Interesting post. I think for the sake of discussing the product strategy of Kiwi News here, advertising on Warpcast was probably the wrong way to grow Kiwi. I had this hunch earlier. I'm grateful for the growth we experienced from WC and those who joined us from WC and sticked with us to build the vision. However, if you look at the real Hacker News, then fundamentally it is curated by developers and business execs. From 5 links that you click, probably 3 lead to reading code. It's really interesting for developers. Kiwi isn't really interesting for developers. In fact, if I share dev related links then I usually don't get upvotes. Sometimes I think we'd do better if Kiwi was actually primarily for devs, as it'd then be clear that we're a "decentralized Hacker News." If you think about it, since we're really not a "Hacker News" at the moment, we probably also should advertise ourselves as one. But back to channels: By making Warpcast our primary channel, the issue became that a lot of the content and social interaction that you get on Warpcast, you can now get in a worse way here, which makes us a redundant product for many WC users. Yes, we did successfully onboard many WC users. In fact, we'd have high product-channel fit, even today, and we'd have the cultural and technical skills to maintain the fit for some time. Our channel also had a power law distribution, as most of our active users are somehow also WC users. The question is what to do from here on out. My wish was always that WC outgrows the crypto community fast and that we can be the place to serve it when WC becomes really big and normie. But that hasn't happened as WC hasn't grown for a long time. Then there's still the concern that we'll always be a substitute of WC. Thought differently, what would even be the alternative channels Kiwi could grow its dev content Crypto devs almost don't exist online as a group anywhere tangibly, and if they do they're a few bunch on CT or WC. The other option is, of course, to roll with what we have, our own unique mixture of content. But then how do we communicate it. And through which channels are we growing? And what makes us special when compared to WC? Can't you get anything on WC that you can get here? We can't be competing with them as we'll never win! So what then?
Fair points! Here’s my take: 1) Agree that Kiwi is much less technical than Hacker News. And I agree that it probably comes from our early userbase, which shaped the type of content that’s being shared and read in the app. Since our main product is the content, the users co-create the product. 2) I also think that competing with Warpcast for attention isn’t the right strategy. I think it’s much more efficient to focus on users who don’t regularly use web3 social - and most of the Crypto Twitter doesn’t. I think getting their attention via a writing contest with Gnosis, Lens, and Nouns is going quite well, but maybe we should double down on that channel and be much more active there. 3) The fact that there’s no one channel to get the attention of crypto devs is a bug and a feature. A bug because it’s hard to grow. A feature because it means that there’s some void to fill in for Kiwi. There are some channels ofc like “Week in Ethereum News”, “Web3 Builder News”, Developer DAO, ETHGlobal, and so on. Some of them are even thriving communities, but I think there is still some space to become a protocol to connect them all and deliver content for them. 4) If we want to reach more devs, we could also experiment with channels. E.g., maybe we should find a way to promote on GitHub? Or maybe run a writing contest focused on technical writing? Or do some ‘indie hackers’ challenge where people share their most interesting niche crypto repos? We might also follow this “New channels build new companies” philosophy and think about what crypto-native channels we could explore. An obvious one is ZORA mints & Daylight recommendations, but there might be other paths to explore.
> 2) I also think that competing with Warpcast for attention isn’t the right strategy. > I think it’s much more efficient to focus on users who don’t regularly use web3 social - and most of the Crypto Twitter doesn’t. I think getting their attention via a writing contest with Gnosis, Lens, and Nouns is going quite well, but maybe we should double down on that channel and be much more active there. It is going well for the time that there is a contest, but not beyond that. During a contest, people can see the relevance of posting here because there's a prize to be won. But outside of this the DAU numbers are crashing. So this isn't sustainable on its own. And a risk is also that if we don't grow the daily product usage then we also won't be able to attract more clients to run writers contests with. > There are some channels ofc like “Week in Ethereum News”, “Web3 Builder News”, Developer DAO, ETHGlobal, and so on. Most of these suck - Week in Ethereum is really boring and kinda always shows the same links, but never true alpha or interesting stuff. We also can't really grow through Week in Ethereum as it is mostly non-interactive - "Web3 Builder News," never heard of it but so it means it probably won't matter - Developer DAO: honestly, as a dev this isn't interesting to me as harsh as it sounds. I need good info and links. Where do I get any of that there? - ETHGlobal is a legit distribution channel for devs, but ETHGlobal is a hackathon company, so the intention of its users is not to find good links Here are some distribution channels for sharing or finding good links that I know: - https://www.reddit.com/r/ethdev/ - Some CT people like Bantg, BokkyPooBah etc. - Some Paradigm people who always have interesting stuff to share - some small TG channels or whatever - Potentially some dev related Farcaster channels It's basically a hand full of people from what I know and I also said this in the Telegram - IMO this is the most important take away from this conversation: > talking about being in love with our distribution channels, we're not in love with them at all, if we really wanna be a "decentralized hacker news" Best we do is post on Farcaster and X. None of the people that would make a decentralized Hacker News are reached there, or with very little chance. We're not in love with our distribution channels (crypto dev related) as we never engage through any of the above mentioned channels. I'm not saying that we have to become a decentralized HN either. But if we want to, IMO, we should get better at targeting and finding/creating distribution channels that actually matter for us. But it's easy to say: "from now on I will do one post on a dev related channel." Will you and I really do it? If we're not in love with those channels and we don't engage with them naturally, then we gotta position ourselves differently. > E.g., maybe we should find a way to promote on GitHub? Yes. But how!? > r maybe run a writing contest focused on technical writing? Or do some ‘indie hackers’ challenge where people share their most interesting niche crypto repos? Yes, IMO there are existing strategies used by some of the above mentioned people. Sharing beautiful screenshots of code. Always writing about the latest tech libraries etc. Auditless also does a good job on that, although it is DeFi focused. IMO the tricky part is that it is very hard to push out dev related content on a regular basis as it requires more work than "just writing a blog post." Do we love to do that? Also: if it's original content than we're going to have to put in a lot of brain cycles. > An obvious one is ZORA mints & Daylight recommendations, but there might be other paths to explore. idk, these places are very grifty in nature. And then who are the people we're getting exposure to? If we want to sell more NFTs, this might be a valuable strategy, because Zora and Daylight users are minting NFTs, OK. But if it's about increasing DAU and making this site more relevant, we're going to have to attract users who aren't on WC or whereever and they're going to have to post good content here.