Vibe Check with @dawufi ep9 - interview with @nonlinear.eth /fabric /hypersub

thanks for having me appreciate it

yeah well thanks dude

yeah awesome well i appreciate the intro and the kind words as you said i'm the founder of fabric we made a product called hypersub hypersub is a platform to create discover and mint subscription nfts and what i mean by subscription nfts is really it's an nft that has this notion of time and the time is on chain so when a creator launches one they can say this nft costs you know $10 per month not just like a standard nft which would have a standard set price point and it's like a one time discrete transaction the way hyper seven nfts work is that it's money over time and so and because the time itself is encoded on chain other systems can make use of it so if you have a token gated group chat on wordcast telegram discord you know something like that or a blog post on paragraph or if you wanted to do allow lists or discounts or whatever you can simply go and see is this person an act an active subscriber can they get these perks and benefits if yes great they get it if not they don't and so that's something that's happening on a recurring basis and the outcome that this produces is that creators earn monthly recurring revenue and it's really one of the very few ways to do this natively on chain right now and so that's what it is you know it it runs on a protocol that we built called stp subscription token protocol we just launched v two of that which was a huge push so it was you know it was a lot to get done in a short amount of time but we we did it and so yeah right now we're kind of in the process of like closing the feature gap between what is now available in the v two version of the protocol and what is what exists in hypersub so that's the summer has been really focused on that like i've been feeling a little bit conflicted lately just because you know it's summer and it's like nice out and you kinda wanna like chill but we've been really just grinding you know and and i don't really see an end in sight

think we'll probably be in this place for the next few months you know through the fall so i'm feeling simultaneously excited and exhausted

yeah yeah i have

just

as a

yeah yeah good it's a good question well let's see there there's a lot there i guess the first thing i'd say is like there's a lot you said that i agree with and then i can unpack the first is that and and this is something i've been saying to myself recently i'm like if it's good enough for people in crypto but not good enough for people outside of crypto then it's not good enough

and that's like i think that like i think people who work in crypto and who use a lot of crypto products like forget that we have an unusually high pain tolerance that most people outside of crypto have like nowhere near the amount of patience or capacity for that people in crypto just like put up with all this bullshit like switching between you know apps to sign transactions and like like like getting money into an exchange and then transferring it out to like a self custody wallet and then connecting like all this bullshit and so like it's funny because people in crypto are like oh i love hypersub it's great it's so easy to use and then i gotta show people outside of crypto and they're like they're like completely confused like the second the page loads so like i don't know what this is and so it's like i i i'm like okay you you know like we we we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard and i think that standard is just like make a great product not a great crypto product and so when i you you know as a founder you're trying to think about like well okay how how how can we differentiate how can we compete how can we be better than everybody else and like on what dimensions and so like you brought this you know this issue of like audience ownership and like the the the connections between creators and their and their fans and like one of the things i think that you know crypto is very good at is moving money and sharing money sharing value and so the way that we're thinking about this in the context of like creators is helping them to establish a direct economic relationship with you know their fans and supporters and their audience and that and that relationship being mobile you know that that relationship is something that they own then they can take with them between platforms and i think that's actually like that's like we're really differentiated there like you you no other web two platform can can claim to do that because that's not like that's just not how databases work you know like if your subscriber base is in the substack database like it's not easy at all to get that into the patreon database or vice versa or into some new product that emerges that's like the next thing so you know when i think about i guess when i think about go to market you know i think a lot about well who's gonna give a about what i'm saying you know who who cares like and and i think well probably crypto creators care like people who are creating you know content like crypto related content on a web two platform i think are probably likely to be pretty sympathetic to this pitch maybe people who are doing things both off chain like you know on youtube or subsec or whatever but then also wanna do stuff on chain and wanna have the subscriber base exist in both places like exist in this kind of quantum state it's like oh okay that's probably perfect for us like like what we're building and you know as far as like a membership platform goes or a membership payment rail like that's like very likely i think of all the things we could do that like to get to you know to get users i think that's probably one of the best bets at least that's what we're currently thinking so but but you fundamentally have to ask this question like why on chain and and i think like not a lot of products have good answers to that and so and so yeah we're we're honestly i still struggle with this question it's like and something i've been asking a lot of people is like why do you mint stuff you know like why do you put stuff on chain why is podcasts on chain and and it's funny because a lot of people who are making content they're putting content on chain they're putting content off chain and then you see this weird behavior where people will consume it off chain but they'll still mint it on chain and it's like what's you know like i'm like what's going on here like what what like what is this all about you know so anyway that's kind of a a a rambling answer but like yeah these are this is like when when we think about like what are we making and for who and why and how is it better this is kinda like the discussion this is so like the the questions we're we're we're asking and trying to answer

