Feb 3, 2017
A year in fast forward. Alvin’s story.
A year ago I had a farewell meeting with my investor while closing long term relationships with my other project. After completing some legal procedures he warmly presented me a bottle of Bottega Gold to celebrate the end of good times together.
- What are you planning to do now? — he asked.
- I am launching a new startup, — I said.
- What kind of startup?
- I am going to make a wallet for cryptocurrencies. Have you ever heard about Bitcoin?
- Almost nothing!
The day after this meeting we opened the bottle of this wonderful prosecco, not to celebrate the end of my previous “relationships”, but to celebrate an official birth of Freewallet.
We contacted guys from Minergate to promote our new wallet for FantomCoin. Fantom was a nice coin to play with. No one was using it actually, but everyone had, as it was merged-mined with other CryptoNote coins.
We published the app, promised to pay few FCNs for every found bug or suggestion and launched the campaign with Minergate. I remember myself sitting behind two monitors covered with real time data from Google Analytics and opened customer support chat. I was ready. I was ready to have at least 1000 users (as I was promised by Minergate). But what happened next was unexpected.
We had only few users on the first day. My real time setup was useless. We found our first user online, opened his photo and I filled a glass of champagne for him too. Cheers, Charles!
So there was no glory actually. The release was buggy, users were loyal mostly because we paid them few coins and the future was uncertain. Well that’s how startups are done. Nothing works right from the box. It takes time.
And the time was right when we launched our second app — Ethereum Wallet. We updated the icons and “freewallet family” concept and started once again. Without any champagne or glory we published a new app to Google Play and… That’s when time hit fast-forward.
New wallets every month. Thousand of new users every week. Features, bugs, updates, hardforks, competitors attacks (I was even threatened by well known guys from the industry), more features, new teammates, new partners… That’s Freewallet’s year in review.
If you are still reading this, I want to thank you for staying with Freewallet. I do understand all the concerns that are usually uncovered by our haters. It’s okay to hate us. But love and loyalty are better weapons if you are planning to build something to last for years, not for a year.
Join our celebration! Share your thoughts, play the game or read Leila’s article that is dedicated to you.
Cheers!
Alvin Hagg
