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If you’re reading this, you probably at some point had an idea that you felt should be a product in this world but weren’t entirely sure about how to make it happen.
Here’s a few things we learned through our journey in building Striga – A crypto platform that makes it easy for businesses to integrate crypto custody, trading, IBAN issuing and card issuing with a few lines of code and nothing else required – focusing on a problem, pivoting when needed, managing day to day corporate/accounting/administrative affairs and most importantly building and shipping product.
This snippet of our story is of course deeply rooted in building a venture scale company, i.e. one that has the potential to impact millions, if not billions of people and in turn have the potential to generate massive amounts of revenue (think > $100M per year).
The following are a handful of steps we followed while building Striga.
Step 1: Find a Problem
The entire thesis of your business and therefore your product revolves mostly around one single core problem.
A problem can be anything from – “It sucks how many clicks I need to make to extract this statistic from my database” to “we’re running out of fossil fuels, we need to go electric”. The size of your problem is directly proportional to the effort and capital you will likely need to solve that problem.
For us, the problem was simple – “Moving money between different currencies is slow, expensive and outdated.” This is a big enough problem affecting a large percentage of the population with enough multi billion dollar companies solving bits and pieces of this problem. The advantage we had was that this time around there was a new type of solution that hadn’t been tried or deployed at scale yet, i.e. using open and permissionless payment networks that operate 24/7, such as Bitcoin.
This method of blending new payment networks with old ones to solve an age old problem was worth taking a shot at and frankly exciting.
Step 2: Talk to Customers - Sell Before You Build
Most successful companies have a founding story where one or more of the core team themselves felt deeply or were impacted deeply by the core problem identified in Step 1.
In our case, our founding team used Bitcoin as an intermediate currency to move money from Asia to Europe given the lack of alternative options back in 2017 and Striga was born out of that. It however, took us almost half a decade to bake into our DNA the importance of validating that problem with the outside world, i.e. by talking to actual potential customers.
There is no substitute for this and it’s your job as a founding team member to interact 1-1 with your early (potential) customers and hear from them their pain points to truly understand what your product is going to look like. Bonus points if you can get your customers to pay you even before you have built anything. If all else fails you can always return this money back to your customers.
By doing this, you have 1. Resonated deeply with your own problem and validated that enough outsiders have the same problem, making it worth solving and 2. Started learning about how you can find hundreds or thousands more of the same type of folks that have this problem.
Step 3: Build. Build. Build.
Now that you, the founder, have spoken firsthand to enough (potential) customers and are convinced that you can solve their problem and make money while doing so, build your thing!
This almost likely is going to be a software solution and here is a common pitfall to avoid – Learn to build software, you cannot outsource this part. You simply cannot – The first version of the thing you ship is going to be broken, ugly and minimalistic but it’s enough to get your customers to pay for it.
Over the course of time this thing is going to change dramatically and if you have no idea how it’s built or how to change it, you’re shooting yourself in the foot or likely giving up your business to a competitor that can iterate and ship faster. Learning to build software has never been easier in the history of time, with all the AI help available in the world, no-code tools and literally free tutorials for any programming paradigm under the sun, there is no excuse for not learning to build software if you’re founding a tech company.
Step 3.5: Raise Funds?
Not all businesses need investors and neither are all startups VC “fundable”.
A fundable business typically is one where you think you can cross $100M in revenue in the somewhat foreseeable future and there is a large enough market to do so in. For example: If you’re selling custom printed t-shirts with a brand that you’ve built it’s unlikely this is a VC “fundable” business. But for instance you’ve found a way to make money transfers between India and the USA super low cost through a crypto platform and there are more customers signing up than you can handle, odds are this is VC “fundable”.
If you’re “fundable”, getting those “funds” is a feat in itself, you now have to pass this conviction and energy on to people that understand your industry and are willing to bet that your business will be massive. You of course, do not have to do this and you might even be just as well off without funding and build a massive business. But often, the extra cash helps you do things that would have otherwise taken you years to do.
At Striga, we were fortunate enough to have been backed by YCombinator and UC Berkeley (SkyDeck), both phenomenal investors whose wealth of advice helped us get to where we are today – doing multiple millions in revenue, default-alive with our destiny in our own hands. A key part of unlocking this was to be physically present in Silicon Valley, meeting with investors, talking to other founders/advisors and learning all on the go.
When you’ve found your first investors, you need to have a legal, registered company and a bank account to actually get that money and put it to use. Setting up a company, managing it and making sure you’re paying your taxes, doing your filings and staying compliant is a massively daunting task. Tryfondo takes this burden off your shoulders and lets you focus on building your business.
If you’re raising from silicon valley folks, you probably will end up with a Delaware C-Corp – The typical legal entity type that investors understand well and are comfortable investing into. Getting creative here will likely lead to you spending more time doing things you probably don’t need to be doing. There are a ton of corporate legal-ese that are unknown to the normal entrepreneur – tax filing deadlines, beneficial owner information, Form 1099s, state tax payments, legal address requirements etc. Fondo takes care of the entire heavy lifting, seriously, try it now
Step 4: Talk to Customers - Keep Building
Whether or not you’ve raised funds, at this point you’re using Fondo, running a business, have customers and a product that’s doing something.
This part is most often the “valley of death” where companies give-up or cease to exist. It’s uncomfortable, the future is uncertain and you go through obscene emotional cycles of highs and lows with each passing day. What helped Striga get past this to Step 5 was “staying power” – an unwavering belief that this product needed to exist, validated by enough customers and an almost seemingly unrealistic belief that Step 5 was just around the corner.
It might help you to simply not give up and survive long enough, this worked for a large number of early stage companies which took 5+ years to find Product Market Fit through a process of rinsing and repeating Step 2 and 3.
Step 5: Product Market Fit
This step is 99% an “aha” moment. There is no recipe or number to know when you have it, you just do.
One day or week you’re going to realize that you’ve got more demand than you can keep up with and feel like you got whacked over the head with a big log. This usually means you’ve found product market fit.
This mystical step is the one that statisticians and media talk about when numbers about the number of startups that closed shop are reported – Most companies never make it to this stage, which makes sense in the grand scheme of things. If it were that easy to reach here, everyone would be doing it but the odds are that by the time you’ve found product market fit, you’ve invested a massive amount of your time, made absurd sacrifices, learned a novels’ worth of content and grown gray hair on your head, putting you on the right of the bell curve, where the middle of the curve represents normal people. Yes you are abnormal.
Step 6: Boom
From here on, figure it out. You’ve got a business that’s making money, more customers than you can handle and daily fires to put out. It’s much harder to screw up now than it was two steps ago (although it happens a lot), but the odds of your company dying are lower now. Raise more funds to grow faster? Hire more people? Become profitable and build this company for centuries? It’s all up to you.
Try Striga – The crypto payment API product of almost 7 years of rising and repeating Step 2 and 3 – portal.striga.com
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