 ponder tokens to send their survey out but then if the survey wasn't up to the quality that we want it to be up to we'd have to say well sorry we're not gonna send this out even though you've already sent us the tokens so we had to like rescind that capability and then we've just simplified and simplified and simplified and and tried to identify the things that people wanna do repeatedly over time and that's kind of where we're at now with a lot of new stuff on the horizon though i will say
yeah we'll definitely dig into that because i think what's coming is gonna be super interesting as well we've talked a little bit about it but we'd love to love to drop some alpha on the podcast gotta give the users their value i love the viewers yep yeah yeah the game's super interesting i i didn't even know you guys were heading that direction it's funny how these things always happen though because it's always the stuff that you think you kind of don't think much of at least me personally it's it's it's always the things that are sort of orthogonal that like end up being worth a lot i think that's by definition right like the people who go out there and collect things that they know are going to be valuable while everyone else is doing it too and that's where like the og the og nft is like you just had to be active right so i do i do secretly hope that ponder takes off and my three shitty cards end up being a
retirement fund by the way do you still have your og nft
i do yeah i do do you guys did you dump it
no no i still have mine i still have mine
yeah i think they're not a random number like if it's a million bucks it would be hard to keep but until then it's like it's on chain identity right like you never know what it's going to be useful for it's proof of where i've been it's so deeply tied to everything i
do right
i feel like a lot of people feel that way
yeah i fully agree that's my stance i think that's ben's stance on it too but but as far as the cards go by the way the survey cards % in the back of my head i'm like scheming i'm scheming for a way to get these cards to become either useful or valuable over time and it's like as long as we survive long enough and we find product market fit i'm gonna make it happen
yeah i mean it doesn't it happens regardless right that's the funny thing right like useful is great i'm all for utility i really am i i love those things but like the fact of the matter was like the most useless token of all time it's like an ai generated thing from dan that just says og on it smarts in a plethora of memes it's the meme
it's the meme i am
yeah exactly and you know the other interesting thing about that and i'll i will dovetail this into another question is like i i've i've i joined like i don't know six or seven like og gated nft group chats just because like people kept reminding me i'm like yeah sure whatever it's a it's a new group chat feature we'll we'll look it out and you can just you can almost smell the people who bought them aftermarket
oh yeah oh yeah a % i'm in one of the spirits where i can smell yeah
yeah yeah you can't really fake it right and that's one of the interesting things about these things like you can buy it and like maybe for token gating purposes it'll get you access somewhere but it but like you can't really fake your way into these things which i think is something really interesting about the the social proof that that's happening now whereas you know there was a lot less of that like i feel like for bored apes and punks at least during the nft craze the whole point was you could like buy yourself it like they loved that like justin bieber had one it was like a marketing gimmick and like i i don't think any of us would care if justin bieber ever bought a farcaster it'd be funny yeah but like it wouldn't change my stance on the project one way or another
yeah yeah i fully agree with that i can't think of any celebrity
who's who's buying
an og nft would would sort of impact me there might be one i don't know elon
would be interesting
just just as like a signal as a signaling thing that i'm sure there's some out there who are like you know maybe not pop culture celebrities but like celebrities to crypto nerds right
like if the metallic on one yeah i wonder if the metallic got no he probably wasn't active then
i don't know
if he's telling to your point though about like like being part of the community over a long period of time i was telling fun welterwelter.eath or fun.eath welter that one of the things that you should create is a map of people's activity over the past year and a half so you can see who was actually active during the period because there were some people that like just sort of got invited right like you're you're on podcast really early but then you never used it and then you know it became popular so okay now i'm gonna sort of recycle my efforts and then come back in
yeah
i think that a map of people just to shame the people who did that a map of people that were active during that period of time that was like the struggle
yeah
would be would be super useful
i think it'd be really funny there is definitely some people without naming names who sort of told on themselves when they rejoined during the madness i'm like woah you have a very low fid and do not understand any of the cultural norms that is super interesting actually i i mean no offense to anyone i mean you know everyone misses something and people have their own incentives this is not like shame but it is definitely like oh you are posturing as something that you're not right now and to me that's supremely uninteresting but i think i get it
