Funding. We have raised $1M Preseed round in October 2021 and $10.6M Seed round in January 2022. Today, we make our investment memos open source:
Superdao 1.0. Our initial idea was to create all-in-one DAO creation platform. We successfully launched the platform and it was used to create 2000+ DAOs. Unfortunately, most of these projects were short-lived and we’ve learned that the DAO as an organizational format doesn’t inherently create more successful or sustainable organizations. As a result, we felt that the DAO creation platform will not become a big business, at least for a decade, if ever at all.
Superdao 2.0. In Fall 2022, after exploring several adjacent spaces, we reduced the team size and focused on a new idea, a growth platform for existing Web3 projects. Our system was tracking 300M+ wallets across multiple blockchains, assigned various scores and tags to them, linked wallets to emails and social media accounts, and provided tools for building target lists. Superdao 2.0 was used by several dozens of high-profile beta customers. At the end of beta period we begin to realize the ultimate market size for growth tools for Web3 projects will be too small to lead to venture outcome as an independent company.
Super Robots. During our work on Superdao 2.0 we also created an “internal customer”, an invite-only NFT project that was awarding unique personalized NFT to every participating wallet. Using our own growth tools we grew this project to 180k+ mints.
Open source. In Summer 2023, we ran a structured process to sell the company but couldn’t find an acquirer. Following that, we decided to return remaining capital to investors and open source the key elements of our work.
Our own decision, solely based on market size projections. We had a product loved by customers and 2+ years of runway. At the same time, we have formed a belief that crypto industry will be primarily limited to financial applications and will not play a major role in many real world verticals. We still believe that there is a room for several massive consumer-serving crypto companies. But we don’t believe that there will be so many of them that Superdao can reach its own revenue goals as a specialized infrastructure provider. Based on this analysis, we decided that returning capital (and potentially starting something new with a fresh legal entity, a new cap table, and a retooled team) is the right thing to do.
We did many things right. We are proud of quality and performance of our products. The development speed and costs were among the best on the market. In 2 years, we have launched two major platforms alongside with several smaller-scale experiments. We’ve built a great team and were voted as a Top 100 Startup Culture two years in a row. At the end, we have found a product concept that was clearly resonating with the market (and was better than alternatives).
We made many mistakes, but they didn’t kill the company. Looking back, we would do many things differently. Our lessons are summarized in the next section. And yet, those mistakes weren’t fatal and at the end we still had a good product/team/runway situation. The closing of Superdao is due solely to its future market size.