Slise.xyz Q1 2024 Investor Updates: we CRUSHED IT (again)—Profitability, 3M users, Tokenized Ads? 👀
Let's make ads great again
Read the second half for the exciting new crypto-native vision for Slise!
Summary
Unique users reached: 3M+
Annualized revenue: $0.5M
Runway: Inf
Opportunities to connect: with the new big plans for Slise in the retail space we’re going to take 1-2 checks in our Seed extension round (based on a token). Reply to this message to schedule a call or grab a coffee in SF!
Opportunities to help: don’t hesitate to make intros with potential value-add investors and big publishers!
How we survived the winter
The last quarter let us taste both flavors, the sweet and the sour of the crypto market. Since marketing spend is a lagging indicator of the market motion, we can confidently say that we’ve witnessed the bottom of the ad market only in January this year (when retail trends have already been moving upwards). There were exactly 3 active advertisers across all of our competitors and just no business to be made. January became the first month when we incurred an operational loss.
But it didn’t discourage us, in turn, it reminded us that we are not a “project” anymore but an operating business with real volume and real risks. So in order to protect our future and become more resilient to external conditions we started the process of maturing—optimizing weak joints in our product and business practices that we could afford as a teenager but that were unsustainable in the long run.
We spend January and February building towards optimization:
Cut the headcount and restructured the existing roles;
Built a mediation module to resell an unsold inventory;
Reviewed our pricing model, increased the margin, and raised the minimum budgets;
Revisited our agreements with publishers (liabilities) to make them more flexible;
Added additional tools for monitoring and control of our traffic.
The result was not long in coming: February became our best month ever with $42k in revenue that surpassed our operational costs and made us ramen-profitable. With the following boom of the meme coins and new projects, our biggest problem in March became how to satisfy all the demands coming our way and replying to angry asks of advertisers to give them more traffic and move them up the queue. You heard it right, for the first time in our operations we had to put advertisers in the queue while simultaneously making deals with new publishers.
The demand is temporary, operational efficiency lasts forever
What makes me smile looking at my wife in the morning is not our revenue, and not even her beautiful face, but understanding that with our current processes, we can serve 10x demand with absolutely the same resources, keeping our costs fixed and only growing the profits.
Tokenized future of advertising
Time over time, the expectation of asymmetric returns proves to be the strongest driver of growth in the Web3 world. From airdrops, where the user is incentivized to go through complicated funnels for a chance to get a reward (quests) to NFTs and meme coins that motivate users to gamble on a scale larger than any utility-driven product could bring. The desire to speculate and “make it big” is proving to be a fundamental part of “crypto-native” behavior.
Meme coins take enormous mindshare of crypto users but it doesn’t convert into any long-term value. If meme coins are so efficient in organic distribution, what if every project could create its meme coin and use it for advertising?
Our solution—users’ owned ads
The new Slise platform allows projects to tokenize their ad campaigns and let the retail invest and speculate on them. This new paradigm of advertising turns end-users from silent observers to active promoters and makes advertising fun and engaging.
Want to know wtf is going on here? Reach out to us to schedule a call and receive our memo. We’re also available for in-person chats in SF!
That’s all, folks!
Oleksii, CEO