Bukable

bukable

Social tokens are invaluable for creating and marketing user-centered economies in Web3. Here is how they work and why they have great moonshot potential. Last year, Nasdaq named social tokens the . next massive crypto trend This prediction has proved true. Social token popularity continues to grow rapidly, with more use cases and new designs constantly coming out. What are social tokens, and what’s their value? I’ll get you covered in this article on all these questions and more. By the end of its reading, you will fully understand the concept, the existing designs, and perspectives. Let’s get right into it. What are social tokens? Social tokens are cryptos that represent the value of a project, brand, community, or unique creator. In other words, social tokens are currencies that’re agreed to be used within a particular environment or micro-economy as a means of exchange for or experiences it provides. services Despite “social tokens” being a relatively new term, the idea behind this concept is not that fresh. We can think of them as upgraded token incentives adjusted to the current hot Web3 trends: disintermediated digital ownership, and community-focused framework of doing business. creator economy How are social tokens different from token incentives? In fact, they are not so different. The reason why we haven’t heard about social tokens until 2020 is that the Web3 ideology has not been firmly formulated yet. Just a few years ago, there was not much clarity about what Web3 is, and many would think of it as yet another hype rebranding of crypto. However, things have tremendously progressed since then, both on ideological and practical levels. The theoretical framework of Web3 and its foundational principles have been shaped. On a practical level, we got a whole ecosystem of platforms and projects making this vision real. As the crypto space evolves and transforms into the Web3 movement, so do some of its concepts. The same happened to token incentives. The old well-known concept was rethought and adjusted to the Web3 vision. And finally, we got social tokens. How are social tokens used? Depending on goals, social tokens can be used in many different ways. Only the sky and law are the limits. In most scenarios, they apply as marketing tools that help: bootstrap a project. Through social token distribution, projects can engage more users and coordinate them for the project mission; strengthen community loyalty and dedication; attract investment and workforce; and increase brand value and visibility. The long-term goal of social token implementation can be building unique ecosystems that are far more user-oriented and rewarding than currently existing business models. For their holders, social tokens can provide different kinds of value: VIP access to information or events, discounts, governance rights, free NFTs or other digital goods, merch, and the like. Below, I will walk you through particular types of social tokens and cover in more detail what they can grant to a user. Stick with me. How many social tokens are there? Let me answer with data (constantly changes): Coingecko What are social tokens examples? So far, there are loads of social token variations out there. Depending on who stands behind them, all social tokens can be broadly grouped into four categories: Personal or creator tokens Brand tokens Community tokens, and Social platform tokens. Here is the excellent infographic by Forefront that can help you better understand the social token landscape. Now in more detail about each type. Personal or creator tokens These tokens are issued by a unique creator or a group of creators (an influencer, an artist, an actor, a band - actually anyone who has something to offer) to capitalize on their creativity and market it. Depending on a creator's goals and value proposition, personal tokens can come in many different designs: earnable/buyable, granting access, discounts, swappable to NFTs, and the like. Essentially you can wrap literally anything your fans may be interested in into your personal token to the extent it's legally permitted. The examples of personal tokens are given in the Creators Map above. I would also like to mention ( ) - a Grammy Award-winning pop-rock band that is considered one of the most successful cases for fan-focused token launching. Portugal. The Man. $PTM Brand tokens Any brand can issue brand tokens, whether a crypto native or not (like, for example, Coca-Cola), to boost sales, create new revenue streams, and strengthen customer loyalty. For instance, in the traditional retail industry, the most native scenario of tokenization would be tying customer loyalty programs to retailer brand tokens. study on brand loyalty has shown that if tokens are proven to be simple to use, 79% of brand followers will use them. A KPMG Let’s take another non-crypto example - a sports club. Spanish soccer giant FC Barcelona ( ) and attracted USD 1.3 in less than two hours! had successfully sold out its social token BAR Community tokens Community tokens are based around particular communities and intended to provide their members exclusive access to information, expertise, human talent, events, etc. Examples of community tokens: token - represents the Ethereum investment community around the subreddit r/ethtrader. Members can earn Donuts by actively participating and contributing content to the subreddit. Donuts FWB token - represents - a community of artists, creators, thinkers, and people leading Web3 transformation. FWB token incentivizes community members to participate in Discord, attend calls, and host events. Friends with benefits $CLUB - a community token of - a social token incubator. $CLUB holders gain access to Discord, events, educational content, contribution opportunities, and governance. Seedclub Social platform tokens These tokens represent some interest in a platform that facilitates social token issuance and exchange. For example, they can provide their holders with membership perks (VIP access to events, discounts, etc.) and other special features like staking and participation in the platform's governance. Examples: , , , and . Roll Rally Chiliz Fyooz Is an NFT a social token? Originally, NFTs were not designed as social tokens. They are digital collectibles, providing their holders with a kind of exclusive IP rights to the unique content they represent. However, with time use cases of NFTs have evolved, and now many brands and individual creators use them as non-fungible social tokens. Examples: , , etc. IreneDAO VeeFriends The purposes are the same: self-marketing, user engagement, and capitalizing on that. So despite many saying that there is a whole different world between NFTs and social tokens, I would argue with that. NFTs can play the role of social tokens when used for the purposes described above. It’s worth noting that some creators apply NFTs in tandem with fungible social tokens to boost engagement. For instance, a creator can use NFTs to monetize their artwork while also releasing a social token that gives the holder access to personal Q&A sessions or art lessons. Meme social tokens Meme social tokens are hybrids of silly memes and reward tokens. They are a relatively new design of social money, which has all chances to explode. Here is why. First, meme social tokens preserve all qualities of meme coins, which are cryptos inspired by a joke or some funny narrative. Basically, pure meme coins are not supposed to represent any value but fun or to have any meaningful cases of application. However, despite their unserious nature, some meme coins like Dodge or Shiba Inu achieved enormous user adoption, and their prices saw meteoric growth at times. Second, meme social tokens are , meaning their holders can benefit from them in more ways than just price speculation. reward tokens One of the pioneers in meme social tokens design is the , backed by . DUCKIES platform Yellow Network DUCKIES platform aims to accelerate Yellow Network’s community growth and reward its participants (Yellowians) for their dedication and commitment to the project. Essentially, the DUCKIES Platform offers Yellowians a reward meme token $DUCKIES, that can be swapped for particular NFTs, Yellow Tokens, and other digital assets. $DUCKIES also enable their holders to participate in the community's governance and access its events. $DUCKIES are tokens, which means you can't buy them on the market. earnable New community participants can get some DUCKIES for free as a welcome bonus. Those who want to increase their DUCKIES’ holdings can do it by participating in DUCKIES learn-to-earn activities, contests, community initiatives, and the referral program. Is DUCKIES the next meme coin? Chances are, it can be. At least now, DUCKIES proves to have a great moonshot potential. Despite the crypto winter, DUCKIES crossed 2000% growth and tens of thousands of users in just one day upon its release. By the second week since the launch date, there are almost 150K active DUCKIES holders. Here is the proof: If the DUCKIES keep walking at this pace, they are well on their way to becoming the next meme coin. Combining meme and social tokens’ traits can be a huge step forward in social token design. Conclusion With the crypto space getting more impacted by the Web3 vision and creator economy, it's no surprise that social tokens are becoming the next big thing. For businesses and individuals, they can be great marketing shortcuts to build dedicated communities and create new revenue streams. For fans or customers, social tokens can provide participation in the economies they like - either as owners, investors, or a workforce. Sounds like win-with IMHO. By for Yellow Network. Julie Plavnik If you want to learn more about DUCKIES and Yellow Network, don’t be shy to ask your questions in . Yellow Telegram

