Why I Asked To Be Removed From Product Hunt’s Trending List
It all started one night in college. I was checking balances on my favorite investment apps when I noticed that my Coinbase portfolio was far outperforming my accounts with Acorns and Robinhood.
I’ve always appreciated the hands-off approach Acorns provides its users, but I was itching for a riskier portfolio option that would allow me to drop spare change into Bitcoin. That’s when I stumbled upon Lawnmower.io. They had exactly what I was looking for. Just one small problem…the company had recently been acquired and the spare change crypto feature was dropped.
People were genuinely upset; many demanded a replacement. This was the exact market validation I needed to inspire the creation of Crumbs.
I immediately called Zach, a software engineer and friend, to ask his thoughts about an Acorns for crypto app. “It’s a golden ticket” he said.
Zach instantly offered to help create the MVP. Three months later we were ready for launch, and went live on Product Hunt. Our post catapulted to top product of the day — further validation that we could be on to something great.
As exciting as that was, we soon realized that FinTech is not to be taken lightly. Crumbs would require much more than a functional MVP before we could launch. So I emailed an admin from Product Hunt and asked that our post be removed from the trending list. If I wanted to do this properly, I would need to find a technical co-founder, raise money, get banking & crypto connections, hire an attorney, and rebuild the app from scratch.
Fortunately, Crypto mania and the momentum from our Product Hunt post was enough to convince a few angel investors to take a chance on me. I immediately hired a few contractors since Zach wanted to focus on his own start up.
Then I got introduced to Carson, a fresh Computer Science graduate from UC Santa Barbara. I hired him for a front-end job, only to then find out he’s an incredibly talented back-end engineer, too. I hit a full-stack full house! Carson managed to build a working front-end for our iOS app in just five days. He’s a monster. Carson is now my technical co-founder, and he’s currently building some very awesome features for our redesigned app.
We updated our UX/UI and gave Product Hunt another shot. This time we hit the #3 product of the day. Everything was going great…until our payment processing vendor gave us two weeks to switch payment vendors. That torpedo almost sunk our battleship.
I immediately contacted our investor and advisor, Marshall Hayner, who came to the rescue with a few potential options for us. A couple weeks later, we signed a contract and our first relationship with a financial institution was established. The downside — it would take more than a month to integrate their API with our system.
This put our users in a tough spot. They could withdraw funds anytime, but would be unable to keep rounding up transactions into crypto. We decided to be transparent about the transition period. Thankfully, our early users were supportive and appreciated our honesty.
Since we were already rebuilding our code base from scratch, this was an ideal time to implement commonly requested features and feedback from early users: custom portfolios, more assets, an android app, etc. The new app is currently being tested internally while we work out last minute bugs.
It’s been quite the ride so far. We got into a few bar brawls, but we’ve picked ourselves up every time. Countless valuable lessons later, we are eager to officially launch Crumbs to our devoted early adopters and waitlisters!
If you are reading this, thank you. And thank you to everyone who downloaded the early version of Crumbs. We would not have this opportunity without you, and we promise to provide an amazing and enjoyable user experience moving forward.
For questions or comments feel free to email or tweet me: patrick@crumbsapp.io & @patrickmro_
For early access to the Crumbs please visit our website.
