In this Dev Update, we will be discussing the status of our Proof-of-Concept (POC), next steps, and additions to the team.

POC

As mentioned in our last update, we have been working on developing our POC and had opened up the same to our advisors for a quick test / feedback. Our advisors have been helpful and provided us with their valuable feedback. This has helped us to not only refine the product, but also think of a better product-market fit. Taking into account their feedback and further developments, we now have a mature POC.

We would like to make a special mention of our new advisor: Alex Shin. He is one of the key members of Blind, which is an anonymous chat app, currently making waves in the best SV companies, like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. Alex advised that we should have a narrower market focus and start with a particular niche for testing our POC.

Following his advice, our POC is beginning to test the waters with the blockchain and developer community. In specific, we have narrowed down the focus to 5 core skills, each of them related to blockchain. We have also added the ability to create profile pages for the user and co-relate the profile page with the claims and the votes.

We are going to open up our POC to the first batch of users, ie, developers, tomorrow, Saturday 16th September. This is to validate our hypothesis and the algorithm behind Anonymous Indorsement Protocol (AIP). We also want to see what sort of proof elements people put with their claims.

Since a link to our app was available on our website, various potential users registered their email addresses through the app. We scanned through the list and have identified a few developers to whom we will be inviting for a test of our POC.

Even if you’re not a developer, fret not, since we will be opening up the platform for other skill sets too in the next batches.

Here are a few screenshots which show how it looks —

Claims page: This is the page which lists down all the skills that has been claimed by a user. In the below screenshot: I have claimed a skill of NodeJS coding and have submitted my Github link as a proof.

Claims page

Votes page: This is the page which lists down all the skills on which I have voted (either through acceptance or flagging-off).

Votes page

What to expect in this POC

Ability to create claims and add proof elements

Ability to vote on other users’ claims

Ability to create a basic profile page

It might have a few bugs.

What NOT to expect in this POC

A finished product which competes with any other established social network

Ability to earn rewards and IND (since this is not on the main net)

Ability to detect that the proof submitted by someone is genuine

Current Processes

Currently, we usually have our weekly sprint planning meeting on every Tuesday and the pre-planning meeting every Thursday (in addition to daily standups). Harsh has been really good at organizing all the standups and these meetings, and also specifying all the tickets in JIRA! Kedar and Prasanna both are working on the application part.

Next Steps

As expected, we were heavily invested till September 7 for a successful execution of the token sale. Now that we have successfully completed our token sale our full attention is on developing a great product!

The next few weeks are going to be concentrated on user onboarding in an easy and user-friendly manner, so that people outside the crypto community can also easily use the application. We are exploring some solutions like Airbitz, uPort and Civic for this. It might be a combination of these solutions.

Also, in order to avoid Sybil attacks, David has come up with a strategy to give weighted confidence score based on validating your profile through one or multiple of these solutions, while also using traditional solutions like Google Oauth.

I am also exploring and researching various solutions to some of the challenges we will face in the future. As for the scalability challenge, Vitalik has written about Plasma, which can be a good option for Indorse in the future. I am also further exploring using the Raiden network for indorsements.

Team updates

We are investing a lot of time in expanding our team. Heavy recruitment efforts are underway. We are interviewing several people across India, Singapore and London at the same time. We have narrowed down 2 good candidates in London and a couple more in Singapore. Apart from recruitment, we are also concentrating on building up a core strategy and streamlining the development processes, while keeping the bigger picture in mind.

We also added two new members to the team in Singapore:

Gerald Goh, who is going to work on DevOps for Indorse and automating the build processes.

Liew Jia Jun, who is an intern, and helping us do some market research and help out David and Dipesh in their day to day responsibilities

We are also going to add another member next week, who will also look after business development for Indorse.

Events!

I will be speaking at the Keynote Conference happening in London being organized by Moe Levin. I will be attending that along with our CMO Avadhoot.

PS: Please take this short survey to help us understand and create a report on how people use endorsements on LinkedIn. We shall publish and share our research insights with you soon.

At Indorse, we’re building the future of decentralized professional networking and by taking this survey you will help us work in the right direction.

https://indorse.typeform.com/to/Jw27IM

PPS: Indorse IND token became trade-able on Gatecoin and Etherdelta yesterday around noon Singapore time.

https://gatecoin.com/

https://etherdelta.com/#IND-ETH