Introduction

As I embarked on a personal project, I was motivated by the desire to make a hefty sum of money in a short span. The project involved a cryptocurrency mechanism called a "sniper bot". The principle of the sniper bot is to scan all newly minted cryptocurrencies directly on the blockchain, buy them for a mere $10, and then implement a gradual resale strategy based on growth. The risk was high, with many $10 investments potentially going down the drain, but the hope was that one out of fifty projects would yield substantial returns, possibly surpassing $17,000.

First attempt

I decided to build my bot on Solana, a blockchain platform that I had heard was in vogue. Without challenging this perception, I was ready to dive headfirst into the project. However, just before I took the plunge, experience gave me a moment of pause. I questioned whether Solana was indeed the most popular platform or if I was merely under that impression because a couple of people had suggested it. I realized the importance of verifying this before investing my efforts, which led me to conduct a comprehensive analysis of recently created cryptocurrencies, their characteristics, and growth over time.

Taking a break

The initial analysis revealed that if I could identify the top five cryptocurrencies, I wouldn't need a sniper bot. I could manually invest at position 345 instead of 3, making less profit indeed, but considerably more than the 345,000th position. This strategy allowed me to start without any technical setup.

However, my experience offered another layer of protection before I began. I realized that I could used AI to analyze the launched and high-performing tokens. I could scan their websites and the number of followers on all their social media platforms, and calculate an "investability" score. This meant that instead of randomly hitting the bullseye by investing $10 in hundreds of projects, I could invest $50 in a nearly sure-shot project.

Let's go

After realizing this, I dove headfirst into developing a visualization tool, confident that I could do it quickly. However, after spending three hours without success (Solana blockchain sucks), I understood that instead of doing all this, I could simply connect to a quality page and target viable ICO projects by scraping data. I could determine their viability using AI that would check their websites, their follower count across platforms, determine a score, and auto-invest. There was no need to connect to the blockchain.

Conclusion

This case study is a reminder of the lean process, which is a very good practice in order to avoid overcomplicating things. I took the opportunity to write a new process for myself that you don't need to read:

Lean methodology

  • What is the goal?
  • What is a satisfying degraded goal?
  • How would you proceed manually (or with no tech)?
  • How can we do simpler?
  • How would you do without tech knowledge?
  • How do you mix both, apply the tech to the no tech methodology to reach the degraded goal even faster? What about the goal?
  • What business model type (B2B, B2C, B2B2C, etc..) do you think is the most relevant and why?
  • Do you think this company and business idea is profitable or even sustainable? Explain why and really consider the financial aspect
  • What are the top 5 biggest risks ?
  • How would you do sales when the saas product is ready and why?
  • what are the critical points that can lead to success or failure?
  • What are examples of business that succeeded or failed due to those critical points, and why?

Why don't I need to read it?

Because I made a tool reflecting all this methodology and those questions! Enjoy, and don't miss the "Summarize" button at the end that will give you the 2 most important things to know out of those blocks. Cheers!