Menlo One Token Sale Success Part 2
We’re happy to announce the completion of our token sale. Menlo One is making a framework to make decentralized applications faster, more user friendly, cost effective, and easier to build. The ONE™ Token is a utility token which powers all of the transactions within our framework. Over the last 12 months we’ve been building software and selling tokens. This is our story.
Part 2 of a 3 part post.
Part 1: Token Sale Metrics
Part 2: Retrospect
Part 3: Why decentralize anything in the first place?
Menlo One Token Sale Retrospect
I’ve been in crypto since shortly after the dawn of Bitcoin, but didn’t get involved fulltime until 2014 when I became fascinated by the power of smart contracts. I spent roughly 2 years with colleagues developing blockchain voting systems and decentralized database solutions, though I think we were a bit too early. At the start of the ICO boom, I teamed up with my friends at Ark to help companies launch token sales. We advised over 20 companies with millions sold under our advisement. I noticed how every company I worked with was experiencing the same problems launching ICOs. I realized an easier and more secure marketplace was needed to accelerate the growth of the space.
In October 2017 I wrote a whitepaper for a “decentralized ICO marketplace” which incorporated the years of blockchain R+D into a consumer facing product and started work on it shortly thereafter. Disintermediating the sale and exchange of tokens during the ICO stage would open a world of possibilities for the community. I was excited to have found a business use-case for our decentralized web stack. That December I posted the whitepaper to my private Facebook. I was flooded with messages from friends saying “I love it, how do I buy tokens!?!”. Then their friends messaged me, then some of their friends. We started getting cold emails from executives at major blockchain companies wondering how they could buy tokens. We sold 1,000 ETH of ONE™ tokens over two weeks in January 2018 without me ever having to leave my apartment. It was clear we were onto something.
Freshly funded, I called a bunch of friends and colleagues and asked them if they would like to join Menlo One. I’ve spent a lifetime in startups and I’m fortunate to have a network of talented friends. Within 2 weeks we went from 4 semi-full time developers to 10 fulltime people, and we launched a full force public crowdsale campaign. To build community and get user feedback we ended up launching two major product tours across North America and Asia. Still, the majority of the tokens sold was not the result of in person meetings, but spending time with our network in online chat. I’m already feeling how blockchain technology is going to transform society.
The tours enabled us to meet A LOT of people. The most common bit of feedback we heard was “The ICO marketplace sounds great, I’m really interested in the decentralized web stack that powers it”. People we’re sharing the many types of applications they would like to build with our architecture. Feeling the interest, we decided to white label the technology as a development framework. A little like how Ruby on Rails was born out of their product Basecamp. We realized it was an opportunity to make something with the impact and scale of Rails or Wordpress. It would be silly to limit this architecture to just a single ICO marketplace product. In blockchain we’re seeing developers using the same design patterns, why not formalize it into a framework, and incorporate our research into decentralized databases and caching solutions. Having been in tech all my life, I hesitate to say the cliche phrase “we going to change the world”, but it seems like we have a rare opportunity to do exactly that. Smart contract technology promised us a lot of things that have yet to happen. Blockchain has not lived up to the hype. I think what we’re doing is the missing piece of the puzzle.
When architecting this framework, I wanted to apply object oriented thinking even on the product level. Our goal is to decouple all the components of the framework so they can work together or autonomously on their own. We didn’t want to go the route many projects do by selling tokens without at least having something built. One of the issues many ICOs have is everyone treats them like investment vehicles, except lacking the legal protections. We wanted to have a system for people to actually use the token with, and sell the ONE™ token as a product, not an investment. So in January we began work on the layer of our stack which manages chats, messages, and communication which we call “Townhall”. It was based on a lot of the Ethereum work we did in 2016 so we weren’t starting from scratch. The codebase is deceptively small for the tremendous amount of engineering that went into it. One of our achievements was in optimizing the GAS cost on transactions.
We we’re doing product development in real time along with crowdsale marketing efforts. We could have hit our hardcap of 25,000 ETH to just a handful of private sale within a few months, but it was important that we we’re not just selling tokens, but building the community to actually use our product. In my career I’ve learned the lean startup methodology works wonders. It pays to measure twice and cut once. We ended up pushing the date back twice for this reason, but runway burns faster than most people realize, and it would be pointless to not be building the right thing.
