It All Began With Belief
Because if you never believe then you can never win
Wow, one year anniversary and we’re still alive and kicking. What started out as a fun little side project turned out to be much greater than either myself or Murloc could have ever imagined. Usually it would feel contrived to write a reflective memoir after only a year in business, but in crypto a year is equivalent to five, so here goes…
The Worst Ever Work Experience
As a long-time crypto investor, March 2021 was the first time I started contributing to projects. I had a brief stint at Snowball, where I was brought on by Leo (aka Best_coder_NA), before moving on to Pandaswap where I got my first real taste of working on a crypto project. Yes, this garbage of a project where I — as well as countless others — lost a ton of money.
In the early days of Avalanche, people were desperate to ape into new DEXes. Pangolin was one of the first and the $PNG token amazingly rose to $20 but couldn’t sustain momentum and kept dumping thereafter. So when this new hot DEX called Pandaswap started to show up all over Twitter, everyone was itching for the next yield farm opportunity.
Come launch day, I decided to ape hard so I threw a six figure sum - a significant proportion of my portfolio at that time - to scoop up $BAMBOO on the first day. I must’ve been a top 3 holder. My chad green candlestick made everyone else ape and token price started to rise putting me in lots of profit. I felt like a genius.
But before the day had ended, reports of people not receiving the correct staking reward amounts started to pile into discord. Smart contract FUD started to spread like wildfire and within minutes, I was already down on my initial investment. Trying to figure out how I could rectify the situation and protect my bags, I volunteered myself to help fix the bug. The team invited me to their team channels on discord and just like that, I became part of the Pandaswap team.
It turns out the smart contract, which was forked from Sushiswap, was fine and the bug was caused by calling the method with the wrong inputs - an operator error. The fact that the devs didn’t know how to operate the smart contracts was one such red flag. Over the course of the next few days, many more would crop up: how all six team members called themselves “devs” when only two actually coded; how the two devs were only college students and one of them didn’t even study computer science; how one member would constantly accuse users with genuine concerns as fudders; how that member proceeded to dump his tokens on the second day; how the leader of the project admitted that his autism was so bad he could not handle the community uproar; how the leader would try to prop up token price by burning his tokens and buying more tokens. In short, the place was a shit show. Lots of people called them ruggers and to their defense, they meant well, they were just severely incompetent.
It dawned on me that if this ragtag group of guys were able to fork a DEX and create some hype then starting a project was easier than I imagined. And so after a week of working at Pandaswap (which really felt like three months) and no light at the end of the tunnel of ever salvaging my bag, I cut my losses, left the job and made the decision to start my own project.
Go Forth And Be Different
At the same time, a long time family friend of mine, Murloc, wanted to get involved in web3. I told him I had just forked Uniswap and was playing around with it to try and understand everything underneath the hood. He’d been in crypto since 2015 in the sense that he bought some Bitcoin and forgot about it, but then heard about DeFi at the start of 2021 and wanted to get involved. I told him of my plan to fork Uniswap and build a DEX. He was fully onboard, but he approached it from the angle that it’d be a fun little side project which would probably fail but at least he’d learn something in the process.
During this time, Pangolin had been live for two months and $PNG token was on a continuous downward slump. How they managed their yield farms was causing insane inflation to the $PNG token and worse yet, they didn’t even have a team running the project. To understand why there was no team running Pangolin would require you to understand the history of how it was started: by an engineer who built the project and had no intention of running it but planned for the community to vote in a team after governance was turned on three months later. That meant there was still a month left before any kind of team would be voted in. For a brief moment, the idea of running for core member of Pangolin crossed my mind after I was recommended by various members of the community for my small stint at Pandaswap, but this was also the time Pangolin was weakest and I knew if there was any chance of overtaking them it had to be now.
Most people laughed at the idea of Pangolin ever being overtaken. Their lead was so strong no DEX even came slightly close to them. Their total value locked at that time was ~$200 million and every other DEX that came after them could barely break $3 million. In the eyes of most, first mover advantage was real and we would be the 12th, so people scoffed at my idea of starting yet another DEX.
“How are you going to be different than all the other DEXes that have tried and failed?” This was the most commonly asked question and it became clear to me that if we were going to fork a DEX, we shouldn’t do this half-assed; we had to be different.
We were still complete newbies at web3 so creating innovative smart contracts was not an option, but we could at least differentiate ourselves in other ways. During this time, Murloc had created a doc outlining our strategy; with no name for the DEX yet, he just codenamed it Trader Joe, after the supermarket. It was a brilliant name for a DEX. After all, most altcoins at that time were named after food like $YAM and $PICKLE. It was also original because it didn’t follow the common convention of something-swap or something-finance which every DeFi project followed. The next part was finding an illustrator for Joe. I spam messaged every top illustrator on Dribbble and Behance and most were either too busy with NFT projects or sick to death of NFT projects and were strictly anti-crypto. Finally I landed on a Russian illustrator named Pavel who had experienced illustrating for games. I told him the story arc of Joe: this young guy (because all guys in crypto are young) who starts off as a farmer, grows his crops, then takes his crops to the local market to sell for money. Eventually as the natural progression of agriculturalism to capitalism goes, he accrues enough wealth and wants to put his money to work by lending it out and becomes a banker. Through honest hard work, he was able to upgrade his life and live out the dream.
Pavel clearly did not understand a word of what I said because he came back with this drawing of an old bearded man with a pot belly and an infectious smile, accompanied by a little pet bird that always has a look of surprise on her face. Despite not following the script, you couldn’t help but smile the second you looked at that picture in the same way Santa Claus makes you feel happy. Were we being too ridiculous though? Surely people wouldn’t take us seriously if this was our brand. But then again, we wanted to be different and this was different, so after some hesitation we decided to roll with it.
