Jorge Falcon

I've launched a lot of digital products over the years-- my first startup was a web portal for Mexicans called Todito.com in 1999-- and it's clear to me that the future of all digital products is going to be play-to-earn/learn/own communities. Currently most web3 projects are pyramid schemes that rely on an ever-expanding base and don't really solve painful problems the way web2 products did/do. Every day I watch products launch on product hunt and then sink to the sediment layer of the internet with few users. This is a shame because I see how much the founders put into these products. I think web3 can be solution by rewarding early believers, adopters, and collaborators with tokens that can be redeemed for access, perks, and ultimately ownership of the value creation of the project. The products themselves can still be web2 -- as most benefit from centralization-- but web3 tokens can bootstrap the traction and value creation that few product hunt launched products ever gain on their own. What this implies for founders is sharing the upside of their projects' potential with users, believers, collaborators, and investors. Instead of waiting to be blessed with a meeting or investment by some pattern-matching, paper-shuffling, ass-covering VC, why not first seek the blessing and investment of time and energy of the people who matter-- users, collaborators, and community. Seems to me there is a giant opportunity here and I'm pointing all my time, energy, and experience straight at it. Curious to hear what all of you think. Any product that launches on PH and achieves over 100 upvotes should be thinking about web3 tokens to bootstrap traction and NFX. LFG!

I love PH and the builders that share products here. I admire the parade of creativity and entrepreneurship and the community of hunters who support and promote them. Just about every product that gets hunted shows a lot of love, effort, time, talent, and resources. I see potential in just about all of them. But I've noticed that a small fraction of the products hunted here go anywhere. Most settle to the bottom of the ocean that is the Internet. Having built a bunch of fintech startups over the past 10 years (Uphold, Airtm, Cadoo, and Slyk) I've come to think of building being four stages of product traction, each of which requires finding a different cohort of supporters: 1. Idea Stage: you need to find Believers for moral support because building digital products is hard, requiring a lot of time, effort, and focus. Believers can be people suffering the painful problem you are trying to solve who validate that they need the better mousetrap you want to build. Seems to me like most PH launches skip this step. 2. Pitch Stage: you need to find Collaborators who are excited about helping you build the product. These can be co-founders or first-check investors-- people who are going to invest their time and money alongside you. This is where you need to not only describe the problem you are solving and the Believers you are going to help, but also why you are the one to do it. The Pitch is persuasion that your product has potential. I feel like many PH launches skip this step too and go straight to the building stage. 3. Product Stage: This is where you and your collaborators build the product, preferably a skinny MVP that you can get into the hands of your Believers ASAP and use to recruit more collaborators. This is where we meet most of Products on PH. The products and their marketing materials generally show a lot of love, care, and talent. 4. Network Stage: This is where your awesome product gets spread by Believers to others who have the same problem. Many startups implement referral sale rewards programs to incentivize this sharing, essentially giving their user base a way to get discounts on the product they love. The goal is the hypergrowth that useful digital products can easily achieve thanks to the Internet, accelerated by digital money. Most PH launches never achieve this stage, even though my impression is that every digital product launched here would love to experience exponential growth. One explanation as to why not all products achieve hypergrowth I've heard is that there is a limited number of products that could be useful to that many people, like a limited number of songs or movies or books that can become hits. I'm not convinced by this. What I've learned from building a lot of digital products that have achieved Stage 4 virality is that you can iterate to hypergrowth if you establish feedback loops as early as possible, i.e. with Believers & Collaborators. My thesis is that digital product builders need to start incentivizing these feedback loops at the earliest stage of product conception, way before the first line of code or domain registration. And I don't think it's too late for products hunted on PH to start these feedback loops to find and reward Believers or iterate until they do find them, and then leverage that cohort to find more collaborators (including investors like me) and users until hypergrowth is unlocked. I'd summarize my thesis like this: if you want to achieve hypergrowth, monetize the potential of your idea as early as possible and share the upside with everyone who helps you grow stage to stage. Would love to hear thoughts and feedback on my thesis.

Community is more important than product for an early-stage startup. Community should guide what founders build and the earliest validation of founder/market fit. Community starts with believers who know the founders and will create a signal for the Community and help founders find early adopters-- pre-mvp future users who will join the Community and help it grow because they really want the founders to build the mvp-- they want to try it, spread it, and help improve it. Community is a hatchery for Collaborators who will help build the MVP and spread the Community to other talented builders. This is where the early adopters get supercharged because they see all the super competent and influential builders joining the Community, promoting the product, attracting even more talented Collaborators. Community is the Platform of the Network. NFX is why digital products attract founders in the first place because solutions to problems can scale so fast and create so much value. Without Community there is CAC. Without Community there is Churn. Without Community there is Corruption. With Community there is Collaboration. With Community there is Coin. With Community there is Crypto. Most digital products-- including VC-blessed products-- go nowhere/die is because they forget that Community is what makes startups fun, successful, and yuuuuuge.