We thought we knew who would show up first

Every project starts with a theory of the customer. You have to. You cannot build anything without at least a rough sketch of the person on the other side — their habits, their instincts, their vocabulary, the problems they feel acutely enough to do something about. Without that sketch, you are not building a product. You are painting a wall and hoping someone walks into it.

Our sketch, in the beginning, was confident. Maybe overconfident. We assumed the first people to understand what we were building — permanent onchain addresses for Queensland, owned once, never renewed, never expired — would be the people already living inside that world. Developers. Crypto-native builders. People who spent their days talking about wallet infrastructure and decentralised identity and the long-term implications of onchain naming. These were the people, we reasoned, who would immediately recognise the shape of what we were offering. They had the conceptual vocabulary. They had already made peace with the idea of owning something on a blockchain. They would not need convincing. They would just need to know we existed.

So we spent a great deal of early energy facing in that direction. We thought about how to explain our technical choices to people who cared about technical choices. We thought about the right way to describe the infrastructure. We prepared for the questions we assumed would come: Why this chain? What happens in a fork? How is this different from ENS or Unstoppable Domains? We wanted to be ready for the sophisticated interrogation that, we assumed, would be the dominant mode of engagement.

That interrogation mostly did not come. Or rather, it came far less than we expected, and from far fewer people. The people who showed up first, and showed up most curiously, were not primarily that cohort at all. They were Queenslanders. Ordinary ones. People who had a connection to a place and who responded, sometimes quite viscerally, to the idea that their connection to that place could be made permanent in a new kind of way. A business owner in Brisbane who had spent years paying annual domain fees and quietly resenting it. A family on the Gold Coast who liked the idea that something with their name and their place could be theirs without condition. A person who had grown up in Surfers Paradise and moved away and felt something when they saw .surfersparadise exist as a real, claimable thing.

We had built a product that we thought was primarily a technical proposition. It turned out to be, at least as much, an emotional and identity-based one.

That was the first assumption we had to discard.

The assumption about technical fluency as a prerequisite

Underneath our early customer theory was a deeper assumption: that to care about what we were building, a person first needed to understand the infrastructure behind it. That ownership of a permanent onchain address was a concept that required blockchain literacy to appreciate. That if someone did not already have a mental model for what “onchain” meant, the whole thing would slide off them.

This felt logical. If you have never thought about what it means to own something on a distributed ledger — as opposed to renting it from a company that can be acquired, shut down, or that can simply change its pricing — then why would the distinction matter to you? You cannot value what you cannot perceive.

What we underestimated was how quickly people can perceive a distinction that is relevant to them, even when they cannot articulate its technical basis. Most people do not know the engineering behind a lock and key. They still understand, intuitively, the difference between owning a door and renting one. The feeling of sovereignty — of something being yours in a way that cannot be casually revoked — is not a feeling that requires a technical education to access. It is one of the oldest feelings there is.

When we stopped leaning on technical explanation as our primary mode and started letting people feel the distinction instead — when we let the permanence speak before we explained how the permanence worked — the conversation changed. People did not always need to understand the mechanism first. They needed to feel that the outcome was real, and then, if they were curious, they would ask about the mechanism.

This was uncomfortable for us, initially. We are people who care about how things work. We find the infrastructure interesting in its own right. And there is always a risk, when you simplify, that you are being condescending — that you are deciding on someone else’s behalf what they can and cannot handle. We did not want to be the project that dressed up something complex in false simplicity and hoped no one looked closely.

But there is a difference between simplifying in a way that obscures and simplifying in a way that illuminates. When you own a house, you do not need to understand property law to know that you own it. You know you own it. The legal infrastructure is there, operating quietly in the background, and you can learn about it if you want. The ownership itself is not contingent on your understanding of the mechanism. We had to learn to let our product work the same way.

What ‘permanent’ means when you have only ever rented

This was perhaps the hardest assumption to revise, because it required us to think hard about a failure of imagination that was almost entirely our fault.

