How I Broke the Startup Playbook - $0 to $50m In 1 Month

This is my builder story.

I came onto X a month ago with 0 followers, 0 connections, 0 money as a pseudonymous cow.

All odds were stacked against me to turn nothing into something, but I did it. I now want to share about HOW I did it and how YOU CAN DO IT as well.

How I started:

The reason I made my account was because the price of my beloved $HYPE tokens were down the drain.. all my savings were in it.

I felt that the least I could do is create an account on here and publish my ideas/thesis on why $HYPE is extremely undervalued as a crypto token to try and help out its price action.. every little bit helps.

So I wrote a paper and posted it on this newly created account, to try and reach the masses.

https://x.com/PerpetualCow/status/1998189903264506291

To my surprise.. it went viral.

If you’re reading this from outside our niche crypto Twitter bubble, you probably don’t know about @ HyperliquidX, that’s ok.. not really the point of this post.

But I always knew the immense potential this ecosystem had.

I started thinking of ways to contribute and help the price action of $HYPE myself rather than just bull posting about it.

My First Failure:

So I decided to build something on top of Hyperliquid to help bring more volume/revenue to it which should bring more buybacks as well as attention/mindshare to the token.

There already is a great ecosystem out there with people building insane financial instruments like trading pre-IPO companies (@ ventuals) or accessing leverage on future contracts on equities (@ tradexyz).

One thing was missing though.. nobody thought about Forex pairs, one of the largest derivatives instruments in traditional finance but deployed on Hyperliquid.

For some background, anyone can deploy whatever they want on Hyperliquid, it’s a permissionless exchange.

Forex is literally 10x bigger than ALL OF EQUITIES by volume doing $7.5 trillion in daily volume, this knowledge is something I had edge in coming from the traditional derivatives scene.

I don’t think the other deployers knew what an opportunity this could be. If I could be the one to deploy Forex on Hyperliquid my fee share alone could be worth billions of dollars in the future.

I couldn’t believe nobody had thought of it yet.

I knew I had to go for it and I had to go for it fast, it would only be a matter of time before other deployers realized what an opportunity was sitting right in front of them.

I took an 20mg instant release Adderall, DoorDashed some Red Bulls and got to work.

I stayed up the entire night programming and by morning I had the product ready.

I got the domain ready (Hyperfx.xyz), I even got around 500k HYPE ready for the deployment fee which was worth around $15m.

This was going to be my moment.

https://hyperfx.xyz/

Then came my biggest mistake.

Before crashing down from my stimulant bender I deployed on the testnet (as any reasonable cow does) and went to sleep.

This is one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made in my life.

https://app.hyperliquid-testnet.xyz/trade/fxx:EUR

I had no idea people were keeping track of testnet deployments so intimately but by the time I woke up I saw my deployment being spread around in HL’s private builder group chats.

Everyone was aware that a new deployer had come onto the testnet to deploy the Forex pairs and it caught a lot of attention in the Hyperliquid ecosystem, people figured out about the gap in the market.. nobody had thought of Forex pairs until I decided to go for it.

The news quickly reached the much bigger player, @ tradexyz who quickly caught onto the opportunity and bought the JPYUSD ticker meaning that they were now going to deploy the Forex pairs.

@ tradexyz processes billions of dollars through platform and pairs with hundreds of millions of dollars behind them.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to compete with a titan like them.

What would the point in becoming a second weaker Forex offering on HL be?

In 1 wrong move I had KILLED my entire opportunity.

The best move would just be to hang it up instead of slopping it up with another copy of the same pair. That wouldn’t help HL in anyway which was my main goal.

Since then they have also deployed EURUSD.

I was FURIOUS.. can’t even explain how mad I was. I would have smashed my PC if I wasn’t so depressed, never even knew I was capable of feeling such rage.

I was mostly angry at myself.. how could I make such a fucking stupid mistake and leak everything I worked on.

It was YC 101 and I was PISSED. I had really fucked up this time. Probably fucked myself out of a billion dollars that it would have earned in fees over the next few years.

1 dumb mistake and my entire plan was already dead on arrival. I couldn’t believe myself. I’ve made some idiotic mistakes before, but none were as simple as this.

I vowed to myself that I would never deploy anything else on a public testnet ever again.

