It was just another day when Gaurang, (the CTO of Indorse) called me somewhere in the beginning of 2016 to talk about a startup he co-founded. He told me about the new type of service that they were building— Smart Contracts as a Service & they had been accepted into an accelerator program. The name of the startup was Attores.

I’ve been friends with Gaurang for almost 10 years. We went to the same University for our Engineering courses. After completing Engineering, we had lost touch & hardly had any idea of what each other was doing. We reconnected through a common friend & found out that we both were in the tech space working on different products. We started bouncing ideas off each other. It was early 2015 & Ethereum had started getting some exposure.

One day, Gaurang mentioned that he was looking at creating an Ether Mining Calculator. As the name suggests, the calculator would give you an idea of how much Ether you can mine according to the resources you have. He started working to implement that, but when he did some research, he found out that there were better services for this & creating just another calculator wouldn’t create much value. We scrapped that idea off.

Days went by, we worked together on some interesting FinTech projects (I was freelancing back then), created and marketed products, but there was something missing. Impact! With our work, however good it may have been, we weren’t able to create an impact. We knew our stuff pretty well, we worked hard (and smart at times), but we weren’t able to create tremendous value for people.

We always strived to create something that potentially could change a billion lives!

Coming back to Attores, when Gaurang told me about the service offering, I knew this idea had great potential. I had a chat with David (CEO & co-founder of Attores/Indorse — really an awesome guy) the next day & I decided to start working with them on Attores — in communications & marketing.

At Attores, an idea that struck us well was to offer digital certificates on blockchain. We landed a project with Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore, where Attores is located. For the Polytechnic, we place diplomas on a private ethereum blockchain and help the students push their e-certificates to professional networks like LinkedIn.

We soon realized that there was something fundamentally broken with the current model of systems for professionals. Specifically, professionals looking to publish their skills which are certified by trusted institutions (which we were working with), but additionally non-accredited or independently acquired skills such as coding outside of a classroom.

The current professional endorsement systems on other platforms don’t make sense. Anyone can endorse anyone for anything, at times without knowing whether the person really has those skills or not.

This needed to be fixed.

We’re living in a professional world where qualifications are representations of skills acquired. While your education & the institution you went to still matters, it’s your skills that you acquire along the way that play a greater role in your growth trajectory.

Another problem that everyone of us who uses social media faces is the ownership of data. Your data on these platforms is owned by the platforms you post it to & they monetise. Bad news — you aren’t getting anything out of it, nor from the value of the network as it grows.

We now had a fair idea of the platform & what it could offer. But, for this to work, we needed a network effect. With blockchain, we saw a unique opportunity to tap on the existing blockchain communities in order to create a network to begin with and incentivize the supporters themselves to use it.

There we had it. The dots started connecting together. We had a problem that we could fix using our expertise in blockchain, that could have an impact on billions of lives and benefit everyone in the ecosystem. David, Gaurang, Dipesh (our Operations Head) & I started working on this in March 2017 and it’s been a heck of a ride.

We were able to achieve a lot of things since then:

David & Gaurang wrote the first draft of the whitepaper over a week in April with the help of Brian, who is now studying law at Oxford. It’s been seven iterations of the whitepaper since then.

S$100k seed round from Coinsilium in May-June

12k newsletter subscribers

4.3k slack members — we had stopped slack invites a month ago because of spammers

5.4k twitter followers, 6.2k FB followers

Presented Indorse at 14 meetups & 9 conferences in 7 countries

Received $9m in token sales from 1871 different accounts (actually $11m in total but $2m worth of Ether had to go back to the Chinese contributors through ICOAge)

Team strength — we’re soon to be 10 members team working on Indorse

Partnerships with Change Finance, Bitjob & Gimli — More partnerships in the pipeline and in discussions.

Indorse POC out — Received feedback from Advisors & first set of testers. New batch of testers trying out the app as I’m writing this.

Exchanges — Gatecoin, YoBit, Coss, HitBTC, Liqui.io

And, this is just the beginning. :)