We assumed that the word “permanent” would land simply. We used it constantly, and we meant it precisely: once you own an address, it is yours. No renewal. No annual fee. No company that can change its terms. No expiry. The address exists on the blockchain and it is yours for as long as the blockchain exists. That felt, to us, like a self-evidently remarkable proposition. We said “permanent” and expected people to feel the full weight of what we meant.

What we did not account for is that most people have spent their entire digital lives in a rental economy. Every email address, every website domain, every handle on every platform — these things are provisionally yours. They feel like possessions but they are leases. You pay, or you comply, or you stay in good standing, and in exchange you get continued access. The thing that looks like ownership is actually a subscription with good branding.

This is so universal, so deeply woven into how digital life works, that most people have stopped noticing it. The rental nature of digital identity is not experienced as a grievance because it is experienced as a fact of life. The water fish swim in.

So when we said “permanent,” many people heard it through the only lens they had available to them. They heard it as marketing language. As a claim being made about a service, the way a gym might advertise “lifetime membership” or a software company might advertise “forever free.” A strong word in an ad. Something to be mildly sceptical of because strong words in ads have always, eventually, come with conditions.

We had to grapple with the fact that “permanent” is a word that has been devalued, specifically in the digital context, by decades of promises that turned out not to be permanent at all. That Gmail was once “free forever.” That platforms once promised they would never sell your data. That domain registrars once implied that renewal was a formality. The word itself had been eroded.

This meant that simply saying “permanent” more emphatically was not the answer. Louder is not more credible. We had to find ways to let people understand what made this permanence structurally different — not as a matter of a company’s intentions (which can change), but as a matter of how the underlying system works. A promise made by a company and a property embedded in a blockchain are different kinds of things. One requires trust in human intentions. The other is enforced by mathematics and distributed consensus. These are not the same.

Learning to explain that distinction — without drowning people in technical language — took time. We got it wrong, then less wrong, then more right. We are probably still refining it.

But the deeper revision we had to make was this: we had to stop being frustrated that people did not simply accept “permanent” at face value, and start understanding why their scepticism was entirely rational given every prior experience they had ever had with digital ownership. We were asking people to update a very deeply held prior. That takes more than a word.

The assumption about price as a signal

We set the starting price at five dollars, paid once. No annual fees. No renewals. Just five dollars, and the address is yours.

We thought this would be experienced as a straightforward advantage. Compared to the lifetime cost of maintaining a traditional domain — annual fees, multiplied by years, across a lifetime of ownership — five dollars is not just cheap. It is transformatively cheap. We did the arithmetic. We were certain the arithmetic would speak for itself.

What we did not anticipate was how price, at certain levels, works against the perception of value rather than for it.

There is a well-documented human tendency — we did not invent this observation, it is one of the most consistent findings in behavioural economics — to equate price with quality. Things that cost more feel more substantial. Things that cost less feel, at some level, less serious. This is not stupidity. It is a heuristic that is often quite useful. In most contexts, price does carry information about quality. The instinct serves people well far more often than it misleads them.

But it misleads them here. The five-dollar price is not a reflection of low value. It reflects a structural reality: the ongoing costs that make traditional domains expensive — server infrastructure, ongoing administration, renewal processing, intermediary margins — simply do not exist in the same way for an onchain address. The cost is low because the architecture eliminates cost centres that traditional domain registrars depend on. The low price is a consequence of building something better, not something cheaper.

We had to learn to explain the price rather than simply state it. To give people the context that would allow them to interpret the number correctly. Without that context, five dollars sounds like a novelty — something you buy at a market stall, not something you build an identity on. With the context, five dollars sounds like what it is: a function of infrastructure that has removed the rent-seeking from the middle of the transaction.

We also had to confront something harder: that in some cases, the low price was itself an object of suspicion. If it’s so permanent and so valuable, why is it so cheap? Is there a catch? Where is the business model? What are we missing?

