The main thing this month was getting Lunch Mixer finally launched in Lisbon. This slackbot app is now live in the Lisbon Digital Nomads slack and being used to coordinate weekly lunches in a channel with 575 members.
Other Wins
I finally got us setup with Mautic as a proper self-hosted, open source CRM/marketing automation solution. I finished writing a useful eBook for helping someone run their hackathon and then used Cursor to develop a custom WP widget for automating delivery of this lead magnet and bringing the lead into our new CRM.
The hope here is that I can test some paid ads and some 30x500 content marketing with this lead magnet helping generate some leads for us powering internal corporate hackathons.
The other big win was revamping our events page to a far better UX so it’s less like a database table and more like a photo gallery of upcoming events:
Paid bounties now display as such:
We finally ditched the awful service that is Sendgrid and replaced it with Postmark for better email deliverability and made one-click unsubscribe available to all email recipients.
On the IRL front, I was lucky to run the mentor programs for not one but two startup weekends in the past month in Coimbra:
and Albufeira:
And I’m still doing the monthly Nocode Lisboa, Polylogue and Open Startup events in Lisbon.
What I’m Thinking
I had an interesting insight from a discussion with one of the mentors at this weekend’s event in Albufeira who is an angel investor. I showed him our platform and asked what it would take for him to feel comfortable using it to deploy super early stage capital to promising projects. He proposed the idea that a different type of milestone should be possible to set via investors on the platform. So in addition to the project owner being able to incentivize creation of specific deliverables and reward with project tokens, a potential investor could set traction milestones that unlock investment contingent upon satisfaction of certain criteria. This is actually super interesting because investors can essentially these mini conditional term sheets that get unlocked by the project meeting various conditions. This is totally consistent with the idea of “alignment fabric” and making everything transparent and trustless.
This seems like a very useful feature to win the interest of angel groups and I’m intending to take a stab at deploying v1 of this capability and then demonstrating it to the Lisbon Core Angels to pilot.
Open Questions
- What’s the bare minimum set of capabilities that need to exist to test this ^^ out in a way that’s intuitive, useful and even seductive to angel groups?
- Assuming this is a key advancement that wins interest, how then to best take this out to the various groups and roll it out?
Next Month’s Focus
Platform
Implementing this feature for angel groups.
Project Success
Continued iteration on Lunch Mixer features.
Events
Nocode Lisboa and OpenStartup.
Content
None outside of the usual recording of the Nocode Lisboa “Live cooking” session tomorrow.
Traffic Snapshot
The technical roadmap as always can be found here.