gm and happy New Year!
We’re taking a short pause after the holiday build season to reflect on all that was 2024 and to look forward to 2025. We grew quickly through the first half of the year through Orange DAO, early investment, a first look at Data 3.0, and reaching >$40k/m in revenue. As the bear market finally took hold of many in Q3 (and dropped our MRR with it), we used the opportunity to reset and double down on our foundations.
As a result, we’re entering 2025 with a narrowed focus and a stronger core team. Data in web3 remains broken. Distributed, permissionless data is routinely centralized and paywalled, forcing every scaling company to reinvent the wheel on data processing. It's time to rethink data processing and the business models that go along with it.
And although there isn’t a quick solution, we’re paving a path to innovate there one step at a time. We’ll be launching Just in Time Indexing (JITITM) powered by Neighborhoods in Q1 (using P2P processing to outperform traditional APIs is very cool). This will unlock entirely new customer segments for us and help bring enterprise-grade infrastructure to the masses. We’re also beginning to shape how a true protocol can bring a distributed ETL beyond web3 to make the world’s data accessible.
Our thesis is simple: Distributed data demands a distributed ETL.
A look at 2024, by the numbers:
[1] This is true revenue from customers. This does not include alternative income such as grants
[2] We changed how we measured this halfway through the year. This number is a conservative estimate
[3] Not all were recurring; some had one-time or temporary needs
I won’t sugar coat it, the year has been a bit of a mixed bag. Q3 was particularly brutal as we saw most of our recurring revenue evaporate due to businesses shutting down or pivoting. We also saw the departure of some team members (wishing them all the best!). We wouldn’t be here without them and all the great customers we’ve worked with along the way.
We’ve also had some high highs though. In January we won audience choice at ATX DAO’s pitch competition and had the honor of going through Orange DAO’s fellowship program. Through May we grew our revenue 40% MoM while raising funds from UDHC and a number of angels. Through the second half of the year, we rolled out entirely new infrastructure that cut our fixed operating costs by >50% while increasing our capacity by 5x. And through the last several months, we’ve signed a lead investor and received >$1m in commits for our Seed Round.
Our strengths have lied in sticking to our core personas and passions: building quality infrastructure and actually helping others. Admittedly, we spent much of the early year on side quests trying to see what new product or sales tactic might unlock even more growth. Some worked (e.g. usage-based pricing), but the vast majority didn’t (e.g. offering managed APIs). We started this business to scratch our own itch and solve the very same data usability problems that continue to persist today. Every step we take to zoom in and narrowly focus on that problem space has paid dividends down the road.
Finally, some links highlighting our progress and exposure of the last year:
Data 3.0 Vision: https://www.indexing.co/data-3-0
Our many articles and case studies:https://theindexingcompany.substack.com/
Orange DAO Demo Day: https://youtu.be/HYolaOkivAM
Workshop with Mode Network: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1dRKZdObpkQJB
Looking forward, in 2025 we’re aiming to surpass:
[1] Roughly 10x the usage we have today. Rolling out Neighborhoods will allow us to both optimize and track compute usage at a per customer per millisecond basis.
[2] Many of these new customers are expected to be at new, lower pricing tiers.
[3] Although we’ll continue to support any chain a customer needs, the market sentiment is that we’ve already reached a critical mass for the “vast majority” of chains that will be needed.
Grow. Build. Repeat.
While we’re focused on web3, we view the market in 3 distinct customer segments:
That customer lifecycle from Builder → Team → Enterprise isn’t new. When we started Indexing Co, we realized that all existing solutions took the easy route of targeting Builders. This may have worked a cycle or two ago when the data landscape was empty, but people demand more of their data and infrastructure these days. Centralizing and reselling data over APIs simply won’t cut it. Most importantly, it doesn’t scale. Selling data is a race to the bottom and, architecturally, it doesn’t work for Teams or Enterprises where every product has a distinct need.
This is why we’ve built things fundamentally different from the ground up. We sell infrastructure, not data. This required an entire rethink for how data is Sourced, Transformed, and Delivered and led to our third (and soon fourth) iteration on building a distributed ETL. It’s also why we’ve had the most success selling to Teams and Enterprises; the needs and the revenue affords us the ability to innovate along with customers.
Now, after 2.5 years of innovation, we’re ready for the masses. The path ahead is [increasingly] clear. In Q1 we’ll be rolling out JITI + Neighborhoods to begin realizing our Data 3.0 vision. This will enable us to compete, and outperform, most data providers on the market (while staying true to our core of selling infra, not data). That will enable us to meet Builders (and agents) where they’re at and build a top of funnel for customers to grow into the rest of our infrastructure offerings. From calling APIs to streaming billions of datapoints per month, we’ll be there every step of the way.
Our Q1 rollout will also be wrapped up in our first, fully self-service product offering. You may have seen the version we’ve been demoing for the last few months (Console). Customers will be able to sign up, create these ETL pipelines, and get back to building; all without being forced to chat with humans. Most importantly though, this self-service offering will be powered by the exact same infrastructure that powers our Enterprise offerings. That’s the power of distributed processing.
As we shift into Q2/3, and gather further feedback from the launch, we’ll focus on 1) hardening the new, core infrastructure and 2) exposing it in new, useful ways. The roadmap for the latter currently includes things like a one-click migration from a Dune query and an instant alternative to subgraphs. The Graph, and its subgraph approach to indexing, is particularly terrible and yet has captured the mindshare of the entire web3 space. We’ll be changing that soon.
And although our focus is on the months and year ahead, we’re keeping an eye on the 3-5 year horizon as well. A large part of this includes expanding beyond web3. We tend to view our distributed ETL as a marketplace for compute and data. Today, we control the supply side by having access to distributed (e.g. onchain) data and running our own Indexing Co nodes (aka Neighborhoods). Our infrastructure is blissfully ignorant to the types of data its processing though and being built to disrupt the much larger data behemoths in web2 (notice Databricks latest $62b valuation?)
Finally, as a background thread to all of this, we’re beginning to iterate on plans for protocolizing Data 3.0. We’ve had a vision/lite paper out for a while now, but that is truly only the tip of the iceberg. Distributed processing for distributed data will require permissionless communication, verification, and payments. How Neighborhoods interact with each other will be a key piece of our R&D through 2025. Expect a whitepaper later this year.
Redefining indexing and upending decades of data infrastructure isn’t a quick nor easy task and certainly not one we could do alone. From the business and product feedback to the warm introductions and investments, every piece has made a material difference. We’re reaching a critical mass in market support (nearly ramen profitable on COGS), investment (only ~$300k short for our immediate needs), and are seriously excited for what’s ahead. Please do keep it all coming!
Genuinely, thank you to the team, our investors, and our customers that have supported us on this journey so far.
Cheers,
Brock