Last week I had the chance to meet face to face with the CEO of TRM Labs.
He’s a YC grad (2019) and a 3rd time founder.
For context, TRM Labs raised their Series B in late 2022, has got a total of $150M worth of vc investments, and is regarded as one of the hottest startups in the blockchain space.
At first he told me TRM was his 3rd application for YC:
In 2017 they tried to build an events app, through which you can host/attend events at your area.
In 2018 they tried to do Pokemon Go for picking up Crypto tokens.
In 2019 they pitched a demo of performing some analytics on blockchain data, which later turned out to be TRM.
About the “events app”:
“At first you would want to validate your assumptions, we assumed that people would want to check an events app to meet new people around their interests – which was wrong. People often depend on several ways, but they won’t make new friends through an app”
“We were rejected over & over, and later we’d know why their decision to reject us was right. At first we wouldn’t even get an interview. It’s quite tough”
Then later he talked about implementing a “game”: ”We wanted to make something like Pokemon Go, but instead of collecting pokemons you can collect crypto tokens”, he said.
“It had potential, we thought. We used to attend gaming conferences and talk to people, and we spent a few months gaining feedback. But ultimately we stopped because of the product-founder fit. We didn’t have any game development background, and we found ourselves in front of many many technical challenges. The more we dove in, when creating the game, the more we got convinced we will not be able to pull this off.”
“So we were in the middle of the interview, and when they asked about a clear value we’re providing, we stumbled at giving a one concise sentence. Only then we knew this is not going to work”, he said.
Few months later, they came up with a new idea of implementing an analytics dashboard for several crypto token. The dashboard would give higher level insights about transactions on the network. They made a list of 100 tokens and would talk to each one of their creators.
They were not interested.
“Then we thought, instead of offering to the token’s creator, may be we could offer these analytics services to businesses directly, because we found that almost all entities working with these tokens would need some form of asset compliance” – “And there was the value”.
“When you know what you have, it shows – People expect you to pitch in 30 seconds, not 3 minutes” – “After repackaging our offer, we knew we had something solid. A few months in, we thought we might not even need YC.”
Several lessons here:
1/ Agility to change courses
2/ Validate your assumptions
3/ Focus on the MVP
4/ How many repetition does it take?
5/ How solid is your elevator pitch?
6/ World makes place for your vision, when you know what you want