Crypto SaaS Spotlight: John Young With Ledj.io and Building Professional Crypto Research Tools
John Young joins me from ledj.io. John worked at Capital One before starting his first two crypto Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS) businesses in early 2017: Spreadstreet and Cryptosheets. Both these services let users work with crypto pricing data in Google Sheets and Excel. Install a plugin, and you are good to go. Definitely worth checking out. I was excited to speak with John since he is running a crypto SaaS business for crypto research like us. We talk how he has been finding customers, who his customers are, other SaaS tools he uses for his business, and what kinds of data analysis tools he’s building at Ledj. His product is much needed in this space, and it was awesome to get his perspective on it. If you are a trader, investor, or researcher, this episode is worth listening to.
Here’s a transcript of QuantLayer Crypto Podcast #18.
The episode in its entirety can be listened to here:
QuantLayer is a software consultancy based in Brooklyn, New York. All opinions expressed by podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of QuantLayer. The information presented should not be construed as investment advice. Guests may maintain positions and assets mentioned in the podcast.
Vikram: Hey, everyone. You got QuantLayer here, Vikram speaking. I’m also joined by John Young who’s the cofounder of Ledj. Thank you for joining us today, John.
John: Hey. Thanks a lot. I’m actually really excited to be here. I have a three-month-old at home who’s been waking me up at night, so if I say anything off the wall, I promise it’s not my fault.
Vikram: Alright. We’ll keep that in mind. Yeah, I’m super excited to speak to you too because, you know, we were talking about this before the call, but I have a background in the investment space, I worked for a hedge fund for a while, and I’m really interested in crypto, in particular the kind of research products that people are building, so that’s something that you guys are doing and it’s gonna be awesome to learn more about that.
John: Yeah. I bet you have probably used, when you were working a hedge fund, used a bunch of very antiquated systems. They work, but they were very antiquated in the space. You know, the Bloombergs of the world.
Vikram: Yeah. I mean, my day to day was, you know, Bloomberg and Excel was basically the two main species of software that I used on a day-to-day basis. There were a couple other applications like StreetAccount, Capital IQ, kind of — that were more research-centric, but, yeah, I was in Excel every day.
John: It’s like all the usual suspects.
Vikram: Yeah. So you guys are based out in Maryland, am I right?
John: Yeah. Essentially right in between Washington, DC, and Baltimore. I mean, we’re almost directly in the middle between the two.
Vikram: Got it. Yeah, I was out in Baltimore a couple months back. It felt like there was this little revival going on in that downtown seaport type of area.
John: Oh, yeah. In the Inner Harbor. It’s great down there. It’s a lot of fun.
Vikram: Yeah. Is Urban Outfitters there, or is it Under Armour, I think, maybe?
John: Yeah, Under Armour is like the thing that everyone — it’s almost mentioned in the first sentence every time you talk to someone from Baltimore.
Vikram: Okay. So, we’ll keep that tradition going.
John: That’s right.
Vikram: So, what’s your background, John? What were you doing before Bitcoin?
John: I’m actually a finance grad, a finance guy pretty much my entire life. You know, I graduated from Towson University and went immediately to work for Capital One who I spent the entirety of my corporate career with. I was in a finance rotation program that they had so I went through a couple of different roles there, but towards the end, I was working in their card partnerships division and the longer I was in corporate, the easier it was to decide that I didn’t want to be there anymore. You know, I actually had been planning to move out on my own for quite a while and then February of 2017 is when I actually made the leap out, you know, to start my own business. It was very interesting timing. I know everyone that went through all the craziness of 2017 with crypto, you know, it was amazing to see an industry just absolutely blow up, you know, from where — I mean, it was already on a pretty good standing at the beginning of 2017 but 2017 took it to, I don’t know, the moon. It was ridiculous.
Vikram: Yeah, 2017 was totally nuts. I remember back in — ICOs started taking off like in early 2017 and I remember it really specifically ’cause there were some ICO that raised a ridiculous amount of funds in like thirty seconds or something like that and I think that is what really had everything blow up.
John: Yes, I do remember that. Yeah, it was like multimillions of dollars in under a minute.
Vikram: Yeah. So, in early 2017, what made you feel like you’re in a good place, like what kind of things did you have set up? Did you know what you were gonna be jumping into on the startup side? Did you have like a few ideas in mind?
