The creator is the brand

Welcome to the 343 new people who joined the Terminally Onchain community since Sunday!

I'm thankful for all 3551 of you and I hope everyone is having a great week so far 🔥

If you're enjoying my writing, please share Terminally Onchain with your friends in Crypto and join the /toc channel on Farcaster 🤝

I'll be honest...this past week was tough for me.

I was feeling tired, unmotivated, and was all in my head about the current state of the newsletter, hypersub, farcaster channel, etc. Also, I received a job opportunity from an awesome founder that I was debating taking or not (ended up saying no). It was one of those weeks where I was just quieter on social media and using that extra time to brainstorm in my notebook and talk to friends for advice.

Personally, I hate using the word "burnt out" but that's exactly what it felt like for me recently. The last 5 months have been a non-stop grind with work, traveling, conferences, etc.

After NFT NYC wrapped up, I definitely felt like I needed to take a few days to reflect on my journey ahead. What went well recently? Where can I improve? How can I continue to enjoy my work, balance my other responsibilities, and ship at a consistent cadence for my audience?

At times, I felt like I was just coping and using "reflection" as an excuse to not ship. But I don't think that's actually the case. The reality is that a lot has changed with my work since I first started this newsletter in December. Let's take a look at the numbers from the past 4 months:

• Crossed 50 posts published last week (in 116 days so that's a post every ~2.3 days)

• Went from 0 to 3500 subscribers on the newsletter

• Went from 3k to 27k Farcaster followers

• Started a premium community that has 200+ paying subscribers in the first month

• Grew the /onchainletters channel on Farcaster to 2k+ followers

If you would have told me in December that this would be the path ahead, I would have simply laughed at you.

But that's the amazing part about consistency: as long as you are hitting the publish button, experimenting, and showing up, then the path ahead just reveals itself without you even realizing it.

With that being said, I'm feeling refreshed and have a plan that I believe is the best route ahead.

Did some of you notice anything different in the formatting of today's intro at the top 👀

Well, let's get into it!

Today's letter will have 4 sections:

1. Terminally Onchain by YB

2. Terminally Onchain: newsletter

3. Terminally Onchain: token gated community

4. Terminally Onchain: dune dashboard

5. Terminally Onchain: farcaster channel

Let's dive in 🚀

If there's one thing that's clicked for me in the past week it's that...the creator is the brand.

I got feedback in the Terminally Onchain group chat that my branding is pretty confusing. This led me to go back and forth on trying to figure out brand consolidation and how to best market my offerings.

How can I make the marketing simple stupid so that anyone who doesn't know me can understand what I'm up to in less than 5 seconds?

In fact, @0xdesigner has this hilarious cast that accurately describes how simple everything needs to be for anyone building a brand.

Many of us, especially me, forget that 100% of anyone's audience is caught up in a million things going on in their life. No one actually has the attention span to read the fine print. If you are a creator or founder, it is your job to make the branding as simple as possible. The easier it is to understand, the higher the chances of people giving a shit about what you're doing.

For a while, I was stuck on what my audience would think. I was worried people would get mad at me for changing the name or doing spotlights or whatever else. But after talking to some friends (h/t @linda @androidsixteen), I realized that my audience cares about my journey and that's really it. For the most part, the people that have been following my work are simply excited to see what I'm thinking about, take part in my experiments, and get some value out of it (informational, discovery, financial, etc). And that's exactly what I mean by the "creator is the brand".

And that realization helped me understand that these moments of change in my journey (i.e. branding, cadence) don't need to be treated as this grandiose thing that is such a big deal. Of course, it's always important to be thoughtful and intentional but this is a journey that I want to be on for the years to come and there's bound to be many more changes like this in the future!

As long as I am transparent and authentic with my decisions, my guess is that 99% of all of you will be onboard and excited for the road ahead. And as for the 1% that aren't, it's okay! Not everyone can be happy with every decision.

So, what am I going to do to simplify things? Now that I'm working on few projects in parallel, it's time to put everything under an umbrella brand ☂

The key change here is that I will no longer be calling this newsletter 'Onchain Letters'. I'll still keep the format and vibe the same, but the newsletter will be one component under the Terminally Onchain brand.

In the sections below, I wrote some brief thoughts on how I'm thinking about each of these 3 pillars and what I'm focused on in the coming months.

For those of you that have been reading the newsletters the last couple of weeks, you may have noticed me experimenting with a "spotlight" post where I pick 2-3 folks from the paid community and write a tl;dr on what they're working on.

