Testing Whether Tokens Turn Into Money
Yesterday the Google approval came in. With help from Kim at Platform Calgary, $25,000 from Google for Startups. With the earlier $5,000 AWS Activate grant, that is $30,000 in cloud credits. Not investment. Credits. Still, it lets me start the work I could not do because of cost. Three jobs were put off: putting the apps out, using tokens without holding back, growing the user count. All three were pushed back because of cost. The credits pull them forward. One condition: credits expire, and I have to learn as much as I spend. Putting an app out in public costs tokens. Every meeting, every question spends tokens. More users mean more cost. That is why I stopped at the line of a few acquaintances. The credits undo that stop. There are apps that only my acquaintances and I have used. Nunchi catches English meetings in real time, JOBI helps with preparing for work abroad, Nomi finds team knowledge from the side. I built them, but I could not bring myself to spend money putting them out. Tokens are money. What scared me was not failure. It was the speed of spending. Ten users cost ten users' worth, a hundred cost a hundred's. Rising cost with no revenue yet scared me. So I stopped at a few acquaintances. Now it is time to cross that line. I am starting the work I put off. The test I want to run is one. They say that as AI gets smarter, tokens become money. I want to see if that is true from where I stand. The thing I was afraid to do: investing tokens in my own apps. Token investment is not advertising. It is using the model more, giving longer answers, checking more often. Skimp on tokens and the app goes shallow. Spend tokens and the app goes deep. Whether deeper keeps people, and whether kept people pay. I want to test that chain myself. How I measure it is simple. How many tokens I spent, how many users stayed, whether the ones who stayed paid. Three numbers, every week. "Tokens become money" means these three numbers connect. If they do not connect, that is an answer too. If they do not connect, I will not cut tokens. I will narrow the job. Not the job that uses the most tokens, but the one job worth spending tokens on. Credits are not seed money. They are experiment money. An experiment does not start with the answer fixed. How much tokens convert into money, and whether this becomes the real start of my startup. Starting without knowing is the experiment. That is why I barely slept. Not because money arrived, but because the excuse disappeared. The experiment can fail. Tokens may not turn into money. I plan to share that result too. A lesson bought with credits has to be worth something without credits. The start of a startup means a structure that keeps running after the credits run out. Running only on credits is not a start. It is life support. This experiment will tell which one it is. If you believe tokens turn into money, have you ever tested that belief.