John: I did. It originally started as I wanted a way to bring insights to people and it’s funny because a lot of my expertise was in Excel, you know, the tool that everybody uses pretty much almost on a daily basis. So I wanted to provide a way to make it so people could get easy access to dashboards and analytics but in Excel, but as I was going through, right around, I think it was May or so is right or so is right when the first crypto boom started happening. Some of my background has also been in trading stocks, trading options. I had done, you know, had almost ten years of experience doing that too as well, and when crypto came along, it seemed like a very natural move into the crypto space because I won’t try to generalize too much but there’s quite a bit of things that are shared, similarities between the asset, stock asset space and the crypto asset space. Now, I guess I don’t wanna generalize ’cause there is an enormous amount of differences too as well, but a lot of the knowledge that I had in that space was pretty easy to transfer over, and almost to like condense a lot of the thought processes that I had, I eventually got to the point where I was like, well, people need data. It’s — some people don’t really want to wrangle with APIs, and so how can I make something that would make it easier to get data and tools that people were using and that’s where Spreadstreet came from. Spreadstreet was like the first one where it was a Google Sheets add-in that made it very easy to get crypto data into Google Sheets with a press of a button. And, you know, that was kinda like the first foray into crypto.
Vikram: Yep. And that particular idea, had you thought about doing it for stocks as well or is that market pretty much covered and it’s kind of much more — the space needs a lot more attention on the crypto side?
John: No, I had absolutely thought about doing it with stocks too as well, and I still think there’s an underserved market on the lower cost side. I think the very premium cost side can’t fit another person into it. It gets insane how many people there are at the premium end of things. But there still is a great solution for — actually, let me not say that. Now, IEX with their API, that is a very, very good solution for stocks. That is also a free API so you can use it as much as you want, but there was a pretty big void left when, you know, Yahoo went down ’cause that seemed to be the one that everybody was using.
Vikram: Right. I remember IEX taking their API public and it was kind of under the radar and I was really surprised ’cause I think a month or two had passed before we realized it was even available ’cause we were doing some stuff where we’re working with — working on a few other ideas related to stock market data, and IEX, it was literally, pretty much every stock that they carried, they have a free API. There was no rate limits. There’s no API queue or anything. You literally just hit an end point and hit Refresh and you get the latest feed. It was kind of — it was pretty impressive.
John: Yeah, it’s incredible. I mean, I don’t know, A, you know, how much it cost them, B, I don’t know how much it’s currently being used. My guess is it has to be getting used pretty significantly, but either way, right now, it’s a fantastic solution.
Vikram: Yep. So, as far as the products that you’ve been building, so the first one was Spreadstreet, right? And then you also are working on Cryptosheets as well?
John: Yes. So, Cryptosheets was the very natural, you know, people using the Google Sheets one say, well, where is the Excel one? You know, I use Excel, I don’t use Google Sheets. Actually, a really big one with Google Sheets is people who are in companies can’t even access Google Sheets. A lot of times, they have a completely — internally within companies they have Google Sheets completely blocked off so people can’t even use it.
Vikram: Oh, really? What’s the reasoning behind that?
John: Well, it could just be, you know, more strict firewall rules. It’s typically they don’t want people going — I don’t know, a lot of it is ’cause they don’t want people going out to the internet and looking at, you know, random sites and because of that, Google Sheets is blocked by proxy.
Vikram: Okay.
John: But it was a very natural move because a lot of people were very used to Excel. There are some pretty big differences between Google Sheets and Excel and, you know, some people just never wanted to touch Google Sheets. So, that’s when we started actually working on the Excel add-in. Cryptosheets is actually developed in Microsoft’s newer structure ’cause before, developing an add-in for Excel was actually a huge pain. They pretty much forced you to use all of their own things and it was very restrictive as far as what you could do. The newer structure actually allows you to build add-ins with, you know, familiar web technologies, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and what that means is it now opens up any of those libraries that utilize those languages. The only caveat being that you have to have Office 365 in order to use it.
Vikram: Okay. I mean, that doesn’t seem like that bad of an investment because — I mean, how recent was this, in the last couple years, I guess?
John: For when Microsoft –
Vikram: Yeah, when you can actually use JavaScript, HTML, CSS on the Excel side.
John: I think it was right around 2016 when they were finalizing some of the build for it. So it’s been around a couple years now. But there hasn’t been a lot of traction in the store as of yet. They have a pretty strict validation policy. It’s like a 124-point validation policy that you have to pass.
Vikram: Yeah, that sounds pretty interesting. You know, I’m on Cryptosheets right now and I was on the templates page, so everyone listening, I’ll link all these stuff in the show notes. I like this page here because it kind of looks like a few of the major indicators that you might care about. I’ll just read ’em off real quick. CoinMarketCap Dashboard, Risk and Volatility Metrics, Price Prediction Template, RSI Dashboard, ATR Dashboard, Volatility Dashboard, MACD Dashboard, and then there’s kind of this RSI-ATR-Vol-MACD Dashboard. These are nice ’cause they’re like preset dashboards and a user can just download to try out. How did you decide to incorporate these? Was it like talking to costumers or kinda guessing what people would care about first?
John: A lot of it was similar things that people have asked for over and over again. And that’s, I mean, CoinMarketCap is one of the most requested no matter what we do. I mean, that’s just kind of obvious. But, you know, other ones are kinda just ones that were requested. Other ones were honestly a create-and-see-if-it-sticks type thing. And so, you know, it’s been interesting to see people use those as well.
Vikram: Have you gotten any feedback on the Monte Carlo simulation one?
John: Yes, and actually that started kind of late last year, early this year, with Spreadstreet ’cause there was one that was very similar that I created for Spreadstreet and actually did extremely well on medium as far as, you know, people reading it and sharing it. It seems as though people were a fan of it but when you had more model of cryptocurrencies, it expanded the bands to where the answers almost –
Vikram: Like unknowable.
John: Exactly. I mean, it was just like, oh, well, you know, we’re just gonna put, you know, this cryptocurrency can go anywhere between zero and a million. It’s like it doesn’t really tell us anything. Actually, I say that, and that was the result I got earlier in the year for OmiseGO when it came out that it said that it was gonna be over — it couldn’t be over a million dollars and, you know, I was like, okay, well, this one’s not very useful.
Vikram: That’s pretty funny. With respect to pricing data and the problem that you’re trying to solve, you know, what are some of the major issues faced by traders and investors right now?
John: Yeah, and I guess that’s — the question’s kinda more so in regards to data itself or just anything?
Vikram: Kind of the data itself. You know, sometimes, the product we’re working is a crypto real time dashboard for investors and traders and so we integrate with a bunch of exchanges and one thing that we see is often the data itself is an issue. Like an exchange might put fake data in a production API. They might have accidentally divided by a thousand instead of a hundred, right? Like stuff like that does happen, so I wonder, do you face these kinds of issues as well? I know CoinMarketCap having an issue every couple months or so where they might have an exchange that has like a price of a crypto associated with an exchange where the price is stale and it kinda messes up the total — the actual average price, so just curious if you see any data issues like that?
John: Oh, yes, absolutely. Well, one of the first things, and I think it’s actually a very big issue, is the lack of any sort of identification framework. I would say similar to something like use of ISIN but maybe not even that involved. This is an older example. I don’t even know if Dashcoin is still traded anymore but through multiple different sites, there were different naming conventions for Dash and there were different naming conventions for Dashcoin, some intertwining between the two. And, you know, so what would happen if you were trying to trade Dash but you ended up trading Dashcoin because it was Dash’s ticker at a different exchange and that sort of thing is very common. I mean, there is quite a bit of that. Now, you typically with the more well-known projects, I mean you’re not really gonna have that issue, although actually when I say that ’cause even with Bitcoin, you may have that issue because the “BTC” ticker is used in so many different things. That’s kinda number one because like, it’s a fundamental question, like what the hell am I trading?
Vikram: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Bitcoin Cash had that issue too. It’s BCH in some exchanges, I think BCC on some others, so certainly there’s a problem there.
John: Yes, exactly, yeah. I think it was BCC on Bitfinex, I remember, but then they like changed it or something along those lines.
Vikram: Yep.
John: Yeah, so the big question is how do you know what instrument you’re trading and that’s what an identification framework would try to solve. It’s easy to say it needs to be done but much harder to actually implement one. Especially considering something like ISIN is geographically based but you don’t really have geography when it comes to cryptocurrencies, so, you know, that might be — that’s a little bit different thing to solve there, but also, it’s just another thing that’s difficult to solve for.
Vikram: Yeah. I mean, I guess there’s some benefits to centralization with respect to normalized data, like this identification framework that you’re talking about, like if you’re Bloomberg, or even SEC, the SEC has the CIK for different companies, public and private companies, right? That’s kinda like a formalized identifying piece of data, and then Bloomberg has its own code. I’m not sure who sets ISIN but I imagine it’s some sort of central authority.
John: Yes.
Vikram: And we don’t have any of that, so, yeah, you’re right, it is a big issue, and I guess CoinMarketCap kinda deals with it by using names in their slug instead of tickers. I know some exchanges, they use tickers but, you know, that can be an issue but instead they use like the actual like coin’s name.
John: Right, and they also have a unique identifier but the unique identifier is 1 for Bitcoin so, you know, I mean it needs to be a little bit more fleshed out than that.
Vikram: Right.
John: But I was also gonna say this is not really a data problem but it’s much more of a reflective of the industry as a whole but it’s extremely difficult to identify, you know, legit trading from illegitimate trading. Example like how much a volume is related to wash trading and market manipulation versus actual trading.
Vikram: Yep.
John: That is a gigantic problem, but, you know, it’s not really, I mean, there’s been some good work out of different sites that have tried to strip out some of that data, Coinmetrics is one of them, and it’s just rampant right now, it’s kind of incredible.
Vikram: Yeah. I think about this on a regular basis ’cause I’ll hear something like wash trading and I’ll think like isn’t this a problem that the NYSE and NASDAQ have solved like twenty years ago, right? Like people got in trouble for this, didn’t people go to jail for this stuff, so, I don’t know, in a lot of ways, we’re like reinventing a lot of the things that people have already looked at, but then on the flipside that’s also good, like we have new market participants who actually get to learn a lot about like how market works and I think there’s a lot of value to that.
