Overcoming Project Hurdles as a Team
This is article #11 of “180 Days to Startup” series documenting my entrepreneur journey. In case you want to start from the beginning, please click HERE to the first article. You can also check out what Nodis.io is looking to accomplish HERE.
Having a strong team with good relationship is an important ingredient to the success of a project. This is especially important when facing challenges. In this article, I want to share some of the bigger difficulties that we faced and how we overcame them as a team.
Hurdle #1 — Shadowban by Facebook Ads
I am not a social media marketing expert by trade so I could only rely on what I knew best at the start, which was Facebook. While I knew their attitude towards this technology, I still had to take my chances. I studied hours on how to do segmentation and data analysis through FB Business Manager advertisement tools. And just when we were starting to get traction with people following and liking our page, they shadowban our account.
I was using it simply to promote the project on how we can help small businesses with marketing. I ran a few ads but eventually, FB figured out that we were a blockchain-based project and shadowbanned it. I know that’s the case because they will never approve the ads I had posted. Even when I tried to appeal, they will just be radio silent.
This was very hard to swallow for me as I was just building up my confidence in digital marketing. I was spending a lot of time and some money. I was totally lost for a short while on what else I can do to get online exposure. I had no prior exposure using other social media platforms.
I felt like I had let my team down because I couldn’t deliver result. However, the team was extremely supportive. We prayed together for God’s guidance and they encouraged me to try new things out.
That’s when I turned to Instagram and Reddit.
Long story short, I learned the in’s and out’s of IG. Within 4 months’ time, the account has grown to past 2.5K followers. For someone who didn’t even have an Instagram account before, it was quite a success!
As for Reddit, we have gained quite an amount of exposure there and drove a lot of traffic to our Medium articles. We even had someone from Michigan reached out to us and wanting to work for us!
Hurdle #2 — Change in NEO Fee Structure
One of the main reasons why we picked NEO blockchain to build our product is due to the absence of transaction and storage fee. We are building a social marketing network with the potential of A LOT of transactions. We needed high transaction per second (TPS) and we needed it as close to free as possible. Even a small fee could amount to extremely high service cost. It had been our cornerstone since we started this project.
8 months into the project, NEO introduced the 0.0001 GAS (NEO blockchain’s gas tokens) cost structure per contract call and it totally messed up our plan. This was a huge setback and we had to consider scrapping a huge part of Nodis.io’s functionality.
Those of you who are familiar with our project may know that we want to help businesses gain exposure through community Challenges. Upon completion of the Challenges, participants will submit the proof for validation. This then becomes open to everyone on the Nodis.io network to approve or reject. Both approved Challengers and voters will receive tokens as a reward for their effort. It is a critical way to ensure submissions are valid and it decentralizes the distribution of tokens. Most importantly, voting will give exponential amount of exposure to the businesses that posted the Challenges.
Every time a transaction happens, it will equal a contract call, which will cost GAS in the new fee structure. As you can imagine, if Nodis.io becomes big with thousands of users, that 0.0001 GAS fee will add up really quickly. Just doing the math of hundreds of submissions times thousands of users. This will be a significant cost to our bottom line. Voting/decentralization is why we are using blockchain and if we were to remove that, it completely changes the product and the fundamental value proposition.
It was a devastating change to our vision.
We needed to come together as a team to evaluate the impact and solution. We worked the math to see how we can limit the impact. We reviewed the monetization model to see how we can recoup the cost. We even talked about extending the development timeline to another 6–12 months to build our own blockchain. Everyone had their own ideas and we were all going in different directions.
In the end, we were able to come to a consensus. It required significant re-work to our Challenge structure, submission limits, monetizations, and smart contract codes. All the while staying with NEO. This couldn’t have been possible if we didn’t have a strong team. Most gratefully, our co-CEO, Nathan totally rocked the smart contract and made it all possible. We are now on testnet to try out all the codes and things are definitely looking on the upside there.
Hurdle #3 – Development Difficulties
All our devs have full-time jobs working in huge organizations with a lot of responsibilities. For them to sacrifice sleep and weekends on this project is not easy. Thankfully, we were moving really fast for the limited time we have. However, it didn’t come without costs.
Since we were moving so fast, codes, repositories, deployment processes, and other dev-related things became really messy. Eventually, we had deployment issues and we realized branches were not merging properly. We ended up having to backtrack significantly to figure out what went wrong. This cost us a significant amount of time, headaches, and frustrations.
Again, this had to be rectified as a team and we knew there is no point in pointing fingers. We understood each others’ difficulties and sacrifices. We needed to share the risks and responsibilities.
Everyone in startups knows that hurdles and roadblocks are expected. However, experiencing them first hand is different from knowing. Some of these roadblocks could have caused us to blame each other and ruining the camaraderie. By God’s grace, we believe in what we are doing and we all understand what’s at stake.
The members are extremely humble and it is such a blessing to have this team. We can be open with each other and resolve issues together without personal grudges. For this, we are grateful.
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