Open Letter to Creators and Builders

An introduction.

Creators and builders —

I’m Will. I’m an NTF, a non-technical founder. Actually, if I had to guess, so are you. As a creative entrepreneur you wear many hats. You’re your own salesperson, growth lead, CEO, brand designer, and more.

Being non-technical in a burgeoning, inherently-technical industry like web3 can present challenges, like imposter syndrome, but I have also realized that it can be a blessing and an advantage. By entering and exploring web3 this early, we are bonded by a responsibility to improve usability and move past technicality at a magnitude that affords the rest of the world the ability to adopt web3 ideals as reality, too. The concepts, in theory, should sell themselves — owning your own data, being free of the holds of platforms, composable interaction between different ecosystems, etc. — but lots of these nascent concepts are still largely promise not practice.

At Decent, our mission is to make NFTs useful, so that any creator and application can harness the power of web3 with the best user experience possible. We have a no-code Creator HQ and management dashboard that is the easiest solution to releasing and sharing an NFT on Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, or Arbitrum. My mission, as someone that wants to make the Decent experience as frictionless and optimized as possible, is to be a teacher and a translator.

I started Decent with the sole mission to empower creators, like one of my cofounders Xander Carlson - a full time touring artist with Palm Tree Records - to have alternative ways to build their brands, own their relationships with their fans, and grow. This vision of empowerment and enablement has not changed. Over the last year the Decent team and I have iterated on our platform, our model, and product in ways that we wholeheartedly believe allow us to create the most impactful, value-creating, and sustainable product for creators and developers, and the future of web3.

While this is my mission currently, my route here (like most) has been far from linear. A quick rundown on my background:

Previous to starting Decent.xyz, I studied Economics and Architecture at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. During the pandemic I cofounded an organization called The Farmlink Project, which rescues surplus produce from farms and delivers it to food banks around the US. In the last 3 years, Farmlink rescued and transported over 100M pounds of fresh produce and won a Congressional Medal of Honor. And with Decent, I was lucky enough to participate and learn in Y Combinator’s W22 batch, and now we have been building for over a year.

Moving forward, I will be sharing more writing, stories, thoughts, and videos with a few goals in mind:

1. Start a conversation. I share my knowledge with the hope that I get feedback and start a dialogue. Where can Decent get better? What are the needs of you as a creator? I want to hear from and talk to you.

2. Be more approachable. Asking questions can feel daunting, especially in a space where it seems like everyone knows everything. I’m learning with you, so please don’t hesitate to use me as a resource.

3. Show how to take advantage of the powerful tools that we are building at Decent. Being non-technical, I also need no-code tools to power my builds on the blockchain. Want a tutorial for something? Let me know.

My experiences as a multi-time founder, combined with life lessons from advisors, friends, and role models (so many one liners from my dad…which I’ll dive into eventually), add up to a wealth of information that I have been dying to share.

As a non-technical founder, my responsibility is you, the creators, the ones our technical team executes for. Reach out, let’s talk. I am excited for this next chapter of sharing, teaching, learning, and creating together.

Yours truly,

Will Collier

Cofounder, Decent.xyz