Underdog May Update

Hey Tony - Let’s see how building Underdog Protocol went in May 2023. A month of fixing bugs, big partnerships, and more planning. TLDR: We’ve been developing business, developing compression, and building deeper use cases. We’re speaking at New York Hacker House in June! In May , we landed Metaplex (the standard for NFTs on Solana), built 4 apps on top of Underdog, spoke on the Ecosystem Call, and are re-thinking about our pricing.

What is Underdog Protocol?

Underdog Protocol is an API that enables developers and startups to seamlessly integrate web3 into their product or workflow to enhance user experiences

We’re building the modern data stack for web3 by turning the blockchain into a shared data layer so we’re able to build user-centric experiences

🤝Asks

Pricing

Can you help us figure out an alternative pricing model? We’re currently in a weird place - we are making recurring revenue, pipeline is growing, but compression has thrown our cost structure into a whirlpool

Angel Investors Introductions

Enterprise customers

Do you know any web2 and web3 companies who want to create experiences like Customer engagement + retention for their users? The verticals that we are focused on are- De-Fi, Consumer Products, and Social

👍 Highlights

Partnerships & Biz Dev👬

We closed an official Partnership with Metaplex - we provide them with all their cNFT drop needs + are working on building an alternative to Mailchimp in web3.

We’ve grown a pipeline of valued at $280,000 ARR, an increase of $110,000 (+65% MoM) that is continuously growing with names like Jupiter, Collector.sh, and SolanaPay

We are increasing our velocity of Outbound vs. Inbound. We are now growing ~5 users per day. Decrease from last month, mostly due to volume of content on our socials.

Once again - We’re on the radar while pricing & positioning is working ⭐

Product 📱

We built so many application on top of our API like duster, telegram snapshot, cookies

Integrated batching + worker services to power the ability of our Compression API to handle 40,000 NFT drops with Metaplex.

Continued Usage, our partners Solarplex, are running weekly scavenger hunts on their Platform that make up ~2500 NFTs each week, it’s a great way to engage + retain users.

Check out the apps here -

duster⁠

snapshot⁠

ticketing⁠

onchain report card⁠

, and

stamps⁠

⁠

👎 Low lights / Challenges

We need to re-think through our pricing 🌀

Compression makes everything cheap. Transferrable NFTs are expensive, packaging is weird, people like paying for NFTs a-la-carte.

We need to rethink a pricing that increases our margins, hyper-focuses on LTV, and scales with compression.

Fundraising 🐶:

Wow. Fundraising in this market is hard. We doubted it. Can you make introductions to people you know who are deploying capital? Respond and I can send you a list.

May Growth

May Growth

⁠

Thoughts on Metrics

Retention + Churn is starting to come top of mind. We believe that these numbers are because people have missed their payments due to banking issues or switching payment methods (to crypto) but it brings up important questions around how we plan to do this.

Our revenue is off because we have had a mix of crypto payments + stripe come in. Mostly crypto payments, so we have now way to combine and accurately display our growth. We have churned, per our Retention numbers, leading to a drop to $2,500/ MRR from $3,000/MRR.

📰 News

Our builders are the best. They’ve built the applications for us with little to no direction.

⁠

This is small but a special shoutout to

0xaryan.sol⁠

0xSavant⁠

for stepping up and building the On-chain Report Card + Ticketing Platform using our API. I created a small PRD for them to follow, they asked me initial clarifying questions, and within 3-5 days , they made working products. We plan on minting the on-chain report card to the public, have DAOs like Deanlist using it, and more. Ticketing platform is going to be using by the Solana Hacker House + other Foundation events as we start to build it out more.

Excited to build with these guys!

We presented to the entire Solana Ecosystem!

⁠

This was Kevin’s view of the

May Ecosystem Call⁠

. A great tradition from our partners SuperteamDAO, that brings the entire Solana Community (20,000+) to talk the biggest wins, coolest products, and alpha drops.

We shared our vision, what we’re building with compression,and shared some alpha. We joined teams like Tensor, Backpack, Hivemapper, and more.

🎯 June Priorities

Biz Dev + GTM 📊

Close Dialect as a customer using our Compression API ( Deal worth $20,000 ARR). Increase Basic + Starter Plan Revenue by +$2500)

Increase follower count +150 by running contests, interacting, creating content, and memes

Sponsor hackathons + builder events to increase usage and brand recognition of Underdog Protocol

Product 📱

Launch 3+ applications on top of the API with the help of Builders Program

Integrating Sphere Labs to handle crypto payments to shift from Stripe

Fundraising 📈

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