Social Tokens: Creating User Centered Economies in Web3

Dogecoin holders could soon buy Tesla automobiles and services using their assets. Tesla is may be testing Dogecoin as a cryptocurrency payment option. On January 11, a Twitter user going by the handle revealed in a screenshot Tesla code showing Dogecoin as means of payment. @BitDeepu Notably, Tesla’s source code shows that the memecoin holders can now buy Tesla Model Y with their DOGE tokens. This news comes after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on December 14, that the electric carmaker would accept his favorite coin — DOGE for merchandise on a test basis. He , said “Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes” However, before this, Musk asked his Twitter followers if Tesla should accept DOGE as a form of payment in May. Among the respondents, 78.2% replied yes. Although the image shows that the electric carmaker giant integrated crypto payment with Dogecoin, there is no official announcement from the company. Note that Musk is the biggest fan of the memecoin. He once called Dogecoin, a meme-inspired digital asset, a 'hustle' during his guest-host on the "Saturday Night Live" (SNL) comedy sketch TV show in May. Last year, Tesla said it would stop accepting Bitcoin for its products, less than 2 months after the company started receiving the largest crypto by market cap for payment.

Is Tesla Adding Dogecoin as a Payment Option?

While consumer products get all the hype, B2B products are a quiet gem “What’s cool nowadays?” I love asking my friends this question and hearing about the latest products and brands they’re loving. I’ve also noticed that in all my years of asking this question, I’ve never heard anyone mention an enterprise company. Can you imagine hearing a response like, “Oh — Cloudflare, Databricks, Superhuman, Slack, Salesforce, Envoy, the list goes on!”? To be fair, it’s easy to get lost in the consumer product bubble. Many of the most salient technology companies today are consumer internet companies. They’re splashy and (for better or for worse) attract all the hype. Consumer products also easier to identify with and more consistently used, so it makes sense that they occupy a prominent cultural position. But, after spending my career both building consumer and business products, it's become increasingly clear that building for enterprise is the easier and more pragmatic route. Here's why: It’s easier to tell when you have product market fit in enterprise. Consumers have much more varied needs than businesses. Consumers need to solve the nuisances of their daily life, but they also need to feel seen and heard, they need to be cool, they need to be entertained, they need to know about things before their friends do, they need to express themselves in a way that shows they’re woke but not overbearing or obnoxious, and on and on. Businesses, whose only real needs are to operate and make money for shareholders, are much less complex than humans. If they’re fiscally responsible, they will focus primarily on solving the problems that prevent them from achieving long-term survival. Consumers, on the other hand, have many “problems,” but in reality, most are non-vital. This leads to the lukewarm adoption of most consumer products. As a founder or product person, it’s easy to get stuck in the “ .” You have some usage, but people seem to feel “just ok” about your product. People aren’t lighting themselves up trying to spread the word about your thing. Many founders flounder at this stage and mosey on for years before throwing in the towel. It’s frustrating, but it’s also the result of solving a problem nobody cares enough about. trough of sorrow When building B2B products, it’s easy to know if you’ve attained product-market fit because most enterprise products require you to pay for them. If you’re not doing a good enough job at solving a need, companies won’t hesitate to churn, since churning actively costs money. This means that when enterprise customers use your product, they’re largely looking to answer two questions: not Is this product solving a problem of mine? Is the problem being solved so difficult or important that I would pay to not have to solve it myself? Enterprise problems are problems of survival, while most consumer problems aren’t. Since the former is born from desperation, while the latter is a nice-to-have, B2B customers are much more incentivized to find a solution that works. If yours doesn’t, they’ll churn. You then, as the product person, can get signal quickly about what you’re doing right and what’s going wrong. Consumer product usage is subject to factors like trendiness, taste, and psychology, creating inconsistency and volatility. Consumers are inherently fickle, which makes success hard to sustain. Even if you emerge from the trough of sorrow to find what feels like product-market-fit, your product can still fall to the wayside as new fads materialize. Take Yo, a great example of how consumer products can disappear just as quickly as they’ve risen. The app, which will forever live in infamy as a product whose only functionality was to let people say, “yo” to their contacts, had, at one point, almost 3 million registered users and over 1 million monthly active users. Yo, an app once valued at $10M. Source: The Verge It’s meteoric ascent was grounded in a novelty that eventually wore thin as people came to realize, “yo” was really not all that interesting. While Yo is a rather obvious example whose demise seems easy to predict in hindsight, others like Flappy Bird, Vine, Yik Yak and Peach represent products that simply lost their luster for no apparent reason. The risk of being upended by variable external factors is the price of building consumer products. Just imagine being that data scientist. B2B products don’t face the same volatility because they’re less swayed by cultural zeitgeist. You may stop using a product because none of your friends are using it or because it’s no longer trendy, but businesses remain unfazed in the face of these factors. They’re much more rational. There are clear moral exceptions to this that may cause companies to jump ship from even the best of products (e.g. CEO of an enterprise software company becomes embroiled in workplace harassment lawsuits), but otherwise, most enterprise customers will continue to pay so long as the solution they’re paying for continues to work. What’s more, corporate clients also tend to move slower than individuals. If a company decides not to renew your software offering, they may wait until the end of the quarter or pay period to mobilize their employees to stop using it, as