Since joining InReach Ventures as a Data Scientist I have been learning a tremendous amount about entrepreneurship and what it takes to build a company. In the following post, I develop how I applied my learnings while working on my latest side-project: a SaaS product for cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

Cryptocurrency investing is the latest gold rush: adoption is booming and prices are skyrocketing with a total market cap flirting with 150b$. One of my favourite pieces of business trivia is that back in the 19th century gold rush, people who made the most money the most were those who “sold shovels” or provided other services to the miners.

In an attempt to find a lucrative side project, I decided to dedicate my summer to building a cryptocurrency related product and start selling some shovels.

In this article, I try to reflect back on what I did and how I ended up building my smart cryptocurrency prices alert bot.

Find an idea

My first step to find an idea was to turn to cryptocurrencies enthusiasts and simply ask them how I could help. Indeed, my motivation was at its maximum but I did not have a clear view of what I could build.

At the beginning of June, I made various posts on cryptocurrency related sub-reddits, introducing myself to the community, detailing my skills and asking how I could be of any help. I made sure to be upfront and honest about my intention to build a paid product.

I got several answers, with a few ideas coming up several times:

A portfolio tracking app that combined features from the dozens of existing apps

A price comparison / analysis website

A notification tool for price movements

That last one stuck with me. It was indeed a problem I had personally noticed. Cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile assets and in the past few weeks, I had seen myself checking market prices every other hour. If I could have some kind of alert system to notify me when something is actually happening I would save a lot of time and mental energy.

There are already a few services and apps that enable users to set price alerts at defined thresholds, but they don’t help much since you have to manually adjust your alert thresholds every other day. My alert system would have to be “smart” enough to automatically adjust the thresholds.

I was now set with an idea that seemed to have some demand and, more importantly, was useful to me. It has been said again and again, and I personally believe it: there is nothing more motivating than working on a problem you actually have yourself. As both the user and the builder you can notice flaws and fix them, have feature ideas and implement them straight away.

Lessons learned:

To find an interesting idea, solve your own problems or turn out to the community and be open about your skills and intentions.

Experiment and validate the idea

During my time at university, I got to study forecasting methods. Forecasting is defined as the process of making predictions of the future based on past data and is most commonly done by analysis of trends. While forecasting methods are not a good fit to predict returns they could be of help to automatically define price trends and predict price boundaries.

In short, I could compute the price interval in which I have a strong confidence that the price would fall in in the next three days. And if the price turned out to go above or below the interval boundaries, it would mean that — statistically — something is happening and we should get notified. Remember that here, my objective is not to accurately predict the market prices but to get an interval of where the price is the most likely to be.

This whole solution-finding part turned out to be a fun weekend project. I could have stopped there though, like I have with many weekend projects before, but I had the objective to turn this whole idea into a product.

Before spending more time on engineering the solution, and to avoid the usual mistake of solving a problem no one has, I went back to the cryptocurrency community to validate my idea and approach.

I embraced the “fake it ‘till you make it” motto: without any product to show yet, I put together a slide explaining the problem, my solution and shared it on Reddit. Overwhelmed by the positive reception by the community, I made sure to give an easy way to people to stay updated with the project and put together a newsletter subscription via Tinyletter.

The fake-MVP: A slide explaining my solution

I ended up with a list of 400 cryptocurrency enthusiasts interested enough to be kept updated on the upcoming beta version of the product.

Lessons learned:

Take time to experiment with your idea and find a plausible solution — but make sure to get enough interest in your solution before spending hours engineering it

Build

In front of such a positive response, I dived into implementing the whole concept and I spent the following weeks building a first MVP.

When it comes down to side projects I believe there are two schools:

people who use their side projects as a way to try as many new tools as possible and end up over engineering everything for the sake of it,

people with a more pragmatic approach who just want to get things done.

In retrospective, I think I ended up somewhere in the middle. I used this project as a way to expand my skills but still, the thought of the 400 waiting beta testers kept me in touch with my “just-get-things-done” side and it only took me a couple of weekends to put everything together.