Vibe Check with @dawufi ep15 with @grace of /unlonely
Aired Date
January 30, 2025
Series
Vibe Check
Episode
Vibe Check with grace
Watch on YouTube
https://youtube.com/live/HqEPQmliBzMwhat is up everyone welcome to another episode of vibecheck this week we have on the lovely grace from unlonely a company that's near and dear to my heart unlonely was one of the first platforms that i first got involved with when i was starting to make a name for myself on what's called web three social and i've been following them ever since they've had an incredible journey her and her brother brian within some interesting pivots going from streaming to more of a media company based to solana talk about things like ltv of a crypto user versus normal users and definitely some locked in alpha here as well which is starting tomorrow so i had a blast i hope you have a good time listening to it too and without further ado here's the next episode of vibecheck with grace from unlomi
alright we're in with vibecheck it's it's been a long time coming we have a great smile
finally i'm lonely that was the calendar invite that i got sent and i love that
yeah well you guys are a big part of my lore i don't know i've told this to people but like i haven't i don't know how much i've stayed like publicly but like i'm only with like my first like social experience in crypto
really
period yeah yeah
but you found us through farcaster though right
yeah but like i wasn't posting i wasn't anyone i guess in some okay
so you you were on farcaster but you were lurking you hadn't really like built social connections yet until i'm lonely
which is a hilarious title for it now in in hindsight but that's where i met syed obviously you i was i think my claim to fame is i was there for both times brian cried on stream i'm a lonely person i will i will take that to to my grave as like my a badge of honor no but you're here
badge yeah yeah yeah yeah you have all the the context and all of the lore
all the lore it's been
quite a journey
it has and i wanna talk about it all with you because i think it's well one it's really interesting just like as a story i think it's compelling but i also think it's interesting especially as we enter bull markets and like people are building businesses or trying to they are launching tokens they are pivoting and i think there's a big consumer thing happening my lens is always through opacity and like z k two l that's obviously but you guys have been at this for a while i think there's a lot to learn there's a lot of interesting stuff but before we get into all that grace who are you and feel free to answer that any way that you feel is appropriate
who am i
at the moment what's at the forefront okay i i'll go into the back so fine i'm cofounder of unlonely i've been building unlonely with my brother brian who is the unhinged character on the internet for going on the last two years which is actually pretty crazy to think about i come from like a trad tech background i was working at youtube i was working at google i was in the bay area for like four or five years and then i moved abroad and i was in london did b school there and during that time sort of stumbled down the crypto rabbit hole this was like circa 2020 and then have just never left and i'm still a little bit shocked to to to realize that like sometimes i step back and i'm like wow i'm really i'm really still doing this that's kinda wild but i love it here i do love it here like through the bear through the bull there's pros and cons to both but the people have always kept me here and you're one of those people for sure like long live the erewhon water tasting moments
we'll get into water tasting but with some niche stuff that we got to do over at far con but as far as what i brought you on there's been a lot of interesting stuff in the unlonely journey that at least i've been sort of privy to a little bit inside mostly outside
you moved to new york mhmm which is exciting and that was a very similar time i'm sure it wasn't like i'm sure a lot of it was coincidence but she also made this big pivot from like based to solana and brian is untinged and i i absolutely love him for it i think we need more of it in the space yeah and it was let's call it contentious on barcaster
it was it was yeah i mean i feel like i have to like rewind to the the beginning of unlonely i mean you were one of our probably first users and like you were like reliably in the chat i feel like on every major stream that we've ever had and even if it's
just a
stream like you're you are chronically online in a huge way and i definitely saw that as like the person who was on unlily who was always like monitoring all the streams and making sure that they were all working out so anyway like for those who don't know unlily started off as like a decentralized live streaming platform like a web through twitch is i think what we were calling it and our first like a hundred users all came from farcaster and there were all these i mean kazi was streaming ted was streaming you stream for a little bit we had gm farcaster like kind of the old og crew the cozy crew days and we were like constantly searching for this like crypto feature to to kind of to combine with live streaming that we thought would like make it take off and to to brian's credit i think he was intuitively like definitely in the right direction like he was all in on tokens before this whole meme coin season started we were talking about creator tokens we tried to launch creator tokens for channels and we played around with that a lot but i think from what we've seen with pump fun is like we actually came about it kind of maybe the wrong way like we went live streaming