Addressing your questions about GoatedGoats…

For context, there have been many recent discussions going on inside our Discord, and a few members summarized those discussions into questions, and these are our answers.

Q: Communication

A: Communication is simple to address; we’ve had a complete lack of communication since June 2022. We fully admit this is unacceptable and will begin scheduling communications and adhere to that approach.

Q: Wtf is going on? Why do you keep abandoning your kids?

A: I’m going to keep this answer brief and more sarcastic just because the proceeding questions are why more targeted and have concrete answers. A lot is going on behind the scenes regarding what the future holds for GoatedGoats and with that uncertainty, there was not a lot to communicate that was confirmed. Whenever we announce something, there’s an expectation that it is to come to fruition, and with that, we have to tread lightly. To list a few of the discussions we were having or paths we were evaluating were things like; switching to Dapper Wallet, bridging to a new chain, and raising an investment round, for a few examples.

Q: How can you not see where people are coming from when they call this project out for being a rugpull/money grab/ scam/whatever you want to call it. Are you going to talk for a week then disappear again or is GG going to be something? Again, this all boils down to communication failure.

A: In our opinion, rug pulls/scams involve anonymous people seeking to exploit people for money. We are not anonymous and did not lie about what we set out to do here, but where we did fail was not delivering on our commitments here. Great examples would be the 1 of 1’s, custom traits, and connective tissue of Flow (which I go into greater detail on below), to name a few. There will be no more disappearing, but there will not be consistent daily participation from any of the founders, including myself, in the general chat channels. Instead, there will be more consistent and meaningful updates on a scheduled basis, including updates on the progress of the next steps, conversations around the future and long-term goals, and more interaction from me overall. To sum it all up, not daily but consistently on a weekly and monthly basis. However, I will be available daily, just not actively chatting or in a voice channel unless something comes up.

Q: You are not big on providing updates because there’s not a road map, things change, have to pivot based on what is or isn’t working, shit happens…we all get that and fully understand. Being silent is the ultimate red flag. Your fear of updates has turned into exactly what you didn’t want to happen.

A: I agree here; the feeling of not having a concrete update and also not having a roadmap have hurt our overall ability to deliver. When you are constantly pivoting or having to explore new paths just to survive as a project, you get pretty disoriented. I think this is where we lost a lot of the original goals we set out to accomplish, and any ability we had to communicate was now diminished. I don’t want to share when I’m failing or even ask for help, and that’s a problem, and that is something I openly admit.

Q: Why did Ownage bail, or is he still around? Is there an artist?

A: Ownage didn’t bail; his studio lost the main artist who led the art direction for GoatedGoats. That hurt us tremendously as there were cascading fall out from that happening. Owange now had to find a new main artist to fulfill his requirements and the GoatedGoats. This has led us to explore new options; most recently, we contracted Concept Art House for a set of traits and are still working to find the right artist from their team to move forward with.

Q: Where are the other founders? What are they doing? Are they still around? Are you a 1-man team now? Why aren’t they communicating?

A: They are all around and handle different aspects of the business: for example, financials and legal or growth and game development. I’m one of the few comfortable with being public and enjoy interacting with the community; therefore some of my responsibilities are Discord and socials.

Q: Announce what happened with the dev team that bailed. Is there a new dev team? How many people are on the dev team? Is there not going to be a dev team until there’s signs of a potential bull market?

A: To be clear, the dev team did not bail, Zay.codes were acquired by Dapper and were no longer allowed to work on any outside projects. There are currently two people, plus me, on the entirely in-house dev team. The breakdown of that team is one backend/smart contract engineer, one only backend engineer, and myself being frontend focused. Being an active FE engineer also straps a lot more of my time for some added context.

Q: What is the deal with custom goats/traits/1/1's/Elder traits? Dead? Not possible? Refunds? People spent a lot of money on those, you owe it to them to communicate what is going on.

A: I’ve communicated with the owners of one-of-one’s goats, and there’s a discussion to be had there about timing and what a refund could look like given the price of Flow token then versus now. It’s possible but will take some time to get the new artist/team up to speed on those. Regarding the traits, we plan to get that ball rolling as that is fair and less difficult than making a brand-new goat design. There are also about 50 traits that were done by the original team, including some customs that have yet to have been released.

