zonaris launch and what next?
After our beta launch last week, I will be talking through our wins, misses, and targets. 🎯
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A Promising Start 💪
zonaris Beta went live last week, and node numbers are flying. One of my top priorities for the last 3 months has been to build up our Minimum Viable Community (MVC), which in Web3, is arguably more important than the Minimal Viable Product (MVP). So when our micro-community engaged with our product, our hypothesis that there was demand had been proven, and we were over the moon!
Our community consists of Streamr Wolves, Streamr newcomers, and pre-existing $DATA whales looking to spin up multiple nodes, sometimes in the 30s, 40s, 50s, etc. I have become so convinced by Streamr and its project that I have now decided to become a baby whale. I will start by running 25 fully staked zonaris nodes. Consequently, I am officially putting my money where my mouth is!
The Launch — Dubiously Smooth? 🤷♂️
The launch was by no means perfect, but I don’t think that many launches are. Right now, we’re in Beta. Our community members have been spinning up zonaris nodes on a 30-day free trial and, in return, providing us with invaluable feedback. Listening to our customers, we can improve our product—making it even simpler to spin up nodes and collect rewards.
We did experience a tech issue just after a couple of days of being live. And while we are fixing it, we have put creating new nodes on pause. This issue has been isolated, and it’s to do with load balancing (not working as intended) — and we are working on fixing it. It is a small delay in fully ramping up for launch, as node numbers were flying, but we move on. They will start flying again and we will learn from our mistake so that something like this doesn’t happen after Beta.
My key takeaway? No matter how much pressure you have to launch, never do it on a Thursday or Friday. Instead, do it on a Monday so you have the whole week to fix things if they go wrong! Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been told by my seniors!
This will be the first of probably a few hurdles along our roadmap, but we wouldn’t learn and remain strong otherwise. Our experience will guide us at the next node project launch, to be even better, and then become even smoother for the next 20 projects, so that by the time we get to our 50th project, we can be so smooth and effective that the hype will be uncontrollable!!
My New Role — Product Owner 😊
My two quotes I will live by in this role are both from Peter Thiel’s Bible book, Zero to One (a common theme in my blogs).
“Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.”
“If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.”
Our product does not “just follow” existing NaaS businesses—we will have a truly unique and unrivalled product and UX!
Manifestation: zonaris will escape the competition and create a monopoly in the $300 Billion+ Staking Market.
I have been given the task of owning the zonaris product. To succeed in this position, I must be able to thrive in the current scrappy, “cold” environment and be comfortable with ambiguity and frequent changes and tweaks in direction as the company works towards product-perfect market fit and starts scaling.
I am responsible for marketing, support, and sales of the product.
In order to be successful from the get-go, I want to incorporate a product/engineering partnership philosophy that will be the most effective route for the growth of zonaris. I have to be transparent with our engineers and vice versa to create a strong yin-yang with joint discovery, decision-making, and shared accountability.
Below is an ambitious but achievable roadmap that I have drafted.
Acknowledgement — Streamr and Community 🙏
Streamr and their community have been incredibly supportive, and we wouldn’t have got to the point of launch if it wasn’t for all the conversations and Discord chats with the many unofficial/non-executive zonaris directors! A big shout out to Mark, Bonjovo, BenjaminFrenklin, Ironbridge, and all the others who’ve helped us along the way.
Target — 1,000 nodes by 15th November 🎯
This is an ambitious and aggressive target. However, all we need is a few more whales to start staking and running 50 nodes each — then we are there!
If you are still reading… I am hoping so… 🙌
Any thoughts or ideas? Please get in touch. Any help is good help, especially when you are new to the game like me!
Thanks for reading, Theo :-)
Check out our website
Join our Discord — we offer support for setting up nodes on our server
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Send me an email — theo@zonaris.com
