Taylor Phoenix: Rising from the ashes

Our plan to recover Taylor after our token sale funds were stolen

Since we got surprised about the incident that made us lose our funds, we’ve been into a mix of feelings: anger, deception, sadness, hope. But we never lost our mind. It helped us to keep focused on problem-solving, despite the (understandable) community aggressive behavior.

After I published the open letter on Taylor’s current situation last week, we received a lot of supportive messages and constructive feedback's. I would like to thank you all. It’s been awesome to learn from you.

In that letter, we presented our current situation and the options we had. In short, the options were:

1. Stop the project and end the company;
2. Get a full-time job and work on Taylor at our spare time;
3. Find an Angel or VC to fund us;
4. Run a new token sale using the ~2,000,000 remaining TAY tokens.

The first two options were not what we wanted, but we had to consider it as options given our sensitive situation. The last ones were the best scenarios because it would allow us to keep building and improving the products. After a lot of discussions and considerations, we came up with two important conclusions:

1. It’s not the time to sell our equities;
2. It’s not fair to sell the ~2,000,000 remaining TAY tokens when we didn’t even release the app.

We wanted to come with a plan that would allow us to overcome this situation and regain the trust of our token holders and the whole community.

Cost optimization

The truth is: to keep building the product in a reasonable time frame, we must be full time dedicated to Taylor. It would not work if we were working only during our spare time or part-time. We must have 100% of our focus on it. That means we still need funds to pay for wages, infrastructure costs, etc.

We started to think about how we could optimize our cost structure so that we could still be productive. We would need to cut down some fixed costs: leave our WeWork office, cut down our salaries and — the harder part — fire the ones who don’t work directly in the core product. Even though it would be hard, we decided to do it. And we already did it.

Survival fund

After the cost optimization, we knew how much we needed to operate for about six months, which is the deadline we expect to achieve the break-even. We needed about $80,000. Note that six months is half the period we proposed in the last statement.

Since our goal is to regain the trust of our token holders and the community, we decided that the best to do is to sell part of our own (founders) tokens. So we are offering 20% of our tokens for a private sale at 0.0007 ETH each.

We already have some deals for a substantial portion of these tokens which gives us peace of mind to continue with our plan. We still have tokens to sell. So if you are interested, please fill up this form.

As soon as we raise the needed amount, which will guarantee the core team to be full-time dedicated, we will back to work on the app.

Our new roadmap

Our master plan to overcome our situation is solid. We know exactly what to do and when to do. Of course, this will affect our original roadmap.

Our master plan includes six months of (very) hard work. Here’s the drill-down:

June 2018

• Raise the survival fund by selling privately part of the founders’ tokens;
• Finish the improvements and necessary fixes on the app;

July 2018

• Issue a new token and distribute to the legit TAY token holders. The tokens will be kept locked to help us focus 100% on the product. Details on the new distribution to be announced;
• Release the beta version and invite first users;

August 2018

• Start acquiring paid customers. It will help us achieve the break-even as planned;

September 2018

• Decide if we will sell the remaining ~2,000,000 tokens to invest in the company (new team members, marketing, exchange listing costs, etc);

October 2018

• Unlock the tokens;
• Prepare for listing;

November 2018

• List the new token in an exchange with a good volume;
• Distribute bounty tokens;

Conclusion

I have to confess: It has not been easy to handle these many situations in a short period. It’s been quite challenging to have clear mind when part of our community keep calling us exit scammers. Well, if we were exit scammers, would we still be here?

Fortunately, many others are still trusting and believing us. It gives us even more motivation to keep going. Time will tell. And we will always be open to receive those who have left us; No hard feelings.

The investigation is going on. We already have law enforcement agencies on it. I hope you understand that we cannot give much information until the investigation is finished. Once it’s done we will make public everything we can.

Yes, we f*cked up! We could have prevented this unfortunate situation. But we are doing our best to fix everything.

We are very confident that this plan will work out and will help us to rise from the ashes. This episode will make us stronger.

Thank you for your support.

Fabio Seixas
CEO & Co-founder at Taylor