catty

turning a meme page into a million dollar creative studio, team, @thirdweb @SocialChain 💫

[catty @cattybk]

Friday was my last day at @thirdweb!

I joined the team when it was 4 engineers in a discord server, and it’s been the most blessed experience going from 0 to one of the biggest development tools in web3.

We built one of the best growth teams in the industry and I've been lucky enough to work with the best creative talent in tech.

Forever grateful for @FurqanR, @jake_loo and @StevenBartlett for betting on me and building such a generational company.

This is my 10th year in startups so I’m going to take a few weeks off to enjoy the summer in NYC before diving into my own thing.

(if you wanna catch up, grab coffee or hear about what im doing next shoot me a dm!)

✌️

[catty @cattybk]

@eRaBloke @instagram How did you get it back?

[catty @cattybk]

@jappleby overthinking it

marketing isn’t for marketers - it’s for normal people who look at this and see something new and fun then continue with their day

[catty @cattybk]

try it out 👇
https://t.co/mHmQIm5CiZ

[catty @cattybk]

this month we partnered with @airHQ to officially launch the meme booth!

the meme booth is a digital photo booth that turns you into a starter pack meme, using an AI model trained on thousands of memes i've made over ~6 years.

[catty @cattybk]

it started as an experiment to see if AI models could reliably replicate niche, esoteric internet-humor - turns out they can with the right training

we partnered with creators and meme pages to launch, and over ~22k memes have been generated since!

[catty @cattybk]

@HESaBSG i made this lol

[catty @cattybk]

@emilylai have you tried them? not good?

[catty @cattybk]

it feels increasingly obvious we're entering the post apple era of hardware

for the first time ever the iphone no longer feels like a luxury product.

luxury used to be signalled by physical goods: the louis bag, the cartier bracelet, the iphone.

luxury is now signalled by the way we spend our time: how much we're offline, how little we need to be informed, how much time we can afford to spend in the gym

new hardware is reflecting this - innovating backwards to allow for more intentional use of technology

it's cooler to not know what happened at the oscars than ever before.

the iphone used to be a sleek sexy progressive tool for artists. now it feels like a fast food casino in you're pocket, sucking away time that could be spent becoming more interesting.

I begrudgingly upgraded my iphone 14 recently after destroying the camera lens during a blurry night in puerto rico. I couldn't believe how ugly the new iphone 17's were. it was the first time buying a new phone felt like a necessary business expense, rather than something to be excited about.

unboxing the new iphone used to feel like christmas morning, now I couldn't care less about what the iphone 23 max pro will look like (because I already know.)

the most interesting innovation in hardware is either happening with new AI form factors or with dumb phones - either way reducing screen time is the end goal.

the big winners here are the art directors. @nothing's brand identity is good enough to make me want to buy the product from their campaign shots alone. it's a long time since i've felt that way about hardware.

more please.

[catty @cattybk]

@charlicohen we peaked at the iphone X

[catty @cattybk]

@lee94josh @afterimage @cyrusduff_ damn where is this?

[catty @cattybk]

join the hivemind
https://t.co/qe0wt5nZVO

[catty @cattybk]

we just launched the group chat for arc teryx heads only.

(inspired by @immike_wing)

[catty @cattybk]

@emilylai generational run congrats!!

[catty @cattybk]

@BobbyThakkar https://t.co/WlTS9CO89q

[catty @cattybk]

@ibuyrugs no you're just old now

[catty @cattybk]

@bdguan @NYCMayor dude stfu

[catty @cattybk]

@yitong always the founder of some mysteriously “acquired” startup with no revenue or users

[catty @cattybk]

@nstlgiaxpress black background meme is crazy work

[catty @cattybk]

@michaelmiraflor brooklyn is packed

[catty @cattybk]

platforms must kill fake UGC or die themselves.

every generation of marketers finds a new way to cheat social platforms with undisclosed ads and algorithm hacks.

I know because i've done it.

at my first agency we acquired hundreds of the biggest twitter accounts, meme pages and viral content accounts with massive followings.

we'd activate hundreds of accounts simultaneously and create what we called a 'thunderclap'. it would flood the timeline and manufacture the appearance of organic virality. twitter suspended all of them overnight. no warning and killed that entire section of the business.

all our ads were disclosed, but ultimately twitter saw it as damaging to the platform - which on reflection I agree with.

the same thing recently happened with infofi.

a wave of tools and platforms that were paying people crypto to tweet about products. it turned a chunk of the timeline into a pay-per-post marketplace where nobody was disclosing that they were being compensated. X restricted API access and killed it

fake UGC farms on reels and tiktok present a whole new problem.

the thunderclap was detectable because it was coordinated, hundreds of accounts posting the same thing at the same time. infofi plugged into x's API, so x could just turn off the tap.

AI-generated UGC doesn't have either of those vulnerabilities. there's no API to revoke. there's no coordination pattern to flag. it's individual accounts posting what looks like a real person talking to camera about a product they love.

the AI is good enough now that you genuinely cannot tell the difference between a real creator and a synthetic one.

one option is requiring content to be signed with cryptographic proof at the moment of creation, verified through the device camera, timestamped, tied to a real identity. i've seen a few people exploring this but nothing solid yet.

we're bleeding towards a dead internet - pretty bleak but im curious to see how platforms attack this.

[the dutchess of bushwick @ktrivs]

a company made an ai generated voiceover of me “promoting” their credit scoring business. now it’s being ran as an ad on tiktok. had no idea this was running until a friend sent it to me.

scary times ahead.