#1 Building Bipa - Early beginnings
This is the first in a series of posts I am going to write about my experience building Bipa. My goal with this series of posts is to show that if I managed to get where I am, you can too. We are far from being a success story as a company, but if I convince at least one of you to go out and build stuff, I will consider these posts successful.
Bipa, or an app like Bipa has been in my mind since around 2015 when I first saw that Venmo (US) and later PicPay (BR) existed. At that time, I was still learning how to program but was already full of dreams and product ideas. One of these ideas was a payments app that would make it possible to dump your wallet and only have your phone with you (when charged). At the time I didn’t even know what I had to do to make this happen, so I pretty much left it behind and never got to work on it. I was working on other silly ideas in my spare time.
By then, I was really an amateur developer, I had learned how to code on my own and through online courses, but had never really deployed any serious code to production. So I set out to find myself a job that I could learn the necessary skills to eventually build my own thing. I was fortunate enough to get a job as an intern at Magnetis.
There, I met people that literally made me into the programmer that I am today. They were patient enough to teach me and show me the way, and I will be forever grateful to them. These same people also gave me the chance to work on creating and deploying backend servers and APIs, JavaScript/CSS/HTML front end, as well as building from scratch and working for 2 years on their React Native mobile application.
But at the end of 2019, I was feeling a little frustrated that I wasn’t taking enough risks and wasn’t learning enough new things. Magnetis had some interesting challenges ahead, but they weren’t aligning with what sort of challenges I wanted for my life. At the same time, I started doing some more research into Bitcoin and started buying again. I soon realized that the same frustrations I had when I was buying in 2017 and 2018 still existed, it was still very difficult to buy and own Bitcoin in Brazil, and we were light years behind apps like Cash App and Coinbase. All of a sudden, I found my calling.
This is it, it fits right into the idea that had been in the back of my mind for years and also matches with the technology I am most excited about, Bitcoin and Blockchain. It was obvious to me, this had to exist in Brazil and I was going to be one of those that bring this to market.
So, as you do, I set out to convince other friends to join me on this idea that so obviously needed to exist. While they were all supportive, none of them really cared. I remember when I was talking about it at a bar in early 2020 (pre-pandemic) and while they didn’t ignore me, you could see them steering the conversation in a different direction. This the first lesson I want you to take away, very few people will understand you until you show them.
For me this was no problem, I was used to it, I was always the one with the crazy ideas talking about them non-stop and never actually building them to their full extent. I would have done the same thing if I was in their shoes, they were probably a little tired of hearing me only talk about stuff and never actually do anything. It’s important that you are building or experimenting with the stuff you talk about for people to take you seriously.
At first, I had no idea how to build a payments app that included Bitcoin and why that would make sense. I just knew that as a user, I wanted that. Like, NOW.
As a developer, I am used to simplifying things and breaking them down into smaller steps. When I saw the skills I had and the regulatory barriers needed to launch the Cash App of Brazil, I found that if I launched the Bitcoin side of the business first, that could potentially help me go to the next step, which is becoming a payments app.
So I set out to build Bipa’s first version. Now, the question becomes, what do I need to do to make this happen?
At first, I knew I needed to pick a name, have a logo, figure out the set of features the first version would have, figure out the design of each screen, and go build it. You might initially think you need someone else to help you do all of that, while that may be true for some specific things like designing a logo (I am not a designer), you can do the bulk of the work yourself, you just have to find a way.
Picking a name was one of the most challenging parts, I wanted to call the app/company something easy to say and spell, but that also was somehow related to money. My first choice was dindin, in Portuguese dinheiro means money, and it is common in many places of Brazil to call money dindin. That quickly went downhill when I found out there was another app called dimdim that had already registered the brand and was also a payments app. After many searches and iterations, I landed on Bipa which simply unites Bitcoin Payments (also works for Portuguese Bitcoin Pagamentos). Looking in hindsight, it was a good choice, but it took me a little while to get used to it.
The logo was the part where I really didn’t know how to do. So what I did is I got a friend of mine who is a Designer to work on something that was simple enough that people would know it is Bipa. Now, these things change in a startup and I wouldn’t consider this as something set in stone, expect your logo/brand to change in the years that you fight to find product-market fit.
The features I wanted to build were always very clear:
We needed a way for users to buy and sell Bitcoin.
If they buy Bitcoin, that means they need to somehow own it.
If they need to own it, then we need to be able to support Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals.
But, buying Bitcoin is a regulated activity in Brazil, we need to do monthly reports to Brazil’s IRS and we need to KYC our users.
If we need to KYC, then we need to make sure we have an account validation workflow.
By doing this thought process of going from the most basic feature Bipa had to support. I came up with the set of features I wanted to build, but knowing what you want is not enough. You need to be able to implement it and to implement it, you need to figure out how it is going to work and look like.
The design and user experience are some of the hardest parts for a developer to do right when launching new products. It is much harder when you are pushing the edge on how things should be done, but in my case, I was not pushing the edge (at least not yet). I am just building something that exists elsewhere but has not made its way into this shores yet. In my point of view, this makes my job much simpler as I don’t have to reinvent the wheels, there are great designers out there that have done the work of figuring out how a product like Bipa should work in its essence. So I just copied them.
If you are like me and can’t use these services and apps, just look for videos of people using them on the internet. It’s incredible the number of screenshots that you can take of these apps just by watching through videos of people promoting them on youtube, it’s almost like you get a team of designers working with you, it’s amazing.
I am not telling you the whole story yet. You obviously can’t copy every single thing the other app does, every app and service is different. You need to wear a UX/UI designer hat and fill in the gaps. For me, the open account process of Bipa was something I had particularly strong ideas about, I had worked on the open account team at Magnetis and was always thinking about how could we have a very easy and quick open account process. So when it came time to writing Bipa’s, I knew exactly what I needed to write. But to get it right, I had to make sure that the screens followed a similar pattern to the ones I had copied, so the app wouldn’t look extremely different from screen to screen.
You, me, anyone with the technical capabilities can build a product that users love. They just have to be willing to put themselves in a position where they are constantly learning and using good ideas from other people. Nobody is the genius of everything, learn to be humble and recognize great work where there is great work being done, and use that work to influence your work.