Altcoin Fantasy

In 2017 and 2018, crypto had a massive education gap. Millions of people wanted to learn to trade but the path was steep — most lost money fast, and there was no safe place to practice. We built a gamified crypto trading simulator where users could learn by doing without risking real money — think fantasy sports, but for crypto trading. Users joined free weekly competitions, built simulated portfolios, and could win real prizes from our partners and sponsors. It was available on web, iOS, and Android, with most of our users and growth on Android.

We were early in a category that was barely defined — I always call it Game-fi before this was even a niche. What's interesting is that the business model significantly shaped our user experience, and in fact was critical to it.

We monetized through B2B partnerships with crypto companies — CoinMarketCap, TradingView, DataDash, OKCoin, TrustToken, Metal Pay, Gate.io, Travala, and others — who paid to put their tools and content in front of our engaged user base. We also ran private competitions with institutions including Emlyon Business School and NYU Stern. Users got better learning resources at no cost. Partners got high-intent users at near-zero CAC. We got revenue without ad-tech overhead.

The PM lesson: when you build a consumer product, the business model is also a product and you need to choose the more valuable one. The way we monetized — through curated B2B partnerships rather than ads or subscriptions — wasn't just a revenue strategy; it was what made the user experience better. Optimization that aligns users, partners, and the company is durable. Optimization that puts them at odds is not. We should have leaned into this even further and dropped the cost for partnerships to maximize the number of prizes we could give to users, further driving the user growth flywheel, which would further drive the B2B partnerships flywheel. By trying to monetize too much from each individual B2B partner, we restricted our own growth.

In 2020, Google Play removed our app as part of a broader crackdown on crypto-adjacent apps. We appealed. They refused. Without distribution on the Play Store, the consumer flywheel stalled and we were forced to wind the company down.

Platform risk is a real PM concern, especially in categories where platforms have policy stances that can shift. It's something I think about whenever I'm evaluating where a product is exposed to forces outside the company's control and what mitigation can be done to prevent complete platform risk.