yeah yeah yeah i mean and that's a it's a really good point i mean and like i'm a i'm a elon musk fanboy i like elon musk but there's a lot of people that don't like him and feel like him buying twitter like was effectively them getting rugged and so it's like and then you you look at something another example of this would be like i mean i'm old enough to remember myspace my myspace just became lame and facebook became cool and then facebook became lame and instagram became cool cool and then instagram became lame so it's like it's like whether it's a a political thing you know a a a the platform itself getting deplatformed whether it's be it's because it becomes culturally irrelevant or gets disrupted by startup or whether it's it gets purchased by someone who has a different value set than you do i think like the rule not the exception to the rule but the rule is that platforms fall out of favor they fall they they like that's what everyone should expect to happen with a platform so if you look at something like you know whatever like substack or patreon or like whatever platform du jour happens to be you know like what everyone's what what everyone's going to it's like the baseline assumption should be that on some timeline this will stop being cool and there'll be something else that's that that's new that's cool and i think like what you want it from a creator perspective is for that not to matter you want all of the work that you do to build an audience and to like create a network and an economy to be transferable that's like is that 10 x better i think it's like a hundred x better and this is the thing that like is crazy to me about the way the internet works today is that when you do the work of building an audience on a platform that that work exists inside the walled garden of that platform and it cannot be leveraged by any other platform so if i subscribe to you on instagram and you have 50,000 subscribers on instagram or youtube or whatever like if you go to some new thing you have to start from zero like that's crazy that's like totally insane to me and so the the idea like one thing we've been thinking a lot about is this this notion of like a universal subscribe button that when i subscribe to you on platform a that subscription persists it's it's legible and it persists on platform b and vice versa and i feel like that's a world where you actually truly do own your audience i think that a lot of web two platforms basically just psyop creators into thinking that they own their audience when it they don't it's like it's the platform that owns the audience because they're the ones mediating the economic and social relationship between the creator and the consumer yeah so like it's complete it's just a it's just a lie it's just like bullshit that you that it's your audience it's definitely not your audience

that's a good point

like what

know or to that i love that point there's like it's like this notion of like creative destruction or like or like wealth like how many new million like how how often and how much does like wealth turn over in a society so if you look at like america it's like there's lots of people that make a lot of money and there's lots of people that lose a lot of money and it's like there's kind of a lot of volatility there but if you look at like europe it's like this the people that are rich in europe today were rich you know four hundred years ago because they're they're royalty and there's just and so it's like there's these signs that's like okay well one has greater economic opportunity one does not and if it's like if you look at what's been happening on the web it's like you see these you see these like aggregations of attention and wealth and followers and all this stuff and there's not a lot of volatility and i think like it's a sign of decay it's a sign of stagnation it's like but you need a way to for the good stuff to persist and to me that's like if you built an audience and there's people who really like fuck with you and your work and they're like fans that should persist that should that should be the thing that's like that's yours and then the the the means by which you interact with those people and the kinds of things you can do with them that can change

so i think like the big grand vision of of you know really of stp of the protocol less so hypersub the product but the protocol is that it is the universal subscription protocol on the internet it's like it is the thing that preserves that economic relationship and like that network between you know creators and consumers across platforms

yeah i i mean i agree i think that advertising is clearly a successful monetization model and i think is is not going anywhere

