A Sugar Daddy Almost Paid for PeopleTok's Servers

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Newsletter #004, Feb 14 2025
Contents

• Updates

• PRESS THIS!! 😄 

• BTS: Conscious & Ethical Business

• Tale of the Almost Sugar Daddy

• Name this app!

• Why AT protocol?

• BTS: MVP Alignment

Hey Peeps,

Next week, we’re hosting our first Roundtable! This is an exciting opportunity where we bring together a group of experts to tackle key aspects of the app and help us land on the best possible solutions.

Our first topic? Incorporation and legal structure.

If that sounds boring, think again—because we’ve assembled an incredible lineup of speakers, including:

• Matt Dearden. Highly sought after business lawyer and TikTok creator.

• Samantha Radocchia. Futurist, 4x tech entrepreneur, 30 under 30, and best-selling author.

• Mike Feerick. Internationally recognized social entrepreneur who’s provided tens of millions of people with free education through Alison.com.

• Mike Mumola. Recovering lawyer and former co-host of BloombergTV, turned health & wellness entrepreneur.

We’re also working hard to try to find someone from the nonprofit world. Know someone? Reply to this email with deets, please!

And if you need to get any of your contacts up to speed on what we’re doing here, you can send them this 5-minute explainer:

Press This!!

Beehiiv (the newsletter provider we email you through) allows us to partner with another company and share an ad from them. We try to choose platforms that are values-aligned. 

For each unique user that simply clicks on the ad below, they’ll pay us a dollar or so. Last email, 233 of you clicked, and you covered the cost of our Figma subscription (where the designers do their prototyping).

It doesn’t cost you anything, just a single poke of you index finger 🙂 And it would make for a hilarious and amazing story if the clicks of the Crowd were able to cover legal incorporation fees, PM software, and all the other startup costs that are usually bootstrapped.

If our list was big enough and enough people put their index finger to use, we could even compensate our devs and designers upfront. That’s a wild thought.

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Speaking of $, thank you for everyone who has given to the Substack, whether it was $8 or $150. We’re over $3k in Substack subscriptions now. Once we figure out how best to incorporate, we’ll take that cash and put it where it’s most needed — whether that’s covering the cost of servers or bringing in a lawyer to ensure we’re compliant for crowdfunding.

Behind the Scenes: Business Transparency & Financial Ethics

Kasey and I met for a 1:1 to discuss next steps on some of our shared initiatives. She also shared some of her business philosophy and her very interesting origin story as a businesswoman.

Her mother, a dentist, had a substantial amount of money embezzled from her business by an employee of 20 years. That kind of betrayal is heartwrenching, and it also served as Kasey’s catalyst to get into business. She’s all about fairness, honesty, and transparency and it comes through in her whole character.

Tale of the Almost Sugar Daddy

A TikTok sugar daddy slid into my DMs, offering $3,500: “now what would you spend it on honestly?”

Naturally, I said what any startup founder steward would: “cover the cost of running our team’s servers for a few months.”

When he agreed, I floated the proposition to the team. And within five minutes our resident robot-whisperer, Aaron, had created an AI bot to interact with the would-be benefactor on my behalf (he’d already created one that can summarize communications in our Discord channels to help people digest information more quickly and efficiently — amazing).

Things seemed promising until the almost-benefactor asked for photos. I sent him a stage shot from my first NPC competition…

Him: My bro.

Chiara: So do we have a deal?

Him: Hell nah.

Chiara: That’s a funny way of saying you can’t afford me. [immediately deletes snapchat without waiting for a reply, never to redownload.]

In the meantime, we’re brainstorming ways to monetize “SugaBabyGPT.” (Just kidding, we’re heads down on PeopleTalk, but it was a fun and brief diversion).

Name this app! (and tag @byclearlightstudios on TikTok)

If you have an idea of what to name this app, tag us here: https://www.tiktok.com/@byclearlightstudios

I’ll continue to post to my personal, but we want to feature the whole team and all our updates on the app account!

So bring your name ideas and @ us, stitch us, leave a comment, DMs, whatever you’d like. We’re waiting with baited breath.

Because let me tell you, Katie and I tried to ideate on a name when we both had late-night zoomies and it was a disaster:

What do you think? Should we go head-to-head with The Neptune App and start an interplanetary war? The Pluto App?

Seriously, please save us from ourselves.

Submit your names on the Reddit megathread or connect with us on TikTok. We’ll round all the suggestions up and then the Crowd will VOTE.

Why AT Protocol?

We’ve been asked on a number of occasions: Why ATproto? Why not Nostr? Why not Activity Pub? Well, let’s take it a piece of tech at a time, starting with Nostr.

AT protocol is like having a whole cake from a master baker to frost. But Nostr is like having some eggs and you need to go find all of the other ingredients.

Think of AT Protocol as a ready-to-roll car. It’s got all the parts we need—user accounts, encryption, video uploads. With Nostr, we’d basically be like, “Cool, we have an engine! Now let’s spend the next two years building the rest of the car.”

Get the deeper dive about AT proto vs Nostr on our substack. Special thanks to Andy, Ally, and Adam for contributing to this one:

 
Behind-the-Scenes: MVP Alignment

The MVP timeline? 2-3 months.

The governance structure? Six months after release.

The vibe? Controlled chaos.

The summary of this conversation can be found here, on our Substack.

Alright y’all, newsletter was a little shorter and sweet today. Take good care of yourselves. We are thrilled to be building this, and absolutely determined to do it right.

e pluribus unum,
Chiara Scuro
Steward