Warpshop

Gramajo, sits down with Colin M, the innovative mind behind WarpShop, to explore the intersection of onchain e-commerce and consumer behavior. From comparing wallet interactions with Instagram views to the potential of blockchain for personalized data and seamless transactions, Gramajo and Colin dive deep into the world of digital wallets, social tokens, and integration with platforms like Shopify and Farcaster. We also touch on the transformative nature of blockchain for both businesses and users and gain insights from Colin's experiences with building apps at Red Bull and his advocacy work with Tweak Labs. Stay tuned as we explore how technology is reshaping commerce, the decision-making complexities in startups, and the exciting future of onchain product management.

00:00 Enthusiastic cryptocurrency builder, established in the industry.
06:04 Digitally native brand covering fashion, events, art, tech.
14:41 Red Bull partners for athlete training and marketing.
17:30 Intentional event curation with local artists.
24:27 "Company's fast pace driving innovation and growth."
31:35 Prioritize quality over quantity in frame design.
36:27 Martin launched higher coin; Farcaster shutdown.
40:43 Positive about Farcaster's potential for startup launches.
48:26 Knowing when to move on from projects.
53:17 Reevaluating business strategy, expanding offerings for growth.
56:55 Lowering fees and adding transaction context key.
01:01:27 Blockchain enables tracking and rewarding user actions.
01:10:33 Zelda, badass. On chain creates Lego channel.
01:12:50 Blockchain allows deeper understanding of individuals.
01:17:59 Blockchain enables radical transparency in digital age.
01:24:09 Enhanced analytics and tracking for Coinbase commerce.
01:30:08 Platform facilitates seamless payment and currency exchange.
01:36:10 Public online boot camp for learning smart contracts.

Music & Sounds By: Lakey Inspired
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CastOff/Episode Discussion, here.

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Transcript

0:00

Like, I think Farcaster is great for launching products. There's no doubt about that in my mind, that right now, like, if you're building a new startup semi related to crypto, you should be launching and focusing first and foremost on Farcaster because the quality of people there and the quality of, like, feedback you'll get on Farcaster is light years better than Twitter or Instagram. And I just sort of took it as, okay, we're going to build a something else, and probably we're just going to utilize Farcaster to get people on it and we'll see what happens. GMGM welcome back to another episode of behind the screen with Ramon Home, the podcast where we unravel stories, insights, and secrets from top tier artists, Arvid collectors, innovative builders shaping the digital frontier, better known as Web three. Little sick today, but I'm your host, Gramaho, an avid crypto enthusiast that's been in the space since 2012, joined the NFT space in 2021. I never really left. Yeah. So this week's episode is with Colin. He's a co founder or founder of Warp Shop, which is an on chain. It's trying to bring basically your merch or e commerce on chain. And we talk a little bit about what does that mean and what's the difference between doing that versus just doing shopify. Really interesting stuff. I think it's a segment that hasn't been explored fully yet. I think we're still trying to understand what are the benefits of going on chain like that with commerce. You know, if you're in the crypto space, it's pretty clear, but, yeah. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode and, yeah, let's dive in. All right, man. So thanks again for doing this. Really appreciate it. We'll start off with just like, the intro, you know, who's calling what is tweak labs, and then I'll go into. We'll go from there. Cool. Yeah, it's interesting doing this, like, being on this side. I've never been interviewed. It's always like, I've been doing the interviews with tweak labs for a couple of years. So I'm super excited to just, like, get to kind of ramble and spew a bunch of stuff. Did I cut out there for a sec again? Yeah, you did. For a hot second. All right. I might have to do, like, low data mode. If it happens again, I'll make sure to fix that or move. All right, no worries. Yeah, yeah. But a little bit on me, I'd say I'm an avid builder. I've been in this space for four years, but it really started, like, I got into bitcoin and crypto. Like, 2015, got a fake id with bitcoin. Kind of like everybody else was buying on binance when you weren't really able to buy on Binance. So I had to set up a VPN, and it was all super sus. But, like, since then, I've been super into crypto and just the idea of this decentralized world, like, kind of a new Internet. So I've now been building, like, actively building in this space, like, almost four years and kind of got my start, I'd say I'm just, like, almost like an anxious builder. Like, I'm driven to just create stuff and build new things. And a lot of times, sometimes I don't even know, like, why per se. It's just out of, like, anxiety to, like, want to do more, want to constantly be growing and learning and pushing and, like, I've always sort of been like that. I was doing, like, ted talks when I was in high school on Plato's allegory of the cave and, like, holograms and all this crazy stuff. And then in college, I went to USC. So I graduated two years ago in 2022. I studied data science and cognitive science and then actually minored in blockchain development. So I was doing solidity development. Learned a whole course on bitcoin alone. The teacher for that class was actually the founder of this startup called ETH Sign, which is now, like, heavily funded, super cool concept. It's sort of like attestations on ETH. So I was lucky to be able to do, like, an actual formal education kind of thing in blockchain. I don't think many colleges really offer that. So once I saw that I was already doing nfts and tweaks and just, like, messing around in the space, so I was like, oh, shit, this is a new class, new course, new program. I jumped right in. And that's actually where I met my current founder on Warp shop too, which we can jump into later. But from there, I started tweak labs with a buddy of mine named Max Dresner, who's fine artists, super, super talented dude. And this painting or picture behind me is actually kind of what started tweek labs, basically. Wait a sec. Basically found out that or met this guy Max through my fraternity in school and really talented artists, and I was like, hey, just learned about this thing called nfts. This was like 2020, late 2020. And we sort of teamed up to mint his artwork on the blockchain. And start making nfts, see what happens. Like, can we do something here? Is this a thing? And as we were doing that, it sort of continued to blow up and became, like, a real thing. So we made it into, it's essentially a digitally native brand that covers a bunch of different areas. So we do fashion, we do events, we do art, first and foremost, and we do tech. So we've got a lot of cool, interesting, just random pieces of technology that we've built on top of the tweaks. And then I would say, first and foremost, tweak labs is just amazing community of really interesting, nice, funny people that are for better, for lack of a better word, tweaks. Everyone in the community's, like, tweaky in their own way, kind of offbeat, and that's how we like it. So we try to keep that kind of vibe going. And that part of that is, and I had said, like earlier, I'm an anxious builder type, which is a big reason why we made tweak labs very mission driven, focusing on, like, mental health initiatives. So we've done a lot with different charities, hosted spaces with them, donated, hosted a couple of events with mental health charities, and then did a little bit of that kind of mental health advocacy work at USC while I was there. So that was great. And then from tweaks. Oh, I see you enabled low data mode. I must be cutting in and out. Yeah, I'm gonna turn it on. I think it cut off, like, a couple times during that shoot. Okay. I can also do the same. Yeah, it's good. At least this will focus on grabbing the audio. Yeah. Which is. Which will be good. Let's see. So from. How did you. Sorry, how did you turn on the low data mode? I was able to turn it on for everyone. So you're good? Oh, okay, cool, cool. Yeah, yeah. So it's on for everybody. All right. No, that's awesome. I think. Yeah, you got in pretty early. You're like me then. So, like, I kind of fell in love with bitcoin for the same reasons that you did, like, early on as well. And it sounds like you. You took that passion and started acting on it in terms of creating tweak labs. Did you study computer science at USC? Data science? And then, like I said, I minored in. I might have cut out. I minored in blockchain development. So I was doing solidity development courses at USC, which is really, and it's interesting, I kind of got my computer science background through the cognitive science because I was doing a lot of UI, Ux, sort of design engineering type stuff, a lot of front end, which was a lot of fun to do and that's sort of where I kind of fell in love with software, I guess. No, that's awesome. And are you still predominantly doing front end or are you doing like full stack now at this stage based on predominantly front end. So currently my co founder on Warp Shop, he does most of the back end and in general a lot more of the development and then I'm more on the branding, the product community marketing side of everything. But I do really enjoy jumping in the code and helping and writing cool front end design where I can. It's just like a lot of fun for me. The back end stuff, not as fun, but it is still really interesting. It's just like you run into a lot more bugs when you do that and I hate bugs. They're very frustrating, obviously. So. Yeah, but I. So I actually now work at Red Bull full time doing, I build apps for the marketing team. So we, my team specifically, we're technically on the it side and a lot of people don't really realize this, but Red Bull has a pretty big tech stack behind everything that they do. So we are in charge of building, managing, pitching, promoting internal applications to basically make the marketing team more efficient at Red Bull in whatever way we can. Getting to kind of continue to flex that sort of technical mindset at Red Bull, which is a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah, I, we, we're definitely going to talk about Rebel because I'm a big, I'm a big fan of Rebel and what they do with, with the sports and really like you said, like detect like they, from, from the outside looking in, you know, they don't, they don't hold back when it comes to delivering the best experience to what it is they're working on. Yeah, for sure. That's. Well, definitely, yeah, we can dive more into that a bit later for sure. But it's been like one of the coolest learning experiences, but not in the traditional way. I mean, just the brand around it is so strong and it seems like, oh, it's a great brand because they do this and that. Everything they do is super intentional. So learning kind of why and how they