Everybody will be on friend.tech

Web3 Social Finds Product Market Fit

friend.tech stealth launched last week and has immediately found product market fit amongst crypto natives. I believe Web3 (crypto and NFT investing, trading, building) is inherently social and friend.tech is a killer app that could become something worth billions.

The problem

We currently have multiple, disparate sources to gather information about new blockchains, DeFi apps, NFT projects, or games. This requires constant flipping between browser tabs and apps like Telegram, Discord, Twitter, and our favorite Spotify or YouTube subscriptions.

Web3 has an incredibly steep learning curve and getting new users comfortable with navigation requires education and experimentation (risk). The social landscape is also incredibly intimidating and can feel elitest amongst the crypto OGs. Many elite researchers, traders, and thought leaders don’t get the credit they deserve for their work due to their lack of followers, while big shitpost accounts that make inside jokes and post cat memes get hundreds of likes and retweets.

The Twitter spam problem will only get worse with monetization as accounts are paid to farm engagement, both good and bad.

The market and opportunity

Social media has exposed our generation as attention addicts. Followers, likes, retweets, and comments are serious motivators for content creation, and when financial incentives are built on top things could get really wild.

It’s obvious to most that in order for crypto and web3 to become mainstream, the onboarding process must be simple/abstracted away. 86% of the world are smart phone users, as of August 2023, so companies like Coinbase are developing products that enable users to onboard easily via apps like Coinbase wallet. Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2 chain, is the perfect vehicle for cheap and fast onboarding into a killer social app like friend.tech.

Crypto natives are already migrating into friend.tech to collaborate with their favorite Crypto Twitter follows, and are receiving executable trading, airdrop, educational, and other valuable information.

friend.tech is the Solution

friend.tech is a high signal information aggregator that is objectively quantified by the market participants. Invididuals’ share prices can dictate each user’s value based on the content they create, the trading ideas they share, the airdrops they discover, or any other hard work and actionable information provided via the private chat.

What I like the most about friend.tech is it abstracts away noise from the Twitter timeline, the Discord chat rooms, the Telegram spam, and enables simple, distilled information from trusted sources. At least that’s the idea since the market (and perhaps future algorithms built by friend.tech or 3rd parties) ultimately will decide what is valuable in terms of share price.

The Twitter integration is brilliant and enables easy onboarding for anyone, both crypto natives and other users. Also, the developer was able to bypass Apple’s app store by creating the app as a Safari page that works on mobile.

What’s possible and feature ideas

friend.tech will help facilitate the reward mechanism for good work ethic and results. Crypto is predominantly speculation and yield generation so value is generated by where you can find ways to make money faster and safer than alternatives. For users willing to put the time in to research, friend.tech will provide a solid platform to reach a broad audience of paying customers interested in what they have to say. friend.tech levels the playing field between Twitter Popularity contests and real, actionable alpha.

New crypto traders, funds, and retail users can find as close to objective data on who’s valuable. The pricing or share model may require tweaks because they can be gamed. For now, you can view how many shares individuals own of themselves (I have bought many of my own shares because I don’t plan on selling them and have offered a buyback to my holders for profitable trades).

I believe paid groups on Discord and Telegram will have to migrate over to friend.tech and will have far more efficient pricing based on the quality of the content. I also see Substack writers moving their content into a crypto native media (with gated access) because they can cut out the censoring middle man.

I am sure the team has received thousands of feature requests, but some off the top of my head include desktop integration, copy trading, revenue sharing from your shares, portfolio and trade tracking, NFTs, and sharing additional content (images and videos, eg).

I also expect many crypto native teams will establish pages for their projects and integrate with AI bots to help simplify the due diligence and prioritize support.

What can you do?

First of all, set up a friend.tech account and buy shares of Twitter personalities or researchers you respect, encourage them to share information on friend.tech, and contribute to your own group to increase your share price.

Trade shares on FriendMEX, a trading dashboard built by Anish Agnihotri, where you can speculate on Twitter personalities. Some users have made tens of ETH buying and selling shares, and the most profitable ones are buying big accounts who get onboarded.

There is no token yet. I am extremely bullish on this product and would invest today, and am excited to see how the market values the token when it’s released. The first airdrop has been teased to go out on Friday (8/18/23) so it’s smart to get in there are start experimenting.