9/2/22 Note to Flipside

9/2/22 Note to Flipside

Failing the NFT experiment was the achievement

Godmode is dead, long live Godmode!

Aye, the trip was short, but good golly miss molly, it sure was meaningful.

First, there’s the launch. We started from zero, we talked to advisors, experts, internal theologians, and went damn deep on NFT expertise. We CPOM’d, we built from scratch, we designed brains. We sold large holdings to major players like the LAO and Spaceship.

In short, we grew NFT (Open) Sea legs.

There’s some gooey goodness: We sold 67.3 ETH at the launch. We inspired 644 analysts to hold brains.

But. Math.

A small crew of supremely dedicated analysts went full send. They smashed some turkeys. They were impassioned, they optimized, they owned the crap out of it — generating an average of $1,271 in earnings each over the 90 days of the program. It worked, it worked! Oh… shit, it really worked!

Then timing hit us like a basic bitch. The market softened and NFT sales dried up; we squeaked out just $19k in secondary sales. Sure, glass half full, that actually ain’t bad, but that coincided with our clients coming up for renewal, and bounty production slowed as we re-committed.

The money was tight, and bounties were tighter than an otter’s pocket.

I’m no mathematician, but the input on the left hand side didn’t match the output on the right hand side.

Hey, don’t get all mopey on me now. Buck up, buttercup! The outputs, oh the wonderful outputs:

• As we fretted about hundreds of thousands in Godmode payments each month — growing exponentially — it accelerated and instigated deep analysis of our outputs. We inspected scavenger hunts and elite bounties, and determined the value set of each. This led to the crafting of a new methodology, ARIM (Acquisition, Retention, Insights, Marketing), to match bounties to specific customer pain and directed outcomes. Without Godmode this evolution would have never happened.
• We successfully launched one NFT, how about another? We flexed into ShroomDK 🍄 activating hundreds of analysts to begin building on our open SDK toolset. The NFT launch brought more eyeballs on our data. The eyeballs (fortunately placed under the foreheads of people from Kraken and FalconX and TRM and OpenSea) blinked 3x for more. So we delivered private access via Snowflake. And, Snowflake (with their bevy of eyeballs) is our newest bestie with partnership discussions active and frothy. No Godmode = no ShroomDK = no Snowflake = no oculus dexter and no oculus sinister 👀.

Most importantly, we learned to say no. Which is a critical feature giving yourself room for what should be a yes.

• We contemplated, analyzed and debated how to solve Godmode’s drain on our bounties. We began making all sorts of squinty faces, and it started to feel like we might get stuck that way (maybe our parents were right?). We concluded that Godmode adaptations were distracting from our core mission. We made the boldest of decisions to not accept sunk costs. We didn’t point fingers, we didn’t yell or scream or stomp. We just decided. Together. This is what’s right. This is the way. We chose to begin and we committed to end.

Having the nerve to experiment is one thing (many don’t). Having the ability to know what’s working and what isn’t — and doing something about it, is another (even fewer do).

So Godmode is over. But is it? Its presence lives on as a jPEG NFT. Sure, it’s a piece of digital art, but it’s also now a snapshot of a moment in crypto time; it has history; it’s complete with a backstory and a lesson that can be reflected on. I’d say a part of Godmode lives in us all. That throne shall never be empty.

godmode est mort, vive godmode!

You can read the public Godmode Post Mortem here.

Originally posted on medium.com