alright y'all - i know it's been quieter the last few days, i get locked into engineering and time gets away from me. i wanted to share thoughts about next steps: 1) Attention: we've done a good job with our content engine the last couple weeks. this is important -- content gets us attention, and attention is the first step to getting users. these past couple weeks i've gotten a lot of questions, comments, and DMs about scout - most people asking really basic things like "so what is scout?" importantly, i've gotten a lot of questions about scout at mtndao - which means we have ecosystem insiders, devs, founders that are all aware scout and @darkresearchai exist. it might sound basic, but i can't say the same thing about all of our competitors - we're winning (modestly) on the awareness front. this also highlights something important about internet marketing: for a very, very long time - often a lot longer than people expect - the #1 question people are going to be asking about a product is, "what is it?". we're going to be focused on basic introductions of scout for a while - this is not a bad thing! attention is an every day thing, you can't stop, but we should feel confident that we're doing well with it - we've had over a thousand people sign up for our product. in fact i just checked -- 1,101 users as of right now. this brings us to my second point: 2) Product: people are trying our product, and some are even coming back, but they're not doing something very important: paying us money. let's talk about a brutally honest metric: Scout's lifetime revenue (so far) is $9. this is very obviously not what you want - $9M would have been nicer (axiom does make ~$2M/day, after all). realistically, we should be eyeing 1% of axiom's revenue as an initial benchmark - $10k/day. i have a thesis here when it comes to consumer products: it's either hell yes, or it's hell no. meaning: if people aren't rabidly trying to use your product, you're not doing it right. and that's fine - knowing what doesn't work gets us further along the path to finding what works (thomas edison has that famous quote - successfully proving 9,999 ways to build a lightbulb won't work) what do i think we need to improve? an oversimplified way to put a learning i've taken away from the last couple weeks of watching people use our product: we shouldn't focus on token research to start - we should focus on token discovery. two reasons why: (a) people say they like to research tokens (i've gotten a gazillion comments on this), but the reality i've observed is that deep research isn't what drives their trading decisions (which is what's revenue generating). to the extent they research, they do so relatively quickly (vs. a "deep research" approach that would lend itself to a traditional research agent). i think this is why we're not seeing other agents blow up in usage right now, and i think it's a brutal reality people aren't necessarily ready to face yet. (b) scout's current form factor pits it up as a direct competitor to something like axiom, but that's competing in a pretty red ocean - we're at a disadvantage chasing a more developed product on features, and our unique features aren't unique enough to differentiate the product. we need something better - we need to differentiate better. what does this mean? (i) for starters, this means we keep building - nothing changes there. we keep talking about scout, we keep iterating. winning products are built through rapid velocity and iteration. (ii) second: we hone in on token discovery. scout's homepage becomes the product now, and we lean into it hard: - realtime token discovery feed: we need to figure out how to make scout not where you go when you get a CA, but where you go to find a CA. - search needs to be best in class. everyone's search is still bad (ours included, even though we've improved it). - AI chat needs to go into the homepage + be multi-token by default i've already been working on upgrades and i'll share them as soon as we have them. for now, keep this one KPI in mind: if you're not trying to throw money at scout for what it offers you, it's not good enough. LFG