How Our Crypto App Went From Managing $0 To $1,000,000 In 1 Month Flat

One month ago when we were releasing Shrimpy, we didn’t expect this moment to come so soon. We actually didn’t know if it would come at all. We were just hoping someone would try the application. Our team isn’t a bunch of wealth management executives from Morgan Stanley who have unlimited resources. We are engineers who just love building awesome things.

Thank you for supporting us. Everyone here at Shrimpy appreciates you!

When Shrimpy crossed over $1,000,000 it was 5am this quiet Saturday morning. I know this not because I checked our server logs when I woke up. I was still awake. There was too much to do to sleep. Startups are like college. Where you stay up all night to finish work. Except there is no break afterwards, only more work.

Watching the ticker hit $1,000,000 was interesting for me. I found it interesting because it’s never like they show in the movies. There was no soundtrack playing in the background to build up suspense. There were no balloons. No banner raised above our office with confetti and vuvuzelas. No mariachi band waltzed through the door. Not even a single conga line. Just silent contemplation.

Some people would call this part happiness. Yet, that’s not the way I see it. This is more like the beginning. Shrimpy is just getting started. We want to be publishing a post for reaching $10 million soon and then $100 million after that.

Now is not the time to stutter. It’s time to advance.

But it’s only a million dollars.

No, it’s the first million dollars. Since every journey begins with a step. This is our step. A step may not seem like a lot, nor two steps. Yet, take enough steps and you’ll find yourself in a new place.

_ _ _

Lessons learned

Shrimpy wasn’t our first idea. Our first application was actually a trading bot called Crabby. It was a free application you could use to build strategies by chaining together different technical indicators. It was interesting, but restricted us to a small market.

Make something a lot of people want. Even if they don’t know they want it.

This was our first lesson. Some people wanted an advanced trading bot. Some. Not a lot, but not necessarily a little. Just not enough to make VCs go “Wow”. We wanted that wow.

So, we pivoted quickly. Lifting as much code from Crabby as possible, we pushed out an MVP for Shrimpy within a month.

Get an MVP out quickly.

Cut to the second lesson. We knew users wanted something far simpler than a complex trading bot, but we didn’t know exactly what. At this point, we needed to decide quickly and take an educated guess. This is when we gambled on rebalancing. It’s close enough to HODL that we thought users would feel like they are HODLing, but they would have the potential for significant gains.

This is where we side with Sam Altman. MVPs should be released quickly. So quickly in fact that you have doubts. Things will go wrong, but you push the button anyway.

Don’t be timid.

The MVP is out and in marches the third lesson. The MVP may be released, but nobody is going to see it. People don’t simply happen upon your product.

Frankly, nobody cares about your product. You need to make people care through relentless marketing.

Tell everyone about the product. This can only happen if you hit send. The material doesn’t need to be perfect, ship and iterate.

Listen Closely.

Once people start using the product, problems don’t go away. Now you need to listen to users. We have amazing users, so they tend to tell us what they think. This has allowed us to structure our road map in a way that we can address the users’ wants and needs, as well as direct the product towards our ultimate vision. We won’t be able to do everything our users request, but we are willing to consider each suggestion.

_ _ _

What’s Next?

A few things, actually. There are a lot of features we have in the works, several updates, and a lot of improvements. These changes will be rolled out over the next few weeks. While this is happening, we will also be developing our vision.

Shrimpy as the predominant crypto investing platform.

An investment platform which can entice the average person, yet delight the power user. This is not a simple task. In fact, potentially impossible. Whatever the chances, we have a team that’s ready. No matter the challenge.

It’s time for funding.

Shrimpy has been boot strapped from the beginning. A team consisting of assorted engineers from Facebook, Amazon, NASA, Samsung, and other great companies. The office is just a bedroom in our house repurposed for work. What I’m trying to say is we got off the ground with pennies.

You can either spend a lot of money to get what you want or you can spend a lot of time. Choosing time requires a meticulous mastery of your craft and all of your time.

The last month was spent convincing users that they could trust us with their money. It’s time we begin convincing investors we can be trusted with someone else’s money.

_ _ _

You Can Help

Even if you aren’t Chris Dixon writing us a large check, we could still use your help. Shrimpy is not done. You can help define the future of cryptocurrency investing by sharing with us what you think so far.

Tell us what Shrimpy can do to improve.

There are plenty of people out there who still haven’t discovered the Shrimpy application. Many of these hopeless saps are still manually allocating and balancing their portfolios.

Let people know about what Shrimpy has to offer.

Maybe you are an angel investor or know someone who is interested in working with us. In this case, don’t hesitate to reach out. There is a lot of ground to cover. The more talented people we have traveling beside us, the better our chances of success.

Join the Shrimpy revolution.

Most importantly, remember to enjoy using Shrimpy. We can’t lose sight of the reason we started this in the first place. We really love building awesome things.

The Shrimpy Team