The author of this article is @0xmeme4fun. Meme4fun is a meme platform on Sol. All opinions only represent the author's ideas.
Why do you want to copy pump.fun?
Starting a business itself is an extremely risky thing, with a 99.9% chance of failure. Choosing the right track will increase the probability of success by 10 times (the success rate is as high as 1%). Is pump.fun the imitation market on this track?
My answer is of course yes. From a business perspective, the current competition in the meme launch platform is insufficient. Pump.fun is the only one in the market. No product doing similar things, whether it is SOL or EVM layer2, can reach even 1/10 of the market size of Pump.fun. No one would believe that this would be a monopoly market.
The competition in the pump.fun clone market is one order of magnitude less intense than that in the past dex/layer2. Judging from the competition in the nft marketplace, it is far from fierce enough. There is still a lot to be done.
From a product perspective, pump.fun currently does not have enough motivation to make many people carry out vampire attacks without issuing coins. The rest will be discussed below.
VC Financing Environment
Insufficient competition and a large enough market are also the reasons why VCs are willing to pretend to be looking at this track.
But in addition to pretending to be watching this track, VCs are also pretending to understand memes and pretending to play with memes.
Here are two explosive theories:
- Among the current mainstream VCs, the proportion of investors/analysts who have bought any token on pump.fun is probably no more than 1%. The proportion of VCs who are actually participating in the meme is less than 5%, and basically none of them participated in the early stage.
- The current mainstream VCs pretend to understand memes and play with memes by reading such media articles. The proportion of media editors who seriously experience new products and rush to play with memes is much higher than that of VCs.
Once you realize this, when thinking about financing strategies, the first person you should look for should not be VC, but directly DM the truly participating users on Twitter. They will better understand some of the problems in pump.fun and the entire meme ecosystem.
When your product has something interesting, you will get the most authentic feedback, and the path to community financing will be smoother, let's fuck VC.
By the way, the support of top VCs will only help the operation and implementation of the project in the short term. In the long term, VCs are actually useless.
The Problem with Pump.fun and Meme Eco
The first problem is already clear, and it is very clear when looking at a set of data: 
The "NFT is dead" market has been said for a year, but in the past year, the creators have earned more than 100 million US dollars, and the platform's revenue is also in the order of 100 million US dollars.
As a representative of the new creator eco, pump.fun, which aims to create entertainment content for the new era, had an income of 100 million US dollars in the past. The incentive for creators is 0.5 sol of raydium, and the total fee paid out is in the order of millions of US dollars, a difference of 100 times.
To replace the old product, the new product must be 10 times better. This is the opportunity.
The second question is also obvious. When will pump issue coins? What happened to opensea by looks rare/blur is bound to happen. People follow the meme not only for fun, but also to make money. When will the platform coin recover?
BTW, although Pump claimed in the public AMA that they would issue coins, it is not cost-effective for them from any perspective. Currently, they make money from transaction fees without any effort, and they don’t see any decent competitors. Issuing coins is more of a threat to the teams that want to launch vampire attacks.
The third problem is a long-term solution and also a long-term product planning, which is the content/asset duality of meme. The logic of asset is very clear, but the content attribute of meme itself is ignored.
Currently, various trading bots that rely on trading attributes provide a good distribution of these high-risk assets, and users can easily make speculative decisions based on the data behind the asset attributes.
How to distribute the content attributes of meme itself? These distributions are a bit like lottery, not speculation. A good content is easy for users to make lottery/reward behaviors below $10. The liquidity of the long tail requires a new distribution method. How to build this distribution method will be discussed in the product part.
Which chain to choose
When you have chosen a track, gained insight into some industry problems, and have some financing ideas, when you are ready to start working on it, choosing a chain is the first step, because EVM and SOL are two completely different development models, and everyone has different development resources.
Ideally, I think there are only two chains to choose from, SOL and Ethereum mainnet, because only these two chains have enough meme developers and meme liquidity.
This is similar to how short videos first appeared in the United States as musically and in China as Kuaishou. Only with good enough infrastructure and population can a new creator economy be possible. Other layer 2s do not yet have this condition. Platforms deployed on other chains need to wait for the meme ecosystem of that chain to emerge before they can be successfully built.
Of course, from a business perspective, if you can get the support of a public chain, or directly get investment from the public chain, it is indeed a very cost-effective choice. For a public chain, supporting a meme platform has basically become a must, but from the perspective of long-term product construction, other public chains have an order of magnitude difference in meme population compared to sol/eth.
