Nov. Recap and Dec. Outlook
Nov. Recap and Dec. Outlook
It’s been a tough, productive, and important couple of months at TIKI. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, excited for what’s to come, and in better spirits than I’ve been in a long time.
It’s been almost 2 months since my last investor update, I aim for monthly, but we’ve been heads-down building product. So apologies, sort of. There’s no better feeling and nothing more important than shipping great product. To this end, November was a smashing success. Team spirits are high; it was the unprompted theme of our Friday sprint retrospective.
As a brief recap, in July, we made a big pivot. Our mission remained data ownership, but we moved from a direct-to-consumer strategy to an infrastructure play.
A few short months later, I’m thrilled to announce we’re live! Our data ownership infrastructure is now available for iOS, Android, Flutter, and Dart applications, with Javascript and React Native shortly following (monster shout out and congratulations to Ricardo).
In under an hour, developers can add TIKI’s decentralized data exchange technology to their existing apps. Bringing transparency, control, and data rewards to their users. Increasing opt-in rates, opening new revenue streams, and minimizing risk for their businesses.
Think Stripe, but for data.
Some of the really cool examples we’ve been talking with businesses and developers about are:
Offering users a discount on a product or service in exchange for critical data, like IDFA. Which post-Apple change, user opt-in rates plummeted from 85+% to ~16%.
Data DAOs/unions as a consent-management vehicle for AI and personalization
Data royalty structures for users and businesses to share in data monetization via secondary markets
New data-driven loyalty point programs enabled by edge-based decentralized tokenization.
As of writing, we already have a handful of companies/projects that have asked to participate in our initial pilot cohort, spanning industries such as gaming, public policy, AI, and fintech. We will select 4-5 to work closely with over the next couple of months to dial in the developer and user experiences.
Now, no holding me to this (trust tree), but I wouldn’t be surprised to see TIKI cross 1M end-users by the end of Q1 ‘23. 🤯 Yes, you read that correctly —10x growth from 100k to 1M. Companies are pumped, and they have sizable install bases. We need to deliver on product.
Words are one thing; I’d like ya’ll to take a look at the product. Head over to https://mytiki.com and poke around (I don’t even think it says “fuck” once!).
You’ll find:
A landing page to get started building with TIKI’s infrastructure
A developer docs portal with guides and references on how to add our tech
4 killer SDKs, including our novel L1 blockchain and L0 services on our Github
A developer console to register for and actually run our DEX
And more than a few easter eggs —take a peek at some of the DAO stuff we’re working on (h/t Barry); it deserves its own blog post, but it’s certainly exciting.
Refreshed branding and messaging (h/t to our talented friends over at ids.company, Vignesh, and always Shane)
Clearly, we’ve been busy.
Now, not everything has gone smoothly (they never do, it’s a startup).
I know this stuff is not typically talked about publicly or in a very sanitized form —everyone’s worried about “signals.” And I get it, but some investors of ours once made a comment about wanting to see the “bad with the good,” that how a team handles adversity is really the signal you’re looking for as an investor. That really stuck with me.
So here’s the deal. We believed we were all systems go on closing a significant seed round of financing, simply waiting on one last final commit. We had stopped pursuing competitive offers because that type of behavior has never really sat well with me. Ultimately, the deal fell through, and we were left with some hard choices to make.
One option was to go back out to the market and fill in the hole left in the round, but that would require pausing our product launch efforts —fundraising takes a ton of time, time that I personally needed to commit to writing code and onboarding customers. Another option was to adjust the round size and valuation —but that’s kind of a half-measure. 75% of the way to series A doesn’t cut it. You gotta get all the way there.
Ultimately where we landed, as a team, dealing in advisors and key stakeholders, was the plan dubbed “Embrace the Suck.” (Thank you, Myers). We made the following hard choices. Looking back, I’m very proud of our team; we killed it this last month.
Got singularly focused on delivering product
Cut back team salaries to bare bones.
Paused/brought in-house efforts with 3rd-party service providers (UX, Accounting, etc.)
