Any global company or startup that had big ambitions like mine was severely disrupted by events in 2022, anybody who claims differently is running a false flag operation. The good thing is I have listened to my own advice I wrote here on Dream and Hustle in terms of prepping and hedging to defend against potential risk vectors. But the thing is I did not expect all of this new stuff to show up impacting everything.

In this article, I want to talk about our startup and what we went through in 2022 and I mentioned some of this before. But the overall goal is to help you guys understand that we not going to live in a linear progression anymore where we have step 1, then step 2 then step 3. We are living in a period where we have to cover all potential risks and look for openings of opportunity and seized those opportunities – very fast.

The Manufactured Solution and Early Adopters

The good thing is our startup is very well self-funded and we don’t have problems in terms of having to make moves by opening our checkbooks if we have to. But the tech game isn’t about money, only cornballs chasing a headline of getting VC funding to think that’s the tech game – that’s not even the beginning. It’s no different in the music business – getting signed and getting upfront money is the easiest part – going out on the road and recouping and trying to blow up is where the real work begins. We got to make sure we can launch and reach enough customers to form a sustainable operation quickly.

For our Early Adopters, we will begin our newsletter so we will be sending out our first copy hopefully this week. It will talk about the roadmap ahead and how to prepare for the launch of our platforms and services. Not everybody is tech-savvy and we understand that but the platforms are designed to help navigate and guide those into digital-first operations or learn about the opportunities and that is what we will be discussing.

In the first quarter of 2022, we began refining our codebase – we started to separate out core services. For example, Kolin-Avers would serve the identicon for Kossier, the check-in QR code, media, and tokenized media assets like podcasts. Today, we have a core media platform with separate servers that handle identicons, media, tokenized access and Kolin-Avers just sit on top of it accessing the core services. This approach gives us better scalability where we can push the core platform around hubs around the world and gives us resiliency and fast growth capabilities – I have been talking about this when I mentioned gateways like our payment gateways around the world.

We are going to launch because I’m not getting any younger and we paying a lot of bills as if our business is fully running and it’s time to move.

Global Disruption and the Hidden Opportunity

After seeing how full of crap the Black community is towards their own, I saw looking closer at the landscape that is going on. First, we are looking at a global migrant crisis going on worldwide from unrest in Africa, Latin America, East Europe, and Asia to military coups, currency devaluation, inflation, COVID lockdowns, geopolitical conflicts, and more. I made two comments on this already – the African-American community is going to get hit hard in two places.

The first place is the Black community will further see gentrification acceleration – hipsters cannot find homes so they go straight to the hood and buy homes and buildings there. Second, the Black professional class going to get squeezed out of the PMC or professional-managerial class by migrant professional workers willing to work harder for lower pay to establish themselves in their new land, new country. The Black community really messed up and took things for granted and think things won’t change on us as a people – it has already taken hold strong this year along as we see Black folks portraying an image online but working gig economy jobs as a permanent underclass in reality.

We have realized that our biggest opportunity is helping the global migrants establish digital-first businesses as their entrepreneurial effort. They can help build out services and hubs where we can partner on delivering some digital services to our customers. We also realize we can enable a digital-first merchant class with many migrants as well enabling them to quickly build out multi-lingual shops in their communities to serve their own people and the local customer base. This global migrant class is a very bigger market than the Black community that is too focused on looking the part when the migrant crisis going on is real and desperate meaning our potential customers have more motivation to use our service and help make it work to find revenue in their new land.

Economic Resilience.

I listened to my own advice back in early 2020 when COVID was manifesting and tearing up the global economy. I ditched my gas-engine car (sold it at a huge profit) and got an electric vehicle that was very cheap because people didn’t need daily drivers to work anymore and chose to live further from work. I’m not impacted by any gas prices and live around dozens of free EV chargers.

I have invested in precious metals such as gold and silver but they were hedges – the beautiful part and I get it now; the metal price actually did not go down while everything else went up. So a $25/ounce silver was still $25/ounce to sell right now and if I need money, I can liquidate but the better than metal was luxury watches and handbags Louie Vuitton quality and above. Those never went down in price as well but were easier to sell on Poshmark and other places online. Hedging put me in a situation where I did not need to spend new money – I liquidated the assets quickly and converted them to cash for emergency funds like one of my appliances broke down and would cost $700 to replace.

The biggest thing was food and lifestyle – when the bad economic indicators were coming, I dumped African-American women from my dating choices because she always wants to go somewhere and eat, spend money, travel to Mexico during COVID and buy expensive things acting like Black people are rich when we are not as a people. I focused instead on parks and local softball and cricket tournaments and tennis courts and met quality chicks who got money and BMWs and were frugal just like me and we can do simple things like cook together.

My house was full of prepped vacuum, canned, frozen food, and recipes on index cards and I made my own meals most of the time and went out and enjoyed the natural life. I was able to transform from the character who goes out to eat at the bar section by himself to someone who took eating well and working out and living a stress-free lifestyle during this time and it paid off. I will say it felt good being resilient and able to live off your prepping. It’s like when the lights go out but you had a backup UPS that turned everything back on and kept you going – that’s how good it felt being resilient with a backup plan.

How We Moving in 2nd Quarter 2022

As you saw, me and my operations were disrupted – we could not move further into our original Japan plan due to that travel ban and we are still processing our next move. Europe's landscape has changed due to the refugee crisis and the focus on military defense buildup. Asia markets have been devastated due to the COVID lockdowns where stricter and Africa is unstable with high inflation, supply chain from Ukraine and Russia disrupted, and military coups making Africa not the desired destination anymore for any Pan-African brothas and sistas. The one ray of hope is going to be Latin America but there is still widespread corruption and that is going to take a coup as well before that region is stabilized.

Our decision is to pivot to the global migrant class and focus on helping our customers mitigate these disruptive events with our platform as a possible solution to stabilize, that’s our new focus. We believe there is an opportunity with NFTs, metaverses, digital asset trading, paid content, and more as digital-first solutions that can be pursued and we going to focus on these key areas.

Right now, we have already established our billing and invoicing system – this is a big step to let everybody know we are going to be in business. We are already moving our core services and gateways online around the world and will begin real-time global testing of our hubs and gateways. Then when we switch on the Toshikiso APIs and distribute our SDKs, we will be in business operations and launched. The nice thing is we don’t need to let anybody in the Black community know what we doing since they were acting funky about us going for ours over here in the first place. By the time they see what we are doing, they just going to chance upon us because I’m not advertising anything or putting my name in any media outlet – we just going to be helping our customers.

That’s going to be our move as we reset our roadmap for the 2nd quarter in 2022.