#38: Colin Armstrong, Founder @ Paragraph | How they combined web2 & web3 features to create a Substack alternative that’s already used by over 5k creators

Colin Armstrong has been in crypto since 2011 and has spent years working at Coinbase and Google. He built Paragraph to create a more neutral and web3-friendly alternative to Substack. The project has already amassed 5k+ creators and 100k+ subscribers, and Colin shares how they made it happen.

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0:38 How to make sure you get info about the new web3 talks episodes

1:27 Why Paragraph is a great example of web2.5 Substack

2:22 How Colin’s experience at mining Bitcoin in 2011, building decentralized Kickstarter in 2014, working at Coinbase with the founder of Litecoin, spending 5 years at Google, and being dissatisfied with Substack led him to build Paragraph

13:37 What were the most interesting Paragraph use cases Colin has seen so far

16:24 How do they manage to ship features so fast, and why waitlist doesn’t make sense in most products

19:40 How do they decide what to include on their roadmap

21:12 Why they’ve been integrating with web3 social and how it works in practice

23:17 How they acquired their first 10 users via cold outreach on Twitter, and why they didn’t implement any crypto functionalities in v1

25:16 What they’ve been doing to acquire 5k+ users and how they used the market situation to their advantage

28:40 How do they measure success in their product and why just looking at the number of writers or readers wouldn’t work

30:34 What do they do to protect newsletters from landing in the spam box

33:09 What are their plans for integrating wallets and why is infra not ready for it yet

36:43How does wallets x Paragraph x Farcaster integration work technically and why do they use Searchcaster

39:20 How a developer built a streaming payment with Superfluid on top of Paragraph without needing any permission

40:51 How getting developers to build on top of their APIs was easier than he thought

44:13 Why choosing the right feature set for their niche was so hard and why web3 UX & e-mail limitations led to design challenges

47:10 What would Colin build if he wasn’t building Paragraph

50:00 Why would he get rid of airdrop hunters and speculators with his web3 magic wand and add new useful dapps with great UX

52:33 Colin’s favorite web3 projects (spoiler alert: he mentions Farcaster)

56:00 Where can you learn more about Paragraph

57:01 What other builders would be a great fit for the podcast