John: Absolutely. You know, it is actually incredible, but I guess that’s — a lot of the time, regulation go too far, they become stifling, they become expensive, they become completely obnoxious but usually they have a reason for why they were formulated in the first place. It doesn’t mean the execution of them was formulated correctly. There’s a reason why t they were put there in the first place.
Vikram: Yep, exactly. Back to the apps that you guys are working on, so, what’s the business model? So, it’s kinda like a — it’s a SaaS product, and how are you thinking about that? Like how do you look for customers right now, who are your customers, and, you know, how do you find your customers?
John: Just as a who are our customers, there is a couple of different segments. I lump investors and traders kinda in the same one, because a lot of times they’re looking for the same things. Their time intervals might be different or some of the alternative data might be different, but also recently we’ve seen a larger uptick in the research community from actual doctor and post-doctor professors looking to do research papers.
Vikram: Oh, interesting.
John: And what is interesting is that they still have a lot of trouble finding data. Quite a bit of trouble, actually. I mean, if they were doing more asset oriented, like stock oriented-type research, usually the university had paid for a service that allows them to access that but it’s not really the same within crypto, and so they kinda go to a bunch of different places to try to get data but in this arena, it’s so unique because, I mean, just think about how many exchanges there are. I mean, I talked to a provider the other day that said they had connected 250 exchanges. I didn’t even know 250 exchanges existed. But, you can imagine trying to do a research project and getting data from all of these different places, or trying to find someone that has a unifying data source in order to make it, so they don’t have to go to all these places, but even then it’s also extremely expensive usually if they have that so — but there is a lot of great research coming out, you know, that actually is already out but is also coming out in the pretty near future here. And then on top of that, we also — students are another sect that we have that is very interested in using the data sets for, you know, whether that’s like data science or using it for some of the financial concepts that they’ve learned, they’re another larger base of people that are using that.
Vikram: Gotcha. And how are these customers finding you? Like how are you finding them?
John: Yeah, most of the Spreadstreet customers have come from my existing blog post so I’ve done a little bit of content marketing just kinda showing how the tool itself can be used. Quite a bit of people, in fact a majority of people, have come from those. Other ones from them, you know, referrals from existing users. Others have been actually like manual outreach from us itself, to people that we think could be using the product.
Vikram: Yeah, one of the reason I was excited to talk to you was because, you know, there is not a whole lot of SaaS products in this space just yet, and I’m purposely excluding ICOs where you can use tokens to buy, you know, whatever credit they’re selling ’cause they’re not doing a whole lot, so it’s cool to see a, like a traditional SaaS model in this space.
John: Yeah, and it’s funny ’cause one of the areas that is missing, I’m actually curious to see how long it’s gonna take before somebody does it, Stripe tried but they stopped, but a payment solution that would take not only credit cards but also cryptocurrencies, on a recurring basis model. So, Coinbase has one that allows you to pay in crypto but you can’t pay in credit card, and then obviously Stripe is the go-to resource for paying in credit card but they used to be able to pay in Bitcoin but they dropped that. They don’t do that.
Vikram: Right. It’s a really interesting problem. I’ve had this exact same question, ’cause I imagine you wanna be taking crypto as well, right?
John: Absolutely. In fact, I would almost prefer to take crypto but, as of right now, it’s too prohibitive of a model in order to have a sustainable business. I would prefer to take crypto but it’s just — there’s no good enough solutions to actually accept the payment on a recurring basis right now.
Vikram: Yeah, and they’re not able to accept on a recurring basis, and then also like all the tax considerations, ’cause like the moment you receive it, how do you record that and then once you convert it to dollars, you gotta record it again, like we don’t wanna be doing that all that stuff manually, like we probably want Stripe to like handle all that.
John: Yes.
Vikram: Right?
John: And that’s why we’ve gotten spoiled by Stripe because how good of an execution they are but, yes, like that sort of thing, as soon as it comes about, I will switch over to it.
Vikram: Yeah. It will be interesting. There’s a couple — there’s two, AdEx protocol, there’s Groundhog Pay, I don’t know if you’ve talked to any of those guys. They haven’t launched yet. We spoke to AdEx a while back. It sounds like they’re still a few months away from like trials, but it would be nice to do. It’s just there’s a lot of technical issues that need to be solved.
John: Yeah, and that’s also a part of it too because, obviously on the newer created ones, they’re gonna have underlying issues that the other incumbents don’t really have, you know? Like some payments may not just go off, or other things that are even worse, so ’cause the fraud detection is actually pretty good with Stripe too and that’s another one.
Vikram: Right. Have you thought about taking like a year’s worth of payments up front in crypto?
