Quidli

A Quidli Slack app is one of the most requested features we've been asked for by users - rather than using the web app, they'd rather recognize and reward colleagues publicly. So we built a quick & dirty beta and released to our most active users and close friends to install and play around with in their workspaces (https://quid.li/slack)

In the first week of launch, we onboarded two clients who made transactions using our app ($101 total)

As we haven't introduced subscription payments yet, our aim at the moment is to achieve monthly revenue/recurring monthly revenue (in addition to driving more user sign ups onto the platform)

After a couple of months building performance-based compensation tools for various gig-economy businesses on top of smart contracts, we determined that none of the use cases were sticky enough to pursue further.

Instead, we saw that accessibility to existing crypto like Bitcoin and Ether is still too complicated, and decided on building hosted wallet services for groups, projects and companies.

Our security token ESOP platform generated enough interest to raise funds from SOSV and Emurgo via participation in their joint dlab accelerator in NYC. The team spent their time in New York researching and interviewing employees in different industries to determine which fields have problems with compensation that can be solved using tokens and smart contracts.

Pivoting to a web-based employee equity app placed us squarely in competition with cap table management software leaders like Carta, Captable.io, Capshare, etc. We felt we offered nothing new in this space after dealing with only a handful of clients and so made the decision to return to a blockchain-based security token issuance platform for employee equity.

As initial users were not blockchain/crypto companies, we learned very quickly that non-crypto founders and CEOs aren't interested in taking the time to learn how to use blockchain applications. This drove us to remove the blockchain base and offer instead a normal web-based employee equity template generator for Delaware C corps, starting with incentive benefits plan + restricted stock options templates.

Built initial client list of 10 interested companies; and released a closed beta that enabled users to issue employee equity plans and agreements as tokens. Attracted interest from ConsenSys Ventures, received a pre-seed investment via their Tachyon accelerator in SF.

After speaking with 100+ founders and CEOs over a couple of months, we felt we understood that there is a pain felt by founders around managing their startups' equity - Lawyers are too expensive and cap table management tools are too confusing. And so we decided to kick off our project focusing on an employee equity tool built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.

Having already bootstrapped one company to reality and investments using a work-for-equity system, Quidli is imagined as a blockchain-based employee equity platform where tokens and smart contracts would be used to automate equity attribution and distribution based on respective contributions.