The Journey Ahead

Thoughts on crypto and what lies ahead for our projects as we continue to grow our users and build during the bear market.

For anyone who is or was new to crypto - you can now safely say you have experienced the volatility and massive swings that have become expected in crypto. We have seen 90%+ Drops in almost every project, purely based on the macro shifts of Bitcoin and Ethereum. This is one of the major challenges of building value in any project. No matter what your project does or will do - you are still very much tied to fear, uncertainty and doubt of two major projects - Bitcoin and Ethereum.

You can see how closely they follow each other BTC and ETH. And where they go, all projects go.

Looking Beyond the Charts

Of course, when we see a massive reduction in price in anything - we begin to ask the hard questions - “What is the utility of this? How will it build value in the future?”. It is during the bear markets when projects have to do the hard work and build real value not only to survive but flourish.

Of course, building “real sustainable value” takes time. If we have learned anything during the wild swings of the last 12 months - is that you can’t judge the real value of a project by the price on the chart. This is why we continue to focus on the business we are building. Unfortunately, the culture of crypto was born from the idea you can 10x your investment in a matter of days - which we all know is not realistic.

What we are Building

When we launched DOOR and subsequently NIL, it was based on the core belief that the Internet will evolve to embrace the technology and models being created with Web3. With DOOR, it was based on the idea of shifting away from monopolistic ad networks, and allowing consumers to be rewarded for their clicks. We successfully launched our DOOR+ app, and are rewarding consumers for clicks as we speak. This is a huge accomplishment in the span on 1 year - and now our focus is to scale.

With NIL we saw the same dynamics with social influencers, where we could reward influencers directly as being part of a web3 oriented network. Both projects embrace the idea of decentralized value distribution. Both are big ideas, and will require a lot of work and time to build.

Challenges Ahead

There are three major challenges we face as we continue to push forward. The first is the fact we are a decentralized project. There are no “full-time employees” or anyone being compensated for their time building the business. It is 100% volunteers. This means we have to operate like any other project (Bitcoin, Ethereum) where there isn’t “dedicated support”. Unfortunately users still expect the same level of support, which makes it challenging.

The second challenge is that crypto is still very, very, very early. We are still in the mode of scammers, fraud and very low adoption rates. This is reflected in the headlines each day. Until crypto makes it through this storm, it is very difficult to acquire new users. Not unlike how hard it was for any Internet company to acquire users in 1996. Everyone knew the Internet would change the world, but that doesn’t make adoption happen any faster. We are currently in a bear market, which makes it even more difficult to accelerate.

The third challenge is acquiring users. Unfortunately due to #2 above, most ad platforms don’t allow for marketing crypto projects. So getting users on our apps requires a lot of work, time and money. The more we try to accelerate user acquisition the cost exponentially goes up. So there is no way to really reach our goals without working within the confinements of our ad channels. As with any startup - it’s not easy.

Progress

Despite the above headwinds and turbulence of the crypto markets, our focus has been on the fundamentals of the products and business. We have be constantly adding to our products as we get feedback from users.

Our focus of acquiring users and making sure they continue to use our apps has been the only focus over the last 90 days. As we grow our user base and maintain traffic to our app - it creates more value for advertisers and content contributors.

Here are stats for the DOOR app over past 30 days.

Users are signing up and we are issuing rewards. This was what we set out to build, and we are see it work every day.

So how do we go from 6,000 users to 60,000 users. This is the million dollar question and what we work on each day. I wish we could snap our fingers and magically make 50,000 new users sign up tomorrow, but that just isn’t reality. Building value takes a lot of work, time and patience.

13 months ago we launched DOOR, and we couldn’t be happier with where we are right now. As the market swings back over the next year or two - we will be in a position to provide access to thousands of users ready to click on ads.