John: Yes, and we do accept that right now. That is one way that we do it because that’s one way to get around a recurring model.
Vikram: Okay. Yeah, I’m just asking these like specific questions ’cause we’re trying to figure this out as well.
John: Absolutely.
Vikram: The problem that we have is the exact same as yours. We’d love to take crypto. There are no great solutions yet to do that but I think one solution we had in mind is maybe just offer like a year up front. Do you give a discount for that or do you kinda just — like how do you think about that?
John: We do, yes, so pretty standard is to kinda give two months off so that’s what we do. Just pay for a year, you’d only pay for ten months.
Vikram: Yep. And another thing that I think that’s really cool about your product is that it’s for Excel and Google Sheets so versus like a traditional web app.
John: Yep.
Vikram: And I can definitely relate. Like when I traded full time, I worked entirely in Excel, less so Google Sheets but definitely Excel. And, you know, finance people are super comfortable with Excel hot keys and shortcuts. People make fun of Excel but it’s actually a pretty powerful program. You can do a lot with it. Like you’re saying, you can build all kinds of dashboards and whatnot.
John: Well, see, I don’t want you to stop my momentum now. I’m announcing our actual web app which is Ledj.
Vikram: Oh, okay.
John: No, but, see, what you said actually makes complete sense. I mean, Excel, people hate on it. They really do. But it has a place where it’s like the bridge between what you have now versus what you need and so that versatility is the reason why people still use it and will forever use it. It’s never going away, ever. But the problem — Excel has its own problems, obviously, you know? The million-row limit is one of them. I mean, say if you were trying to do analysis on two thousand cryptocurrencies, Excel would not be what you would want to use, you know, because it would bog down, it would crash most likely if you try to use anything that large in Excel. But to be used as ad hoc analysis on shorter data sets, it’s incredible. I mean, it really is.
Vikram: Yeah. You know, every year there’s like a startup who wants to disrupt Excel. This is not like what you’re talking about with respect to the web app that you guys are building, I just mean like someone just wants to make their own version of Excel on the web.
John: Right.
Vikram: Like it’s tough, ’cause it’s not just an issue of entrenchment, it’s just so powerful, it has a lot of tools built into it. Nowadays, you can start integrating third party APIs and in a lot of ways, it’s like a person’s own personal custom front end. But, yeah, what are you guys doing on the web app side?
John: Well, and so on the web app side is basically the unifying force between Spreadstreet and Cryptosheets and the — some of the biggest feedback that we’ve heard from Cryptosheets and Google Sheets is that people wanna be able to do analysis on large data sets, whether that’s, you know, eight years’ worth of pricing data or more complicated stuff that takes much more processing power or doesn’t take them having to store it in multiple tabs in either of the two spreadsheet programs, and so what Ledj is is basically if you have a question about a cryptocurrency project then we wanna be able to give you the tool to be able to answer it. And we will provide a very large amount of data sets when we actually fully release it, but it will have a ton of data, it will allow you to slice and dice the data any way that you want including through our web interface but also through raw SQL queries too as well. It will allow you to put it into a dashboard and then that answer, you can pipe it to Cryptosheets and Google Sheets, and then you can get it on a constantly refreshing basis so you don’t have to worry about stale data. Honestly, I’m super excited about it. I can’t start showing it to people because it’s so intuitive. It’s allowing people — I mean, I have the entire Bitcoin blockchain in there and I ran a distribution calculation on 650 gigabytes in under a second, so it’s very, very powerful and, you know, it’s gonna be great when you can slice and dice it further into Excel and into Google Sheets and then be able to go even further if you want to.
Vikram: Yeah, that is really awesome. So how does the data get into the — so the use of the Bitcoin blockchain, like how does that actually get into the app?
John: We may unlock this in the future but as of right now, the initial data curation is gonna be on our side. So we have actually loaded it into a backend that is piped into the program.
Vikram: Right. And I guess like customers will also tell you like what they want, like, oh, I want the Bitcoin cash blockchain and the Ethereum one and I guess you’ll be able to easily add those pretty quickly.
John: Yes, exactly, and the good news is is that we want this to be more so the projects themselves. We don’t want to kind of pigeonhole into one thing or another. When I say about the projects itself, if there are mining companies that wanna come in, get the answers to the questions they have, they should be able to use our platform. There’s a couple companies that are giving us some really great stuff where it’s allowing businesses to monetize their free tier by getting permission from their customers to mine cryptocurrencies with their computer, but their sorts of analysis needs are, okay, well, what is the most profitable cryptocurrency to mine right now. That sort of stuff, I want our platform to be able to get to that answer, get to it quickly and keep that answer updated.
Vikram: Yeah, that’s awesome, ’cause if you have all the underlying data, hash rate, and all that stuff then you also have pricing data, like you can figure that kind of thing out pretty quickly.
