The problem Beearly solves

The biggest challenge of launching a product is getting your first customer.
The traditional web2 approach attempts to reach potential users by asking for email addresses, enabling outreach and increasing their connection to the project as early users.
This approach has a series of issues and elements of friction:

1. Most people are subject to email spam and are therefore hesitant to share their email addresses;
2. The web2 waitlist as part of a sales funnel, involves multiple steps, such as from social media, to website landing page, to having to manually input an email address, which decreases the amount of email addresses that make it to the database;
3. Web3 users expect their online interactions to seamlessly integrate their social graph.

Solution: Farcaster users can join your waitlist without sharing their email addresses and without having to leave their feed. All they need is one click in one frame.
This ease of use is apparent, as exemplified by the numbers we achieved in 40 days:

• 24 waitlists
• 63k overall waitlisted users (26k unique)

N.B. The project was started on the 14th of May. The features built as part of the Buildathon are specified below.

The core functionality of Beearly:

• Project founders can create a waitlist and share a frame with a simple “Join Waitlist” button;
• Waitlist owners have access to a dashboard to control all aspects of the waitlist;
• Waitlist owners can broadcast a message to waitlist users through @beearlybot

Beearly includes a number of features that enhance the value proposition further:

• The waitlist owner can restrict a waitlist to power badge holders, or to users who follow a specific channel or user.
• The waitlist owner can set proofs-of-humanity using a captcha or Talent Protocol’s builder score.
• Once users have joined a waitlist, they can reshare the ‘join waitlist’ frame, thereby climbing a referrers’ leaderboard, which waitlist owners can use to incentivise virality by rewarding top referrers.

Challenges we ran into

Following the initial MVP, the features built in June as part of the Buildathon are the following:

• Waitlist owners can broadcast direct casts to all waitlisted users
• Introduced paid tier options. Payments implemented with Request Network.
• Waitlist owners can add users - manually or set proof of humanity (captcha or Talent Protocol builder score)
• Dashboard - improved waitlisted users’ table by enriching waitlisted users data (following/follower count and Airstack social scores), adding filtering and pagination options and allowing CSV exports

While developing these features, two hurdles got most of our time and attention:

Each time a user joins a waitlist, we fetch additional onchain data to enrich the user profile. Some of this data is dynamic (followers/following count, social score, power badge etc.). In order to provide a more performant service to our waitlist owners, we wanted to have a way to synchronize users' data, so that they can take action accordingly. Doing so is neither easy nor cheap.

Our initial ambitious plan was to schedule a cron-job every 12hrs to synchronize data. After significant assessment of growth trends (50k+ users at this point), we decided to run the synchronization once per week.

This level of frequency was only possible by architecting a complex system that integrates queues and API to process users in batches of 400 items.

The second hurdle has been around setting up a checkout system to support the introduction of our paid features. Due to growing interest, we opened it to the public and designed 3 tiers of waitlists that can be created, with different features, capabilities and pricing.

After analysing different options among which Stripe and LoopCrypto, we preferred building our own checkout system using RequestNetwork. This required a little more effort than expected, to ensure that payments work smoothly and users are actually able to use the features they paid for, only once the payment settles.