She said “You guys already won”

TL;DR:

• The people, community, and environment around Mean is the most important source of inspiration to build it.
• Just skip the TL;DR this time and read the whole article… your name may be in it 😍

Yesterday, Michel (one of the co-founders of Mean Protocol), was discussing with his better half, Altairis, and telling her how excited the team is for tomorrow (Oct 29, 2021) in anticipation of the announcement of the Solana Ignition Hackathon, and how the chance of winning one of the tracks in the competition was giving everyone a degree of emotional excitement.

She answered this, with the calmest demeanor and conviction:

Why the big fuss? You guys already won

— Altairis

What a profound thought!

So, with this in mind, we wanted to acknowledge the wiser people around our lives. Those who keep us going. To our partners, the friends, the girlfriends, the boyfriends, the wives and husbands, the mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, and the community that has supported the Mean DAO core team since we started this project. You have had to endure our madness, dreams, plans, with our sleepless nights, and endless weeks of work and focus and intensity. We are thankful and happy 🙏 you chose us to share your lives and every moment in it, including this ride to launch the Mean project and seeing it take off like an interstellar rocket 🚀🚀🚀

This is all for you.

We already won

Not the hackathon, that decision still rests with Solana and the Judges. But what Altairis was referring to is that we already won the market, and in the end, it is all that matters.

To put things into perspective, we launched MeanFi.com on Sept 17th, and in the first month we’ve literally grown from nobody-knows-what-we-are-doing, with less than 10 people using the Mean protocol in a closed beta to:

• 18k+ Twitter Followers
• 14k+ Discord Community Members
• 22k unique wallets connected to MeanFi.com
• Avg 1.5k daily active users (with at least 1 transaction)
• A vibrant Mean Army Community ready to go to battle for the project

All of these are INCREDIBLE validation points that our message, our product, and our delivery are striking the right chord, and even though these are not laurels to rest on forever, they are amazing market validation metrics for a project born less than 6 weeks ago.

So, yeah, we already won.

A Mean Message

Not in our wildest dreams we could imagine the reception MeanFi and Mean Protocol have had in the market. We first came into the Solana Ignition Hackathon with a simple idea because of a wide gap we kept seeing in the market.

We wanted to build a bridge that helped TradFi users cross into the DeFi realm, and we wanted to build it in Solana.

We posted this in our official launch announcement (which you should read if you haven’t) illustrating our vision.

The first pieces of feedback we were getting from “the professionals” sounded like this:

• Too wide, too vague, too dreamy, too lofty
• You need a more hyper-narrow product to make a dent
• Sounds like noise, don’t know what it means

We kept tunning the message until we landed in this:

A DeFi protocol powering everyday banking workflows in Solana

But even then, the question of “what are everyday banking workflows” kept coming on. One of our close friends and advisors even made a comment once saying “Why don‘t you say you are fu*ing building a DeFi bank and call it a day” 👀

Humble Beginnings

We are humbled every single day by what is happening in the Mean DAO community and Solana in general. We have been left with our mouth open in pure awe, floored and impressed and excited and thankful many times as we have gotten a community of thousands of people organized with top-tier skills by our Mean Community Managers: Durden, Tariq, Ryan, Drogan, and Anne, watching and coordinating everything from the Mods Tower; we’ve gotten top-shelf UX/UI feedback from the Superteam DAO and Solana Labs thanks to Akshay and Yash; received hundreds of memes made by fierce followers of our vision and brand; gotten super crispy posters and video tutorials without us even asking for it from super-talented community members like JoelOJ, Evo, Sage, Starayush and many more; getting our app, docs, and tutorials translated into five different languages; partnering with top Solana Protocols like Grape and Solflare; having a group of Mean Ambassadors covering the front lines of Social Media, Brand Awareness, Partnerships and Community Management that is OMFG amazing! 🔥 🚀 🤘

As we move to formal DAO governance for Mean DAO, all these pieces are key to the health, long-term viability, and success of the DAO structure. We are in many ways already working as a decentralized, community-driven project. Granted, there’s a certain degree of centralization, especially on the product side, but the core dev team doesn’t work in a silo.

Many things that have been added to the product have been direct input from the community, a consistent reminder from our users that we have many opportunities to do better. We get 100’s of new requests, product feedback, with videos and pictures, in short, and long forms; and the non-stop stream of user-generated recommendations is incredible. Just go to our discord server, and experience it for yourself.

With all of these taking place, it is difficult not to feel like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson here:

The Mean Universe Ahead

Whether you want to call it “a DeFi bank” or a web3 app that powers “everyday banking workflows”, the message is strong, the quality of the product is super f*ing high, and the market likes both of those things. A LOT!

There’s a huge gap being filled by Mean Protocol, serving those without a bank account, and those with a bank account oppressed by a dictatorial government, and millions of freelancers that need to receive a simple payment for work completed on UpWork/Fiverr/etc. without losing a 10% transaction fee, and millions of families getting remittances from their relatives, and millions of employees getting paid late, and millions of businesses struggling to manage complex payroll systems and distribute salaries in fast and cost-efficient ways to their international workforce.

MeanFi and the Mean Protocol are here for you. We are just warming up this rocket to make DeFi Banking the new standard of banking worldwide.

An accessible, easy-to-use, global, trustless, permissionless, self-custody, censorship-resistant, and super-fast banking experience with super-low, sub-penny transaction fees.

Get Yourself Involved

We are super excited to embark on this journey with the community and our users. Stay in touch with our progress every week, and join the DeFi revolution by checking our website, joining the Mean DAO Discord, and following @MeanFinance on Twitter.

Now… back to riding the Mean Rocket! LFG!!! 🤘 🔥 🚀