Become A Cryptopreneur — Part 2
Update 2020: I have a new crypto investing app called Prospero.
Prospero is gamified DEFI and cryptocurrency investing.
Please visit the link and check it out. I would love to hear what you think about it.
Missed part 1? It’s here. Let me remind you why I think you should be doing a startup in cryptocurrency. It’s an emerging market, there will be less competition. Less big dogs to compete with say than the social video market, internet search or online retail market. Also, not all problems have been solved here. New products are built every day creating new problems that need to be solved. Also, there are tons of hungry, early adopters in cryptocurrency just waiting to try your product out. Ready? Okay, lets do this.
I used to think there was 3 steps to starting a business:
Step 1) Find A Problem
Step 2) Find A Solution
Step 3) Build Solution And Charge For it
Many times I built something only to realize I couldn’t sell it because I had no audience. Sometimes I didn’t understand my customer’s problem. And even if I did, I couldn’t tell them about the solution because I couldn’t connect with them. This is why I had to change the steps to this:
Step 1) Find Your Audience
Step 1.5) Build Your Audience
Step 2) Validate Your Problem Within Your Audience
Step 2.5) Build Your Audience Even More
Step 3) Build a Solution For Your Audience And Get Paid
Step 3.5) Keep Building That Audience.
Now lets talk about how you are going to do this with Crypto.
Step 1) Embed Yourself In The Crypto Community
Start to familiarize yourself with where people are hanging out and what you can get out of each of these communities. You will use them throughout your entire process:
Go to a Meetup: Cryptocurrency meetups really became a thing in 2017. This is definitely where I started to get my feet wet in the crypto networking scene.
Facebook Groups: The are hundreds of thousands of people in cryptocurrency Facebook groups. Some for beginners, some for advanced, some for specific Altcoins. Join them, friend people in the groups. Start posting cool content in them about crypto. Like people’s posts, start to build a little Facebook crypto network, I’ll give you a few groups later specifically.
Telegram Groups: Telegram groups are more popular with day traders, but can be very active. Certain Altcoins have their own telegram groups. Other telegram groups like Bitcoin Bravado, which has over 20,000 users, are very active with crypto-traders.
Slack Channels: Dylan Damsma’s Cryptominded has a thriving Slack community with thousands of users. Cryptominded is a resource for all things crypto on the web.
Cryptocurrency Conferences: These are like Meetups, but produce more bang for your time spent. If you are in the midwest, check out what is happening with the Chicago Blockchain Project.
Product Hunt: Check out cryptocurrency products already being built. This will give you an idea of what has just come out and what’s already been done.
Sub-reddits: There are several sub-reddits you’ll want to be a part of to monitor: What’s trending? What’s bothering people? What do people complain about? What are problems people are having that maybe you can solve?
More on these tools later.
Step 2) Validate Your Problem In Crypto
Go out there and talk to people in the community. What are they complaining about. Ask them what they want. What is trending on the crypto Facebook groups? What is trending with the crypto-twitter gods? How about on Medium? What are people talking about at the cyrpto-meetups? Here’s some problems I’ve discovered with my research:
Crypto Accounting:
Andrew Gordon, an awesome accountant and lawyer specializing in cryptocurrency, posted this video below and in days he had over 20,000 views. There is so much interest in accounting around cryptocurrency on social media and so few products:
Crypto Education:
Cyrtocurrency is complicated. People are looking for education. You can make a paid e-books and or create online video courses at Udemy.
Buying Altcoins Is Sooo Hard:
People need a one click solution for this, but before that can happen we need to solve….
The Problem With Wallets:
Cryptocurrency wallets are a foreign concept. People are used to keeping their money in banks. Also, certain coins have their own wallets while others don’t. Someone needs to make this easier.
Crypto Conferences:
There is a huge demand for these and already a number of startups are capitalizing on them.
We Need More Women In Crypto:
In February of 2017, my friend’s son had just gotten a job at an exchange, but it wasn’t a traditional stock exchange, it was a cryptocurrency exchange. His son was telling him to buy Ethereum, he had convinced him it would be the future. He was telling me to buy it and I was telling him no way. At the time, it was March, and Ethereum was under $80. April, he told me to buy Ethereum, I told him he was crazy. May, he told me, and by this time FOMO had started to set in as Ethereum’s price climbed. I had that feeling, like I’ve had before, that I’m going to look back on this and be mad for missing something BIG. So I dumped my saving into Ethereum, and started to ask my bus driver friend what kind of app would he want that had to do with crypto. He said he would love to invest his spare change into crypto.
