Titans Journal Day 23: Financials

When John Saddington (@8bit) shared his experience as an investor, he said he would always ask the CEO one important question--what's the balance of the company bank account? Taking care of the financials is one of the 3 things a CEO does.

I didn't do an excellent job at that in my first startup. I did constantly seek cash flows and investments but did a very poor job in planning--I was overly ambitious and optimistic even when I shouldn't have. I focused mostly on products and developments, not enough on the financials.

To keep the Titans Finance financially in the green, we decided that we need to have fundings. And before the fundings come in, we need to self-fund the project. After working on the project for 6 months on our own, my co-founder started working full-time to support the project financially. I had the luxury of continuing full-time on Titans because of that.

However, when I was contacted by this startup that uses blockchain technology to close real estate transactions--I jumped at the opportunity. The founder and the team are fantastic, and I love what they are doing. The biggest problem, in my view, in the decentralized finance ecosystem is that all the credit is generated through over-collateralization. This does not improve the efficiency of money, or generate real economic values. Mostly, the current use case only benefits the speculators in leveraging their positions, and the "hodlers"--people who are bullish on cryptocurrencies in the long run--to borrow against their holdings without selling.

What if we can tokenize the actual assets and allow them to collateralized on-chain? That could be a game-changer and bring real credit that improves money efficiency with the blockchain-efficiency!

Also, while Rocket Mortgage improved the experiences of the loan application process, the closing is still using antiquated legacy processes that involve notary public and fax machines, which customers are paying upwards of USD 10,000 for the (dis-)services. And with the COVID-19 shelter-in-place, such process is pretty much blocked. But this startup has proven that this process could be handled on-chain in minutes. This is a super exciting project and it checks all the boxes for providing real-world values.

What does that mean for the Titans?

The founders will continue to deliver progress and grow the community and improve user experiences. In about two months, when we anticipate the MVP to be stable and robust, we will hire full-time developers and build a customer service team for the growth phase. Founders plan to continue innovating on the underlying technologies--including possible integration with Stellar, a blockchain designed to handle fiat and cryptocurrencies with less than 5 seconds of transaction time, one-tenth of the transaction costs, and sophisticated security features built-in.

COLLAB x

Also, a great shout-out to fellow Indiehacker Steven (@stevenmeets) and COLLAB x for featuring Titans Finance in this awesome newsletter! Sign-up to join the COLLAB x here!

To all the fellow Indiehackers who are working on their projects on the side, or transitioned from full-time to part-time, I'd love to hear about your experiences.