Why we’re selling our YC-startup onetool as NFT art

Hi all,

Gordi from onetool here.

We’re a YC backed company that worked hard to solve the SaaS chaos and failed along the way. It’s a story that many founders have experienced one way or another — from flying high after being accepted to YC to reaching rock bottom aka the realization of not being able to offer what you set out to solve. This rollercoaster journey represents the struggle many founders are facing (but are often still not entirely honest about) and we’re paying tribute to it by converting our failed company into a collectible piece of art by selling onetool as the first startup ever sold as an NFT

Before I dive into the more detail, a little background info on why we failed:

We started off trying to build one subscription that gives you access to a broad range of SaaS software in sales & marketing; similar to SetApp, but for SaaS. Over time, we realized that the range of pricing levels between SaaS vendors is way too high to offer them in one bundle. Think of a HubSpot which might cost you $1000 a month and Calendly which might only cost $5. Thus, we moved on to build an app store for SaaS where companies and employees could just choose the SaaS they actually want to use and then easily manage all the subscriptions in one place. The special thing about it was that you were able to try out new software in seconds because we were so deeply connected with the SaaS vendors that we could create new customers directly in their system. For you, as a customer, it meant that you were able to see “log in tiles” for every tool you are subscribed to and that you never had to register or log in somewhere again. The biggest limitation here was that the model only worked for entirely new accounts, but many of our customers already had many SaaS in place. Over time, more and more of our 6000 customers reached out to us and asked if we were able to manage all their existing SaaS stack with our proprietary technology. The good news (we thought) was that we were convinced we could already do that. Our API enabled companies to create licenses, delete licenses, manage users, have single-sign-on, and get a single invoice for all their subscriptions. What we hadn’t solved was how we deal with SaaS vendors that are not connected to our technology, yet.

It was incredibly easy to onboard mid- and small-size SaaS vendors to our tech, and we even had some big ones such as Pipedrive, ClickUp, or GSuite on board, but convincing the remaining top 20 SaaS vendors turned out to be a big challenge. Thus, we created a second technology that used web automations to connect to these vendors. It might be surprising, but there is no open standard out there that allows you to manage and provision SaaS apps for every pricing tier and SaaS vendor. The closest thing to it is the SKIM/SAML protocol which has big setup limitations (takes forever and Dev Ops resources) and mostly only works for enterprise pricing tiers which start-ups and growth companies are normally not subscribed to. Hence, the web automations enabled companies to manage all their software with a maximum setup time of 30 minutes. The more customers we onboarded, the more we realized that our web automations required high maintenance as every customer is set up differently, with different languages and organizational structures. Captchas, 2-Factor-Authentication, and other security required individual setup for every customer. After calculating the time we spend on maintaining integrations and how that limited us in developing new integrations with more vendors, we concluded that the “automated provisioning industry for mid-market companies” is just not there, yet.

Realizing that there was no way to make onetool work in this space, we were looking for a pivot into other areas while simultaneously starting to talk to several competitors about asset sales. However, by the end of June sales negotiations had turned into lengthy discussions and we were at the same time closely watching the NFT space evaluating related business models regarding a potential pivot. Connecting the dots between the seemingly unrelated areas of selling your business and non-fungible tokens, the idea of turning onetool into an NFT and selling it as a piece of art was born.

The idea mainly struck us from an angle where we did not understand why failing is so rarely embraced in the startup community. You often see “exits” for “undisclosed amounts” where, in many cases, people tried to hide their failure, trying to make it seem like a successful exit. We thought “that’s not us”. Instead of whitewashing the situation by going through a fire sale, why not be authentic and do something we actually enjoy doing as our last move: Trying something completely new and different; being entrepreneurial. Being aware of the fact that selling a business this way doesn’t attract buyers in the traditional sense, we think that the journey of a startup setting out with a great vision and eventually failing represents something most entrepreneurs should be able to identify with — the art of failing as you might say. Closing a business is never easy, and a culture where failure is something people rather prefer not to talk about makes dealing with it even harder. Selling onetool as an NFT is our way of embracing failure as entrepreneurs. Being transparent about it and setting an example that even in difficult times, there’s room for fresh ideas.

If you like the idea, feel free to share our auction:https://nft.onetool.co/going-down-in-style

Cheers,

Gordi