These are not unreasonable questions. They are the questions a thoughtful person asks when something seems too good relative to their experience. And we had to take them seriously rather than simply reassuring people that no, really, it is just that good, trust us.

The answer to those questions involves explaining our actual model — that our sustainability does not depend on extracting annual fees from existing owners, that the incentives of the project do not require ongoing extraction, that the architecture makes the economics genuinely different. That answer requires trust to be built over time, and cannot be fully short-circuited by a clever explanation. We had to accept that.

The assumption about place identity and who holds it

We are building addresses for Queensland. Specific places: .queensland, .qld, .brisbane, .surfersparadise, .gold-coast, .brisbane2032. These are real places with real histories and real communities of people who carry those places with them.

We assumed, early on, that the people most powerfully motivated by this would be the people who currently lived there. Residents. Businesses. Organisations with a physical presence in those places. The logic was obvious: you own a business in Brisbane, you want a Brisbane address. You live in Surfers Paradise, you want a Surfers Paradise address. Place-based identity, we figured, was a matter of current geography.

This was not wrong, but it was incomplete in ways that turned out to be significant.

We had not fully thought about the diaspora. The people who grew up in Queensland and left. The people who lived there for a decade and still feel, in some important sense, that it is home. The expatriates in other states and other countries who carry Queensland with them and who responded, sometimes with something that sounded like relief, to the idea that they could hold a piece of it — permanently, immutably — regardless of where they now lived. That ownership of a place-based address does not require residence. It requires connection. And connection does not expire when you move.

There is something in this that goes well beyond domain names, and we found it somewhat humbling. Place identity is one of the deeper forms of human identity. People fight for it. People return to it across decades. People pass it to their children. The idea that you could own something that encodes your connection to a place — not renting it, not leasing it through a platform that might one day be acquired, but genuinely owning it in a way that persists — resonated with something we had not fully planned for. It touched a nerve that was older than the internet and more durable than any technology.

We also underestimated the interest from businesses and individuals who were not yet in Queensland but intended to be. The Brisbane 2032 TLD in particular surfaced a kind of forward-looking ownership instinct that we found fascinating. People who were planning for something — a business, a move, an event-related venture — and who understood that securing a permanent address now, before the domain became culturally loaded with the weight of a global event, was an act of foresight rather than impulse. They were not buying for today. They were buying for a future they could see forming.

This complicated our early model of who the user was and why they were buying. Residency was one motivation among several, and not always the dominant one.

The assumption about how people explain it to each other

We spent a lot of time crafting explanations of what we had built. We tested different framings. We refined the language. We thought carefully about analogies. And then we watched what happened when people who had understood it tried to explain it to people who had not.

The language changed almost completely.

The explanations that worked — the ones that caused understanding to land in a conversation — were almost never our explanations. They were translations. Someone would take the core of what we had said and render it in the vocabulary of the person they were talking to. They would say things like, “You know how you keep paying to renew your domain every year? This is the version where you just own it.” Or, “It’s like the difference between renting an address and actually owning the land.” Or, “It’s permanent in the same way that a Bitcoin wallet is permanent — the address doesn’t go away.”

These are imperfect analogies, all of them. But they work because they connect the unfamiliar to something the listener already understands and has feelings about. They trade precision for comprehension, and in most conversations that is the right trade.

We had assumed that our explanation was the best vehicle for our idea. What we found was that our explanation was a seed, and the explanations that grew from it were often better adapted to the soil they were growing in than anything we had planted originally. The people who cared about what we were building became, in many cases, better advocates than we were — not because they knew more, but because they knew their audience.

This changed how we thought about what we were doing when we communicated. We were not trying to produce the perfect explanation that would work for everyone. We were trying to produce an explanation clear enough and compelling enough that the person who heard it would be able to carry the idea forward and adapt it. We were writing primers, not encyclopaedias.

