The Future of Funky Frens
From Funky Panda:
We truly appreciate all your guys’ support through thick and thin. I want to be fully transparent as much as possible. From my point of view, it’s been very difficult balancing Funky Frens with my personal and work life. And the same goes for Zilla and Rascal. We’ve been honestly burnt out for a while, so we apologize if we’re not as active on Discord for the past couple of months.
We poured our hearts and souls into this project. I’ve never been this excited and passionate about anything in my life. More often than I’d like to admit, there were times when I literally spent more time on this than my actual residency job. And this is coming from someone who works 12+ hour shifts, takes 24 hour call, and often works 12 days in a row. My parents and friends thought I was crazy about Funky Frens but I was focused and super driven by passion like I’ve never been before.
But as you know the NFT and Web 3.0 community can be very volatile, both financially and most significantly — emotionally. We’ve seen the highest of highs but also experienced the lowest of lows. We keep it positive publicly, but the reality is we’ve had countless sleepless, fearful, and melancholy nights. It was especially disheartening to see members of our community (even if were only a few) turn on us when anything, no matter how little, went wrong. The launch was especially eye-opening for us, as we obviously made some appropriately human mistakes, as all companies do when they start out.
But we kept our heads down, foot on the pedal, and kept grinding for the community. We made pivots taking in feedback from the community. I started working on community-backed ideas for new artwork. Rascal started developing the Funky Coin. Zilla worked hard on outreach for collabs/giveaways with other projects. We did our best to give back to the Funky Frens community via giveaways, whitelist spots, and free merch packages. And to be 100% transparent, especially with this crypto winter, with all our expenses, we actually came out in a net negative profit (luckily not a significant amount, but -$1750.66 to be exact as of 7/12/22).
As we kept grinding, I slowly came to the realization that I was getting burnt out — really bad. My turning point was one day, I was going to see my sick patient in my hospital. This patient had a sudden clot in his lungs and basically died for 23 minutes. My friend was doing CPR on him for 20 minutes straight. But he miraculously survived, stabilized in the ICU, and returned back to my care. As I was walking to go seen him, a Discord notification popped up about a member saying something negative. I remember talking to the patient, but my mind wasn’t in the right direction. All I was thinking of was how to respond on Discord and put out the fire. And it scared me. I was so out of tune with myself that I couldn’t even focus on my super sick patient in front of me. This man literally died for 23 min and I couldn’t give him the full attention he deserved. And then it happened again with another patient. And then again.
And that’s why I want to reiterate how much you guys meant to us. We kept pushing through, because we knew our most loyal supports were the faithful, educated, positive, hardworking members — the backbone that fueled our passion for this project. You guys always defended and supported us, and I will forever appreciate that. Your support gave us life during these tough times. But the reality is these hospital/patient events made me take a huge step back and re-evaluate what I truly valued. I knew the next pivot we needed had to create substance — something that would better the community. And I’m not talking benefiting others so they could make a quick flip financial at the cost of another. Yes, creating a Funky Coin and our Metaverse plans were cool and trendy. But what really made me passionate throughout this whole project was the educational part of this project/community. I loved the inter-community discussions about latest web 3 trends and news. I loved the convos about responsible/smart financial management. Our ultimate goal with Funky Frens was always to provide educational content to our community.
This is why I brought up to Zilla and Rascal a pivot to educational content. It combined our strengths and skillset. And it fueled my passion for teaching/education. And most importantly it does things to better/unite the community as a whole. Like Zilla said, I know this pivot will upset some community members. We understand we cannot make everyone happy. But we also need to look out for ourselves. Our previous trajectory would have burnt us out, especially in the relentless Web 3.0 space.
We truly believe that there is a role for Funky Frens in the future. Our vision as the educational content grows is that we offer exclusive membership features to holders to collab and work on creating content together as a community. I think it would be a huge leap in the NFT/web 3.0 and bring in another level of value. But we also understand that this is down the line, when our project has matured significantly.
I know you’re probably tired of me repeating myself. But thank you for your everlasting support. We are not forgetting Funky Frens — merely a temporary pivot while the crypto/NFT winter cools off a little.
We are taking a temporary holiday from Discord while we put our heads down and work on this new pivot. We’ll still be available for comment/discussion via our other social media outlets (see below). If you’re interested, give us a follow here:
https://www.instagram.com/frensmedia/
https://www.tiktok.com/@frensmedia
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx4zfkAZvY7yTUTjnsI-I1Q
With much love,
Panda