i need to watch the the people come in now from twitter too that are like they're trying to bring their same strategies in and you're just like what are you doing and again i don't wanna i don't wanna name names here but there's some folks that i think i don't know gmoney is one of them so like he came in and he started bringing in like giveaways and things that are like oh do x y or z and get this and it's just like oh no don't don't do that in here and by the way i think gmoney is awesome super legit but it's just like you just see that strategy falls flat against and i i love that forecaster is able to push back against that like the the culture is so strong that yeah
so the the alternative title i had for this podcast is actually positive fragmentation which is sort of the idea that like saying no to people whether it be through product or through tribes or through communication like that is a really important part of sort of the human experience right or like when you study cults or intentional communities as i like to call them like the the your leading exit is really important right like if you're literally jailing people and keeping people there it can you can never have that sort of deep seated belief that you wanna be that you need to sort of let people at least think that they can leave right like i think i think i think i can leave broadcaster i think dan knows i can at this point like i'm fully locked in but like that's that's how you sort of create those those things and i think it's yeah it's it's interesting to watch especially because some of those tactics are working with a new subset of audience as well like there is serious fragmentation going on but when push comes to shove and this is actually what i wanna talk to you a little bit about next about like getting traction for something other than a giveaway for for for getting someone to do something without you know degen rewards let's say i'm not saying those things don't have their place and they have you know specific audiences and use cases they definitely do but i think a lot of people sort of miss the forest for the trees so to speak where they say you know i want to get likes or i want to get recast and i'm willing to pay for them ultimately you're doing yourself a disservice because you're gonna ruin your product feedback you're gonna get an audience that you don't even really want have you thought about that at all with ponder have you thought about any of it tell me
i think it's really important to be and everyone says this so i don't hesitate to say it but like adding value rather than extracting value right now in the life cycle of farcaster i think you can sort of pay for engagement with dgen you can you can gain followership by being genuine as a creator which is by the way what i think you should be doing which it's you seem to be to some degree but but but like you can you can add value as a creator because you're talking about content that's relevant to people and you're consistently showing up and doing that and i think that's that's adding value you can be infrastructurally interesting you can be like a a nanar right or you can be like like frames js or frog or any of those that's useful to other builders there you don't see a lot of folks that are just sort of building their brand on farcaster i guess paragraph is a good example but paragraph is also sort of like adding their infrastructure layer but folks that are just building their brand over time for a product that isn't like distinctly farcaster related and by that i mean like we are farcaster related but long term the ponder vision is gonna be that we can deliver these types of surveys anywhere right obviously we're like the children of farcaster so we're not going anywhere anytime soon but but there's this sort of greater vision of being able to ingest human insights in real time from everywhere forever so so anyways when when you come around to sort of identifying how you build a followership i think you need to figure out how you offer value to other people i think the way that we offer value right now is we make it really easy to to make polls and we manage all the sort of back end infrastructure and then we allow you to go sort of review those polls over time and we're gonna keep making that dashboard more valuable so that when you're using ponder you just feel like you have superpowers effectively right like like that's the goal for us to add value and then you also just have to show up over time like the equation you can be really really good and really punchy for a short amount of time and you can make really punchy frames that get 1,500 recasts like a lot of them did when frames first came out but there is a time element that is like really really critical like showing up consistently and doing something consistently over time is hard and that's something that like can differentiate you from other brands we send a survey out every day we've sent out like a survey every day for over a year maybe we've missed 15 or something like that like a lot a lot of days so anyways yeah showing up and adding value if i had to just simplify my long winded description