first which is like a huge barrier to entry definitely takes like a lot of like intentionality and overcoming maybe your fear of like not being edited or something like that and like thinking of yourself as a creator and this is a distribution channel we went live streaming first and then tokens after so we like required you to have a channel on and lonely and be live in order to launch channel and we thought or to launch a token and we thought that the context like the added context of you being live and having an audience already was gonna allow for that token to maybe like have a better chance of success pump fun obviously went like the total opposite direction they were just like meme coin shit coin launchpad and like just get as many out there as you physically can and just like make that super easy gamify the shit out of it and then later on they added live streaming which was interesting and then also later on infamously they had to switch off live streaming because people were absolutely going insane and doing crazy ass shit like just inappropriate things violent things all sorts of abuse all sorts of spam all sorts of scams like it's just a wild world out there with like user generated content and content moderation and that conversation continues to be really interesting because you know with zuckerberg being like we're tate we're like getting rid of all of our content moderation it's just gonna be elon style community notes that's wild like tiktok getting banned and everyone all the tiktok refugees moving to xiaohongshu is also wild it's like a crazy time to be a social a social consumer which like everyone is i feel like like unless you're literally like i'm hiding from the internet i don't i i i don't have instagram i don't have tiktok i don't have twitter i don't have any of these accounts like i don't connect with ugc in any sort of way this is relevant to you so i still think it's like a super interesting space to be in but what we found was that like crypto definitely didn't feel super ready for that like we were really hyper focused on serving a crypto native audience and i think there was like a lot of cool stuff that we learned from that one is like the ltd of a crypto user is so much higher like the willingness to spend the willingness to pay for a certain kind of experience or even just to experiment or even just to be early is so is like astronomically higher than any web two social user who like doesn't expect to have to pay for any content that they ever interact with or consume and the other is that there is like really fun like maybe speculative stuff or interactive stuff that you can incorporate into live streaming and we're still really like bullish on that as a medium of greater closeness like like you as a viewer like wfp like i didn't know who you were for i don't know probably like the first like six months of you being like in our chats but we felt like we knew who you were you know and we felt that connection in a real way because it was like we were chatting with you in real time all the time and it wasn't these asynchronous like back and forth threads whatever you know there was like personality and personhood behind it so anyway that's kind of like i feel like that's helpful context to just like set the scene for what unlonely was and then the many pivots that we've taken to like get to where we are now
yeah there's a lot there's a lot in there damn there's so many things i wanna talk about we're gonna try to get to all of it we'll go back to solana in a second but just some notes on what you were talking about because i was i just did one with dan hubert we're gonna i'm gonna put out later that's not out yet at the time of this recording but we were talking about like sort of like the democratization of like difficult things and it always struck me that like brian got really fucking good at streaming like he was yeah he has a good personality for it but it became like kind of a skill issue at the end like i tried live streaming i always knew it was hard but then you tried and i'm like man this is really hard
yeah yeah
but like
it's a fully experienced yeah
for sure it really is but then it's like when you one of those skill issue things it's like it's hard to upscale people right it's hard to get people to be charismatic it's hard to do those things and like it takes a lot of work and like you can put as much incentive behind it as you want like if it's not fun and a lot of times streaming is not fun a lot of the times right yeah it can get difficult so with that there's like this pivot that you guys did to i don't know it's it's not quite a production company but it is there's like certain events that you guys are going on so i would love to know well one i don't know if that makes sense i feel like you're sort of democratizing the skill issue thing here where it's like we're gonna set you guys up for success instead and that feels like a way stronger product it's it's similar to what you guys were doing before like at its core it is kind of the same thing but the strategy of go to market around it it's like totally different so i don't know does that resonate and is that also like if you could dovetail that right into the unlock thing i wouldn't i or locked in so i'm i'm all thinking token unlocks locked in they'll be locked then unlocked later
the unlock yeah
but so does that resonate and like tell me about locked in if it relates to that at all
