How We Launched in Beta and landed 20,000 users in 7 days

The response to our Open Beta Launch was overwhelming, over 20,000 users connected their wallets to Spectral’s app and generated a MACRO Score, a personalized assessment of their on-chain creditworthiness. Read on to hear how we got this far.

How We Launched in Beta and landed 20,000 users in 7 days

On August 23rd, the Spectral App launched in Open Beta. The response was overwhelming, over 20,000 users connected their wallets to Spectral’s app and generated a MACRO Score, a personalized assessment of their on-chain creditworthiness. This was the result of two years of hard work and meticulous planning. Here's how we did it.

STEP 1: Solve a Big [Blockchain] Problem [using AI]

Decentralized finance could help bring hundreds of millions of un-banked, underbanked and undercapitalized people into the world financial markets, in the process help create opportunities and reduce inequality all over the world. At the moment, however, DeFi lacks a capable creditworthiness assessment system–and remains capital inefficient and tilted toward entrenched capital.  

At Spectral, we care deeply about the following principles and believe that by holding strictly to them, DeFi can be better:

  1. Power should be decentralized
  2. Credit assessment must be credibly neutral
  3. DeFi must become a vehicle for economic empowerment for all and not just entrenched capital.

Our vision is to build a decentralized network of machine learning models—the Scoracle Network— that will transform credit scoring into an open and publicly accessible good.

Spectral CEO Sishir Varghese's Keynote Address to DeFi in 2022 

STEP 2: Hire the best and focus their effort on that BIG problem

Despite the downturn in Web3, we believe in our mission and have continued building a team of experts drawn from both traditional finance and Web3. Spectral’s Open Beta version 0.3.0 enables the creation of MACRO Score and NFCs, financial reputation primitives. We analyzed the 20,000 scores generated over the past seven days. The average time it took to compute a Score was ten seconds! Of course, we see this as a starting point and aim for our subsequent releases to be even faster.

Are you looking for a BIG problem to solve? Join our remote team spanning 12 countries and counting! We are currently looking for a Product Manager to join our team (PM role) and we’re always on the lookout for developers who are interested in building on our platform, APIs, and smart contracts. Fill out the following Typeform or contact us directly in our #Integrations channel on Discord.

STEP 3: Attention is precious. Reduce all friction between your users and product

Introducing a potentially revolutionary new product involves consumer education and creating a seamless user experience. Spectral created working documentation that evolved along with the product and keeps evolving through user-friendly education articles on our blog. Stay tuned!

Have you had a chance to check your Multi-Asset Credit Rating Oracle (MACRO) Score or minted an NFC yet? We’ve created a walkthrough video to show you how it’s done.

How to use Spectral App v0.3.0 | Product Walkthrough Video

The video describes basic operations such as connecting a wallet, checking a score, bundling wallets, and minting an NFC.

  • Connect your wallet to Spectral's app (0:05)
  • Generate your Multi-Asset Credit Risk Oracle (MACRO) Score (1:11)
  • Bundle your wallets and mint a non-fungible credit (NFC) token (2:35)

Looking for more information?

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STEP 4:  Ask for feedback.  Iterate.  Ask for feedback.  Iterate...

At Spectral, we strongly believe that successful startup culture focuses on building feedback loops. One of the most important to create is one that encourages product feedback and the crucial next step, which is following up on that criticism, analyzing the causes and addressing it quickly, and communicating the changes to the community.

We’ve received a staggering 3,500 form responses to our product feedback survey (also in 7 days!). We noted your concerns over NFC minting, app performance and responsiveness, ENS selection, and minor wallet connectivity issues. Our team is already working hard on a set of new features and radical enhancements for our next release. Stay tuned!

Your feedback is also crucial to help us validate some design hypotheses and ensure we are headed in the right direction… Infinite thanks to Lisa_Crypto and the many other messages we have received!

Product Feedback received from one of our Community Contributors on 25.08.2022

We’d love to hear more from you or even, help us bring programmable creditworthiness to DeFi communities that can benefit from it the most. Feel free to refer us using contact@spectral.finance or share our early access form with your network.

STEP FIVE: Build an active community by getting involved

Kudos to our amazing Discord community! Over 400 of you shared your MACRO Scores in the #Share-your-score thread. Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese communities have translated the Intro to MACRO Score (Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese). Connect with our Discord community today!

There are several ways to get involved with Spectral’s project. Have you checked your Score yet? Check Spectral’s app and connect your wallet, or give us more product feedback here.

Courtesy of AhmetG shared on the #🌈・memes channel

If you’re a developer, Spectral’s new financial reputation primitives open up brand new possibilities for use cases such as collective creditworthiness, DAO-based credit ratings, credit default swaps, credit delegation, and permissionless tranched debt. Get early access to our APIs and smart contracts, reach out to us or visit the #Integrations channel on our Discord.

Finally, one of our next goals is to build out the Scoracle network, a crowd-sourced machine learning network (CSML) of credit risk nodes. We’re looking for data scientists and model builders who are interested in participating. If you’re interested in becoming an agent in the Spectral Network, please contact us at contact@spectral.finance.

STEP SIX: Celebrate with your community!

We celebrated our Open Beta Launch with a Discord party. Forty people expressed interest, and 600 showed up! The event began with an agenda and a glimpse at the future that didn’t reveal too much alpha, plus a look at our itinerary for the next couple of months. Then co-founder Sishir Varghese began an AMA. There were some terrific questions and more attempts to tease out some alpha. Don’t worry, all shall be revealed in good time. Also, we are working hard to make the faucet experience better and help you obtain Arbitrum test ETH faster, directly through our server.

Quite the party!

PS: If you attended the Discord Party last Thursday, don’t forget to snag your POAP! Keep an eye out for the announcement channel.

POAP for Discord Launch Party Participants

Special Thanks to…

The Data Science, Smart Contract, and Frontend teams have worked tirelessly over the last few months implementing last-minute changes and preparing our pipelines and UIs for an influx of users. After the launch, they are working even harder, stomping the few remaining bugs and doing all they can to ensure our new users enjoy their experience.

To our founders, Sishir Varghese, Kevin Choi, and Srikar Varadaraj, for their vision, dedication, and endless energy.

To General Catalyst, Social Capital, Samsung, Gradient Ventures, Section 32, Franklin Templeton, Shrug Capital, Circle Ventures, Jump Crypto, and others for believing in our vision and commitment.

Spectral raises $23M to help create web3 credit scores – TechCrunch
The long-term vision for Spectral, a credit risk assessment infrastructure web3 startup, is to make credit scoring a publicly accessible network.

And finally, a big thanks to all of you for helping make our Open Beta Launch a success! This release is just an experimental build, but thanks to your feedback and reactions, we've started the work on Spectral’s next release with even greater enthusiasm. We are excited to continue building out DeFi’s credit assessment layer and commit to building a more capital-efficient and provably-fair tomorrow.  

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