Hey, it’s me Daniel
CEO and Co-Founder of Tokenise
I wanted to write this blog as a bit of a personal update on all things Tokenise. What’s going well, what’s going badly and the plethora of erroneous things we’ve been doing and learning from along the way.
This is certainly not my first rodeo. But I’ve rapidly been realising Tokenise is an entirely different rodeo. It’s F1 instead of F3. And not in a braggadocious, LinkedIn self-suck “look at me” way. More in the “holy shit I shouldn’t be allowed to drive a Formula 1 car get me out of here” sort of way.
It’s unbelievably exciting. But it’s exhausting and challenging and crazy and about a hundred different other adjectives.
So what’s going well?
We’re growing much faster than anticipated
To give you a taster, we gave our initial version of Tokenise (the MVP V1) to 12 people. Within 3 weeks, we were at 250 users.
No marketing. No ad spend. Just word of mouth and a lightning fast network effect.
I mean in hindsight it’s obvious that it would have happened but we didn’t realise Tokenise was going to catch on this quickly and move from user to user.
When a user jumps on to Tokenise, they create their token model. Then they want to share it.
They share it with investors, team members, community members, etc etc. And then those people share it with their friends and their investors and their team members. You can see how this has resulted in the product spreading like Covid in its initial weeks (lol, remember when we had a pandemic?)
I think the core reason why growth has been so exponential (12 - 250 users is >20x) is because of how good the product actually is. People love it.
We’ve had users credit Tokenise for their conversations with investors. We’ve had users delighted with how the product breaks down what is typically treated as one of the most complex parts of a token launch. We’ve even had users thank the gods for Tokenise.
And all this praise is just for V1. Pressure’s on to not fuck this up.
Something else fun to mention is that our fundraising journey has been progressing considerably better than normal.
For context, I’ve been learning the fundraising ropes for about 2 years now (most of this was for a previous startup that didn’t quite pan out).
And for almost all of that time, I’d been stuck in the classic loop of outreach -> pitch -> get rejected -> back to outreach.
It’s exceedingly painful mentally. You almost have to learn to enjoy eating a rejection burger. Tastes like shit but you have to eat it.
But Tokenise has changed this. Our early pre-seed round was fully committed within 3 days and the relief was astronomical.
For the first time in years, I don’t have to worry about whether or not my startup is going to still be alive tomorrow.
What’s going not so well?
We’re already hitting bizarre scaling issues which is very much a first for me.
This can be framed by the following example.
Just before we launched the first version, a team member raised that they weren’t sure if it was a good idea that we were forcing users to login/create an account via Google. They felt that even personally, they weren’t sure they would sign up if they were sent a random link that required a Google account.
I completely agreed with them. But I also felt that this problem probably wouldn’t be something we’d encounter for at least a few months while we were still in our testing phase with our initial dozen users. The thinking was that the initial 12 users knew me and trusted me so there wasn’t going to be a barrier to creating an account for them even with a Google login. I also assumed (naively) that we would remain at 12 users until we started spending money on marketing (which wasn’t supposed to start happening for a few months post V1 release).
Boy was I wrong.
As soon as we launched, the product travelled beyond those initial 12 users. I think on day 1 that number had already doubled (maybe tripled I can’t remember). One of the 12 users shared it with someone and then they shared it with someone and then they shared it with someone and so on.
Pretty soon there were users who were 4 or 5 people removed from me receiving random links to something called Tokenise asking them to sign up using their Google account.
As you can probably assume, this created friction points and those users were less enthusiastic about signing in.
We’re currently in the process (only a couple weeks of discovering this particular problem) of pushing a change that will totally fix this and should help to encourage more product users.
This captures the “fun” problems we’ve been running into. A good problem to have that’s an affectation of our growth and something that is reasonably easy to fix. Something that we didn’t foresee but seems obvious and (frankly) humorous in hindsight.
Onwards.
What’s been erroneous?
The fact that we didn’t think Tokenise was going to be this much of a hit.
I keep talking up our product like it’s the best thing since sliced bread so you’ll have to check it out for yourself https://app.tokenise.tech/ (I promise we’re safe and it’s okay to sign in with Google).
But to be serious for a moment, this has all been totally unexpected. Like I said at the start of this blog, this isn’t my first rodeo trying to build a startup.
I’ve tried my hand at drop shipping, clothing manufacturing, artist management, garage sale ebay flips, trading, consulting business number 1, web3 chess and a smattering of other little businesses that didn’t even survive long enough to be named.
All failures, all skeletons in my graveyard.
After experiencing years of failure between the ages of 18 - 24 (half a decade of some of the best years of my life that I’ll never get back) as an entrepreneur, I’ve finally hit something that seems to be working (touch wood).
I can tell you with all my heart that my shock is genuine. So much so that pride hasn’t even had time to settle in - I’ve been too busy trying to keep this thing alive.
Not to be corny or anything but if you’re a fellow entrepreneur building something, unsure of whether it’s going to work, keep going. You never know when you’re going to hit that gold vein.
Sometimes we don’t just meet our expectations. We smash so far past them that we look back and laugh at what we thought was possible.
What’s next for Tokenise?
Now that we’ve built this MVP into a solid foundation, we’ve switched over to a rapid release structure where we construct future versions, one feature at a time.
Every two weeks we’re deploying new iterations of Tokenise with optimisations we want to make, bugs we’ve found, new features we want to add or suggestions from our product users.
We expect the next “big release” will be sometime in late Q2. Then there’ll be another big release in Q3 and then Q4 and then so on.
The goal right now is to grow Tokenise into a company that can stand alongside giant financial institutions, both traditional and non-traditional. We’re confident we’ll get there and we’re doing everything we can to pull this off.
If you’ve read this far, thank you.
Your support means the world to us.
Until the next one
Daniel <3