Good Morning (or Good Meowning as my 7-year old now says),

One of my responsibilities as President of Many Hands is to give both our company and our supporters monthly updates on how our projects are doing, and our upcoming plans to improve them. To that end, I’m going to survey our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Strengths:

• We have top talent from the TCG industry creating an innovative TCG.
• We have top talent from sci-fi, fantasy, and gaming creating art for our project.
• Our narrative team is churning out a lot of good sci-fi/fantasy writing.
• Our partnership with InterPop has solved a lot of problems as a Point of Sale. (PoS)
• Our product is exciting. Click through rates on ads exceed average rates by 300–900%.
• Highly engaged community. People who joined our Discord have put a lot of effort into helping the project, are warm and kind to each other, and are interested in what’s next.
• Sold out first NFT offering in 3 days. This validates our basic economic model.
• Foreign language communities around our project organized organically.
• We have open sourced hypermaps, a new machine learning-based visualization tool for sorting and examining NFT collections. This demonstrates our commitment to open source and that we are actively applying machine learning to CryptoArt.

Weaknesses:

• Unanswered questions. We need better tutorialization about the project and a white paper.
• Underdeveloped marketing funnel. We need more fun engagement for those who land on our website so that they develop emotional resonance with the project before moving to Discord, social media, or MinterPop.com.
• People who found the project early, but can’t afford rare and ultra-rare items, need something they can participate with besides the MultiPass.
• User Base. With only a few weeks of active marketing, the project has only around 1000 engaged supporters.
• The project is running in the red.
• Limited number of wallet types permitted in MinterPop marketplace.
• Signature Edition tokens are unnumbered.
• A lot of cool stuff and useful information is buried in our Discord server.

Opportunities:

• Our promotional materials are exciting to test audiences. Time to show them to investors and the Tezos Foundation and do some fundraising!
• We have offers to collaborate or partner from parties who have seen our project.
• We can enhance our website with the materials on our Discord, especially FAQ content and Narrative content.
• We can build a stronger funnel with information we gained from launch and feedback from our community.
• Drive adoption by MinterPop.com of all Beacon-based Tezos wallets.
• Create promotional items to engage community members who lack funds to buy items, as well as hold giveaways and contest to distribute them.
• Our current supporters can help us find more supporters and platforms to share the project.
• Diffuse the innovation that is hypermaps. We defined the term, and we open-sourced the code. Work with industry peers to develop open standards and open code for this core CryptoArt technology. If fully decentralized per true web 3 philosophies, hypermaps can be a fundamental data structure of CryptoArt markets.
• Leverage the collective wisdom of our Discord community to make continuous improvements and new connections.

Threats:

• A bear crypto- market decreasing available investment resources and appetite for risk.
• Negative perceptions surrounding NFTs, especially around the environment and artist’s rights.
• Backlash among gamers when companies or projects do NFTs or user-owned content “wrong”. See: Diablo III, Artifact, UbiSoft.

All in all, our launch had a bumpy start: No seed-wallets allowed in the marketplace, no auctions for the Signature Editions leading to fixed prices pricing out early supporters, a massive crypto downturn only days after getting started.

That said, we are encouraged by the responsiveness of those we have engaged, believe the sell out of our first token demonstrates the viability of our business plan, and are confident that as we improve our deployment of information and awareness about the project, that we have something people will love and will thrive.

Over the coming weeks we will be rolling out some promotional items for community members on a budget to get for free for supporting the project, a white paper, numerous website upgrades, and some more informational videos.

We will also be launching a round of fundraising, which should give us the capital we need to make some key new hires with the confidence that we’ll have enough runway to get clear through game launch even if sales only grow slightly between now and then, and even if there are unexpected delays.

I look forward to checking in next month to let you know how all of these efforts are going!

Alex West
President, Many Hands SPC
Co-Creator, Verses TCG

2/2/22

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