create these intentions around like marketing campaigns and everything down to like the design of the can is really interesting to learn about and definitely plays a role a lot in like how I try to function with these different startups that I work on. Yeah, actually, no, let's dive into it, man. This part is actually, what. Which. What is interesting to me, I didn't know that you worked at rug bull until I think I saw. I think you tweeted it, actually, after we had kind of linked up on that intro call. Yeah, yeah, I saw that you tweeted about it. So. Yeah, so I guess, like, for, for those that, you know, you know this because you work there, but for the people that aren't familiar with Red Bull, I just think that it's kind of like, you know, energy drinks. You know, I think they've done a lot of crazy stuff with Formula One where, like, you know, they didn't just want to slap on their name on a, on a Formula One team and call it a day. You know, like, they ended up, you know, acquiring a Formula One team and, and they wanted to win. You know, they know that the best marketing for, you know, for, for their drinks is doing, like, this. Extreme marketing, I guess I would say, is kind of like the way to do it. Same with soccer. You know, they didn't want to just, like, you know, put the name on the stadium or do anything. They've. They've acquired a bunch of soccer teams. So. Yeah, and that's, like, the approach that I guess you don't really realize until you kind of take a hard look at, at Red Bull. And it's really unique in that sense. Like, everything they do, they don't want to just slap on the brand name or throw on Red Bull or the logo and just, like, call it a day and, hey, here's. Here's the logo, here's, like, some money, and here's, like, let's do a partnership or a marketing opportunity. They really want to be in on the ground floor and, like, creating the things from top to bottom. So with, like, f one. They've been doing it since the nine late night. I don't want to, like, speak wrong on this, but I think the late nineties, they got into it, like, very, very early and immediately decided to not just kind of sponsor a team like a lot of other companies in this, in a similar space, like a consumer packaged goods space do. They decided, let's build out our own team, let's get our own drivers, and really, like, kind of go from the ground up. And that's the approach that's taken with everything. Like you said with the soccer team, there's a. I believe it's the New Jersey Red Bulls is like, the soccer team and they have their own soccer team. I don't think any other CPG company has their own soccer team where they actually have players. And even like with athletes, it's super cool. So the headquarters of Red Bull North America is in Santa Monica, which is where I'm at. And they have like one of the most advanced athletic performance facilities in the country. And they'll actually have the athletes kind of fly out and do like training programs at the Red Bull headquarters, which is like right this like athletic facilities, like right across the street from us. So we'll see athletes coming in and out all the time, like grabbing a coffee or grabbing lunch. And it's just great. The partnerships they build. That's sort of been the biggest thing is rather than just doing things like half ass or trying to just do it for promotional sake, they want to create this end to end experience that signifies what the brand is all about, which is just really fun. And a lot of cool things come out of that, too. It's been a journey for sure, working for them. And the role that I have is marketing is such a big part of Red Bull and obviously marketing now is very digitally focused, so they're always going to need new, different applications to help assist them in their jobs. So I get to kind of interface with all the different teams in marketing and sales and even operations to help them just do their jobs better. So there's a lot of different marketing teams in Red Bull. There's like brand marketing, team sports marketing, culture marketing, which is like dance, music, art, sports is pretty obvious. Brand is the entire brand. And then they have like product marketing, which is the actual product itself. So every level of Red Bull is very intentional. And I try to kind of take that into everything that I do is acting with very, every step you take is very intentional as you go. Yeah. So going off of that is that some of the thing is that some of that culture, is that how you try and approach things with like tweak labs or in your current roles, like, you know, as a builder? Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's taught me a lot, especially with the tweaks. Like, I feel like the tweaks are a very strong brand. We have very strong imagery and designs and just kind of vision and mission that we stand for. Like just basically, essentially being good people and spreading like this, I don't know. I don't, for lack of a better word, gospel of decentralized technology in web three. So everything that we do with the tweaks really try to make it super intentional. So we've hosted a couple of events ourselves. We haven't really done any sponsorship of events where we just pay a couple hundred bucks or whatever and throw our logo on the flyer we've done. All the events that we've done have been, like, planned, produced, and hosted by tweak labs, and then we'll bring in sponsors or artists or whatever it might be. So the most recent one we did was with Stephen Rae of Brain vomit, and it was an art gallery slash, like, DJ showcase where we brought in two local, really awesome dj's and then had a bunch of art up. And it was sort of a all day, all afternoon into the late evening kind of event. And that was extremely intentional, even to, like, how we set up the space with having the art on the outside of the walls, benches in the middle. So you're kind of looking out at the art at all times. And then the DJ stand sort of right in the back center middle. Like, it was all very intentional to kind of curate a vibe around what we're doing. And we actually have, like, another event that we're planning in August right now that's more of an outdoor sunset set kind of event where we're bringing in a couple different, like, house music DJ's and throwing a big outdoor event for a couple hours during sunset. Just music, drinks, good vibes, people. And that'll be, like, thrown and hosted and planned and produced by tweak labs and myself, kind of, so. And same with warp shop. I mean, all the moves that we've made, very intentional, and it's. It's just the way that, like, I like to move. And, I mean, a lot of times in this space, it's, like, hard to move like that because things come at you so fast, and things happen so fast that, like, you want to just pounce on every new, like, hot topic of the, of the day. Literally, like, by the day, new things come out. And there are definitely great strategies where it's just, like, capitalize on each one of those moments. Like, how can we form our marketing strategy, our building strategy around what's hot? And we definitely try to do that, but we do it in such a way that it doesn't deter from the brand. And this is both with, like, tweaks and with warp shop. And then even the other couple of projects I've worked on in the web three space as well, it's always tried to, like, lead with intention. Yeah, it's good, you know, because I feel like it's good to be methodical. And also, like you said, there's so much happening in web three space. Like, it moves so quickly that you also need a little bit of that flexibility. But you still, like, if you're intentional, then you could be like, more precise with what it is that you're trying to accomplish. And sometimes it's like, exactly. Yeah, I don't know how to describe it. Like, you know, sometimes there doesn't have to be like, going to do this release. It's like, you know, we're like, it could be like we're trying to have more engagement or make our product sticky. You know, like that could be like the intention behind it. And, you know, a new, like, direct cast API opens up with Farcaster and then it's like, okay, you know, we think that lines up with this thought process. So let's work on that, like immediately. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's exactly what you're saying. It's like the intention isn't just shut everything else out and close your mind and work in one lane without adjusting to what's going on around you, but it's building and having a set thing that you're reaching towards. And then as you're on this path, making sure to leave open the opportunity for when new things do arise, let's have space to be able to quickly implement it and add it to our suite of tools or to the product or to the brand or the community or the marketing strategy. I mean, the direct cast is like a great one. I mean, I think they put out the direct casts API, I don't know, maybe two weeks ago, a week ago or not a week ago, two and a half, three weeks ago. And we had just set up email notifications for like anyone that purchases a product through warp shop. You'll get an email kind of letting you know what you just bought. And then, same with the seller, we'll get an email notifying them they just made a sale. So we had that set up. And then once we saw that this direct casts API was coming out, it was pretty easy and made a lot of sense to then just also integrate that as well. So actually, right now, if you set up a warp shop and you go make some sales or you buy some products from other warp shops, you'll get direct cast sent right to you. Which that's the sort of intention like that I guess I'm talking about. It doesn't have to necessarily mean like, okay, we're going to take three months to think about this and then do it. It's more, let's leave ourselves open to new opportunities and jump on them when they come. If it makes sense for what we're doing in the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Especially the way the, the Merkel team or the warp cast or not. Yeah, like, the farcaster team, like, the NDW are like, they, they move so fast, man. It's insane. Like, they don't have to keep up sometimes. Yeah, like, they'll, like, even for me, like, you know, as, like, not a technical person, that, like, it's nuts to me. Like, we'll say, like, you know, this one's actually taking the longest, I think, in my opinion. And it's not a, it's not a criticism against them, but, like, you know, Vitalik's, like, we want longer casts. And, you know, it's had a lot of really good debate on forecaster, but, like, the direct cast, when I swear, like, that one, it came out of nowhere. Yeah. Like, literally, like, they were like, one week, it was like, hey, we're thinking about this. And then a week later, there was like, here's a spec sheet. It's ready to go. And, like, these companies are using it. Same with, like, frames inside of direct cast. Like, I swear. Yeah. You know, people were asking for it, and then, like, seven days or eight days later, they're like, here it is. And, like, here's, you know, hyper subs already using. And it's like, it's insane, dude. Like, the speed that, like, sometimes, like, you know, if you were like, okay, we're gonna take three months to think about something. Like, you could