Passports, paper clips, and products


Hi nerds -

I salute you from Panama City during my favorite part of the year: summer.

Weather is windy, sun is out daily, and I’m about to head to the beach to attend the wedding of one of my bestest friends in the universe.

This week though has been a crazy one for two exciting reasons:

  • I’m speaking at Schelling Point and DAO Denver next week, as part of ETH Denver - the largest Ethereum conference of the world - talking about “Where are the next 10,000 DAOs coming from?”.
  • We launched the first sneak peek of the Surge Passport NFT. 5,000 uniquely generated NFTs, the Passport collection is womxn’s golden ticket into Web3. Through scholarships, discounts, conferences, mentorships, digital identities, courses, and more, the Surge Passport will provide token-holders with an easy way to dive into the Web3 space.

Surge Passport NFT
Surge Passport NFT - my PFP ❤️‍🔥

3 brain farts

1️⃣ The One thing: About 80% of an article comes up as you’re writing. This means we don’t need to have the entire idea structured before we start writing - just like we don’t need to have entire product figured out before we start building.

Too often we get stuck thinking in the macro side of things, when really if we work in small goals we can accomplish way more over time.

“The One Thing” by Gary Keller dares us to ask: “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

And I add: “what’s stopping you from doing it right now?”.

Small packets

🕵🏻‍♀️ Twitter-led development: Twitter-led development means the product team makes decisions based on the feedback they receive from Twitter (or any social media platform for that matter).

  • Pros: we’re focusing heavily on listening to the audience.
  • Cons: If you only focus on what people say, you easily loose direction and focus. We start building defensively, over proactively.

This can become a trap for people building audience-first products, whose main strategy is listening to what their followers request.

The antidote is having a clear user persona who’s input you value greatly, while dismissing other personas who are not the target. By establishing a strong north star metric to lead the user research, we can make sure findings are not (as) skewed with distracting reviews.

Distractions

🧬 On-chain reputation: Today, we track our professional achievements through our CV, a LinkedIn profile, or social media accounts.

This is a problem because:

  • It needs to constantly be updated
  • It’s not a good source of objective truth - people can write whatever they want
  • Because it needs to be so concise, it’s often not reflective of our entire career path

On-chain reputation systems, however, will capture your behavior across the digital world and fetch your contributions, voting patterns, and projects you invest money and energy on.

Because every transaction is stored on the blockchain, you’ll be able to track your movement across cyberspace, aka the new work force. I predict this trustworthy, up-to-date source will become the de-facto credentials throughout interview processes and assessments.

2 intellectual goodies

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures”

~ F.M. Alexander

Habits

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks and then starting on the first one.”

~ Mark Twain

1 funky audio

Whether it be French, Dutch, or African languages, few things I love more than music in sounds I don't understand.

Having that said, here’s one of my favorite playlists, filled with languages that feel foreign and beautiful, but for which I don’t yet have an entire playlist for

multilingual by juliette_chevalier


Thanks for reading.

As always, feel free to connect by hitting reply and sharing a juicy thought 💡.

We all help the curious community grow.

Best,

Jules 🤸🏻‍♂️

juliette_chevalier

Learning to code is 21st century super-power. I work as a Software Engineer and teacher around the world. My purpose is to empower others by showing them what we can do with our brain, a computer and wifi.

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