Who’s Linus?

And why am I spending so much damn time with them?

I’m really excited to finally talk publicly about what I’ve been working on for the past 9 months: Linus.

Linus?

At Linus, we’re helping the everyday users build wealth by making it easy to access high-yield interest rates available in digital asset credit markets.

Today, it’s possible to earn in excess of 4% APY on digital versions of the US dollar. The problem is that those yields are comparatively hard to access when considered against traditional substitutes like savings accounts, certificates of deposit and money markets. Accessing them requires:

1. Converting USD to its digital counterpart via an exchange,
2. Sending those assets to a digital wallet,
3. And then interacting directly with one of the markets offering the yield.

A slide from our pitch deck illustrating the struggle to access these high-yields.

This isn’t a problem for me, but I’m not normal when it comes to new technology. I’m an early adopter. I’m willing to struggle through clunky user experience to play around with new things and understand how they work. When I think about my friends and family, most of whom are too busy with their day-to-day lives to spend time tinkering with new tech, it’s apparent that none of them will ever take advantage of these yield opportunities without some streamlining of the ways they’re accessed. This is what we’re trying to tackle.

At Linus, we’re helping the everyday users build wealth by making it easy to access high-yield interest rates available in digital asset credit markets.

Why am I working on this?

1. Higher yields on cash deposits can help younger generations that are struggling to build wealth. Rising costs of secondary education and slow income growth — to help pay for those costs — means younger generations bear significant amounts of debt and have trouble building wealth because of it. This debt keeps the average person mostly in cash, of which there are little to no options to beat inflation on, leading to a loss of purchasing power over time and into a negative cycle of wealth erosion. I see an opportunity to help the average person break from this negative cycle through inflation-beating rates on their cash deposits, and that’s driving me to work on Linus.
2. I want to see blockchain-based products adopted to their fullest potential, and that means having a tangible, direct impact on the lives of average people. I believe that the only way this happens — at least initially — will be through products that don’t feature blockchains at all. Adoption will come through products that look and feel like existing products but deliver either higher value or the same value more efficiently, without the technology being the focus. While I’m extremely impressed by the progress taking place in the decentralized finance ecosystem, development is going in a direction that’s more suitable for sophisticated users, not the average person. To see wide-scale adoption, products must be built with the needs of the average person in mind. With Linus, we’re making sure that everyday use by everyday people is properly represented in the space.

Where are we currently, and how have we gotten there?

I’m really proud to say we’ve launched a private beta, and currently have a small, contained set of users managing their deposits using Linus.

In September last year, we raised a small pre-seed round with the objective being to ship an MVP and uncover potential product-market fit, while maintaining enough runway to raise a seed round after launch. We had an idea for what our MVP was going to look like: deposit fiat and earn high-yield interest rates without the need for end-users to purchase digital assets. After the initial scoping of the work items, we estimated that MVP development would take until the end of January to complete. We wanted to make sure we were onto something before January though, so we came up with a plan to begin taking deposits prior to that: build a few UI screens to collect user KYC info, throw together a 1-pager describing the offering, and see if we could get users to send us their deposits in whatever form they could drum up. In December, we onboarded a small cohort at a 69% conversion rate, with average deposit size of $1500 and began generating (a tiny amount of) revenue. There’s more to product-market fit than an initial shock of demand, but seeing it without any tangible means of self-servicing deposits seems like a good indicator.

We spent the rest of the holidays and the month of January wrapping up MVP development and prepping to turn our UI loose on our early cohort, successfully meeting our launch goal of the end of January. We’ve spent the last week and a half onboarding users, listening to their feedback and iterating on it. Feedback so far has been extremely positive, but it’s not all been puppies and unicorns. We prioritized speed over control and as a consequence, we’ve run into some limitations on implementation (our chart for one, needs a full rework in the future). But over the full 9 months, we’ve managed to maintain a very low burn and I’m very happy with where we’ve ended up considering the resource constraints.

The Linus dashboard

Where are we going?

We’re looking forward to continuing to grow beta users and deposit volume. We’re also preparing to fundraise a seed round, which we’ll earmark for product development, compliance, and marketing.

Long term, we see ourselves as the entry point for new users and new money into crypto. If we get this first product right — the High-Yield account — there are many directions we can go. I won’t give away too much, but I will say that we’re keeping an eye out for new, creative ways to bring the awesome developments in the decentralized finance space to market in a friendly, non-sophisticated manner.

If you’re interested in learning more about Linus, check out https://getlinus.io. While you’re there, open a beta account or sign up for our mailing list.