miss multiple boats. I mean, three months ago frame, like, basically three months ago, three and a half months ago frames launched. So if we had taken three months to debate whether or not we should put out frames, warp shop, like, wouldn't even be a thing right now. I mean, they move at a pace that is awesome. I love it. Like, you want to see companies moving at that kind of pace, and it's really just, can you keep up? Can you build as fast as they can and integrate the things that they're doing into their product? And not everything that they put out is going to make sense right away to integrate, like, cast actions. Really cool, awesome. New kind of thing that potentially opens up a whole nother new, like, app store for actions on casts. But we didn't find an immediate implementation that made sense for us, so we kind of stayed in our own lane and, like, continued to build on the features that we were building out and are sort of ideating around how we can add some sort of cast action type apps to warp shop. Yeah, I feel like cast actions are super underutilized, so I have a notion database of frames and cast actions that I like. And it's obviously not very, it doesn't include everything in under the world because there's so many out there. But my frames one is a lot bigger than my cast action ones. Like, there's probably like less than 20, like, really useful ones. I mean, I think, like, and if you include auto mod, like, auto mod has like five, let's say, like, if we just clued it, made it just be one instead of five different actions, you know, like, it's a small list. Like, the one that I use consistently is, for me as a content creator, I use read wise to, to track content instead of bookmarks. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, so I use read wise. This guy from LA actually, like, he was like, oh, I love read wise. We don't have a cast action for it. Like, because I usually save it for tweets too, on top of my reading and everything else. Like, if I see a good tweet and that I want to put in my newsletter, you know, all use the read wise Twitter one. But I was missing that for, for forecaster. And finally someone's like, I'll do it. And then I was like, dude, I'll pay you whatever money you want just to make this thing a real thing. I'm think that. Do you think that cast actions are slept on right now? Do you think there's implementations? Yeah. You do? Yeah, I think that. I think they're super slept on, to be honest. It's my observation. I think the one that's interesting too, is bought or not. Got really good with his cast action. Like initially when bar not came out, that's all it did. It was like not a bot or a bot or like basic caster. But then it started connecting into. What's those guys that are doing that algorithm now? Like, they're trying to, like, push for, like their algorithm for the power badge. I think it's like, it's not air stack. I think it's like open graph or something like that. But he connected it to that. And basically, like, now it does bot or not. Plus the level of type of caster you are. So, like, if you're like pro or like Xbox based on their data, like, it connects to the, like, it does it via API, and then it also, like, looks to see, like, where you cast more frequently. So it's like a more sophisticated cast action. But yeah, I would say they're super slept on. Do you. Is that. And you don't think that's with airstack? Cause I know airstack has, like, the social score or the far. Yeah, it might be airstack then. Yeah, yeah. Using one of the, one of the open. It might be air sec. I think you're right. It's using the social graph, like score or whatever. But yeah, cast actions. Super, super underrated. Another question, while we're here. I might as well get some user feedback. What are your latest thoughts on frames in general? Because I know, like, I still, I'm super bullish on frames. I think they have a ton of unexplored implementations and a lot of really, really cool things that can be done. But I have been seeing, I guess, like, fud around frames where people are. Like, I even saw someone go so far as say, yeah, I muted all frames. If anyone mentions frames, it's. I don't want to see it because they're all just like, dumb, spammy frames. Um, I'm curious, like, what are your thoughts around frames in their current state? Um, I don't know if I would mute them. That's aggressive. I wish we could. I wish we could mute. So, like, someone brought this up on Farcaster, too. That was really interesting. It's like, I want to follow the person, but if they're posting on, you know, the FOMO channel, don't show it to me. You know, like, overall, like, this person's great, but when it comes to them posting their, like, builder frame, you know, like the token farm and stuff, I can't blame people either, because I have benefited. I have benefited really well from Djen, myself, personally. And I do, do tip Degen as well. Like, the things that I like. So, like, I don't know, like, be early. Like one of these guys from Limone eth or whatever, he's Italy. Yeah, yeah. He had, like, a frame that was like, be early, and it's like a waitlist. I really like that. And I was like, dude, I'm just gonna tip you my whole allowance. Like, that's freaking dope. But, you know, you know, there's people that are like, here's, I don't know, a picture of my toenail. Like, and then people are like, ah, here's 10,000 degen. Like, you're, I don't know, like, that kind of stuff. I'm like, so I totally get where people are coming from. I wouldn't mute frames. I wouldn't fud frames. Personally, I think frames are. I do have some gripes with them where some of them are, like, the, for example, like, paragraph. When I post my paragraph one, like, my article, I feel like the space isn't being utilized now nicely. So, you know, like it's like a box. Let's say it's like 300 pixels by whatever and like the text is like a quarter of it filled and, you know, it's missing. Like it doesn't support markdown either. So like, you can't even see like the title, like bolding. I don't know, like it's, it's a little janky still, I would say. Yeah, I agree. I need some nicer frames for sure. That's exactly like I was going to say. I think I, I think people are annoyed with the low quality, the low effort, low quality frames where there's a lot of room now to, in my mind. And this is sort of going back to that intention thing. It's a much better idea to spend a month or so building one really awesome frame and really honing in on the UI, the look, the design, the interaction and release that versus whipping out like five, six frames, like a frame every week, basically, where a day even where it's just like, they look like crap and you get like minor engagement, you get minor, like very little people interacting with it because it's just a low quality frame. And I mean, we're actually having probably next, probably this time next week we're going to be releasing a new frame in collaboration with, I would say, farcaster's favorite account right now. And it's been a couple weeks, at least a month and a half in the works. And I think it is going to be, in my opinion, it's going to be one of the best looking frames that's ever been released. And I'm super excited about that. So like sort of trying new things with, with warp shop too. Like, we don't want to just, you know, remain stagnant and continue building when people aren't per se reacting to a certain thing. So that's why I like frames a lot is like, you can keep experimenting with these things and if you do it in such a way that's like tasteful and high quality, even if it does flop and people do end up hating it, like, they're not gonna, like, they're, they're still probably gonna tip you their djen or something because you put like, it's clear when you put a lot of effort into something like that. Yeah. Like going back to the, the be early example, like that was a really smooth frame, like flow, you know, where it was like. Or actually, no, sorry, it wasn't even be early. It was strings. He was, like, promoting his strings, like, sign up. So, like, strings is going to be like a far caster client that, like, gives priority to threads. So it's going to make the threads experience a lot nicer. I'm sure you saw it to same guy, but basically the thread sign up for it. It was kind of like problem like solution and then how to sign up. It was like a frame that, you know, it was like three pages or whatever, maybe four. I forgot now. And then at the end, it was like, you know, the beer leader, the waitlist frame, and it was super nice, man. Like, I'm looking at it right now. I actually haven't. This is. I haven't heard of this one, the strings one. Yeah, it's super nice, man. Same guy that did the be early one. But it was like, you could tell, like, exactly what you're saying. It was, like, good design, intentional, like, good quality. Like, really pushing the limits on frames, I would say, like, and what it's capable. And also, like, building it in a. In a way where, you know, like, frames is like, it's building it with that in mind. So instead of, like, being like, oh, let me, you know, put a hodgepodge of things and make it into a frame, it was like, no, I'm building this so it looks good on a frame from day one. Nice. Okay. Yeah, I'm looking into this. I've definitely. I know about Limon. He's great. I like. And I think I was actually looking into a little bit deeper, like, the builder's garden thing. I really like that. This whole idea of, like, a web three MVP studio that just ships products fast and sees what sticks, I think that's a super interesting thing, especially right now in such an early, early phase of farcaster and, like, this social fi stuff. It's one week something might be the hottest thing ever, and then the next week, it might not. People might hate it. And having the flexibility to, like, kind of ship what you think is going to hit is important. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that. That brings me kind of to. Did you see? I think his name is, like, sloke. The Nook team. Dude, I was literally just gonna ask you about that. Oh, my God. I saw that last night, and I was like, what the fuck? Like, are you, like. These guys were. They were killing it, dude. They were absolutely killing it. Nook was awesome. And I was so surprised to see that. And they raised capital, I'm pretty sure, like, less. Less than a month ago, like, far con, they announced they raised a bunch of money. And I was really surprised to see that, honestly. Yeah, I was as well. It was funny, too. I saw, like, I'm good friends with Martin, who did, who like, launched the higher coin. Me and him, actually, he was somewhat of a, I don't know if I like mentor is the right word, but he was a year older than me at school and we were in the same organizations and we'd always like, jam on this kind of stuff. And I saw he posted yesterday, like, rip Farcaster, February 2024 to June 2024, and it kind of went a little mini viral. And a lot of people were like, oh, yeah, it's like the vibes are weird on the timeline. And even Dan came out and posted why build on Farcaster in June 2024? And had this whole list of things that why he believed you should keep building on it. And I mean, Nook's reason I like, researched into a little bit more their reason behind deciding to shut down was they didn't want to have a dependency on Merkel. And basically we're saying, like, if Merkel works and they do what they say they're going to do and acquire more users, then great, it works out. This dependency is an amazing thing. If it doesn't, then they just wasted a bunch of their time and they were basically saying they don't want to wait around and find out. Yeah. And the VC's don't want to wait around and find out either. Crazy. What did you make of that? Like, what were your thoughts around that initially. Think you might have cut off? I probably cut out. I was just, I just asked, what did you make of the Nook thing? Yeah, I think for me it was, it caught me off guard. I've been following sloke, or however you say his name, but I've been following him. When he built that Reddit client, I forgot the name of it, but he built a Reddit like client. That was really nice because I think Vitalik did like an AMA. Yeah, actually it was Vitalik. Vitalik did like an AMA a couple months ago, maybe like in February or late last year, if I'm remembering correctly. And it was really kind of like the experience to see that AmA on the Farcaster side or the Warpcast side. Wasn't that nice? And he built that like flink. I think that was the name of it. It was like Reddit client. And it was really good to read the responses and follow the conversations with that tool. So I became familiar with him then and then got in pretty early on. Nook, like on the test flight just because I was following him for a while now. So I was, I was really bumped to see Nook kind of for this to happen. I kind of get it, though, from, like, the perspective of, you know, if you take VC Monday there, they want to bet on you, like, in your team. And the dependency on the Merkel team is like, you know, it's a double bet. You know, you're betting on the Merkel team plus the nook team now. Yeah. And that might just be, you know, a barrier too high for, for VC money. I also get where Dan's coming from, too, where it's like, you know, if, if you're not taking VC money and you're doing like, the, the builder's garden, like, you're building MVP's and you're okay with kind of testing things out until you figure something out, um, you're bound to find something that's going to work and stick really well. Um, but again, you know, like, be keeping yourself available or open to work on other things is critical in this, you know, this moment right now. So that's kind of how I took the whole, the whole thing is like, I didn't read it as, like, they're done with Farcaster. Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I read it more like they're going to explore other ideas. Yeah. And I think, I think that's, I mean, I respect it for sure. I think I'm definitely going to keep following along with whatever they shift to next and, like, and build out next. I really like the team a lot and I took it as we're going to keep building and they're probably going to like, I think Farcaster is great for launching products. There's no doubt about that in my mind, that right now, like, if you're building a new startup semi related to crypto, you should be launching and focusing first and foremost on Farcaster because the quality of people there and the quality of, like, feedback you'll get on Farcaster is light years better than Twitter or Instagram. And I just sort of took it as, okay, we're gonna build something else and probably we're just going to utilize Farcaster to get people on it and we'll see what happens. All right, let's take a quick break. Hope you're enjoying this episode. This episode was made possible with the support of my premium subscribers. Seattledog, EtH Magwinnels, eth ko eth og eth lucras, Johan Youngweeknd topos ethnic new subscribers PG and inceptionally. Thanks again for your support. If you would like to receive exclusive drops access to token gated content, exclusive art, make sure to subscribe to my hypersub. I'll have a link below. And also make sure to check out my telegram channel where we talk about whole things to podcasts and all the content from Andre aliens. Alright, let's get back to it. Yeah, I did want to ask you something that maybe it's a little more, a little more morbid, but something I've thought about as well. So obviously I think there's a skill and a takeaway that we can all learn from. You know, it's not like Nook wasn't working or failing. Like, it's not like it flopped. Like people were using it, people liked it clearly from like the messages. So I respect that they were able to do that analysis and pull a plug. And something that I've actually, that I kind of wanted to ask you because I've been thinking about it as well. So, like, you know, so I've been doing this content thing now for like two years and I've been trying to figure out in my head like when, like, what is the thought process or how do you like determine when it's time to pull the plug on something, you know, because we only have like a finite amount of hours. And I know you do too, because you have, you actually are still working at Red Bull and I'm the same as you. Like, I work in, you know, technical, technical operations and product management is kind of like a weird way to say what my title is. And in real life, um, it's funny. Because I know exactly, I know exactly what that means. Yeah, it's like a weird, I'm in a weird place. Like, it's in the legal space. Like, I'm in a super weird position. Like, but that's the easiest way to describe it. But I'm like the tech implementer for, for legal departments. Like, it's weird, but yeah, so, like, I don't know, like, have you ever thought about that? Like, how, how would you know when it's time or how would you even come to a decision like that? Like, I'm just like, that's what I'm mostly curious about. Like, how did he know, you know? Yeah. Can you, can you repeat like the. What team were you referencing? Were you referencing nook? I think he cut out for like just a second right at the beginning of the question. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, you know, like nook, they clearly, like, they sat down and it's not like they had a completely failing product where like, no one's, yeah, no one likes it, you know, like, it's clearly like there were some legs to it, but they still decided to like, you know, pull the plugs. So, and I respect that because I like, I feel like there's a skill in sometimes moving away from things, you know, instead of like letting it die or continue, you know, just, yeah, no. I mean, this is a really good, this is a great question. Yeah, it's like morbid, but it's hitting on all the right things, I think, because, and especially in this, I've actually talked a lot about this, especially in this space, things move so fast that sometimes you launch a product or a company that goes out of style or it was actually just kind of a hype thing that maybe doesn't make a whole lot more sense right now. And it's sort of a double edged sword because in a lot of startup and entrepreneurs minds that would mean, okay, we can like really rapidly iterate and just keep launching new products and trying things out and seeing when things actually hit and like, when we think that this is a long term play. But it's interesting because in this space, like when you do that, you're sometimes will be seen as like a grifter or someone that is disingenuously building. And I think it's obviously there are a lot of grifters and there's a lot of people that are just launching shit just to make a quick buck. It's pretty easy to tell the difference, but there are a lot of people that launch things that don't work out and then they get labeled as such because everyone in this space seems to think that if you launch something, you have to stick with it forever and continue building it forever. And if you don't, then you're a scammer and you just took people's money and dipped. When in actuality it probably was shut down because of some sort of internal conflict or there was some data that they found that didn't add up. Maybe the payments and the expenses that the company had was greater than any sort of potential profit. So, and it's such a tough question as to like, when do you pull the plug? And I've dealt with this before. I've worked on, so when I graduated USC, I continued, instead of like going and trying to, you know, get a job and whatever, I was like, all right, I'm going to take my hand and try this startup thing full time. I'll give it at least a year and see how it goes. And like held myself to that. So I was working on basically three projects, the tweaks I was continuing to work on, just sort of building out the community. And then I also joined two other teams, an animation studio and then like a historical NFT project that both really amazing people building them, really awesome teams, very qualified, great ideas behind both of them, but they were both launched in like the depths of a bear market to an audience that no one gave a shit about animation or gave a shit about historical artifacts in that moment. And they fell flat and it was a tough decision, like sitting down with pretty much like both of those teams, pretty much, and at some point being like, all right, guys, like, it's time to pull the plug or it's time to move on or shift and pivot ideas and what we're doing. And I think it's, I really think it's when you get to a point where Nook is like a really interesting example because they weren't, they weren't going poorly in any sense. Like it was going well, it seemed like they were gaining users. But I think it's really when it gets to a point when you've tried a few different things and the data just keeps showing you that something with this general idea or direction or product that you're building just isn't hitting and maybe the sentiment has shifted in such a way that you're actually able to see the future, or I think you see the future a bit more clearly and say, okay, I got caught up in this moment of like crazy hype around, I don't know, cast actions and this isn't the future that I thought it was going to be. And you see that in a new light and that's, I guess when I think you need to pull the plug, typically it's like, and with these two projects I was working on, it was like we had tried genuinely every angle that we could to do. They're both NFT projects, pretty much both very different. And we had tried almost every angle as to like, how can we get people to care about what we're building and get people's eyes on it? I mean, one of the projects, actually, both the projects we built out like full, complete mini games where you stake your nfts and then you go like play with them and you battle or whatever and you can build all this great product and tech, but if you don't have people that care about it or that want to use it, then it doesn't matter. And I think that's where you need to get to a hard realization that no matter what features you add on to your product, it, people don't care. And that's sort of the moment, I think, when you figure out, like, okay, I need to move on. And for nook, I guess it must have been like something where they just didn't think. They probably hit what they thought was the top of the users. They could pull in from Warpcast and