Hey friends 👋
What a lovely night, where I should open up my email to find that at long last I've been granted access to t². I remember when I first heard about this platform and its manifesto. As both a passionate writer and a lover of all things web3, I knew I would have no choice but to give it a shot.
Background
In 2021, I started a little twitter account to help share some of my ideas about frugality and deal hacking. The pandemic had sapped a lot of my enthusiasm for life and I wanted a way explore my creativity while providing something of use to others, hoping I might make a little money eventually. I've always loved to share the things I learn with other people, so twitter felt like a natural place to do that.
I soon realized that twitter (and social feeds in general) are not the place for nuance and understanding. Too little information fits into a tweet, threads are not everyone's cup of tea, and the psychology of how our brains respond to information while scrolling a feed is not even conducive to the absorbption of new ideas. So I started a blog.
My first blog, Thumbs Up Deals, was on BuyMeACoffee. I liked that there was a way to host a simple blog without needing my own website, and a community of readers were there, ready to support the writers they enjoyed reading.
Every week or two, I'd write another article sharing my thoughts on some aspect of deal-hacking, frugality, and eventually, investing. When crypto started to really take off I started to buy a little bit, and not having money to gamble on something I didn't understand, I wanted to learn as much as I could about it.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Once I began experimenting with Ethereum, I discovered DeFi. Swapping assets instantly without needing to create an account was mind-blowing to me. The ability to make cross boarder payments to support charities or help out a friend who was short on ETH for gas, to buy or trade digital artworks with verifiable lineage. Even today it's impressive, but back then it felt revolutionary.
Then I found PoolTogether, the crypto prize-savings protocol that changed my life. Not only did this little dApp help to legitimize my view of DeFi, being a protocol that's genuinely built to create positive sum outcomes with as little risk as possible, but it introduced me to the idea of DAOs and DAO-like communities.
Back in 2021, the crypto space was starved for good content. There was almost no one making easy-to-read, informative content, that wasn't scammy. So I decided to take on that role, with PoolTogether as my first muse. The PoolTogether community supported me on BuyMeACoffee and I used that money to create a tutorial video and blog post about PoolTogether v3 on Polygon.
After that, I would go on to get grants from PoolTogether, Push Protocol, Notional Finance, and many more as well as sponsorships and prizes for my writing. I won a writing contest for Hackernoon in partnership with The Sandbox Game for writing about the metaverse, as well as numerous prizes on Layer3, back when it was a DAO content bounty board.
I found my passion
Now, nearly three years since I started my little twitter account, I'm pretty well-established. While I never exploded in follower growth—probably due to my style of verbose, nerdy posts, as opposed to "how to get rich quick" narratives—I've developed a loyal fanbase and have been sponsored to write content for many DAOs and protocols. I've even had my content shared by some really big name accounts.
I no longer write on BuyMeACoffee and I even gave up on Medium. Now the home of my content is Mirror with every post being collectable as an NFT on Optimism. I cross-post my monthly newsletters via Paragraph, a hybrid web2/web3 platform that allows me to send them straight to subscribers' inboxes. Occasionaly, I even post to Publish0x, to take advantage of their large, crypto-focused readership, but it's less and less appealing as time goes on.
I have to say t² has me pretty excited. I find the Lens ecosystem to be very vibrant, full of people who believe in building great products for creators. And t² is no different. So I'll be playing around on here, and I hope you'll follow along. And I hope you'll follow along as well on Mirror since that will remain my official home for the forseeable future.
This was my first post on t² and it won't be my last.
Until next time,
Thumbs Up
