On Development
To my mind, and based on our team’s experience over the last year or so, the most important challenges for us to address at this stage can be boiled down to two things:
improving the product to prepare Seeds to scale and
finding a repeatable way to reach more people who resonate with our mission to fill the so-called “top of the funnel.”
Seems pretty basic, right? One could argue that, at a high level, that’s the challenge for every project after product-market fit is achieved. (Note: I kind of hate using terms like “product-market fit” and “top of the funnel” because they don’t really align with the higher level energy I believe Seeds vibrates on, its work to transcend the failings of legacy capitalistic monetary systems, but in this post I’ll resort to using phrases like these for lack of better ones).
I’m finding that these challenges are simple, but surmounting them hasn’t been as basic as I’d hoped…or else we would have done so by now. There have been blocks that seem intangible and energetic to me. Sometimes they’ve felt aggressive/attack-y, sometimes abandoning.
For anyone who’s done a bunch of therapy/healing work as I have, I guess it won’t be surprising to know that what I describe above was also my experience of my family or origin. My father was an abusive narcissist, and my mother enabled him. I was the scapegoat kid, and my three siblings were trained by the family system to attack and/or neglect as well, to channel the family dysfunction at me as the scapegoat rather than addressing it. There’s a lot of information online about what happens to scapegoat kids, and when I first heard the term used in a therapeutic context, from a psychologist I saw when I was in my late 20s, it really seemed like my family was a textbook case. I’ve healed a ton of this - mostly through Vipassana - but I’m not out of the woods yet.
I often think about how important it is for founders to heal their stuff, in part because when they don’t, it shows up in the organizations they’ve created. re: my issues and Seeds, it’s been no exception.
So I ultimately built 95% of the existing Seeds ecosystem myself. This wasn’t for lack of trying to get help. I’ve made many, many attempts over the years to bring in the talent I assumed was needed when we required a tool, or some added functionality, that I thought would take me too long to figure out how to make.
It’s never worked out…and sometimes it’s gone really badly. Some of the collaborators were nice, and the ones I’ve found seem to have gotten nicer as I’ve healed. Many were narcissists or abandoners themselves.
In any case, it seems like the universe, or whomever, is telling me that I’m meant to continue improving the product myself. I’m finally coming not only to accept that, but what’s more, to believe that it’s possible for me to achieve…maybe even relatively quickly.
So how does Seeds take care of #1? I shared an idea for a dashboard tool for givers with our community in an email this past week, and all who were kind enough to respond were in favor.
A dashboard would function like every other DeFi platform I’ve seen, in that it would allow folks to choose when they would like to receive their SEEDS reward, but it would require them to pay the gas fees for that transfer.
Though I’m not aware of any other crypto project that does this, we’ve been covering those gas fees for our givers for years now, and that was a big part of my hesitation in making this shift. I didn’t want our givers to feel confused or unappreciated. But now I understand that in making the decision to have covered these fees for years, though no other project does so, I was taking on more than was necessary such that it was detrimental to the highest good - exactly what I learned to do growing up in my narcissistic family structure. And of course, once I recognized this and shared thoughts about changing it, the kind people in the Seeds community were not only receptive, but some bowled me over with their support and generosity.
What’s beautiful is that even though I haven’t yet healed enough to attract a large team of collaborators who are able to elevate the Seeds mission, there are many givers within our community who elevate Seeds (and me!) in often moving ways.
So I’m taking steps to build this dashboard now. When it’s fully functional, Seeds will be in a much more powerful position for scaling. There’s other work to be done in that regard for sure - for instance, a basic, necessary functionality to this end will allow those who make Requests for Help to create their own shareable pages for their need, like every other crowdfunding site in the world. This would almost certainly help with virality and word-of-mouth surrounding the project as well.
So that’ll be my next task once the dashboard works.
What about #2, filling “the top of the funnel?” The challenge here is much simpler than that of #1, but I seem to be hitting even more robust energetic blocks.
Which is to say, advertising platforms that show crypto ads frequently - namely YouTube ads - have suspended Seeds. I’m not sure why, and my attempts to appeal this have been unsuccessful. What we’re doing is no more in violation of their terms than is any yelling white guy crypto ad I’ve seen. Those people haven’t created an ecosystem that is about helping others and building abundance for all.
But the people creating these policies don’t seem to care, and I think a lot of the problem there has to do with the fact that there is no other project like Seeds. Many crypto projects are the epitome of shitty masculine capitalistic energy, and so these policies are designed to protect potential users from that. These policy-makers seem to have no ability to imagine the notion of a blockchain ecosystem like that of Seeds, which is focused on uplifting.
Sometimes it makes me furious. Sometimes I can see the silver lining. It’s been a problem for many years now - being chased off Facebook in late 2017/early 2018 is what ultimately took me to TikTok, which was a blessing.
But now TikTok isn’t really working as a traction channel either. I get maybe 1/20th the number of people I used to easily attract for a live, and my videos don’t get seen to anywhere near the degree they did a year ago. TikTok Promote was kind of working for a minute, but then they started banning my posts as well.
Some of this has to do with the crypto market “quieting,” and I embrace those cycles, recognizing their healthfulness. But I worry about what these centralized platforms can/are doing…how am I meant to reach the people who will understand Seeds? What’s the right way to surmount these hurdles?
If you resonate with Seeds and have any suggestions about how we can get around these Google/YT/TikTok blocks, I’d be grateful to hear them! Collaborations with like-minded folks in a Live, speaking engagements, PR items, etc. could all help. But the energies seem to have been kind of blocking my attempts at those as well - for instance, I’ve tried to hire a PR firm for Seeds a couple times over the years, and weird things would get in the way.
But I can’t yet see what the lesson there is. Does the universe/whatever want me to improve the product for scalability before it’ll allow for ease in connecting Seeds with a larger audience?
Maybe so. I’ll keep trying at this - everything is impermanent, after all! In a few months, the landscape could be totally different.
-Rachel