I found this reddit post that proved that this is a good solution. Lawnmower was an existing spare change into crypto app. They pivoted and stopped the spare change feature. People were not happy with this. This was enough evidence for me to move forward.
Step 3) Build It
Now it’s time to build something and charge people for it. I’m a strong believer in the idea that you should built it yourself. First, pick the programming language you know to build it in, don’t try to learn a new language while building a new product. Then go to town with these free tools and tips.
Build Your MVP On The Web
Don’t build your MVP as a mobile app. I made this mistake before. Coding for mobile is harder because of the multi-threaded nature of mobile phones. It’s more expensive to hire mobile coders. Also, to deploy mobile apps can take weeks. Sometimes you’ll deploy only to be rejected by the app store. Launch on the web where there are no rules and no gate keepers. Also, HTML and Java Script have been around a long time. There are a lot of libraries already built to do the heavy lifting for you.
Make sure to make your website adaptive so it can be opened on Android and iOS and the web. You can use Bootstrap to do this. Make sure to test it thoroughly on your phone because you’ll be building it on your desktop.
Amazon hosts servers and databases. You can run a server for free, they are called micro instances. Everyone who signs up for AWS gets a free tier usage for an instance. It should be more than enough to launch your MVP. Need a database, check out RDS. These can costs as little as a couple dollars a month too. Need a place to store files? AWS handles this too, it’s called S3.
I know I said spend $0, but I did pay for this. For $100 a month you can call AWS support 24/7 and ask them anything related to system administration or any of the services I mentioned above. This is charged month to month, so you could just start the subscription and cancel at the end of the month. Their support staff is very smart and good at what they do. They will screen share your screen and walk you through exactly what to do. They’ll help you with anything not code related. I recommend this service.
GitHub: This is where you’ll backup your code. Also ideal for collaborating with other coders. Use sourcetree to manage your git repositories.
Charge From the Beginning: Use Stripe, you can copy and past their code and be up and running with a payment option in minutes. You can also charge in cryptocurrency using Coinbase’s new service.
Automate Everything: You do this with cronjobs. They can be written with a line of code to run a script, run a program, go to a website every hour, day or week. Here’s an example:
Remember I said test it on your phone? Don’t have an Android or iPhone? A great tool for doing tests with real devices is called Browserstack. You will have to test Mac, PC, iOS and Android devices with your adaptive webpage.
Work remotely: You don’t need an office to be a maker you can live anywhere. Don’t pay for office space.
Hire Off Shore: Upwork seems to have slightly better talent than Freelancer but I’ve hired most of my technical people off of these two platforms.
MailChimp: Use mail chimp for your mass emails to your users. You can create professional looking emails easily and track conversions.
Google Docs, Slack and Google Analytics will all help you as well and they are all free. Slack is great for communicating with your outsourced talent.
Incorporate Later: After you’ve launched and get some traction, then get your incorporation docs in line. No point doing this if no one uses your product. You can incorporate a Delaware C corporation for $99 on clerky.com.
Launch It And Build That Audience
After you’ve built your MVP you are inevitably going to hate it. It’s not going to be close to thing you wanted. You would have had to slash half the features you wanted and it only works 80% of the time. That’s fine. Because if nobody uses it, none of that matters. You need to prove that people would pay you for this. Get your 1 paying customer, then you can move on. If people aren’t going to pay you for it, you have to prove this too. You have to get your product in front of people to find this data. Here’s how you’ll do it:
Product Hunt: You have to launch your cryptocurrency product on product hunt.
Post It On All Crypto Subreddits: But before you do that, you have to spend time on all of them upvoting and commenting. Many of these subreddits have specific rules about posting, you have to comment and upvote several times first. So make sure you read the rules about this otherwise your post will be denied by the mods.
Also, you’ll want to post to them at certain times of the day and on certain times of the week to maximize eyes. Use this tool to find the best day and time to make your post.
/cryptocurrency sub-reddit, 550,000 readers, hit this one first.
/bitcoin, 700,000 readers, also a huge subreddit
Also check these one’s out to:
/ethereum, /ethertrader, /cryptomarkets, Every coin has their own subreddit like /ripple, which has over 14k subscribers.
Get It In Front Of Live People: Take your idea to a cryptocurrency meetup in your own town and pitch it to the crowd. Get feedback, find those paying customers, get feedback. In Chicago, meet me at a Disruption Joe meetup, he is the go-to Chicago Meetup guy.
