CoinMarketCap

Tech companies buy media arms as cheap user acquisition

Shaan's thesis on why crypto media commands a premium: exchanges like Coinbase and Binance are worth $80-100B and want owned media as a cheap customer-acquisition channel, so they overpay for sites like CoinMarketCap. He'd put a 2.5x crypto premium on a normal media valuation.

“And so they've been buying up media companies in order to own their own media arm, which is basically cheap user acquisition for them. And so whether it's them or it's a traditional media company that will buy, I don't know. But I do think that a crypto news site is going to get whatever, whatever a normal media site would sell for. I'd put a 2.5x on it for crypto right now”

Don't just pick door 1 or 2: map every no-risk way to ride a wave

Shaan's revisionist framework for catching a trend: beyond 'do nothing' (door 1) and 'build the big risky thing' (door 2), buy the underlying asset, build conviction before folding to a smarter skeptic, and consider zero-risk plays like a media company or an agency (e.g. Consensys-style consulting doing $100M+).

“So what are the no-risk ways to ride this wave? That's what I think Blockworks did. That's what CoinDesk did. That's what CoinMarketCap did. So there was other things you could have done. You could have created a media company”

Steal thisWhen a new wave hits, list 10 ways to ride it (own the asset, media, agency, community) and match the play to your conviction level.

CoinMarketCap gets more monthly traffic than the Wall Street Journal

Started by one guy in his apartment just displaying crypto price data, CoinMarketCap grew to ~100M monthly visitors, passing the Wall Street Journal's ~80M.

“And it is amazing to me that this thing was getting 100 million monthly visitors when the Wall Street Journal was only getting, you know, like 80. It had passed the Wall Street Journal. That blew my mind and I had to know some more.”

Picks and shovels: sell to the gold rush, don't join it

CoinMarketCap sold to Binance for a rumored $400M by just displaying crypto prices rather than speculating. Shaan ties it to the picks-and-shovels playbook: in any gold rush, sell tools to the miners instead of mining yourself.

“whenever there's a big gold rush, don't try to be one of the people in the gold rush. Go sell shovels to the people who want to go get gold.”

Steal thisWhen a market is exploding, build the neutral data/tools layer for everyone playing, not another speculative bet inside it.

Build the CoinMarketCap for any hot industry

Shaan generalizes the data-display playbook: become the searchable info/leaderboard site for any space with a lot of interest, the way DeFi Pulse does it for NFTs, Crunchbase for funding, and Chartable for podcasts.

“And I think you could take that same principle to really any space that's hot, right? Like, you could do it with— Crunchbase or whatever did it with startup funding news. Every time there's funding, cool, we're going to write it down here, and it's a searchable database of that. And you can just do this in any industry where there's a lot of interest.”

Steal thisPick a hot, data-rich niche and become its at-a-glance info display and searchable database before anyone else does.