John: Exactly, and I want this to be much more focused, like I said, about the projects. ’Cause the projects are so interesting. I mean, they are so interesting. I know there’s a lot of theoretical stuff in this space but there are some people doing some really great stuff, and this industry is only gonna get better and better as the days go on.
Vikram: Yeah. Just curious on your Tech Stack. So, did you have a development team or do you do a lot of the coding and integration work?
John: So, I would say I’m between basic to intermediate when it comes to coding, but I do have a CTO who handles — he does almost all of the heavy lifting. I have a decent amount of experience as far as, you know, like database administration and so a lot of that I was able to set up too, plus I’m also really, really good at finding shortcuts to things. But he has been handling the majority — he’s been doing the really heavy lifting. He’s really damn good.
Vikram: How did you all meet?
John: We actually met on CoFoundersLab because I was looking for a cofounder earlier in the year, and, you know, I did probably thirty to forty different interviews and he came out pretty far ahead of everybody else.
Vikram: That’s awesome.
John: He was much more looking for something like, you know, on the entrepreneurial side because he too was kinda fed up with just working for these larger companies.
Vikram: Yeah. A lot of our listeners are actually — a lot of our episodes, we spend a little bit of time talking through like, you know, what kind of stuff you wanna think about when you’re building an MVP from the technology side and things like that. What are some recommendations you have as far as like finding a CTO that you’d wanna work with? Like how did you decide on him and if you had to like advise someone else to look for certain qualities, what would you recommend?
John: This is actually a tough question and I’m finding this not only with CTO but also looking for additional team members is you really have to have an idea of what you’re looking for first before you know if someone’s considered to be a good candidate or not, and that is very difficult to do because you’re not the domain expert, you know, the whole point is you will never be the domain expert, you’re trying to hire someone who is. When I was looking for him, I had help from a couple of members in my network who were already software developers and they were able to tell me, you know, I have problem statement, they would really tell me essentially what I was looking for and they also helped me on kind of curating who would be good to talk to, you know, who were the ones that, this person is not really gonna be someone you’d wanna go on with further, but as far as finding other people, I really quite liked CoFoundersLab. I thought it was a pretty good place to find other people but if there’s a free version to look for, I mean, you can use LinkedIn quite a bit in order to find people. Just depends on, you know, what you’re actually searching for and they have pretty good tools for searching whatever you need, but I would say before you find anyone, actually talk to someone who is that type of person in the industry ’cause they will be able to help you nail down what it is you’re actually looking for. Otherwise, you’ll be blind and have no idea.
Vikram: Yeah, that’s a good point and super important, ’cause you can speak to a lot of — I’ve heard this story. I’ve heard a similar story many times where, you know, someone wanted to do — like had a SaaS idea but they don’t have the technical background to build it necessarily, so they’re like, oh, if I work with a PhD, they’re gonna know exactly what to do, but, you know, that might not be the case. You might be working with someone who’s super smart but also like very dedicated to like a different — you know, something totally different from what you’re doing, right? Like web development is very different from like computer science research.
John: Absolutely. And also there’s another thesis that, I mean if you’re actually doing an MVP starting from the ground, finding other companies’ CTOs who are established may not necessarily be a good idea. ’Cause a lot of the time, if they’re in a larger, more established company, most of their time is actually spent managing people under them as opposed to actually building out the prototype that you need them to build. So you’ll see CTOs from established ones are very expensive and they’re more used to actually managing people versus building things nowadays. Now that’s not saying that they aren’t talented. In fact, they’re probably incredibly talented but you can also get incredibly talented people who are not as established as a CTO of a larger company.
Vikram: Yeah. I mean, someone with the title of just, say, software engineer, but not just — someone — software engineer title might be the perfect fit for someone to build an early stage CTO versus someone who’s CTO at like JP Morgan or something.
John: Absolutely. And they’re usually really hungry too. I mean, they really wanna build something out.
Vikram: And as far as your SaaS stack goes, you’re using Stripe right now for billing?
John: In Cryptosheets, we use a combination of Chargebee and Stripe. I’m actually shocked Stripe does not have a customer portal solution yet, and so, you know, we had to kind of mix together Chargebee and Stripe in order to get a customer portal that would allow our customers to make changes on their account without actually having to reach out to us to do it.
Vikram: Oh. That’s really surprising. This is like if you wanna go from monthly billing to yearly billing or, you know, cancel your account –
John: Well, it might but if your customers wanna, you know, change a credit card or if they wanna stop their subscription, you know, basically giving it so it’s a good user experience for them –
Vikram: Oh, and Stripe doesn’t have that? Wow.
John: Stripe does not have a customer portal surprisingly. Let me take a step back and say that their API is so good that you can build one with it, but as far as a plug-and-play solution, they don’t have one. They seem to have everything else but they don’t have that.
