Why is it Hard to Say More?

Accelerating Output for Creators (and Me)

Mar 29, 2023

Credit: MidJourney got me coding like a madman and also absolutely wrecking the stock photo industry

I launched SayMore.tv a week ago.

It’s an app to help Creators create more of what their audience wants.

It’s also an app to help fans communicate what they want to their favorite Creators.

It is only usable to folks with a Farcaster account (for now), but anyone can explore it.

It has 3 parts.

When a Creator (primarily writers for now) posts something their Fans want to hear more about, the Fan can reply with “@saymore” with a short message asking the Creator to dive a little deeper.
This triggers a bot to record the request and posts it to SayMore.tv where the Creator can accept the request (and everyone else can vote on the requests they think are interesting).
When the Creator completes the longer form content, they’ll submit the link to the published post - alerting the original Fan (and everybody that follows SayMore Bot on Farcaster) that it has been completed.

It’s simple.

It’ll do much more (like pooling pre-funding for content ideas, AI assisted creation tooling, and dynamic idea A/B testing to name a few) soon, but for now I’m genuinely excited about just the bare metal idea.

Creating is Hard

500 hours of content gets uploaded every minute… just to YouTube.

Now think about TikTok.

And Snapchat.

And Audio.

Now add in the written word.

It’s bonkers.

But the craziest part?

Those numbers are only going to go up from here.

Yet somehow, it’s still really really hard to create content.

Emotionally, creatively, practically - all of it sucks to try and figure out (speaking from painful experience).

There’s an art to it for sure.

Yet even though its an art, its also a science.

A science that I actually think is pretty underexplored.

I have a lot of thoughts here that I’ll follow up on in a separate essay (shoutout to my buddy Jayme Hoffman for calling my bluff and tagging me to Say More about SayMore.tv), but the important thought here is that we’ve got a lot of work to do to help Creator’s spend more of their time, energy, and effort on ideas that actually resonate with their audience.

Plainly, I think SayMore can eventually save content creators years of effort while helping them create better content faster.

SayMore Challenges

Another friend of mine, Vincent, asked me to share the biggest challenge with building SayMore (hence this essay).

It’s unequivocally been doing everything at once as a solo builder.

SayMore started with a much bigger vision (still to come 👀), but came out of a forced sprint.

I joined Zeitgeist’s Spark mini-accelerator about 4 weeks ago and realized at the start through some group sessions that my project spec was too much for the timeframe.

So I cut and pared and reduced and then in another session someone (I think Yondon) mentioned that it might be neat to do an implementation with Farcaster.

That struck a chord.

You couldn’t beat the intention out of me after that got in my head.

So I got to work, but wanted to learn from the lessons I got from launching VF Protocol last fall so I couldn’t just build.

I had to talk it up on Farcaster. I had to meet with users. I had to build the public case even as I fought dumb bugs because I’m frankly much more a scrappy developer than a… proficient one.

So I did all of it and it generally worked and while I didn’t do 1% every day on everything, I came pretty close.

The launch was a success and as of now there are four completed requests (and about 10 in progress)!

All in all, it was pretty hard.

Not hard enough to make me stop, but hard enough to drive home that I have to seriously streamline everything that I’m doing so I can keep everything moving forward as fast as I want it to move.

Fortunately, the concept and app seem to be resonating with users and that’s a huge motivation boost.

Wysr by Cameron Armstrong

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