🎮 TGOG LVL 3: Web3? Applying to YC, learning how to learn

My learnings, experience and updates from September 2022.

Happy Monday and welcome to Level 3 of The Great Online Game where I share my startup journey and cool things I find stumbling along the way. If you haven’t already go check out my new essay on the science of motivation. A lot of effort went into it and is the accumulation of months of research. Relatively short, but packed with great mental models to understand behavior.

✈️ Updates about me:

• Flew back to San Diego from New Jersey to work alongside my co-founder once again. Every day it’s 80 degrees and sunny. The past week I’ve been doing a lot of research into Web3 and potential paths for MindGarden in the space, whether it be creating NFTs or potentially creating a meditate-to-earn token model. If you or someone you knew could give guidance please hit me up on Twitter.

📱The App

• Still continuing to search for product-market fit. Man, a lot of times this feels like wandering in a desert. There are times when I think a certain feature will take us to the promised land and when it doesn't, it hurts. There is no such thing as failure just information, gonna continue to iterate, analyze, step back, and build with a smile on my face (most of the time anyway) because at the end of the day, it's a privilege to be doing what I'm doing and it's fun.

• The good news is: the curve does flatten for all users, but even better cohorts of users who interact with the story feature of our app have 3x the 30-day retention of regular users. There’s light at the end of this tunnel? The key now is then to optimize the funnel to get more users to interact with this feature. We’ll see how this goes.

• Interesting thought: I'm going to look back at these moments a decade from now and think "Wow I would pay anything to go back to those days".
  

🏠 Y-Combinator

• About 3 weeks ago we submitted our application to YC. The acceptance rate currently is under 1% but I believe we have a good shot at getting an interview because we’ve already validated the product and are making revenue.

• YC also allows applicants to update their application for a short period of time, which is a strong forcing function to either raise a small amount of money from angels or to improve growth and retention because it could very much make or break our chances.

• It’s hard to suppress the desire of getting into this accelerator, it’s the Hogwarts of Silicon Valley. The people you form friendships and connections with usually last for life. It’s a community of some of the smartest most driven people in the world.

• I’m trying to detach myself from the process because with or without YC we’re gonna make this work. We have to make this work.

🤑 Fundraising Time / Crowd Funding

• With that said, we’re going to put the YC application to the side and focus on what we can control.

• We’ve created our pitch deck, made a list of investors (mostly in the San Diego area), and have also looked into crowdfunding.

• My co-founder has decided to be in charge of raising money as this gives me much more time and energy to focus on making the product remarkable.

• We plan to raise half of our seed round on WeFunder or SeedInvest utilizing my Co-Founders audience and network. If you want to invest when we launch the campaign, email me: hey@dantekim.com.

💭 What’s on my mind

• What are the skills I should be cultivating today, that will still be compounding 10 years from now? The thing with coding is if things go according to my plan I won't be doing much of it in the future. I do enjoy coding sometimes, but I see it more as a tool to manifest products I conjure up in my mind. I honestly enjoy designing, strategy, and writing/learning a lot more. We currently have a single IOS contractor, who does about 50% of the development. There are so many more talented coders than me that it doesn't make sense to continue to invest in the skill.

• I think everyone should have the ability to spin up a prototype, but in terms of creating scalable, maintainable code, that's a whole different ball game.

⛏ Learning how to Learn (essay coming soon)

• As a founder and someone who constantly is wearing different hats, mastering the meta-skill of learning is the ultimate cheat code.

• This is the trade-off of investing my time sharpening my axe versus simply just chopping the tree. There is a common problem where people (I am guilty of this) start to become obsessed with sharpening the axe itself versus actually going out there chopping the tree which was the goal in the first place. Here are some of the best resources to get started, I plan to write a full essay on the topic soon.

🦄 Cool Things This Month:

• Snipd: Highly recommend using app if you’re listening to podcasts. They use AI to transcribe podcasts that don’t have transcripts and when you double tap on your AirPods they will automatically take a snip of the last 30 seconds, so taking notes becomes frictionless.

• The Behavioral Science of Great Gamification is probably one of the best talks on gamification I’ve seen. It’s crazy because the video has less than a thousand videos. The only reason why I stumbled upon it was I followed the author for his Roam Research content. Weird.

• Product-Market Fit (highly recommend both)

  • Casey Winters talk (Pinterest, Grubhub)

  • By Segment Founder Peter Reinhardt

• Book: Build by Tony Fadell, read half of the book on my flight, and wow shaping up to be one of my favorites of 2022.

Until next time. Logging out.