Vikram: Right. And building one is not like the best use of your time, like you probably wanna be adding more features, connect to like a different blockchain, right?
John: Right. And if you’re a startup just starting out, I mean, you really want to be fleshing out what is your competitive edge, your difference. You don’t wanna be sitting there building out things that should already exist, you know? I mean, it’s not like you’re not gonna sit there — I mean, this is why Stripe is so great, they are a PCI compliant payment provider. You’re not gonna say, okay, I wanna build out this product. First, let me start by building out my PCI compliance. You know, you’re not gonna be doing something that asks why these companies are so great.
Vikram: And what are some of the other tools that you use in your business?
John: My favorite one recently is Netlify. So, it’s a combination. So the first part is actually, it’s a website builder called Variant Builder. First off, they have absolutely beautiful components in their builder but it’s a GUI that you can use in a browser to build out a website and then it exports the actual static HTML for you.
Vikram: Oh, that’s great.
John: But why Netlify is great is Netlify allows you to do continuous integration of any changes that you want, so I can make any change here, you know, do a couple commands, and then it will automatically be pushed through on to my actual website. That’s just one thing that they do. I mean, they have so many other things that they do. It’s almost like a hosting provider that has made a lot of the annoying things really easy, you know, like snippet injection, JavaScript menufication, stuff like that, that most people are not gonna have a clue on how to do, Netlify makes it super easy. Oh, and SSL certificates are another thing that they do great.
Vikram: Okay, gotcha. Yeah, I’m looking at their site. It looks pretty nice.
John: Yeah, I mean they’re fantastic, but they also, I mean, their big thing is they want people to move to server-less frameworks using functions and they have their own identity provider and they have their own forums. They’re trying to make things just much easier to do so you can actually push things pretty quickly.
Vikram: Yeah, it looks like, you know, AWS has some of these features too. I don’t know if you looked at AWS before for this, but they’re a lot harder to — this seems like much more plug and play. AWS is like, there’s a lot more configuration involved.
John: So, Ledj is actually on Elastic Beanstalk. I don’t know if I’m just stupid or whatnot but every time I go into AWS, I can’t figure it out. I just really can’t.
Vikram: No. I mean, we work with AWS, you know, almost every day and their console is not like user friendly.
John: No. It’s so confusing, and Netlify, there’s a lot of stuff that they do that is as simple as it could possibly be and that’s why I like them.
Vikram: Awesome. And then just out of curiosity, do you use anything for like invoicing, HR, and stuff like that?
John: Stripe we use for invoicing. As good as it gets for invoicing. Did you say for HR?
Vikram: Yeah. I mean, even if you have a small team, just curious if you have any kind of like HR solutions and desk or anything.
John: Yes. Gusto, I’m sure you’ve probably heard of that or mentioned it before, but if you’re doing any sort of payroll, there’s no one easier than Gusto. I mean, they’re so well done. It makes everything so much easier.
Vikram: Awesome. And a couple other questions I had before we wrap up. So what other areas of crypto research do you think are lacking right now?
John: I actually listened briefly on one of the prior podcasts. I believe it was someone who was in legal in crypto. I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. One of your podcasts.
Vikram: Yeah. It might have been with Kurt Watkins who’s with MG Miller.
John: Yes, that’s who it was. They were talking briefly about custody solutions and also insurance on custody solutions.
Vikram: Yeah.
John: I thought that was a very interesting thing that you said about the difference in mindset between the New York crowd and the San Francisco crowd, but I still think, you know, no matter what you believe on this particular topic, I think custody solutions can’t really truly get fleshed out until they have a decent insurance solution attached to them. But that’s such a boring one and nobody wants — well, there are a few that are building it and there are a few that wanna build it, but, you know, when you think about the exciting stuff in crypto, that’s not the stuff that you think about.
Vikram: Yeah. I mean, it’s exciting to the people who are gonna build it ’cause they’re gonna make bank.
John: Right. Yes, they are.
Vikram: But for us, it’s just insurance. Like how interesting is that?
John: Right, but it’s undeniable that that is lacking right now. Now, I’ll do a shameless plug here on a second one but really in end-to-end data and analysis platform. There are a couple of fantastic platforms out there. TradingView is one of them. TradingView is there for a very specific reason, and that is a charting solution is basically what TradingView is. If you wanna go any further than that, they do have some screener tools, they do have some other things, but if you wanna go any further than that, I don’t even think they offer an export option. I’m not sure. Last I checked they did not, but they are very strictly technical analysis or bust. And that’s why, you know, one of the parts of why we’re building Ledj out is because we wanted the ability to go further. Especially on alternative data sets. You know, for example, if you’re thinking about mining profits, electricity costs factor into that, you know, are a huge factor into that and so having data sets related to, okay, how has electricity cost changed season to season in X area, you know, that sort of stuff, you can’t do in other platforms. Or you can but they’re $2,000 a month.
