Shareweave

Shareweave (shareweave.com) was the first startup I made. It started back in late 2021/early 2022. I had joined buildergroop, a community of teens building projects and startups. I was inspired to work on my own idea I had - I had briefly started working on a bounty for a crypto project that wanted to make a shop directory where shop owners could list their sites if they accepted that cryptocurrency. The concept was simple, it just needed to be able to post content and get content, and have some element of moderation. And they were offering $3k just to build the backend for it.

I thought, there are lots of sites that use this framework: post, update, comment/review, and moderate. If I made a system that did the backend part of this, it could be used by a lot of different sites. It could be used for blogs with comments, for reviews and items on eccommerce shops, etc. I also saw a cool blockchain project, Arweave (a permanent blockchain storage), that was offering grants and investments, so I decided to use that to build it to make everything decentralized.

But once I started using arweave, I realized that it was very early and the tools for building on it were not great. It was super hard to do basic CRUD actions, and super slow - users would have to wait at least a few minutes for their posts to go live. The grants and investment offered was nice, but I could get that elsewhere.

As I started building it, I eventually came across Y Combinator's startup school. I realized that I was neglecting something really important: talking to users. And once I did that, I eventually realized this idea was a bit of a stretch. (note: it was not immediatly obvious from talking to people that this idea was unlikely to work. it took a lot of different conversations and thinking. also note: I highly reccomend reading the mom test)

It had some potential, but the amount of devs that wanted to create sharing sites on Arweave was small, and the problem I was solving was pretty minor: a good dev could make their own sharing site backend pretty quickly, and creating a custom backend offered some benefits. So, I decided to pivot to making moderation software. From there I talked to a lot of mods, and eventually, at the recommendation of a discord mod, decided to make a simple tool for discord to allow people to save tasks and set reminders.

I did build it, and it helped me get an internship at a YC-backed startup, and I didn't really continue that after. I think it was probably a mistake to make a product based on a request from someone else, and not based on a problem I had and that I verified other people had. Still, maybe it would've had some potential if I had time to continue it.

Lessons:

• try to build a problem I have myself
• if I don't have it myself, it should be something that gets me excited and that many people have
• verify a problem before building (following the mom test)
• make an MVP that I can build in a week or less
• don't use a specific technology just because it has an investment arm attached. there are lots of other investors out there if your product is solid
• things like web3 get a lot of hype, so be careful to pay attention to actual people that would pay for your product vs people excited about a new thing being built with a certain technology or investors trying to get into a really "hot" area
• Often, web3 projects with little to no utility grow much faster and do much "better" than innovative projects like arweave. Yes, you get money from giving people what they want, but often what they want is a status symbol

While it ultimately failed, I'm very glad that I started this project.