Interview with Edward Sturm, the CEO of Commit Club [2023]

Hey! Thank you for having me. Insights about Commit Club… Let’s see.

We’ve found there are two primary groups of people who will find Commit Club interesting and for different reasons. The first are whales and Web3 influencers. They’re most interested in the decentralization aspect, so we’re turning our challenges to smart contracts asap. These people don’t want custodying dapps.

The second group doesn’t care about custodying vs. non-custodying and don’t really know the difference. They like the idea of doing community challenges with similar people and potentially earning from it.

The first group can like the community functionality of the second group, but the second group doesn’t care about the same things as the first group.

So in addition to turning to smart contracts asap, we’re working with influencers on implementing community challenges.

Another insight is people really want the ability to stake against a friend. It’s like on the basketball court a friend says, “I’ll bet you $5 you can’t make this shot.” This is on our roadmap for the future. Too many people have asked for it, so we have to build it.

I was interning for various TV networks, but also appearing on them! While doing internships I was making viral videos and going on the biggest talk shows in North America.

Then I found my way to one of the biggest marketing agencies in the world, Dentsu International, doing pretty sophisticated SEO for blue chip clients. Then I started my own successful agency.

Some mentors asked me to get into blockchain and I ended up running the biggest blockchain meetup in the world and these friends and I released the first play-to-earn game in crypto.

All of these experiences informed me with Commit Club. I learned marketing at the beginning of my career. I learned crypto after the marketing parts but got way better at marketing while in crypto.

It’s kind of been this upwards flywheel, if you will. Consistency is everything and that’s what I’m all about now.

It’s not so simple cut. We’re a dapp because we use a decentralized currency (Ether) in our MVP for staking and the Loser Pool. But I’m glad you asked how we plan on becoming more decentralized – because the depth we can go to is wild.

For starters, as I previously explained, we’re turning all challenges to smart contracts. This is super important and has to happen asap. At this point, other people will be able to examine our smart contracts and plug into them, as is the nature of crypto. We will likely switch to a Layer 2 at this point and have been considering zkSync and Polygon, among others.

But we will go so much deeper. People will be able to write their triumphs to the blockchain.

We will turn into a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. Token holders will be able to get a portion of the Loser Pool, revenue from our NFT badge and trophy sales, revenue from whitelabing and partner challenges. This is the idea at least.

There will be exciting governance actions like authorizing oracles, settling disputes, and settling on fees which would benefit the protocol and its stakeholders. We would likely do a delegated DAO model like ENS or MakerDAO.

And I mentioned a protocol – this will become an open protocol that anybody can plug into. We assume we will be the most trusted in-point for the protocol but people will be able to create whatever they want.

To begin, it’s very simple. Since we already have staking, we’re imagining APY and maybe no loss lotteries.

However I could imagine complex markets around groups, oracles, and challenge niches. Bundling challenges and turning that into a decentralized asset.

To note – we’ve thought deeply about APY and no loss lotteries, but this bundled market idea is still immature.

I do a very poor job of it, but my natural extroverted tendencies force a work-life balance a bit.

The three of us, Alex, Leon, and I created Commit Club while living in Ukraine. Alex is from there and Leon and I had apartments there.

When the war happened, I returned to my home in NYC because I needed the emotional support of my family. This was also the first time I returned to NYC in three years and so I had a million friends and acquaintances to catch up with.

Being away for so long and having so many people to see has made it easy for me to be social with those who are important to me.

I’m rare in that I legitimately enjoy management and teamwork. Nothing makes me happier than the team that I love passionately working in sync with each other towards solving a goal or accomplishing something great.

I also enjoy the marketing work I do. I love people seeing and taking part in my creations.

Liking my work helps me keep a positive work environment. I put my work above everything so I optimize my life around it.

In general, eating well, exercising, meditating, and keeping a tidy space encourages and nurtures me.

We’re a distributed team! After leaving Ukraine, Alex went to London, I went to NYC, and Leon travels around Europe. In fact, I’ll probably return to Europe soon.

We use Telegram for communication, and Trello for task management. Figma is the GOAT design tool I’ve ever used. All of these are amazing for collaboration amongst our small team.

Our design approach is also very lean and we’re all fan’s of Eric Ries’s work. We’re shipping features as lean as we can make them and validating based off real world feedback.

It’s largely what I discussed before. Crypto whales and influencers don’t want to custody their stakes.

These people, we imagine, will drive great adoption to the protocol and platform, so we’re building for them. We also are decentralization enthusiasts ourselves and just in general think smart contracts will be cool. 

Overall, we’re making something we find interesting and want to see built. For example, what will happen when a Mom can sponsor her child with digital assets to read every day? What will happen when a group of friends can use cryptocurrency to challenge an influencer across the globe to do a challenge as proven by an oracle?

These are questions we want answered… and hopefully the results are huge.

In terms of market competition – our greatest competition comes from Web2 companies. None of the other major online commitment devices offer digital asset incentivization and decentralization.

We also think (empirically) we have the best design of any commitment device; shoutout Alex.

Ask why you want to build on Ethereum Mainnet vs. a Layer 2. In our case we put our MVP on it because it’s where the most users are. However, the expensive gas fees made it unusable for smart contract-based challenges. This is why we have to custody in the current version.

This is also why we will probably switch to a Layer 2. We’re also considering Optimism or Arbitrum.

Aside from that I’d recommend being in communities of other builders in the Web3 space. There’s so much to learn and one of the best ways of doing it, aside from consistant effort, is having mentors who have done it before. Learn from others and check your ego at the exchange.

Oh, it’s a lot.

Long term, the Commit Club OPOS (Open Proof of Success) protocol and the Commit Club DAO are intended to become the Web3 era Guinness World Records.

The Commit Club smart contracts will be the most trusted authority on established records. 

To attest correctly whether challenges have been achieved, Commit Club will integrate with external witness authorities. These can be real institutions, apps, juries, settled events from prediction platforms like Augur, and people.

By abstracting witnesses as smart contracts, Commit Club will provide an open model for witness participation.

Commit Club will be a protocol that groups and developers all over can make use of. Analysis of challenges and witnesses will also occur with intriguing data being generated.

We’ll break self help being siloed by category (meditation, running, reading), so that self-improvement challenges become a general fashionable trend. Somebody isn’t only working on themselves through fitness, or meditation, or self learning – but all three.

Commit Club challenges will be used by individuals and groups to motivate themselves into accomplishing any challenging task.