Probably Nothing 2023 Team Offsite Recap

Dear community,

Apologies for this long-overdue update.

We had a wonderful offsite where we focused on the future of the project. We had a ton of work to do post-offsite and every week we have scheduled meetings to complete those follow-up tasks and get our questions answered.

So let's get into it…

We spent 2.5 days doing very intensive work together as a team. The entire team was present (Lash, BCP, PD, Fungie, FSteve, Audie, and The Dude), as well as some friends of the project who have been contributing to our mission recently. One of those friends is helping us design an LLM or Large Language Model to further extend our product, as well as helping us to automate as many internal processes with AI as possible.

It was a very collaborative process where everybody had an opportunity to share thoughts and ideas and help set the stage for the next 5 years of Probably Nothing as a company, and Zerø as a killer app. We pushed each other, beat up ideas from every angle, and came out with a very clear direction for what everything looks like moving forward.

Most importantly, we focused on our Why, How, and What, our mission/vision, ran a SWOT analysis, and locked in our roadmap in 3 phases: short (60 days), mid (120 days), and long (12m+).

SWOT

The first thing we focused on was a SWOT analysis for Probably Nothing as a company and Zerø as a product. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It’s important you identify all areas of your business for opportunities and threats alike, along with how the team’s strengths and weaknesses can help or hurt. We identified items in each area and made plans for how to approach and attack them.

Here are just a few examples of what came out of the exercise:

Strengths: Networked like crazy, integrity, domain expertise (web products, blockchain. & AI), working product in Test Flight and Google Play Beta.

Opportunities: Alternative assets market, partnerships, big sales funnel, AI for optimization, and exponential growth with a small team.

Weaknesses: Lack of funding, remote team, not everyone full-time, community comms.

Threats: Speed of tech moving too quickly, regulations.

Vision

We spent a good deal of time coming into alignment on our 5-year vision and plan including what, how, and most importantly why we are doing what we are doing. We did this exercise both for the company and for Zerø. Out of this exercise our goal was to come up with 3 simple sentences that can help us get real focused on everything from the product roadmap to the types of success metrics we want to achieve. Below are the Why, How, and What for Probably Nothing:

Why: To pull the signal out of the noise

How: We use trusted agents (human + AI) to identify the signal and disseminate it to users in zero time.

What: Create a source of truth for alpha.

We will continue to provide the community with further details as to what this means and how this plays out.

AI

We spent a great deal of time and effort talking about Artificial Intelligence, especially Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Bard. We discussed and acknowledged the paradigm-shifting nature of this technology, and formalized plans for how AI would be leveraged not only internally to make us go faster but also as a tool that enhances Zerø and anything else we build in the future.

Fungibles took us through his vision for where AI is headed and how it will impact businesses and disrupt society. He had us watch this video first on how fast AI is moving:

Fungibles went on to explain how all of us will have an AI co-pilot that will work just like Jarvis in the movies, and how we will start to witness the collapse of big companies and products that consumers will no longer need because they will be able to do many tasks and jobs themselves. This massive shift from centralized institutions to individual users will put Probably Nothing in a really good position.

We discussed how close AGI is, how jobs will be taken by multi-model engineers, and how we need to organize as a company if we want to grow exponentially.

These next two videos do a good job of explaining this phenomenon.

You used to need 10,000 people to support a billion-dollar business.

Instagram did it with only 13 people. In the age of AI the next unicorns will be 3 person companies.

Everyone on the team is becoming a prompt engineer, and anyone we hire moving forward will also need to be one.

With AI, anyone one of us now do the jobs of multiple people. They are coming for your job, don’t get left out!

AI is here, get on board or get left behind; or as PD so eloquently put it: “AI or die.”

Zerø Roadmap

Our final piece of work was to revisit our roadmap for Zerø. We have an MVP of a product that is live and usable. Zerø has tremendous potential, and everyone who sees the tech agrees. We are now officially in a closed beta release, with Probably Nothing community members being the first to have access. We have also done activations at Web3 events across the country, giving people the opportunity to access Zerø through IRL interactions. Next, we will be onboarding holders of Rug Radio’s RDAO token.

Our road mapping exercise centered around refocusing and reprioritizing what we believe to be the core features and functionality of Zerø. We have a detailed set of features we will be building and releasing over the next 60 days.

Much of this focuses on the curation side of things, but also includes additional end-user features and functionality. We are excited to iterate on Zerø while simultaneously showing it to the world.

Out of the offsite we were able to create a very detailed road map that we are meeting about weekly and knocking down in two-week sprints.

Closing thoughts:

We have been personally funding everything for a while now. The entire team is working on reduced, or non-existent salaries. The directive from the offsite we all agreed to is to stay bootstrapped as we work towards cash flow. Once we solidify cash flow we have been looking into a number of alternative fundraising options. Lots of good ideas that we are working towards.

In November it will be two years since the token launched. But this isn’t 2021.

We’ve dealt with all kinds of fun bear things along the way from FUD, to Discord hackers, and even another brand sharing our name.

We also ran into a game changer called artificial intelligence.

If we don’t adapt, we die.

True entrepreneurs keep going despite all odds.

So we adapt.

We appreciate those of you who are still around for this journey. We can schedule a call with community members who would like to participate to go deeper into details around these subjects.

Please remember this is a long game. Don’t ever play with more than you can afford to lose and the community is still the IP.

We love you guys.

🫡