opposed to deleting you from their phones the next day. This flattens the curve and gives you the runway to bolster your pipeline or improve your product to make up for lost business before it’s lost. You’ll never get a warning when an individual ditches your social app for the next TikTok. For consumers, too many risk factors are out of your control. It’s hard to predict what’s trendy and what has lasting power. And when you think you have it, you might win fast only to fail faster. Hitting on something that will stand the test of time requires a lot of luck. Enterprise execution is a straightforward path. One of the benefits of building paid products is that if people are unhappy with your product, they’ll find a way to let you know. When I worked on building Nearby Friends at Facebook, a free location feature enabling you to see which of your Facebook friends were around your area, we would conduct user research by incentivizing people to attend focus groups or take surveys with Amazon gift cards. We’d beg people to participate, since one of our biggest concerns was not getting a large enough sample size to inform our decision making. For people, attending these sessions was usually a big chore. You could tell most people didn’t really want to be there. When I transitioned to working on paid enterprise features, I saw the opposite phenomenon. People were clamoring to give us feedback because they were paying for our product and wanted to do anything in their power to get their money’s worth. We instrumented a feedback button on every page and, to my surprise, businesses would take the time to report bugs, write long, open-ended pieces of feedback, and request new functionality through the channel. Businesses have a greater sense for what they want. They’re able to identify gaps that, if solved, would better serve their use cases. If you asked a consumer, “would you want an app that lets you see photos posted by your friends, supports direct messaging, and shows you ephemeral photos and videos that expire after 24 hours?” (Instagram) would they say yes? Or if you had asked a consumer 10 years ago whether they would stand in line for hours to buy a phone with a 3X larger screen (iPhone), would there be consensus? Actual consumer behavior is much more inconsistent with what people report they want. This makes product execution circuitous and often unfruitful. It’s easy to build the thing people say they want and sit back and watch as no one uses it. Businesses report feedback based on real pain points. There is a world of growth opportunity that lies simply in solving these pain points and expanding to adjacent issues/use cases. And if you get things wrong, you can bet that companies will find a way to scream at you over the phone about taking away something that was beneficial or adding something that made their lives more complex. In this way, execution for B2B products is much more linear. In the enterprise world, there are also more consistent ways of operating and getting to success. When you don’t need to hack virality or devise creative marketing tactics for shock value, your work becomes less guesswork of what will capture consumer attention, and more about how to build an enduring and scalable product. Interestingly, most enterprise companies are structured the same way across sales, marketing, engineering, etc., so learnings are broadly applicable across B2B companies, even if the products being sold look markedly different. While the success of consumer products is hard to trace to a specific set of factors given the impact of trends and psychology, enterprise products have a relatively consistent playbook. Enterprise products make for better businesses. The challenge of building consumer products is not only that of creating a sticky user experience, but that of generating the monetary runway to continue iterating. While it’s true that some of the most lucrative and outsized exits have been consumer businesses, these should be considered outliers. Why? Let’s take a look at the most common monetization schemes: Advertising (e.g. Google, Facebook) In-product purchases (e.g. buying add-ons in games) Subscription (e.g. Netflix, Underclub) Commissions on selling product (e.g. selling physical goods or collecting app install fees for software) If you’re building a consumer product, monetization is difficult before you’ve achieved significant scale. Each of these models has their own associated challenges. You can’t build an a business based on advertising if you don’t already have millions of people using your product. If you offer in-product purchases, you’ll need to sell something that’s high-margin and re-buyable. Subscriptions are so common they’ve begun creating for consumers that don’t want to be beholden to so many monthly payments. And finally, selling products won’t create an outsized consumer outcome unless you are marketing an extremely high margin product (e.g. luxury goods). fatigue Even businesses like Youtube and Uber, which have grown to millions of daily users, still face tough questions on the viability of their business models. It’s not uncommon that SaaS companies like Salesforce and Shopify see gross margins of >85%, while salient consumer players like Netflix, Snapchat, and Uber generate gross margins between 40–55%. Enterprise products are usually subscription services, which businesses will pay for so long that it solves their problems. And unlike consumers, businesses don’t fall prey to subscription fatigue. We can also look at startup exit data to understand the ease of value creation across consumer and enterprise companies. Since 1995, the number of enterprise venture-backed exits has consistently outpaced consumer exits (4,600 enterprise vs 2,600 consumer), though in recent years, the value of individual consumer exits has eclipsed enterprise exits fairly consistently. Source: Sapphire Ventures What does this tell us? It’s much more common to see enterprise companies succeed. It’s hard to build consumer businesses, but if you are one of the lucky few to reach the promised land, the prize is certainly worth grinding for. Like most things, the decision of whether to build B2B or B2C comes down to your goals. If your goal is to learn how to develop strong products and businesses, enterprise is probably the right choice. On the other hand, if you’re excited by fame and can handle extreme frustration, maybe you’re cut out for the harsh climb of the consumer world. The best thing to do is to make a determination of what matters to you, stick to it with resolve, and guide yourself down the path most aligned with your inner scorecard.

