2015 was a year of transformation for me. I started working for an SEO company the same day I met my future wife. I gave up a series of dead-end jobs to dedicate my life to marketing. It only took a few months for my company to be profitable enough that I never had to work for another person again. Until recently, it has been the most liberating experience of my life.
Yet at the end of 2020, I casually sold this profitable business that I spent 5 years building to a partner. There were a number of reasons, but the only important one was a lack of interest. I realized that I was simply trading dollars for hours of my life. I was no longer invested beyond the paycheck, and that felt not much different from working for someone else. At the same time, I was overcome with an idea. That idea was decentralized finance.
This is the story of how I discovered Ethereum, and what I was willing to trade to be a part of this community.
Trading Facebook for ETH
Our time is the most valuable asset we have. Naturally, how we spend our time is the most valuable data a marketer can acquire. Therefore, it’s idiotic how much time we spend on Facebook, wasting our time and energy, and freely giving our valuable data to a corporation.
In an interview between Gabriel Haines and Supermassive, head of video & multimedia at The Defiant, the cinematic DeFi storyteller shared his concept behind a social experiment where participants would give up their Facebook accounts for a weekend. The value of that data over that period would be valuated and given to the participants in the form of tokens. The concept wasn’t just to show people the value of their data, but also to answer the question of where that extra time not browsing Facebook would be spent.
Soon after deactivating my accounts, I discovered the answer. Instead of arguing with people I didn’t even know about politics, discussions handicapped by the parameters of a broken financial and political system, I was finding solutions and engaging with some of the most brilliant people I’d ever engaged with. While I did become addicted to ‘Crypto Twitter’ in my own way, I still continue to find tremendously more value talking to cartoons and anons in this zany space than I ever did engaging with my own friends on Facebook. It’s easy to burn hours engaging with Crypto Twitter, but in the midst of the chaos I discovered the value Ethereum was bringing to DeFi.
Redphonecrypto poetically compared holding Bitcoin to harnessing time and energy in his interview with Gabriel Haines. While I agree with this comparison, I’ve become somewhat of an ETH maximalist. I see Bitcoin as finally getting its day in the sun thanks to Ethereum. In my view, the 2017-18 bull run was cut short because in spite of all the promise crypto offered financial systems, there was not enough utility for adoption. There was no Compound for lending and borrowing. There was no Yearn Finance. There was certainly no Badger DAO, bring BTC to DeFi on Ethereum. It is my opinion that the utility offered to Bitcoin by Ethereum and the greater DeFi ecosystem is what will ultimately solidify its mainstream adoption.
While negative political posting is a great way to get engagement on Facebook, my last posts were all related to Ethereum. I told my ‘friends’ to buy in September, when ETH was still tracking around $300. Later posts showed ETH gaining momentum, but none really got any comments. I felt like I was wearing a tinfoil hat before temporarily deactivating. I wasn’t trying to brag about my success. I just wanted other people to have the same financial opportunity I had.
When it was all said and done, less than a handful of people showed any interest in remaining connected outside of Facebook. I switched to permanent deletion and am proud to be dedicating my time to something more meaningful.
Selling a Profitable Business for ETH
While my business catered to a variety of niches over its lifespan, regenerative medicine was my focus prior to the pandemic. My work for my largest client involved developing marketing strategies to reach patients for regenerative medicine and hair transplants. We eventually became partners before I moved to Los Angeles to aid in the management of the business. I handled most of the initial patient consultations for the doctors to save them time and managed the day-to-day operations of the practice.
When I realized I was carrying greater weight than my paycheck justified, I split from my partner and decided to market regenerative medicine on my own. I built a team of my trusted business associates and friends to launch a pay-per-lead regenerative medicine marketing system for doctors. Los Angeles was to be our first location for geo targeting.
At that same time in March 2020, I was in the middle of purchasing a home in Las Vegas, aiming to get away from the high living expense of LA. The idea was that there was no need to live in LA to market to patients there. It was a strong business plan, but between the financial difficulty of buying a home and the blow to the economy from the pandemic, we abandoned the project. Thanks to getting a rebate on an ads campaign, our greatest loss came from the time spent on the project. We even made a little money, but it was still a huge disappointment.
When it was all said and done, I still had clients to service mostly in the medical industry. Unfortunately, I had little remaining enthusiasm for it. Additionally, I had just been qualified for the SBA PPP loan and the EIDL, programs meant to aid small business owners. I had the liquidity I needed to launch a new project, but I didn’t know where to spend it. I eventually decided to go all-in on crypto, sold my remaining clients for a mere $5000, and started spending 8 hours a day researching Bitcoin, Ethereum and Chainlink.
