7 Lessons from Agyle, the pseudonymous co-founder of Talisman - building the first community-owned wallet built for the paraverese. A huge innovation for the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems and the realization of the vision of Web3
These pearls are sourced from our podcast.
You can listen to, and own, the entire podcast on the RMRK using their new audio features here: https://singular.rmrk.app/collections/ee8d75dede329d1224-SKMP
Lesson 1: We are seeking the Talisman
The first step to starting a community.
Put out the bat signal.
Again and again and again.
Draw your superfans in like moths to a flame.
Lore and story are core to the Talisman community.
To find their first superfan's Agyle wrote a post imaging an artifact that could solve many of the problems that would plague the paraverse.
This became the siren call for all who sought the same vision.
Lesson 2: 10 super fans are better than 1000 normal fans
Engage deeply with your first fans.
There will never be a better time to understand why they were drawn to the signal.
Reward them, put them to work, learn from them.
They are pure gold.
This is an un-original mistake that I recently made.
Too often we ignore our first users because the "numbers" aren't there.
With ten people you can create a true community around a shared vision.
This is a critical step on the path to success for any startup.
Lesson 3: Polkadot and parachains are fundamental institutional infrastructure that enables innovation and allows growth to a larger scale than we have before while being resistant to cancer, corruption, and auto-immune failure because of transparency
The innovations of Polkadot and Kusama are incredibly necessary to realize the vision of Web3, but with these innovations come a new set of problems that Talisman is trying to solve.
Lesson 4: Make original mistakes only
With Web3 there is more opportunity for creativity than there has been since the onset of the internet.
Let's stop playing old games and build our own.
We will fail at times, but let's fail with style.
Lesson 5: In order to find what works you need to do experiments. You will have far more things that fail than work, but in technology, the successes have non-linear returns.
When you release your fear of failure you hyperdrive your opportunity for growth.
When we recorded this podcast I was sitting on top of what felt like a colossal failure.
By the end of it, I was juiced up with ideas on how to engage the community.
Agyle helped me realize the lessons from my "failure" were much more powerful than my early success.
Lesson 6: The most valuable currency in startups is focus -
The distillation of a career in Web3 startups.
FOCUS.
Stop chasing everything.
Lesson 7: Using NFT's with true utility.
Talisman uses spirit keys as a device to permit access to our products and services, and that allows us to make them scarce and thus make them valuable because.
For the full podcast and the chance to win one of their spirit keys subscribe to the podcast at a Yeonmi Park level or above here: skmp.supercast.com