Why Building Enterprise Products Is Awesome

“Tokenization” is pitched as an efficient way to securitize small deals, under $80M. However, it suffers from a deep underlying problem, which is that small cap deals make bad security investments. They don’t consistently deliver profits for passive security buyers, and . If there is no way to package small offers for passive investors, then the current “tokenization” pitch is a dead end. Is your deal dead? In this article, we examine the size of the problem and propose some enhancements. investors are not buying The traditional private investment market works well. There are a lot of private deals under $80M, in which 1–20 fairly active buyers buy stakes and hold them indefinitely. The volume of offers that are “securitized” and distributed to less committed investors is vanishingly small in comparison. Smaller security offers do not work in any context that I looked at: Equity crowdfunding raises a small, disappointing amount of money. The buyers tend to be customers with other motives, not real investors. If we look at more actively traded markets, smaller deals have been flushed off the exchanges, penny stocks often have problems, and Reg A+ investments have been a disaster for IPO buyers. Portals to sell real estate investments are the largest category for the $3-$80M deal sizes. They typically end up with a small set of permanent, active investors. Smaller offers to work in the unregulated crypto ICO market during 2017. Now we can see that the smaller deals are going to zero. seemed Passive security investors have good reasons to avoid these smaller offers. They often don’t have enough disclosure to enable fair pricing, they won’t have enough shareholders to develop a secondary market, and there is often nobody in place to represent passive investors if something goes wrong. Enlargement and Shrinkage The minimum size for a successful stock offering has been increasing. Intel did an IPO in 1971 that raised $6.8M. Microsoft did an IPO in 1986 that raised $61M. More recent IPOs had an average market cap of $1.5B, according to , and the larger IPOs were more likely to go up in price. this study The tokenization movement is attempting to reduce the practical size of a securities distribution through a combination of increased exchange opportunities, and a reduced cost of distribution and compliance. On the graph below we represent the plan to increase opportunity (in blue) and reduce cost (in orange). Where we are now (above) and where the tokenization teams want to go (below) Does it measure up? Here is a simple three part test to determine whether an investment offer can be securitized or “tokenized”. 1) Is it a Good Investment? Would it be an attractive investment for a knowledgeable investor who can buy a big piece of it? The deal is likely to have the highest value for a buyer who has knowledge and some control over the deal. If it’s not a good investment for that investor, then security buyers with fewer advantages probably shouldn’t buy it, and probably won’t buy it. I have heard issuers claim, in various ways, that security buyers are stupid enough to buy non-competitive investments. However, security buyers seem smart to me. They may be temporarily insane. They may briefly buy small IPOs with no underlying value. But they are not stupid enough to make the same mistake twice. Some variations on this theme include: The mythical guy in Singapore who is smart enough about money to accumulate a lot of investment assets, but stupid enough to buy anything “token”. Sports fans who will buy non-voting shares in money-losing teams in order to get T-shirts and a night with the stars. That’s probably a good pitch for someone who is putting in $500. However, these deals are looking for tens of thousands from accredited or sophisticated investors. People who are desperate because they can’t get “access”. Yes, it’s true that they can’t send money for your exclusive Mongolian yak ranching syndicate any other way, but they have literally thousands of other assets to choose from, including assets that may be a better bet, have similar returns, or more liquidity. This first test shows why small cap securities markets suffer from “adverse selection” (only getting bad deals). When an issuer has a good deal that they can sell by visiting a small number of investors, they are unlikely to expend time and money to package, sell, and manage a security offer for a larger number of investors. 2) Is there an economic reason to distribute it? So we must ask, is there a reason to distribute it to more investors? Does this reason have a monetary value that pays for the extra expense of a distribution? There are reasons to do a security distribution. For example: Liquidity. Your investment will gain in value because it’s easy to buy and sell. This is the large cap solution. The bigger your deal, the more likely it is to have active trading. Liquidity only adds value if it is actually available, and not just a promise. You are marketing to a community and a customer base, and your customers will use your security. They may use it as a utility coin, or as a membership or a stake that is required for using a product or service. This was the original promise of utility tokens. I expect it to become popular with normal securities that can be used to buy memberships. The New York Stock Exchange used to require that brokers buy a “seat” or a “membership” in order to trade on the exchange. Now we can do the same thing for services on a smaller scale. This adds some marketing and product value to the security. You have a lot of shareholders already. They may be employees or mutual customers or other stakeholders. There is a category of investors that wants to buy your offer that requires a global distribution. The nice thing about blockchain format securities is that blockchains are borderless, and they naturally have global distribution. Many new categories of buyers are mythical. You can assume they don’t exist until you have interviewed real people and you know they are willing to pay a premium compared with local private buyers. You don’t want to give the money back for a long time. Real estate, VC, and PE funds will usually want their money back within about six years. They run “self-liquidating” funds that need to get the money back on a schedule. A security can be outstanding for a longer time, especially if the initial buyers can trade out of it. This may be important if you are making long term investments. “Monetary value” means that the issuer will pay a higher yield or accept a lower price to get the advantages of a security distribution. You should be able to quantify this. For example, an entrepreneur might say “I want to finance this yak ranch with a security, because yaks take ten years to mature, and don’t want to pay back a PE fund in five years.” You might ask “specifically, how much extra yield, or lower price, are you willing to give your investors for the extra five yak years?” If the answer is “zero”, then you are done. You need some actual monetary value to work with. 3) Are passive investors represented and protected? A lack of investor representation creates problems. Many tokenized securities are designed by the issuer. This hurts them in the primary sale, because, with no pushback from a lead investor, the issuers will usually ask for uncompetitive terms. That’s why none of these offers are currently selling. The securities are also risky to hold, because most of them offer no governance rights, or a diffuse minority stake at best. It’s not clear who will represent passive investors if something goes wrong. This risk to minority shareholders has a cost, which we have represented as the “minority discount” in the graph above. Investors will pay more if they get protection. We have many ways to represent and protect passive investors, for example: Insurance, like a monoline bond insurer. They take an insurance premium up front and they pay for investor losses. Servicers. They make a small fee for collecting and distributing money Trustees. They make a fee for handling problems that arise in a debt deal Tranching, as with an asset backed security where the lead investor takes the first losses and then gets paid extra if there are no losses, essentially selling protection to investors in later tranches. Lead investors. They can make a profit by getting into a deal early, and “signaling” the value of the deal, and then bringing in later investors at a markup. Lead investors/managers controlling the investment, strongly representing the other investors, and earning a percentage of their profits A good way to represent passive investors is through a fund manager. Investors make a long-term commitment to a fund, such as a PE or a VC fund. Then, the fund manager takes a large stake in small deals, and aggressively represents the investors, and gets paid if the investment delivers a profit. A strong lead investor can fix two out of the three problems that I listed for a small-cap security — poor disclosure, a lack of secondary market interest, and poor investor representation. They directly represent the passive investors. And, they can smooth over some of the lack of disclosure, because they can look at non-public information. The lead investor has some important responsibilities: Negotiating the terms of the investment. Participating in governance and reporting on progress If problems do arise, putting in significant amounts of work to recover the investment Pushing for a profitable exit Enhancement proposals Lead from the buy side I think that there is a category of security offers between $20M and $80M in size that can work if there is a strong lead investor. This person will put in some money, assume the responsibilities of a lead investor for this specific offering, and make a percentage of profits if the other investors in the offering make money. These lead investors have the effect of unbundling a VC, RE, or PE fund. Freelance asset managers can skip the fund and add their services to a single asset. There is something lost with this unbundling because we don’t get the extra services that come with a fund management team. However, there is also an efficiency gain. The asset manager doesn’t need to raise money in advance, and doesn’t get paid for a long period of prospecting. That produces cost savings. And, the deal by deal approach can respond quickly to new market opportunities, and engage a wide diversity of asset managers. Then enlarge I believe that small cap securities need to be rolled up into larger funds. There is a limited amount of money available to buy small offerings. Large institutional investors will avoid these offerings because they can’t buy enough of them to justify analysis and slippage costs. Traders will avoid them because there are few bids and offers. We can greatly increase demand by rolling up many small cap holdings into a large cap fund that offers bigger purchase volumes, and more trading. Having these funds available is also important for attracting good offerings. An issuer with an attractive offering is not going to bring it into the security market if it’s not clear that funds are available. Fortunately, we can do this rollup efficiently when we build active management into the single assets. We can create a fund that is like an ETF. We need to be careful about the price that we pay when we bring new assets into the fund, and ask for a discount in exchange for doing due-diligence and underwriting a significant chunk of the initial offer. However, ongoing management is inexpensive. We can reduce the probability that this type of fund will trade at a discount to underlying value by allowing investors to redeem fund shares for the underlying basket of cash (probably stablecoins) and securities. So, after many steps, we finally arrive at a reason for “The Blockchain”. The tokenized format makes it easier for us to do low-cost rollup, distribute the related securities globally, and redeem them. An attractive package I propose to sell lead investor services that will create buyable security offers. Qualified issuers will be able to contract for these services, the same way they can buy insurance and trustee services for debt deals. Our single-asset group will provide protection and profits to investors in small-cap securities, using the same level of representation that is demanded by the world’s biggest VC and PE investors. Our multi-asset group will provide access to small-cap asset categories, through large, liquid, and efficient global ETFs. These categories have global scope and include VC, PE, real estate, and liquidity for emerging economies. The value-adding ingredient is both of these services is asset managers who can represent the BUY SIDE of a securities market. A lot of ink has been spilled on Medium about the potential for tokenized securities. The small security problem has killed all of these plans so far. This article presents some of the ingredients of a solution. First we need to identify deals that gain value from securitization, using something like the three part test listed above. Then we need to make small deals acceptable to remote security buyers, and we have to do it at reasonable cost. Then we need an efficient way to roll them up into bigger bundles.

Fixing the $80M problem with “tokenization”

