Here’s a daily reading routine I established for myself lately. It was also what got us to start working on Itemsy in the first place. We wanted to:

• stop using multiple reading lists, notes, keep tens of tabs open
• always be able to go back to or find new interesting reads
• when time is right, receive my personal email newsletter

One-click save

You come across an interesting article, website or video. Simply save it for later using Itemsy Chrome or Firefox extension. Add a note to remember why you’re saving it.

Alternatively, add it to your Saved items at itemsy.com …

Whenever I come across a blog post I really enjoy, I try and subscribe to be notified of future posts by email. Very often though, blogs lack that feature. I end up forgetting and never going back to them.

This short blog post explains how to add a newsletter to your blog using Itemsy in 3 quick & easy steps.

Step 1/3

Create an Itemsy profile:

Step 2/3

Every time you post on your blog, publish the link on your Itemsy profile

1. Great product is the single best marketing channel.
2. Quickly launch the most basic version of your product.
3. Your one-liner must be crystal clear.
4. People want to instantly try out your product.
5. Choose the right day of week.

Last Friday, we launched I T E M S Y on Product Hunt with almost no preparation. We were very positively surprised by the response and wanted to share some lessons learned.

1. Great product is the single best marketing channel

It may seem like a good idea to spend time asking friends for support. But in the end it’s a numbers game and what counts is upvotes from Product Hunt…

Microsoft Excel came out over 30 years ago. Since then almost every other software tool has been replaced by its modern, cloud version. Except Excel.

Came for the data, stayed for the Excel

Spreadsheets have become a natural end point for every BI, accounting or data management tool. No matter how sophisticated, slick or “made with ❤️ in SF” the tool is, eventually you’ll always want to export data to Excel.

As a result, data is always centralised on a local hard drive and shared with others via dozens of emails. Arguably, Excel has become the most popular database (and programming language) in the world which makes email…

Getting an online marketplace off the ground is very hard. Growing one is no easier. Marketplace metrics are extremely complicated.

One thing that makes marketplaces so complex is feedback loops.

Let’s say we want to estimate the effect of spending $1,000 on supplier acquisition. That will result in some change in suppliers’ behaviour. While that’s difficult enough to estimate, it will also affect customers’ behavior. That, in turn, has an effect on suppliers. Eventually, the whole system converges to an equilibrium that is notoriously hard to predict.

That’s not totally unlike the problem of designing economies of blockchain smart contract…

Incentivai has built a tool for testing incentive structures of economy-based systems. They are simulated in a safe environment (which closely resembles the real solution) with ML agents to estimate likely patterns of behaviour and help improve on the choice of system parameters. Augur, a prediction market protocol, is an example of such a system encoded in smart contracts and deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.

The Augur system was simulated using the Incentivai tool. This blog post summarises some of the findings and agent behaviour patterns found during the analysis.

Key findings

1. Agents convinced about their belief choose to exit Augur rather…

It always starts with an interesting problem.

Many people give blockchain technology too much credit. Many give it too little credit. I believe that is at least partly due to there being a confusion as to what it is really that we can do now that we couldn’t without blockchain.

What is it that makes something a C thing? I believe there are two requirements. If either of them is not strictly necessary, it’s a B thing.

What you want to build is a C thing if and only if it is required to be:

1. Decentralised
2. Self-executable

I will provide…

Results of collaboration with Ocean Protocol

Tokenised ecosystems (e.g. curation markets) require effective mechanisms for distribution of their native tokens. Bonding curves are a promising continuous token model where early adoption is incentivised and price is adjusted based on current supply.

It is however extremely difficult to reason about the likely user behaviour resulting from a particular bonding curve setup. We believe that modelling and simulating the system can provide invaluable insights and guide the design process.

1. Introduction

This report discusses the results of testing a Bonding Curve setup using the Incentivai simulation tool. The purpose of the analysis is to…