It was May 2021, the market was still hot and Murloc wanted to get to market quickly whilst it lasted. He had the web2 mentality of getting to market fast and iterating things after launch. I was adamant that we had to at least have something that looked and felt different otherwise we had no chance of persuading the community we were different to the other ten clones that had come after Pangolin. After all, we were going around telling people our DEX was going to be innovative, and if our contracts were forked, we had to find innovation somewhere. So back to Dribbble and Behance it was to find a UI/UX designer. After careful consideration, I eventually settled on a designer who had an impressive portfolio — or at least I thought it was.
Our goal was to launch in early June, so we gave the designer a tight deadline of delivering the final designs in three weeks. After a week, he presented some designs for the logo. All five designs were Joe’s head cropped out and the colours tweaked to various neumorphic colour palettes. No modification had been made to the head, just the colours. Hmm.. I thought to myself, clearly not very creative but perhaps my prompt was not specific enough. We decided to scrap the logo and ask him to work on the swap page instead. A week later he came back to present his designs for the swap page and again, five designs of the exact same swap page of Uniswap’s and no additional detail added, but with different neumorphic colour schemes. Turns out, this guy had managed to build an impressive following on Dribbble doing the only trick he knew how to do — using neumorphic colours — and it was clear that he had no idea how to create any semblance of UI/UX design.
We decided to cut the UI/UX designer and search for a new designer quickly so we could get to market while it was ripe. Then on May 19th, $BTC crashed and our plan was suddenly out the window.
Back To The Drawing Board
In hindsight, getting rugged by our first designer and the market subsequently crashing turned out to be a blessing. It gave us more time to refine our product. We interviewed about three dozen different designers before deciding on an agency called Etheric. They were five times more expensive than others and had no experience in crypto, but their head designer, Andriy, convinced me when I asked him what he thought about Uniswap’s style. In typical Eastern European directness, he replied with a single word: “shit”. This was refreshing because neumorphic style was all the rave in crypto (and still is), but in his mind, neumorphism was tacky and we could do better. They came up with a style which we initially thought was too basic, but we learned a valuable lesson when working with strong, opinionated creatives which I preach to my team to this day: we all have strong opinions of what would look good, but our opinions are often clouded because we’re so knee deep in this rabbit hole and sometimes it’s better to just trust the experts.
With the designs underway, it was time to make a splash. After being a degen for so long, you understand that marketing is very important in crypto, probably even more so than the product itself. People tend to buy things that other people recommend - that’s just the way the world works - and so it was important to build hype before we launched. Without any significant Twitter following, I knew that the first step was to develop a presence in the community. And so I suggested we build up our personal accounts first so we could build trust with the community. Many projects fail to do this, which is a big mistake. In the world of crypto, personal brand is everything; people are more likely to buy into your project if they can trust the person running it and this is especially true of your anonymous.
Be Bold And Loud
Learning to build up your Twitter following is a skill. I started off by writing tweet threads and tagging influential people like Emin then dropping my threads in various discords and telegram channels to farm engagement. Yes, I was that annoying guy who would constantly try to sell himself, but that’s what you got to do when you’re an unknown person. The watershed moment which kicked off my tweeting career was a thread about ARC-20s which got over 300 likes after being re-tweeted by Emin. After developing somewhat of a following, it was time to start the Trader Joe account with a bang. Our first post was an image with Joe at his market and an avalanche in the background with a simple caption of “coming soon” and a link to our telegram that immediately got people pouring in. No one knew what we did, they were just bullish about the art. One guy even commented that he was ready to ape based off the image alone.
The next step was to present our vision. Like I said previously, doing things half assed was not an option, so we took the bold decision to start some controversy. Our first thread was a polarising one where we basically fudded the hell out of Pangolin. Regardless if you think it’s good or bad marketing, it’s marketing and sometimes you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and get dirty.
We continued that momentum with some hype videos that to this day still give me a gooey feeling of nostalgia. You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m big on branding and can safely say a year later that small touches like a well made video or graphic were incredibly pivotal to our success.
By July, we had become renown for being the shit-stirrers on Avalanche. The question on everyone’s mind was, "were we actually going to deliver our promise of being different or were we just hype?”
Then on July 3rd 2021, judgement day arrived:
We opened voice chat on telegram for our launch party and the initial reception was of praise and acclaim. People loved our user interface and the small features that other DEXes didn’t have such as a candlestick chart and double reward farms. Most of all, people just loved Joe. Something about his calm and authoritative yet silly demeanor resonated with people; perhaps it was because he was a welcome distraction from the bear market. Whatever it was, it worked - within the first few days we reached $10 million TVL which completely smashed our internal forecast. We couldn’t say for certain whether we would make it, but we at least achieved the first hurdle of exceeding what the other ten DEXes before us failed to do. That belief gave us, and our community, the idea that we at least had a fighting chance of becoming the dominant DEX. It turns out this was one of many hurdles we had to overcome. Some of our biggest lows were to come months later, but I’ll save those stories for another day.
For now though, I hope you enjoyed this little back story of how we came about. Once again, I’m so happy to be standing here reflecting on the crazy year it’s been and all this could not have been possible without you, the community. And with that said, I just want to say a massive thank you ❤️
hey fish, really loved how you guys came about the Joe, to be honest, all you said would be different turned out to be different. Joe had the feel, design, and product that I used for the first time on Avalanche, though time & market might be treating us pretty badly but this was so refreshing & nostalgic to read! I wish you & Joe team all the very best.
We might make it if we remain strong & keep bringing a difference to the table like our mascot does, it pays to be different & certainly pays to believe.
Thanks for this, Godspeed <3
Super cool read. It is possible to win by executing on the fundamentals better than anyone else. Gonna go buy more Joe.