You’ve probably heard of , , , , etc, and wondered how those platforms work ? 0xgame Cryptokitties MLB Crypto Baseball Decentraland Cryptocorals Maybe you have a great idea and want to develop your own platform but do not know where to start? Or you’re just curious and want to understand the potential of decentralized application (dapp) on the blockchain? We’ve been there at and and I want share with you what we’ve learned and answer some of your questions. cryptocorals.co frenchbureau.co This article is dedicated to developers who have experience in web development and understand how smart contracts basically work. My primary focus is the architecture needed for an Ethereum Crypto Collectibles Marketplace. My example will be a Pokemon marketplace where you can buy and sell Pokemons from the Ethereum blockchain. The goal is to have a web interface where you can see the different pokemon and buy/sell them. I won’t be covering the ERC721 non-fungible token standard implementation needed to build a Crypto Collectibles Marketplace in this article but may do so in future publications. Create, publish and interact with your smart contracts So what you need to do is to create your smart contracts, in . solidity I highly encourage you to use . framework truffle https://truffleframework.com/docs/truffle/overview With truffle, you put all your .sol smart contracts in the folder and use: /contract to arrange them into a JSON file that contains the contract ABI and a bunch of other data truffle compile to publish your contract into the blockchain. truffle migrate Here is a very short and dirty non real solidity overview of what your contract might looks like. Where can I publish my smart contracts on ? : It’s a private blockchain for your local machine, you use it for local development purposes. Ganache , and more are test networks: it’s like your private test environment for your team or a staging environment. You use fake ether so it doesn’t cost you anything. Rinkeby Ropsten : It’s real ether, real money, it’s production baby ! Ethereum Mainnet In the truffle config file , you can set your different environments. truffle-config.js Then you can do something like to publish your contracts on Ropsten. truffle migrate —network ropsten How can I interact with my smart contract ? Before you begin, you’ll need to add the web3.js library to you script. (If you use react, Drizzle is an excellent option). When you want to talk to the blockchain you need to talk to one node. All the blockchain data is stored in every individual node, so you just need to interact with one. You can use to talk to a node and do stuff like web3.js web3.myPokemonContract.getPokemon(1) In dev environment you can easily host your blockchain and Ganache and it will provide everything you need to interact with the blockchain. With Rinkeby, Ropsten or Ethereum it’s a bit different because you’re not part of the blockchain network. If you do not own a node you have 2 options: Either you create your own node with geth for instance and connect it to the network of your choice (ropsten, mainnet, …). You’ll then have to install, configure and make it accessible from outside, manage the security stuff and that’s a lot of work, especially if you just want to launch your product as fast as possible. Or you can use an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) like . They maintain their own nodes and provide you with everything you need, such as an api, to easily interact with the blockchain. Infura There are many detailed tutorials that’ll help you create a web page that can extensively interact with the blockchain so I won’t cover those details here. Create your web app ! Keep in mind that you can essentially do two things with a smart contract and the blockchain: : Get a pokemon by Id, get the number of pokemon you own, etc. Read : Create a pokemon → Write the new pokemon into your smart contract, Transfer a pokemon to another address→ Write the new owner on the smart contract, etc. Write In this example, we want to call the and the functions. getPokemon() buy() In our Pokemon marketplace we now have a single page that collects the pokemon XXX information from your smart contract, display the data and allows the end user to buy this pokemon (assuming he is buyable). The architecture will basically looks like this. Their are also pros and cons to consider when using a blockchain. The blockchain is slow While using a blockchain is simple, there are fundamental challenges to consider. As you already know, the blockchain is frustratingly slow! It can take a few seconds to get Pokemon 001’s information. So if you want to get the first 25th, then from the 25th to 50th, it is challenging to build a nice user experience. And with every refresh of your time is wasted on loading. Reading the blockchain is free It is fundamentally free. You can read the blockchain from the javascript thanks to web3.js and call the function but is does not include any additional updates. getPokemon() Writing, updating your smart contract data has a cost You will have to pay a gas fee in ether according to the computation needed by your action to update the blockchain. If you purchase an item, you will also pay the item price in Ether. To send Ether and to pay the fees, you need to own Ether and therefore have a wallet with Ether. You don’t have credit card linked to your Ether wallet but you can pay with Metamask! How can someone pay ether to your smart contract from your website ? Metamask is a chrome extension that safely manages Ethereum wallets. With web3.js, you can ask Metamask to send 0.0004 ether from your wallet to buy a Pokemon, Metamask will then ask for user approval and complete the transaction. Metamask can also be used for a one-click, cryptographically-secure login flow (like social login). There is nice tutorial from Toptal about it . here But do users really need Metamask to pay transaction from your website ? Yes! But keep in mind Metamask is not a guaranteed system. Your end users we’ll have to get, understand, and trust Metamask as a system; which has created caution amongst crypto enthusiasts who own ethers or bitcoins who have no previous experience with Metamask. Centralize a decentralize app Like we’ve just seen, the end users will need Metamask to perform writing actions on the blockchain but reading is free. So one solution is to centralize a decentralized application (crazy talk, I know) that will read and save your smart contract data into a database. You’ll get the data (slowly) from the blockchain to serve it (quickly) to your users through your scaled API. The benefits of using a Smart contracts is that it can , like: or . emit event emit Pokemon Transfer({ from: 0XO67465, to: 0x43546}) emit Pokemon Birth({name: Nidoran }) So when you receive a event (means someone called the function), you can add a new Pokemon to your database to better serve your users. Birth createPokemon() And when you receive a event, (means someone called the function) you can update the owner of the given Pokemon in your database. And you can listen to this events with web3.js ! Transfert buy() To do that you will need a dedicated server to listen to your smart contract. It can be a CRON job, hosted on a google cloud function, an AWS lambda or even your own server, coded in Node.js, Go or Python, it’s up to you. Make sure your transactions are confirmed When you receive an event, you will get the block number of the transaction. The block number refers to the block associated with the transactions that have been added to the blockchain. As you know, with blockchain, your transactions can still be reverted so you need to wait at least 12 blocks to ensure that the transaction won’t be reverted. (More info ) here In the meantime you will want to set the transaction as ‘pending’ until you are sure that the transaction is confirmed. For instance, when a Pokemon is created, you can set it to the database with a pending status so your visitors will be able to see it but not buy it. On when a Pokemon is being added you can display the card with an overlay to tell your users that it’s coming. Server architecture Now that you centralized your application, you can serve your dapp data to your users more quickly with an API. Your database is like a mirror of your smart contract. Conclusion If you want to create a crypto collectible market place on Ethereum you need to know that: The blockchain is slow and you can’t ask your front-end app to fetch and cook the data for every single request. One solution is to create an event processor to listen to your smart contract events and populate data into a database that would be a mirror of the blockchain. You’ll then be able to serve the data through an API. Metamask is mandatory and it can be scary for your users. Make sure to provide a good user experience and introduce Metamask usages to your users.

