Christina Beltramini I Growing Web3 Social Apps | Pragma Lisbon 2023

foreign [Music] so it's kind of very apt for us to make our last talk about how do we actually go from here and make this actionable and scalable so I'm super excited to introduce Christina from Lentz to talk about what does it take for us to build more consumer-friendly web3 social apps please welcome Christina on stage excellent excited to be here I don't have lens swag but I do have three Rave tickets for the best lens ideas after this presentation and that'll get people to pay attention but I needed to wake you all up it's uh 3 P.M so Siesta time in uh in Portugal I think well we have a lot of coffee for for a reason all right well I'm excited to have you on stage Christina my first question to you is I'd love to kind of know about your background and kind of especially in the Social Web 2 space before before this and I'm kind of curious to learn about how you got into crypto yeah so I have um a little bit of an abnormal background I've been in the at the intersection of consumer Tech uh and music as well as entertainment for the last eight years I feel old in this space uh when I say that I have a working history of eight years I actually got into crypto personally in 2017. and so my parents are Argentinian so for obvious reasons I understood the value of anti-inflationary digital money and I was also working in music tech at the time and so I was going deep into how the blockchain could be useful for musicians in the creative industry as well to give them um you know to give them a relief from uh the intermediaries that were that were impacting uh their independence and and after I left the music industry I went and worked at Tick Tock during the stage where they were scaling growth after the musically acquisition by by dance which was um The Entity that bought musically and and scaled Tick Tock in the west uh and in my last seven months there I was quite fortunate to be able to join a team we actually formed a skunk work team because uh nfts were starting to to blow up at the time and Tick Tock strategically was looking at the space in trying to use this technology to solve its problems around creative monetization so we were able to launch a launch Tech talks first nfts they're still out there so there's a little bit of alpha there they're actually on immutable X but unfortunately that project uh stalled uh it you know lack of uh you know being able to really drive at home with with other priorities and the other team said we're building decentralized social and I said sign me up um the writing was on the wall and I've been here for a year and a half now building lens protocol amazing well there's going to be a lot of things to uh to learn from what the last one app here has been when we kind of look at web 2 and social Labs we kind of an idea for what that looks like you have the Facebooks and the twitters and and so many other social networks that are dominant in different countries but it's not exactly mappable to web3 so what is a web 3 social app mean in this context and kind of how do you define this I've been doing a lot of thinking around this definition uh because as you mentioned it it you're kind of comparing apples and oranges when you're looking at web 2 social apps and web3 social apps uh and so the way that you know I've defined it is blockchain apps that are powered by a decentralized social layer and you know one thing that we've seen with blockchain technology is it's it's scaled rapidly on the financial side um and you know the the whole notion of owning your financial Capital but actually you know your social capital is more important and I think we've learned over the last 10 years with web 2 social you know how important it is um and how decisions have not been made in our favor by by big centralized entities and so when I think about you know DEC decentralization is a spectrum even when we're talking about web 2 so even when we're talking about uh you know web 3 social and so you know that you'll you'll get different types of decentralization in web3 Social and you know personally my view is we need decentralization at every layer um to be able to to solve the problems and allow people to have more Choice uh and more control of their their social experience and the last point that that I'll make on this is you know web three social you can have applications that are not necessarily social applications now but have a social layer to them and have now been improved and so I think about Eventbrite a lot um and Eventbrite you know is a great ticketing application but they've never been able to add a social layer because of closed apis and so ultimately with lens protocol and and and the openness of web3 Social and incomposability you would be able to add a social layout directly into non-social applications and I still consider them web3 social powered applications that's a very it's a very interesting way to kind of think about it because you're saying that this can be introduced later on if if I understood that right but as long as every layer is still decentralized that's what you truly achieve web3 aspect of this being social um maybe another kind of question on that topic will be what we kind of usually see is there's a lot of successful web 2 consumer applications but we're kind of slowly seeing that Port over to web3 what do you kind of commonly see that developers either get stuck on or don't really get as they think about going from web 2 to web3 and building something in this space rather kind of common pitfalls or just common things that they have to unlearn what's usually kind of been your experience and seeing that transition from Founders building into web3 from web 2 to web 2 to web3 yeah I think the founders in in web 2 don't necessarily always have a good sense of how important Community is because when we think of web 3 social you know the your profile is the the main primitive and you're able to take that and your followers wherever you go and in essence you become a um and and starting uses this word a lot you become a liquid citizen uh and so you know while Community has been important to some degree uh in web 2 um in web 3 it's even more important because the ability for you to be able to take your social graph as well as your content um you know at the whim if if a platform doesn't serve you um is very very easy so for web 2 developers building in web 3 the importance is to really focus on Community First as you as you scale and as you grow I think communities are pretty pretty good common share theme for for all of us and uh in this room is as equivalent generally we totally are on on the same kind of frequency there as you think about lens what what have you done to kind of foster this community and kind of what's been like the last one and a half years of getting lens out there and having people play with what you have to offer on the social graph side yes obviously eighth Global one of the main apps on lens protocol is lenstar which I would consider you know a multi-purpose um uh blogging application and that was