they realized, all right, we now have, like, pretty much as many users as we can get from the current market. How do we get more users, and that's on Merkel, to bring in more users into Farcaster. And that's a really hard thing, to rely on another product team entirely to bring in your users when you can do the hard work and get users on your own in a completely different way. I mean, crypto is already super hard to build in. Adding a dependency where you don't think there's a strong future for is a lie is a really good reason to kind of end the lifecycle of a project. This is a super long answer because I'm sort of like piecing it together as I speak out what I'm thinking. But it's like, it is a really good question because it's just, this is like the, one of the most important things as a startup founder is you're going to fail, like probably 20 times out of 21. And that 21st try, it'll hit and like, listen and read about any startup entrepreneur, founder, whatever. They'll tell you that they tried a million things and all of them were just terrible failures. And then this one thing, they hit and it launched and it was received well and the growth wasn't stagnant. I think that's a huge thing is like, when growth plateaus, that's when you need to kind of have those conversations as well. Yeah, that's very true. Yeah, no, I know what you mean. Yeah. Like, I listen to a bunch of business entrepreneur kind of podcasts, and I know that's like, you know, like, there's like, almost no difference between, like the, between you and like a crazy person, you know, because you need that level of belief in yourself and in the tool and what you're working on, you know, for it to, for it to work. But it's also like, you know, you can't keep spinning and spinning your wheels on something if it's, if it's not gonna succeed. You know, you just got to keep reiterating through things. So, yeah, it's just, yeah, it just caught me off guard, so, but, like, immediately, I was like, damn. I was like, well, you know, I applied it to myself. I was like, well, then how will I know when I got to that point, if I ever got to that point? Yeah. And I honestly, I think that we're gonna see, I think we're gonna see a couple other people in the next couple of weeks that shift their, their serious companies back into a side project or something like that, where it's like, all right, yeah, these guys kind of opened up a new thought process in me and not me specifically, but in this hypothetical person. And now why? Yeah, I think we need to rethink our strategy. Is this actually a full blown company that can really become a massive thing or is it just a fun, neat little idea and, yeah, I mean, it's a struggle, I'll be honest. Sometimes warp shop, I think, is amazing. And I'm so excited for everything that is lying in front of us with the future. But we have had those conversations of how do we break this dependency of being so reliant on Farcaster and so reliant on another team. And our sort of solution for that is like, one, expanding on chain and two, expanding like, our offerings. So allowing not just shops in a frame, but other kind of out of the box solutions. And I think, like, that be early thing is a great example. Like a very simple frame builder for like a waitlist tool is a great, is another great tool. Can that be a full blown company by itself? Probably not. But add that to a suite of 20 other tools. Now you have this really powerful creator stack. Wherever. I can pull all these different strings when I have a new product launch and I can get a waitlist going and I can post about it through an article that's done through like paragraph and I can then sell the early passes through a frame and like mix all of these things together, it becomes a real valuable thing. Put all of these things on chain and it completely 100 x. Hundred x is what can be done. And I think that with warp shop, that's like the big unlock is really having everything be on chain. And what I mean by that is when you set up a warp shop, when you add your products. Also, I never really gave a, I never really gave a summary on warp shop. I mean, just kind of jumped right into it. No, you could jump into it. That's where we were going next anyway. Yeah. Which I love. But basically, warp shop is a no code tool to make a storefront in a frame. And it's v one, simplicity and expanding beyond that is putting all of your shops and your products on chain in such a way that they're composable and they can be used not just in a frame, but they can potentially be used if another person decides to build a frame that renders all of the, or not build a frame, but build a product that renders all of these on chain products. And the biggest unlock with that and with on chain commerce, in my opinion, is the fees. Like, I even had this conversation. Someone came up to me today and said they're helping another person set up a shopify. And the only options they had were a 3% fee plus a 30,$0.30 on every transaction fee, or a 3.1% fee with no, like, change added to it. And I was like, that is insane. For reference, Coinbase commerce is a 1% fee, which is minuscule. Like, 2% is a massive number for really, really big companies. So I think, I really do think the big unlock is that fee being able to be so much lower to where it's, in a lot of cases, literally even pennies, because maybe there isn't a fee in the specific protocol that you're using to exchange goods. And it's now like, how can you build out infrastructure around these transactions to make them more than just transfers on the blockchain? It really is like providing context and metadata around a transaction so that it's seen or viewed by a certain app as a physical product transfer kind of thing. I don't know if that fully makes sense, but it's essentially putting all of this, your product information, the sizes, the colors, the styles, whatever it might be, as metadata on chain, and even going so far as abstracting away the physical address entry, so that in a trustless way, when someone purchases a product, your product on chain, and they have to enter their address, that is done on chain, but the address is, the physical address is hidden and completely abstracted away from the ETH address or the Solana address or whatever it might be. And I think that's like a really huge unlock because it really lowers the fees. And then it also puts all of this data in a public forum that others can now get a lot more of an understanding and feedback on, like, what people are actually buying. Like, imagine if every single product that was purchased through Shopify was all on chain, and you could go somewhere and just look up on like a block explorer how many t shirts were sold through warp shop or through Shopify in the last day, and that information would be directly accessible. And that doesn't mean, you know, where they were shipped to or what kind of t shirts or potentially even, like, what stores were selling the t shirts. But now, you know that what kind of products were being purchased in a very, very broad way that is not accessible in, like, any other fashion. I think it's just, I mean, that's the nature of public blockchains is like, really this. It's giving access to, it's laying, it's laying, it's making the ground even for everybody to build things on top of because we all have access to the same stuff and the same data. Sorry, that was a really long explanation, but I hope that makes a little sense. No, it does. Yeah. Yeah. And like, even for me, you know, like, it's so funny because, like, even, like, you know, like, this podcast, like, I posted now on chain and it's like, well, why would you do that? Because, you know, you already have, like, you already have it on Apple Podcasts. You already have it, you know, in all these places, I already get analytics, you know, why would you do this? And, and kind of it, like, it does make sense a little bit. Like, why? Why would I do it? Because, like, it bifurcates my listening base, too. You know? Like, now my metrics are not really, really representative from my podcast host because some of it's not being listened to through a traditional RSS feed. You know, it's being listened to on pause or whatever. But like you said, like, it's really interesting. Like, I'm able to see now who, like, I'll give you an example. So, for example, I used to do a Zili board. I think you know what Zle is, but it's kind of like a quest board. So I would have like, a quest for, you know, who's reading my weekly newsletter. And pretty much like, the, the main goal was to track engagement, really, or, like, loyal fans is kind of what I was after, you know, and I was doing it, you know, because, like, in Web two, everything is like, you know, its own database. It's, you know, not everything has an API. Not everything is, like, connected together. You could do it, you know, like, if you were rich, you could probably like, hodgepodge it all together. Like, or if you were very technical, you could build something like that. But with doing this on the blockchain, you know, I'm able to basically point it to a bunch of contracts and be like, hey, if somebody collects my podcasts, you know, give them one point. If someone reads my newsletter, give them one point. If they follow me on Farcaster, give, give them one point, and then you're able to very quickly see, like, okay, these are all the people that are, you know, like, the fans, like, the people that are digesting my stuff, you know, and, you know, with, like, with what you're saying, with, like, warp shop, you know, if I wanted to make a, you know, Genesis capsule, like, t shirts or something, you know, before, it would be like, just an email, and now it's like a wallet. So it's all your wallet. So I could see, like, okay, this person, I'm able to better follow the life cycle of a customer or a person, you know, like, the journey as they go through the funnel deeper and deeper. You know, like, it's like a. A product manager's, like, wet dream, basically. In terms of. Totally. That's such a good way to put it. What do you see as the top of the funnel in terms of wallet interactions? I'd say, like, the top of the funnel right now, for comparison is a view on Instagram. Like, one impression on Instagram is the very top of the funnel. What do you think the top of the funnel is? For wallets. For wallets? I would say. I would say that based on my experience, it would be like signing up to my newsletter, like, on paragraph. This is me specific. But, like, it would be like signing up to my newsletter on paragraph. I could see their wallet. That's it. They're just, they just. They just signed up. Yeah. You know? Yeah, that's it. That means to me, they showed interest. That's it. They're going to get my newsletter, and then now I have collectibles on. So if someone collects it, that means that now they're willing to press a button. It's one layer deeper. Yeah. Yep, one layer deeper. And then if they're. It's kind of the same for the podcast, too. Like, you know, I can see who's following it, and then if they collect it, then it's one layer deeper. But it's nuts. Like, you know, I never really thought about building, like, a base token or a token, and I'm like, okay, but now I can build a token, and I can see who the holders