What was your life like before Bounty0x?
Before Bounty0x, I was employed as an associate attorney at an insurance defense litigation firm. In my free time, I reached out to companies in the cryptocurrency space and assisted them with various tasks, including in community management and marketing. These jobs weren’t related to my day job, but they allowed me to use my skill set and learn about cryptocurrency.
While working these jobs, I noticed there was a unmet market demand for a product which would enable online freelancers and content creators to earn cryptocurrency. At the time, their were numerous jobs being posted by companies in online forums, but this was pretty inefficient. Therefore, I posted the concept for BountyOx on a github repo, to see if it there was any interest. Deniz Dalkilic responded that he was interested in the idea and later joined as CTO. We decided to develop a product which would streamline the process of posting these tasks and receiving work.
What’s your relationship with risk, especially as an attorney?
I believe that risks should be clearly quantified and managed. Risks should be clearly analyzed and minimized to the greatest extent possible in order to reduce and mitigate potential downside.
Has anything surprised you while launching the business?
When we launched two years ago, we enjoyed a great deal of immediate growth — more than we expected. That was a surprise.
In retrospect, launching and developing the business, features, and customer service required creativity, attention to detail and problem solving. For example, we incorporated KYC identity verification through Bloom after receiving feedback from our users that this was a feature that was in great demand and added significant value to our customers.
What’s your approach to the business? How do you get things done?
I see building a business as a series of very small tasks, which over time lead to something bigger than the individual parts. We make sure to do significant planning and researching when developing new features in order to reduce the likelihood of having to go back and make changes. We delegate tasks through Trello and communicate internally through Slack.
What is your superpower?
My management style. I like to give people freedom in their job, so I try to manage employees to have the best possible output and authority to make decisions. This kind of earned trust allows them to take ownership of their work and be more productive.
What’s your team like?
We are a remote, global team. Our CTO Deniz is in London and Pascal, our CMO, is in Germany. We use Slack and Telegram to communicate and keep really flexible schedules.