no i feel like you're i feel like you're speaking direct directly to me about the podcast like i kinda like i'm trying to get like a backlog of episodes going
yeah
yeah this is this is exactly what i'm trying to do i i agree with you a % like especially with the adding value thing i think a lot of this is very ephemeral and we're gonna see it i i don't think anyone thinks dao goes straight up right like there's gonna be dips and things and whether your audience sticks around and whether you and like whether that's for farcaster like for you specifically right because you guys obviously like you were just saying even if people just like love ponder and then end up hanging out on the website because they're like i like twitter better than farcaster but i do like pander i'm going to stick around there that's still a success for you guys right that's still you've built your own audience and tried
we've yet to find that customer but yes that's totally that'd be great
well it's early though right like we've talked about this and i've said this this before i think you know using broadcast as the distribution is like it's the go to right now and it's really silly to fight dan on that because he's already said he goes you know he wants dao on the protocol the best way to do that is to get people on the dapp and if you think you're fighting a unicorn with 10 or 15 of the best engineers in the world for trying to make a product that gathers attention when you can just it's not really a vampire attack but hopefully you're adding like if you do it correctly you're also adding value to the to the to that right and like whether that is long term tbd right like whether like you can build an entire like business just being inside of wordcast tbd but in the short term it's very i struggle to find any other go to market that makes sense if you're targeting farcaster users
yeah yeah i think i think that's that's entirely accurate one of the problems i think some people run into is they think of oh it's a farcaster client that i have to build and if i have to build a farcaster client to make it my own then i need to have feature parity with warpcast and then like you're you're wrecked from that point on you're wrecked because you're not gonna have feature parity with with warpcast right like i think some people are brilliant like wodge is brilliant like i forget who does did flink but like super smart and i think like they will take some market share supercast clearly has has some market share because they're doing things differently but i think people need to disabuse themselves of this concept that it has to be a farcaster client or that a client needs to look anything like farcaster like you can use that information rework it into your own experience and just have the sort of social graph or the social network on the back end be farcaster and it can like host the comments almost which is like a little tip of the hat towards something that we'll we'll be doing in the future but it can like host the conversation you don't have to create another competitive client right you can there's other ways to utilize the information that exists on hubs that looks nothing like a client that becomes much more useful and and is its own standalone products that's at least part of the thesis of ponder
no i think that's i think that that should be every smart person's thesis right now you should be finding ways to leverage maybe the probably the most incredible social graph since what facebook instagram tiktok maybe but is tiktok even as i feel like tiktok's not even really a social graph as much as it is like an algorithm right like it's sort of using it to feature content like in terms of like actual social graphs that like that have a lot of interaction it does feel like i don't know since facebook probably is is what i would say is is what we've seen
and with payments baked in too which is just like mind blowing right i i don't think we've even gotten close to exploring what that can what that can power so
there's good yeah there's gonna be i mean it's we're still definitely serving the cambrian moment we're i'd i'd say we're out of sort of the primordial loose but but we're definitely not anything sort of full fledged yet i don't think even dannerview would would sort of claim pmf i i'll claim it for them i think i think this this counts as pmf
well a hundred k and dan has to start dancing for us right yeah yeah
yeah archon yeah he's getting he's getting real for us
honestly that that might be the time that might be where the axis correlates the dancing slash qdao axis
yeah that'll definitely be a market top but it's fine
yeah i feel like it's the nft
i feel like founders dancing traditionally especially in crypto but broadly speaking whether it's like ballmer or like the dutch coin guy like founders dancing just like usually isn't a great time to be that is true being dry
you're you're at
the bottom but it'll be funny and i i think the top's gotta come either way we're running a little low on time what's i wanna make sure we we we get in what what's going on with pander what's new what's exciting plug it what what do you want people to try out say say something about actionable items
