A month ago, I had just finished my last side startup project, it had never really taken off so it’s hard to say that it failed in any way. It had followed a long line of failed previous startups: (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. I define failing as not making money but to be fair, some were never designed to make money. Before I started diving into anything, I decided to take a day or two to just research about how to pick your next startup idea. Let me just say right off the bat that I was actually pretty depressed, I felt alone and I was questioning the whole ‘startup as side gig’ premise. So the first thing I had to do was mend my wounded ego. Venting to my family and friends wasn’t really working because they weren’t in my world so I went online to search.
I kind of got lucky because the first place I visited was indiehackers.com and this really helped. Just knowing that other people were out there just like me failing and talking about it made me feel so much better. I spent a bit of time on the site listening to podcasts and reading articles. Two made an impact, the Patrick Mckenzie interview and a Pieter Levels video. Both of them talked about all stuff I’ve heard before about finding the right startup idea but this time the main tenants really stuck. For me they were:
- try to solve a problem
- validate
- make something that can make $
- make it as fast as possible
- make it in a growing industry
- build it yourself inexpensively
- make something you would use
- have a launch plan
My friend and I had just started putting some money into Ethereum, he thought it would be cool if there was a way everyone could invest into cryptocurrency, he actually thought it would be cool if there was an app that rounded up his spare change and invested in Ethereum. I had heard of the Acorns app which was doing something similar, Acorns rounds up your spare change from credit card transactions and invest into mutual funds and stocks. Why not do something like Acorns but for cryptocurrency? My buddy and I’d would at least use it.
I validated this idea by simply googling ‘Round Up Spare Change Into Cryptocurrency’. I found that the Lawnmower app already had done this but then stopped because they pivoted. They actually pivoted because they weren’t making enough money with their round-up model. Uh oh. That’s not good. But I wasn’t going out to be the next unicorn app, I figured if I could get a couple hundred users with a launch then I could cover my expenses and move from there. When Lawnmower did pivot it apparently pissed off some users that really liked the app enough that some articles were written about it. This made me feel better. In addition to Lawnmower, there was the Acorns app that had found success with a similar model. Wanna see the UI in action:
I wish I had more to go on but this was actually more than I had for some of my other app ideas. For monetization, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but I knew it would be either transaction or monthly fees. I ended up just lifting Acorns model, $1 a month but with a twist, it gets paid in Ethereum. I did some basic research on the two Api’s that I would use to make this happen, Plaid and Coinbase. It seemed doable with a limited amount of coding. The only problem was Plaid’s API fee but they would waive it for the first 100 users. I wasn’t sure how else to validate except to build out this MVP and see if I can get past 100 paying users. So here we go . Check out Coinflash. A web app that automatically invests your change into cryptocurrency like Ethereum and Bitcoin: https://coinflashapp.com. Mobile app in the works!