2018 has indeed been a great year for Indorse! We did not just deliver a working product on the mainnet, but also did one more iteration on that for second layer scalability and also got our first few customers who are already trialing out the product. Through the tumult of market euphoria towards the beginning of the year and the impending “long winter” for crypto towards the end, Indorse has never wavered from its promise of delivering a solid and working product. We always managed to behave like a fledgling startup, being frugal and conservative with our resources and making sure each and every member of our team was excited about what they were doing.

I would say that the highlight of my career at the helm of Indorse was when I asked our validator community (predominantly from Europe, India, and USA) whether they would like to do code reviews over Christmas and the resounding reply from them saying — YES! We want more! I’d say that it speaks volumes about their unfaltering motivation and love for Indorse…

Tech

We launched our first alpha in December 2017, where users could sign up on the platform, and claim their unique username on the blockchain, like https://indorse.io/gaurang. Since then, we have taken monumental leaps in terms of product and technology on the platform. We released the first version of Anonymous Indorsement Protocol (AIP) as written in the white paper in May 2018. Since then, we have been iterating on AIP and the voting protocols almost on a weekly basis, adding and removing features from our highly motivated and dedicated validator community.

We also revamped the AIP tech just this month and released an improved process for voting by utilizing Merkle trees. This also gave us much better UX for the validators. Meanwhile, we kept validating our product and technology hypotheses and assumptions by constantly speaking with our customers and end users. This gave us a lot of valuable insights and amazing features to work on.

In short, we have shifted our focus from being a Decentralized Professional Network to a Decentralized skills validation network. When we started Indorse, we had made three promises —

Data ownership Data monetization Skills validation

We decided to use Ethereum because it lent itself well to all these 3 promises. While we are still focusing on all these promises as a whole, we realized that the demand and NEED in the market for Skills validation outweighed the first two promises.

Along the way, we have worked on some amazing pieces of technology, both in terms of a market-ready product and also R&D which helps the community as a whole —

Merkleized state commits — https://blog.indorse.io/indorse-scaling-merkelized-state-commits-e74a6ebac099

— https://blog.indorse.io/indorse-scaling-merkelized-state-commits-e74a6ebac099 GraphQL for our hybrid DAPP — https://blog.indorse.io/building-a-dapp-api-with-graphql-why-do-we-use-and-how-did-we-move-from-rest-to-graphql-25febb3872e8

— https://blog.indorse.io/building-a-dapp-api-with-graphql-why-do-we-use-and-how-did-we-move-from-rest-to-graphql-25febb3872e8 Upgradeable Smart Contracts — https://blog.indorse.io/indorse-launches-the-first-100-upgradeable-smart-contract-on-the-ethereum-mainnet-ddbfa05f4cb

— https://blog.indorse.io/indorse-launches-the-first-100-upgradeable-smart-contract-on-the-ethereum-mainnet-ddbfa05f4cb Agile thinking for blockchain teams — https://blog.indorse.io/how-agile-development-and-blockchain-technologies-require-a-fresh-way-of-thinking-fbfbb76418de

— https://blog.indorse.io/how-agile-development-and-blockchain-technologies-require-a-fresh-way-of-thinking-fbfbb76418de Smart Contract Security tool Solstice — https://medium.com/@rajeevgopalakrishna/solstice-solidity-security-tool-for-investigative-contract-examination-1fafda26d038

Marketing

Avadhoot and his team used a lot of growth hacks and a combination of digital marketing, various social media campaigns, and email outreach to achieve some impressive numbers for the marketing team —

40,000+ users signed up on the platform

96 expert programmers validating and doing code reviews almost on a daily basis using our AIP protocol

1000+ candidates, junior to mid-level programmers claiming their skills on the platform

1 online hackathon in India

40+ content articles published through our Indorse blog and other outlets

We are also doing a series of interviews with our validators — https://blog.indorse.io/tagged/interview

Business

Throughout our journey of building a great product at Indorse, we always tried to stay close to the actual customers of the product and shape the features based on actual market feedback. Our business team led by Dipesh, and now Naqib was instrumental in making sure that we ALWAYS got good feedback on our features and product. This helped us work and remain like an agile and lean startup.

What we have achieved is the following —

Close and meaningful relationships with various market partners and stakeholders, through incessant efforts by Richard

Product market fit, and a laser focus on what needs to be done in the first 2 quarters of 2019

Several customers, both big and small, in the pipeline for 2019. On the verge of making significant revenue in the next few months