#3 Building Bipa - Finding our niche
Building something new is hard, especially if what you are building takes a long time to get built. Startups easily fall into that category, you may get lucky (or not) and sell your startup in a year or two of starting it, but most people will grind for years before they even see a glimpse of success. This multi-year grinding to get to a product that actually has users is the hardest part and the most rewarding at the same time. That's assuming that your company still lives and has not yet died.
Turns out, if you are a new company whose future is still uncertain, structuring yourself in a way that prevents you from dying is one of the super strengths that you as a startup can have, Paul Graham famously called the Airbnb founders cockroaches because by the time they got into YC they had survived many though times and the company still hadn't died.
Structuring a company in a way that it can't die has limits, you won't be able to live on a very low or even no salary for a long time. You may have a family, bills to pay, or other priorities in life that are just as important. If there is one certainty in life is that our time is scarce and we need to find ways to use it wisely.
For that reason, when launching a new product/company, it is extremely important that you understand really well the market that you are targeting and how your solution will fit into that market. When I launched Bipa, I was very confused and had not yet figured out how the market worked and how we would fit into it. This came after quite a bit of thinking, observing the market, and listening to those who seemed interested in what I was building.
As I built Bipa and started immersing myself in online communities related to Bitcoin and crypto, I quickly got a better sense of where the market was. My initial conclusion was:
The market is still very new and there are tons of new people joining every day still. You can easily notice that by joining Telegram groups and watching how many new members join asking for beginner advice.
There are quite a few people that have already learned about Bitcoin and Crypto and have invested in it through the various means that are currently available.
I saw a shift in narrative and perspective. Many people now identified themselves as Bitcoiners, Ethereians, ADA, XRP army and etc. The cryptocurrencies of the world are becoming the places where a strong community backed by a monetary bet is evolving. Bitcoiners don't just express themselves with their mouth or tweets, they also do it through their wallets, and so do other cryptocurrencies enthusiasts.
After noticing the huge shift in behavior that these cryptocurrencies brought to people's lives. It became clear that as the market evolves, it is not enough to just build something and add more and more features to it, you had to embed a personality and a vision that matches what these communities want. The winning products of the future will be the ones that win the heart of these communities and solves their problems.
You may be thinking that this is a very small market and wouldn't make for a very large and successful company. But, if we take a look in history, college students are not that big of a market neither, and that’s where Facebook got its start. Apple initially sold computers to people that attended the homebrew computer club, which was just a few hundred people.
Bitcoin and crypto are growing at such a rapid pace, that I wouldn't be surprised if these communities become some of the strongest economical and political communities in the world in years to come. Much like the community in Silicon Valley and everyone that moved there became the powerhouse of today’s economy with some of the most influential companies in history coming from there.
It is within one of these communities that we found our initial user base, those that really wanted what we were building. And we focused solely on making their life easier and better. Bitcoiners need a place that gives them full control over their Bitcoin, not only that, they really wanted a place where they could recommend it to their friends or random people on the internet. Because to them, the most important thing is that they are helping more people realize the economic freedom that learning about Bitcoin, money, and self-sovereignty brings. If we somehow, managed to create a product that helped them buy their Bitcoin and send it to their wallets, and that they could then introduce it to others to help fulfill that altruistic nature of wanting more people to learn about Bitcoin and money, we could certainly reach an initial user base.
In the previous post, I mentioned how launching the integration with the Lightning Network helped us move from a place where nobody cared, to a place where a small niche of users cared. The LN was the initial spark of people’s interest in Bipa, but the moment they tried, they saw there were other things I had deliberately put into the product that would help drive growth within the market scenario I described above. Some of those were:
Buying or selling as little as 1 BRL. This helps bring beginners onto the platform since they don't have to commit much in order to start.
Users can create daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly recurring purchases of Bitcoin. This is something that some of those that had already bought Bitcoin and know of its volatility knew helped a lot, if you divide your purchase into many parts, your risk of buying at the top is smaller.
We don't charge any fees when taking your money out of the platform. If you want to withdraw your BTC, you will only pay the miner fee. If you withdraw through Ted (Brazil's kind of ACH), you would only pay the bank transfer fee, which was 2 BRL. And as of recently, users can withdraw their entire BRL balance instantly and for free. This helped differentiate us in the minds of those who have learned the power of self-sovereignty and prefer to be their own bank and those who want to have their Bitcoin and BRL instantly available to them.
When depositing BRL into Bipa, your money is instantly recognized. That helps improve the quality of the experience for users, as they don't feel like their money has been lost somewhere until someone does something and it is credited into their account.
In summary, early on in your startup, you should dedicate 100% of your time to finding your initial niche of users, talking to them, and building a solution that will be appealing to them. There are many places in your product that you can implement functionalities that will give your users the absolute certainty that your app is the app that they have been looking for, find those places and make sure to delight them with it. Make sure that you put your company in a position where it is resilient to crisis and that you can make a turnaround if things are not going well, remember, time is the most important thing, both in terms of its scarcity, but also because it compounds, the more you survive and learn as an organization the more you put yourself in a position to absolve some of the opportunities the world throws at you.
Thanks for taking the time to read. 🙏
O BIPA realmente é sensacional!