and that's great i and i think there's other models that also make sense like i'm not and that's like well established i think how we do that you know how like the idea that there's direct payments between creators and consumers like and that there isn't this sort of these these middlemen i think that's proven like that there's demand for that there's a market for that but and and and we do it a certain way today and i think like we'll keep doing that but how we do it may change and to me that's where like hyper sub or just a lot of the things that like a lot of the experimental economic models that are emerging on chain i think represent like oh okay well it's kind of the same old stuff but it's like in a new way and yeah i'm optimistic that like there's

there's like alternative monetization you know models that that that gain more traction like i think there's demand for that

yeah

yeah so there's two ways to earn money on hypersub the first is with what we call referral rewards which are it's basically just affiliate links but the difference between the way that we're doing it and the way that a lot of web two companies do it is that it's percentage based so the way a typical affiliate link would work in you know web two whether it's uber airbnb or coinbase or whatever is they say you know refer a friend and if they complete x task you know they'll get $10 and you'll get $10 or a hundred or whatever it is whatever their customer acquisition you know budget is essentially defines but what's broken about that is that is that it doesn't actually represent or capture the value of those referrals so for example if i refer you to become an uber driver and then you know i get a hundred bucks and you get a hundred bucks but then you pretty much immediately churn out say that's like one version of a referral the second version would be where you're like a phenomenal driver you do thousands and thousands of rides you have you know really high rating etcetera etcetera like i also got a hundred bucks for that but like those are like i'd argue like those a hundred dollars does not accurately represent the value of those referrals one might be worth much less one might be worth many times more but the problem is that because the web two rails just like don't have any economic concepts like there's no there's that you can't program money like you can other things this is just like this is like the the coarseness of it it's like a very coarse way of of doing it we have much more fidelity building on chain like much more and so we're taking advantage of that you know with how we're doing referrals which is it's percentage based so if you as a creator decide that you're willing to share say 10% of subscription purchases with people who refer subscribers then if i come along and i'm like oh i'm gonna refer you know i refer like alice bob and charlie and like alice mints a hundred dollars bob mints you know $500 and charlie mints a thousand dollars like i'm getting 10% of all of those and so what i'm getting is commensurate with the value that i'm driving to you and that all happens at mid time it's all observable it happens on chain there's no bullshit like net 30 payments you have to wait on us to process it's none of that it just happens instantly and so it's kinda interesting because if you look at the referral leaderboards that we have on you know each individual subscription like like hypersub subscription page you'll see it's it's kinda cool you're like oh this person referred 10 people but earned like 500 and this other person referred like a hundred people but only got $50 and it's like yeah it's because we're able to like accurately like represent the value of each referral so that's how referral rewards work and then we have a whole separate thing which is really complex and and we're working on making it simpler which is what we call subscriber rewards which is essentially rev share it's like on chain rev share so you as the creator can basically say it's an it's an option you don't have to do it and some people don't but but some people like do it a lot which is you just you could say i am going to share you know 10% of the subscription revenue with back to subscribers themselves so for every hundred dollars that that flows in i'm gonna take $10 i'm gonna put it into a pool and the question then is like what happens you know to the pool and the answer is that depending on how much like how much time you mint and how early you mint it you're going to get more shares of ownership in that pool so the people who subscribe early and for a very long period of time are gonna get you know 50% of the pool or 80% of the pool but then as more and more subscribers come in your you know each individual percentage ownership starts to get diluted so it's it's effectively a cap table like that's basically what it is and it's fine if you're getting diluted because if you're getting diluted it means more money is coming in the so it's cool and it's works the way you would kinda want it to work if it was like a real business the problem that we're struggling with right now is that it's fucking complicated like it's like startup equity like if you once you kinda understand the way startup equity works you're like oh this is sick you know like like like startup equity structures are responsible for minting tens of thousands of millionaires you know at least right so it's it's very very powerful economic structure but like it's it's took me years to figure that shit out you know it's like when you first start getting into this game you're like what you know like you're like an an option like what is that you know like it doesn't you know it's like a vesting sched you know so there's all this complicated stuff that we're trying to figure out like okay how do you make this just like super smooth brain like super simple and i don't think we're there yet but anyway that's the economic primitive that's how it works so it's cool because you can you can cut people into the upside and then the thing that we just added for v two is the option to make deposits into that reward pool from external sources so actually coop from coop records has been doing this lately which is he's taking revenue that he's earning from mintz on like sound.xyz and and other places and he's just boom making like lump sum deposits into the subscriber reward pool which is pretty sick because it means that when you pay for a subscription to the coop records club