The assumption about scepticism being an obstacle

We feared scepticism. That is the honest version of it. Not openly — we would have described it as wanting to answer hard questions — but underneath, we wanted people to receive what we had built with enthusiasm and to move past doubt quickly. Doubt felt like friction. Friction felt like a problem to be solved.

This was wrong in a way that took us a while to see clearly.

Scepticism, expressed openly and in good faith, is not friction. It is engagement. The person who asks hard questions about our model, who pushes back on the permanence claim, who wants to understand what happens in a worst-case scenario — that person is not an obstacle. That person is doing us the enormous favour of treating what we have built as something worth interrogating. They are not dismissing us. They are taking us seriously.

The people who were genuinely dangerous to our thinking were not the sceptics. They were the people who nodded along, who accepted our framing without examination, who reflected our enthusiasm back at us without adding any friction at all. Those people taught us nothing. They confirmed our existing beliefs and sent us on our way, no sharper than we arrived.

We had to learn to welcome the hard question. To not feel it as an attack. To understand that when someone says “I don’t understand how this can be truly permanent” or “isn’t five dollars too cheap to be sustainable,” they are giving us something. They are showing us where our explanation is incomplete. They are marking a place on the map that needs more work. They are doing, for free, something that is genuinely difficult to do from the inside.

There is a culture, in some building communities, of treating criticism as something to be managed. To have a response ready for every objection. To absorb the question and redirect rather than genuinely engage. We did not want to be that, and we had to actively guard against it, because the instinct toward defence is strong when you have built something you care about and someone appears to question it.

The discipline we tried to build was this: when someone raises an objection, the first question is not “how do we answer this” but “are they right?” Not “how do we handle the scepticism” but “is the scepticism warranted?” Sometimes the answer is no — the objection rests on a misunderstanding that a clearer explanation resolves. But sometimes the answer is yes, or partially yes, and those are the cases that matter most.

Intellectual honesty in building means not just being willing to say you were wrong after the fact, but building the habit of checking in real time whether you might be.

The assumption about what people would do with their addresses

We spent considerable time thinking about the functional uses of onchain addresses. The ways they would be used in practice. The scenarios we built in our heads were largely practical: someone claims a business address, links it to their wallet, uses it as a human-readable identifier in transactions, builds an identity layer for a website or application. Use cases that made sense to us, that we could describe with precision.

What we underestimated was the dimension of ownership that is not functional at all.

People own things that they do not use constantly. People own things because owning them expresses something, because having them is meaningful in a way that is not reducible to utility. Jewellery that is not worn every day. A surname passed down through generations. A piece of land that is not farmed. These things are owned because ownership itself carries meaning — because the relationship between a person and a thing they own is not only transactional but expressive and even affective.

When someone claims .brisbane or .surfersparadise or .queensland in their name, they are not necessarily doing so because they have an immediate functional plan for it. They are doing so because they want to hold it. Because it feels like theirs. Because there is something satisfying about having a permanent piece of something you care about, even if that satisfaction is not attached to a specific practical outcome.

We had not fully built our thinking around this dimension, and we should have. The desire to own something meaningful is not irrational, and it is not a consolation prize for people who cannot think of a functional use case. It is one of the oldest human motivations there is. We are a species that makes things, names things, claims things — and the act of claiming is not always downstream of utility. Sometimes it is the whole point.

Recognising this changed how we thought about the range of people who might want what we were building, and why they might want it. The domain was not only a tool. It was also, for many people, a statement. A flag planted. A piece of ground claimed in a place they loved, now held in a form that would not erode.

Letting go of the need to be right at the start

The deeper pattern in everything we have described is this: we wanted to have the picture right from the beginning. We wanted our early model of the customer, of the use case, of the communication strategy, of what would resonate and why — we wanted all of it to be correct. Not because we were arrogant, exactly, but because starting with a correct model would have made everything easier. It would have meant less wasted effort, clearer direction, fewer conversations that did not go anywhere.

