Reflections on Samudai

I have been taking some notes on things I personally and we as a company could have done better and some insights we uncovered along the way, listing some here (Juicier ones towards the end).

DAO OS

1. Took too much time in “perfecting” the product.

Entering a space as crowded as DAO tooling, launching early would have been fatal to ride the momentum and cement some early partners.

Launching early also would have given us more iterations and time for reflection.

2. Realized late that most DAOs are currently not self-sustaining. Should have identified this earlier to either solve this core problem or pivot.

Made it difficult for us to find sticky users a SAAS product where the users themselves were pre-PMF. Made it even more difficult to get paying ones.

3. Going after existing DAOs and ignoring the new DAOs, this didn’t work.

Sales cycles were longer, no clear decision makers. BD was exponentially difficult for larger communities and getting entire community to switch was a greater challenge than we had accounted for.

Also presents a dilemma where you want to go after the largest players to back you, as being a funded startup those are the only people who can pay for your services.

4. Current model of DAOs doesn’t scale

We realised late that the current model of DAOs doesn’t scale, the only successful and sustainable DAOs are either very small where governance overhead is minimised or Foundations (eg Uniswap) with clear team driving decision making. Either case, would not have been sustainable for us as a client.

Points OS

1. We joined the points party a bit late, while still strong as a meta, the hype and fomo around points had died down and people were no longer jumping to start their own points systems.

This made it difficult to get the viral growth we had hoped for and we faced stiff competition from companies with more resources who were early entrants. This is where our product superiority helped us differentiate from them.

2. A lot of companies wanted to do a points system with us as it would boost their growth but had no idea what they wanted.

We had to adopt a consultancy model where we sat with them and helped them design their KPIs, product changes and incentive programs. This helped in building good relationships with them but made the sales cycle extremely long.

General (Juicier ones)

1. Somewhere between 2022 and 2024 the influx of growth people in the industry also declined, this might have been because of AI stealing the spotlight and appealing to a larger audience, which eventually slowed the entire industry.

(I will write a larger piece exploring this)

2. Hesitating in asking the users to pay, feeling that they would leave, also would make it more difficult to onboard new users.

In hindsight that would have been a good way to root out non serious users and also understand in depth about what is working and whats not.

3. We didn’t focus on marketing enough, also had the mentality that the launch needs to be a big “launch” launch and that marketing would skyrocket from that one single tweet, marketing doesn’t work that way.

4. We thought that just building a better product would be enough and that compensated other aspects of business, thought that the best product alone would be able to compensate for every other thing.

Looking back and at the market, that’s usually never the case.

5. It took time to transition and understand the role of a Founder and grow into it.

For some time after starting I was still thinking as a builder which led us to missing out and understand the importance of crucial things like community building and building in public.

6. Hiring someone without a clear defined role because they were a “good” guy.

Eventually led to a waste of resources and stirred the team morale where some were working super hard but we were not able to utilize others to their fullest.

7. Trying to get everything right, eventually slowed us down, made us hesitant while experimenting.

8. I think somewhere across the way, due to decreased traction, it made it difficult for us to maintain the intensity with which we needed to operate. Without small wins and newer challenges, it made us little complacent or maybe this was because we were so desperate for bigger wins that we ignored those small wins and termed them as “normal” or nothing extraordinary to be celebrated, to the extent we even ignored them.

Maybe raising more money than we needed had a part to play with this. With that amount of dilution you’re expected to make big breaks and not small ones, maybe that pressure got to us and we went after larger DAOs and clients, with whom the sales cycles were longer, required heavy personalization and almost a consultant approach to working with them.

9. We were able to create a culture in the team which imbibed the feeling of belonging and a sense of not personal results but a shared journey of mutual success in the company. Which was incredibly helpful because all of us were devoted to make it work, this also helped eliminate any jealousy among team and promoted accountability where every piece of good deed and failure were shared. Early on we faced difficulties such as frontend devs blaming backend devs and vice versa for missing a deadline and this eliminated that.

10. Building a SAAS in web3 made us realize that market is still not mature enough for venture backed companies operating B2B. Since the entire space is pre-PMF that made the organizations we were targeting also pre-PMF and unsustainable by transitive property.

Another factor reinforcing this was that a lot of companies have idle talent so just use their devs to build the requirement instead of using a service provider. This hinders the companies themselves because building that service is not their core business, they will not be able to keep up with resource allocation, newer developments and product improvements on that end, will also take up considerable mindshare of the team to build a supplementary piece of tech infra.