I wouldn’t worry about someone stealing your idea. Feedback, customers and connections is so valuable at this stage. Don’t cut your self off to it because you are scared about people taking your idea. Besides, startups are mostly execution. It’s all about how you execute your idea and it has a lot to do with your audience building. So build that audience and don’t worry about people stealing your idea.
Post It On Every Crypto Facebook Group: Remember that Facebook network you are building? Now it’s time to use it. All those friends you made on Facebook will help you test your product and get the word out about it. Here’s a list of the Facebook crypto group’s I’m a part of, join them all. You can’t just post on them, you have to be a member first. Also, don’t just post on the ones with over 50k users. Post on the small ones because people will talk to you on these smaller ones. I’ve posted several below, some small and some large. I’ve starred* one’s my friends are mods, post their first and I’ll spread the word.
Cryptocurrency Investing > 7,000
Beginners Guide To Cryptocurrency Investing >1,000 *
Totally Crypto >10,000
Cryptonews > 80,000
North Texas Blockchain Group <1,000 *
Cryptocurrency Collectors Club > 80,000
Respond To Everyone In The Beginning: Respond to every post and upvote it. Anyone that reaches out to you on twitter, respond to them. Same with email. Those first customers are the hardest. You need them to move on.
Create New Products To Advertise Your Old Products
After you’ve launched your product and got that initial audience how do you get new eyes to that old product? Pay for advertising? No, build another product (maybe free, maybe not), relaunch it and advertise your product on this new product. I did this with Coinflash Trends, it will notify you when Google is trending up for your cryptocurrency of choice:
Notice the advertisement on the bottom of the page:
I posted in the ripple subreddit and had 10,000 views in a few days, paying for this kind of advertising might have cost me thousands of dollars:
Create Crypto Content
You’ll have to start writing, video making, tweeting and Facebook posting regularly now. Building that audience slowly over time. I have some tips on that:
Write: Create blog posts like this one, tell the world your story. Share your tips. Update your audience on new features. Write your blog posts on Medium and then copy and past them to your Linkedin, Steemit is very big in the crypto community, it’s reddit built on crypto. You get paid in Steem for creating good content so make sure to support them.
Create Video Content: Create videos like this one that just explain your product and how to use it. The great thing about youtube is your video will show up for people searching for crypto:
Also, Google will throw videos on the front page of Google searches, remember Google owns Youtube. So it’s important you have a Youtube video:
Then repost them on Dtube, which is like youtube built on crypto by the Steemit guys who you should support.
Twitter: Once you have your product, this is how people will reach you and give you feedback on your product, notes, bugs, etc. Speaking of twitter, using hashtag tools like hashtagify.me will help you a lot to figure out the hottest trend in crypto and get you more attention. As far as other twitter influencers to follow and mention, check out people like Peter Fenton: MISSNATOSHI, Ian Balina, Barry Silbert, Aaron van Wirdum, Neeraj K. Agrawal since those are the people whose retweet would be very impactful for your crypto startup.
Youtube Vlogger/Crypto bloggers: There are lots of them, they’ll contact you once you have launched. You’ll want to follow them, watch their videos, like their videos, support them. you’ll need them to support you. Here’s a few I recommend: Kenn Bosak is a great crypto blogger, watch his videos. His good friend Omar Bahn that runs his channel called Crypto’s News is also another awesome dude. Also, guys like Crypto Daily, and Michael @Boxmining.
Relaunch With New Features
First launch didn’t go well? Relaunch your app when you have a new feature. Drive new users to your product with the new feature. Reconnect with your old list of media contacts and update them on the new feature.
Failing And Learning
It’s inevitable you are going to launch products that get no views, no likes and nobody wants to use them. These are learning experiences. Here’s some failures I’ve learned from:
Versa App: Shoot a video, tag your friends, they shoot a video and it gets added onto your video making a little movie. I learned social video is too crowded a space and spent 2 years building a product no one used when could have built a much simpler version in 2 months and learned the same thing.
Battle Running: Race anyone anywhere with your fitbit or phone. Did not charge from the beginning so had to stop updating it.
Findmymemorial.com: Google maps for headstones in cemeteries. Could not find one paying customer so discontinued.
Hope you guys enjoyed this. Contact me on twitter if you want to chat crypto or have a crypto startup and want some feedback. Hope your launch goes to the moon.
