We've been building Kiwi News for 7 months now and have created a vibrant community of almost 1,300 monthly readers and 200 curators.
The community is very diverse - from protocol researchers and hardcore developers through a16z-backed crypto founders, top Dune analysts, award-winning artists, influential crypto podcasters & bloggers, Nouns owners up to investors from Tier-1 VC funds.
As it’s been some time since we started building it, I thought it was a good moment to look back and reflect on how we made it happen.
So here are 10 steps we took to make the Kiwi community what it is today.
1. We started in a place where we already had friends.
I’ve been on Farcaster since July 2022, and Tim has been there since the end of 2022. Most of the time, we just hung out online and had fun.
When Kiwi was launched in April 2023, Tim was already a well-known guy. So when he posted an NFT based on the kiwi meme, many people minted the genesis NFT just to support him.

When the app went live, it helped to get some initial users. I joined early, and since we were Farcaster power users, it was easier to spread the word about the project.
Farcaster was a good place to start because many FC users are web3 founders, devs & operators. The audience-product fit was pretty strong, which is how we got our initial users.
Lessons learned: It’s good to hang out with your potential users before you build the product.
2. We created a new way for users to express themselves.
The primary Proof-of-Work on Farcaster is casting. In other words, sharing your thoughts is often accompanied by a picture, video, or a link.
Theoretically, you could post links on Farcaster without any comments from your side. But if you did it all the time, your profile would look like some bot and feel out of place because social media (even decentralized one like FC) is a place to socialize (duh).

Kiwi’s primary Proof-of-Work is sharing links. Our product filled a small niche for people wanting a zen-like experience of reading, sharing, and curating interesting content.
Lessons learned: You must give users something they can’t get on other platforms.
3. Community solved real users’ problems and has co-created our product.
Most people today feel overloaded by information, especially in crypto. Neverending FOMO makes us subscribe to 27 newsletters and scroll Twitter for 2 hours a day to stay on top of things.
With Kiwi, we solved part of this problem by giving people a curated list of things to read, watch, or listen to.
In the early days, we had too few users to have a proper feed, so we started with 3 daily links picked by one prominent Farcaster user. People liked it because they could learn what other Farcaster users find interesting.

When we reached a sufficient scale, we leaned into a feed that users could curate together. And this is when the magic happened - from this point forward, the quality of our community had a direct influence on the quality of our product.
It worked in 3 ways.
1) The number of curators directly impacts the feed quality.
If we had 2 people submitting links to Kiwi, and each of them read 10 articles a day, our entire community aggregated the best content from 20 sources.
If we have 20 people submitting links to Kiwi, and each of them reads 10 articles a day, we aggregate content from 200 sources!
It’s something a single person couldn’t do by themselves. The community reading so many things and picking the best of them really makes a difference.
2) A more diverse community means more diverse content.
It’s useful to have a diverse community because people share different links.
Some will share privacy-first technical products, others will focus on essays about public goods, and some will submit links to interesting dashboards.
I would have never come across many of these things if it wasn’t for our community. This diversity can be a feature and a bug, though - more on that in point #4.
3) High-quality, diverse community means the discussions are valuable.
We also started discussions on our Kiwipass holders’ Telegram channel. So, instead of sitting alone at home and reading articles, we got this “online book club” focused on crypto-related essays, news & podcasts.
And since we have a diverse community, there’s almost always someone specialized in the subject we are discussing, so these conversations can be really valuable.
Lessons learned: If your product integrates the community, it’s much easier to get new people on board.
4. We were very deliberate about the niche we were after
Kiwi is a community-curated site. So, theoretically, whatever the community posts & upvotes populate the feed.
It creates a seemingly innocent problem because some subjects are more popular than others.
If everyone posted cute cat videos, they’d inevitably get many upvotes and dominate the feed. When other users see a feed full of cat videos, they would post even more cat videos, generating a self-perpetuating circle.
And although cute cat videos are nice, we were focused on crypto.
So, we developed the content guidelines. The first guidelines were very rough. They also generated some tension because our community raised a fair question - “Shouldn’t the community decide what kind of content we want to see on the website?”.
We knew, though, that we wanted to keep the site focused and retain a high-quality bar. So we discussed our ideas with the community and thanks to Alex Palmer, we came up with new, polished guidelines.
The decision to keep the crypto focus also meant that some people stopped being active. It was sad, but it had to happen since we wanted to focus on this particular niche.

