It hit me again over a cup of cacao—this time not from an oracle line, but from receipts and road miles. For something like a year and four months I’ve been watching our physical sales channels the way you watch weather: not because every day is dramatic, but because patterns only show up if you’re stubborn enough to keep looking.
And the pattern wasn’t the one I wanted.
We had energy early on. A lot of it was beautiful—generous, idealistic, alive. Some of it was also… very Web3. Very “mindfulness adjacent.” For a while, a slice of the room felt conspiracy-theory scented, too. I’m not saying that to sneer; people arrive with the stories that make sense of their world. But communities have flavors, and flavors become product signals. If you listen long enough, the market starts designing your SKU for you—sometimes before you mean to let it.
Somewhere in that mix, I noticed a quieter emptying. The profiles that tend to write bigger checks or push harder on technical due diligence—financiers, deep-tech folks—thinned out. Sometimes people drift for neutral reasons. Sometimes they drift because the vibe shifted underneath them. Either way, you end up with a composition problem: who’s left, what they reward, what they refuse to tolerate, and what that trains you to optimize for.
Here’s the blunt part—Fatima told me a version of this in frustration, more than once, after she’d burned cycles on conversations that felt like talking through fog. “Keep it commercial.”
That’s not cynicism. It’s survival wearing sensible shoes.
If you’re trying to move real inventory through real doors—apothecaries, small grocers, the weird glorious retail fringe—you need a proposition a busy buyer can repeat without needing to adopt your whole cosmology first. Mission alignment matters, but legibility matters too. You can be philosophical in private. In public, on a shelf, the product has to answer the first question fast: what is this, for whom, at what price, with what proof?
And if the early community mix tilts hard into “spiritual woo,” the SKU you infer from aggregate demand might paint you into a corner you didn’t intend—a corner where the packaging sings to one choir while the rest of the world walks past, half curious but unwilling to join a mystery cult just to buy chocolate.
A breath of fresh air in Oregon
Counter-signals matter because they keep you from turning your own frustration into doctrine.
I spent time with people running a healing-arts sanctuary in Oregon—kind hosts, intense visitors, the kind of place where narrative runs hot. They said something that stuck: having me around felt like a breath of fresh air. Not because I’m special—because I could enjoy the narrative without getting carried away by it, while a lot of folks who pass through are, in their words, “way out there.”
That’s not an insult to seekers. It’s an observation about bandwidth.
If you can hold story lightly, you can sometimes move between worlds that don’t normally share a language. And that makes me wonder about an experiment—one I’m not claiming is guaranteed, just worth testing honestly:
We’ve got footholds in nomadic, festival-adjacent, wellness-leaning channels—communities that already trust us enough to meet us halfway. Could those footholds be a springboard for a more mainstream SKU—still mission-aligned, still traceable, still us—but easier for an ordinary apothecary buyer to say yes to? Same SKU, broader demographic, less prerequisite ideology.
Partners and places matter for grounding that kind of hypothesis in reality—not as magical thinking, but as logistics and relationship. If you want a concrete anchor page to understand one slice of that network, here’s one we publish: Soha Healing Sanctuary / Agroverse partner page.
The boring module no one applauds (and why I built it anyway)
Here’s the other thread—not distribution psychology, but engineering humility.
We shipped a small tool on the DAO dapp called a repackaging planner: inputs on one side, outputs on the other, inventory holder, suggested Currency string, cost breakdown—explicit enough that a human can audit the logic without needing to infer intent from vibes.
Link: repackaging planner (TrueSight DAO DApp).
Nobody throws a parade for boring clarity. But boring is what keeps you from paying twice—once for speed, once for reversals.
We’re still at the stage where ledger updates can be partly manual on my side. As volume climbs, the temptation will rise to let an LLM “just handle it” in natural language. I’m not morally opposed to that future—but I’m terrified of the sloppy version of it—the version where the model confidently mints nonsense because nobody forced the business rules to be explicit first.
So the order I want is almost disappointingly linear:
- Make the logic obvious in a module a human can read.
- Let automation attach to something inspectable.
- Only then expand into conversational interfaces—with guardrails, not wishes.
If that sounds unromantic, good. The romance can live in the mission. The ledger needs a seatbelt.
Course correction isn’t betrayal
If you’ve ever built anything in public, you know how easy it is to confuse loyalty with consistency. Consistency can become a trap—especially if what you’re consistent with is a demographic snapshot from an earlier chapter.
Course correction isn’t betrayal of the mission. It’s refusing to let one chapter’s weather pretend to be climate.
I still want the ethos: traceability, farmer-facing seriousness, the patient work of supply chains that don’t lie. I also want buyers who will never join a DAO to be able to buy something excellent without feeling like they’ve enrolled in a worldview.
Fatima’s phrase keeps ringing because it’s the right kind of rude: keep it commercial.
Not “sell your soul.” Not “optimize slime.”
Commercial as in: respect the buyer’s time, respect the retailer’s shelf, respect your own future self who will have to explain numbers when they’re no longer theoretical.
Reflections for the week
Key observation: communities teach you what to build—sometimes before you realize you’re being taught. The trick is to notice when the lesson is about taste and when it’s about physics (cash, lead times, compliance, believable proof). Mix them up and you’ll build something gorgeous that can’t pay for its own freight.
What I’m sitting with now is two-track work: outward (mainstream SKU experiment, grounded in real channels) and inward (small, explicit tools that make dangerous automation safer later).
So—what about you?
When have you mistaken an early crowd for the whole market—and how expensive was the corner it painted you into?
And where in your own work are you skipping the boring, inspectable step because narrative is more fun—and what would it look like to give the boring step its due?
- Business
- DAO
- Startups
- Technology