I gave it a shot for 3 weeks, but I am not a fan of the format. If anything, I noticed myself avoiding to write the post and felt like I had to do it. And more so, it just felt like I wasn't actually learning anything or going deep into a topic.

Personally, I enjoyed the deep dives I've been writing the past few months a lot more. I'm able to get into the weeds of a technical topic, lean into my "tech history" curiosity, and tell a good story of why that topic matters (i.e. 4844/Broadband, prediction markets, stablecoins, etc.)

So, that's why I'm reverting the weekday posts back to my normal 2500-4000 word deep dives on topics that I'm excited about. And then on Sunday, along with the normal list of "what I minted this week", I'll share 2-3 "micro-spotlights" of what paid community members are building.

Wednesday (creation): analysis, deep dive, strategy, and technical depth

Sunday (curation): my mints, projects I'm following, and spotlights

The main note here is that I'm going to stop calling the "premium version" just Hypersub. Hypersub is an incredible tool that I'm using to facilitate the onchain subscriptions but I'm realizing that not everyone knows what it is and I'm obviously not the only creator using Hypersub.

So instead, I'll stick to the basics and what I know anyone in crypto will understand: token gated community. And that token is of course the NFT you receive when you sign up for some time (0.0042/month) at terminallyonchain.xyz

This token gated community will offer collabs and onchain perks roughly once / week. Some months may be more and some months may be less but subscribers can expect 3-5 partnerships that I set up in any given month.

Some examples collabs I executed on in the first month of the paid community:

My hope is that these collabs will lead to airdrops or early access to products that will appreciate in value and help pay for the subscription itself.
Not every collab will be like this, but every now and then being in crypto has its perks!

Back in February, I wrote a letter to the Paragraph team titled E-mails are handshakes, Wallets are Portals. In it, I discuss the perks of being a crypto creator and how the meaning of community goes one level deeper:

Wallets serve as a portal to help creators better understand who their community really is. Onchain social graphs, dapps they interact with, etc. Being a crypto native creator enables you to build a community, not just a list of e-mails.

Now, with the Terminally Onchain gated community, it's becoming crystal clear as to how important it is for any crypto creator to be proactive about better understanding and marketing their community's onchain activity.

Last week, I worked with @yesyes to get this awesome Dune dashboard created which gives detailed insights into the onchain activity of the paid members (~200 wallets).

What's the point? To help any founder or creator understand why it's a no brainer to partner with Terminally Onchain - it's a community of the most active onchain wallets in the space.

Right now, it's mostly me reaching out to folks in the space and setting these collabs up, but hopefully overtime I'll start getting some inbound. And if anyone asks "why partner with Terminally Onchain?" then I can point them to the dashboard.

To the founders and creators in this space, what will you get by working with the Terminally Onchain token gated community?

You'll get access to distribute your work to some of the most high intent users and collectors in the Superchain & Farcaster ecosystem.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to change the root name of a Farcaster channel. And a few months ago, before Terminally Onchain was even a thing, I decided to create /onchainletters.

Although it's not ideal that I need to start a new channel from scratch, this could be a great time to rethink how I want to approach the vibe of the channel. In the onchainletters one, it was really just a way for me to update people on what was happening on my end (i.e. new posts, metrics, etc.)

There wasn't much discussion going on and I wasn't that proactive of starting conversation as well.

This cast by @androidsixteen was interesting and I liked the "crypto product hunt with friends" description.

My goal will be to lead by example here. How can I prompt interesting discussions on products, trends, collections, etc. I'm noticing? And if I do it enough, others are bound to join in and post questions of their own.

It doesn't need to be forced, but now that I'm only doing one deep dive per week instead of two, I can use that extra time to have conversation in the channel.

I also want to use the channel to help highlight all of the cool content Terminally Onchain subscribers are producing themselves to help bring attention to their work. Again, not forced by any means, but something I definitely want to keep top of mind.

My goal with /toc Farcaster Channel: how can /toc become the "general channel" on Farcaster for discussion on all things OP stack? Projects, mints, trends, metrics discussion, etc.

Note: the token gated group chat will of course be there for discussion as well but I view that more so as friends talking about whatever and all of us thinking out loud. Naturally, there will be some discussion in the chat that people don't feel publicly casting and there will be some discussion in the channel for when folks want an open discussion.

For example, the chat helped me pick the channel name.../toc!

I'll keep you all updated in my Sunday posts if there's some cool discussion happening in the channel that you should check out 🤝

I'll see you all on Sunday, I hope everyone has a great rest of the week!

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, my DMs are always open :)

- YB