Introducing AltScreener and Higherrrrrrr Retro
I’ll talk about altscreener at the bottom of this post, but I wrote this post yesterday about fear when facing near death company experiences. It’s centered around what happens when company leaders realized that there’s a roadblock that could kill the project or company.
I’ve seen this many, many times. It happens with every company. With my first company, it was because the market for infrastructure wasn’t materializing in a way that would support the funding structured we had raised on. I’ve also seen it in the context of different cofounder situations, competitor pricing etc etc with other companies.
I wanted to write about how this happened with higherrrrrrr, how I handled it, what the outcome was, and what I learned. I’ve never seen another situation like this, and I’m hoping it’s can be helpful to other entrepreneurs in the same place.
The start to higherrrrrrr went incredibly well. We launched a neutral platform and got an incredible amount of attention pointed to the website and to me as a founder. It was fun. We spent a lot of time joking on the internet, community members launched meme coins and there were a few public and very active community groups on telegram. At a high-level, what I’m most proud of from the initial platform:
We launched a neutral platform and didn’t personally trade any more than token amounts or custody assets which generated significant volume (100s of millions of organic volume)
We built a massive community
We were one of the top 3 platforms on Base in the fall measured by verified real-user (not bot) wallets and a top 5 memecoin launchpad overall
Everything was fair launch - there were no insider deals with influencers and the like
The place things started to unravel was when I started looking at our performance vs competitors, and trying to explain the differences. What we discovered is that on other coins in the same ecosystems, there was suspicious volume that couldn’t not be explained by anything other than wash trading bots (not organic trading). My mistakes started where instead of ignoring that activity and focusing on our development, I focused on calling it out in a vigilante robin-hood sort of way.
There were a few downstream effects of this. First, we were right. When 98% of activity on a coin is coming from wallets that ONLY trade that coin and not other coins in the ecosystem - it’s likely not real. This is true for a few coins in the meme market, but there is line where some volume definitely isn’t organic. There is no proof, but no other motivation accounts for things like that. The problem was, for me as a leader to call it out, that created an environment where our community also got upset and started being loud and disruptive to projects. This created a problem for whoever was doing it, and led to the following timeline:
Middle of December - realized how manipulated metrics of competitors were on Base - specifically in the Clanker ecosystem, $BRETT, and $SKIMASKDOG - brought concerns to the Coinbase team and offered to help with understanding fraudulent behavior on base (even rejoining the team to fix it possibly, privately)
Coinbase team acknowledges and supports the Clanker in public vs the higherrrrrrr platform - explicitly ices me and our team on the premise that Clanker was more legitimate because “they had just shipped without anyone elses help in the Base ecosystem“ (which was untrue, and in hindsight was due to some of my own polarization and strong opinions) - this starts a process that forces us to start a migration to Solana because we weren’t able to get the support of the base core team - they explicitly chose to support Clanker over Higherrrrrrr in public even though we were larger at the time by relevant metrics
As we’re migrating, we dig into data analytics to start to understand the root of the manipulative scheme - our conclusion is that members of those teams must be the ones recycling fees to prop up the market caps and volumes of assets, but we have no proof without funds flows
Dec 25 - came out with some data on market manipulation linked above. Contrasted with public Base data (all metrics included), it shows organic volume is 50-100x less than is being reported by the teams of these coins (and Base team)
First week of Jan - actively working (and livestreaming) our Solana migration work - on a livestream an anonymous account appears and starts dropping personal details about my life that would be hard to find without resources (old jobs that weren’t public, details about people close to me that are not public, would require someone to follow me or them in person). At this point it became a physical safety concern.
We spent a few weeks focusing on safety, worked with security professionals and legal help - documenting as much as we can. The consensus was to stop talking about competition and keep building quietly
By late Feb / early March we were close to launching our Solana offering
Early March our community (not me I was in meetings for most of this) starts to get upset about another coin on social media - because of the association I get more backhanded threats and don’t feel safe. My cofounder also gets weird traffic in twitter DMs. I get some phone harassment.
Re engage with security and legal help. I decided that I need to step away as a founder because of any potential safety issues for people in my life, but want to help support the other folks working with us as well as memecoin founders with their launches on solana that we committed to helping with from the background
We open source everything and help with some Solana work with specific teams, but without the active social presence struggle to regain PMF for the new launches
Later it comes out that the Clanker founders had stolen funds from their previous employer and the core founder leading the project is fired - still no proof on the other coins
The real thing I need to admit here is that I went from very aggressively building that business to very afraid of the 2nd or 3rd order effects if someone that I couldn’t put a face or name to online decided that other people in my life should be a target, whether it was real or not, reacting to the fear was reasonable but also my fault. We doubled down on security and have been quite quiet in the last 3-4 months. I’ve been building other projects FT and taking care of some critical health things. It didn’t die, but the experience has definitely evolved it a lot.
For consumer founders: safety shouldn’t be an afterthought. After you get to a certain scale, 0.001% of people will be scary or dangerous and not people you want to readily find addresses online. There are security resources for this and I can help you find them if you’re in my network. For me I had doxxed certain things and had to move (physically), invest in security (cyber and physical), online privacy, and just making sure ducks were in a row. I’ve invested a good amount in security since - anyone that comes after me or the people I’m close to physically would have issues both with systems I have in place to deal with that now.
For the project, the market moved extremely fast. I’ve been talking with Squigs, and we don’t think another launchpad attempt makes sense now that we have this figured out, but we do think there’s an opportunity to build a meaningful content business on top of what we’ve already created in terms of twitter following. That’s altscreener.xyz and we should have our first posts coming out this week. I’m excited to see where it goes.