How to choose core products
Traders or Dev?
Many users, including those who are observing the industry, believe that PVP and high rug/pull are the biggest problems in the current memecoin ecosystem. Whoever can better protect investors will have the potential to gain a larger market share.
This is probably the biggest wishful thinking of our entire industry.
The industry's most explosive applications, from 2017 to now, have always been about how to launch tokens more conveniently and build liquidity.
Traders are well aware of the targets they are trading. I trade not for a refund, but for a 100x return. Therefore, the products for traders are not about how to ensure that the principal is not lost, but about providing as many targets as possible to traders.
The Meme platform should prioritize incentivizing developers, as they are the ones who create new narratives and targets.
In addition, when you crawl all the on-chain behaviors of pump devs, you will find that devs are also traders with higher trading vol.
Do we need to use a new bonding curve or a new issuance mechanism?
How were tokens issued before pump.fun?
You can refer to pinksale here. This product provides very good templates for various liquidity locks, vesting, and refunds that everyone can think of, but why did pump.fun come out?
Because it is simple and direct enough, pvp is not a problem, it is a feature.
Therefore, when using a new bonding curve or issuance mechanism, the key consideration is who are the users you need?
Various mechanisms such as pk/short selling/refund/fair launch are liked by users or those who want to issue coins. 
In terms of bonding curve, there is actually a product that does a great job, vv.meme. Anyone who wants to study new distribution methods should check it out.
We are also studying whether the new distribution method can add some fair launch models in the PVP process. The current reality is that we have not found a better solution than the current bonding curve, including ourselves. Our future new solution may only provide users with a new option.
How to motivate in the long term?
Currently, the graduation rate of pump.fun raydium is about 1%.
After raydium graduates, the probability of rug&pull should be as high as 99%, and the first batch of profit-makers will basically run away. New incentives are needed here to extend the life cycle of graduated memes.
Moonshot’s new product last month proved that users have a demand for long-term construction. They built a new LP reward mechanism, and the meme’s dex transaction fee will be distributed to holders, which is a very good attempt.
This is also the part of our product that we are building. In addition to the incentives for transaction fees, how tokens should be incentivized and how sharing relationships should be constructed and incentivized are all products we are building.
Of course, just like building a distribution mechanism, we need to find out who is the most worthy of incentives both inside and outside the market.
Conception of distribution mechanism
As mentioned earlier, memes have the dual nature of content and asset. How should content be distributed?
In fact, we have already seen that we.rich has made preliminary attempts here. It has actually made basic tags for each meme and used a simple recommendation algorithm.
Unfortunately, due to the liquidity of base and the number of devs, there is not enough data accumulation and it may not be possible to build a complete distribution mechanism.
In fact, this is what pump should build. They should not compete with pepeboost-type trading bots for the distribution of trading assets, but should consider more about how to distribute the content behind the meme. The current daily launch volume of 10,000 memes + the attributes behind the user's wallet are actually enough to try a new distribution mechanism.
A new opportunity may also be here. Building a new meme discovery mechanism by using pump nesting dolls and gathering long-tail liquidity will be of great help to the entire meme creator eco.
Operational choice: build a platform or a creator ecosystem
In the process of deciding to do pump.fun, one of the suggestions that came up was actually to do the plate.
You need to artificially create some wealth effects when the new platform is launched, so that early users (traders) can stay on the platform for a long time.
For example, a meme platform promoted by a public chain had several 10m memes in the first week of its launch.
Some products that try to start a business on the meme platform on different layer2 also follow this idea. I have seen a lot of such social media materials:
"xxx is pump.fun of xxx chain, xxx token is Longyi, you can pay attention to it."
The second material is: "Dragon One is already xx times, Dragon Two may be xxx"
Many people raise funds for this purpose, in order to better acquire early users.
If you recognize that meme is an ecosystem for creators, then artificial manipulation is actually harming the community. The devs and traders on the platform will only consider one question: whether your project has official support. The opportunities for wild growth have been smoothed out. Since there is no official support, go to pump.fun and get new opportunities.
Trading is a way to get positive feedback in the short term, but in the long run you will fall into a trading trap. These platforms now have less than 100 new tokens per day. This is the reason. What is important is not trading, but establishing a mechanism for wild dev to come out.
This choice also determines the future product direction: building a new meme distribution platform by providing tools for more convenient issuance and building community liquidity.
