TL;DR
We must articulate what we could have done better and how we’re adjusting before posting a renewal.
Some improvements:
- We set overly ambitious goals that aimed at inspiration rather than reality. We viewed a 10x volume increase through rose-colored glasses. Better than 100x finger-in-the-wind but needs pragmatism.
- A lack of communal goals across leadership creating accountability friction.
- A constrained process, and way too much saying no. Instead of cultivating ideas with merit and doing more of the leg work for contributors/community who couldn’t see what leg work was needed.
- KPIs were vanity KPIs. How many specs to completion doesn’t matter if it doesn’t convert users. And so on.
Marquee learnings
We spent too much time saying no in Product, instead of saying ‘YES and….’" We migrated our backend twice along the way and completely unblocked what were once huge constraints (chain integrations, wallet boilerplate). I wrote about this extensively in the forum at the beginning of January with austerity looming. Preemptively, I cut my team’s budget and focused us on the actual results we really want to push. I changed our process, and we’re still in the midst of matching velocity without too much overhead.
A lot of heavy conversations (why no acquisition? where am moat? whats even worth spending money on?) is now also unblocked. We ended up having our engineering team triple their commit rate by the end of the year. With four products that are primed for sales mode (Platform, Agent, API, Mobile) I’m even more confident, despite USDC runway constraints, that we will succeed in breakeven or damn near close.
Halfway through the year, I led leadership on a vision quest for goals. We could have accomplished this in less than a week in person, but instead we took 6 weeks. I tried to get us to upgrade our goals, think about our mission, and realistically just communicate more cohesively as a team. It hurt more than helped.
Ultimately, we drove an artifact inside of Figma that didn’t become a new way of executing. Instead of making people feel more committed, it made them feel more disconnected. Combined with the doldrums of the summer market and a recognition that our visitor count and DAUs had just been continuously declining for the better part of a year and a half, we ended up floundering for a chunk of time (IMO all the way into beginning of Q4). The one positive benefit out of this is we now have a crystallized strategy and we have a new mission statement that actually should embody the DAOS perspective, learnings, and strengths.
Leadership did at least rally and align there so, not all is lost!
It’s time for a sea change.
New Mission:
Shapeshift is a community of high quality builders, accelerating access to open decentralized protocols. We are the gateway to the frontier, an open pathway into the borderless financial system.
Strategy:
- Get any asset that you want.
- Earn Yield on anything you have.
- Discover and manage leverage.
- Use AI to automate boring stuff.
- Work with AI as customers.
Products:
Everything we build is with the concept of low maintenance in mind, in case we need to turn anything off. So, apps like Og, or even our agent, are basically free to maintain. This frees our resourcing to focus on expanding the following:
- App
- API
- Agent
- Mobile
Check the renewal for a more strategic overview.
Process:
Initiatives-driven-development.
Built from Prototypes, POC, and or strong business cases. “Why and what” comes form tangible businesses we think have legs, not vague product docs that take forever to align on a weeks worth of engineering plumbing. There is a conversation on what to build and why now, involving everyone who is, well, shipping that.
I no longer ask others to do endless discovery work. Now we ship fast, polish, and reach customers as quickly as possible.
Goals last year:
- Goal 1: Align teams around an ambitious one year vision and ship it
- Done (look at them product lines)
- Done (look at them product lines)
- Goal 2: Iterate & execute on a series of bets each quarter to support the vision.
- Done, however this should have been nested as 1a, it’s the same. but more of a nerdy product operations focus goal.
- Done, however this should have been nested as 1a, it’s the same. but more of a nerdy product operations focus goal.
- Goal 3: Talk to Our Users & Deepen Ecosystem Partnerships
- (FBL will grind for one DM a day and try to assemble a list of 25 users for research)
- I showed signs of life but failed on numbers—I reached only 7 users after sending 3500 messages. This took less than 15 hours of actual effort as all the outbound was automated.
- Goal 4: Refine Retention and Build Towards the North Star
- (north star is : 200 MM month-on-month volume )
- We set an insanely overambitious target. We need to complete the foundational work to achieve quarter-on-quarter growth, then month-on-month growth
- We set an insanely overambitious target. We need to complete the foundational work to achieve quarter-on-quarter growth, then month-on-month growth
- (north star is : 200 MM month-on-month volume )
- Goal 5: Conduct Scoped Beneficial Experiments, Kill Under-performant ones, and remove app bloat.
- Done. we operated on KISS through the summer, shipped a mobile app that actually works, and continually evaluated a new roadmap expansion until landing on where we are now.
- Done. we operated on KISS through the summer, shipped a mobile app that actually works, and continually evaluated a new roadmap expansion until landing on where we are now.
Onwards, lets seize our potential.