So Long 2020 — And Thanks For All The Fish

2020, we did not see you coming.

You got us good on a number of things that we’re still recovering, recalibrating and rebuilding from.

We faced severe challenges but met them with unwavering determination. Startups are hard, hard to build, hard to finance, hard to manage. Will it beat me, nope, will it shape me, yep.

Challenges ranging from COVID shutting down an entire team and country of operations to outstanding bills to creditors due to funding drying up and having to make the pivot to cashflow generating activities.

The time delays not meeting a range of stakeholders expectations and causing tons of strain on relationships. It’s been hard on team members, suppliers and backers too.

Apologies if you have been caught in the crossfire of all this in anyway at all, and we pray that you are safe in the storm that is 2020 also.

Lessons learnt have been invaluable and a reassessment of what are our strengths as a team and how can deliver on promises has been at the forefront, we will come out of this thriving, it’s just going to take a minute longer than we all thought.

Personally I have taken, wisely or not, personal recommendations from colleagues as very highly important & valuable insights. This got challenged for me incredibly this year when things went south on certain objectives.

Leading me to this major realisation:

As obvious as this might seem for some, it was a biggy for me as in this industry I’m dancing in, EVERYONE is new to the game. Also incredibly interesting learnings around human interactions when building technology where trust is not required, especially the ironic lesson of just how important trust is before the “trustless” technology is complete.

I could write a novel on the lessons from this year alone I swear, I’m sure most people could..

One of the biggest powerful upgrades for us as a team though was to go back to basics of “what is it that we are really really good at?”

In the startup world, you’re meant to blend your time across different things like product market fit, securing capital and creating a movement of people who love your products and can evangelise them.

Upon reflection we found the merit in these actions, but ultimately realised that we are the main resource that will drive these things, so if we didn’t figure out how to get us doing the things from a place of strength, then all our hard work would go down the toilet.

So looking forward to 2021 and beyond we have nailed a go to market plan which we will begin softly rolling out shortly, with a bigger launch early to mid next year.

Startup folks might be reading this and thinking, “you should just launch, then learn, then iterate, then launch again” we subscribe to this notion too, but one of our strengths as a core team is to build things that last, so we go a bit slower than others… We have come to terms with this and thought about ways to build a defensible business model with this in mind.

Inspired by Nassim Taleb's idea we found in his book “Skin in the game” we looked for something from history that has existed for thousands of years and will continue to exist for thousands more. What we found was that people look for hand holding and assistance when doing things they don’t understand.

A classic example is merchants, agents and all sorts of retailers, they have existed for thousands of years, and will continue to do so forever.

In finance there have been financial planners, accountants, stockbrokers and bankers for eons. Just because finance is being disrupted though, it doesn’t mean people won’t still want help from other people.

So we’ve turned most of our attention into training an army of what we are calling “New Money Mentors” to help people get educated, started and empowered on how to use DeFi products to produce consistent, predictable returns. Replacing the tired model of centralized products with decentralized products is still going to require middlemen, but these middlemen won’t be advisors, they are going to be educators who help them understand how to take control of their own affairs.

A cool response on twitter from Andreas about this subject matter also was a neat coincidence to the writing of this article.

These educators will be able to use GrowUSD.com as just one of their tools in their tool boxes. GrowUSD is the diamond amongst the rough this year for us, being able to get that out was super cool, and a great proof of concept of tools to come. The TLDR of GrowUSD is it allows people to get rewarded for helping others get started with DeFi returns in a safe way for all parties.

Grateful for these lessons this year has dished up, as hard as they have all been, look forward to crafting some seriously better results and momentum in 2021.

So long 2020 and thanks for all the fish.