are. So you start grabbing all these bits and pieces, data, and you could see at the very bottom who are the true followers. And I don't mean it in a weird way. It's just like, I want to, uh, incentivize or reward those people. You know, it's like, you know, they're, they're consuming and listening, and, you know, they're clearly vibing with me so totally, yeah, they deserve, they deserve to get rewarded in whatever way I, you know, I can think of. I would say I totally agree with you. I would say the top of the funnel can go even higher than that with, with, now with Farcaster, like, so for example, someone signing up for your newsletter through paragraph, amazing example of like, top of the funnel. It's showed interest. You can go even deeper and you can actually, with just one click of that paragraph frame. And I don't, paragraph probably isn't like collecting this right now or showing it to you, but this is sort of where we're kind of starting to head with warp shop, is we can see exactly what, who the user is that interacted with the frame. So even if someone isn't purchasing anything or signing up or submitting anything, as long as you click one button on one of our frames, we can get your wallet address, we can get your FID, your farcaster username. We can see. Then, like, once you have the wallet address, it unlocks this entire world of on chain information and data. What coins do you hold? What nfts do you have? What apps do you use the most? When was the last time you signed up for someone else's, like, like signed an attestation on chain? Like, all of these things can be seen. And that is, to me, like, it's so powerful. It's like someone literally just has to click on a post and we can immediately get this whole world of data that is super valuable for someone like you, a creator that wants to understand who the people are that are actually going and signing up and using and listening to your podcast. Like being able to see that, like, okay, if someone took the time to click on this frame that I made, that is valuable information. Okay, now what tokens, like, what's the most held token of the people that then decided to sign up? All right, for some reason, my product's really popular in the hire community. Let me go over to the hire channel and now post there and bring in more of the people that enjoy what I'm doing. And oh my God, no way. Channels are also now on chain. So now I can see all this like likes and recasts and replies and everything that's being done inside this channel. And I can see what users are replying to, what pieces of content. Like, if someone's responding to every polymarket meme post that's being made, that's incredibly valuable information. Now, you know right off the bat that this person either loves memes or they love gambling, or they love sports or they love prediction markets. And that is all so valuable to understand, like how to grab and reel in your potential customer. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with that. That you could see that's all extremely valuable. I forgot the name of the company that I was using for a bit. Is it ungroup? I forgot the name of it. For what use case? Basically, like you can create a group of wallets on this app and it shows you all that information. You're saying like what tokens they're collecting in the last. Obviously you could do this via dune, but they were making it easy to drop a bunch of wallets and give it a name and then you're able to see what it is that they're active on, what app they're using, what marketplace are they using? Opensea versus blur. Exactly what you're saying. You're able to see everything that they're interacting with, which is extremely useful even for me because like, you know, now I could be like, all right, you know, the, everyone's collecting, you know, this on chain token or builder token. Let me, let me write about that, you know, or like, let me go over here and see what it is that they're talking about. You know, you're able to write better content that's more specific to them at that point. Yep, yep. And it's like with the builder token stuff, it's, I really like what they're doing too. It's, it's super cool. And like you can instantly see how much builder someone has or build token someone has. And that provides some sort of more further social proof. And this is, I guess this is like what airstack is doing with the social, with the, I don't remember the exact name. It's like social score, social forecaster score or something. That's a very valuable number. And it's like they're basically pulling in all this on chain information about people that are interacting on Farcaster and giving it to the user. So you can understand exactly like what kind of person they are, what kind of person they are online at least. Yeah, no, 100%, man. I wanted to ask you about. I think you kind of touched a little bit on it. What makes you bullish on warp shops? So something that crossed my mind a little bit. Why would you want some of this data on chain? And you can tell me if I'm going in the right direction a little bit too. I was thinking about it in the sense of, you know, for example, there's this new Lego set that's coming out that's the deku tree from Ocarina of time. I mean, I think it's in other games as well, but I'm thinking of Ocarina of time. So it's basically this, like, you know, it's like the first challenge in Ocarina of time. It's Zelda. Yeah, looks badass. You know, if it was on chain, I can now see everyone that owned this or bought this, and I, you know, like, I can now quickly create, like, a Lego channel for adults, you know, and then, you know, I can invite these people to be like, hey, you know, join my channel. Like, we know, we could talk about it like, adults that play Legos. I thought that's, like a whole demographic, too, in case you didn't know. But, you know, like, that, that's like, the benefit I see from, like, putting things on on chain is like, you know, you're able to bridge those connections and, and there's better data now. You know, like, so, like, something like interface can show better suggestions to you, you know? So, like, if you were. If you had a paragraph, like, if there was a content creator that had a paragraph newsletter that talked about, you know, the latest Lego sets, it could be like, oh, you collected legos via warp shop? You know, you would like this content creator that likes, that talks about legos, you know, like, it could, it could piece it all together for you, which is really nice. Yeah. Is that what gets you kind of bullish on? Yeah, I mean, warp shop? Yeah, I guess you just answered, answered my question in, like, a perfect example for me. I think one, the first and foremost thing is, like, the idea of having the ability to shop directly in a feed really excites me. And this is, like, where, like, Instagram and TikTok are headed with all these, like, TikTok and Instagram shops. And I obviously don't think that those are going to go away. And, like, I don't think frames are going to replace those. I think frames are another opportunity to get your products as close to the end user as possible and reduce the friction for conversion as much as possible. So being able to directly just buy something that you like with, like, two clicks of a button, sign a transaction, and boom, it's now on your way. And you have the tracking number in your DM's that you can look up very powerful. And I think that sort of, like, number one is like that. That is the distribution that a lot of people are looking for. And having this be on Farcaster and on, like, an on chain sort of social graph. It allows me to then to get all of this really unique, interesting data about that person and understand them on a much, much deeper level than I would be able to on Instagram. I don't know exactly like the analytics that Instagram would give me on my users, but I think it's very limited in terms of it's male gender, age group, and then maybe some of their interests or something, whereas this data is. And it's almost like my mom actually had asked me this recently when I was explaining sort of like blockchain stuff. I don't know why, but I've gotten her into blockchain so long ago. And for some reason she didn't realize until like a couple months ago that anybody can see the balance of her crypto wallet. Like, of her ETh wallet at least. She's like, what? Like, that feels so weird. Like, that's like they can almost like, look into my bank account. I'm like, yeah, that's the point of, that's the point of the blockchain. It's all public. I can look at what tokens you have, look and look at what you've done and what you've interacted with. And it is a little bit, like, intrusive in a sense that anybody is able to see where and what I'm interacting with. But also at the same time, it is very beneficial because now, and I see this in the future, based on my five years of ETH wallet history, I'm going to have, like, the best possible algorithm or the best possible suggestions for things that I might like because of my last five years of minting nfts, buying coins, playing games, interacting with people, clicking on frames, all these different things. And it makes it incredibly valuable for the companies and the people that are trying to, like, sell me something. But also, it's, I mean, it's valuable for me as an end user because now I can get the best possible suggestions across many different applications. And like, yes, this is true for, like, Twitter and TikTok algorithms. Like, you spend five minutes flipping through it, the algorithm is immediately adjusting. That same thing can happen, but across every single application on Ethereum. And that's what's, like, super exciting, is, one, the distribution, and then two, the data that comes along with it is why I'm very, very bullish on warp shop frames and in like, the broadest sense, just on chain interactions and on chain commerce. And maybe it's more than just on chain commerce, like you brought up interface. It's really cool. It's almost like a block explorer, but with very niche, specifically designed kind of mechanisms behind it. And it's awesome what you can kind of learn about other people and yourself through these things. It's almost, like, freaky, I guess. Like, sometimes I don't want to know how much money I lost on an NFT. I guess it's good for me to know, you know? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because they just released, like, a token view, which is really nice, actually. So, like, it shows every single time that you've bought into or sold a token or did an airdrop. So, like, for Djen on interface, you know, you were able to see how early, you know, you got in or if you sold the top or, you know, all that. And it keeps people honest, too, you know, like, it's funny, you know, people will be like, oh, yeah, I got into bitcoin on Exxon next date. And then I'm like, cool, like, show me your wallet, like the one that you used to buy it with. And they're like, ah, you know, and I'm like, no, I don't. Because, like, you should have the receipts. Like, it's that simple. This isn't a complicated thing, you know, like, I'm able to show, like, my purchases from Coinbase, like you said, like, from 20, like, early 2015. That was like one of their first customers. And you could see it going into my wallets and stuff. It is scary. You know, you could see, like, this dumbass bought a pizza for a thousand bitcoin, like, in 2016. So it is, it is nice in that regard. But I will also why. That's also why I'm, like, for privacy coins, too, a little bit. Like, I think I need. I think we do need a little bit of privacy coins as well. But that's also why the government doesn't want them. Exactly. I mean, yeah, I guess what I'll say to that, too, is in an age where it's so easy to fake things with, there's just a million tools you can use. You could fake an entire life on Instagram using Photoshop and all these different tools. In an age where that is so easy, the radical transparency of the blockchain is kind of needed and really interesting and engaging. Like, the fact that I'm able to do things that I know other people are going to see, it definitely makes me double, like, think twice about specifically what I might be interacting with on chain for a better way. Like, I don't know, there's that whole meta of, like, just really heinous coins on Solana, like, where just like super racist coins and like, for now, forever. Whoever bought those coins that is going to be etched into your on chain history. And that sucks because that's just like a horrible thing. Like, like, it's just, it's good that you can suss out those things and those people that might be doing like, just really stupid, dumbass shit on chain, scamming on chain, like sus things on chain. And it sort of makes you wise up about your own interactions that other people can see. Yeah, I mean, we had, we had some YouTube, I gotta say names. We had some YouTube content creators, you know, where it's very easy to see, like, you know, they load it up on a certain coin and then, you know, they, they made a big YouTube video about it and then they dumped it on everyone, you know, on the pump. You know, it's very easy to see, see people do that, you know. You know, shame on me once or twice, you know, at that point, you know, you know, they do if you know this and they do it to you a bunch of times and then you're kind of being willfully ignorant. But, you know, it's all trackable. Like you said, you can and it's not that hard. You know, people could like spin up a wallet, another wallet and all that. But like, you know, people are smart. So. Yeah, what I wanted to ask you. Let's see something also that I had a question on Warp shop too. So I know that you guys are connected to Shopify. So if I wanted to spin up a warp shop, does that mean are you paying for the shopify subscription version as well and Warp shop? Or, or is it the free one? So currently, Warp shop is 100% free for everybody. There's actually like zero monetization on Warp shop at the moment. And we're doing that right now mostly to just get as much user feedback so we can build a product that people actually would want to pay for. So you can add your shopify and put in your products and then start selling through Warp shop. And it's no extra cost to you. You still are going to be paying the shopify fee and the subscription fee. And then also, if you elect to have people check out with Shopify, I think they charge like a 3% fee as well. So right now there's no extra cost. We're also using Coinbase commerce, which is a 1% transaction fee. So much lower transaction fee. So we actually like, heavily encourage people to use the coinbase commerce versus Shopify and a lot of the reason that Shopify is this, this integration is great is because of the fact that you can still just manage your logistics on shopify on this very built out platform of a lot of people. And I've done this too. A lot of people will make merch and then put the mock up in a website like printful or printify where it's on demand printing and fulfillment. You don't even need to touch the product. So, and you hook that up directly through the shopify. So like you could theoretically string together these kind of tools. And ideally we want to just directly like integrate with a printful or a print defy where you can directly fulfill your products through warp shop that then goes through a printful. Basically you can add printful, your shopify, add warp shop to your shopify, and then now you have a frame that people can purchase through your frame. And then you see those orders come in through your shopify and then you click fulfill. Boom, you, within a couple of clicks, you just sold some product and it's being created and shipped to your customer. Yeah, that makes sense. And shopify is super powerful. So does that mean then essentially, like, let's say if I had a warp shop that was selling a sweatshirt, is there also maybe like not an NFT, but like the transaction is saved to the blockchain. Right. So someone could hypothetically be like, look up all the sweatshirts I've sold. Yeah. So it's, right now it's done through Coinbase commerce. And like, so if you, if you basically as the admin, you can say, I want people to only purchase through a shopify checkout that's totally off chain. It's done with like credit, like whatever payment method. Yeah, that's done with them. Okay. Yeah. Whereas Coinbase commerce, that is fully on chain and we've actually kind of hack together, like really strong analytics around all of that. Coinbase commerce is great, but they don't have the best tracking and APIs and understanding of when people are abandoning their checkout, when they're actually completing a checkout. We have a whole admin panel now where you can see when someone goes in and purchases a product through, through Coinbase commerce, you can see their wallet, you can see you get their physical address so that you can ship the product out. You get their farcaster name and you can even see like abandoned checkouts. So you can see, oh, there was 300 checkouts that were abandoned out of the 500 total. So I sold 200 shirts. How can I get that conversion rate higher? So there's less abandonment in the checkout process. So that is all. Yes, on chain. I don't know exactly how you would look that up in a block explorer, but through like, since basically we have your Coinbase commerce API key, since we have that, we're able to kind of pull all that information for you and then just display it to you. Got it? Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. I know what you're saying now. Yeah, I was just trying to figure out like wrap my head around it in terms of like, you know, like how it's, how it fits. I've used Coinbase commerce before. Yeah. Like kind of how it fits with the blockchain to then do like discoverability later on, you know. But yeah, if you have, like you said, the API key, I mean, you have the unique identifier, so you're able to grab everything associated with it after that. So. Yep. Yeah. And I mean, the direction that we're moving is like Coinbase commerce is amazing. We love it. We love working with Coinbase on it as well. But for us to get the best data possible and to make the transaction in frame and as seamless as possible, we essentially have to make our own smart contracts that allow you to transact Ethereum or whatever currency to purchase the product. So basically like end state is you have as an admin, as a creator of a store, you have ten different options of what payments you want to accept. So you can enable credit card, you can enable on chain transactions, you can enable Coinbase commerce, Shopify, all these different sort of checkout methods. We want to give you the option to use any of these, not just limiting you to coinbase commerce checkout. And that is sort of where we're headed with it. Additionally too, in terms of like a monetization sense, that is one way that we can make the experience incredibly cheap. Adding the same fee that Coinbase commerce uses, a 1% fee to our contracts. So we're still able to function as a company and grow. But you're also paying a fee that is incredibly much, much smaller than Shopify or credit card fee. Oh, 100%. Yeah, it opens you up to do a lot more. Yeah. Like, even for me, like subscriptions are like 10% with substack because that's where I initially got started. And even with like now I use fabric and I'm pushing for fabric as much. And even like Patreon is like 1015 percent as well. You know, fabrics, like, I think it's 4% or 5%, you know, like way cheaper than the competition and and it's funny because, you know, I'm used to the, the 10%. And so I was like, all right, so this 5%, I'm now putting it into a pool for referrals, you know, nice. So now people can, you know, refer other people and they can earn money, too. And to me, I'm still getting the same amount, but now it's given me the choice to spread some of that love, so. 100%. Yeah. And you guys got to, you gotta pay the bills, man. So. Yeah, I get it. I mean, right. Yeah. Right now we're, we're basically just going after grants and different, like, funding mechanisms like that so that we can keep the product free in every sense until it makes the most sense to, like, add a subscription fee or add a. Percentage, like a protocol fee or, you know. Yeah, and I mean, like, there are other products out there that are like, no code frame builders that essentially what they're doing. Like, you can, you can do that in warp shop and it's free and they charge a subscription. We just want to be a better, more holistic product before we start trying to charge. And some, some people argue and have told us that's not the right strategy, because it's better to have ten paying engaged users than it is to have 100 semi engaged users, which, yes, I agree with on some level, but in terms of just user satisfaction, user happiness, people like things that are free, so we'll keep it like that. Yeah, well, you also could do something kind of like, if you use, like, descents. I think that was like, yeah, decent. Yeah. So they let you kind of like, pay like with Djen or, you know, and it takes care of the swap on the back end, you know, like the end user is paying with their preferred method of payment, you know, so, like, if I only have Djen, but the creator only wants base, you know, I don't have to, like, swap or bridge. Like, it's doing that for me on the back end. And I'm sure it's, you know, taking some off the top, you know, a little bit for themselves. So, you know, you could take that approach too, you know, so it feels free. But, you know, you're, you're making some on both sides, you know, on the swap for the, for the Djen and the base. