Roadmap Update — Reality Check for Polygen

Since we are the community’s launchpad, we felt it is only correct to be transparent and speak about the elephant in the room. The Polygen roadmap.

In the crypto space, everyone wants to see the roadmap, and everyone wants to know if the roadmap results are met. Here is the honest truth: most projects cannot meet their roadmap deadlines.

Yet, if the expectations of the roadmap aren’t met, the project is at risk of being seen as “unfit” or just a “scam”.

We’re neither of the above. That is why we want to be transparent rather than brushing this under the rug. We want to accept our reality in order to continue building a transparent, fair, and accessible community-driven Launchpad.

How it actually went down

Therefore, the story begins with why we created the original Polygen roadmap. We designed our roadmap as a clear outline for future plans. Each quarter was meant to be a new area of focus designed to concentrate on achieving goals and objectives. Our roadmap sets its journey out on Q4 of 2021.

Throughout Q4 2021, everything felt as if it was running smoothly. Our smart contracts passed the audits. The dApp was up and running. Polygon’s Beta testing was a success. Our raise functions were ready!

We roll out with our first public IDO — our own. Things ran pretty smoothly in our first market experience. It felt as if Q4 2021 ran better than planned; nevertheless, it’s always easy when it comes to only looking at the first three months of a project.

As Q1 2022 approached, we didn’t realize that uncertainty was on the horizon with Q1 2022. It took us a month (January 2022) to barely notice that we may not achieve some of our Q1 2022 goals. Then it took us an additional month (February 2022) to realize we were not going to actually achieve all our Q1 2022 goals.

It wasn’t an unsuccessful quarter, in our eyes, our product development became the focus.

Product Development Shift

In our case, we turned our focus on product development rather than product deployment. Meaning all our goals regarding launching projects on Polygen were put on the sidelines as we focused on creating the best possible launchpad.

In short, we did not accurately forecast the number of projects we would launch for Q1 2022. Regardless, this was no loss in our eyes. For we learned more about the market and about the community.

What went well for us in Q1 of 2022.

What we have done in Q1 of 2022

• Decentralized and Optional KYC
• Finally helped you understand raisetoken (rTKN)
• Launched a DAO
• Grew an engaged community
• Offered 3 curated launches
• Designed a tier system ( and all agreed on it)
• Added new raise types ( moving to development as we write, some features are even being tested)
• Built V1 of our Ambassador Program ( testing as we write)
• Instated regular weekly content and events; Fireside chats, AMA’s, Discord & TG Games, Weekend update ( 30% of our Medium fans read every week!)

What didn’t go so well for us in Q1 of 2022

• We missed our goal of 30+ curated launches
• We missed our goal of 50+ Permissionless launches.

Now to the big question of “What happened?”

We want to share a few insightful points to answer this question.

Polygen is in Beta

When we did our initial IDO with Polygen back in December. We made it clear that we were in the MVP phase. MVP stands for a minimum viable product; in laymen’s terms, it is a product with sufficient features to be usable by early adopters but still unpolished for feedback to be an essential part of the product development.

Perfect segway to the next section.

Product development based upon community feedback

We have had nothing but an open ear for any constructive feedback about Polygen. And we heard the feedback. Our community has been outstanding; without them, we would have been lost the last 2 months.

For example, building our Tiers. We constructed a tier system; after creating it, we ran it past the MightyPGENians, our most active community members. They candidly told us we needed to fix a lot of it. What did we do? We started over.

You told us KYC sucked, we fixed it, in fact- we made it optional in some cases.

Token Utility- tell us about it- so now, everything we are currently working on naturally factors in utility.

Product development based upon the market

Flexibility is one of our primary goals when addressing the needs of other crypto projects.

Luckily, we realized we needed to add more features to Polygen to contend as being the most flexible. Since Polygen is the mediator between early investors and crypto projects, we also need to notice what other crypto projects are looking for in their search for a launchpad.

For example, we thought every project would be thrilled to use our Fair Launch Offering. Come to find out, fair launch offering isn’t for all crypto projects. This caused us to revisit the drawing board and create different raise types.

We developed 3 new raise types, we know you’re going to love. In fact, the customization and flexibility of these raises will make Polygen the most unique launchpad to ever exist.

Overconfidence in the state of the market

When the infrastructure and the viable product were ready to go. We thought we could storm the market and take over the launchpad ecosystem. Only to find out we needed a bit of a reality check. We had set our eyes out on having over 75 raises on Polygen.

The reality is there are just not enough crypto projects launching right now to fulfill the 75 launch quota. Meanwhile, our limited infrastructure and our attention to product development kept our focus away from achieving our quota of launching 75 projects.

After revaluation, we have decided that we should be launching 15 projects per month, putting us at a new target of 45 launches per quarter by the end of the year.

We’re better in alignment with the market than before

After an intense last two months, we’re starting to find our groove. We are now addressing the actual pain points of projects and solving problems that we have heard from projects directly. Before, our ideas of what utilities the Launchpad world needed were all hypothetical.

Thanks to the community, we have been able to tweak and redesign many dynamics of the Polygen ecosystem to better accommodate investors and projects. We are also expanding our team and hiring new super talented people to drive our business forward and help us meet our roadmap goals.

We are honored to take on this role and want to thank the Polygen community for sticking with us for this long 💜