It's not a straight line. Appreciate the adventure.

 "An unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates 

I remember it was like yesterday at the office, when my friend Raja(co-founder) and I discovered that we had the same passion for Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology.

Today, though, I’m excited to announce we have completed 365 days as an entrepreneur. It has been quite a ride and we survived it. Our intention here is to share what happened in the last twelve months as it is without being loud. By this, you get an idea of what it is like out there in our shoes. 

We don't post all the stories online. We always felt it wasn't necessary until you had time to reflect on your learning. Half of the time it is not worth sharing and it could remain as personal too. Yet in the times of today, as a startup founder, you are encouraged to share all your experiments and lessons with your audience. By this, you are building a brand story or narrative around you, your team and product. And the key to do this is to sound like it is extraordinary. But we don't have anything like that yet. It's a simple one. 

The first adventure: It all started on an assumption. We thought equalizing finance through Crypto would be a noble business idea. The idea was to make Bitcoin available for sale as low as $1 or ?1. By doing so, you enable crypto to be in the hands of every single individual. We wanted everyone to own Bitcoin at least once. This grand thought almost engulfed us.

We always wanted to be something and we started to believe that something is this idea. We believed in the stories our minds created. And all our experiences got colored by emotions. To sum up, we failed in the first 6 months without access to license and payment gateway. Oh Yes! We failed big. We lost our valuable time and savings in the first adventure. We were troubled at heart and started to question ourselves. We didn't give up. We looked back, learned to accept humiliation, and moved forward. 

The second adventure: Life is an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while still being who we are. Trust me, this is the hard part. 

Every day, the thought of losing out on Crypto was burning. We quickly pivoted and started to think about Society 3.0, which is building the next generation of meaningful privacy-respecting internet applications for people.

It all began from a 30-day hackathon and the vision is to create a data collection platform focused on privacy. We built to solve our own problem of doing market research. And then rolled it out as BlockSurvey - a privacy-focused data collection platform for the public use. We constantly shipped code every week over the last 6 months and today, we have around 2k+ signups and are rising every day. Today we are a 5 member team that volunteers to support us in all possible ways to monetize what we have built. 

Our key insight is remembering this famous quote “One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.” - Abraham Maslow.

We are at peace for the first time after months, because the noise in our head is gone. And we are enjoying this new adventure and moving forward every day as a team. Sometimes its funny how things work out in life and you have to watch it without hurry and enjoy the ride. It's not a straight line. How boring it would be if life is a straight line. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Just learned to embrace it.