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yep. Take, take the centralized exchange, the coinbase approach in the Gemini. Let's see. All right, I have two more. So other than Shopify. I know, me and you have talked about this. Are you looking to do gumroad or supporting digital products as well. For example, I have a notion template that I sell to collect emails or even for money. Have you thought about doing something like that? Like digital products as well? Yep, 100%. Yeah, we want to integrate with Gumroad as well if we're able to. Sometimes these services don't really want you to integrate with them because for whatever reason. But yes, we do want to enable digital products like an ocean template or a course or a figma template or whatever that might be. And Gumroad is obviously sort of the most popular way or most popular thing to use to sell these digital products. So that's sort of first step and then on top of that, enabling NFT sales as well. And that would probably be through integrating with a protocol like Zora, for example. So being able to mint or purchase nfts through a frame that are minted on Zora, stuff like that. And yes. So, yeah, that's definitely part of the roadmap right now. We want to perfect the physical product side of it where from end to end it's the best possible experience to be purchasing physical products through a warp shop. That means fulfillment, the best notifications, the analytics, the whole shebang that Shopify is offering and more with this on chain information. And then we'll expand into digital products and nfts. Makes sense. Yeah. And Shopify has huge market cap, so plenty to chew on, on there for a while. Yeah, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty wild. I mean, Shopify as a company too is still growing rapidly. Like if you look at their year over year growth and sales and users on the platform and even like the stock price, it's all just like going up and up and like, you would think that everyone knows what Shopify is and everybody that is selling shit online is using Shopify. But like, I. Not, it's, there's still so many people that you can onboard to a digital sales platform. Yeah, no, I have a, I have a friend that works there and I met some people in web three too that worked there like a while back and yeah, it's like a sneaky company. I think a lot more people know about it now, but like, it was one of those companies where like, you know, like the, the branding wasn't like in your face, so like, you had no idea, you know, up until like probably they introduced Shopify pay, which got really like, dangerous in terms of how easy it is. Yeah, but before that, you know, like people probably didn't even know it was shopify in the back end doing all that work. Yeah, 100%. And I think that was intentional on. Yeah, in some way. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah. Once they enrolled, you know, shopify pay, like, I. It's so, it's so clutch, man. It's like, it's dangerous. Yeah. Like, and also, like, as a professional, I don't. If I have a really professional brand and high brand integrity, I don't want to set up a shop that has another company's branding all over it. And I think that's why the branding and sort of marketing of Shopify is pretty, like, subliminal in a sense, because you don't see a Shopify logo on, like, any Shopify website. And, like, most big, like, fashion brands and companies, huge companies, are all powered by Shopify. And you can't even tell. Yeah, no, it's nice. I think, like, Lulu was using them for a hot minute until I think they, you know, reached a certain stage where they, like, made sense for them to, you know, bring it all in house. But I think they were, like, huge. Like, they made it pretty big purely on Shopify's back infrastructure. So it's kind of nuts. Like, you can. You can definitely grow it really big before you bring it all in house. Yep, 100%. Let's see. Yeah, one quick one. Let's see. So you recently did a base bootcamp. I wanted to kind of know what that is and what that was like and if you would recommend it to others. Yeah, it was great. Basically what it is. And it's all public, so you can go take the base bootcamp right now if you want. It's essentially an online course where they have a bunch of different lessons that are spread out and they teach you from the very beginnings of writing smart contracts on base to the most complex interactions that you can do. And this boot camp was essentially like, you apply. And I talked with the guy that was leading the program and just kind of told him my background and whatnot. And you get in, there was a cohort of, I want to say, like 20 to 25 people, and it was very hands off, but it was, I had the resources if I needed them at any point. So there was a full, like, calendar and sort of course load that you go through. Follow the calendar of, like, this week. You should do this and you should do these exercises. And if you need help, there's office hours. At this time, we also had a mentor, which was great to be able to just kind of bounce things off. If there's a bug that you need to quickly, like, it's it's just one little thing and you want to check in on it, you can pop in and ask your mentor for some help. So I highly recommend, like, if anyone's wanting to get on solidity development. I think base is, like, the most accessible place to do that right now. And the resources they have with this base bootcamp are great, and you can do it all by yourself. I mean, to be honest, I didn't really even use the office hours that much. I kind of just went to, like, hang out and see other people that we're building. I didn't ever really go in with too specific of questions because I just. You kind of follow the course and can figure it out in a general sense as you go. So, yeah, it was a great experience. Self driven. I had access to some really awesome people. And then at the end, the final day of the boot camp, we had like a demo day sort of thing. And Jesse came and spoke to us for a little bit. That was super cool. I also just got. Today I saw in my wallet I got the NFT. That signifies I completed the course or whatever, which was cool. So I recommend it. There's no reason not to, especially if you have time and you want to learn how to develop on chain products. Like, go ahead and do it. I think the link is literally like base.org camp. Yeah, I'll have to check it out. Yeah, I saw that. It looked really interesting to me. It was cool. I mean, they walk you through literally everything and the directions are great. It's very clear. It's easy to understand. And, like, having done a lot of this solidity development through the courses that I took, they taught it in, like, a way that is very, very good. Like, it's the exact kind of structure and course load and path that you should follow when you're developing on chain. It's almost like the same thing as what we did in my courses. Just abridged version. It's much not as in depth because obviously it's not a whole fucking college course, but it's. Yeah, there, you know? Yeah, that's awesome, man. Like that. I know. I saw you kind of talked about it, so you look kind of enthusiastic about it. I figured I'd ask for anyone kind of on the fence. All right. So I don't know if you know this, actually, but I tend to ask people at the end because we've been going at it now for an hour and 45 is. I initially got started with this whole concept of quick bites for the newsletter. So it's like tapas. So I went with the word pintoshos, which is basket for tapas, essentially. So it's a spanish word. So I initially got started with the newsletter. That was the name of it. It's like beaches. Little too sophisticated, highbrow. So I changed the name. But one thing that I used to ask everybody was, you know, what is their favorite snack? So that's been the recurring question that I've asked everyone. So I wanted to ask you that. What is your favorite snack? My favorite snack? I gotta go with snack. This is a good one. It's either goldfish or a peanut butter jelly sandwich. Hey, my man. There you go. I love peanut butter jelly sandwiches. It's, like the best snack in the world, man. Yeah, dude, I'm a fiend for those. I've been eating them forever. Uncrustables, too, are amazing. I will fully stand on PBJs being the best possible snack. You got carbs in the bread, you got protein in the peanut butter, and you got a little bit of good fruit sugar in the jelly. It's like the perfect combo of snack. You know, there's people that do like peanut butter and jelly, like diets, really. And they lose weight. Interesting. I mean, you gotta stick to it. Like, you can't eat, like, 20 of them or whatever, but, like, essentially, that's, like, your meal. And it's exactly what you're saying. You got the fats, the protein, the sugar and the carbs and. Yeah, there's people that's off that have lost weight that way. I mean, I. Knowing me, I'd probably wait too many, though. Super interesting. Okay, I'm gonna look into that. That sounds appealing. That's so funny, man. So do you go jelly first or peanut butter first? I usually do the peanut butter first. No, I do the. Sorry, I do the jelly first because it's much easier to clean the knife. Ah, there you go. Yeah, we're on the same wavelength on that one. I've literally said that on the podcast before. Yeah. Otherwise you gotta, like, really clean the peanut butter, and then I. It just gets into the jelly and all. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's no. No, it's too much work. Yep. That's awesome, man. Yeah. Thanks again for doing this, man. Where. Where do we want to send people? Do you want to send them to follow you on Farcaster and Warp shop? Yeah, I'd love to just have people toss us a follow on at warp shop on the Farcaster and warp shop XYZ on Twitter, and then just. I. It'd be awesome if people just went to warp shop. XYZ, checked out the platform, signed in, it takes 5 seconds. You just sign in with Farcaster and you can immediately start setting up your own shops. And I, if anyone has any feedback, good or bad, tell me you hate the product. Tell me you love it, open to all feedback. So would love to just get some more people to kind of check it out. Yeah. And it's free. So it is free. So for the moment, you know, for the moment, yeah. Well, no, I mean, I totally get where you're coming from with that thought process. So I know, like, once you've kind of nailed, you know, product market fit and all that, then, yeah, you know, makes sense to start figuring out how to, how to keep the lights on and stuff. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. Yep. Well, I appreciate, yeah, I appreciate you having me on, man. Yeah. Yeah, man, definitely. Thanks again. All right. Welcome back. This week's cast off, and for those that don't know, cast off as a segment where I want to hear from you, the audience. This episode's cast off question is, what do you think about bringing your e commerce brand on chain? Do you find that to be beneficial? Or do you just think sticking as like web two still makes sense? Now, for me personally, I think the example that I gave regarding you can now see like if you bought a Lego set, you can now see a other people that bought it as well and then kind of build a community off of that. It's very powerful in my opinion. So I'm pretty bullish on it. Yeah. So if you're hearing this message, you've listened to the entire episode, I appreciate you for making it to the end. If you're listening on pods, make sure to collect this episode. And if you're not listening on pods, make sure to subscribe, you know, from your favorite app that you listen to so you get notified when new episodes drop. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share this with your friends or anyone that might be interested in the topic. And also feel free to let me know any topics or people that you like me to cover. You can get in touch with me via text in the show notes sms rate supply. You can join the Telegram channel, say what's up? And also make recommendations there. Yeah. See you next episode. Peaceful. See.