yeah so so top level the cool thing to do with ponder right now is to just make a poll and you can make a poll at weponder.io on our website or if you're extremely lazy or efficient depending on how you look at it you can just go to the ponder channel and we have pinned at the the top of that channel the poll creating frame so you basically just go to the ponder channel it'll be right there at the very top pinned you can type in your question type in your your survey results or sorry type in the answer options and then literally right from that frame you click launch and it will launch the poll for you so you never actually have to even leave the the warpcast app to launch your poll and then we'll do all this sort of data aggregation people vote vote in real time and then forever after you'll be able to go back and look at your poll on the dashboard on our website and there are a lot of fun features that are coming to that dashboard so right now you can just see what the general population we like to call them gen pop what they voted for on your poll but we're also gonna allow people to sort of filter by whether or not they have a power badge or what their fid is or their follower account other things like that longer term we'll implement filtering by like nfts not that long term but like after we'll have filtering by nfts so that you can start to actually look at the data and and gain useful insights from it right and say like okay people that are are active power users actually have a different viewpoint than the general population and they gave me this feedback about whether or not i should start a podcast or a youtube channel channel right so anyways that's what i would recommend people do is go make polls and then utilize the dashboard the new dashboard that we have coming up soon again i just mentioned the dashboard is gonna expand we're also looking into some qualitative stuff that i don't think we can quite release at the moment but people should know that we're in seed club and the seed club demo day is gonna be june 20 so by june 20 we'll need to have an experience that's that's pretty compelling i think we have an experience that's compelling as it stands right now but even more compelling by then so that's the next kind of like critical date for ponder and then after that you know there's there's a there are a lot of things that are much more web three in the works i'll say but not that we can announce currently
awesome no i'm i'm super pumped about it i really wanna see you guys succeed i will say i actually had a i was i was in a message i totally forgot to but i'll i'll throw it here at the end of the comments just as like a funny anecdote from my own experience using ponder which like i made that poll about the the the ideal sauce vehicle i was sitting there i had i had i had fries earlier that day and i was having a rice dish later i was like and i was having trouble deciding i think ultimately i went with rice but i wanted what's the best way to get a sauce or a dipping sauce something to you know from plate to digestive system and rice took an early lead but i was really shocked to see that when asia woke up fries and potatoes caught up pretty dramatically so i think there's one of these like you don't need to build that for me specifically but i had not thought about the response timing as being sort of an interesting metric to watch how things sort of how people in different time zones react and that's all part of that social graph that farcaster has that like quora could never right
totally totally totally the other thing to keep in mind is when you post things matters a lot on farcaster too just like other social networks like yeah posting at 11am eastern standard time is probably a good idea as a general rule just because there's a lot of activity between like 11:11am and 1pm but yeah the the polls are open for forty eight hours so we try to take everyone globally into account dude it's wild when we look at like the countries that people are visiting our website from it's like it's not just us uk australia it's like indonesia turkey nigeria kenya it's like it's super super global which is which is awesome and all of our traffic is coming from farcaster so it's just it's really cool to see the product propagating in that way japan now also has been pretty good
yeah all the big crypto places man they're they're they're out here trying to answer surveys so alright i don't wanna keep you longer than scheduled i i mean i could talk to you all day but kojo dot eath make sure you go follow him i'm dewofi make sure to follow me too weponder.io is the website go try out go try out the polls or slash ponder for the channel on forecast and then yeah there's the alpha for everyone who made it to the very end we we buried the lead post at 11am eastern if you want engagement that's if you don't get anything
we'll take that slot yeah it's fine
right no i think that's you want everyone on there like you wanna ride your wave right like people like oh the poll comes out at 11am eastern what what else is happening on our cast or david casted something too i should have
help you grab his podcast yeah exactly
also i'll i'll have to make a poll for the podcast i have to say did you like this or was or you know or not or something like that i should start getting feedback with this
as well but it's
appreciate the time so much man really deeply wish you nothing but the best any sign offs or you good
no we're good glad you're doing this and keep it up yourself
appreciate it man alright cool later