Vikram: Right. Yeah, that’s an interesting point you bring up. So, like when I traded full time, I used all kinds of research tools to inform, you know, research and trade decisions like Bloomberg, StreetAccount, FactSet, Thomson Reuters, and in crypto, there weren’t — when I first started looking, there weren’t really any great research tools in the space and to this day, you know, a lot of crypto traders focus on technical analysis like the five-day moving average, ten-day moving average, Ichimoku Cloud, stuff like that. And because of this, trades get crowded very quickly. And like you have a trading background too and we know that low liquidity in a crowded trade is just a total recipe for disaster and you see so much volatility in the space as a result, so I think as the space itself matures more, the fund managers will have a better opportunity to generate edge and have alpha.
John: Yeah, and I also wanna make another extremely important point on this that I haven’t made yet, but we actually want this platform to be accessible. When I think of the Bloombergs and Thomson Reuters of the world, I’m sorry, but those are not accessible. How many people do you know that can just drop $20,000, you know, on the spot? I mean, individuals. Even most businesses don’t wanna do that. I mean, they have a large amount of businesses that use Bloomberg, but that’s pretty out of the range of most people, and not only that, I mean, a lot of their systems are so old. They have an insanely high ramp-up curve. We have so many new technologies that we should be building things out better and we should be building things out more intuitively, and also they don’t have to be $2,000 a month. They should be accessible to everybody, and so that’s a lot what’s driving us with Ledj because we faced these problems a little bit ago when we were doing trading in stocks. I mean, it was impossible to find good data at a reasonable price. It really was. So we have a very big want to make this not only be extremely powerful but affordable.
Vikram: Yeah. We went through a very similar discovery process where we were looking — there were a couple stock tool-related ideas that we had, we just wanted to — let’s build an MVP, let’s just go connect with a few exchanges and deliver that data to the users, and it was just ridiculous how expensive some of these things were.
John: Yeah, like QuoteMedia and NASDAQ, it’s, I think QuoteMedia is like, oh, my God, it’s so expensive.
Vikram: Yeah. There was an options-related idea that we had and the underlying data alone would have been eighty grand per month.
John: Eighty grand a month? Oh, my God.
Vikram: I know. You can’t build an MVP with that, it’s ridiculous.
John: Absolutely not.
Vikram: Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s funny you said accessible ’cause when you first said that I thought you meant UX, like Bloomberg doesn’t have the best UX, but I think what you’re building is gonna solve that problem too. Not just accessibility with respect to cost but also accessibility with respect to UX.
John: Right, exactly. And we have mentioned Bloomberg quite a bit. We are not competing directly with Bloomberg. We’ll let them do their own thing.
Vikram: Yeah. Awesome. So, where can people find you?
John: Find me specifically if they wanna message me or –
Vikram: Yeah, if they wanna get in touch, if they wanna go to your site, try out Cryptosheets or Spreadstreet, what can I recommend people go to?
John: Yeah, I mean they can obviously they can send me a direct e-mail, I respond to everything. That’s John.Young@Ledj.io.
Vikram: Yep.
John: But also, if you want, you can go straight to the website. We have an intercom window moved out. You can also send a message there. We respond to everything, so that’s probably the easiest way to do it.
Vikram: Awesome. Well, thanks so much, John. Really appreciate it.
John: Yeah. Thank you very much. I very much enjoyed being on this, and I actually look forward to a lot of the changes coming in QuantLayer. I mean, I was learning quite a bit as I was going through some of the updates on there.
Vikram: Oh, cool. Thanks a lot. I appreciate that.
John: Yeah, absolutely.
Show Notes:
Topics:
- His background and what he did before Bitcoin
- How Spreadstreet came about
- The products he’s building
- What made him decide to incorporate Cryptosheets
- Issues encountered by traders and investors with respect to pricing data
- Type of customer he has
- How customers find him and how he finds them
- Taking a year’s worth of payment upfront in crypto
- On Excel as a powerful program
- What they are currently doing on the web app side
- On Tech Stack hiring a development team
- Recommendations when hiring or looking for a team member in general
- Billing they use in SaaS Stack
- Other areas of research lacking in crypto now
- The reason they built Ledj
Links:
- Email: john.young@ledj.io
- Ledj: https://ledj.io
- Cryptosheets: https://cryptosheets.com
- Spreadstreet: https://spreadstreet.io/
- Medium Cryptosheets: https://medium.com/cryptosheets
- Cryptosheets Templates: https://cryptosheets.com/templates
- Trading View: https://www.tradingview.com
- Netlify: https://www.netlify.com
- Gusto: https://gusto.com
Hey everyone, this is Vikram again. Thanks for listening to us. If you’re
an exchange, a trader or working on a crypto project get in touch with us.
You can reach us on twitter at https://twitter.com/quantlayer or email us
at podcast@quantlayer.com.
