Hey everyone, I'm excited that today we're getting going with our first major push to get our alpha out the door. You can see @shanemac's notes on it here:
XMTP Planning Meeting for Alpha Kick-Off
Over the last couple of weeks we've seen the whole team start to make a concerted effort to get to greater clarity, and a honing in of the direction for our initial push. Personally I'm just excited to get to focus back on product for a while. We've got interest coming in from every angle to bring messaging to web3, with more and more outreach each week, and now is the time to come together and focus big to achieve our ambitious goals.
XMTP is no small product, and our mission here is no small task. Every decision and non-decision we make in these early days has a major impact on the future, in both our short and long-term timelines. Starting with alpha, we'll come into each major release with a big picture view of the protocol, what we've accomplished so far, and a specific set of achievements we hope to get through by a specified date. Each release will be an incremental step closer to Mainnet, but each one should unlock potential in web3 messaging in its own way.
We're T-minus 5 weeks before the holidays so let's make the best of this last push!
Last week goals
Nov 15-19th
- Updated product roadmap and UX for full client
- Outline what it will take to get to Alpha
- See that every team member has sent a message over XMTP by the end of the week (pretty sure everyone has, but need to double check)
- Define what is needed for an alpha launch, work backward from there on timing, deliverables, and communities to engage for this
Next week goals
Nov 22-26th
- Alpha kickoff
- Alpha user flows understood and finalized
- Alpha wireframes delivered
XMTP Updates
- @Graham_McBain had his first full week in the books, and dropped a draft of his Community Plan here in HQ — let's give him some more thoughts and commentary!
Crypto industry news
- Biden's "Build Back Better" infrastructure bill was passed, though it had unfortunately included some language that was particularly onerous to the crypto industry
- Thankfully a set of Democratic representatives came forward and signed a letter to Speaker Pelosi, calling to make some important changes to the bill.
- Of the ten signatures, one of them was Susan Wild, representative for Pennsylvania's 7th district—my district. I reached out to her as the bill was reaching the house and asked to sit down and help educate her about crypto. It worked, and she's now one of our key allies in the house.
- https://twitter.com/RepDarrenSoto/status/1460732676411957256?s=20
- A DAO successfully raised $50M to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. While ultimately failing on the final transaction, this should absolutely be seen as an incredible coordination effort. [Link]
- StarkWare (one of our investors) received a $50M investment, valuing the firm at $2B [Link]
What we are reading/listening to
- The Bankless podcast with the ENS team [Link]
- The $ENS airdrop was so impressive, and it seemed it was all that crypto twitter could talk about for a week!
- They had put just so much thought and work into making the airdrop successful and it showed
- We can learn a ton from their process, and thoughtfulness around it all'