ApiCrypto.io

Hello, this is Robert! 👋

ApiCrypto (https://www.apicrypto.io) started as a side hustle while we still held onto our day jobs. That way, we could keep a roof over our heads and our bellies full. Starting up can seriously mess with your head, but having a job that satisfies your geeky cravings can help balance things out.

GENERAL NOTES

• the app itself is not necessarily important - will talk a little bit about it towards the end of this post, but the story around the app is
• we bootstrapped as a team of 3 friends with no external investors
• we started with $50 as a side project

PHILOSOPHY

3 of my friends started working together around 2 years ago.

All of them are programmers.

1 left a couple of weeks in. No trust in the project. They are still friends as the person who left was interested in pursuing other interests.

I joined the team as a consultant. I have some programming experience, but I am not a full-time programmer. One thing you most remember that building a product in the digital space is not all about the code, although that's the core.

So how can I fill the gap?

I've been in the online space for 5+ year making and making living online.

I'm doing other things in the digital space too, like managing multiple YouTube channels, ghost writing, digital art, teaching online classes, building courses, and trading a suite of personal productivity tools I depend on every day, as well as some other things you might not never hear about nor see. I'm also quite fond of interactive learning environments.

My philosophy when I joined the team was: let’s make a viable product, launch it, gather feedback, improve it. Repeat.

I truly feel that one big reason people are not building products is the fear of their product not being used. Questions such the following may arise: What do I do after the product is done? How do I promote it? I do not have an audience. Should I invest in ads? etc.

They learned quite a lot of things while building.

I feel that people who are not into tech think that once your website is up and live, people will come. Once your work goes live, you feel exposed.

One of the biggest advantages of having a cushy day job was that it gave me a lot of time to work on my own projects. My mind had the freedom at night to work on whatever I wanted, and I had no risk if one of my side projects failed. To this day, I encourage people to not quit their day jobs until they have their side business going.

The most important hurdle we were facing is actually continuing to do the work, even in small increments, where progress does not appear so linear.

You must keep going. You must keep sticking around.

Do not think about the money. That’s not the proper goal one should put on a pedestal. It should quietly stay in the background. One should focus on nano progress instead.

Nano progress = a small brick one can add to a project that can help keeping

I don’t have 5 or 10-year plans. I generally look at my life as 6-month projects or 2-week experiments within those projects. And I choose those 6-month projects in such a way that even if they fail by the most objective metrics we might use, I will develop relationships and skills that persist past that project. Whether a project fails or not, I can succeed regardless because I’m accumulating skills and relationships that transcend and last much longer than any project.

And if you do that just from the snowball effect of relationships and skills, you will succeed on a meta-

What did we learn in the past 2 years?

TECHNICAL

• Web crawling with Python
• Data ingestion
• Non-relational database admin (MongoDB)
• Microservices
• Distributed message queue
• Dockerizing
• Multithreading

Non-TECHNICAL

• How to write copy
• How to write documentation
• Start a community
• Learning to tell the story
• Deal-making
• Negotiating
• Non-violent communication
• Prioritization
• keep learning

“The people who get what they're after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough.” - Austin Kleon

BOOKS USED TO KEEP US SANE

Books are a great tool to upgrade your mental capacities. We used them to take care of our minds in times of need.

They provide us with a wealth of knowledge, insights, and perspectives on various subjects. With the rise of digital media, the power of reading books may have been overlooked, but it remains an effective way to broaden our horizons and develop our cognitive abilities.

You can improve your communication skills with practice much more effectively than you can improve your intelligence with practice. If you’re not that smart but can communicate ideas clearly, you have a great advantage over everybody who can’t communicate clearly. - Conor Barnes

Here’s a list of books we used to keep us sane

• On Anger by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel
• Keep Going - Austin Kleon
• How I Lost 170 Million Dollars: My Time as #30 at Facebook by Noah Kagan
• 1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
• Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow
• “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character

Tech stack

• Java, Python
• MongoDB
• Spring Boot, Angular
• Apache Kafka
• Web Sockets
• Ubuntu 18.04
• Docker

What do we actually do?

Our product is ApiCrypto.

We provide a wide variety of cryptocurrency data endpoints. We have over 21TB of history market data available, ideal for statistics, charts, training data for machine learning models and also for general purposes. We have multiple distributed processing units which provide an extremely optimized time response despite the extensive workload and the large payload.

This is our story.

Hope it is helpful in some way or fashion!