New Hires
+2: CPO, Product Marketing Swiss Knife
We’re taking a (short) moment to properly evaluate our needs moving forward and decide which roles we need most, in what order. But I do see a controller in our near future…
- From France. Ginger swiss knife Baudouin (AKA Minion): “Give yourself time, it’s everyone first time on earth”
- Currently in Sweden, Miss Audrey took over the product department for a complete (and much needed) overhaul. I don’t usually speak of myself in the third person and won’t quote myself since I’m already writing the whole darn thing!
Shipping Stuff
Raise your hand if you hate crypto accounting. 🙋♀️
Aside from slashing over $130,000 from our monthly burn rate and landing new grants from Google, Notion AI, Github and Fireflies, we:
- Updated the token and career websites (still WIP);
- Fixed push notifications and other in-app features;
- Updated our methodologies, mission, vision and a bunch of internal stuff I’ll go over in a minute.
Building Stuff
Work in progress:
- Product overhaul: building the web3 foundation;
- Presentable strategy and GTM narrative;
- Token utility (there, I said it);
- Q4 partnerships, collabs and events (Gamescom, Token2049).
Testing Stuff
Despite being new to the Wasder team, Minion has been working with me for… over a year now, if I’m not mistaken. A Gen Z himself, one thing Minion is famous for (aside from challenging my tech stack) is testing new things. His latest gadget is called Obsidian, and boy does he love it! Step aside, ChatGPT!
“Hey there, it’s me Minion!
I’ve been toying around with Obsidian for a month, and let me tell you it will change how you take notes.
Notion is great but Obsidian is better. Notion has limitations, Obsidian doesn’t. Imagine Notion, except you can customize absolutely ANYTHING. Obsidian can be your Digital Notebook, Research Center, Daily Habits Tracker, etc…
My favorite thing overall is the Map. When I read books or articles, I like to see visually how they can be connected. Obsidian does that so well it’s addicting….
Obsidian is open source (something we like at Wasder), and plugins are created by the community on Github.
Obsidian is great for developers, you can customize everything; change the colors, the font, and everything very easily (because you have the knowledge). As a marketer, I don’t, therefore it is harder for me to adapt.
I have recommended Obsidian to some friends and colleagues, and most of them enjoy it more than Notion.
So if you like customization, creating your system from scratch or using plugins, definitely check out Obsidian. It will change your life (I swear)”
Breaking Stuff
I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘Kill your darlings’ as often as I have since I started advising Wasder (around April of this year, although I’ve followed the project for much longer). When Thomas and the executive team asked me to take over the Product Officer role, I had already heard from both the team and token holders that speed had historically been a major issue. Add to the mix the shifting regulatory and economic frameworks and you’ve got a recipe for disaster, or at the very least stage freeze.
A common problem when teams launch their tokens before having a clear idea of how to execute, mind you. A16z Crypto recently wrote a good summary of this catch 22. Resources are spread thin, trying to reconcile a startup budget with delusions of grandeur fed to hodlers by the media, Reddit, Crypto Twitter (Crypto X? Boy, that sounds even worse)… You get the gist; it was a mess. An excruciatingly slow mess, like watching crash test videos in slow motion.
The first thing we did was pause everything that wasn’t directly tied to the core product. The CR01 not getting stamped as ‘Essential’ sparked a miniature controversy (1), but the team was gracious enough to give me three and a half seconds to articulate a mission and a vision that would align both with the original intent and where the market is heading.
The second thing I did was a shell shock and a real leadership test across the organization. Looking at the talent, their performance, level of commitment and grievances (yes, those tend to be connected), Mads and I shifted the whole place around to reorganize the teams into PODs (product-oriented delivery teams). Small, might I say intimate, cross-functional teams with a high degree of ownership and autonomy. What happened next, predictably, was a mix of awesomeness, clarity… and some closure.
“For the first time in maybe 4 years, I know what our purpose is and precisely what I need to do” — Ross
In order to confirm our market positioning and fit, I triangulated a perimeter for the teams to canvas for clues. The known coordinates: Identities, Networks and Play(grounds). I’ll expand later and make sure to add a link here. But for now, teams had their assignments: no matter what their skill sets were and what they’d been used for in the past, they were now researchers and would dig in barely structured sprints until they found assumptions worth testing.
Learning Stuff
Starting this process during the summer had its ups and downs. Increasing velocity of our engineering sprints would have been challenging regardless due to travels, vacations, parenting, etc (2). On the other hand, having to shift people around on a weekly basis added some friction we could have done without. Silver lining: people come together in adversity and some team members who had never worked together before became much closer, developing an understanding and mutual respect for each other that made it all worth it.
I have to admit, I’ve always had a positive bias towards engineers, so it’s no surprise that a few of my highlights came from that group. Patrick, one of our full stack engineers, quickly grasps complex concepts and is able to articulate them on the fly with a level of eloquence that I’ve rarely seen in his profession. A few of us caught ourselves listening to his streams of consciousness with a contented smile.
Meanwhile, Julien flexed both his creative and coding skills after a couple of weeks of doing work that’s completely outside of his comfort zone and created a hilarious mini game for us to play during Friday afternoon wrap ups.
Three weeks in, we failed in some places, confronted the monsters under our beds numerous times and learned to say ‘I need help’, ‘any way I can support?’ and a number of other accountability and ownership tricks that make everyone better and reduce handoffs and information loss.
While I doubt anyone will be switching careers anytime soon to become market analysts or UX researchers (3), we’ve built the foundations of a single source of truth and taught ourselves why and how processes can improve what, why and when we ship.
Random Stuff
Books we read this month:
- The Lean Startup
- The Rules We Break
- Stuck on the Platform
- The Signals Are Talking
- Design For Belonging
- Machine, Platform, Crowd
- The Revolt of the Public
- The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook
- The Warrior Prophet
- Tankar från en Kannibal
- Savage son
- Sapiens: a brief history of humankind
- Journal d’un corps
Things we played with:
- Julien’s mini game, of course!
- MidJourney prompt challenge
- Languages and DotA, as usual
- Zelda: Links Awakening ‘This game’s ending I think gave me my first existential crisis’ — also Ross
- Super Mario 3 & Super Mario World
- Bass & electric guitar
Next Up
- Can you spot Skinny in the wild?
- Notes on quick prototyping
- Meet the Wasder team at Gamescom (Cologne, Germany)
As to the TL;DR of our research and what we’re testing, within which timeframe, what’s next for us and how you can take an active role in shaping our future, join our AMAs on Twitter and keep an eye out for future updates and monthly wrap ups!
Stay curious!
// A.
- Fear not: Skinny’s alive and well!
- Friendly reminder: there are humans at work behind those tokens! 😊
- Fun fact: I was the first in Canada to put together a Masters degree ‘Blockchain Project Analyst’ course back in 2018, for York University in Toronto. Last I checked, they never updated it. This is why (ironically) I never went to uni.
