My First Product in Crypto. Part 3

I was sure I had caught the perfect market moment. I had investments, a team, a funnel, a ready product, and a niche that was skyrocketing literally before my eyes. After 9 months, the project died. (story beginning here)

I know many newcomers won't be super interested in hearing about my crypto topics, but people usually find failures interesting))) Ironically, this failure later led me to AI.

So.
Summer 2024. I raised investments, I already had: a business model, a ready marketing funnel, and a content team, and at that moment Hamster Kombat was about to distribute its coins — the peak of hype around tap-to-earn games, the moment seemed just perfect.

And then I made my first mistake.

In essence, the platform I envisioned wasn't complicated. We already had ready stolen automation scripts from GitHub for tap-to-earn games, we just needed to automate their launch for specific accounts, create a personal account, payments, and a clear funnel.

The project seemed simple. And I, together with my friend — the technical director — decided to build the development in-house (i.e., assemble our own team within the company).

Sounds logical, right? I already had experience in quickly hiring strong people. Plus, the tech director said he had ready developers. And indeed: why outsource a project that looks like "assembling a construction set"?

In the end, instead of 3 months of development, we got 9.

What went wrong? Literally everything)))

To speed up the process, we decided:
"Why write everything from scratch? Let's use WordPress for the client side and outsource automation as a separate service."

Naturally, WordPress didn't help; it only threw a wrench in the works and broke everything it could, fighting it consumed a lot of time.

At some point, fighting it became a separate product. Not that WP is bad, it's just that neither the tech director nor I had much experience with it.

Anyway, any change brought three more problems. And in parallel, we needed to build the funnel and design.

And then the next problem surfaced: we needed to get people to spend money in a niche where everyone is used to being scammed.

We had to explain very clearly what it was, why it was needed, and why we could be trusted.

It took a huge amount of time and iterations to form the right message.

According to my calculations, we needed 3 active months of development. But we didn't make it.

Money started running out. Because of this, we had to cut costs and reduce the development team. And naturally, we moved even slower.

In the end, the in-house team couldn't stabilize what was actually a fairly simple project.

Mistake #2 - Content.

I had a strong production team from another project, and I decided to use this resource to the max.

But I overlooked one important thing..

The guys worked with speakers who had been in their industry for 10 years:
they knew the material perfectly, knew how to speak, sell, and hold attention.

And at that time, I knew about crypto about as much as my production team. (Very little)

Because of this, we tried to make content in a niche we didn't really understand.

The audience feels that instantly. As a result, the content just didn't resonate.

But the problem wasn't just knowledge.

I didn't know how to present myself on camera at all.

Here's how it was at first: youtu.be/BMKzHZHVhDs?is=6CTfKFYcwzKSOB_W

Here's how it became later: youtu.be/IMW0TliAOJk?is=0RrUC9cwmhbSNk9l

Speech delivery, on-camera behavior, and appropriate editing eventually started to yield something decent, but after 6 months!

That's normal, but such indicators didn't match my calculations at all. And besides, content isn't just editing and on-camera behavior; content is about finding a format that interests your specific audience. And that can take several years, and again, that wasn't in my calculations)))

And that was the second big lesson: content cannot be "hired."

For content to start yielding results, you need years of practice, dozens of mistakes, and hundreds of videos.