actually created at a hackathon uh you know back when we were in testnet uh and so you know we've spent a lot of time building the developer community and also building tools that make lens protocol scalable as a distribution layer and a social layer within web3 and what has been slightly difficult with with growing lens is you know we launched without a front end and so when you launch without a you know proper user journey and the pitch to web 3 developers is you know we're bringing a social graph and we're also bringing content liquidity when we started lens we didn't have any of that and so you're asking Builders to to build without having that that context that you're also building at the same time so it was a little bit uh chicken in the in the egg in in some sense so the way we really tried to to focus uh lens protocol is we thought about different user types and audiences and if we didn't have an application built on lens that served them we went out and did a number of Integrations to allow them to have the util ability of the social graph and so a good example of that is musicians and musicians in web 3 understood lens from the get-go you know Tick Tock is their their main medium now there's no social features uh on Spotify and so being able to bring those musicians in web 3 that truly got it we got them in the front door on Leinster which wasn't a music application but then what we did was we learned from those musicians where else they would have liked to see lens integrated and we built that utility for them and the flywheel and then they ended up bringing more musicians into the space ultimately then after that we actually had a front end that built for musicians because they'd seen all the traction that the Integrations in that flywheel had brought and so you know I like to think of that a little bit of a playbook for success and we are looking for us lens protocol the most important thing is to to bring content to bring the hard side which is the creators and their fans and so by you know having this playbook in the on the music side we're able to then and it did this is very traditional social where you take a Playbook and then you copy pasta it with with different communities so that's a very interesting Insight because I would have assumed when you got the musicians on board they only came in in larger quantities after they they saw a front end that was specifically for their Community but that you're saying that didn't happen you ended up customizing the UI after they already came in or most of them came in with their friends um that's a that's a very counterintuitive thing just you wouldn't expect that in any of the context for what too um so that's that's pretty cool what Layla thoughts to experiment uh well you have to and that's gonna how you understand I guess what's different well speaking of experiments well what are some experiments that didn't work yeah a lot uh so uh the the the main experiment was when we launched lens saying we wanted to have a very diverse social graph and that meant going after you know we would go after different audience types and we would take them all to Leinster and when there's no user journey and there's no product differentiator for that particular audience or user type they end up joining and then they end up you know not sticking around and so we learned we were lucky we learned that lesson very very early and which is then why we continued experimenting and and were able to troubleshoot and now we have this this case study with with the music community and and and and which which has been you know that we are now with lens protocol the music web 3 nfts on polygon are all driven by lens see in this case he is kind of the the Insight that you kind of have to just pick which subcommittee you want to go for and until they are successful you don't move on to a second uh sort of area Focus for another Community or is it more about the fact that you need it not just a journey but a whole ecosystem for that particular interest to be thriving so that they can just stick around even though they're not in large quantities there on the platform yeah you needed to build that ecosystem while you were parallel tracking and and onboarding uh those users but you know whereas we were a small team and so we had to you know pick a certain Focus point but if we had more people and um you know we would have been able to we'll be able to do that and parallel track absolutely I mean you have to start small and once it hits then you know how to repeat um and that's the Playbook and that's the playbook for web 2 social as well you need to start some more you need to start focused you're not going to solve everyone's problems uh you know with one application and so picking one lane and doing it well and building something that's you know truly differentiated and useful uh ultimately at the end of the day value ends up flowing absolutely um one thing that you mentioned uh when we're chatting before this was a really interesting point which was in this context of web 3 people can just leave with not just what they built from their content site but the entire graph if they don't like something which is not really an easy thing to do in web 2 if I don't like Instagram I leave that's fine for me but my friends they're gonna stick to the platform I don't get to own my posts it's a lot different here um how do you think about building something that's interesting and from that point of view of as lens are you focused on the graph or the products on top because people are defining what they want to do on the community side but you are here getting people into the ecosystem so so what I'm trying to ask is what is a good way of thinking about what possibilities are there for building interesting applications that people like without being too prescriptive on hey you should do this or just this use case matters which if you're something like Tik toky okay you can only make videos they had to be 60 seconds long you can and can't do this but here there's a lot more freedom so I'm curious how do you get people to be excited about joining the graph I think it's the utility and the different use cases and and and that aha moment for people and and it can be quite simple depending on you know the type of person that you're onboarding if you're onboarding someone in web 3 they understand the mission they see that they follow someone on one platform and they're automatically following them on another that that's pretty powerful um with the with the web through musicians they were able to actually directly drop a song as a post and have it collected and curated across multiple platforms and so I do think that the lens architecture and infrastructure provides for you know Baseline use cases that bring the web 3 community in the door um but then we need to continue building um differentiated products to web 2 if we do want to you know ultimately onboard the masses because we've seen you know there have been a number of applications that have launched which is web 3 social on the blockchain and they managed to drive a lot of hype