We had Townhall ready for people to use their ONE™ tokens, but we were getting a lot of interest in getting Menlo Core done so people can set up content nodes. So in July we began work on the first dApp built with Menlo One, Block Overflow. We built it primarily as a use case to build out the content nodes, but we wanted to give people something tangible to show what our framework does and how it uses the ONE™ tokens. Plus as developers we always wished Stack Overflow had the ability to just pay people to help us solve problems.
We launched the crowdsale September 17. That month was statistically the worst month for ICOs in over two years. We we’re watching a lot of other strong projects fail to hit their softcap. Despite the fact that it was at the bottom of a bear market during our crowdsale, we still had an influx of people who loved what we we’re doing. Some presale customers wanted to buy more. Still about ⅔ of sales were done privately in the summer. We had hoped that most of our tokens would be sold to the crowd though the smart contract, but the market shifted dramatically in 2018. We would love to see the market shift back towards the crowd, and hopefully our framework will give rise to an easy to use, simple, safe, token buying experience.
Over the course of 10 months we sold approximately 15,028 ETH worth of ONE™ tokens. In retrospect, the most important thing we did during this experience was taking the time to really get to know people and build relationships with them. At the peak our Telegram had over 15k people who all strongly supported what we’re doing. Most didn’t find us though indirect advertisements, but word of mouth from friends. The key to our success was doing things that don’t scale like getting to know people and earning their trust.
Summary
The last 11 months we’re the most rewarding, challenging, painful, joyous, incredible, exhausting, and successful months of my career. I feel privileged to have been able to work with a team as talented and driven as ours. Our small team accomplished what many teams many times larger than ours still couldn’t do. Often weeks would go by where every day we’re putting in 18+ hours each day. Some of us took to sleeping at the office. Never before have I seen a team as dedicated. I think it was contagious. As new people joined they took to our crazy work schedule. Personally I was having the time of my life and could think of no better way to spend this year. It’s not often you feel like you and you friends have somehow figured out how to move mountains.
In that year we saw the good, bad, and ugly of this industry. We encountered our fair share of scammy unsavory characters, but we knew what we we’re signing up for. Our hope was that our tools will help clean up a lot of the scammy nonsense which seems to have overtaken our space. We also met more amazing, kind, thoughtful, intelligent people than we’ve ever met in such a short period of time. Many many people gave is their time, energy, and passion to help our project flourish. Many stood to gain nothing by helping us other than the pleasure of seeing our project succeed. I didn’t expect as many random acts of kindness as we were privileged to receive.
We at Menlo One would like to thank everyone who joined our community, bought our tokens, debugged our code, shared our posts, let us speak, got us VIP passes, introduced us to their friends, gave us tips on good BBQ in Korea, said nice things about us, worked their butt off for us 18 hours a day, or supported us in any way on this journey. Together we all created something more than a better way to build dApps, but the global change that will come of it.
What comes next
While we’ve already accomplished a lot, our work is just getting started. Over the next 12 months we’re going to continue building out the framework to bring it from it’s alpha stage to a public beta. We think the best way to build something people want is to work closely with the people who will be using it. We currently have 5 companies in our Developer Program who are building products with our alpha stage framework. They were chosen carefully as they all represent a wide array of sectors (big data, fintech, gaming, even travel). Over the next 12 months we’re going to continue development, while working closely with them to gather their feedback to ensure we’re solving tough problems for them. Making the “perfect tool” is only accomplished by putting in the time and effort to learn from our users what problems they face and how to best solve them.
We’re going to revise our roadmap and scope for the market. When we began in January our hard cap of 25,000 ETH was worth considerably more in USD than it is now. Unfortunately the dollar is still the worlds reserve currency (for now). That said I think we can accomplish a lot within our budget. And we may still do an equity round.
We’re working closely with our partners to develop solutions which we think will change our industry. We’re going to keep development private until we have a stable releases ready for the public. We wouldn’t be able to work with the crowd as closely as we do with our partners. We’ve personally experienced the pain of using a framework too early when there may still be breaking changes coming in later versions. We want to release tools developers can feel confident about using for years to come.
Our goal is to enable our Developer Program partners to launch dApps built with our alpha framework in 2019. We’re also going to be releasing a few dApps of our own including more updates to Block Overflow. We hope to have a public beta launch of the full framework by 2020 which has been battle tested and ready for the general public to build with. Everything released to the public will be made open source with the goal of completely decentralizing development by letting the crowd drive it.
We’re still accepting partners into our Developer Program. If you would like to completely decentralize your web stack, please email us at satoshi at menlo dot one, and tell us about what you’re building.