Ethereum Crypto Collectibles Marketplace Architecture

“I’m sick & tired of all the PHP hate. You can write sh*tty code in any language.” That’s our only PHP defender in the team, ranting. “Most times, problem’s the programmer, not the programming language.” Him again — mostly right. “Ever tried building something with Laravel? framework & community.” Awesome PHP’s made gigantic leaps since my early programming days. And I haven’t taken the time to jump back into its modern environment (been busy refactoring & prototyping). dabbling in Vue.js So today, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. How? . By creating a Laravel e-commerce site I’ll use Laravel-powered PyroCMS & Snipcart to help me do just that. It just so happens that I made a huge batch of spaghetti sauce this weekend. I’ll never be able to eat all of it, so why not sell the surplus online! In this tutorial, I’ll show you: How to set up a PyroCMS demo site How to add an e-commerce panel to PyroCMS How to display Snipcart products on your project’s frontend How to use webhooks & Laravel controllers inside PyroCMS How to use Snipcart’s custom validation during checkout Let’s see if my rusty PHP skills can outshine my cooking skills. Laravel & e-commerce: quick context For those who didn’t know already: . Laravel is an open source PHP web framework used to build sites & web apps It has a smooth learning curve, removes some quirks of building with PHP, has many modern built-in libraries. Some say it’s the Ruby on Rails PHP equivalent. Want to familiarize yourself with Laravel before starting this tuts? Check out this post — shows you how to build a simple MVC app < 10 min. With Laravel, you can leverage to manage dependencies & packages. Many useful packages will allow you to fast-track your Laravel app or site development. Think stuff like debugging, authentication, API interactions, etc. Sites like & are great resources to find helpful Laravel packages. Composer Packagist Packalyst E-commerce on Laravel? And of course, there are e-commerce packages for Laravel. Popular ones like and can help set up e-commerce functionalities on your Laravel app. Mage2 Aimeos So your e-commerce options with Laravel are pretty much: Build your own e-commerce application from the ground up with Laravel’s framework. Use e-comm. packages built to extend your app. Pick a Laravel-powered CMS and add custom e-commerce to it. . I could’ve done a whole e-commerce app in Laravel. But I didn’t have time to code everything from scratch — I needed an MVP to test the spaghetti sauce market ASAP! First one? Time-consuming . We might do it in another post! Second one? Actually interesting It’ll fast-track our development with useful shortcuts (PyroCMS scaffolding the site; Snipcart abstracting e-comm. logic & backend). Third one? This is what we’re doing here. I’m really glad to be operating inside a Laravel project for this demo. Unlike many of our JAMstack/static site tuts, it’ll be easy to handle any backend logic for our store. Editor’s note: if you’re building a simple subscription business with Laravel, check out Laravel Cashier , or our own subscription feature . A word on PyroCMS My previous experience with a PHP CMS wasn’t that great. However, I’d heard good stuff about Pyro here and there. And since I needed a Laravel-powered tool for this tuts, picking it was a no-brainer. is a PHP CMS built specifically for Laravel. It’s under the MIT license and comes equipped with a bunch of useful features. PyroCMS open source In the spirit of transparency, here are other Laravel-based CMS to consider: October CMS ( ) see our tuts AsgardCMS Lavalite TypiCMS Statamic ( ) see our tuts Laravel e-commerce tutorial: building a PyroCMS demo shop Pre-requisites For this tutorial, you’ll need: A basic understanding of PHP as a programming language A webserver set up with PHP and installed Composer A database for this project (I’m using MySQL) (forever free in Test mode) A Snipcart account Step 1: Installing PyroCMS Start by scaffolding a PyroCMS project with Composer. composer create-project pyrocms/pyrocms pyro_demo Set the root folder of your webserver to the project’s folder. Make sure it can write to , and folders. Those familiar with Laravel you'll recognize the directory structure. If you're new to PyroCMS, prepare to be impressed by how fast it is to have something up and running. public public/app bootstrap/cache storage Visit your website and use the built-in installer to configure Pyro with your site info and database settings. You can now remove the dependency from , then run . anomaly/installer-module composer.json composer update Step 2: Building an e-commerce panel for products Although we have a Laravel project to play with, PyroCMS suggests slicing new functionalities into . For a big project, making a few addons for non-related features would be a good idea. Here, we’ll create a products module using the : addons artisan command php artisan make:addon snipcart.module.products That will generate the folder . Most of the path from now on will be relative to this folder. addons/{your site slug}/snipcart/products-module At the core of Pyro is a concept of stream — essentially a collection of content. Our addon defines a stream that we scaffold with artisan: products php artisan make:stream products snipcart.module.products Those commands have generated some new elements. Let’s first look at the folder in our addon, where we only need to add a few things to have a complete product management backend. migrations Go ahead and define the fields of a product inside . They are defined using the . {date}_snipcart.module.products__create_products_fields.php built-in field types of Pyro Our products will have a SKU, name, price, description, image and tags: We must also add them to the parameter inside so they show up in our admin form. $assignments {date}_snipcart.module.products__create_products_stream.php We can type in the console to install the addon. That's enough to be able to add/edit products in the CMS admin! php artisan addon:install products Should you make changes to the migrations later on, you can refresh them using _php artisan migrate:refresh --addon=products_ . But there’s a lot more we can do to improve the editing experience. Let’s add the product image in the product listing. Edit in : $columns src/Product/Table/ProductTableBuilder.php We can show the stored value of the field by using its name, or format it by using . The latter evaluates the string and allows us to call presenter methods for our fields’ values (here: to show a dollar sign and to show a resized image). valuation currency preview Looking good! Step 3: Displaying products on the PyroCMS website We’ll add a view using ’s templating engine, then wire it with a controller and route. Create the product view that uses the default layout with a few Bootstrap classes in : Twig resources/views/products/index.twig Followed by a really simple controller in : src/Http/Controller/ProductsController.php For the route, add the route into to the ones generated for the admin: products src/ProductsModuleServiceProvider.php There we go! Looks nice if we visit : /products We also need a link to this page. Override the navigation template by creating the file : {project root}/resources/{site slug}/addons/pyrocms/starter-theme/views/partials/navigation.twig Here we copied the original template and simply added: Step 4: Integrating Snipcart with PyroCMS Just a few more steps to transform those buy buttons into . properly defined Snipcart products First we need somewhere to store our API Key. Add a setting entry for the module by creating the file : resources/config/setting.php This setting is accessible in the admin under . Settings Module > Modules > Products Module We’re ready to override the template in to add : scripts {project root}/resources/{site slug}/addons/pyrocms/starter-theme/views/partials/scripts.twig Snipcart's required files To inject Snipcart’s item attributes to buy buttons, modify to add a method inside : ProductPresenter buyButton src/Product/ProductPresenter.php There’s a lot going on in this file (especially if you’re new to Pyro): Receiving the through dependency injection in the Presenter's constructor HtmlBuilder Using our Product entry from $this->object Building a cropped image’s URL using utilities from Pyro’s FilesModule Transferring all product data to their respective Snipcart attributes Finally building the button ( ) element <a ...> We can now update our product view in to call the presenter: resources/views/products/index.twig {{ product.buyButton('Buy for '~product.price.currency(), {'class': 'btn btn-primary'})|raw }} Aaaand my delicious spaghetti sauce is now buyable! Step 5: Adding custom validation during checkout Selling food online — or anything else for that matter — often comes with various challenges. Frozen stuff can’t be shipped over long distances, for instance. Extra spicy stuff must come with a warning. And so on. So first let’s add a few dummy checks by using our new . We’ll prevent customers from ordering products too spicy for them: custom validation feature That code filters for validation events on the page and adds an error to products with a tag. It goes into and we add another line to : . cart-content spicy resources/js/validation.js scripts.twig {{ asset_add("scripts.js", "snipcart.module.products::js/validation.js") }} On to Frozen stuff checks and Laravel land now The ProductsController we made earlier actually extends a Laravel controller with a few goodies from PyroCMS added. When you look at the sources of from PyroCMS, you'll see all the stuff from the namespace wired to the controller. Now let's create a simple by extending the base Laravel controller directly and adding only the stuff we need. BaseController Illuminate shipping webhook Create this controller in : src/Http/Controller/ShippingController.php So only uses classes from . It's a plain old Laravel controller that checks Snipcart's input data and determines if we must return an error message or a shipping rate. Like for the , we add a route inside our module's service provider: . ShippingController Illuminate ProductsController 'webhooks/shipping' => 'Snipcart\ProductsModule\Http\Controller\ShippingController@webhook', Live demo & GitHub repo And we’re done! We covered lots of stuff here. But it should give you a broad overview of how to integrate Snipcart with PyroCMS + use more regular features of Laravel. See the open source repo on GitHub . See live demo here ! Closing thoughts The project and the admin interface were running in less than 3 hours, without any prior experience with Pyro on my end. The whole tuts ended up taking two days. Mostly because I really wanted to integrate Snipcart by injecting our scripts tags from the module instead of having to edit theme templates. I had a blast building the admin for this tuts. I don’t think that process can be made easier, so kudos to Pyro! Not knowing Laravel much, it was a bit hard for me to differentiate where PyroCMS ends and Laravel begins. You have to get familiar with PyroCMS’ source code to picture ways of how to accomplish things that aren’t easy to understand from only looking at the documentation. If I had more time to spend on this demo, I’d explore the many content management features of the admin. Lots can be accomplished directly from the admin without much code. A cool test would be to assign products to specifically tagged blog posts! Originally published this post on the Snipcart blog and in our newsletter .