like we're getting to a point now where it's like those deposits that he's making are just like kinda acting as a discount but the discount gets so steep that eventually it's gonna cross a threshold into becoming profitable

and so like that's where there's this kind of fun game that can be played which is like if you really believe in somebody you're like fuck i'm gonna subscribe for like a really long time real as early as possible so i can get as many shares in that pool as i possibly can so that as deposits are made into it you know i'm getting a bigger cut of of that which will then not only offset the cost of the script of the subscription itself but you know i can make

yeah yeah that's right like the idea here was that the first like you know you look at people like justin bieber and it's like or like post malone or there's a lot of people like in the last ten twenty years whose careers you know really were made on the internet they weren't made by like typical you know a and r record label like star makers it was just like people doing cool stuff on the internet finding fans that loved it and told everyone about it and it and it and it growing kind of virally and it's like the the takeaway for us there is that you know the first ten fans the first hundred fans the first thousand fans like have an outsized impact on the success you know of an artist and so they and and and they should be rewarded like that that impact should be compensated and can be compensated once you're working on a developer platform which is the evm that has the means by which to kind of track it and reward it and so it's like it's like you you know you see this in in other parts of the economy or in other sectors where it's like you look at say the impact that a venture capital firm has on an early stage startup which is in many times this the company doesn't exist without the investment of that firm right

and then fast forward like you know the company does really well and who gets the outsized reward the venture capital firm does not the retail investor who bought the stock on the public market why not well it's it's the universal rule like reward is commensurate with risk and so in our view it's like if you're really early to someone and you're like hell yeah like i fuck with this person like i wanna like support their stuff and you subscribe to a creator like a really young creator for a year or two years or five years like that's risky that's like super risky you know and like like what's probably gonna happen is they're gonna like churn out or they pause it or they end it or they refund you or whatever and they it goes nowhere but in the rare cases where it really pops i would say like you probably had an outsized impact on that person continuing to do what they're doing and that absolutely should be rewarded like you you you can and should be cut into that upside and so that's what hypersub kind of enables but like i said the you know the thing that we're struggling with now is how do you tell that story in a way that's like you can be you know multitasking and inebriated and still be like i got it you know like it makes perfect sense you know we're we're not quite figured that out yet

yeah so i hang out a lot on farcaster my username is nonlinear dot eth i post updates on hypersub and fabric there pretty regularly i post a lot of memes i'm on twitter as well my username is underscore nonlinear and i mostly just post sort of fabric and hyper sub related updates if you're interested in making money on the internet and you wanna do it on chain i think hyper sub is the best way to do it so hypersub.xyz you can create a subscription nft you can also find a lot of really cool people kinda in and around the farcaster ecosystem who've been using it one of the use cases i'm most excited about is app developers so you can subscribe to bui which is an amazing search tool to to farcaster studio to cast sense intelligence a lot of cool emerging kind of products and services you can you can support the developers by just subscribing to their hypersub so that's kind of a new thing i'm excited about we're gonna have alternative payments i think we're actually launching that today so it should be live by the time this airs so you can now just pay with what you have you know you can subscribe to someone who maybe denominated their their their hypersub in usdc or eth but maybe you wanna pay in higher or d gen or whatever you can now do that so those are all the places you can can find us and of course if you have any questions comments suggestions if you're a creator and you know you you want you wanna be personally onboarded send me a dm i'd be happy to help

thank you bro thanks so much for having me