Lessons learned: Be very deliberate about a niche you want to occupy and consider saying “No” if people want to expand it too much.
PS: On our roadmap, there are “subreddits” that would be focused on one subject. So, we predict some of these users might return. If your community would like to have its own "subreddit" on Kiwi, let me know. We might do some partnership here.
5. We gave our community a shared activity & goal
Many communities are about talking, but doing something together is much more valuable.
So Kiwi wasn’t just an outsized group chat - our community members worked together hand in hand to achieve a goal. And the goal has been to create a top-quality feed of crypto news, which is now read by 1,300+ people every month.
We also gamified the whole experience by adding a leaderboard. Some users even said that getting “kiwi karma” was what made them search for new links every day.

Another big shared activity is discussing the links. At this point, the conversations take place in our Kiwipass holders' Telegram channel, but later on, we plan to move them via comments inside the app.
Lessons learned: Give your community a shared activity to strengthen the bonds.
6. We highlighted social connections, online and offline.
Doing something together is great, but social connections are even more important.
There are 180+ Kiwi holders on our Telegram channel. Tim and I have talked 1:1 with almost all of them, reaching out, learning what they are looking for at Kiwi, do they have any feedback, and so on.
We also made it easy to connect with them - both via our TG channel and our community page. Thanks to that, Kiwi became a space where you meet new, interesting, like-minded people.
Because it’s about other people, not about us.
And although online is a great way to find interesting people, it’s not the best tool to build deep relationships. So, that’s why we organize a lot of offline events.
Kiwi is only about 7 months old, but we have already organized meetups during ETH conferences in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw & Istanbul.

Lessons learned: Help to build connections between people inside your community.
7. We shared memes to build a narrative.
For the first few weeks, I shared a new kiwi-related meme almost every day. Some of them were even created by the community members.

We used the kiwi emoji a lot - in our profile descriptions, posts, and replies. Thanks to that, we strengthened the Kiwi meme. We also did a drop during Base Onchain Summer, promoting the “How to eat kiwi” meme.
Lessons learned: Take care of the community’s memes since they are a low-effort way to bond.
8. We support bottom-up initiatives.
Our community members come up with many ideas.
The first time this happened with freeatnet building his own client and running a Kiwi Node. Later Matallo built Kiwi Search.
There also have been smaller projects - Alex Palmer helped us with design, Brais with kiwi stickers at ETH Barcelona, frota with our DevConnect meetup’s POAP and rvolz with the Dune dashboard.
We try to support them and don’t intervene too much so that people can realize their ideas on top of Kiwi.
We also shared some of our revenue with the most active community members. First by handpicking winners ourselves, and then by hosting a proper Retro PGF round where community members voted using their karma.
Lessons learned: Invest in your community early on and give people creative freedom.
9. We recognize great submissions.
What makes Kiwi different from most token-gated communities is that we are half-open.
Community interactions aren’t hidden behind the closed Telegram or Discord doors. Everyone can just open kiwinews.xyz and read links picked by our curators.
It means that the external world sees the work done by our community, and we double down on that. So when a curator shares a great link, we don’t only praise them on our Telegram channel. The most popular links of the week are being shared via the Kiwi Weekly newsletter.
We also set up bots on Farcaster & Twitter that reshare the 6 most popular links a day, and we give submitters credit by naming them in the tweets and casts.
And it’s not only a digital high five. By praising users for posting good content, we also show what type of content we aim for. That strengthens our culture and makes everyone more aligned with the main goal - sharing top crypto content.
Lessons learned: Praise the community members for doing great work.
10. We were lucky to have community members who praised us publicly.
This is not something we (Tim & I) did, but this is what our community has done for us without any prompts. The fact that people themselves say that Kiwi is great is much more valuable than us promoting our product.