Laravel E-Commerce Tutorial with PyroCMS [Live Demo]

The Promise and Peril of Tokenized Funds

Photo by on Yiran Ding Unsplash I tried buying a t-shirt on my phone the other day. First, I get redirected to a http://m.thatsite.com URL. Mobile site loads… Content finally appears, along with a fullscreen pop-up: Download our mobile app for a better shopping experience! I tap the link. App store loads… Bad reviews, blurred screenshots, 50 MB. Sigh I close both app store and browser. This familiar, sketchy shopping experience have been avoided. could How? With . progressive web app e-commerce Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) have been on the rise these last years. Solid are popping up everywhere, and for good reasons. PWA examples They encourage an inclusive, global, adaptative approach to web development. They make sense both from a user AND a business POV, as we’ll see in this piece. Frameworks like and are increasingly used to craft PWAs. React Vue JS Today, I’ll show you how to use Gatsby to build a smooth PWA store. This post will cover: A definition of PWAs A case for PWA e-commerce An overview of Gatsby.js for PWAs A detailed PWA example with steps, code repo, and live demo Let’s dive in. What is a Progressive Web Application (PWA)? is an umbrella term coined by Google engineers. It is rather a set of development principles than a specific technology or stack. Three significant principles encompass the approach: Progressive Web Application 1. Reliability Through , a PWA is never unresponsive to a user’s request, no matter the device or network condition, including offline status. service workers 2. Performance With techniques like compression, pre-caching, code splitting, and progressive rendering, a PWA drastically reduces the number of “pogo-sticking” users — the ones abandoning your website when it’s slow to load! The goal here is to strive for minimum . time-to-interactive 3. Engagement Through the Web App Manifest, PWAs become easily installable on mobile home screens. As a developer, you get the best of both worlds here: no app store redirection/lousy installs AND the ability to . All of that inside a web app that feels and behaves almost identically to a native mobile app. engage mobile users with web push notifications For a more comprehensive PWA checklist, make sure to check . this Google entry Why use a PWA for e-commerce? Flipkart Lite, a prime example of mobile e-commerce with a PWA The technical advantages of progressive web apps translate into direct business benefits for e-commerce merchants: It widens the market and use cases. Browsing & buying is done on most devices, on any connexion — fast or slow — from anywhere. Offline capabilities can also stimulate engagement, as we’ll see in our PWA example below. It fosters a better conversion rate. Pre-caching with service workers makes for a fast, smooth shopping experience. Out of the box PWA audits in Chrome DevTools ( ) allow you to spot & fix performance issues quickly. Serving content adaptively diminishes bounce rates across the board, thus boosting , a prominent SEO ranking signal. Google Lighthouse user engagement metrics It reduces development budget. No need to develop separate web & mobile apps. Thanks to “ ” and push notification functionalities, your e-commerce PWA looks and feels just like a native mobile app. add to home screen Considering these benefits, it’s no surprise big industry players are turning to progressive web app e-commerce. Here are a few good examples of e-comm. PWAs in the wild: Flipkart AliExpress Konga Selio Go see for yourself; these mobile commerce experiences are A1. Why use Gatsby for this PWA example? The short answer? Because Gatsby makes it easy to put together a PWA example swiftly. Often presented as a static site generator for React, it is in fact much more than that. It’s a full, modern website framework that has become a developer favourite in the ecosystem. JAMstack Gatsby creator Kyle Matthews, in , explains how his brainchild has PWA baked in: an interview with The New Stack “Google does a lot of research about how to make fast websites, and PWA is sort of an umbrella term for these patterns. So with Gatsby, we just asked ourselves, why not bake these patterns, all these things that make a website fast, into a website framework?” In , he explains how Gatsby acts as a for your site, with built-in — not optional — performance optimizations. this post metacompiler So Gatsby has many “checked” PWA support boxes, such as: Its outputted files are static HTML, making your e-commerce content easy to crawl, index, and rank for search engines. Organic traffic is a rich source of traffic for online stores — for many shops, it is their life-blood. It supports service workers through and “add to home screen” functionality with . this plugin this one For a full list of Gatsby’s impressive features, read . this page PWA Example: building a Gatsby e-commerce progressive web app A bit of context for this demo: humanity is knee-deep in zombie apocalypse. Internet is sporadically available, but more often than not, network is down. Our PWA’s goal: 1) Offer useful survival guides available offline. 2) Offer buyable survival gear when network is up. Pre-requisites Basic understanding of Gatsby JS with Snipcart Free Test account For this demo, I’ll use the from Ruben Harutyunyan. It comes equipped with all plugins needed to make a Gatsby PWA with sane default configurations. Material Starter Namely: to allow app installation on mobile devices' homescreens gatsby-plugin-manifest to automatically generate images in various sizes gatsby-plugin-sharp to make your app available offline with a service worker gatsby-plugin-offline It uses markdown files as a content source and to provide a component based on the Material Design mobile style guide from Google. I’ll also show you a few tricks to make Snipcart gracefully handle changing network conditions. react-md Let’s start by installing Gatsby and the starter. Install the Gatsby cli if you don’t have it yet: npm install --global gatsby-cli Create the project: gatsby new gatsby-pwa-demo [https://github.com/Vagr9K/gatsby-material-starter](https://github.com/Vagr9K/gatsby-material-starter) Launch the development server in the project’s folder: cd gatsby-pwa-demo gatsby develop Responsiveness Responsive web design is far from new. Since its arrival, the web development community cumulated a lot of good practices. First, there’s the layout of your PWA site. By providing fully responsive pages, you’ll give shoppers a more consistent e-commerce experience across devices. For this, you can use a library of responsive components like react-md or use your CSS skills to create it from scratch. Where Gatsby helps you is for serving responsive and optimized images through the . It processes your images and generates different sizes that the browser chooses from in the attribute. So only the most appropriate file for the current screen size is downloaded. gatsby-plugin-sharp srcset Although, I would advise using images when possible. Web servers can easily compress that size format, and, since they're in a vector format, you only need one file that scales to any size. .svg Offline capabilities Offline functionality is often the central argument for PWAs. While not the only cool feature, I can’t write a post on PWAs without talking about it. And with Gatsby, it’s as simple as adding to your ! gatsby-plugin-offline gatsby-config.js Under the hood, this uses from Google, a library which generates a service worker that automatically caches your website files for offline use. sw-precache A service worker is like a background task running outside the context of the DOM without impacting the user interface. It’s useful for offline mode, as it can intercept requests and have custom caching logic. With Gatsby, all HTML and JavaScript is cached and retrieved from the cache when offline. App-like behaviour A nice feature of Progressive Web Apps is the ability to use a web application in place of a native mobile application and have it behave in the same way. There are many opinions on the subject — whether it’s a good or bad approach to imitate the look and feel of native apps. At least web technologies give you that flexibility, and the allows your app to be self-contained outside the UI of a mobile browser. Pretty neat! Web App Manifest generates that manifest automatically. You can customize it in : gatsby-plugin-manifest gatsby-config.js The parameters are mostly descriptive or visual details of the app. The most interesting one is . That's what will make the app open as its own window, without browser navigation options. display: "standalone" In some circumstances, a browser can automatically prompt the user to install the app to their homescreen. You can also . If you have native versions of your app, there’s a parameter to instead. trigger this manually instruct the browser to suggest these apps Making the cart handle changing network conditions For this PWA example’s e-commerce functionalities, I’ll integrate our own dev-first shopping cart platform, Snipcart, to the app. Snipcart works quite simply: you add the required scripts to your site, then define products directly in the HTML. One of the shortcomings of service workers is that they can only cache content from your domain. So you’ll have to use another strategy for Snipcart to handle a loss of connectivity. First, you need to load the required assets only once you have Internet access. I’ll cheat a bit here and use direct DOM manipulation to add the tags to the page’s head — you can adapt it whatever framework you’re using! Above, I check what file were loaded, and every time the browser comes back online, I go through those checks again. With a few more events, you can handle products added to the cart while Snipcart isn’t yet loaded or when you are offline: In those event handlers, we maintain a queue of products to be added. Live demo & GitHub repo See live demo See code repo Conclusion Gatsby is a darn smart piece of engineering. While it have a learning curve and tricky debugging, once you get it, it’s so powerful you’ll get to love it real quick. does Crafting this whole tutorial took me a few more days than . I encountered a few unidentified GraphQL errors, and the command once crashed midway without returning an error code. But overall, I had a fun experience working on this PWA example. our usual demos gatsby build Of course, I couldn’t cover all possible use cases in a single post — there are SO many awesome features under the PWA umbrella. With more time on my hands, I’d have explored the and APIs to boost mobile app user engagement. Notification Push Here’s hoping you learned a thing or two with this piece. I sure did! :) Got comments, questions? Hit the section below! I originally published this post on the Snipcart blog and shared it in our newsletter .

