TL;DR
Hey OP community 
My name is Cam and I’m building Contxt. You can learn more about the project from the Build V3 Launch video.
I’m building Contxt to be your home for the quotes, quirks, jokes, isms, and interpersonal lore you have with your favorite people. Contxt is a web2 app with and I’m looking to use the OP Grant to fund Contxt’s web3 monetization and governance add-ons.
Background
About Me
I’m a non-technical founder based in Oakland and am part of a growing cohort of entrepreneurs: Community managers → founders
My career has revolved around community management & customer success, starting in augmented reality, then customer success at Clay, recently as Director of Member Experience at Kift, and today as Head of Customer Ops at Forecast, the first community-based AI image generation platform.
I take a community-first approach in everything I do, and Contxt is no exception.
Why I’m Building Contxt
From cave wall drawings to Substacks, there have always been documentarians who preserve the context of their time. Scribes, photographers, and orators have served the invaluable role of observing the world and sharing their art with others. Within this group of documentarians are those I affectionately call Quote Keepers. If you enjoy writing down funny, notable, and insightful things people around you say, you’re one of us. Making people feel seen, heard, and appreciated is our love language and I’m building a social platform to help make our practice more shareable, simple, and impactful.
In the 21st century, Quote Keepers have been limited to notebooks, Word & Google Docs, Notion Pages, and random Apple Notes to store our quotes. These methods are usually disorganized, solitary, and labor intensive. I’ve been keeping quotes since 2017 and decided to build a social documentation platform that empowers a new era of multi-media documentarians. A platform for those of us who are invested in the quality of our friendships, not quantity of followers.
Build Update
This month has been everything I needed it to be. I learned a ton about DraftBit, the no-code platform I’ve been using to build Contxt and feel very comfortable with navigating the app and working with my Expert Sefa (major s/o Sefa, he’s been a dream to work with). I started the month with a barely-functioning prototype and am ending with a working MVP that I can start testing with my initial Quote Keepers.
I’ve been getting supportive feedback throughout the Build program and Contxt and was also selected as 1 of 43 finalists from Build V3 out of the 1,300 that got accepted.
Contxt Today
The best place to see a full walk-through of the app is from the Build V3 Launch video. It’s a very simple MVP that allows you to record quotes for the contacts you import into Contxt. It’s a big first step towards creating a text-based social platform for documenting and appreciating IRL moments. We’ll add images, video, and other media once our community has made it clear that it’s needed.
Traction
As Contxt just launched as a Private Beta, I’ll be onboarding the first users this week with a goal to reach 20 Quote Keepers by the end of April. However, before Build, I interviewed 30+ Quote Keepers and found a consistent need for what I’m building and have started onboarding them into the Private Beta.
Quotes as a social platform are already very popular online. Overheard LA (1.6M followers), NYC (1.8M followers), and SF (336k followers) have established large brands powered entirely by volunteer Quote Keeper submissions. Further, each Quote Keeper that submits a quote is tagged in the post’s description, so these Instagram accounts will serve as my main lead generation source once I’m ready for my next cohort of Quote Keepers. These IG accounts validate the existence of Quote Keepers and the desire people have to read quotes. Yet, unlike Contxt, these accounts are often sarcastic or deprecating towards the culture they’re about, not celebratory or appreciative of it.
Contxt is poised to ride this existing momentum in social media by providing a home for social documentation with a suite of tools to help Quote Keepers do what they already do best.
Side Note If you know any Quote Keepers in your life, it’d be amazing if you could share this link with them. Filling it out will set them up to get a 1-1 onboarding with me as part of the first 50 people to use Contxt.
Optimism Native?
Today, Contxt is a web2 app. After operating in the web3 space for the past 3 years as a participant & Steward at Cabin & leader at Kift, I’ve come to see blockchain as a tool that is most effective as an option, not a requirement, to benefit from a product.
My aim is to use the OP grant to develop two opt-in web3 features powered by the Superchain that greatly enhance the core web2 experience. The first two on-chain initiatives are:
- Collect Quotes - Users can collect each other’s quotes by minting them from a Farcaster Frame that embeds the Contxt quote for anyone else to mint. Doing so automatically stores the quote as a “Collected Quote” in the purchaser’s Contxt profile.
- You can only collect other people’s quotes, which reinforces Contxt’s value of mutual support and appreciation while simultaneously enabling Contxt users to financially benefit from their everyday genius.
