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
- Intros for founding frontend engineer and protocol engineer → we’d like to hire both in April!
- Intros to crypto casinos - we’d like to explore them embedding us as a lottery feature, or to incentivize their users (eg. when user generates rake, they issue a Megapot ticket)
- Feedback on our app and protocol
Personal thoughts
- In-person matters: I owe this launch’s success to connections made at ETH Denver. Word-of-mouth helped build an initial LP base, make introductions to potential candidates, and get folks genuinely excited to amplify our launch.
- Feels like the pace is picking up: Relaunch complete, hiring in full swing, work trials getting started. The last 2.5 years feel like this tweet.
Going well
- Relaunch on Base went better than expected. We had 2.5k users with ~200 DAU now (stats), $850k in deposits, and 350k impressions on X (tweet, tweet2, tweet3)
- Someone finally won a huge $207k jackpot! We’ve run 6-figure jackpots for 5 months, and a big win adds credibility
- Started work trials with a frontend and protocol engineer
- Launched a flow for non-crypto users to checkout with just a credit card in 15 seconds. Try it at https://megapot.io/
Not going well
- Constrained on frontend engineering and design
- Coinbase Wallet integration had limited impact as we’re live only on web
- Limited progress on compliance this month
Top Priorities
#1: Hiring
I did 31 meetings with candidates this month and aim to 1.5x in April. I spend the majority of my time on this post-launch, and will continue to do so until we land these hires. We changed our opening to a generalist frontend engineer (rather than full stack) and will open a role for a designer soon. We still have an unlisted cofounder CTO role. We also started work trials with a protocol engineer and a frontend engineer. Our funnel so far has been referrals and our lead investor’s talent team.
#2: Compliance
This is moving slower than expected, with a timeline 2-3 months away, due to our focus on hiring and launch. We added policies, a few features, and identified vendors for our randomness audit, geoblocking, and international gaming KYC.
#3: Finding product-market-fit
In April, we’re exploring launching first party apps inside of World’s app store. Players will pay with tokens on World chain, which settle in our jackpot on Base that’s denominated in USDC, all in one click. Expanding here lets us maintain ticket sale volume, and thus, a large jackpot for third-party app B2B conversations. This change in focus is because:
- DAU only dropped 50% two weeks after launch vs 90% for previous launches
- Farcaster Frames had strong conversion since it has an in-app wallet, while users rarely added us to home screen (PWA) after prompting
- Most tickets were bought with non-USDC tokens on other chains. Our x-chain payment provider should work with World app and chain.
Big bets
We are targeting large audiences with small transactions. We plan to take one big bet a month to 100x our audience, in addition to continued work improving app engagement, sharing, and retention.
- April: World mini app launch
- May: Third party app distribution via B2B
- June/July: Reach iGaming users and partner with crypto casinos after getting our gaming license. This is a pivotal bet since it introduces KYC on the frontend, not the protocol, for withdrawals and large deposits.
Shoutouts
- Everyone who helped amplify our launch on social media. Building in crypto is about getting attention, and I appreciate everyone who helped RT, comment, and more.
- Felix for convincing me to skip the weeklong iGaming conference to focus on hiring and launch
- Sina for the intro to our credit card payment solution
- David for the mention in his podcast about our launch
- Rui for writing an article featuring us
- Will for feedback on LP mechanism design
- Frog for thoughts on launch post wordsmithing
Patrick