There's no action expected on your part, but if anything I talk about piques your interest, I'm always happy to hear from you.
One-liner: Megapot is building the world’s largest jackpot.
Asks
- Who are the best fullstack (frontend leaning) and protocol engineers you know? Happy for intros or just a name — I’ll DM. Roles here.
Going well
- Our jackpot tripled to $944k daily and we hit $1.2M in TVL
- Four apps built on our protocol, including a Telegram mini app, Farcaster mini app, an auto-subscription feature, and a jackpot in another token. All of this was inbound!
- Forbes featured Megapot prominently in an article
Not going well
- We haven’t hired a frontend or protocol engineer yet. It’s been a humbling month learning how to recruit and hire.
- Compliance is moving slowly
Top Priorities
#1: Hiring
Most of my month was recruiting: 53 meetings with potential candidates, personalized outreach, flew to do a coworking session, and rejected 2 work trials. Now, I have one ongoing work trial and solid candidates in the pipeline. I learned many lessons that I thought I’d share here:
- My concern about product momentum led to me prioritizing candidates who offered work trials immediately, even if I wasn’t a hell yes on them. I’ve confirmed with my lead investor that hiring is my only focus, not product momentum. Even if it was, I’d use agencies instead of personally screening contractors.
- I wasted time by not cutting candidates once they would no longer be a hell yes, often passing them if they were fine, and met with candidates who didn’t meet my requirements.
- I relied on inbound which is low quality. I’ve switched to reaching out to my network and have higher quality candidates.
#2: Compliance
Timeline for being a regulated frontend is still ~2 months out. We set up our offshore entity, but there are changes needed. For our gaming license, the blocker is the gaming audit. Finalizing requirements took longer as gaming auditors have never encountered a fully onchain game, but we should have a clear timeline next week.
#3: Product
In May, we’ll give players chances to win small prizes, rather than just one jackpot. Normally, this would be a protocol change that’s 3+ months away. To reduce churn, build a better experience, and learn ASAP, we’ll fund the prizes ourselves at a cost of $100/day until the protocol is ready.
We found that apps don’t need our UI kit since integrating is so simple. They asked for, and we’re rolling out, APIs to fetch onchain data like player history.
In June, we’ll launch a World mini app. This was delayed by the lack of cross-chain SDKs compatible with World app’s wallet, but we got a payments provider to build this for us. There’s huge growth potential with 35M mini app opens last week and lets us test quickly with non-crypto users.
Notes and Personal Thoughts
- Jackpot and TVL growth is due to points farming, since we’re oversupplied with low APY. Jackpot size increased faster due to increased LP capital efficiency. We cautiously set low LP limits due to our inefficient contract, unexpectedly maxed it out, so will increase next month.
- Shuffle's lottery now offers single ticket purchases, and it’s gone well with $100k in sales/week. For context, they have $168M in monthly deposits. As it’s denominated in SHFL, it’s unlikely that competing casinos would build on top of it. Their team is exploring offering a white-label product. It’s bullish knowing there is whale demand for lotteries, and I’m confident in our value prop — 100% revenue share, a stable and neutral currency, and where operators don’t have to risk their own capital.
- I feel calibrated on recruiting now. I jumped into the deep end last month, but I’ve gotten in a bunch of reps and have great advisors guiding me through it all.
Shout outs
- Alex, Anthony, Christos, Danning, George for intros
- Esteban for intro to the Forbes columnist!
Thanks
Patrick