Report to GnosisDAO members
This report is derived from a report sent to all TickDAO investors on February 20th. These reports were previously sent only to Gnosis executives on behalf of GnosisDAO, but on their request, we’ll now make quarterly reports available to the wider GnosisDAO community.
REBRANDING
TickSpread is now called quiver.trade.
We did a relaunch late last year, redesigning the entire website, and created a waitlist that required users to input their email and Discord profiles, as well as share us on Twitter.
This helped us gain initial awareness on Twitter and get a critical mass of active users on our Discord server.
TRACTION
Previously, our goal was to prove that we could obtain minimal traction. We needed a significant set of real reference customers to make data-based product improvement possible.
We have succeeded at that! Over 10,000 people performed the necessary steps and signed up for our waitlist. Out of those, more than 2,000 created accounts, and over 250 unique accounts made real money deposits in January.
Some more data for January:
Total volume: 34.8 million USD (~15x growth in 6 months)
Fee Revenue: $ 1,200.54
Total Revenue: $ 1,777.75 (includes PnL from market making bots)
Total deposits: $ 18,560.81
Total withdrawals: $ 11,505.85
Daily unique traders: ~25
We currently have about 5 daily traders making over 30 complete trades in a day.
WHAT WE LEARNED
After testing multiple growth strategies, we learned two very important lessons:
- The perception of scarcity is really important to drive user acquisition in crypto. The strategy that worked the best was to put up a waitlist that required several specific actions (making a tweet, connecting Discord, sharing crypto address) to join. Besides helping us stabilize user influx and creating a viral-like effect, it also made users somewhat psychologically invested in joining the app, which really improved all our metrics (intake, engagement, and retention).
- Crypto users also rely heavily on social cues as indication of product reliability. Recommendation from reputable influencers in particular (as opposed to paid ads) are a great driver, as that kind of endorsement is much harder for potential low-quality products to obtain.
PROGRESS
Until Q4 2022, Quiver was yet to demonstrate product-market fit and prove there really was a segment of users to be served with lower fees.
I think our numbers this year is good evidence that this segment does indeed exist. While we transacted a substantial volume, the average trade on Quiver is quite small on a percentage basis, meaning it wouldn’t be viable at other exchanges, where the execution costs are higher. This makes us confident that we are really making the pie bigger, rather than (re)splitting it.
On the product and operations side, we iterated on sign-up/deposit flows to make them more intuitive, and we measured sevenfold improvements in funnel metrics with some relatively small changes. This means we are still quite early in the product improvement process.
We also finished our whitepaper.
NEXT STEPS
In light of the current growth, we expect to increase headcount (and burn rate) by hiring:
-
3 new engineers/programmers (2 of them as replacements)
-
a Product Manager with significant experience in cryptocurrency trading
-
a COO with strong Silicon Valley experience (willing to give substantial equity as compensation)
Major features:
- Automatic hot wallet
- Stop Loss / Take Profit
- Insurance fund (prevent auto-deleverage – trades being closed automatically)
- Integration with Trade Terminals (used by many professional users)
- Gamification and trading competitions
- Listing several new crypto futures
- Listing stocks/forex/commodities futures
FINANCE
Total Treasury: ~799k available
Current Burn Rate: ~25k/month (32 months runway)
Predicted Burn Rate: ~50k/month (16 months runway)
GROWTH STRATEGY
We believe we’ve found the core growth channel – getting trading influencers to endorse and continuously advertise our product with partnerships or referral programs. This can happen on Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, or personal blogs.
So far we’ve partnered with some very niche airdrop influencers, which did provide great results (majority of our current users) at a very low price (about ~$1000 in total cost), but probably won’t scale much.
Landing partnerships with key influencers that focus specifically on trading, particularly on technical analysis, may let us grow up dozens of times relatively quickly. To do so we need to build relationships to gain their trust, as well as deliver on basic features that are important for more serious traders.
Growth can be significant not only in the number of users, but also in the lifetime value of each user. We currently enforce a small $500 limit on user deposits, which we can lift once the system is reliable enough for more serious trading. More experienced users will certainly operate with much larger balances.
—
We are sure to have a lot of work to do over the next several months. It has been very rewarding to see the product we’ve been working on for years finally getting some steam, and I look forward to sharing even more exciting news in the near future. From now on I’ll keep you informed of updates at least quarterly (and potentially earlier if we have particularly relevant changes).
While we are not sharing the cap table publicly here on the forum, GnosisDAO continues to hold a 2.5% in our project. GnosisDAO members are free to reach out to receive a copy of the current cap table.
-Kelvin
. Together with their commitment to Gnosis chain, this to me is a strong investment case.