How to Survive the Crypto Boom & Bust Cycle

Chandan Loa is the co-founder of CoinTracker, the gold standard for crypto portfolio management and taxes. He knows, as well as just about anyone, what it takes to survive the crazy boom-bust cycle of crypto. The price of Bitcoin is surging again, showing no signs of slowing. Another warning signal is flashing for Bitcoin; the crypto market is crashing. Bitcoin briefly bounced back above $67,000 this morning.

When there's excitement, how do we capture that excitement and push to use it to propel ourselves forward? And when we're in a down cycle, how do we hunker down and use our resources effectively to just continue building so that when that next wave of crypto adoption comes, we can ride that wave? So today, we're sitting down with Chandan to discuss the origins of CoinTracker, how they've survived several crypto downturns, and the state of crypto today.

Let's get started. For a lot of people, jumping into the crypto market can be intimidating. It can be hard to track your portfolio across exchanges or figure out how to file taxes. CoinTracker is solving these problems, and what they're building is making crypto more accessible and easier to use.

"Our mission at CoinTracker is to enable everyone in the world to use crypto with peace of mind by building the leading cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and tax compliance software." Like many of the best products, CoinTracker was built to solve a problem the founders faced themselves.

"My co-founder John and I, um, we had both worked together in our previous job, and we were interested in fintech. Um, we were actually building something that had nothing to do with crypto at all. We got really frustrated with building on the traditional financial rails because they're super slow and they're super inefficient. And so that was kind of the kick that made us look deeper into the crypto space."

This is in 2017. One of the first pain points was, "How the heck am I going to keep track of all these assets?" That was the kernel of a problem that led us to building the first version of CoinTracker to enable users to track their portfolio and then eventually do their crypto taxes as well.

But making sure users are tax compliant is just one of many challenges Chandan and his team are facing. Crypto has gone through bull and bear cycles since Bitcoin's inception. In fact, Bitcoin has been declared dead over 47 to 75 times in the past 12 years. Running a company in the space is particularly difficult because you're forced to evolve as the cycles come and go.

"Our journey and crypto's journey definitely are intertwined for a variety of reasons. And one of those reasons are these ebbs and flows of the crypto market, which is sort of unique compared to other technological spaces that I've worked in in the past. You have these really big bull cycles; you have a huge amount of growth and demand that comes in all at one specific time. And then you have these bear cycles where there can be, again, a year or multiple years where the space is declared dead and there's not a lot of activity happening, at least on the speculative trading side."

Building startups is hard in the first place, but dramatic ups and downs in the crypto cycle can take a toll on founders and teams in the space. "Going through crypto winter is brutal. Um, it's probably the lowest point that I've had as a founder or like in my professional work history. Um, not only is it a struggle from a company morale and growth perspective, but on top of that, the entire world is telling us that the entire space that we're working in um is irrelevant and dead and doesn't make sense."

"There was a point in 2020 where um we were 6 months away from having to shutter our doors because we were going to run out of money. I…I it's just a feeling of desperation of just like oh my God like nothing is working and there's nothing we can do about it. Um, so that was a really tough and very low point."

"And the way we got through it was A, I have an amazing co-founder, um and I cannot imagine having gone through this without him. But B, I think it's again taking a very long-term view on what we're doing and does it actually make sense from first principles regardless of the kind of local climate that we're currently in at a specific point of time. Like is the mission that we're fighting for a mission that we want to see the world like adopt and to make it, you know, does it improve users' lives in some kind of meaningful way?"

"So it was kind of sticking to those first principles and also like the really amazing team that CoinTracker is. Like really bringing people in from the team and saying, 'Hey look, we're not going to lie to you here. Here is the reality of the situation, um here's what it means for us, and here's what we need to accomplish in order to get back on a growth trajectory.' Um, so we had to just basically have some really open, honest, vulnerable conversations with people. And um, I'm really glad we did that because it got us through some of those tough times."

"It's basically the companies that do survive those tough times in crypto that get to reap the benefits of the really good times like what we're in now." During the last crypto bull run, CoinTracker grew 14x during DeFi summer in 2021. During that time, they focused heavily on driving growth and getting as many users as possible. But as the space started to cool, they began to get feedback from customers that they were losing their product edge.

"Specific feedback that we got from users was basically that we hadn't kept the product up to date with the latest things that they were doing in the crypto space. So as crypto evolved, the use cases, the types of transactions, the activity, the diversity of the activity had evolved a lot. What we like failed to keep up with was the rise of all of this more advanced on-chain DeFi activity, people using liquidity pools, Uniswap."

"It was a painful realization having users tell us that we weren't solving their problem anymore. And so we basically just said, 'Okay, the only thing that matters is getting product quality up.'" Based on the feedback their customers gave them, CoinTracker decided to completely halt everything they were doing for 9 months. In that time, they reimagined what the product and company should look like.

"So for CoinTracker 2, we made a couple of specific changes that really transformed how the company works and how our product works. The first was elevating user obsession, and the result of that is that everyone in our company is constantly talking to users now at every level of the company—from um, customer support to product design to marketing to um, the product management team, engineers. We're constantly running user experience research."

"I myself am talking to users on a daily basis. Um, I'm constantly on Reddit and wherever our users are, we want to be there. We want to understand what's working and what's not, so we can constantly get that feedback and make improvements. So user obsession was number one. And then number two was that we shifted one of our company's guiding principles from 'Think Longterm' to 'Think Long-term, Ship Today.' And just that small change gave everyone in the company that permission that they needed in order to take some risks and experiment and just build the thing that they wanted to build and try it out."

"And as a result, the entire execution of the company massively accelerated almost overnight. And people were shocked. It was pretty wild; we could see the energy just light up across the company when we made that change."

"We've learned this important lesson that no matter how much we grow, no matter what scale the company reaches, we can't forget to always obsess over the users and make sure that we're staying up to date with their latest and evolving needs, especially in a space like crypto that changes quickly."

Chandan and his team used crypto to refocus on the two things that we at YC believe are the most important: building product and talking to users. They made sure they were ready for the next bull cycle with the launch of CoinTracker 2.0 in January. "This is the culmination of all of our product quality work over the last year. And while we had sort of painfully realized that we had fallen behind in some key areas before, with the new launch, we feel very confident that we're back on top."

"I think the best advice I can offer people who are in the crypto space um is to take a long-term view. Crypto is, I think, going to absolutely change the world. It already has, um, and it will continue to do so on a scale that is hard to even imagine, even today in 2024. And so the more patience one can have, the more like fruits of those labor that you'll be able to harvest down the line."

"So um, stay humble when things are going to the moon and stay believing when things are tough. Take a long-term view on what can happen here. Building crypto companies is hard; it's a challenge. But you can use the winters in an intelligent way to emerge as a stronger company. I believe crypto is still going to change the world. It already has, and I'm excited to see the future that it'll bring forth."

"So if you're looking to do crypto taxes or get your portfolio in order, check out cointracker.io. That's it for now. I'll see you next time."