initially but then people don't really know how this product is different to Twitter right other than being you know a um you know a smaller subset of people from Twitter and and that is not what's going to allow us to scale um we need to pull out different triggers such as Creator monetization uh being one of them uh you know the opportunity to actually choose how you consume social so the thing that I find incredibly interesting about web 3 social is you don't just need to build a front end you can actually build um you know different parts of the stack and so when we look at Tick Tock for example you have Tick Tock that controls the algorithm which we all know is a great algorithm uh Unfortunately they control it's a pretty good one they control the algorithm they control the moderation policy which is problematic um and they control the features on the front end as well as Define how creators can monetize in web 3 social for developers you'll actually be able to have somewhat of an A La Carte experience so you can choose your front-end you can choose you know your moderation policy you can choose an algorithm that you like and there's a lot more customization that can happen and I think for Builders that makes it incredibly interesting because you don't just need to build a front end you could build premium features that people are willing to pay for and attach to the front end that they prefer and that's a really big surfacer in design space because that lets you to too many creative things too so you kind of talked about monetization there what are kind of some unique lens specific or just one three specific features that you get on the stack now that you don't get in web 2. yeah so the the whole notion of user generated collectible content um I think is incredibly interesting uh because we like to say everything starts at the social layer and we've seen the meme coins like like Pepe they all gather steam because of the social layer um and you know a lot of that happens organically and so the ability for creators to or even just users to in a in a as simple as a post post some interesting content that can be collectible potentially it could go viral uh you know down the road people could you you know have that would have provenance and people would be able to remix it and you would be able to trace that all down to that original poster because everything is on chain so I think usable user generated um Collectibles it has a lot in the design space um and then this one's quite basic but open data structures so one thing that we've learned and we actually have we chat with developers every day we chat with creators every day we chat with web um three product designers every day and one thing that we've learned from our conversations with creators is oh wow I can finally understand you know who the people that engage with me the most are across multiple platforms uh and so you know with web 2 it was all about influence and reach and likes and virality I think with the infrastructure of lens and the fact that all main Primitives are on chain you can actually gather a lot of insight into depth of your relationships and as a Creator understand oh I'm actually more valuable than the number of followers that I have because the people that follow me actually engage with me more and it's a more effective two-way relationship and you get to curate that through the help of other people building on top because you can now choose your algorithm or better ways to engage or some new plugin comes up um maybe I want your algorithm yeah let's see what you see yeah uh oh that is a really good way of thinking about this what challenges do you kind of foresee um just people kind of coming into this space as users for for web3 social the next couple years like what are you going to see are the hurdles and what can we do to get millions more to uh to be users I think we're currently building the web3 social layer before the entire ecosystem has built an easy way to ramp into the space for non-cryptonatives and so I think if if we're able to solve that account abstraction is going to be particularly interesting uh we'll be able to onboard more into the the web 3 social layout in terms of kind of going back to for others in the audience or just people who are going to watch this after as they're thinking about building something in what three social what general advice do you have for them to think about growth and how do they get their first x amount of users to really understand how they understand this protocol or the product um what's what's something that you learned from lens that you can kind of share that people can apply and then learn from and and copy for for a better world in this space and what would you tell them the importance of community and building in public is actually a huge benefit and so you know lead generate a very uh interesting uh piece which was about psychological ownership and so as people start to build in the space it's very important uh to you know find the early tribe that you're building for uh and allow them to feel like owners in the product that you're building and that can be you know through ways Leinster which built uh the biggest one of the biggest applications on lens um they actually managed to crowdsource um a hundred thousand dollars from uh their early supporters to provide a gasless experience I did not know that that's that's amazing yeah they did that through the collect module and now they know who all of these early supporters are to be able to continue to build onto that loyalty and ensure that they have a sticky Community uh so that was a great example other other products on lens are exploring how to do this more so on like the native product feature side so loyalty badges uh and those types of um you know growth hacks but I do think that while Community is incredibly important um in this space and and can somewhat be scary because it needs to be a main focus it's also very exciting because open source and the technology allows you with richer ways to to actually build that community and those feedback loops building in public and focusing on your community to actually help grow the initial early users and uh I feel like that's luckily true for more than just social and and that's a pretty good recipe for getting people to care early on and help you succeed yeah and even I we can even look at Whip too on on this community point when I was at Tick Tock and we found out that Instagram was copying our product with rails and we we all managed to to actually be able to see the product specs and it was exactly the same and Mark Zuckerberg decided to launch this feature during uh you know the time when Trump was going to bend Tick Tock we were all incredibly frightened and our CEO sat us down and said they can copy our product but they can't copy our community and so I think that Rings true for web 2 and even more so for web 3 social builders I think that's a wonderful note to uh to end this on this is very actionable advice for everybody in this space and I want to thank you for taking the time thank you music