What we have learned, slowly and with some resistance, is that the model is never complete at the start. It cannot be. You can think carefully and build a sophisticated prior and still be wrong about things that matter, because the system you are engaging with — the market, the community, the culture — has information that you do not have and cannot have until you actually engage with it. The assumptions are placeholders. Necessary ones, because you cannot function without some model, but placeholders nonetheless.

The discipline is not to have better assumptions. The discipline is to hold your assumptions lightly enough that when the evidence starts to complicate them, you actually notice. That you do not unconsciously filter out the data points that disconfirm your model. That you do not explain away the people who do not fit your expected profile. That you let the picture update.

This sounds obvious. It is not easy. There is a particular kind of cognitive pull, when you have invested enormously in something and believe deeply in it, to interpret all new information as confirmation. To see the early adopters who match your profile and take them as representative of the whole. To hear the question that reveals a gap in your model and experience it as a problem to be managed rather than a signal to be absorbed.

We have not always succeeded at this. There have been times when we held onto a picture longer than the evidence supported because the picture was comfortable and the revision was uncomfortable. We are not claiming to have solved the problem of motivated reasoning — we are claiming only to have named it, to have made it a thing we talk about explicitly, and to have tried to build practices that counteract it.

What intellectual honesty actually requires

Intellectual honesty in building is not just about being willing to say “we were wrong” after something fails. That is the easy version — failure is an unambiguous signal, and responding to it honestly requires nothing unusual. The harder version is being willing to say “we may be wrong” while something is still underway. While the team is still behind the idea. While the stakes of revision feel high.

It means building cultures within a team where a person can raise a concern without it being experienced as disloyalty. Where “I think we got this wrong” is a contribution, not an accusation. Where the person who was loudest about a particular assumption is not too invested in that assumption to hear the case against it.

It means being precise about what you actually believe versus what you are performing. There is a kind of confidence that is strategic — projected outward to build trust — that can, if you are not careful, start to infect your internal thinking. You say the thing confidently enough times that you start to believe it more than the evidence warrants. The performance becomes the belief.

It means tracking your predictions, not just your successes. If you assumed something, and that assumption turned out to be wrong, you should be able to say exactly where it went wrong and why. Not as an exercise in self-flagellation, but as a discipline that makes your next assumption more calibrated.

And perhaps most importantly, it means being honest in public — or at least, not actively hiding the intellectual journey in favour of a cleaner narrative. The story of building something rarely looks, in real time, like the story of building something looks in retrospect. Retrospective accounts of successful projects often iron out the doubt, the revision, the abandoned assumptions. They read like a straight line from insight to execution. The reality is messier, more iterative, more genuinely uncertain.

We have tried to resist that ironing-out. Not because we want to perform humility, but because we think the honest account of building something — including the things we got wrong — is more useful to anyone paying attention than a myth of original clarity.

Where this leaves us

We have discarded a lot. The early sketch of who would show up first. The assumption that technical fluency would be the main gateway. The belief that “permanent” was a word that would speak for itself. The confidence that price advantage would simply translate into perceived value. The narrow theory of place identity as a function of current residence. The assumption about what people would do with what they owned, and why.

What is left, after the discarding, is something more honest and more interesting. A clearer picture, not because it is neater, but because it has been shaped by contact with reality rather than imagined in advance of it. A model that has been updated by the people it was trying to describe — which is the only process by which models actually improve.

We still believe, completely, in what we have built. The conviction is not what we discarded. The conviction deepened as the assumptions fell away, because the conviction was tested by the process of revision and survived it. What we believe now is not what we believed at the start — it is more specific, more differentiated, more responsive to the full range of people and motivations we have actually encountered. It is better.

The assumptions we had to discard were not mistakes. They were the scaffolding. They held the structure up long enough for the real architecture to emerge. And like all good scaffolding, the point was always to come down.