Right Idea, Wrong Time
Around August 2020, I had taken an interest in trading cryptocurrency after hearing about the price action of Bitcoin and Ethereum in the media. Chainlink was another project that caught my interest, though at the time I merely knew it was important for smart contracts. I didn’t even know what a smart contract was when I started buying LINK, BTC and ETH.
I discovered very quickly what an awful trader I was. In the course of a month or two, I was down about $2000 and ready to quit. I remember the moment when I approached my wife, tears streaming down my face and head in my hands. While this was only 20% of my portfolio, I felt like I was on the road to losing everything and I hated myself for failing at something I truly believed I could be successful in.
It was a dark time in my life. I’ve never been suicidal to the level that it never even made sense to me why a person would kill themselves, especially over money. In the darkest days of the pandemic and my initial failures to understand crypto markets, it illuminated to me what it really takes to make that decision. I felt like I was failing at the last thing I was interested in. Worse yet, I was failing as a provider for my family. My wife had also been in a car accident with a drunk driver that totaled our vehicle and was still working with a leg injury. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even carry my weight at home.
My wife doesn’t understand cryptocurrency and she’s up front about that. Still, in that moment and having nothing but faith to guide her words, she told me to keep going.
Discovering the Gabriel Haines Show
Shortly after my wife’s encouragement to keep going, I heard about a project called Yearn Finance whose governance token $YFI was worth more at one point than Bitcoin. I kept wondering how a token that you couldn’t even buy on Coinbase was worth more than Bitcoin.
While trying to discover what Yearn was and how to buy $YFI, I discovered an influencer who was building a following on YouTube named Gabriel Haines. Initially, I watched his videos and pieced together enough information to set up a private wallet and do my first trade on Uniswap where I purchased YFI. However, I was eventually more interested in his videos on earning rewards through DeFi protocols. I also discovered that I was better at making money just participating in DeFi and holding versus day trading.
I still had a tremendous amount of time on my hands. Idle hands truly are the Devil’s workshop, and I knew I needed to occupy my time with something meaningful or I’d continue trading away my profits. I reached out to Gabriel with the goal of helping him with his content production. I would have been happy just to do some work for free for him just to return the value I received from watching his videos. I wasn’t sure he’d even respond to my emails, let alone actually take an interest. Not only did I get to repay some of that value, but now we work together regularly and have become good friends.
Eventually my work helping Gabriel with video editing and sharing clips to his Twitter lead to a confidence to repeat my approach with other DeFi projects. I was learning so much and was no longer trading on a whim. I actually understood the ecosystem I was involved in and saw more value in creating content, participating in DeFi and holding Ethereum long term.
My first big opportunity came shortly after the launch of Badger DAO.
Becoming a Badger
I knew little about Badger DAO outside a workshop video between Gabriel Haines and Chris Spadafora, aka Spadaboom. While I was interested in checking out the project after it launched, I wasn’t immediately anymore enthusiastic about it than any other project in DeFi.
This changed in November when Badger launched the Honey Badger Hunt Airdrop. While being an airdrop recipient certainly increased my enthusiasm for the project, I was more impressed with the airdrop distribution. By distributing based on qualifying DeFi activities, like minting wBTC or participating in governance, they were ensuring participation from people who were truly engaged in the ecosystem. In my view, having amassed over a billion dollars in liquidity (over 2 billion at one point) in barely a few months, this is one of the most successfully marketed projects in history. Not only did I enthusiastically stake my $BADGER airdrop, but I began to participate in the Discord and the Badger forum.
When recruitment efforts began in the forum, I noticed an opportunity for creative writing to bring tremendous value to Badger. I wrote my first article, posted it in spite of fear of criticism or rejection, and waited. The original Dropbox link to the article received over 100 clicks, tons of positive feedback and, even better, I was welcomed to the DAO to write content.
Going on 4 months now with Badger, it has been an incredible journey. While not without its challenges, it has been one of the most positive working experiences of my life.
What’s Next?
There is clearly a strong need for content creators in the DeFi space. Most of the content we read is geared for crypto enthusiasts and degens, creating a barrier to entry for individuals outside the space looking to join the financial revolution of decentralized finance.
Over the coming weeks, I look forward to collaborating with a team I’ve assembled for addressing this exact problem.
One life has been saved by DeFi and the promise of Ethereum. Who’s next?
Do your own research. Not financial advice. Make responsible decisions and be the future you want to see in DeFi.
-DeFi Fry
Great article and great journey!
The story of Target and marketing is interesting n pretty influential. If it's "free", WE are the product, right?
Mindfulness is key.