Chasing narratives into dead ends

Founders in hype-adjacent industries face a specific kind of FOMO that has nothing to do with missing parties. Or at least nothing to do with real ones.

The industry on social media often feels like it's throwing a party without you: the trending tweet, the funding announcement that repositions your market, the open-source drop that makes your work look late. But the FOMO that derails products isn't about missing an actual gathering. It's the fear that someone else's narrative is about to become the market's default frame, and that if you don't react immediately, you'll be left behind. It feels like strategic urgency. It can be indistinguishable from good market awareness. And it leads, reliably, to dead ends.

There are two ways a narrative can break your product. The first is constructing your own and insulating it from reality: the long-term vision that never gets tested, the roadmap sustained by token price rather than product truth. The second is the opposite: abandoning your own narrative to chase someone else's. Both traps lead to the same place, building for a fiction instead of a customer. But the second can be more seductive, because for a brief window it feels like you're doing the right thing.

The Ordinals rush

In early 2023, Ordinals emerged outside the Stacks ecosystem. Bitcoin-native NFTs. A new primitive. And almost immediately, the Stacks community, including us at Leather, saw an opportunity. Ordinals represented a "Bitcoin Web3" meta-narrative to which we could tie our own Stacks narrative. If Bitcoin itself was becoming a platform for digital assets, Stacks' positioning as the smart contract layer for Bitcoin suddenly had a powerful new proof point.

So we jumped. And something curious happened.

After months of building toward the long-term Stacks roadmap, where there was no external feedback, no inbound demand, just the internal conviction that the infrastructure would eventually matter, we were suddenly building features that people were actively asking for.

The contrast was intoxicating. We were rising to meet inbound demand instead of trying to create it outbound. Engineers who had been grinding through protocol upgrades with no visible user impact were now shipping wallet features that people on Twitter were excited about. It felt like finally, after the endless theoretical roadmap, we were building something real.

We mistook an externally generated narrative for market demand.

The first wave with basic Ordinals support, displaying inscriptions, and enabling transfers felt good and right. We were shipping fast, people were using it, the feedback was immediate. I took a red eye to the US and worked through the entire flight to get features out.

Then BRC-20 hit. A single developer named domo had created not just a token standard but his own narrative around it. UniSat, a wallet that had appeared out of nowhere to serve the Ordinals wave, embraced BRC-20 before any other wallet provider. And suddenly we were scrambling again, not to serve a need we'd identified, but to react to a second trend layered on top of the first.

That second wave was the telling moment. The first had felt like genuine product development. The second made it clear we were trapping ourselves. We weren't building toward anything. We were chasing every car that passed.

I remember a particular Sunday, working from my relatives' house while on vacation, trying to complete BRC-20 support to ship Monday morning. Xverse shipped theirs that Sunday, a non-standard weekend release to get the edge. And I realized we were in a reactive sprint with no finish line. Every new micro-trend would generate the same urgency, the same scramble, the same feeling that if we didn't react immediately, we'd lose our position forever.

We had traded one narrative problem for another. The Stacks roadmap had been a narrative insulated from the market: too long-term, too theoretical, no real feedback. Ordinals gave us the opposite: a feedback loop that felt real but wasn't ours. We were getting signal, but it was someone else's signal. We were building for excitement we hadn't generated, serving a community we hadn't cultivated, on a timeline someone else controlled.

The mirage of inevitability

What made the Ordinals rush so seductive was the ambient certainty. Everyone in the ecosystem treated these trends as unstoppable. The trajectory was up and to the right. The technological frontier was real and permanent. People who questioned it were mocked as non-believers. The social dynamics were high school in the most literal sense: you were either in or out, cool or irrelevant, shipping fast or falling behind. The FOMO was totalizing. It felt strategically justified.

Now, in 2026, we can see it with complete clarity. The make-or-break urgency was a mirage. The inevitability was a collective projection.

Ordinals and BRC-20 may yet find durable value; that's not the question. The question is whether that specific moment, that specific frenzy, was the decisive juncture we all believed it was. It wasn't. The companies that "won" the Ordinals race didn't win anything lasting. The ones that "lost" it weren't destroyed. The entire frame of zero-sum competition for narrative position was a fiction generated by the echo chamber itself.

Every hour I spent on that red eye, every Sunday at my relatives' house, was time allocated by someone else's narrative rather than my own conviction about what mattered.

The pattern followed me

I left the Stacks ecosystem last year. I'm now building Neotoma, a truth layer for persistent AI agent memory. Open source, no token, tight feedback loops with real developers. Different industry, different incentives, different game. Or so I first thought.

