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KOLs & promotion

Can useful products survive without a hype machine?

More accurately, I started building it before my vacation, but the further I get, the more I wonder whether serious products have any chance here unless they come wrapped in hype, a shitcoin, or somebody already famous enough to…

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I am building something.

More accurately, I started building it before my vacation, but the further I get, the more I wonder whether serious products have any chance here unless they come wrapped in hype, a shitcoin, or somebody already famous enough to manufacture attention on command.

The preview is below...

My fam at @MASTRlabs have already built mobile apps for iOS and Android.

The apps reached roughly 1,000 downloads, around 400 daily active users atm, and processed thousands of token checks. (Without marketing! Without shills btw!)

Well...

Only a handful of people are willing to pay for a subscription.

More than 8,000 times, maybe much more, users asked human experts from the team to review tokens while the service was free.

Thousands of checks, real time, real knowledge, real responsibility. The moment even a small payment was required for that work, almost everyone suddenly lost interest.

That tells you something deeply fucked about this industry.

People claim they want security, research, accountability and better tools, but most only value them while someone else is paying the bill.

They remember you exist when they need a wallet checked, a scam investigated, a project exposed, a connection explained or a warning before they lose money.

Once the work has value attached to it, the gratitude disappears remarkably quickly.

I consider the databases, historical knowledge, KOL connections, wallet patterns, accumulated evidence, intuition and experience I have built over the years extremely valuable.

Extremely valuable.

I would hire myself in a heartbeat and pay a fucking fortune to have someone like me on the team. But then again, I am me. (Lmao)

Most of it cannot simply be scraped from an API or reproduced by prompting an AI model.

It comes from years of watching the same people, schemes, wallets and narratives repeat themselves under different names.

The question is whether I should spend weeks or months turning that knowledge into a serious intelligence platform when this market repeatedly proves that it would rather gamble on another shitcoin than pay a small amount for information that could prevent the loss.

Maybe the product is valuable but the audience is wrong.

Maybe Web3 only understands value when it comes with a token, artificial scarcity and a loud idiot promising 100x.

Maybe I am wasting my time building infrastructure for people who only contact me when they want something for free.

I want your honest opinion.

Would you actually use and pay for a platform that connects token data, wallets, teams, KOL networks, promotions, historical incidents and human intelligence?

Or should I stop pretending this industry rewards anything beyond hype, gambling and whoever shouts the loudest?

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@mastrlabs

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