On the other hand since the target market for B2B companies is mostly dev focused, the only SAAS companies we saw working were dev tooling. So a long way to go for SAAS in web3.

11. As time progressed I grew pessimistic of what we are trying to achieve as an industry, I was yet to see any projects (including us) building to take web3 mainstream. That means that there are hardly any solutions in the space which would convince the masses to prefer them over web2 alternatives, in terms of usability, UX and cost.

This was a hard hitting fact that I’m still trying to process and made me think again from first principles of why we started building in the first place. Turns out a lot of people were doing things because it was a viable or a good business model and they could raise funds and not because they were genuinely interested in that, and that to some extent sucked a lot of my energy.

As it stands today I’m re-learning web3 and why I started in the first place and looking to surround myself with people who are building for the right reasons.

12. We had a very expensive and supporting set of investors which we were not able to capitalize on to the extent that we should have, maybe due to inexperience or other notions that held us back. Even though we have good relationships and were in constant touch, if I could do it again, this would be one of the first things I would change and put more energy towards building even deeper relationships.

I’m super grateful for everyone on our cap table and thank them for their patience. I couldn’t have asked for a better set of people to learn from and build my first venture with.

13. Being vulnerable is something that doesn’t come naturally to founders and for the most part I perceived it (incorrectly) as a weakness, which made me think twice before reaching out for help and exposing my weaknesses.

Not asking for help is not a sign of weakness but a trust issue, so start with a few trusted people and ones who have been through the same things as you are going through. This changed for me over time and the results were drastically different from what I had perceived.

In my recent experience I shared a post trying to do this and was amazed at the response and help I received. It was a very new feeling for me interacting with the “strangers” on the internet and only wish I could have understood this sooner. I will write a bigger post on this to explore this and share my experience.

14. Right from the start of our journey we were very mindful with how we spent our money, optimizing the expenses to maximize runway, this in hindsight was not the best mindset as on some level, being on its extreme end, it stifled growth.

We now realize that we needed to find the balance of being able to identify necessary expenses and do them to make sure a better chance to gaining traction and running better quicker experiments.

15. Survival is the name of the game and borderline that most startups need to optimize for. If you’re not able to survive, you will not be able to create the change you started when you started.

Its also a forcing function which expedites a lot of things, but that desperation sometimes comes at a cost of losing your path, always remember your “Why” and stay true to it.

16. We weren’t failing occasionally, (PG quote: "If you’re not failing occasionally, you’re probably being too conservative.") We made our bets and worked on them but pushed too greatly to make them work rather than experimenting new things, in hindsight we should have iterated faster and failed faster.

17. One of the biggest and the most difficult to write about is that over time we stopped having difficult conversations and I completely blame myself for it. I was weak and scared to confront and call people out. This could have been partly because our team was compromised of friends who I knew from college and meant a lot to me. The thought of how they would react and that it could turn into a fight was scary but nevertheless not an excuse.

I believed that everyone in the org was doing things for the benefit of the company and was naive to acknowledge anything otherwise. I trusted them blindly which ended up hurting us even more because it wasted precious time, time we could have spent experimenting and iterating. Maybe a part of me even thought that I can do alone it even with this shit going on.

Now when I look back and think about it I can only think that I should have backed myself more and trusted my gut, and had those conversations, maybe we would have been in a different place. But yeah, now that I have been through this and know what it feels like, never again!

18. The decision to shut down was one I’ve ever had to face, but looking back maybe it was inevitable, taught me about Founder’s ego. Which I will write in more detail about.

19. Not taking out time to sit alone and disconnect, reflect upon the actions.

Getting too caught up in the day to day makes you lose sight of the big picture. Take time to reflect and introspect, write about it. Eventually also affected the goal of building an audience on social.

Having said all this, building Samudai was the best experience I’ve ever had, I enjoyed it thoroughly, the sleepless nights, the emotional fatigue, constant new challenges, working with friends and trying to take on the world, everything. They’ve only made me stronger and I’ve learnt so much the past few years. Grateful for the team who stuck by us through thick and thin, I’m extremely grateful for the community, the people to work with I met along the way, and grateful for the privilege of the pressure. I could have only dreamed about doing what we were able to achieve despite the difficulties.

If you’re building something, go through these and learn from our mistakes. Reach out to me in the DMs and we can chat more. Thanks!