Lessons learned: Word of mouth is much more effective than marketing by the founders.
Summary
And this is it.
Probably everyone knows this old storytelling cliche: “Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way.” In crypto, it’s typically said with tongue in cheek when you get liquidated during the bear market. But it also holds a certain truth.
A big part of building a web3 product isn’t just writing and shipping code. It’s about creating a space where people can meet and do things together. If you do it right, the community might not only help you build the product but even become its most important element.
And I believe this is the right way to build in web3.
PS: If you’d like to join the Kiwi community, it’s open to anyone. You can join us by minting the Kiwipass NFT. We can’t wait to introduce you to the rest of us!
PS2: If you’d like to set up a Kiwi board so your existing community can curate interesting links and bond like the Kiwi community did, contact me on Telegram. We are already in talks with some DAOs and might work something out.
Thanks to Tim Daub for feedback on this essay and to the Kiwi community for being such an amazing group of people.
@cameron said that posting here is an og thing to do, so let's see. 1. How did I discover Farcaster? Liron - the guy who lately dunked on FC because of a $150M raise - dunked on the FC $30M raise in 2022. I discussed it with him, and that's how I met dwr on twitter and joined farcaster a few days/weeks later.
2. Previous career highlights: - Turned around a company from serious debt to 6X revenue growth, Fortune 500 clients portfolio, and acquisition, - Built a new comms narrative for a $3B+ AUM European family office, - Created web3 talks from 0 to 1,500+ subscribers and interviews with founders of ZORA, FC, Gnosis etc.
3. What am I currently working on? @kiwi - decentralized hacker news focused on crypto tech, products and culture, built on top of a p2p network (similar to Farcaster) kiwinews.xyz
4. How did we get first 10 users? @timdaub.eth got the first 10 paying (!) users when he launched the Hyperkiwification NFT mint. On top of that, we used "Editor's picks" to bootstrap the Kiwi network. We described our first few months in the post below https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/community-building-lessons-kiwi
5. Taught @christin some basic ways to fool opponents in card games by stacking cards and making a messy chips pile
hahaha i had no idea
funnily enough liron raised $170M for his first startup and failed
that is hilarious lore actually at least the dude is consistent
'brand is a promise kept'
>dunked on the FC $30M raise in 2022 lmfao No wonder he was so reluctant to change his opinion on Farcaster.
The /farhackers growth playbook just dropped! 😈 We analyzed the growth strategies behind 20+ Farcaster projects Projects include @perl, @drakula, @lottopgf, and more! Want to see if for yourself? 👀 https://farhackers.com
10 $DEGEN
Nice idea but kind of sad there's no @kiwi there as we've been around longer than any of these listed projects and even shared some of our lessons learned online (linkrel) https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/community-building-lessons-kiwi
cool project, we'll check it out!
getting a frame timeout
looking into it
This is amazing! 🤩
Cartesse is love @viisikanta.eth ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 2 $degen
how much does this cost to mint? i'm getting nothing but errors
Just $3! try again now?
Man I have no idea but it's not allowing me to mint at all. What chain/token is required? I have Base ETH, USDC, etc. etc.
it's eth on base, so you shouldnt have an issue. I think we just discovered and fixed the error though. Let me know if it works now!
same issue, I have money on Base and it doesnt let me mint.
Cartesse is love @spencecoin ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 1 $degen
@launch The Farcaster Growth Playbook by Farhackers
Cartesse is love @richie ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 2 $degen
You scouted @jhv’s launch! https://www.launchcaster.xyz/p/664bd8c55743a5fe66943dec
Let's go 🎉
Cartesse is love @eliottmogenet ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 2 $degen
Awesome, thank a lot team
Cartesse is love @lottopgf ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 2 $degen
Super cool work. FC needs more of this kinda content. Would love to help with the next pieces yall are cooking :)
would love your help with the next one! Which projects should we analyze next? 👀
Uncut and Build would be cool
noted! 🙏
Cartesse is love @spenser ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 3 $degen
I minted this playbook, but still can't view it.
Cartesse is love @ryancharleston ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 1 $degen
@ryancharleston Make sure you connect the same address from your Farcaster account to Paragraph
Yes, it's the same address.
Hey Ryan, you minted with wallet ending in "55beb1f" So you just need to connect that wallet when you're in paragraph. Or if you already had a paragraph account, you need to add this wallet to your account.
@topframes.eth !tag new
Cartesse is love @0xtaiwo ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 1 $degen
I cant mint it, I get this error message. I would love to read it
Excited to dive in! Awesome job @safary !
Cartesse is love @zackb ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 2 $degen
Incredible to see this finished product come together so quickly - /farhackers truly has some web3 marketing gigabrains
LFG!
Cartesse is love @maxtaylor ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 3 $degen
Awesome work! Going to dive into this.
