Bluship is back

I've been professionally away, working on things that make me happy. Game development, research, and spending time with loved ones. I've had an itch to revitalize another thing I once loved, and that involves detailing what I want from Bluship next.

Part of answering that means being honest about what brought me into Web3 in the first place, and why I've moved away from specializing in it.

How I got here

My interest in crypto started long before I had any professional reason to care about it. I was using Bitcoin at 17 years old. Nothing substantial. Sometimes practical, like accepting it for odd-jobs in content media production I was involved in at the time. Sometimes for curiousity, and sometimes outright degenerate.

But I was fascinated by the technology.

I remember reading the IOTA and DAG papers and realizing the interesting part wasn't necessarily "internet money." It was what entirely different architectures for ownership, and coordination could be possible.

I read Vitalik's Ethereum whitepaper. And truthfully, I also attempted reading Gavin Wood's yellow paper that followed and realized that reading english and understanding it aren't always the same thing.

The geek in me loved reading about this stuff, but I never dived in. Not until 2022 when I worked for a boutique French Web3 agency and it clicked. I was spending most of my day with founders, creatives and tech-savvy ideations, talking through products, launches, positioning, ideas and business problems.

That is what I loved most about Web3, and the pace was ridiculous. People were willing to experiment. A conversation could start with an idea that sounded completely insane and end with a team actually trying to build it.

Some of the smartest people I have ever spoken with about technology came into my life through this industry, and I don't regret it.

What gave me pause

But I also came away with concerns. Everyone knows the obvious Web3 problems: scams, rug pulls, pump-and-dumps and manipulation. But far in-between is another problem discussed:

Not every bad actor is preying on retail. Many prey on companies, some prey on business partners, and too often investors are misled. Truthfully, I think this doesn't get as much flak as the retail problem because in a way, everybody in this industry is slightly complicit to the problem, and in many instances they directly blur the gray area since they're not the one muddying their hands.

Over roughly two years, I spent thousands of hours speaking with emerging companies, funded projects, founders, executives and personalities trying to reach the broader Web3 consumer.

My biggest disappointment is that the overall standard never matured as much as I expected it to. There were phenomenal exceptions, and there still are. But for every conversation where I thought "this technology may actually change something," there were many more where the execution, incentives, or people behind it weren't at the standard I wanted to spend my career defining.

That creates a difficult imbalance.

An industry can contain people as thoughtful and technically extraordinary as Vitalik while simultaneously creating an environment where opportunists have an enormous amount of surface area to operate.

The former are memorable. The latter are numerous.

None of this means I think decentralized technology is useless, that every project under the Web3 umbrella is bullshit, or that I regret spending those years in the industry.

Far from it.

Some of the most impressive people I've ever met came from that chapter of my career. I learned an absurd amount about technology, sales, positioning, community, business development, product launches, incentives, and what happens when markets move faster than the organizations trying to operate inside them.

But it does mean I no longer want Web3 to define what I build professionally.

The part I actually loved

After being away from it for a while, I realized something pretty simple.

The part I loved was never really the token. It was building things with interesting people.

It was sitting down with somebody who had an idea and figuring out how to make other people understand why it mattered.

• Understanding a business.
• Finding the problem.
• Figuring out why something wasn't selling.
• Making the presentation better.
• Finding customers.
• Building the system.
• Shipping something real.

That part never went away.

If anything, spending time outside of Web3 made me realize I wanted to do more of it, just without forcing every problem through the lens of one industry.

What I want from Bluship next

Not another giant agency.

Not a company pretending it has six departments and forty people behind the curtain. And not another business built around whatever happens to be generating the most hype this quarter.

I'm rebuilding Bluship as something deliberately lean and founder-led. A B2B studio working somewhere between design, growth, strategy and software, depending on what the business in front of me actually needs.

Sometimes that means building a website for a great company whose online presence doesn't do the business justice. Sometimes it means building a better outbound system and creating more conversations with the people who might actually buy. Sometimes it means software, automation or AI that removes a problem entirely.

The category matters less to me than whether the work is useful.

• Websites people use.
• Sales systems that create conversations.
• Software that solves actual problems.

And if somebody hires Bluship this time, they're working with me. That's intentional.

I want to know the companies I'm working with. I want to understand what they're trying to accomplish. I want to be accountable when something works and equally accountable when it doesn't.

I've become increasingly skeptical of work that exists primarily to demonstrate that work was performed.

Good work should eventually become something real. Too much consulting ends in decks. Too much marketing ends in reports.

I have a bias toward things customers can see, use, buy from, or respond to. I care whether it works, not whether it makes a good strategy deck.

What I'm keeping

That doesn't mean I'm suddenly abandoning emerging technology. Anyone who knows me knows I'm probably going to remain a massive geek about whatever weird thing people are experimenting with next.

I'm keeping a lot of what I loved about Web3. The speed. The willingness to experiment. The belief that a very small number of capable people, armed with the right technology, can accomplish a ridiculous amount.

I'm just applying those lessons somewhere broader now. To actual businesses with actual problems.

And after spending some time professionally away, that feels like something worth coming back for.

Bluship is back. Look Good. Work Better.