The combination of defeat and an Adderall comedown lead to rapid acute depression.. I was a defeated cow.

Until I had enough..

I needed to pick myself back up.

I kept thinking of something else.. if people didn’t think of Forex, they definitely didn’t think of other things

I was a defeated cow, but I did not let it stop me.. I was determined to find something else.

After all.. the financial system is massive, surely I could find some edge/gap that people haven’t thought of, except this time I wouldn’t make the same mistake.

The problem with the Hyperliquid ecosystem is that a few small number of deployers tend to copy each other, it’s quite foolish since it fragments liquidity.

An example of this is that there are multiple deployments for the equities of TSLA/NVDA etc.

Nobody really innovated, everyone just produced regular slop by copy and pasting each other, which was fine.. because they would still gain volume and therefore revenue.

The Success:

I realized that the Monero $XMR community was extremely underserved. The government hates you being able to make transactions without them having their hands on it, therefore the asset has been delisted from most exchanges.

Despite all this, it was still a top 20 crypto with a market cap of nearly $10 billion and a solid community, someone needed to give them a platform.

It was the perfect asset to add to Hyperliquid.. a permissionless exchange is built for literally this.

https://wagyu.xyz/

For some context, getting your hands on $XMR was extremely difficult before I launched wagyu.xyz.

You had to use sketchy instant swap websites which take HUGE fees (1%+), or centralized exchanges which will most likely lock your account for any $XMR related deposit/withdrawal activity.

Most centralized exchanges don’t even list it anymore, @ Binance (the largest crypto exchange) delisted it last year and most exchanges have followed its way.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/02/06/binance-to-delist-monero-privacy-token-xmr-slides

Cow realized the potential and made it way easier, simply deposit into Hyperliquid with any asset (ETH/BTC/SOL/USDC) and swap it for XMR1 (my deployment).

Once you have XMR1 on Hyperliquid, you can instantly withdraw it using wagyu.xyz to your XMR wallet like @ FeatherWallet or @ cakewallet.

I made a short video explaining how everything works and it went extremely viral, it gained a lot of attention in the Monero $XMR community.

https://x.com/PerpetualCow/status/2002112238044483642

The product was so much better than anything else available in the market, the best products always win.

Real XMR coins.. a treasure. The Monero community was delighted, they have never seen such a product before that makes their life so much easier. Their alternative was way worse.

Wagyu has been a success ever since. With over $10m+ in withdrawals in the first two weeks and over $20m in trading volume brought to Hyperliquid due to this token.

Ever since the launch, we have made $XMR accessible to a lot more people who previously didn’t have access. This has resulted in $XMR going up A LOT price wise due to it.

This is what happens when people buy $XMR peacefully and place it in cold storage without worrying about their funds getting locked in any other way.

https://x.com/PerpetualCow/status/2001718984945602750

People can now TWAP buy/sell into $XMR with millions very easily to get their hands onto real $XMR in their wallet, the orderbook has now turned extremely liquid and will only get better over time since we’re only 2 weeks in.

Valuation after 2 weeks

The product has made $200k revenue in 2 weeks already, $5.2m ARR.

I did a small funding round for HL community members + friends I made along the way at a $50m valuation (10x P/E). It sold out pretty easily.. a lot of people have figured out the demand here.

I’m not stopping here btw, $XMR was just 1 deployment.

I’m turning wagyu.xyz into a Hyperliquid focused powerhouse deployer with a points system to incentivize liquidity/volume.

https://www.wagyu.xyz/points

There will be a token for Wagyu coming out in the future, people are already farming Wagyu points like they did with @ Lighter_xyz by just naturally trading the XMR token on Hyperliquid and the current spot TSLA token.

The aim here is to turn Wagyu into a big deployer that competes with the other big Hyperliquid projects, focusing on real products that people want to trade/hold.

The moral of the story here is that you can just do things.

Find a gap in the market, there are so many things to do and go for it.

We are living in the best possible times to build a product, success is there for the taking.

Don’t go for repetitive AI products, go for real products that have real demand.

In my case, people wanted their hands on $XMR for privacy, I gave them that. Success was inevitable.

moo. 🐮

I’m PerpetualCow and I approve this message.

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