2021 year in review
I realize we are pretty late to the party and it’s been a month since 2022 began. We had an outbreak of Covid cases where more than half of the current team were affected. We are back to some form of normalcy this week and felt it would be good to kick start this year’s stories with a review of 2021.
Firstly, some numbers about our payments business in 2021
→ 67,977,688 transactions processed
→ 1696 distinct merchants
→ US$ 20 Bn (assuming 1 USD = INR 75)
→ 4.8x revenue growth YoY
Other highlights:
→ Expanded the team by over 3x
→ Partnered with 3 new banks & financial institutions
→ Raised our seed round of US$ 3Mn
→ Published our open source financial primitives with the 1st payments orchestration library as Ruby gems
What we should do better :
→ You are a new company every time your team doubles in size. We realized this later that we should have
→ We still operate ad-hoc with little documentation. This is a very important priority area for us going forward.
→ Setting the true north star of the company — being in a domain where there are lots of dependencies, it has been difficult for us to get to the one significant problem statement that we will forever focus on.
→ Invest more and iterate faster — we are profitable at a time when paying taxes might not be the best use of our capital
What we did well:
→ Keep our hiring bar high — our conversion rate for our engineering hires is sub 5%. We could have easily increased this by reducing our bar but we kept a conscious check always
→ Lean team with potential for disproportionate value per employee — this was an outcome of keeping the bar high and this is consistent with the type of company we are building as well
→ Experimental initiatives — we were not afraid to think big and work on multiple experimental ideas that did not eventually see the light of day
→ Scaled up our payments application — our team went deep into the workings of a relational database system and created solutions that manage our scale at a 1/3rd of the cost that the market operates at
What’s in store for 2022:
→ We will be launching our ‘Ledgers’ product in Q1 of 2022 — this product is solving the problem of ‘Financial Leakage’ for any startup that moves money at scale.
→ Expand deeper into building payment infrastructure products for TradFi and DeFi
→ Experiment with DApps or apps for web3
→ Create the foundation to accelerate our revenue growth by 10x over the next 24 months, in a cashflow profitable manner
Looking back, 2021 was an inflection point for Hypto moving from a bootstrapped profitable venture to a funded start-up that is on the verge of hyper growth. We have overcome many bottlenecks in our 3+ year lifespan. 2022 looks to be very much different for Hypto compared to its previous years of existence — this is the 1st time we can afford to think long term and build a solid foundation and not be going after our next month’s cashflow.
If this is something that excites you, write to us on your experience building things from 0 →1 and we would love to have a chat.
