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.