yes that that resonates and i think you're right like i i would consider us at this point more of a media company and that switch i think happened because we started producing our own content in order to basically beta test the features that we were building on on lonely and be like okay if we can like get high enough quality content here and get like a high enough threshold of people in the audience and in the viewership and people actually using all this stuff in real time are these features interesting and compelling and that was like through the dating shows that we did love on leverage of course we had a couple seasons of that and i think like yeah that moment that definitely clicked for me in the sense of like okay yeah like you cannot build a great platform and build all these amazing features without great content like no one is going to use it your platform will be irrelevant and to your point creating great live content is really hard and then like also integrating like the features that we were building out there's a lot of like comms to users and i don't know kind of enabling them and onboarding them and kind of like showing them really like guiding them hand by hand or like holding their hand through the process of really trying to get them to use these features and integrate them into their content like it was already hard to get them streaming and then to add on that layer of complexity was just like such an uphill battle so yeah over the summer around when i moved to new york is when we decided to like fully switch into like let's take content production seriously and democratize the situation like basically create create scenarios where anyone can kind of just like be featured in it and have the opportunity to get a bunch of eyeballs get a bunch of attention go viral and around that same time is also when we made the decision to move from base to solana which was for me like a hard personal decision because like i definitely never saw myself as like super degen and like super like shit coin trader like that's not my user behavior in this space but i understand that it's like the vast majority of user behavior in this space so it's it's hard to ignore the market even if it's like i feel more i don't know maybe like culturally aligned to the base e ecosystem and i still feel like the vast majority of my network and my people are in that space but you like yeah you can't deny that it's so hard when when when i had close friends that wanted to watch love on leverage participate for me to be like you need to create a wallet you need to buy ethereum you need to then bridge that ethereum to this l two called base and then you need to like maybe see if your wallet decides to work because you know like on any given day metamask coinbase wallet whatever like whatever wallet you're using probably will break probably will just like the transaction will not go through you need to refresh it you're gonna need to like close your browser window reopen it like if you're doing this on mobile just give up now because like it won't it won't work on mobile i hate to say it like you know it was such a it was such a frustrating experience that it was just like the ux is still so bad and like trying to get people to just like get to your product and have it all work was still so bad so i think there was definitely some like some some solana pumping going on in magazines in terms of people being like this is where this is where all the like novice users are like people who don't even understand crypto they have a phantom wallet and they're trading and they're like looking at pump fun coins and that that's like something that we're seeing so between all of that brian's unhinged personality also was yeah getting him into hot water with a little bit of like cancel culture and pc culture he like the more you tell him that he cannot do and cannot say something the more he absolutely will need to do that
wait i mean at this point he's just gearing up for a presidential run like he's like fully like it's it's his time to shine for sure and i didn't wait to bring you on until it's brian's time to shine i hope that's that's everyone else out there hopefully knows that like i'm not that type of guy but but the but the locked in show i think i think it speaks to a lot of that it's like it's sort of unhinged content you need sort of unhinged people you want unhinged participants like that is i don't know at least crypto itself like i don't know i think a lot of ogs or or like hardcore infant nerds like have have taught have told themselves this story of like oh like we can just build the tooling and then everyone can do whatever they want to do it's like it's a no like tell like people wanna like make it easy make it fun like that's how like all the great products in the world are reborn and i think we're sort of at the we're at a tipping point now where like you guys are like really primed for acceleration because there's all these new users for sure i think there's a there's a there's a huge like fatigue in the crypto space with like how has it been so long and like wallets still suck yeah there's this feeling in the air which i think is great and and it strikes me as like a very like strong parallel that like what you were building before was it it it was like a consumer product but it feels a lot more like tooling right like oh anyone can join anyone can stream and it like turns out like the thing that doesn't scale or like you know do the hard thing is like it's actually making the hardest part more accessible which is that like content generation and there's tons of people like i i i saw i forgot where it was i think it was on tiktok but like there was a ton of interest of people who wanted to do this show because they're like they want an audience they love crypto and they have no fucking idea what they're doing so like so like will they hold their hand for that instead of holding them through troubleshooting like metamask connections and cross chain swaps like it's not actually helpful to the product
