It is with a heavy heart that I post this announcement today. The tekDAO team has decided to dissolve.
This decision has come after months of team members battling burnout and mental health issues. We've been working on tekDAO since mid-September of 2021, with many, many hurdles along the way. We came into the space looking to build a project that respected legal boundaries, underpromised & over delivered, and provided real value into a space we saw as thoroughly lacking. Alongside these goals was the creation of our community and our approach towards organic growth. We avoided hype & fomo tactics, we interacted with other creators, influencers, artists, minters, flippers, & collectors one by one, creating connections and relationships that last to this day. Our twitter account grew, slowly but surely, throughout the end of 2021. After months of work, we were barely at 300 followers as 2022 came around. Throughout those last months of 2021, we lost two founding members, our lead engineer and our lead marketer. Neither was really able to contribute much in the short while they were on board. The engineer was to build a custom generative script, akin to the recently published tubbycat generator. We had 300+ individual traits prepared, with branching possibilities capturing all kinds of aesthetics. Leading into 2022, the lack of demand for what we were building had been a massive weight on the shoulders of the entire team, let alone our project manager. Mid January 2022, our project manager stepped down, due to a level of demoralization that led to an unfortunate turn for his mental health. I took over the project and refocused the team down to a tiny supply collection with a unique idea to give holders their forever pfps based on their input. We set a date for mint, and as we approached it our dev pushed us to speed the timeline and get things done. We went for it, pushing the mint up by two weeks. We grinded to set up our minting systems, using both FLP and CMv2, as well as auctions. Our whitelist strategy was also completely unique. During this sprint to get tekw minted, our developer caught Covid a week before mint and had a kidney stone at the same time. I offered to delay, yet he worked through the pain. Leading up to mint projects like Chimpions and Cursed Mikes brought both powerful art and low supply to the forefront of the Solana minting meta, leading to an almost 3x increase in our community size on twitter and discord. Due to this increase, and in an effort to maintain high quality standards, we approached our previous project manager and asked that he rejoin as a paid consultant, to help us get to the finish line. With his help, our mint went relatively smoothly minus a bump in the road related to communications around FLP refunds. Soon after minting, during the process of revealing tekw, they began trading OTC for 10+ SOL, a ridiculous multiplier from the 1SOL mint price. The team saw no secondary sales revenue until a week later once we were listed on Exchange.art and Magic Eden. At the end of the day, a majority of the mint revenue was split between the 3 main team members, to compensate for the 5 months of work leading up to mint. The ~2,900 USDC remaining in the treasury wallet will be split between the same 3 team members.
Regrouping of the team post-mint led to discussions around whether we would even continue with the project, as the 250 supply tekw mint was meant to be a farewell to the project and an effort to increase attention to tekPixel's work in NFT art. We decided to continue forward, feeling that we now had skin in the game and a community we were indebted to. With some loose ideas of what the next project would look like and what the market fit would be, we grew our team by adding community members. Our former project manager took his role again, while I stepped back to focus on our increasing twitter community to work on partnerships and other marketing goals like tekTalks. Throughout the month following mint, morale dwindled as the art meta was short lived and projects like Devil Kidz were fudded for not having a roadmap / token / utility etc. Progress on our next project was minimal at best as our developer was battling burnout, and eventually made the (imo) correct decision to spend time focused on his IRL job-hunt and other complications. I on-boarded a new team member in the past month who was helping me plan and create pitches for some much needed partnerships with other teams. Working together we continued to host tekTalks and reception was improving.
Now we reach the current day. I am writing this a few days after we decided to dissolve the team & brand. The decision was taken to ensure we would not continue to sacrifice our mental health, time, and energy without being able to actually deliver the next thing to the quality level we would want. Especially difficult is the fact that I recently began a new full-time job that has me working 40-50 hour weeks, the fact that our developer needed a stable source of income, and the fact that without funding we would again be building for months purely on blood, sweat, and tears. It's not easy, and now we know exactly what that entails.
I write all of this in an attempt to capture our genuine efforts to create something we are proud of. I think we succeeded.
Thank you Dagzen, for supporting Pixel's art and putting your trust in us. Without you, tekDAO would have dissolved months ago.
Thank you Blank, for coming along for the ride with us, letting me bounce ideas off you in DMs, and generally being an invaluable asset to our community.
Thank you Matthew, for being a core member of the community and supporting us along the way. It's been a pleasure seeing you grow in the space.
Thank you Ikebana, Teddy, Jue, Advena, RicherThanOps, Gh0xst_writer, abnor, foffy, zxcv, crypt0savage, pengumaxi, kentis, hamster, Danny, Juku, hanaknight, Peanut, jems, rokun, and SO many others for being a part of this journey with us.
The community we created is really special to me. Each of you had a massive part to play in it. I am happy to call you all frens.
Kat, pencilflip, boogs - you guys are great folks and I wish you the best. Through thick and thin you and your communities have been a wonderful source of light in this space.
Lauren, I still remember the day you pinged your server about our Drunkies NYE drop. Can't thank you enough for what you've done.
Kylie, thank you for being our most consistent tekTalks guest, even if you weren't a speaker for most of them.
Async, thank you for reaching out in the middle of your mint craziness, it was a pleasure getting to know you and your team.