Ideas I want to write about

Blackbird Pay offers restaurants a flat 2% fee on payments , versus an industry average of 3-4%.

Payments is how Blackbird will make the majority of its revenue. Ben explained that, in the short-term, they’ll lose money on some transactions (when users choose to pay with credit card and Blackbird eats those fees), and make money on others (when the... See more

If Blackbird succeeds, it will succeed because it builds a product that helps restaurants in the ways that they care about. The technology under the hood is a means, not an end.

That’s one of the things that’s newly possible because Blackbird uses crypto, but Blackbird works because it’s not a crypto app. It’s a restaurant platform and consumer app, built by restaurant people, that only uses crypto and whatever other tools it needs to use to make restaurants more profitable, help them understand their customers better, and... See more

Other industries, though, are matter industries .

Think energy or agriculture. These things are necessarily physical. Electricity requires electrons. Digital food doesn’t fill bellies.

For the past few decades, as software has eaten the world, entrepreneurs and incumbents alike have attempted to fix these industries with software. They’ve made them m... See more

When content production is infinite, we’re left asking, “ What is this all for?” An abundance of content leaves us with a dearth of context and meaning. Under the physics of infinity, media doesn’t need to be a vehicle for delivering more content. Instead, it should act as a lens through which we sensemake with content, and as a container for captu... See more

so, what's the onchain equivalent to substack?

hypersub.

hypersub is the economic infrastructure for future communities, the financial rail that empowers creators to build their communities through media and channels that best align with any evolving brand.

like substack, it provides a direct creator-audience relationship that aligns incentives betwee... See more

We’ve talked about crypto very little thus far. Blackbird’s membership cards are NFTs, its loyalty token is $FLY, and network participants can earn ownership in the network with $F2, but we’ve focused on what those different products do for restaurants and their customers, not on the nitty gritty of the tokens themselves.

That is a great thing.

Blac... See more

Blackbird is the first app I’ve used that’s onchain but doesn’t feel like it is. It feels like a restaurant app. I use it to discover places to eat, and to earn loyalty for eating there. Starting today, I’ll be able to use it to pay my tab — automatically, without getting the check — using credit card, debit card, or Blackbird’s $FLY token.

like substack, hypersub gives followers more control over their experience: users choose exactly which creators they want to support and therefore what content they want to consume.

unlike substack, the user-centric feed experience that hypersub offers can be implemented well beyond one app.