Y Combinator Startup Podcast - How to Survive the Crypto Boom & Bust Cycle | Main Function

Episode Date: November 16, 2024

Over the past decade crypto has been declared dead hundreds of times. But with the price of Bitcoin surging over the past few months it’s clear that there are still enormous opportunities in this space. And few people know that better than Chandan Lodha, the co-founder of CoinTracker (W18), a crypto asset management and tax filing platform. He and his team have navigated several boom and bust cycles over the years and in this latest episode of The Main Function, you’ll hear about how they built their company, the time it nearly fell apart, and how they used a crypto winter to retool and emerge stronger than ever.

Chandan Loda is the co-founder of CoinTracker, the gold standard for crypto, portfolio management, and taxes. And he knows as well as just about anyone what it takes to survive the crazy boom-bust cycle of crypto. Price of Bitcoin surging again. Showing no signs of slowing. Another warning signal is flashing for Bitcoin. The crypto market is crashing. Bitcoin briefly bouncing back above $67,000 this morning. When there's excitement, how do we capture that excitement and use it to propel ourselves forward?

And when we're in a bear cycle, how do we hunker down and use our resources effectively to just continue building so that when that next wave of crypto adoption comes, we can ride that wave. So today, we're sitting down with Chandon to discuss the origins of CoinTracker, how they've survived several crypto downturns and the state of crypto today. Let's get started. For a lot of people, jumping into the crypto market can be intimidating. It can be hard to track your portfolio across exchange. or figure out how to file taxes. CoinTrackers solving these problems and what they're building is making crypto more accessible and easier to use. Our mission of CoinTracker is to enable everyone in the world to use crypto with peace of mind

by building the leading cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and tax compliance software. Like many of the best products, CoinTracker was built to solve a problem the founders faced themselves. My co-founder, John and I, we had both worked together in our previous job. And we were interested in fintech. We were actually building something that had nothing to do with crypto at all. We got really frustrated with building on the traditional financial rails because they're super slow. They're super inefficient.

And so that was kind of the kick that made us look deeper into the crypto space. This is in 2017. One of the first pain points there was, how the heck am I going to keep track of all these assets? And that was kind of the kernel of a problem that led us to building the first version of coin tracker to enable users to track their portfolio and then eventually do their crypto taxes as well. But making sure users are tax compliant is just one of many challenges Chandan and his team are facing. Crypto has gone through bull and bear cycles since Bitcoin's inception. In fact, Bitcoin has been declared dead over 475 times in the past 12 years. Running a company in the

space is particularly difficult because you're forced to evolve as the cycles come and go. Our journey and crypto's journey definitely are intertwined for a variety of reasons. And one of those reasons are these ebbs and flows of the crypto market, which is sort of unique compared to other technological spaces that I've worked in in the past. Because you have these really big bull cycles, you have a huge amount of growth and demand that comes in all at one specific time. And then you have these bare cycles where there can be again a year or multiple years where the space is declared dead and there's not a lot of lot of activity happening, at least on the speculative trading sort of side. Building startups is hard in the first place, but dramatic ups and downs in the crypto cycle can take a toll on founders and teams in the space. Going through crypto winter is brutal. It's probably

the lowest point that I've had as a founder or like in my professional work history. Not only is it a struggle from a company morale and growth perspective, but on top of that, that the entire world is telling us that the entire space that we're working in is irrelevant and dead and doesn't make sense. There was a point in 2020 where we were six months away from having to shutter our doors because we were going to run out of money. It's just a feeling of desperation of just like, oh my God, like nothing is working and there's nothing we can do about it. So that was a really tough and very low point. And the way we got through it was, A, I have an amazing co-founder. I cannot imagine having gone through this without him. But B, I think it's, again,

taking a very long-term view on what we're doing. And does it actually make sense from first principles, regardless of the kind of local climate that we're currently in at a specific point of time? Like, is the mission that we're fighting for a mission that we want to see the world, like, adopt and to make it, you know, does it improve users' lives in some kind of meaningful way? And so it was kind of sticking to those first principles and also like the really amazing team that the coin tracker is like really bringing people in from the team and saying hey look we're not going to like lie to you here is the reality of the situation um here's what it means for us and here's what we need to accomplish in order to get back on a gross trajectory um so we had to just basically have some really open

honest vulnerable conversations with people and um i'm really glad we did that because it got us through those some of those tough times and it's basically the companies that do those tough times in crypto, they get to reap the benefits of the really good times, like what we're in now. During the last crypto bull run, CoinTracker grew 14x during Defi summer in 2021. During that time, they focused heavily on driving growth and getting as many users as possible. But as the space started to cool, they began to get feedback from customers that they were losing their product edge. And CoinTracker had to come to terms with the fact that they were no longer the strongest product in their space.

Specific feedback that we got from users was basically that we hadn't kept the product up to date with the latest things that they were doing in the crypto space. So as crypto evolved, the use cases, the types of transactions, the activity, the diversity of the activity had evolved a lot. What we like failed to keep up with was the rise of all of this more advanced on-chain defy activity, people using liquidity pools, uniswap. And so it was a painful realization. I mean, users were telling us that we weren't solving their problem anymore.

And so we basically just said, okay, the only thing that matters is getting product quality up. Based on the feedback their customers gave them, CoinTracker decided to completely halt everything they were doing for nine months. In that time, they reimagined what the product and company should look like. So for CoinTracker 2, we made a couple specific changes that really transformed how the company works and how our product works. the first was elevating user obsession. And the result of that is that everyone in our company is constantly talking to users now at every level of the company. From customer support to product design, to marketing, to the product management team engineers, we're constantly running user experience research.

I myself, I'm talking to users on a daily basis. I'm constantly on Reddit and Workcast wherever our users are. We want to be there. We want to understand what's working. and what's not. So we can constantly get that feedback and make improvements. So user obsession was number one. And then number two was that we shifted one of our company's guiding principles from think long term to think long term ship today. And just that small change gave everyone in the company that permission that they needed in order to take some risks and experiment and just build

the thing that they wanted to build and try it out. And as a result, the entire execution of the company massively accelerated almost overnight and people were shocked. It was pretty wild. We could see the energy just light up across the company when we made that change. We've learned this important lesson that no matter how much we grow, no matter what scale the company reaches, we can't forget to always obsess over the users and make sure that we're staying up to date with their latest and evolving needs, especially in a space like crypto, that changes quickly. John Donne as a team used crypto winter to refocus on the two things that we at YC believe are the

important, building product and talking to users, and they made sure they were ready for the next bull cycle. With the launch of CoinTracker 2.0 in January, this is the culmination of all of our product quality work over the last year. And while we had sort of painfully realized that we had fallen behind in some areas and some key areas before, with the new launch, we feel very confident that we're back on top. I think the best advice I can offer people who are in the crypto space is to take a long-term view. Crypto is, I think, on absolutely change the world. It already has, and it will continue to do so on a scale that is hard to even imagine, even today in 2024. And so the more patience one can have, the more fruits of those

labor that you'll be able to harvest down the line. So stay humble when things are going to the moon and stay, like, believing when things are tough. Take a long-term view on what can happen here. Building crypto companies is hard. It's a challenge. But you can use the win enters in an intelligent way to emerge as a stronger company. I believe crypto is still going to change the world. It already has, and I'm excited to see the future that it'll bring forth. So if you're looking to do crypto taxes or get your portfolio in order, check out cointracker.io.

That's it for now. I'll see you next time.