Q: You say you felt like the NBA challenge wasn’t well received and that it was ran well…how was it not well received? How was it ran well when people had to ask about what traits needed to be equipped an hour before game time? How do you think it could have been better? The concept was awesome, and people spent a lot of time setting their goats knowing that it was going to help the project build. Unless I missed it, there’s still 700+ flow in rewards that should have been distributed btw.

A: The easiest way to talk about the difference between how it was received was expectations. The users interacting assumed or expected that it was a final product. We, as a team, were operating that challenge as a very rough MVP. The equipping and tracking of that worked incredibly well, the points system was flawless, all of the underlying infrastructures worked reliably. Was the frontend or Discord excel sheet screenshot messages the best way to do that? Absoluitely fucking not. I also had to lock games. While that did work without issue I had to manually do it that is what caused a PICNIC problem (problem in chair, not in the computer). I wasn’t always on-time or at a computer to do it. We can all agree that the equipping was tedious, but a “quick pick” solution is already done to address that. Lastly, the excel sheet screenshots were just flat-out jank. The remaining 700 FLOW was intended to be for goats and trait packs worth that in equal value. That is still in the work queue for the art side of the house and hopefully will be distributed one day.

Q: What are the short-term goals for the GG team?

A: Revive, begin rebuilding, and reconnect with the people here. How can we move forward and make something exciting out of the dynamics we created here.

Q: If you are in survivor mode, say so and put it out as an official announcement and include what this means. Projects on hold? Building in the background on X,Y,Z? Where do you make this announcement? Idk. You don’t like discord, the update tab was deleted, you’ve talked about having communications directly on the website or through another platform since GG started but nothing ever came of it. Pick a platform for announcements and make it happen. If you can’t make it happen, ask for help and have someone who cares make it happen. It can’t be done if you don’t communicate though.

A: We are not on hold; we have the funds and motivation to build; it’s more so a question of what and where. I agree we need to pick a platform that’s not Discord for official announcements. We decided on a blog (medium or our own) that will contain updates in long form with video/audio embeds. These will then be shared inside a Discord channel as links. We will also share smaller updates in a channel aptly named updates.

Q: Why do you only come out of hiding to defend yourself? If I didn’t call you out on Graffle would you have just sat silent for a few more months? Should you defend yourself? Absolutely, you have a reputation, but get the root cause of why you are needing to defend yourself and address the issues in an official announcement, not half-assed excuses in the chat where it will only be seen for 30 seconds. You would have nothing to defend if you just communicated and were honest about what is going on. It’s simple.

A: At some point, it just became too much to look at, and when I came back and scrolled back, it all culminated in a desire to respond, so I did. Graffle has done nothing but helps the ecosystem grow, and there are far more people who contribute to that project than just me to call it a scam when no one here has reached out to the project leaders who use it and asked how vital it is all that just felt misdirected anger. Be angry with me, the team, and the failures of GoatedGoats but don’t take it out on others who use a service that’s provided for free just to help them get off the ground. There’s never been a single person of the 200+ developers who use Graffle that have had a problem with us or the service; therefore, why lump it in? Again I’m reiterating why you would cause those businesses who are already struggling to struggle more with technical debt and, ultimately, money by calling for them to stop using Graffle.

Q: Connective tissue of flow?

A: Honestly this was the dream and it was crushed by the lack of things to connect or overall movement in the ecosystem away from non-custodial wallets like Blocto. There wasn’t the expansion of the ecosystem we expected. We need to seriously re-think this as the main goal — especially given the current situation here, on Flow as a whole, and the crypto economy.

Q: What can the people do to help that are still around?

A: I’m not sure how to answer this yet, this is a huge start though as it’s important to hear from the people who care the most but also feel the most hurt. We should probably get on a voice channel at some point in the near future and discuss this question more in-depth.

Q. Connective tissue of Flow as an idea should probably be abandoned UNLESS gg goes Dapper route. Going DW would probably impede any development and progress, since I assume they’d want to review smart contracts etc. Being on DW clearly is no guarantee of any support or success either. If you do go DW I suppose there can be some conversation around becoming that ‘connective tissue’, but otherwise I wouldn’t bother, there ain’t much to connect to.

A: We agree the majority of the ecosystem exists inside the Dapper Wallet, and with this goal in mind, it feels only natural to adopt it. I will caveat this with the fact that DW has restrictions/sanctions in certain countries, so we must think that over carefully.

Q. One key point I haven’t seen you mention is the Twitter presence. I think it’d be a grave mistake to not have a presence, where ultimately vast majority of Web3 people hang out.

