Console

The first all-in-one community-building platform based on Web3

Web3 - Social
New York - USA

Services we provided

Product Design, Backend Engineering, Mobile Development, Frontend Engineering

Deliverables

Mobile App (iOS / Android) 
Webapp

Team involved

RECOGNITIONS

Community and Matchmaking app 2024

links

Visit website

Get the app for iPhone

Get the app for Android

Summary

Console is the first crypto-native community-building platform. It’s an ambitious project led by the tech enthusiast and serial entrepreneur Chris Castig, who came to Z1 to make his vision a reality. “Discord will be remembered as the MySpace era of the community chat,” he sentenced, to which we nodded resoundingly because we have an instinct to detect ideas that bring real value to the world.

A new and better way to build trust, relationships, and collaboration.

Many of the community-building platforms for educating and bringing in new people are terrible and painful: different tools for different things but the same purpose, scarce or non-existent integrations, privacy-related problems…. Chris Castig was suffering from all of it when he decided to change the situation by putting some people together with the goal of improving the experience of building a community.

“Web3 means a lot of things to different people. But to me, it just means improving the Internet, to give people better rights to privacy and data.”

👈

Hear it!

It was 2021, and the conversations in the tech circles Chris frequented were different from the norm and truly inspiring. He joined Trustmachines, a company focused on building a decentralized economy on Bitcoin and talked a lot about the prospects of Web3. He started revolving around putting the human rights of the user first and allowing them to decide how to create their algorithm.

Minimalism, clarity, and intuition

Operating in the orbit of super solid products like Discord or Telegram, whose users have very high expectations, made it vital to create an excellent prototype for Console. This reality made Chris, ambitious by nature, explore as many possibilities as possible.

We loved his tremendous curiosity, but as soon as we started working together, we narrowed down the product features to launch the first MVP and created milestones so we could get iterative user testing as quickly as possible.

A web2.5 approach

Console started focusing on Web3 communities for the first six months, people who really cared about decentralization and NFTs, and we all learned a lot. Against the odds, from a technical level, implementing the Web3 features was the easiest part of building Console.

However, to reach a broader audience, it was important to open this approach.

Even though Web3 and DAOS felt super exciting, soon we realized there were some technical challenges for the regular user, such as the logins only with wallets, that generated a lot of friction. So we changed the scope to include all kinds of communities, not only the most tech-savvy ones.

This way, we helped Chris stay focused and accurate, tackling the first designs he brought and evolving them to make the product not just beautiful and dreamy but entirely feasible.

“Console is an innovative product that needed to be designed alongside the engineers, keeping always in mind the state of the art of the technology.”

“I'm convinced that you just need to build a product that people love and solves a problem. Then think about the technology, which only specifically users care about.”

👈

Hear it!

Technology alone won’t solve your problems

First, we created the desktop app, later, the mobile version using Capacitor because it allowed us to use the web code base.

However, as soon as the project gained complexity we realized Capacitor wasn't enough. Once we validated the usefulness of the mobile application and as we implemented new functionalities, we decided to rebuild the app using React Native to offer a much more optimal experience to users.

Things are going really well

Console is bringing together all the features community builders were craving, so the team is finding a lot of love from communities coming from Facebook groups, Discord, and similar tools, which, together with their native web3 features, attract a wide range of people.

At the end of the day, Chris just wanted to create a product that people love and that reached millions of users. So far, Console has 10K users (and counting!), and based on the comments they leave in the App Store, we can safely say he has achieved his goals. Congratulations!

hs--, 01/25/2024

Big win! Thank you Console

I love Console! There are so many things you can do with the app like chatting, sharing images, and event updates. So fun that you can create new communities anytime, based on the needs of your group. It’s great that there's a free version and I appreciate that the team plans to open source the project. Seems like a big win for community chat apps. 👍

Brandonjamesmarshall, 01/23/2024

Console is great!

Chat just feels more authentic on Console. I love how communities on Console can filter through the noise compared to other communities on Discord because of its built-in gating mechanics.

I started using Console on my computer with a Bitcoin wallet and was able to easily transition and sign in on mobile, so no complaints there. It’s great getting to be part of the conversation even when I’m not at home!

Jay Spencer, 01/17/2024

Game-changing!

I use this app every day, countless times a day. I sometimes wonder what would happen to my brain if I couldn't use Console. Last year we started using Telegram for communities, but it quickly became clear that I was missing important messages. Telegram also feels overwhelming to me. I get a million pinging notifications and spam.

Console isn't perfect yet, but the beta version is much cleaner than whatever else is out there.

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