yeah yeah amen to all of that yeah i think like diving a little bit more into locked in as a show so for those who haven't heard about it we are creating a reality tv show that starts on monday where we're locking three contestants into an into a house like an apartment in new york for thirty days and they are competing to like go viral on the web two social platform so like a combination of tiktok instagram again we can get a little bit deeper into that because the timing is hilarious that tiktok is getting shut down and people are all freaking out about it but i also am like personally of the opinion that the supreme court can make this decision but they're not they're not gonna be able to like forcibly remove the tiktok app off of like 200,000,000 phones in the united states you know like that's and none none of that is gonna happen overnight right like it's like gonna take time so anyway that's been a whole other thing that we've been kind of like thinking about and dealing with behind the scenes but we have these three contestants one of them being lamb chop who is a farcaster native influencer graphic designer super interesting charismatic cool chick like i'm just like interested to see what content she's able to to like create in that but yeah we wanted to create like the environment for virality which is like this format of like three strangers are thrown into a house for thirty days and they just have to fucking commit like they just need to do it and then whoever you know and then they're motivated exactly they're locked in and then it's like it's honestly like kind of a win win for them because even if they don't win the prize like if they don't win the $10,000 they still like walk away with whatever with whatever audience they built in that thirty days so it's kind of just like a this is a this isn't i don't know like kind of an experimental zone where you are just committed to doing this and don't have any distractions and don't have any excuses to be like oh i don't know like this is i just like i i don't have enough time to do this or like i don't know what my niche is like you just have to like hustle you just have to put the work in you have to see what works and then it's like a combination of like consistency good quality happening interesting pov and luck i think like that's how the algorithm works these days so we're really excited to see where that goes and to see how that translates into what the crypto users think because this is like our first like foray into moving away from a crypto native audience like everything up until this point has been very targeted at people who already have wallets already understand crypto and already probably have been like following us for a little while and this is like totally brand new audience brand new platforms we don't have like we're building our presence there up again from like ground zero and also trying to like remove crypto terminology out of it like we're not talking about crypto in the context of the show at all it's just like a a crazy reality show and people should just be invested in like what's gonna happen and who these personalities are but we think there's a way to convert that attention into something that would be useful for like what we're doing and ultimately our token
yeah no i feel that because
i don't know exactly how to put this you guys had like sort of minted multiple stars in in their own way like obviously brian was the first one and like he has a large following now and granted part of it's because he's a founder and whatever it is but like part of it's like he's like creating all this content all the time like it's yeah super interesting but like i very much like i met most of my initial farcaster friends who ended up following me and ended up like recasting me you and brian included and like that was actually a big boon to me like initially getting any sort of following on farcaster which can be difficult it was diff it's probably more difficult now in some ways like the numbers are bigger but like getting people to notice you was was still hard it's still it's always hard right and then we'd be like oh it's so hard to like you know it's so hard to like gain an audience on podcast i'm like you guys aren't fucking doing anything like i i'd sit in a room it was like me and brian hanging out yeah and then like well then like what happens afterwards i gotta come back he's got like 2,000 followers which is like a shitload at the time right like he's like willing to recast me and like engage with me on fardcaster it's like yeah let's go try out some products and and happen another one's like i know moonpapa was like relatively well known but i feel like he really had his moment on love on liberty
had such a moment oh my god what an icon
yeah absolute legend and like now i consider him someone that i i'm like happy to follow yep yep so like this is almost like value capture for you guys right if like if if you can sort of mint new stars and become a platform for that and then have the cryptob and knobs on top of it that makes makes a ton of sense to me so i'm super pumped for locked in i totally think everyone should tune in i'm gonna do my best to get this episode out in the next couple of days so that we can sort of gas the hype on on all of it but with the tiktok thing it's interesting i i i'm with you like i don't think just to get away from like work stuff for a second like yeah yeah and like ironically i follow mike solano the pirate wires guy i'm not sure if you're familiar but he's you know just talking about like the us government's used to like sort of like posturing and then like getting what they want and yeah the the the this again feels like parallel to crypto probably just because it's human behavior it's like fuck around find out not like not only did they not go to instagram and not go to reels
