Yesterday we announced on Twitter, we moved up 12000 ranks in the last week itself. I think we went from 52000 to 37000 really but I did not capture a screenshot to prove it. The journey has been difficult. I personally love what a unique mess of article database I have created and it has to improve on many levels, we are slowly getting there.
We did not reach here because of me. To succeed, you need support. Coin Crunch’s true support and strength has been our readers. Without you, we are nothing.
Monetarily the support has been our advertisers. You see, this is a chain. More readers = More advertisers. So you have to show you have high rankings, you have huge amount of visitors to attract advertisers to spend money by advertising on your platform. Yet, you have to remain true to yourself. I think I am getting ahead of myself. We should start from the beginning.
We have jumped 12000 ranks in our country within 6 days. This is phenomenal. Thank you all for reading https://t.co/KxdWQP04G3
Wouldn’t be possible without you!! pic.twitter.com/E65qVodoUx
— Coin Crunch India (@coincrunchin) July 14, 2018
CoinCrunch was never my real dream. It became an unexpected success for me. I would like to share the story.
Brace yourself as we dwell into how Coin Crunch came into being.
The Shift from Finally Jobless
As many of you know, I go by another name “Finally Jobless”, named after a blog and youtube channel of the same name. I have quit my jobs twice. One was a high paying job at Deloitte Consulting which took me to Europe where I developed my love for travelling. Another one was as a producer at Network18 digital, the media conglomerate that owns MoneyControl, CNBC channels and also Firstpost. Both jobs were vastly different.
When I quit Deloitte, in my head I wanted to take a break for a year and pursue what was my childhood dream – to become a presenter on video. I used to be the most sought after guy in school when it came to becoming an emcee and I wanted to make it into a career. No one, absolutely no one supported that dream of mine and I was shipped off to an Engineering college for pursuing B.E. in Biotechnology. The course was not forced, it was my choice. Fast forward to 10 years later I was putting my papers at Deloitte with a enough money in my bank to not work for another year. Now, free to do whatever I want.
I started making videos on youtube for fun, some of them are horrible, but a couple of them went mildly viral. One fine day a person on high ranks in Network18 digital spotted my video and asked me to join him for a completely new product that they were launching. I did. I was getting paid less than half of what I made at Deloitte but I joined for experience.
What followed was a terrible treatment in an Indian media company. I learnt there that no matter what you do, no matter how much you fight for your right, no one listens, no one cares. I quit Network18 ultimately vowing that I am never entering the media space again. How ironic! I was hired to lead branding solutions for a product that never launched, I was promoted to a lead’s position which was then taken away from me and the final nail in the coffin was that I always felt my boss worked for the higher ups instead of working for his team.
But I learnt a lot from all of my team. I learnt that media companies can be biased, not the journalists themselves but they could be forced to. I also learnt how brave journalists have to be, it is not an easy job and yet you are paid peanuts. Most importantly I understood that to be in media means to be constantly scrutinised by everyone.
When I quit, I started working with the founder of Roaming Clan, who happened to be the sister of a very good friend. Roaming clan was my redemption, a company that wanted to do something for the travellers. I loved it. Finally Jobless was demanding a revival too. I had to quit Roaming Clan because as much as it excited me, I hated that it didn’t excite the clients which demotivated me to work, eventually I just got lazy. Entrepreneurship Lesson 1 – Just because you like it, doesn’t mean they will like it.
At the same time I was introduced to Blockchain. So I started investing some of my money there. The rally of 2017 had only just begun. I was making good money. I figured the revival strategy for Finally Jobless could be writing about cryptocurrency. Many people were flocking into the space. Many of them did not have a single clue about trading, cryptocurrency or anything. I started writing blogs on FinallyJobless.com and helped Coindelta maintain its community on telegram. Everyday I learnt something new. Learned the painpoints. Wrote articles to resolve them and my work got appreciated by a lot of people.
I hit Jackpot. I was out one day and I started receiving text messages from all around the country. One of my posts had made it to Google feeds for Financial news. I had to immediately upgrade my hosting plan to accommodate the traffic on FinallyJobless. Later that evening I had to buy an even bigger plan. FinallyJobless hit 80K views on that one day. So I kept writing.
Then the correction happened. By the end of January most of the cryptocurrency prices had fallen badly. Many news channels were adding fuel to fire by posting non-researched news and articles. It made my blood boil. If I had to fight the mainstream media, I cannot do it with a name like Finally Jobless. Thus was born Coin Crunch. Rakesh Yadav, CTO of Koinex had actually suggested a version of this name to me. I noticed later that their own blog is called Koinex Crunch.
Budget Speech
The domain was ready. All existing articles had migrated from FinallyJobless to Coin Crunch. But I was slacking. Until Budget Day, February 1. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced that Bitcoin is not a legal tender. News channels twisted the truth to say “Bitcoin is illegal”. Thus was born the moment of fighting fake news in the space of cryptocurrency.
Coin Crunch published its first article on Feb 1, “No Arun Jaitely did not say Bitcoin is illegal”. The twitter handle had 3 followers, the telegram group had 5 members. Today we are almost at 2100 twitter followers, 800 Telegram group members and over 800 subscribers to our telegram channel. Every bit of it is organic.
I shared the article on all the groups I was part of. It got shared further by others in the group. Someone texted “Appreciate everything you are doing to keep out the FUD”. Happiest moment. I knew then and there that Coin Crunch is what I am going to do with all my heart. There needs to be someone who is fighting the mainstream media in the space.
That day, February 1, 2018, Coin Crunch India became a dream I wanted to pursue and I am doing it now.
Help from Peers
If you are not part of the telegram Group Indiabits or following their telegram channel Bitcoin India, you’re missing out on a ton of information being shared in the crypto space. Indiabits allowed me to share my articles with some of the best people in the industry. They still do. Now, I play PUBG with group admins, but I was new back then. To allow someone to promote a site with absolutely Zero reads is a tough call especially when many sites shared these days take you to a scammy website.
Then there was Coindelta. I was an admin on their telegram group. I shared my article with their 4000 members. It got many views. We had over 100 subscribers on twitter that day, mostly from coindelta. We added a few members on our telegram group as well from Coindelta’s group.
A relatively smaller group called Crypto Shooters Group is by far my favourite. I have received more support from Vikas Mahajan and other admins of Crypto shooters group and also the people on the group than anyone else. It has been fantastic and I will always be indebted to shooters.
Help from Exchanges
Soon, I was reaching out to exchanges, writing about them and asking the exchanges to share those articles. I was never biased. Everything I ever wrote on Coin Crunch has been unbiased but also slightly subjective. When research is not enough, you apply common sense to come to a conclusion. Despite writing negative points in my reviews, I gathered the courage to ask the exchanges to share those articles.
Some of them did, some of them did not. Koinex and Coindelta were the initial supporters. Koinex even shared the screenshots of their then unreleased app so that I can write an exclusive article. Then Bitbns played a role in our growth. When I reviewed Bitbns app, they immediately fixed the bugs I reported and even shared the article on their social media channels.
Later Coin Crunch received unanimous support from all crypto exchanges. Whether I wrote anything positive or negative I haven’t had a single instance when someone called me up and said, “You must take that down or else…”. A lot of times the exchanges share more information after we have published, we ensure that all the information is added to it.
So in the growth of CoinCrunch, we cannot ignore the help I received in sharing my website with the masses of followers the exchanges have. Thank you for that.
Part 1 ends here. I realise now that the story of Coin Crunch has many aspects and chapters. I cannot possibly fit it all in one article. We will talk about the revenues, competitions, Hirings and vision of Coin Crunch next Sunday.
You can read part two here:
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