Designing and Building Viral Onchain Apps

Transcript

Hi all, how's everyone doing? Cool. Um, today I'm talking a little bit more about designing and building viral onchain apps. And a little bit more about myself. Um, I'm a product designer based in New York and I lead social apps and notifications on base. And I've been pushing rectangles and pixels at Bass for the past uh four years. And in terms of my background, I actually have a third culture upbringing. I was born in Vancouver, raised in Taiwan, and moved to the States. And I think that surprisingly actually gives me a pretty worldly view of how to build apps and engage with builders worldwide. Uh, in

the past, I've studied art history and psychology at Colombia. And I actually want to start off this talk with one of my favorite quotes from Chris Dixon. and he said in 2010 that the next big thing will start out looking like a toy. And this actually uh predates a lot of the innovations we have uh in AI right now and is around the age of social media. And when I talk about looking like a toy, I think iPhone in 2007 is a great example. Uh the Motorola and the Nokia execs actually mocked this tool as a touchscreen phone with no physical t keyboard and limited battery life and it

seemed really trivial at the time. Um especially the BlackBerry XS it they thought it was a fashion device that's not suited before serious productivity. Then you have other toys like musically. I'm sure in 2014 you guys opened up an app and there were like 50 teenagers dancing and lip-syncing to songs that were popular at the time. Growing up, I thought this was a Jenzie fad with no staying power and it also seemed trivial. And lastly, we have 2017 with the CryptoKitties. At the time, it was innovative. They were cartoon cat NFTts, but it felt too early for its time. You could breed and collect them. um but they really had no utility and many dimmed it as a gimmick.

But fast forward today and if you do a retrospective, iPhone actually set the foundation of the modern mobile ecosystem. Most of your favorite apps are built on this app store ecosystem and a lot of the mobile startups uh today which are all unicorns are actually uh deeply intertwined with iPhone developers and being early to the game. musically um predates its time, but it's now a dominant media platform got acquired by Tik Tok. It disrupted Facebook, YouTube, and traditional content distribution. And even today, uh with the speed of LTE and 5G, you're able to watch videos on the go, which you couldn't do in 2014 with the streaming speed back at the time. And

you have CryptoKitties. It's a proof of concept for NFTTS. And now mints are everywhere and you could literally mint anything on Zora today and it would take a milliseconds versus $50 uh during the height of the NFT bull run in 2021. It also is representative of digital asset ownership and what we know of mints and NFTTS today. And if you look at the cycle of things, um you're starting to see a movement for hardwares from gadget to niche adoption. Um for instance, the iPod Shuffle, it launched as a music tool and people loved it. Uh it had a simple job and actually only one job. It allows you to

run while listening to music and it hit product market fit when it found this unexpected utility. People loved shuffling music. They actually wanted more. Um, Apple started adding features like iPod touch in the mid2010s where beyond shuffle you could actually listen to music with a touchcreen. You could start interacting with the ecosystem. And what happens after unexpected utility in the gadget flow you hit ubiquity across um product market fit. You start seeing people loving your product and wanting more and they want to stay in the network because your product is so good.

I want to see a raise of hands of people who played Wii growing up in this room. Okay, that's that's a lot of you guys because I love the tennis feature and I remember swinging in my living room with my parents. And what's so interesting about toys is that it teaches us how to behave in new systems subtly and socially. It conditions yourself um to learn about cultural movements. For instance, uh when we were all quarantining in 2020 at home, had nothing to do. 10 out of my 20 friends were on Animal Crossing building villages in the metaverse. The Wii normalized motion control. People swing on controller in the living room felt natural. And it also brought on a new generation of interactive VR AR

technology followed a decade after. And when I think about hardware toys, they're interfaces to new behaviors. They train you just like onchain apps are interfaces to the new economy that we live in today. Here are three screenshots from the new Coinbase wallet app that is currently in beta. And these are three mini apps that are embedded in our social ecosystem. There's Cat Town, which is a cozy life sim where you collect, trade, and care for cats. It kind of reminds me of the good old day of like Farmville um on Facebook games. It's built to combine DeFi mechanics with playful gaming elements. There's also Bracket, which is on the totally different end of the

financial spectrum. It's a sports betting social prediction platform where users can make predictions, bet on outcomes, compete in tournaments. It was all the rage during um the March Madness uh event in the US um when everyone's betting on sports. It also combines elements of fantasy sports, prediction market, and social competition. And lastly, there's noise. Uh, noise launched um a while ago and it became one of the most popular apps on forecaster today. It enables micro tipping with USDC and you could like, repost, comment, follow, and earn based on these common actions. What's really awesome about all three of these apps is that it no longer live in silo with

other products. It's designed to be actionable directly in feed. No redirects or separate apps needed. And that actually brings me to the million-dollar question for all the consumer app devs in the room. How can my app go viral? And I think that is the hardest question after you build a beautiful app um you know backed by user research, you have people asking for it, but how do you drive that marketing growth and also making sure that the user have an aha moment? And the thesis I really I think is that the most successful onchain apps grow because of their architecture, not just marketing. And if you examine it from the base layer, onchain apps are