yeah
they went specifically to the most
chatty app possible be chatty app
you're fucking you don't want chatty to have my data fuck you like i'm gonna give them even more data like i'm gonna do it even harder right and then
oh my god
they're like maybe we gotta pop this two hundred seventy days yeah this is going the way we wanted it to and it's like that happens all the time that happens all the time like when you push to prod right it's like
i feel like i i saw i saw someone make a tiktok maybe or something or maybe it was on channel actually where it was like did you forget that america is a country founded purely on spite like we will do anything out of spite yeah
it's such a good motivator right
it's so true it's so true like single handedly motivated by spite
yeah and i forget i get a lot of like and now it's invading other places like my twitter feed is starting to become like hilarious clips from where it's like
yes
here's all the here's all the gay sex acronyms that you need to know in case like these guys start like rolling to your dms i'm like yeah this is you know this is useful content i'm not surprised this is going viral
yeah yeah
i love all that okay cool so locked in is happening solana has good vibes for you guys i love the idea that like we're trying to make stuff useful for people and like they don't need wallets but like if you want it there it's helpful and and you can do things with it for your guys' token
you know the other thing that you were talking about that i have written down that i wanna you know briefly is like the idea that like like how rude you'd have to be to like not be a part of like social content or social awareness because i started realizing that in chicago at least all the girlies are drinking tequila espresso martinis and i thought it was just like i was like this is weird that like this is happening all at once and it took my wife to tell me that it's because is it kendall or kylie
oh it's kendall's tequila brand
yeah so this is and now this is like reverberating into my life even though i have nothing to do with that side of social media right but i think it shows the power of like what can happen with a with a platform like unlonely and and the reach that you can get so with that all being said they're all getting locked in in new york is it like an airbnb or something so i was like what
it's an apartment that we're yeah like short term renting yeah
okay nice and then is is brian gonna like pop in can you reveal like what can can i get some gauze about like alpha and like what maybe some people should expect
the alpha so there will be daily challenges to like kind of give them their structure and then they'll kind of get rewarded based on their performance and the challenges there might be some cameos i mean again it's like it's thirty days right so this is like this is all i don't know this is an endurance challenge both for us like managing it on the production side and hosting it and like definitely for the contestants themselves it's so different from anything we've done in the past like we are live streaming it because i think that's like an interesting component to just like be able to like check-in on these people and see if they're like still mentally sane you know like 20%
is everyone okay
yeah exactly just like sanity check what's going on and i think like people are always like a little bit voyeuristic and everyone is everyone's nosy they wanna know they wanna know what's happening behind the scenes so i think like that having the live stream is like great validation for like this is actually happening in real time but so much of the output is gonna end up being like short form content it's gonna be their short form content it's gonna be us creating recaps of like how they perform in the challenges and i don't know daily progress and sort of like checking in on the scoreboard and that kind of thing so that's gonna be all very new and very interesting and i think yeah i think being in new york means that there there could be some fun cameos but they'll be kind of like sprinkled out throughout
nice so stay locked in if even if you're not literally locked in stay locked in okay i don't know if this okay i have two major questions i don't know if this is like revealing too much but i'm like deadly curious so i have to ask
okay
are they cooking uber eats like what's what's happening
yeah there's a kitchen and we are giving them like a weekly grocery budget and they're they're on their own they don't get to order anything like that's against malls
okay sheesh okay well i mean that's exciting for me because i love cooking shows
amazing yeah we like we wanna like dive into content to like cooking content as a niche specifically like we're just like looking at like what are the kind of broadest content niches that people could be interested in and i feel like like i wanna do a challenge that's like make a nora smith inspired cooking video you know
okay so yeah i love the eyebrow stuff but i also have this weird sick addiction like i found this there's this lady who went viral on tiktok and she's just like she got like the big jar of peaches from costco oh and she's there just like drinking the syrup out of the jar it's yeah i i wanna see the i i wanna see the unhinged stuff i definitely wanna see what lamb chop cooks up and the second question i the second question i have is how many bathrooms and like is this gonna be called a point of contention
