We’re winding down Frameboard 🖼🛹✌Here’s a thread of our journey, mistakes, lessons, and everything in between—hoping it helps others building in crypto.
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1/ The ideaThe original idea for Frameboard was a Pinterest-like app and protocol where users could earn from their curation. We thought crypto could empower higher-quality content curation and that users would support great curators by collecting (paying for) it.I came to this idea after thinking a lot about:
- What products don’t give users skin in the game (i.e., Pinterest)?
- What could grow quickly on new web3 social primitives (i.e., frames, bots, NFTs, XMTP)?https://warpcast.com/jayme/0xb8415290005aac659e6879db47817e50d29e2c7b
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2/ TractionSince launching in March, hundreds of users curated over 6,500 posts to 800 boards, with thousands more consuming those boards on the web app, Farcaster, and XMTP. We saw Frameboards for travel, food, fashion, art, train stations, mood boards, NFTs, erc20s, and more.We experimented with a ton of features, including Farcaster frames and cast actions, browser extension, OpenFrames and XMTP notifications, NFT curation, collectible boards, AI curation, and more.
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3/ PMFBy May, it was clear the product wasn’t working, and our core assumptions were wrong. 99% of users churned, no one wanted to collect boards or the NFTs curated on them, and we grew skeptical of people collecting content as a big frequent consumer behavior. I remember walking around a rainy London one afternoon, thinking, “Damn, we built the wrong product for crypto.” In that moment, I felt like I trully and painfully understood what product-market fit is—and what it isn’t.
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4/ Lesson: Avoid SISPingThe first mistake we made with Frameboard was approaching it from "solution in search of a problem." At this point, we were out of ideas and desperate to figure out what to build next. We let impatience guide us, brainstorming crypto and web3 socical ideas instead of identifying a problem and reasoning from first principles. No surprise—we ended up with mostly bad ideas and a few that just sounded good.
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5/ Lesson: Solve the right problem for the right userWhile cool and fun to build, Frameboard was the wrong product for today’s crypto audience. Active crypto users prefer text-based content, are time-constrained, and mostly driven by speculation. Frameboard was more visual, time-intensive, and lacked speculative elements. We didn't solve a real problem the market wanted solved and built something people didn’t need. Don’t make that mistake—be brutally honest about who your users are, what their behaviors are, and what they truly want.
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6/ Lesson: Don't forget about demand Like many Web3 ideas, Frameboard sounded great from the supply side (i.e., the curator) but was weak on the demand side (i.e., the collector). Every creator wants more money and control—that’s a given. The real question is: why will the demand-side users spend their time and/or money in a meaningful and frequent way? We struggled to answer that. Without demand, supply-side users—whether content creators, platform developers, marketplace sellers, or service providers—won’t be satisfied and will churn. Demand is the game and key to providing a magical experience for the supply side.
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7/ Take your time pivotingIn hindsight, we didn't spend enough time between pivots. We were eager to build and ship (always be launching), and didn’t like waiting around. Looking back, I wish we had taken a little more time to research, understand users and their problem, and develop a strong hypothesis that we were going after a big, important market and be missionaries about it. I think in crypto, more so than other industries, teams really need to be grounded in truth and mission-driven to navigate all the skepticism and market swings.
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8/ Curation For those interested in curating or building around curation, here are some tools and ideas worth exploring:
