I think calling them missteps depends on how you look at this as. The steps you describe are all perfectly reasonable, logical, and worthwhile goals a company t

I think calling them missteps depends on how you look at this as. The steps you describe are all perfectly reasonable, logical, and worthwhile goals a company that is bootstrapping themselves would take to ultimately solve a very complicated problem. Then, of course, there is the approach to announce some ridiculous, overarching, near-impossible goal and then do the YOLO "fake it till you make it" dance and hope for the best. Given the hype around Web3, I'm not entirely sure what their best route would've been. However creepy/problematic the shots of poor Africans looking at an Orb may seem, I think sadly there is a nontrivial amount of VC money that would follow that exact sort of approach for "moving fast and breaking things." Conversely, the unkind way to describe your approach is one of a very unambitious, slow, and "not investable" kind of way of running a company. Your approach is undoubtedly the saner route to try to build a successful, ethical, and sustainable business. I'm just not sure that, in the near term, for founders chasing after that VC money (especially how plentiful it seems to be in the web3 space now!), that it is the short-run optimal strategy.