Build an E-Commerce Progressive Web App with GatsbyJS

How we split our week at GreenShoot Labs and how that connects to our long-term goals and initiatives alongside some personal thoughts on the pros and cons of short 1-week sprints. In the of Raw Product we talked about our experience launching on the Slack store and some of the learnings from that. In this episode I share how we organize our week to try and combine long-term goals with more short-terms reactions in a hybrid Scrum/Kanban method. last instalment The usual disclaimers apply. This is just how we do it — not THE way to do it and it works for our current team size (a small, focussed, distributed team of 6). I find reading how other teams approach these issues very useful so hopefully this is a way of paying forward for the knowledge and experience sharing that I gained from. The big picture — Goals and Initiatives Before diving into a single week it’s worth looking at the slightly bigger picture. Beyond our strategic vision we set ourselves monthly and quarterly goals with measurable outcomes. These then translate into specific initiatives (larger, coherent pieces of work) and an understanding of how much time we want to dedicate to any initiative. For example, one of our current goals is to make the SaaS app buyable! Yes, I know that is a pretty basic thing for a SaaS tool. We launched early and didn’t worry too much about how people would pay us. We threw together some somewhat reasonable prices, used and so we can accept payments but hardly touched any of the out-of-the-box settings. Now that we know people are actually interested in the tool and that they are even willing to go through the very basic payment process we are ready to invest the time to make that payment process enjoyable, more relevant and something that inspires confidence in our service. This means proper modelling of alternative price plans and implementation of the tech to support those plans, design that is in line with our current brand, and generally a process that reassures (it also means properly figuring out the joys of charging for VAT — sales tax — across the EU). These points also roughly translate into the initiatives that will support the overall goal of making the application buyable. Laravel Spark Stripe As a sidenote we have recently moved our planning into . We find it a very comprehensive (even if somewhat complicated) tool and right now it fits very well with our approach. So much so that we have directly adopted from it a lot of its product terminology (things like goals, initiatives, ideas, features, etc). Aha! Ok — with the big picture mostly in place lets look at how a single week shapes up. Monday Release, analyse, re-plan (if needed) We try and release as often as possible but Monday is the “official” release day. Anything not released during the previous week that has passed all the code review, testing and QA phases will get released on Monday. The person responsible for the release has this as the main task for the day while others are available to jump in if issues arise — otherwise people get started with their sprint tasks. We hope one day to automate many more of these aspects so that release is not something someone has to be responsible for but we are not there yet. Monday is also the day we analyse feedback from the previous week in a focussed way, and turn it into actions. We use tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, New Relic and our own metrics on app engagement. With data at hand, we then review our initiatives and decide whether any course correction is required. We ask ourselves questions such as: Are we seeing the expected outcomes from features that were released previously? Is there any new data / understanding that points to different features to develop or a change in goals or initiatives? Are there any infrastructure, security issues that require explicit attention? From a technical and UX perspective, do any of the bigger pieces of work require re-thinking now that they are further along the way? Key to this being an effective process is that we are all very open and willing to accept that what we thought last week to be the absolutely best course of action may simply no longer be that. is definitely emerging as a defining aspect of GreenShoot Labs culture. Strong opinions loosely held Tuesday and Wednesday Develop, design, mockup, discuss, plan Tuesday and Wednesday are getting stuff done days. It is a combination of deep, uninterrupted creating and collaboration where appropriate. That means coders code, designers design, UXers mockup, planners plan, and we all share ideas and support each other to get stuff done. By Wednesday afternoon we would have ideally released a couple of new features, have mockups for new features, and have a plan for the week after next in terms of specific tasks to do. Thursday Feedback By Thursday we aim to have enough done so that others can feedback on it. We can discuss technical challenges of features, and provide feedback on mockups. While not easy, our aim is to do this for the work for the week after next so that the thinking can have its time to brew in our individual brains. Friday Wrap up, review, retrospective and plan next week By Friday we are wrapping up our sprint. We review work done, what we are going to release, what remains on the board, and what new items move into the board based on availability. We run a retrospective of the week, identify what went well, what didn’t and what we will aim to improve. The good, the bad and the ugly The weekly map I describe is a somewhat idealised version. We try to stick to it as closely as possible but we don’t beat ourselves up if it doesn’t always go like that. We are a small team and we need to deal with whatever issues come up. In general, here are some thoughts I have about the process: We are a small team, we communicate frequently. Still we’ve found that things can go off course. Had we not had 1-week sprints those deviations would have been actually costly. 1-week sprints force all the units of work and planning into far more maneageable pieces. 1-week sprints saved us multiple times. Before GreenShoot Labs I almost exclusively worked in 2 or 3 week sprints. Also a lot of the work was from within an agency for customers. I dread to think of having to run at this pace with a large team with multiple stakeholders. Having said that I would very reluctantly go back to bigger sprints. I am not sure how it would scale to bigger teams. The running joke is that by the time we hit the end of the week someone will invariable pop-up and say “I can’t believe it is Friday already”. I love that. The pace is exhausting and fantastic. To be able to keep up the pace we need to … pace ourselves. A few months back I went through a few weeks of much more intense work in order to get stuff built but quickly scaled back. It was not sustainable. Balance with the rest of life is crucial. My (obvious but not so easy to implement) learning: Building a SaaS company (especially a bootstrapped one) is a marathon. Perseverance and continuity is far more important than burning out in a ball of fire. That’s our week. Would love to hear your thoughts, suggestions and if you have a similar post please add it to the comments. builds products that use automation, data and conversational interfaces to make teams happier and more productive. GreenShoot Labs Our first product is live on the Slack App Directory — makes working through common, repeatable processes and tasks better for your team with automated notifications and reporting. TeamChecklist

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