Hello XMTP investors new and also not-as-new-but-not-old. It's with great excitement that we share our September update, which starts with having closed our $20M Series A.
The feedback to the news was great. We had over 900k impressions on Twitter + thousands of inbound messages for recruiting, partnerships, and people wanting to early invest in our future token. Thanks to everyone who helped to promote and share our news, it’s safe to say that people really believe and want to see this idea in the world.
It’s time to build the dream team. If you haven't had an opportunity to yet, read our blog post about the round.
Before we get onto the update, here's a reminder on a few things:
- We've got a Telegram group for XMTP investors
- It's a bit more of a social group than update list, but one hell of a crew, and has been really great so far!
- We're using Discourse internally as our discussion forum. You can sign up with the investor role here.
- Right now this is mostly private to the outside world, but all of the areas that are not specifically for insiders will be public once we're ready to launch into our first betas
- We'd love any and all contribution you might give us in here!
- We'll be doing more and more product-focused discussion in here, and having outside feedback is encouraged!
- All previous investor updates are available here.
- If you haven't already followed us on Twitter, please give us a follow at @xmtp_!
- We've got an XMTP Discord server up which is where our community will do real-time chat. Here's an invite for you.
- Note that it's not really active right now, but go ahead and slide in so that you're there when it's ready!
Series A Response
Thanks to all who tweeted out the raise announcement…we got some incredible lift from it. A couple of stats:
- We got over 900,000 impressions on our announcement
- Twitter followers grew from just under 1,000 to now over 4,300
- We’ve now started to see organic tweets from a number of non-investor accounts, replying to people curious about messaging, chat, and push notifications in a crypto context
- Something from Shane on inbound
Hiring
First things first, we’re happy to report that we’ve had two engineers accept offers, and we sent out another last week. The first of our new engineers came from Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle, and the second Digital Ocean, and Shopify before that.
One thing worth calling out is that our newest recruit, Steven, was discovered through a new tool that we’ve developed in-house for sourcing potential engineers. It’s showing some early signs of being quite valuable…we’ve identified dozens of candidates, and have had a 100% response rate when reaching out to them. We’ll share more details broadly once we’ve hired a couple more through this tool and can prove its results. In the meantime, if you’d like to see it in action we’re happy to set something up.
Next here's ourcareers page for your reference. We have quite a few open roles right now, so any help on leads would be awesome.
- Three engineering roles open: Full Stack, Protocol, Distributed Systems
- Senior product manager
- Senior partnerships manager
- Community manager
Product
With fundraising behind us now for a long time, we're back to focusing on next steps with product. With that we're now focused on what we consider "Phase 0" of XMTP, which is described as:
- Support for Ethereum addresses initially
- Open to adding other platforms if they prioritize working with us, perhaps Flow
- Users are able to authenticate with their wallets
- Web-based client
- Uses MetaMask and WalletConnect
- Can send an encrypted message from one address to another
- Messages start off with a simple email-like format (subject & body)
- XMTP, Inc. runs one or more (but still few) nodes
- 100% of messages are stored across all available nodes
To underscore the above, we're starting simple: just a web client that enables users to connect a wallet, create, encrypt, and send messages to others also using those clients. Spam protection, filtering, denial of service resistance, consensus mechanisms all coming later. This phase is all about propping up the network and starting to get some activity.
There's a ton of inbound interest from various projects looking to build on XMTP and we'll be selecting 2-4 to directly build with—a couple of which are already investors here. It's quite possible these projects are using XMTP prior to even our own clients launching.
Our target is before end of the fall we're seeing messages moving about via XMTP, and that before EOY we've completed everything in Phase 0. The phases that come next are as follows:
- Phase 1: Testnet beta
- Phase 2: Mainnet beta
- Phase 3: Mainnet 1.0, token release
While I don't have specific dates for the above, we're shooting for Phase 3 to go live sometime in the next 12-18 months.
That’s it for now. More on our new hires and progress next month!