A: Twitter is tricky for us, and this is our fault. We were running all those giveaways, which inflated follower and interaction numbers. So I will say this now; our Twitter will be deleted and restarted fresh.

Q. As for Ownage: I remember you saying before that “Ownage is not just a prankster but also a great graphic designer” or some derivative of it either here or in Fuse. I don’t have a screenshot of it but I have pretty good memory so I don’t feel like I’m making it up. If I am correct then it does feel like you’re not being entirely honest here or you weren’t entirely honest before in the way you framed Ownage’s involvement. Either way, I understand you guys have a personal relationship so you might simply not want to throw him under the bus, but it wouldn’t sit well with me if I didn’t raise it.

A: Ownage does not do the art for his show nor the GoatedGoats art as an individual. OwnagePranks is a business with employees; the lead artist and the supporting team there are the ones who executed the art requirements for us. Ownage (the person) you heard speak, lead creative direction, and managed deliverables from his team. We tend to think of YouTubers as single people, but there are large teams behind what they all do.

Q. How viable realistically is it for this project to pivot to a different chain? Like we’re not talking about moving a simple pfp project. Gg has so many moving parts that Cadence specifically allowed to build. You said you have a smart contract dev on board now, but that’d mean they have to learn a whole different stack and then basically implement that stack’s version of an incredibly complex project (that gg certainly is) on another chain. It sounds like a gargantuan task imo, if possible at all considering the mechanisms behind gg.

A: Realistically, it can happen. Do we want that to be the outcome of the situation here? Personally, not really. We had a call with Dapper today and believe there’s still a future for us here.

Q. You’re obviously deeper in the Dapper streets then everyone here, so have you heard any rumours about Flow NFTs being available on OpenSea? Dapper being an investor would imply that it’s inevitable, or am I just deluded. Either way that’d potentially bring more eyeballs on the project so, warranted it’s positioned well, good marketing could make this a success.

A: Purely speculating from my side, the OpenSea integration will be Dapper Wallet-enabled NFTs only. I believe they made the announcement public last February, so I don’t think there’s any delusion from your side here. If this is to come to fruition, it would be in all of our best interests to be on that boat.

Q. I know not everyone owning a 1/1 goat/traits has been approached for a refund (if those people choose not to raise this publicly that’s their choice, but again it doesn’t sit well with me to pretend I don’t know that it’s not true). As for the refund itself however shitty it is considering, I think it’d be unreasonable to demand of you to refund anything other than the exact Flow amount a person paid. I mean, if the Flow was $20 now and you refunded the value paid originally in fiat it’d be an uproar that you kept the difference, right? Nonetheless, you should definitely make the biggest possible amends to those people who put the most trust and capital into you and this project. However you do it is none of my or anybody else’s business, but it’s the right thing to do.

A: Most of them have been reached out to, and all the individuals I have spoken to want the one-of-ones delivered. If I misspoke and said all of them explicitly, that’s my bad and not true. You are correct; the price of Flow changed drastically, which influenced our actions or lack thereof.

Q: What you said the other day about using my idea and asking me what I would want in exchange for it was just weird. You were clearly trying to get me to say that I think I should be paid for it. My ideas were always free, I did clearly state before in Fuse though that if I was to be involved in any execution that I wouldn’t do it for free. Why? Because it’d require my time and effort and guess what: I value my time. I really don’t think that was unreasonable.

A: This seems personal but happy to address it. I wanted to know if your headspace had changed since you were less optimistic about the project’s general direction. Everyone should value there time, even if it pertains to just sharing ideas.

Q. Ultimately, I’ve met some of the best people in this discord and a lot of them are holding 5-figure bags of goats. I don’t want to see this fail, but also I won’t sit around pretending everything is fine, when it clearly hasn’t since pretty much mint. You made the first step of acknowledging a lot of it and taking some responsibility, but I will always appreciate actions infinitely higher than words. I really hope you’ll get this right LAMB and will make this project what we all thought it could be.

A: I don’t think anyone is pretending my words fixed anything; they may have settled some nerves. But what I do believe and feel is that people are hopeful we can rebuild. I can’t entirely agree that it’s been all bad since mint. There was still plenty going on until May or June this year. Believe me when I say I understand actions speak louder than words, and that’s why we plan to move fast and share short-term goals by the middle of next week. That way, you know and can hold us accountable for what we want to complete by the end of the year.