Pulled offers we made to some amazing people who were going to join the team post-raise (this one hurt the most)
Scale back any fundraising efforts to strong-fit-only opportunities (<20% of my time)
Sign up pilot customers
This put our burn at a modest ~$25k/mth, with a runway of 9 months heading into December. Focusing on product and onboarding customers puts TIKI in a position of strength; we have the runway and resources to do it. Embrace the suck.
If you want to hear more, check out the podcast Shane and I did just days after making our decision.
One of the cooler moments in the last month is that we’ve actually added two new amazing team members.
Tim O’Guin —help create an open-source/developer community.
Vignesh Sanathkumar —product design and user experience
Without the cash to spend, I was floored by their willingness to jump in and help part-time. Their impact is already visible.
It’s been a tough, productive, and important couple of months at TIKI. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, excited for what’s to come, and in better spirits than I’ve been in a long time.
Choose Better Data
-mike
Content Highlights
Discord Updates
Every week or so, I post a quick and informal update/recap in our Discord —it's kinda cool to see our thinking evolve. The following are from 11/04 to 12/14
11/04
It's been a couple of weeks since I posted an update. They've been an interesting, enlightening, and challenging couple of weeks. Shane & myself just recorded a full podcast on the topic, which we will share next week. For now, I'm going just to hit on a few key bullet points.
As we had hinted at previously, we were in the midst of closing a pretty significant financing round. Then late last week, it unraveled at the 11th hour, which caused us to take a step back and reevaluate plans.
Ultimately, we've decided to stay focused on the product launch and not get distracted by going back out to fill in the rest of the round —as a small team, it's better to do 1 thing great than 2 things mediocre.
The positive is simple: a crystal-clear focus on product launch. There is nothing more important. No excuses, No distractions.
The negative sucks. We've had to pause plans to expand the team, pull offers, and cut some costs/programs that we were investing in. When you've got talented people excited to get involved and bet on you, you want to do everything you can to help them succeed. I wish it went down differently, but right now, we have to maximize our runway to ensure we have the space to make good decisions.
Lessons have been learned, and hard choices made. Please listen to the podcast; this update does not do it justice! Ya'll will start to see a major overhaul of TIKI, content, and even this discord server as we move into product launch mode. For a quick teaser, checkout mytiki.com.
Stay pineapple-y
-mike
11/23
CEO Update. Apologies for not posting sooner. I've been heads down shipping code. So without further ado, here are the recent updates:
L0 Auth service went live (https://github.com/tiki/l0-auth)
L0 Storage service went live (https://github.com/tiki/l0-storage)
Our developer console, which sits on top of both L0 services, went live (
https://console.mytiki.com/)
Our developer docs portal went live (https://docs.mytiki.com/)
Our core SDK (https://github.com/tiki/tiki-sdk-dart) is production-ready (h/t @Ricardo Gonçalves )
Our flutter SDK (https://github.com/tiki/tiki-sdk-flutter) is production-ready (h/t @Ricardo Gonçalves )
Our branding (and messaging) across channels have been updated (h/t @Shane & Vignesh)
What's left:
Get Android & iOS SDKs production-ready. ETA 11/30
Add User & SDK landing pages to the website. ETA 11/27
First demo app. ETA 11/27
Finish user content for the site (blogs/FAQs/etc.) ETA 11/30.
Publish DAO materials. TBD.
OSS contributor process. TBD.
Exciting tidbit. We have our first 3 pilot companies signed up. Stay tuned, and have a great Thanksgiving.
-mike
12/05
Myself and @Ricardo Gonçalves have been driving ourselves nuts for the last week or so to get a reliable and maintainable build process for iOS & Android SDKs. The good news, we've got Android working and iOS looks to be only a few hours away. We just hit publish on a blog about much of how it all comes together. There will be a couple more blogs to follow too! You can check it out here:
As far as other cool news, check out http://mytiki.com/app for a teaser of whats to come on the mobile app side ;). @BOC will be publishing a ton of really cool materials over the next couple weeks on this topic. @Shane has already got several great blogs up on the page.
FYI, I'm going to be updating our discord structure. We're releasing a ton of code and we need to get organized in here :).
All that said, the main thing is, we're shipping code. Good things happen when we release code. First customers will start onboarding very very soon!