💥 Build diary - 9 💥

It's time to take stock and double down on what we've built so far.

Boom now has all the building blocks in place that will under-pin our Social Media platform. A lot of the effort that has gone in to date has been building out the “Social” features and now Boom has two types of social engagement constructs:

• Twitter style news feed
• Telegram style chat channels (secured by NFTs)

Now the real challenge is one of content and delivering on the “Media” part of the equation.

Content is King #

In 1996 Bill Gates penned an essay called “Content is King”, that outlined his thoughts on where a lot of the money would be made on the web. The opening statement he made was:

Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.

The content in that essay has aged extremely well, and much of what Bill talks about is still relevant. Towards the end of the essay, Bill concludes:

But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won’t be writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You’ll just click on what you want, knowing you’ll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis.

Content consumption didn’t end up happening quite as he envisaged, but was flipped on it’s head. Instead of Consumers paying Content Providers a small fee to consume information, Google and SEO became a giant by charging Content Providers a small fee to surface their content to Consumers. One of the core reasons being that the barriers of entry for micro-payments were so large, that it took big centralized companies with banking relationships to monetize clicks.

With the advent of sub-second blockchain technology like Solana this is no longer the case and the original model Bill imagined is now much closer to being a reality. NFTs have shown that markets will respond to pure content based monetary technology, without much more utility than an attractive jpeg attached as a string to the metadata. This is where Boom’s opportunity is, and we will be pressing into that space by aggregating Solana based content and on-chain data and segmenting access to it using NFT Metadata. The ultimate goal is to provide a vehicle for Solana content creators to monetize their content and make a living through micro-transactions the way Bill originally theorized.

The problem we’re solving #

Anyone who’s been in the Solana space for any length of time, will know how fast things are moving. I recently had a week off sick and the amount of Alpha that got delivered while I was convalescing was absolutely insane. I just couldn’t keep up with what was going on.

Between Twitter, Telegram Channels and Discord I have thousands of notifications, and most of the time I mark all as read and carry on.

We’ve got scale #

This where Boom comes in - a single channel with curated feeds of Solana related content, open uncensored comments and chat, and premium channel based content with NFT access for NFT holders and token stakeholders.

Since launching in October when the first tweet was posted: “42” at 08:59:31 on 1 October 2021", Boom has accumulated:

• 3.1k users
• 20k Meeps
• 27k $BMA in tips
• 10k emojis

A bucket list of content #

This depth of content is starting to give us the ability to do some clever things with machine learning, sentiment analysis and big data analysis. But what Boom has also been lacking is the basic things that have grown up with web2:

• Long format content
• Click based advertising
• Aggregated feeds
• Comments and discussion

And now it’s time to bring a lot of those Media based constructs into Boom and let them add to the Social structure. So watch this space because this is where Boom is heading and in a few short weeks the Global Feed is going to completely change.

Boom Heroes status update #

With the realisations and direction that’s been described above we need to take a realistic look at what we’re doing with the Boom Heroes Generative NFT. All the artwork is done, it looks amazing, and we’re going to be launching as planned on April 15. But the NFT Action Cards are complicated and a lot of people still don’t understand what we’re doing with them. So we’re going back to basics and here’s the Road Map for the Boom Heroes NFT:

• We’ll mint on 15 April
• All 1303 SSL token airdrop holders will get 2 tokens to mint 2 free Boom Heroes
• All 1303 OG NFT holders will get 1 token to mint 1 free Boom Heroes character
• We’re going to hit the pause button on NFT Season Challenges and Action Cards
• Establish the Market Place for the 1303 OG NFT
• Establish the Market Place for Boom Heroes
• Build brand awareness through the Boom Heroes NFT, and the new Solana content feed on boom.army

A big part of this is just simplifying what the offering is currently. We’ve got some dope artwork, and some amazing ideas but it really feels like we haven’t been able to make the Value Proposition simple and easily understood. By extending the timeline on NFT Action Cards, and simplifying the delivery our feeling is it’s going to be much more beneficial to the project.

Conclusion #

The Solana space is crazy. It’s the most massive learning curve I’ve ever had to deal with and I’ve been involved in delivering everything web for over 15 years. We’ve got the most phenomenal passionate community, and I’m constantly humbled by the energy they bring to what we’re doing. In the last 6 months we’ve built a container to hold content, and now we’re ready to really press into how that content will be shaped.