DoTadda 2022 Year-end Review

It’s time for DoTadda’s 2022 year in review. What we got right and what we have planned for 2023.

What we got right in 2022

Target Market

Well we quickly niched down in our target market: Asset Management teams. We found which persona has budget authority and who doesn’t. We discovered who DoTadda can help the most on day one, and who has an appetite for efficiency and cost savings. It turns out many asset management firms have budget constraints. Additionally, they are willing to spend money on technology that improves both alpha generation and efficiency. We also know their current set of tools are lacking (and they are lacking). We also discovered the bigger the team, the more leverage our solution brings. A three-person shop all working in the same room can live without us. Once a shop has more than ten people, especially if some are remote, DoTadda is a game changer. So, who is our ideal first demo? It's a firm founder, a CIO, a DOR, a PM with a team, or a consultant in the asset management space. If we can get a demo, they like us.

Advisory Board

We signed up an all-star advisory board with exceptional people in the design, cloud security, strategy, investor relations, and product management spaces. They come from such companies as Bloomberg, Oracle, Boeing, Blizzard Entertainment, and RXO Logistics. This group of advisors are much more involved than a typical advisory board. It helps so much to bounce ideas off them, get introductions from them, and have them of course love DoTadda. I speak for the team when I say we are incredibly lucky to have this group.

Search

We added powerful, accurate, and super-fast search. If you need to find a file or an old email, we can find it. This is why we exist.

Authoring experience

We added a powerful, easy-to-use, Notes editor with first class support for videos and even Tweets.

Responsiveness

We also added first-class support for mobile.
While we don’t have a mobile app, DoTadda is responsive, meaning it will work well on your mobile phone’s browser. Please pick Chrome!

Talent

Another thing I’m excited about is the talent of the team. We’ve basically accomplished something near a miracle. All our code is written by 2 people, at night and on weekends. But when true artists get to the canvas, magic happens. Here is a snippet of magic. Below is our coding effort since last year. According to a widely used development algo, DoTadda’s build should have required 10 full-time devs and nearly $2.9 million of R&D cost. You can surmise we’ve spent a lot less than that. And our team works on this 20 hours a week in total! This is insane. Small, hyper-talented, tech teams have an intrinsic advantages over large ones in my view.

What’s next in 2023?

Revenue

We expect to have revenue in 1q23 and that will be a huge milestone.

Authoring enhancements

We have a new best-in-class text editor that supports search, embedded video, tweets, graphics and so on.  It will of course get better.  However, as a research analyst, having the ability to include sound, video, and embed content from the web in a research memo is very exciting.

Search refinement

Our search function will only get more accurate and faster, optimized for Portfolio Managers and research departments. I think this a major differentiator.

Chrome extension

We will have a Chrome Extension to make it easier to quickly save URLs in DoTadda. No more copying URLs.

AI

We will use AI to auto-tag new database entries. This will support more robust search with no extra work by our fans. We will use AI to summarize multiple database entries and help your team find commonalities, trends, and outliers. This, I expect, will be immensely helpful in generating alpha.

Raise?

Will we raise in 2023? I get asked that with more frequency these days. Well we don’t need to, but if the right partner with the right network would be interested, perhaps. O'Shaughnessy Ventures would be a good partner based on what I have read about their mission. Also, OSV's founder is my adopted internet dad, so it’s only natural to accept dad’s money. That said, we’ll meet with anyone. Our burn is low and we need only 3 customers to be self-funding. Our solution is not cheap, but we’re 10x better than the alternatives which are much more expensive. So, the answer to the 'will we raise?' question is not right now.

So with that, I’ll hit publish and head to bed. There might be edits and refinements later.

Best to you and yours in 2023. Thanks for reading.
Drew

Feel free to connect with me on Twitter @DrewMMeister or LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-meister-7254104/