Clashing Minds

How I understood what the difference between a coder and a founder is.

In 2021 I started working for a cryptocurrency exchange, as a frontend engineer. I got bored quickly and wanted to touch cryptopunk world of mayhem myself – I asked for it, and got it. I worked on a Web3 product that involved staking, liquidity provisioning, and eventually got my hands really deep into Solidity, world of AMMs and applied math.

That didn't last for long. After months of exciting Web3 work, I was shifted to work on a Telegram bot, that didn't even communicate with the blockchain, but only queried an internal crypto-processing API. I got bored very quickly again.

That was about time when I found out about the Kyiv Tech Summit Hackathon, and decided it's just what I need – I can get more friends, build cool stuff, and potentially start my own thing. It was founded by CJ and Rev who have decided to contribute to the foundation of Ukrainian-based Web3 founders. And that's where I met Kien.

Although my Web3 skills were silly back then, we've won an award for a "Most impactful project built on Ethereum". That lit a spark in us, and we decided to go forward, with a vision that what theoretically can be tokenized – will be.

Straight after, Kien left his full-time job to be the brain of just-founded company, but I stayed and thought that my part-time involvement would complement the company enough as I keep being the ultimate soldier, coding anything that requires to be done.

We also had a third co-founder, Ivan. He's a great guy, but has set irrational expectations with huge personal financial risk exposure, and had to quit the next quarter.

Since then, we've gone through 3 pivots, having none of them to reach the public release.

Having a technical mind, I've always been striving for perfect solutions. Building your own project lets you to decide everything, but also you are the only one to blame your code. I was learning fast and was quickly realizing most of the things I wrote were crap, so I always spent extra time refactoring, squeezing the "nicest" set up I could possibly squeeze.

That contributed to my coding skills a lot, but didn't contribute to the product at all. Being an ultimate soldier was not enough to get a good thing out.

I've worked at least 13 hours a day, grinding my 9-5 and coding at startup after, and always thought – "I'm not the brain, I'm the weapon". I let Kien brainstorm all the stuff and figured out having me implementing his ideas would work out. I thought that I don't have time to think, I only have time to act. I believe, Kien thought the same.

Having pivoted 3 times, I finally asked myself, – what the fuck are we actually building? Who will use it? What's the target audience? How can this be sustainable?

It turned out I had a completely different point of view, I had it the whole time. I was always quitting the discussion early, leaving Kien's argument win on a point of "trust". He's a great founder, but also a hard guy to convince something about.

That was a harsh reality. We've had long debates on my doubts, but never found a confluence. We have been building a new, innovative product, that was doomed to fail.

At the time, Kien had discovered memecoin launchpads, such as pump.fun, and was talking offtopic about it. Having my fingers sharpened and founder mode finally turned on, I've seen an opportunity.

We're nobodies. Noone knows about us, as we built in the shadow. We never grew our personal audiences. I knew that fundraising a considerable amount of money to make something innovative or creating a new market required good connections, that we both lacked of.

I then proposed to not invent the wheel, but take something that already exists – and make it better. I've seen the UX flaws of potential competitors, I've even saw their awful coding skills in my Chrome DevTools.

That's how beliefs.social started.

I'm now much more involved into the decision making process and encouraged to let my opinions out loud. It is truly exciting to be in a position where you get to choose not how to build, but also what to build, and it's a duty, even if you're a technical person. If you think you only get time to code and you're a co-founder, give yourself a little brake, get off the coding grind and look at things that you actually do from a higher perspective.

We still debate on many things, but we've found out that when we do, we get to make good decisions. It's just like cold shower, you won't get used to it, but with time, you'll get more prepared for it – mindfully and emotionally.

Thanks to Christopher Wallace, Samuel Louis Huber, Stephan, Kien Fam Chung and Rostyslav Bortsman for reading drafts of this.