enjoy it! 🦁
Cartesse is love @blueclarity ⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 2 $degen
yaay, thanks for leading on this @jhv 🔥
appreciate your contribution! 🙏
Cartesse is love @rebus ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀ 2 $degen
That's a sexy cover ser!
Does anyone know of any good articles about kiwi? Of course I'm not talking about fruit.
What would you like to learn? There's a high-level idea: https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/what-is-kiwi Our lessons about community building: https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/community-building-lessons-kiwi And our product updates newsletter: https://paragraph.xyz/@kiwi-updates
🌶️ take
Accurate. Need to design around it
Community requires trust formation, which involves making yourself vulnerable to others Ofcourse the best way to build community to ask complete strangers: wen token?
Lmaoo
lmao accurate
The problem with airdrops is that they might seem a “no dollar cost” for founders, and even if they don’t hit burn directly, over a long time horizon, they affect the value flow and earnings distribution, hitting as a very high cost
lmao, qDAU is a hard metric to achieve, indeed. 15000 $degen
e-begger
The strongest community (until the Airdrop is done 😁).
Never. And I don't care what anyone says. You have the correct take here.
LMAO!! :D
it is what it is
200000 $degen
Fixed it for you 😁
many such cases
Fun to think about what it would look like if hackernews was a composable and transparent social network powering YC. especially in the early days. (its a bit of a dumpster fire now imo) (also wen /hackernews ?)
/kiwi-news is very similar. Worth checking out.
Maybe you can have better luck convincing @timdaub.eth and @macbudkowski to white label it to you ;)
Let's chat @jess
Since you are community aficionado, you might also find this 'how we built our community' recap interesting https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/community-building-lessons-kiwi
this is a /someone-build post and the answer is /kiwi-news
here to serve you @jess 🫡
Let’s chat!
What startups/founders do you think have done the best at leveraging Farcaster to get traction?
I think @nftd was the first major project to gtm and get traction on Farcaster. @vm @steph looking back, what do you think you did well and what are you doing differently now with @receipts?
- building something on crypto rails that was easy to understand and use - initial launch was exclusive to farcaster users - there were less builders and users back then (april 2022?), harder to capture attention now
for receipts, the same principles, but channels allowed us to target in a more focused way (specifically the fitness channel)
would also add, for this next iteration of @receipts we're looking to abstract more of the crypto elements away think thats something FC/Warpcast itself has done very well (e.g. account creation, warps, etc) & not something we fully recognized with nf.td or even v1 of receipts
If you were to launch something again now, would you still keep the initial launch exclusive to farcaster users?
not exclusive to, but we'd still do a launch on farcaster - highly engaged community - great folks who care to give feedback - diverse enough where you can find an early cohort of users no matter what vertical you're building in
My top3 is @colin, @jayme (you probably know the guy), @cassie We also did a decent job with kiwi :)
Kiwi has done a phenomenal job! Any thoughts on what you did well to attract the first 100-1000 users using farcaster?
We lately wrote a blog post about community building. The first chapter is about leveraging FC :) https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/community-building-lessons-kiwi?modal=subscribe
@betashop.eth wouldn’t have @dawufi ! Right?
correct https://warpcast.com/betashop.eth/0x7cd439d3
We have met and hired through Farcaster We have met and closed sales through Farcaster We have met and closed investors through Farcaster
What have yall done to find success on Farcaster?
Built a Farcaster app Provided tools for developers to build better Farcaster apps Tried our level best to show we are serious shippers who believe in the power of this protocol and community Laughed along the way
@colin and @jason nailed it imo
@bountycaster has been crushing it
I guess founders that are building on top of Farcaster is cheating a bit since there’s already a vested interest but @woj.eth definitely comes to mind here!
I don’t think it’s cheating :) Other than building on Farcaster, what do you think he does well?
– Aligning roadmap with paying users via support on TG → priority alpha group for paying subscribers – Shipping fast and sharing often while being receptive to feedback
❤️
founders building on Farcaster protocol and ecosystem, but that is kinda the point. the same way B2B startups in YC have the best leverage by selling to other YC startups.
@rish stands out for me because I see so many other builders using his product
If you don't list @dwr.eth you're missing the #1.
@colin with Paragraph, @ba and @cojo.eth with Ponder are the two that immediately come to mind.
Appreciate it 🙏
The app where you could check what you could mint/claim from what you’re holding Dawn/daybreak i think — I can’t remember the name but I think they pivoted more B2B last I saw? They had a mint that was one of the first big trending ones on Warpcast (Farcaster at the time) iirc
good one! @daylight might be the biggest user base that started on farcaster. few things i think @kyle and team did well: - teased and got feedback on early designs - handcrafted allowlist for dawn pass - leveraged the trending nft tab (rip) for awareness