Building in Public // Day #4 We launched. Saw a boom. 10X oversubscribed. $800k volume. Yay right? Time to party! Not quite... Outside looking in, a pretty successful launch, but under the hood we've seen an inverted hockey stick in terms of retention and activity 📉 There are a dozen reasons we could point to, but the reality is: the product we put out for S1 just wasn't good enough (yet). So what happened? And where do we take @UpsideFun from here? I will save a follow up post about the adjustments we're looking to make moving forward -- some of them get me so excited I've been losing sleep 😅 -- but for now I wanted this post to be focused on a question I received in our private investor chat. "What does increasing the user admission look like? I can’t help but think that more users will prove helpful to the mechanics." - Upside Angel Investoooor #17 This wasn't the first time we've heard this feedback. "LET IN MOAAR USERS!" has been a battle cry by many of our current and potential users. And to be honest, trying to scale up when things are slowing down feels like a necessary move in the moment. So why did we only allow 1000 people into Season One? And why did we still leave 3X more than that outside on the waitlist? Doesn't more users = gewd?! Yes, an no. Like everything, there are tradeoffs. So I wrote up a private response to Angel Investor #17 I will share with you here 👇 ------- Really good question. I would love to share how we're thinking about this (metering growth), why, and our current plan moving forward. Always open for feedback: 1) We can and expect to increase access to Season Two. While we have 3000+ new people who have followed or requested to join waitlist that didn't get in, my gut tells me would could maybe active about 1000 of those if we really went hard. 2) Completely agree with the thought that more users = more efficient game mechanics. I wrote about this a little in my retrospective but I think its good to use @Polymarket as an analogy. With low activity, the user experience is pretty poor and the prediction outcomes are less accurate. This creates a cold start problem that's difficult to overcome, but very powerful competitive moat and network effect if you can manage to overcome it. 3) I think the part I would add more perspective is looking at the tradeoffs and potential downsides of letting in more users right now. In short, if 90-95% of our users churn within the first few days, doubling the amount of users to 2000 isn't going to do much good. For example: Letting in 1000 new people likely wouldn't double the product experience, but it would have us lose potential trust/interest with 900-950 users. Anecdotal but imo, people really only give a product one or two chances before they've mentally labelled what they think it is and move on (especially in crypto). f we "shoot our shot" and onboarded every user we could, it puts us in a very difficult position to re-invigorate and re-activate those users. While we have a lot of work to do on PMF and retention, the fact we still 2-3X more users who can see S2 after we've filled the holes still gives us a few good shots on goal to make it work. (Analogy for the marketing folks: You don't send an email out to your entire list at once. You send it out to 10%, A/B test the results, the send it to next wave, so you end with the highest converting email blast) All in all, its a tough balance. Yes, there's an equal potential risk that must be considered in terms of not getting enough forward momentum to reach escape velocity. And yes, we could be overestimating the risk of losing trust with users and being too conservative with our ozzy baby. All that said, we think 1000 real (X verified users) who took the time to connect their X and still churn out is a sign we need to focus on leaky bucket more than new user onboarding and acquisition. On a positive note, of the 1000 users that come in from the waitlist, roughly 39% of them spent some amount of money in the app. Actually taking the time to tweet, connect, get to @base, spend money, etc is a great start we think. We have a long way to go, but I think we got closer to our number one mission heading into S1: find our 100 ride-or-die forever users. ----- That's it for this UPdate :) appreciate anyone who read this far! If anyone has any questions about what we're building or wanna chat about what you're building, would love to chat in DMs. - Zachary Dash 🐙

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