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Congrats on launching. It's been great to see DIDs and VCs taking off from all the great work of the W3C working groups. How will you monetize your product? I'

Congrats on launching. It's been great to see DIDs and VCs taking off from all the great work of the W3C working groups. How will you monetize your product? I've long followed Evernym and Bloom who set out to tackle part of this problem, but both have seemed to struggle to gain traction and customers. Can you afford to build on this long enough until a market forms that allows for monetizing it?

wyc 6y ago
Thanks for your support! The big question for all companies in the VC/DID ecosystem is of course timing. I think it's a fatal mistake to create products that require the coordination of multiple stakeholders from the outset, so we are avoiding these in the beginning. We are instead focusing on solving for use cases that are simpler to coordinate, such as a Shopify storefront offering discounts to influencers who prove they have over 10,000 Instagram followers on their public account. As per monetization, we sell commercial tools that give the look and feel of SaaS management (uptime monitoring, data schema management, integrations with proprietary enterprise systems like ERPs) but allow customers to keep the workflows and sensitive data in their own clouds. It's still early for Spruce (we started full time around last fall), so we are still very hands-on with customers discovering and working through their pain points in implementing credentialing workflows. Finally, I think technologies like DECO (https://www.deco.works/ https://www.deco.works/) are truly going to change the game of verifiable data exports en masse, but I don't expect a production worthy implementation for at least another year or two. They could drastically simplify implementations of user-centric data workflows by reducing the requirement of coordinating multiple stakeholders to just one or two.
sebmellen 6y ago
Hey there, somewhat unrelated, I'm super interested in what you're working on with Kiva Protocol — do you have any way I could contact you? I really like what Kiva is doing and am very interested in the Kiva Protocol. Contact info in profile if you prefer to reach out that way.

wyc 6y ago

Thanks for your support! The big question for all companies in the VC/DID ecosystem is of course timing. I think it's a fatal mistake to create products that require the coordination of multiple stakeholders from the outset, so we are avoiding these in the beginning. We are instead focusing on solving for use cases that are simpler to coordinate, such as a Shopify storefront offering discounts to influencers who prove they have over 10,000 Instagram followers on their public account. As per monetization, we sell commercial tools that give the look and feel of SaaS management (uptime monitoring, data schema management, integrations with proprietary enterprise systems like ERPs) but allow customers to keep the workflows and sensitive data in their own clouds. It's still early for Spruce (we started full time around last fall), so we are still very hands-on with customers discovering and working through their pain points in implementing credentialing workflows. Finally, I think technologies like DECO (https://www.deco.works/ https://www.deco.works/) are truly going to change the game of verifiable data exports en masse, but I don't expect a production worthy implementation for at least another year or two. They could drastically simplify implementations of user-centric data workflows by reducing the requirement of coordinating multiple stakeholders to just one or two.

sebmellen 6y ago

Hey there, somewhat unrelated, I'm super interested in what you're working on with Kiva Protocol — do you have any way I could contact you? I really like what Kiva is doing and am very interested in the Kiva Protocol. Contact info in profile if you prefer to reach out that way.