HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
I come from a nontraditional business background.
I briefly helped run our family auto repair franchise. I’ve sold live snails on the internet. During college, I established myself as a creative director for several webcam girls. I also helped medical marijuana growers stay compliant with state laws for several years after college, and then I finally settled in the Cryptocurrency world.
What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
FreeBitcoins.com, our goal is to spread cryptocurrency, allow people to trade altcoins safely, and allow people to have a chance to try cryptocurrency for free.
What is the origin story?
I acquired FreeBitcoins.com in 2015. The domain itself was registered in 2010 when Bitcoin was trading around 25 cents each.
If the person would have spent $9.99 on Bitcoin rather than the domain, it would have been 40 Bitcoins for $9.99. 40 BTC is worth around $1,600,000 USD at the time of typing this!
Needless to say, I really enjoy our domain despite many people disagreeing that it’s a good domain name for a serious Cryptocurrency altcoin exchange service.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
We are a really small team of two.
I love the idea that a team should be able to be fed with a single large pizza. Right now, we are both hungry! That’s why we solve problems for ourselves and it just happens other people face those same issues.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
If I wasn’t with FreeBitcoins.com… I would be selling live snails in California through my old company SnailsInTheMail.com.
I really enjoyed delivering snails to people all over SF. I met all types of people from all walks of life doing that. It was really fun turning a “pest” into cash.
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
I measure my success with how much success I can bring others.
If others around me are successful, then I should be doing pretty well. Right now, FreeBitcoins.com is set up for a lot of people to be potentially really successful with the website and cryptocurrency in general. I really want a Gulfstream G650ER and a yacht that is crewed/staffed extremely well.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
I still think we have yet to catch “real” traction, but our most recent goal achieved was becoming a top 100,000 website according to Alexa.com. Right now we are at 75,000 and I’m just thankful it seems we are headed in the right direction.
What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?
I’m excited and concerned about the same thing, Bitcoin/cryptocurrency. I’m extremely concerned about how the government is going to use some of these technologies that we call a blessing today against us. I think some of these freedom tools that we are so excited about and work so hard on for free could potentially bite us in the ass. I think the biggest blessing of the world would be if the world didn’t need Bitcoin, rather than the world getting Bitcoin.
What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?
I received an email that FreeBitcoins.com could potentially be voted on and I was interested in what kind of feedback we would receive! I like the simplicity of the Hackernoon logo.
What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?
- To smoke less weed (those bitcoins/dogecoins are going to be worth something).
- Gambling losses can NOT be deducted from nongambling income.
- Don’t give up because the answer is always surprisingly close by.
What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?
Fuck VUE and its ability to SEO. We’ve had a horrible time getting search engines to see our VUE web pages this year. I never thought in a million years that SEO would be so challenging, but alas!