In this post, I will outline the steps we took, from sneaking into thousand-dollar events in Dubai to being threatened with lawsuits by the largest blockchain blog, CoinDesk, to raising targeted funds in our token presale.

Over the past 2 weeks, our team at Proof has grown in two particular areas. In addition to the aforementioned area of financial capital, we have gained more appreciation for the power of the crowd. With 5,000 active users on our platform, a Slack chat community of nearly a thousand participants, and a little over 100 participants contributing a minimum of 10 ETH (approx. $3,400) in our token presale event, we have learned quite a bit about the blockchain-based token sale process. Since our platform empowers users to launch their own token sales, these lessons, learned from throwing ourselves headlong into the fire, are essential. Eat your own dog food, as it were.

Over the past year or so, we have been building and deploying blockchain-based products to empower the future of finance. Through our development processes and users’ feedback, we developed new, decentralized, mechanisms for unstoppable finance. “Unstoppable finance” consists of marketplaces free of the threats of capital controls and sanctions by governments and other large institutions. We are developing these mechanisms to complement our existing tools, whilst promoting new kinds of certainty via trustless interactions. Our in-development tools offer — what we believe to be — superior alternatives to the politically motivated government regulatory organizations we have today. These solutions bring real-time protections to investors around the world through crowdsourced insurance protocols and blockchain-based credit scoring. Our AMP Protocol pairs these concepts with prediction market principals to signal risk and facilitate the curation and trade of tokenized property, community currency, debt and equity on the blockchain.

Here are some of the areas that helped us reach our current pre-token sale contribution totals. I will attempt to make each point as bite-sized as a tweet.

Oh The Risks

We traveled the world to meet thought leaders on our own (limited) dimes. When we couldn’t afford the conferences, we snuck in. #Dubai

2. Partnerships

Most of our partnerships were formed after-hours or post-conference (accompanied by live demos) and later cultivated via video conference.

3. Stakes

Most people knew we were using our own life-savings’ to pursue solutions that we believed could improve the financial well-being of millions. This created more support than we expected.

4. Community

Against advice, we never hired a community manager. Instead, the founding team strove to take the time to directly answer user questions. #latenights

5. Content

As hard as it is to pause from platform development, we placed emphasis on always sharing our creations via Youtube for feedback.

6. Growth Hacking

We used our own tools to showcase capabilities, by placing the press inside our tools. CoinDesk wasn’t so happy we created their real-ish looking ICO, however.

Going forward, we are striving continue our open-ear processes. As we gain more users and token sale participants, it is becoming more difficult to converse and incorporate many of the new suggestions and enhancement ideas that come our way. We are working to leverage our current capital to build out new methods of synthesizing feedback, to continue the practice of rapid suggestion-to-productionism (new word). This is, of course, in addition to more secure, further decentralized, and easier-to-use tools. At the end of the day, our present and future are based entirely on the value we provide our users. As one of our most active Slack members @bringmorevalue always reminds us: it’s all in that name.