SPVs
June 12, 2023
CoinList spun out of AngelList, so we had a lot of work we did with AngelList. One of the primary areas was SPVs for crypto fundraising rounds. CoinList helped great projects raise funds from accredited investors, and so there were a lot of SPVs through AngelList that invested on our platform for these opportunities.
Initially, we didn't do anything differently for these SPVs than for our other clients, but over time I realized that we could leverage these SPVs as an additional asset to our business. These SPVs usually had a lot of high-quality users that backed them, and instead of us working with the fund manager or AngelList to manage communications or distribute funds, we should try to own the customer relationship and go directly to the end users to get them engaged on the platform.
We ended up building a prototype for distributions of these SPVs that was super lightweight: a spreadsheet of names, emails, and allocation in the vehicles that could be uploaded, triggering a movement of funds in our system so that the users got whatever they were entitled to. It was a simple start, but powerful since this: kept the funds on our platform, triggered an email sent directly to the end user that their funds were available (and we tweaked the emails for these users so it told them how much more was to come), and indicated in the email what they could do with their funds on our platform (with clear CTAs)
We eventually built a bit more product around this (easier data entry and validations to build confidence in what you were sending to users) so that fund managers could handle distributions on their end without our team involvement. As a result, we gained interest from more SPVs and more end users due to this streamlined product.
This product itself didn't make a ton of revenue for us, but it brought in a lot more business (those SPV users generated significant revenue for us in our staking and mining operations businesses). It also taught me an interesting lesson. When we didn't have any process or product around this, we still helped these fund managers if they asked, but this usually led to pain on both our end and theirs. We weren't actively making money from this business, so our team put effort into closing these requests, but didn't go above and beyond. Once we actually made this a product and had clear SLAs, everyone had a better experience since there was agreement on expectations and the value the product was driving for everyone.