Newsletter #5
building often but pivoting more
So let’s just lay it out…..
Tradable didn’t work. Turns out, no one wants to create their own trading algorithms. It was a tarpit idea. Everyone who joined our platform went straight to the library and just wanted to deploy pre-existing strategies.
We spent too much time building it, making it aesthetic, without doing proper market validation. We didn’t see the red flags with failed startups like Composer, Quiver Quant and many others who tried to make it work when it wasn’t working.
But we learned. We learned to listen to our ICP from the VERY start. We learned to build a crappy product to validate our assumptions before fully building out a pretty product. We learned to own our struggles and fail fast so we can pivot faster.
Here is what we know now: Through 50 user interviews with GenZ from around the world we understand that people are mostly doing a 50/50 split of their investment portfolios. 50% of portfolios go to mutual funds, ETFs, or GICs. The other 50% are going towards more high-return investments like digital assets or options.
Here is what we think we know: First, copy trading is popular and growing. Think about platforms like Etoro with 1.2B USD in revenues in 2021. Second, we know people want to watch crypto whales through Twitter accounts like Whale Alert with 2.1M followers. Hypothesis: It seems like people would like copy trading for crypto whales.
Here is what we are building based on what we think we know: avo is the world’s first copy trading platform for crypto whales through your Coinbase or Metamask account. Swim alongside the biggest whales like Drake, Justin Bieber, Mark Cuban, Snoop Dogg, Steven Aoki and Beeple. This is very niche and we will be the first.
What’s next: We are pursuing whale watching until it either blasts off like a rocket ship or we find why it isn’t working, and pivot from there. The goal is to build a global eToro for crypto whales but ultimately to increase access to insider institutional trading knowledge.
Updates on what we have been up to at avo!
Product: We launched our Discord on the evening of Sunday, April 14th focused on end-to-end automation of crypto whale watching. The goal was to test if there was a market for what we were building. Within 20 hours and $0 on marketing, we got to 200+ active users on our discord channel. We will be launching our first whale-watching strategy later this month. Feel free to join at avo.so with the code FDRXS.
InnovateWest: This week, Anjali took a trip to the conference Innovatewest in Vancouver! Over this week, she has coffee chatted with over 40 investors and fintech founders; ending the trip with a 60+ person happy hour at Yaletown Brewery. She pitched at the Grizzly Pursuit Competition as a finalist and was listed as one of the Top 10 founders out of 100 for the Angel Firehood Pitch Competition. While we didn’t walk away winning any competitions, we did get soft commitments for 50% of our upcoming pre-seed fundraiser.
Overall, Anjali pissed off a lot of old people this week, talking about the future of finance and did not align with a lot of investment bankers and hedge fund managers. That was extra fun 🙂
Antler: Anter is going well….like really well. We are in W4 and have been taking advantage of the 24/7 office space. We made friends with many of the other startups in the office like a proptech Series A startup or Canadian staples like Boast.AI. We have become a part of the Toronto startup community and got a guaranteed office space in OneEleven (one of the best office spaces in Toronto) after Antler ends, should we want to stay.
User Interviews: We decided to do 8 user interviews each week as founders to stay in tune with what we are building and ensure it is always aligned with our user base.
Attending NACO Summit in Ottawa: Anjali has been invited to attend the NACO Summit in Ottawa this May. This is the largest event for angel investors in Canada. Some of the attendees are: Alison Nankivell (CEO @MaRS), Arati Sharma (NACO Angel of the Year), and Daniel Eberhard (CEO @Koho).
Tradable in the Community
40+ person Happy Hour in Toronto at the stock market bar planned in less than 48 hours
60+ people Happy Hour in Vancouver at the Yaletown Brewery
Chatted with Micheal, founder and CEO of WealthSimple about building fintech in Canada
Grabbed dinner with the CEO of Innovate BC, CEO of Finivator, Managing Partner at Deloitte Canada, CEO of SheBoot, and Guy Kawasaki
Social Media: We grew to over 500 followers on Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok! We also started an Instagram account! This week we also posted publicly about our founder journies with avo and how we have been building in stealth for the last 6 months.
Fundraising: Launching our official fundraising in 4 weeks. We already have a soft commitment for 40% of our round from A-level VC funds and angels.
NY Meetup: I (Anjali) will be coming to New York from May 9 to 11. If you are in the crypto or consumer fintech space, I would love to connect with them while I am there or would appreciate any intros to someone you might know in the space!
Book a meeting with one of our founders here to chat about whatever (fundraising, platform feedback, intros, partnerships, etc) - https://calendar.app.google/efmd8R6UXQ2cMuVDA
Thanks for reading 🫶