BuyCoins: Reflecting on 2019
When you are just a 2 year old startup, a year seems like a really long time, with so many inflection points and so many iterations of your products. It’s been a generally positive year and we’ve decided to spend some time writing about it.
Product
The BuyCoins product has evolved significantly over the last year while remaining loyal to our core mission: to enable a truly borderless transfer of value across the African continent and beyond. The first step in this is building a reliable, secure and frictionless medium for people to get onboard with cryptocurrencies and we are ever-charged with this. We processed over 10 billion Naira in crypto trades this year, served 1400 users this year and are growing at ~30% quarter over quarter. Crypto is in its infancy but these numbers are encouraging!
Perhaps the most important thing we do at BuyCoins is listen to users. We aren’t here to build software per se — we are here to make users’ lives better — and using software happens to be the solution to some of these problems. 2019 has solidified this for us and we have increased our efforts in reaching out to users, proactively communicating with users, tracking our response qualities, and letting users’ input shape the way we build products.
We’ve dropped a handful of user-directed features (especially features custom-made for a non-western market). We built credit lines into the app for some users, faster crypto confirmations (it was very shocking how sensitive our market is to this. Most global exchanges have a lot of latency before crediting your cryptocurrency transactions but the Nigerian market demanded instant confirmations. Evidently a culture from offline trading and bank transfers).
The team built a Naira-backed stablecoin on the blockchain, NGNT and another product, Coinlock, a way to earn interest while locking your NGNT in a fixed deposit. Everyone was stretched and everyone turned up, venturing into unknowns we had not touched before e.g Ethereum smart contract writing.
Culture
One of the things that increasingly matters at BuyCoins is hiring. Proud of every single hire in the company today. We’ve iterated, refined and listened actively to get a bunch of ten talented individuals who are a good fit for our core values — and the team is expanding!
One of the things we also invested in was thinking about and refining productivity. The team moved from Slack to Basecamp this year. The rationale around this was to focus more on written communication and to encourage focused hours. We now also provide catered lunch so employees don’t have to spend time thinking about it, access to personal trainer and the option of remote work (employees can choose two days in the work-week to work from home).
We have also been strongly influenced by Basecamp’s culture: Everyone (*coughs*) read It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work. And we’ve learnt a lot from them. We now focus a lot on written communication, focused hours, sprint planning cycles, cool-down weeks, non-crazy work-hours amongst others.
Perhaps the most important cultural thing we started are 1:1s. Each hire at BuyCoins is partnered with a co-founder and we chat every fortnight to share bi-directional feedback, talk about the team’s culture and talk about individual growth opportunities. We’ve come to internalize the responsibility we have to develop and grow the talent that have decided to come work with us — and we are honored to carry this responsibility.
Ecosystem
We have to mention some of the amazing local infrastructure that helps us stay safe most nights: Paystack, Team Apt’s Monnify, and Piggyvest. We’ve also spent some time leaning in and helping a bit this year: successfully running a WomenCode internship program (had a woman spend 6 months with us in a paid internship role where she learned front-end development and graduated into a front-end engineer), helping to sponsor some Wine & Whine events, Frontstack, Resplash Leadership Program amongst others.
Oh, and of course notable mention is that our CEO, Timilehin Ajiboye co-wrote a book called, The Little Bitcoin Book to get people started with learning about Bitcoin.
Headache
2019 was not without its headaches. We’ve encountered an incredible amount of struggle hiring people we think are a good fit for our company values across different roles. We spend a non-trivial amount of resources reviewing applications, giving feedback and interviewing. But it’s clear to us that we can’t build the kind of company and products we want if we aren’t meticulous and clear-sighted with this process.
Third parties are also often a pain. The most frustrating part of this is when they are non-communicative and that leads us to disappoint our users.
And there has been the final challenge of security. Everyday is a constant trade-off between creating easy on-ramp experiences for users while keeping them and their assets safe on BuyCoins.
But it’s been an incredibly positive year building BuyCoins. This team of 10 resilient, hardworking, high-standards, empathetic, user-obsessed individuals are continually crafting what we are confident will be THE BEST SHIT!
Calling the most important thing into 2020: Product-Market Fit! (PMF$)
And as always for us — it’s Day 1!
Love from BuyCoins! 💜