- Community-Centered Product Development - Issuing a “proof of time” token to track efforts to support and grow Contxt, which will be used to participate in JokeRace competitions to prioritize features, Coordinape to organize work & contributions, upcoming product initiatives, investment opportunities, etc.
- Austin Robey said it best: “The real innovation comes from organization design, coalition building, shared ownership models - and then pairing that with tech”. In short, I aim to develop a new blueprint for community-centered product development for bootstrapped founders building products for passionate & under-served niches.
I’ll go into more depth on each of these in the Timeline section below, but the TLDR is that this OP grant will make it possible for Contxt to go on-chain with genuinely useful features with the invaluable financial and communal support of the OP community.
Advancing Optimism Ecosystem
As I’m building Contxt as a web2 platform with opt-in web3 features, my aim is to have new users discover the web3 features when it makes sense for them as their needs evolve along their user journey (ie, user sees a quote they want to collect → they create their wallet - or - a new user does a 1-1 onboarding with me → they automatically receive a Contxt token to a pre-created wallet etc).
Too often, web3 brands try to explain to non-web3 folk why NFTs or the blochain are valuable. My belief is that it’s more effective to build a stellar web2 app that has additional awesome functionality that is only possible using blockchain technology; the web3 functionality should be so great that it’s a no-brainer for the user to use without understanding blockchain or crypto at all.
For example: if I collect a friend’s quote but my friend hasn’t activated their “Collect” add-on yet, they’ll get a text saying “Cam just collected your quote on Contxt for $0.99! Claim your $0.99 by clicking the link below.” They don’t know blockchain is underlying this transaction, but they’re incentivized to sign-up due to the economic activity that’s powered by Optimism.
I aim to only use blockchain when it’s a no-brainer. Due to Contxt’s simple nature, I see it becoming a gateway app that brings a consistent flow of non-web3 folk into the space.
Big Vision
I’m building Contxt to be a consent & privacy-focused multimedia interpersonal wiki. Your place to preserve the context of your relationships: the moments, digital artifacts and tid bits that remind us why we love and appreciate our people.
My vision is to create a social documentation platform that fosters genuine connection and appreciation in order to mend the societal fabric that’s been torn apart by systems that benefit from (and therefore, propagate) polarization, isolation, and hyper-individualism.
To do this, I’ve borrowed from Cabin to develop Contxt’s 3 Obvious Truths:
- Our attention is sacred
- I believe one of the biggest techno-social blunders made in the 21st century was Facebook’s 2006 decision to switch from posting on each other’s walls to posting into an algorithmic Newsfeed. The trillion-dollar attention economies that this decision spawned has fueled genocides, mental health crises, and a global isolation epidemic. Contxt is building an alternative economy, one I like to call the Appreciation Economy, which thrives when we listen to and celebrate those around us.
- Words matter
- We love words and believe they should be preserved and compensated when arranged in intriguing, funny, or meaningful ways. Because words matter, consent is a cornerstone around all documentation that happens within Contxt. This is pivotal to avoid the privacy and data issues that have plagued the social era.
- Appreciation leads to connection
- When you feel appreciated by someone, it’s nearly impossible to not feel connected to them. Once you feel connection with someone, it’s way easier to find something to appreciate about them. We’re designing Contxt to catalyze an unstoppable flywheel of collective appreciation and connection to heal the deep wounds of hatred and isolation we see today.
Contxt Business
Similar to how Instagram made everyone a photographer and Twitter made everyone a journalist, Contxt aims to make everyone quotable.
If quotes have been relegated to those of prominence and in the public sphere, what happens when everyone is quotable? What if your friend sees the quote on your profile, loves it, and wants to collect it for their own profile? Are publishing deals necessary if you earn $0.99 every time someone wants to collect a tid bit you’ve said? And what if that quote could also be put onto stickers for a lil surprise, or a note card for your birthday, or a dad hat for a friend? And what if you chose to list that same dad hat design on your Contxt profile so that when a friend says, “hehe, nice hat”, you can send them a link to buy it directly from your Contxt profile? And what if in all of these blockchain transactions, a percentage is donated to causes the Contxt user selects?
In short, I see NFTs and e-commerce converging within Contxt to foster a user-generated market fueled by appreciation and shout-outs that fund real-world impact.
Contxt Impact
If we take a moment to zoom out, it’s clear social media and algorithmically-driven digital spheres have led to a isolation and loneliness epidemic that needs serious investment, innovative programs, and creative solutions to address.
