Decentralizing Higherrrrrrr
Giving more of the project to the community
I started Higherrrrrrr because I was very curious about meme coins. It was my first attempt at bootstrapping my own project without any additional support from investors, and to be honest, it’s the most fun I’ve had building in a long time. It’s taught me a new way to build software (and companies) that I’m really excited about and I thought it might be worth talking about the long-term vision for what we want to do with the project.
Good ideas rarely survive contact with the market, and this one was no exception. What gets me out of bed in the morning is that how we have evolved it in a way that I think will become something exciting in crypto (over a long enough time horizon).
My rough learnings from the past 4 months:
Memecoins (and most crypto coins outside of stable coins) are a multi level marketing schemes and at best neutral EV (and usually negative with fees), but they’re pretty fun so it’s ok. I probably should have understood this going in, but oh well. The more serious people make them seem, the more you’re getting manipulated into being exit liquidity for some VC fund.
Main characters kill projects
The market structure of crypto is incredibly inefficient, and there are some very clear gaps
Building solo or with friends is way more fun than building for someone else
Most crypto growth is very spikey, so you have to zoom out to see who’s winning and losing
The biggest update is that higherrrrrrr is no longer a company run by Thrive. There is a *frontend* that is *hosted by thrive* for now, but the twitter account now has new owners in the community and all of the contributions by community members have been snapshotted as points. I’m giving up control, because I believe the seed is there, and it’s up to the community is in the correct spot to scale the project without me in control of every part.
Since I’m no longer in control of the twitter, I’m also no longer in control of the marketing, so for all intensive purposes, you should no longer consider the higherrrrrrr as “me“, but it is with a community member who’s very invested in the project and vision and willing to carry the marketing forward. I am also a community member with the same interests, but I’d like to divest my
My plan personally is to step away as the main character. It’s still my project, just the idea is to be a little more like Vitalik - the tech guy that loves to code and be curious (and hopefully a little funny on X). I’m going to leave the main marketing of everything to the community. What I’ve realized is that this is actually a feature, not a bug, giving up control means that we’ve found people who are *better* than me at those jobs, and getting out of their way is where a lot of the power is.
I’ve thought about it a lot, and to truly live this ethos, I will have to progressively make myself less important over time and let other leaders take over. This means giving more people ownership and agency over what we’re building for the long term. I have a core group that I *really* trust to do this, and think it can become something incredible.