A month ago, I launched Tortoise, a music collective and product studio built on Farcaster. There were three main pieces of this launch:
Deployed the Tortoise Token ($TORT)
Launched the Tortoise Player, a Farcaster mini app for streaming, sharing, and collecting music
Released a song called Vains on the Tortoise Player
A ton of work went into this launch, and it was quite successful. The project took over the timeline on launch day, $TORT did over a million USD in volume, and most importantly, people are using the mini app.
Why Clank?
I decided to clank Tortoise to maximize attention on the project and to generate some initial capital. I also wanted to align incentives with the Clanker team, because I like how they move. They strike me as people who care more about innovating and shipping than looking cool or impressing VCs. I thought clanking on launch day would be good since there would be no expectations. And most importantly, $TORT is an integral part of the Tortoise ecosystem, with the first use case being announced in a couple days.
Feelings
The most surprising thing about the launch was the extreme dopamine hit I got from all the engagement. I was getting hundreds of notifications. It was impossible to keep up with. This had lasting effects on my brain chemistry and made it difficult to focus for about a week.
Future
With such an energetically concentrated launch event, it's easy to lose perspective on the fact that this is a long term project, the continuing culmination of a vision I have been forming for about four years. A vision of using blockchain technology to save the recording industry, which has been struggling greatly since the advent of digital file sharing and streaming. The short term mindset of token traders has been the biggest negative aspect of clanking this project. When that launch hype hits, it's hard to not want to do everything you can to keep the token price going up. I was somewhat prepared for that though, because I have seen many clankers launch, and it is almost universally the case that there is an initial hype followed by a crash that is just as intense. I am glad the the $TORT price has crashed and the dust has settled, because now I can focus on really earning the market value. Hopefully the new buyers will be mainly believers and contributors, and not just short term traders(although I appreciate and encourage trading as well).
I created something out of passion and shipped it. Something that I would be happy being the only user of. It's generating revenue from day one, but more importantly, it's laying the foundation for a new record industry. Tortoise moves slowly but deliberately, just like its namesake. And in the end, we all know who wins the race.