The problem is that the real solutions to loneliness (hyper-local IRL community building and support networks) typically aren’t great businesses or get corrupted once money is introduced. In the absence of sufficient government funding to address this monumental problem, I believe a new vanguard of pro-social organizations need to invest their profits into funding grassroot initiatives to help reinforce mutual interdependence. I want Contxt to be part of that vanguard by setting up a non-profit that ensures Contxt adheres to its values and mission while also receiving profits from Contxt to fund local communities and clubs as a public good.
I can talk about all the potential and possibilities for hours, but for now, I’m laser-focused on building the best app for quotes n jokes, and the OP Grant would play a massive role in enabling me to reach the loftier goals I’ve highlighted above.
With that in mind, let’s dive into how I’d use the OP Grant over the next 3 months.
Timeline
April - Contxt 1.0
Product
Contxt is a great 1-player tool for Quote Keepers. It’s an amazing multi-player platform for anyone the Quote Keeper hangs out with. The MVP was designed to validate single-player mode and April is about building multi-player functionality that will establish robust network effects:
- Notification systems
- In-depth onboarding experience
- SMS notifications for non-Contxt users
- Sharing quotes to external social apps
- Profile management (friending, blocking, deleting, etc)
- Home screen optimizations
- Onboard first 20 Quote Keepers
Legal
- Find values-aligned lawyer
- Incorporate as an LCA
- Trademark
- Open bank accounts
May - NFTs
Product
The “Collect” feature positions Contxt to not only have a viable revenue generator, we’ll also have a web3 identity system to enable a decentralized future for Contxt.
- Web3 integration
- IndieDAO to execute:
- Farcaster Frame minting
- Privy integration & identity system setup
- Collected Quote UI
- Additional UI modifications as-needed
- IndieDAO to execute:
- Lists & filters
- Adding ability for users to create lists (favorites, things that are underrated/overrated, hot takes, gift ideas, etc) for their contacts
- Database reconfiguring to accomodate many forms of media & moment stems
June - Membership
After launching the minting feature, we’ll dive deep into bug-squashing and community development, as the end of June will introduce a Patreon membership for Contxt users who want to directly support the project and get access to deeper levels of participatory product development.
SaaS products prioritize requests from their high-paying enterprise clients, so I’m doing the same for a free social product via a membership for Contxt’s most dedicated Quote Keepers.
Patreon
- Launch Membership tiers:
- Supporter ($1/month)
- Participant ($5/month)
- Contributor ($20/month)
- Setup points/coin/token system and strategy for participatory development (JokeRace + Notion)
- Establish transparent financial operations to provide consistent updates to the OP community on usage of funds
Product
- Debug and improve web3 integration & lists
- Design & scope future product features
- Recruit contributors
Use of Funds
I’m building Contxt for the longterm. I’m invested in ensuring Contxt grows at the pace it’s meant to, not the hyper-growth many seek for the sake of getting millions of users as quickly as possible. My favorite apps (Linear, Notion, 1Password, Superhuman, Arc) have built outstanding platforms by patiently crafting their product to make millions of dedicated user’s lives fundamentally better, every day. While I’m not opposed to raising money for Contxt, I want to it the right way: with consent from the invested community of contributors via collective governance because we believe it’s what’s best for the community and product.
I enjoy my job at Forecast and my part-time income pays for all my expenses and Contxt’s costs. Over the last 4 months, I’ve invested 400+ hours and $5k of my own money to build the Contxt MVP. I wake up at 6am most weekdays to put 2-3 hours into Contxt before work, which means having values-aligned funding from the OP community would be a godsend to ramp up development efforts and find additional help to rapidly build a product powered by Optimism.
See the image below to get a month-by-month breakdown of how I’d use the OP grant over the next 3 months:
- Note: Besides DraftBit, these are all estimates
Progress
Share links to any updates, forum posts, tweets, etc. that document your active work over the last month.
The Build V3 page for Contxt and our Github repo are the best spot to review the past month’s month’s updates.
I also discovered Lindsey’s OP post a bit late in the month, but I did share a synthesized 3-week update here.
Links
You can follow me and Contxt on Twitter.
Checkout the Contxt website here and please send this link to any Quote Keepers you know.
Final Thoughts
Writing this post was a fun and helpful envisioning and planning exercise, I hope you enjoyed reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it for you.
If you have any questions or comments after reading this post, please email me (cam@contxt.wiki) and I’d love to discuss whatever came up for you.
Thank you,
Cam