it's one bathroom
oh shit alright okay this is if anyone's out there right now this is the clear sign you have to put it into the show yeah yeah
it's up to them how they handle that actually if you want some real tea it's also only two bedrooms so
let's go is this gonna
be a ranking mechanism of some sort
that's so much i would type before like i was hoping that i'd get a little bit more info from you i'm getting more hype i hope everybody out there is getting hype as well we're getting close to the end here though i want some final thoughts well two things we'll we'll talk about like call to actions in a second but like we talked a little bit before we hopped on there's some twitter conversation especially with my founder hirsch on nyc versus f sf i i don't know i went to sf i didn't really get it i like i did six years in new york i loved it agree disagree what's or we just we could just shit on us for a second too whatever whatever you whatever you feel about the the united states dewalt
from there okay so i am here to fud on sf i i did sf for four years it was it was good for like the first two years i think i was like living i was living my little dream tech yuppie life you know i was like on the little shuttles and i was getting the free food and i was going to the corporate events and like all that stuff oh my god there's a twitter trend today that was like what is it like share a picture of you from a previous era or something like that and i posted one of you when i was like working at youtube and it's so it's so twenty eighteen coated like it's just really i'm like in like skinny jeans a plaid blazer a choker i'm wearing a choker like excuse me
i'm all free
yeah you're off oh i definitely thought that i was slaying like i was like wow this outfit goes fucking hard
dude i get the i have the trend on there's like i get a lot of millennial shit because i'm an older millennial but like i'm addicted to gen z content yeah and there's this trend of like of course like millennials don't know how to dress now look at what we wore to the club when we were 21 it's like business casual like girls in like sweater vest jeans exclusively button ups like tucked into like jeans and like loafers absolute mess absolutely
embarrassing but honestly i like is gen z not gonna be embarrassed like thirty years from now or like twenty years from now looking back on the shit that they wore to the club like they're wearing some crazy stuff
well they're gonna have a problem because like the boomers are really annoying but they're not really mean gen x is like mean right so like when when they start when they start beefing as intergener like it always skips a generation right when they start beefing it's they're gonna have a hard they're gonna have a hard time i think so respect gen z for for sticking it out there we believe in you i am assuming most most of the are the unlocked locked in contestants all gen z do you know
they are yeah i think they're like gen z to maybe like young millennial like okay middle end millennial yeah
perfect for perfect for context well then you've got a cut off i've got a cut off i know the audience always has a cut off which is actually the most important thing they can only hear me yap for so long before they get tired of my voice so what should people do i'm gonna like i said i'm gonna do my best to get this out before we start so let's assume that i follow through on my promise that locked in is starting in two days or a day where do they get in touch with you where do they follow you how do they participate all that good shit
we are going like omniplatform we are gonna be everywhere all at once so you can follow us on instagram only underscore app we will be on tiktok only dot app we're only underscore app on twitter the live stream will be on twitter but also on youtube like we are capturing attention from anyone that will give it to us but i would say primarily i mean if you're on if you're listening to the wifi you're probably a crypto user so twitter or farcaster are probably your best bets like we're gonna be reuploading stuff there i'm sure lamb chop is gonna be posting her updates there but the point system is primarily geared at like follower accounts on their tiktoks and instagrams so that's where a lot of the excitement will be happening check-in i mean it's so like this is also like you can watch the livestream but primarily the content is gonna be through these like short form summaries and so it's a way i don't know it's it's it's like less of an ask you know it's not like you need to show up at this time for the full hour otherwise you'll like miss out on what's happening like this is the very the algorithm will serve it to you and you might catch the recap like two weeks later and that's fine and then you can like go back and binge all the content that's already happened and then catch up so i think it's like a much more flexible user journey but that's where you can find us and i hope we'll see you there
you'll see me there obviously
i'll see you there for that
so if that should be a lot of the audience out there my my audience that i'm slowly growing i'll put all the handles in the description so you can follow grace everywhere definitely follow brian no offense to you grace but
hey yeah i just i'm getting better at my twitter game don't fud my twitter okay doovie i know you don't like thirst crops but the thirst crops are working
no one ever doubted that they would brian's got his twitter back too follow me on podcast soon twitter definitely so back yeah definitely lock it the lock it we're so back that's a vibe jen grace thank you so much for coming on this is a blast we're out yeah