A "Thank You" from Kiwi

We received 28,495 OP in RetroPGF3

Dear OP citizens, Kiwi News users, and community members,

Receiving 28,495 OP at 3.50 EUR a token would be a fantastic achievement for the project. I'm saying "would" because the OP price can drop, so we’re hoping for the bull to continue!!

But for you to know, the realistic revenue goal Mac and I set ourselves in June 2023 was to have a total income of 42,000 EUR by June 2024. Although basically non-sustainable financially, we set it for ourselves as an achievable number and a target of where we wanted to get to with mostly NFT sales.

And if you've been following along, you know we've massively struggled to get there. In fact, this goal is still nowhere in sight by selling NFTs alone.

But if you look through the RetroPGF3 receiver list and compare us to "similar-stage" projects, I think you could get the impression that we underperformed. After all, many got more than us!

But I think we have not underperformed at all. Kiwi News is built and maintained by a community of people, and no entrenched outside capital has entered into this community and created external interest. There are no huge stakeholders, and we are independent so far. This is great, particularly for a media business.

We’ve built this project because we cared, not because we got paid a safe salary, and so it is very different from, for example, a VC-funded startup or brand that may have raised a million dollars before and has hence created a lot of external interest to create a return on the investment of the raised capital.

So, looking at OP’s RetroPGF through this lens and the resourcefulness we've demonstrated over the last eight months of working together as a freely connected community, and now raising an OP RetroPGF round that is DOUBLE the amount we had set out to achieve for the entire year, this is a fantastic result!!

But for me personally, receiving this incredibly huge amount of money also means Deleveraging!

Mac and I have put an insane amount of hours and dedication into this project. We’ve worked twelve to fourteen-hour days without any salary for months. In December, we then also started struggling financially.

It was a crippling period product-wise. It was also not pretty, personally. I was already looking for freelance work, and we saw each other forced to do B2B outreach for potential contract work.

We learned that this strategy of pivoting our attention to privately earning money isn’t easily reconcilable with building the Kiwi vision. If we want to build the protocol and site in a way that is aligned with what we think is good for the Ethereum ecosystem, working as freelancers or selling our alignment felt like a step back.

So, there were moments in December of a really bad struggle, but the OP RetroPGF grant is now extending our runway by a few months.

It’s not a crazy amount considering European income taxes and dividing it among everyone, but for us, it is "free money" because apart from the one week of promoting our application, we haven't had to do anything to get it, apart from doing our regular jobs and trying to create impact anyways.

To me, this is fantastic, and it is a real chance to turn around our business model and adjust our trajectory toward a product that is slightly more financially sustainable for us in the future.

We’ve now had over 800 users join our site. 500 alone in the last weeks. Yet we’ve made the potentially regrettable mistake of selling lifetime memberships, which don’t work out well unit-economically. Yet, getting this quasi-cash injection from OP at a time when we might have otherwise given up completely really makes all the difference!

Kiwi News lives! We’re not bankrupt for another few months, and so we must now use this chance, for we may not get another one like that!

So, all I can say is that I'm grateful for everyone who helped to promote us and showed up on Telegram or our website during the week of promotion (you know what I'm talking about if you were there). Thank you to OP!

It was really nice to see a community emerge and work together with a lot of focus and determination. Thank you to everyone who made this possible! Thank you for voting.

Most importantly, thank you to everyone in the Kiwi News community who’s spending tons of time curating, building products, reading, submitting articles, and engaging with the content on Telegram! We can only do this together.

As for the next steps: We're, of course, going to trickle down these funds to us and everyone who contributed to Kiwi News until the point when the Retro PGF voting stopped. We'll be in touch about the specifics of that soonish.

Best,

Tim and Mac