Cryptocurrency exchange platform
Noticed an adjacent idea showing pull: Talked to users churning asking if they'd use it if they could buy Bitcoin, and they all said yes, so they built it.
Hosted Bitcoin wallet
Low retention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBPTFlpv31k https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32743479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664
“I basically launched the hosted Bitcoin wallet. There were people signing up. I just posted on Reddit and places like that. And maybe like a hundred people would sign up and then nobody would come back. And so I just—in Y Combinator they often tell you, talk to your customers and improve your product. That’s all you’re supposed to be doing. Try to find product-market fit. So I emailed like five of the users that had signed up and I was like, ‘Hey, I worked on this app. I saw you signed up. Can I get on the phone with you?’ I get on the phone with like five of these folks. And I was like, you know, why didn’t you come back? And the guy was like, well, the app was okay for a beta, but I don’t have any Bitcoins. So I didn’t really know what to do with it. And I remember, this lightbulb kind of went off in my head. I was like, well, if I put a ‘buy Bitcoin’ button in there, would you have used it? And he was like, yeah, maybe. So then we went about the process. My co-founder at that time, we got that basically you had to get a bank partnership, payment rails, you know, an exchange, basic exchange functionality, all that stuff in place. And the minute we launched that feature where you could just click buy, put in your bank account or credit card, buy it, buy Bitcoin that showed up in your account from that day forward, the number of users started to go up like this. And so we finally had found product-market fit after two years of wandering in the desert.” —Brian Armstrong, CEO and founder
2 years
The product