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hey all! been working on this project for the last 5 months. will share more on motivation, sustainability, etc long form. but happy to answer any immediate questions.
hey, I guess you're going to cover this in your blog post, but I'm very curious to learn why you decided to work on a block explorer and if you have any thoughts on onceupon shutting down
You also posted today about Once Upon pivoting away from building a block explorer. Considering that they seemed to have a hard time to bring their product to market, where do you see your advantage?
Good questions. Short answer: 1) Block explorers are a bad market (esp. if you're taking VC money), and I knew that [OnceUpon took a seed money afaik, so they had to show VC-like growth] 2) I feel like there is a particular group that is currently underserved (developers and prosumers) [OnceUpon was focusing on social features, which is a different segment] 3) I'd be completely fine if Scope would be able to sustain me & maybe 1-2 developers; I think that's totally viable [OU had multiple engineers on a payroll before PMF] I'm fully bootstrapped so I don't need to chase narratives. I'm also don't do much infra & indexing. That helps me to focus on product & UX. What OU did was very interesting, but it was also a far riskier bet.
Super interesting! Really happy to hear that you're bootstrapping, too! I love your rhetoric around bet sizing and bootstrapping; that's very much our viewpoint too. I have another business-related question, I'm not sure if you've read about https://news.kiwistand.com/jaack.eth's perspective on running Routescan, but my impression from his takes was that it's notoriously expensive to run block explorers because of the amount of data that needs to be indexed, and that the amount of data to be indexed always grows. With Scope, have you made a technical breakthrough to make this work for you? Or do you have a strategy that you can share here around making this work for a bootstrapper?
Very cool! If you want some design support give me a heads up. I’ll check out the repo.
@timdaub.eth Yep, it's pretty expensive to index large chains. For Scope, I decided to use third-party indexing solution, so that I can focus on the UI/UX and save on costs short-term. In the future (e.g. if the data provider will become too expensive or if Scope would hit massive volume) I might start doing indexing in-house. I'd assume that would require some serious hiring though, so I'm postponing that as much as possible.
great interface for contracts, would be cool to add search functionality for a contract