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The Big Little Problems Before THE Problem
I started this newsletter so builders can avoid the potholes I've stepped in while building product & tech at Flipside these past 5 years.
Jim Myers
March 02, 2023
i had the wrong intuition about this
i didn’t realize how hard this problem is
i wish i could just point my front-end to a set of contracts and instantly query all the contract state as a sql database
Me too Bryan, wouldn’t that be nice?
The above is an excerpt from a slack conversation I was having with a Principal Software Engineer at Flipside who is building out a dApp.
In web2 we have countless tools that abstract and simplify data access, and we take them for granted. They let us focus on the core problem we’re solving for our users.
In Web3 the state of tooling is much more under-developed. As builders, we often find ourselves hacking together solutions before we can get to the main thing we’re trying to build.
For non-analytics use cases that require both real-time and high-throughput data access, like any native crypto or web3 app, there is a pretty wide gulf. I call this the “Online” data problem. When we need live data, we're left to either do everything ourselves with an RPC node interface, or use the Graph (not to knock the Graph, it's an incredible tool, but it can't be the only option for developers!)
The point is, with the state of Web3 tooling today, we often find ourselves solving lots of problems before THE problem.
A little over five years ago Dave Balter, Eric Stone and I started Flipside Crypto.
Our mission was then, and still is, to help blockchain ecosystems live up to their full potential.
And when we say Full Potential, we mean billions of users.
Billions of users only show up when real problems are solved, and real problems only get solved when we truly enable communities of builders.
In practice, that means reducing barriers so they can focus their time and energy on the problem at hand, not core infrastructure.
Along the way, we’ve stepped into our fair share of potholes. I started this newsletter to help you avoid the same potholes we’ve stepped into.
Why? Wouldn’t that help a competitor?
Yes. And that’s the point.
We are building in such an early, and in many ways fragile, industry. If we’re going to succeed it’s going to take all of us to get us there and I believe Flipside can realize its mission much sooner if we all rise together.
In future posts, I’ll be sharing tidbits about what’s worked, what’s failed, and what’s possible while building tech & product at Flipside.
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