Photo by Andy Watkins on Unsplash
10 months building a crypto startup and BUMP!
Crypto industry is vulnerable and all projects in one ecosystem can be massively impacted by the downfall of the market and big whales.
Let's see where to begin with. I have been working on crypto startup for around 1 year since the great correction happened with a whole crypto market. That is also a period of time which I help to cofound a crypto startup. The startup is in Solana blockchain.
Where does the story begin?
If you follows the market sentiment for Solana blockchain in the upcoming days, it was not in a very good condition, or I can say, extremely negative. It was the worst year for Solana ecosystem since its launch a few years ago. Several large projects got hacked and manipulated by their own DeFi models. Following that, a story of FTX is what pushed the position of Solana in the whole market deviated. FTX was a huge supporter of the Solana ecosystem. With what happened, our Solana believers were devastated. Enough flashback and quick update on Solana current position. However, this incident brought me back to the main track. I gave myself some time to contemplate a right track of my personal career and the direction of a startup.
Career path in crypto
What can I say? Working in crypto does not give you a very good start for your career. I am a final year undergraduate and to be honest, there is too many factors affecting the growth of your career. The good side of crypto is you will gain a lot of money in this field due to the hype of the community in a bull market. But the bad thing that consolidate my point of view is the technical aspect.
There are dozens of blockchain network maintained and released every month. They can be compatible with the existing blockchains virtual machine like EVM-compatible or they will just release a whole new smart contract language and let the marketing team do the rest. As an engineer, you will have to learn several languages if you want to survive in the market. Imagine learning only Solidity and one day Ethereum crashes, your career just become volatile.
As the blockchain is designed to be your project core system, your project relies a lot on how well the core team behinds of that blockchain manage the project. If they just accidentally corrupt the network, you will be affected too. Even though decentralized is an attributed used to grade any blockchain network, the ecosystem is not decentralized on its self.
According to EarthWeb's statistics:
Currently, there are at least 1,000 blockchains with at least four types of blockchain networks. While the idea of blockchain is a singular data transfer type, there are multiple platforms provided in this industry.
Yes, every blockchain will have a specific use cases. But for public blockchains, the way they grow the ecosystem and destroy it with a few clicks is not worth it.
The direction of a startup
What we are facing is unexpected and it is not a fault of the management team or something. We have been building a startup wholeheartedly and candidly. I discussed with my team and what we decided is to keep building on the chain but trying to reach out to a more Web 2.5 user. Web 2.5 user is more off-chain, for example, people who keep their fund on CEX like Binance or OKX. We try to reposition ourselves as a more Web 2 crypto product instead of relying entirely on the onchain technology. From my perspective, there won't be one chain for all. In the end, multi chain should be a right path for every crypto startup. Targeting at one chain is like neglecting the pompousness of other blockchains.
Don't neglect personal branding
Running a startup is actually fun and I learnt a lot along side with my startup founder and the team. However, I realized I had neglected my own startup: My personal brand. There's a good blog I read recently about growing personal brand: Building in Public - Behind the scenes
The author declared that
But, everything I worked hard for was for the startup, I didn't build up my brand or voice at all in the last couple of years. "Where do I even start?" That was at the top of my mind.
And this is the same thing what I feel when there was a correction in crypto market. It did not only correct the market but also correct my mindset. The trail of most programmers follow is that they think programming is all what their life needed.
However, it's not. Mental health, family, social life and communication is what I would prefer more in life. Programming is still my passion but I truly f*cked up my old life by spending 12 hours a day programming, not until I got some health issues. As a programmer, whatever we do, running a startup or working for a large corporation, does not matter. Both can be destroyed by a financial crisis. But personal branding is what remains after all.
Conclusion
Well, this article is not that I am trying to be a life advisor or something. I hope this can be considered as a self reflection that other pals who in the same situation like I was can take this personally.