Building startups outside of an established tech ecosystem is hard: there’s so much inertia and friction you have to fight that without existing momentum to draw from. You face a prohibitively steep climb out the gate.
Skip the whole “Minimal Viable Product” thing. It leads to incrementalism. Try “Maximum Fucking Love.” It leads to something that someone else might actually care about.
I had a vague idea that web3 was at the core of a new Scenius when I started researching this piece, but what I didn’t appreciate is that web3 seems to be a toolkit for conjuring Scenius. More than financial speculation, web3 offers a set of tools that can align incentives in ways that allow groups to tap into their communal genius.
Around that time, Peltier realized a couple of things. One, it made more sense to tap into existing user behavior rather than trying to create a new means of interaction, and two, his idea could be bigger than just serving musical artists.
The irony is that people can get some of their most important work done outside of work, when they’re free to think and ponder. The struggle is that we take time off maybe once a year, without realizing that time to think is a key element of many jobs, and one that a traditional work schedule doesn’t accommodate very well.
Consumables like food are great opportunities for recurring subscriptions. Nearly 30% of Doordash customers opt-in to its Dashpass service because doing so unlocks better economics for those customers, who have a recurring use case for takeout food.