The industry mechanics and my own psychological patterns followed me. The triggers arrive through my phone, usually via well-meaning friends and contacts who think they're keeping me informed. Over the past few months, each one has produced the same visceral jolt I felt in the Ordinals days.

A contact sends me a tweet from @contextkingceo: "We've raised $6.5M to kill vector databases." HydraDB has funding, a punchy thesis, and the kind of confident positioning that makes the memory infrastructure space feel like someone else already owns it. My chest tightens. I start mentally drafting a response. Not a product response, a narrative response. How do I position Neotoma against this framing?

A WhatsApp message links to a VentureBeat article: "Google PM open-sources Always On Memory Agent, ditching vector databases for LLM-based consolidation." The sender adds: "This might be the storage system you need." Google. In my space. Open-sourcing a memory agent. The implicit message: the big players are here now.

Another link, same channel: Anthropic announcing that Claude's memory feature is now available on the free plan, with import and export. The platform I'm building on top of is shipping its own version of the capability I'm trying to provide. The sender meant it as validation that the space is real. My nervous system read it as the platform eating my lunch.

And then, on a Sunday morning, a tweet from the creator of OpenClaw about Lossless Claw, a context management plugin for persistent memory. The overlap with Neotoma exists at the level of the word "memory," not at the level of architecture. But that didn't matter. What my threat system registered was: someone else has narrative momentum in my space, and I'm not part of it.

Every time, the same sequence. The jolt. The urge to investigate immediately. And then the most dangerous part: the mental drafting of reactive content. How do I position against this? What terminology should I adopt? How do I insert myself into their conversation? It's the same gravitational pull I felt with Ordinals, wearing new clothes. And it's driven by the same FOMO, the same sense that if I don't respond to this narrative right now, I'll be left behind.

The AI developer tools ecosystem has its own version of the dynamics I experienced in crypto. The same influencers have migrated, carrying the same playbook: the "JUST DROPPED and it's HUGE" tweet cadence, the shoutout walls, the GitHub stars as social proof. The attention economy didn't disappear when I left crypto. It just changed venues.

The temptation is identical: this narrative has momentum, these people seem excited, this feels like inbound demand, I should position myself relative to it. And the lesson is identical too: that signal belongs to someone else. Chasing it means building on their timeline, for their audience, in their frame.

The two traps

I described the first narrative failure mode in the previous essay: insulating your own narrative from reality. The second is its mirror image: abandoning your own narrative to chase someone else's. Both end the same way. You never develop a real relationship with your own customers. In the first case, you dismiss them. In the second, you never find them, because you're too busy serving someone else's audience.

The seductive thing about the second trap is that it temporarily provides what the first trap lacks: a feedback loop. After months or years of building in the narrative vacuum, the sudden rush of external validation feels like water in a desert. You mistake the relief for product-market fit. But it's borrowed signal. And borrowed signal has a term limit.

The alternative

The answer isn't to be anti-narrative. It's to construct your own and pair it relentlessly with real feedback from specifically targeted customers.

With Neotoma, I'm trying to keep my narrative explicit enough that I can test it against whatever's trending and see the difference clearly. When the next wave comes (and in AI infrastructure, the waves come fast) I ask myself: does this change my thesis, or does it just generate anxiety? Is this a customer need I should respond to, or a narrative I'm being pulled into? Am I advancing my own frame, or inserting myself into someone else's? The work isn't only intellectual. It's partly psychological recalibration: learning to feel that difference in my body, not just think it, so the jolt doesn't automatically become the urge to react.

A few heuristics I'm trying to apply: if I'm writing about something I saw this week on X, I'm probably reacting. If I'm writing from something I've been thinking about for months, I'm probably originating. If the post would make just as much sense without referencing any trending topic, it's mine. If it requires the reader to know what someone else said first, it's a response.¹

I'm evolving my narrative through its own feedback loop, not through reactive absorption of whatever's loudest. What my actual customers tell me matters. What's generating engagement on social media doesn't. The loudest conversation is rarely the most important one.

Looking back at the Ordinals rush from three years' distance, the clarity is total. The urgency was manufactured by the echo chamber, and the inevitability was a collective hallucination. The companies that scrambled hardest didn't win anything that lasted. And the time I spent on red eyes and Sunday sprints, chasing someone else's narrative, was time I could have spent building a genuine relationship with the people who actually needed what we were making.

The party is always louder than the work. I'd rather be where the work is.

This post is itself a reaction, though one I'm trying to use to understand the larger pattern, not to position Neotoma into someone else's narrative. ↩

Ключевые выводы

The Ordinals rush

The mirage of inevitability

The pattern followed me

The two traps

The alternative

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