Successfully building a consumer product in web3 after many years in web2 requires consciously undoing some fairly deep habits.

The fun part is that web3 work is less about tricks to unlock user motivation, so the undoing feels great.

Here are the big ones I've learned so far:

In web2, data is the moat. Over the last decade 'growth' as a practice ate other product work in a lot of companies: everyone thinking quantitatively about how to get MORE.

In web3, the bigger unlock is being very intentional about all of the open data that already exists.

In web2, so much of what we learned was how to leverage user psychology to drive more engagement.

We still do that in web3, but tokens unlock a much more powerful source of motivation: ownership. @fractalwagmi is a great recent example of the new "drop your ENS" growth channel.

In addition to adding motivation, we spent a ton of time in web2 removing friction: the other inhibitor of engagement.

This is absolutely needed right now in web3, but it will reach a point of diminishing returns. Intentional friction to build strong community will be key.

A good example of this is @FWBtweets. On the one hand, many (myself included) have argued that anchoring the amount of tokens needed to access to dollars would help them grow, but growth also makes delivering community value harder, so increasing friction makes sense.

I'm sure FWB and many others will continue iterating o the design of that friction over time - for example adding smart friction to the referral process but holding price constant to make access more financially equitable.

To be clear, this will be really hard to do well!

Last one is network connections. In web2 we were trained to get more follows, more connections, more content, more richness in the graph.

In web3 the richness of the open graph means that sense-making and contextualizing it to open opportunities is the more important skill.

Ultimately, I find web3 product work much easier from a growth perspective and much harder from a design perspective. Personally, that challenge makes me enjoy the work more because you have to spend a lot more time focusing on how to really solve people's problems.

These examples are just a few skills I've found retraining on challenging, but there are many more.

Bringing more experienced builders over from web2 will help us cross the UX chasm and build web3 products that can truly compete with web2. I hope these reflections can help!

Well hello everyone! Stream of consciousness is always good but sometimes I also take many hours to try and distill it down, so if you're into that kind of thing check out www.flyingpenguins.io/

Also I credit a lot of the thinking here to my cofounder @raphacaixeta who is sharper on all of these points than I am!

Fitting this into what feels like the general progression