composable. They can plug into any existing ecosystem. I'm biased, so you guys should all build on base, but there's also other protocols like Farcaster or even Salana. And smart contracts enable permissionless integrations which allow you to really like embed any tooling out there in crypto. And it expands the surface area for organic growth. And for instance with noise um it grew because they were able to turn every user action like invites like share into an economic event and benefit from that. So if you examine architecture wise um the first thing uh as a consumer app dev I would recommend is activation. So when you open up an app people need to be

seeing familiar people and relevant content immediately. If they see a stale feed that has no uh relevancy to their life or any like commonalities with what they're passionate about, they are immediately going to drop off. And in order to like retain users in that environment, you actually need to employ a mutual first logic. Suggest connections based on mutual friends to create a graph density. A lot of existing uh web two giants already do this like X. um they show a bunch of mutual friends and they also have features where uh they show uh trending events that your friends have also discussed in for instance their news feature and lastly I feel like this is a pain point for everyone in the room but

cross-platform au uh authentication there's mismatch social graph across platforms right now like even Coinbase wallet X and caster you have 10 accounts that you log in with privy with and you don't remember which um authentication method you logged in with imagine a platform where all of this uh identity layer is combined and I think that will be the big UX unlock going forward. I actually want everyone to think about your role as a dev, a designer, a product marketer. And I think just from a product designer or coder perspective, you're actually not just pushing code or pushing pixels. You're a game designer for new behaviors and you're here to

create them. You've probably never seen this guy in the picture uh in front of you, but his name is Chagaryi Miiamoto. You probably played a game designed by Miiamoto before. Um he is the genius designer behind Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. And he designed games with a very specific philosophy. He starts with a unique core mechanic um such as like map exploration or jumping in Super Mario and he builds the world and challenges around that mechanic. He avoids complex narratives early in development. And actually I see that a lot in crypto. We start off with some crazy technology or innovation in tech.

You want to apply ZK to like all of your transactions. You want to obuscate things. But um based on Miiamoto's approach, he actually focuses instead on player curiosity, tighter controls, and gradual mastery of the game. And he wanted the experience of building an app or building a game to be a discovery experience where people can play while they discover. If we employ that strategy and take a look at how we apply that earlier loop that I showed you guys for hardware into onchain apps, I think we could find some similarities. So, you start off with a trivial behavior at first. It could be uh tipping. It could be earning something really fast on an app. I don't

know if you guys played Warp Slot before. It's basically like a slot machine on Warpcast and you earn like a meme coin a day. Um, and then you find simple utility. After that, you encode behavior loops that achieve network effects. And this um kind of model is actually inspired by one of my favorite blog posts by Chris Dixon in 2015. Come for the tool stay for the network. If viral onchain apps start with a simple utility, they're able to create a network effect around it uh through shared ownership and activity.

And once you hit that network effect, it's going to snowball. people are going to use your product and instead of just solving an individual problem, they're willing to stay here because you're so good at solving their need and all of their friends are also uh part of the ecosystem. To make things very tactical and tangible, here are some recommendations I'd love um folks in the room to think about. When you create an app, you should make sure every user is a distributor. For instance, um you can see Claudia and Aner here are my friends and I want to earn something when I invite them. What's really awesome about variable rewards and um intermittent randomized rewards is that they actually

drive higher conversions to referrals. Another really fun system is discriminatory rewards. For instance, Claudia has 55 mutual friends on this platform. She's worth $5. rather than a ner who has only three mutual friends, she's worth three cents. You really want to make sure that you know you get every referral and the system discriminates based on downstream value and to kickstart a flywheel where people you know evaluate their invitees and make sure that um they want to invite their high value network friends into the app. Another thing is building on onchain social. Uh you could build on Forecaster today or soon the new Coinbase wallet and you can turn post into interactive

mini apps, mints um like votes, tips and join and you can let users trigger onchain actions without leaving the feed. Lastly, um I would love to talk about enabling value creation. The centralized protocols win by creating values for creators. And how they do that is they add incentive systems, identity and financial infrastructure into the software. So imagine an app where you could earn by posting, you could um you know share content with your friends, become a creator, and rather in a closed loop system like Facebook or um Twitter in web two, you're able to earn from it.

And that's what's really awesome about programmable economies where value flows peto without intermediaries. And I think in crypto every action like posting, sharing, building can be directly rewarded and owned on chain. So how do you perfect this UX? Um I think reducing onboarding complexity. I think people have talked about this for years, but we're at a point where consumer wallet is um you know with smart wallets where you can sign in with just your pass key and also the developments and embedded wallet. It feels like we've hit a point where you know the needle starting to move and people are actually comfortable getting on chain. The authentication layer is critical. Um, I would recommend reducing

the amount of login methods you have on the app, keeping it super simple, email, SMS, and if within the five minutes of a user using your app and they haven't hit that aha moment, I would suggest like revising your plan and going back to the drawing board. I think the value proposition needs to be immediately clear when a user use your app. And yeah, I think once you hit that aha moment, uh, the viral loop process will actually start. Cool. I want to end the talk with one of my favorite sayings from the base team.

Let's build. And yeah, feel free to hit me up um if you see me around in the conference. Love to talk about how to build viral onchain apps and get you integrated um on our new Coinbase wallet. Yeah. Thank you so much. [Applause]