Spending the Summer on Supertrue.com

"We spend a third of our waking hours streaming music yet only 1% of music artists are able to make a living'" - Chris Dixon

For the past few months, I've been building a product with a few friends called Supertrue: a Patreon-like web3 platform enabling creators (starting first with musicians) to build relationships with their first 1000 true fans. Fans win by being able to gain exclusive content and be realized as an early backer, and artists win by being able to more quickly bootstrap their craft via NFT sales.

In its simplest form, Supertrue gives creators the ability make a profile and corresponding NFT collection in less than a minute, allowing for potential followers to pay for a numbered and dated NFT to follow them. Having ownership of an artist's NFT allows fans to then access exclusive content (posts, discord channels, b-sides, IRL events, etc) that's inaccessible otherwise.

By building a following with Supertrue NFTs, creators decentralize their fanbase and can take it with them across platforms. Supertrue NFTs unlock the ability for creators to message and token-gate content based on follower number. This encourages fans to support artists early, and creates a way to capture value for those followers helping the artists in their earliest days.

I jumped in mid-way through the project and helped see the prototype to its fruition, building out a few features (artist reservation flow, multi-wallet login, email login, etc.), investigations for forthcoming work (ex: 3rd party token-gating tools), and establishing some light workflow standardization (agile with a very lowercase "a") to ensure work goes through smoothly and that all parties are clear on our product vision.

Ultimately, we decided not to continue on the project as it wasn't the problem that we felt that we specifically needed to solve, and we were uninterested in raising funds for what we see as a currently non-"hair-on-fire" problem, i.e. "this is a huge problem and it must be solved right now". Music NFTs will (and do) undoubtedly exist, but this wasn't the problem meant for us to solve, so...on to the next one. ✌️