Founders Feature #037 - Vega Labs
Building fintech products at the intersection of web2 and web3
Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Sujith Vishwajith, Founder of Vega Labs, a technology studio focussed on building fintech products at the intersection of web2 and web3 based in the US.
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Here’s what Vega Labs is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
99% of the population is not on crypto yet and have no understanding of web3 despite how much is it being praised at the moment. This is because the current functionality and User Interface are just not intuitive for the majority of people. There is no real link between fintech on web2 and fintech on web3 right now.
The Solution:
Vega Labs' goal is to build fintech apps that bridge web2 and web3, to make them more accessible to a majority of people. We currently have 3 apps that are either live or in beta.
Roi: Making complex financial data simple and digestible through visualised alternative data and community insights, while allowing you to track all of your investments in assets across web2 and web3 in one app.
OnlyTrades: OnlyFans for Investing - Allows you to follow and copy your favourite investors as well as monetise your portfolio in one-click.
trades.wtf: Spotify Wrapped for Investing - Allows investors to easily see unique insights into their trading performance, by analysing the best and worst trades, and the best performing open position.
The Team:
I'm the CEO and solo-founder. I previously worked at Airbnb, Google, and Microsoft Research as a Software Engineer and left my job to work on Vega Labs. We are now a team of 5 working on the apps, a designer, a growth marketer, and two engineers.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I've been investing for a couple of years now and it really was a solo activity for me back then. In 2020 though it seemed like everyone started investing, and I suddenly found myself in 10 different group chats and discord servers where everyone was sending screenshots from Robinhood or Coinbase. The form of communication was highly inefficient. So, I built a quick MVP for an app where people could see each other's trades and get notifications, and over a few months, that MVP turned into Vega Labs with the decision to focus on multiple different apps.
The main app we are working on is Roi, and that idea came about by interviewing lots of users and trying to understand the workflows of modern investors. We noticed that most traditional investors managed all their investments in one app. Today's new investors however have multiple wallets because they are investing in multiple asset classes, fragmenting the system in which they made their investments. The investment-making process was also entirely fragmented, looking at data from all over the place: What's trending online? How are stocks doing? What is the community investing in? Traditional financial data is too complex for the everyday investor to understand.
Trades.wtf and OnlyTrades were secondary apps for now, that solve a problem with a single, simple feature.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Investing has become mainstream, and now, investing in multiple asset classes is becoming pretty common, too. A lot of people own some crypto now. When people are now asked why they invest, the answers have changed from fundamental data sources which were hard to understand and not very accessible, to alternative data sources, such as social media. So, the way investments are made has changed overall as well. In fact, crypto is almost entirely alternative data-driven, being based on social hype and other social metrics, information that can't be found in any brokerage.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
Having worked alone on the first iterations of the product, getting a team is definitely one of my favourite things. Besides that, seeing organic interest from actual people in the community, and having 1000s of people on our waitlists without any paid marketing has been pretty great. We also launched a TikTok channel and already have 10,000 followers within a month, which is pretty cool for a tech company!
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Managing my time is hard. Being a solo founder is difficult because I have to manage the team and the roadmap, while still working on the engineering and product aspects. The hardest thing is reaching a state where my time allocation is sustainable. Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
When I started working on Vega, my ideas were quite broad and I tried to work everything into one app. So, something I've definitely learned and wish I had done differently is to start as small as possible. Now I've learned that it doesn't matter if it's not perfect. Just pick a problem and launch an MVP as soon as possible to start validating hypotheses. We eventually started launching apps around a single feature, such as OnlyTrades.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Aim to build relationships over anything, whether it's with investors, people you're working with or just anyone you happen to meet and get along with. This will allow you to build a community around you, which makes building and launching something later on so much easier. Your network will be your most valuable asset.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Make sure to understand your value before founding your own startup. While you don't necessarily have to take time to build a portfolio of skills to have 'something to show', it certainly makes things easier taking that time to build your brand, your skills, and your network, and be ready to capitalise on it when you need it. Deciding to build something without a track record of having ever built anything before is hard.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Start small, and learn to ship products around single features. It will allow you to declutter your mind and ideas while validating hypotheses as soon as possible.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I am part of a few entrepreneur communities such as Contrary or On Deck, and the people in these communities inspire me all the time. Knowing that they're in the same boat as me, and seeing how hard they are working on making their visions happen is so cool.
Also, my mom. For different reasons, but she's super hardworking and supports me with everything. She actually suggested I start a company when I was much younger.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut