In early 2025, YZi Labs posted this:
Like many internet ideas, it sounded obvious in hindsight.
Unlike most internet ideas, we decided to build it immediately.
Within hours we had reached out.
Within roughly 30 hours we had a working MVP.
Not a pitch deck.
Not a concept.
A functioning product.
The goal wasn't to raise money.
It wasn't even to secure a partnership.
We simply wanted to answer a question:
Would people actually use this?
A few days later, we found ourselves on a call demonstrating the product to Changpeng Zhao (CZ), founder of Binance, and members of his team.
The feedback was positive.
What happened next was one of those moments that only seems normal in crypto.
The following day I travelled to Abu Dhabi and spent several hours with CZ and a small group of people. Surprisingly little of the conversation was about ReachMe itself.
At the time, he had only recently been released from prison, and much of the discussion revolved around his experiences, what the past year had been like, and his perspective on everything that had happened.
It wasn't a business meeting.
It wasn't a pitch.
It was simply an opportunity to meet someone who had become larger than life within the industry and discover that, underneath all the headlines, he was just another person with stories to tell.
Over the following two weeks we pushed hard.
Security reviews.
Company formation.
Infrastructure.
Payments.
Compliance.
The countless small details that separate an idea from a real product.
By the end of it, ReachMe was live.
What Happened Next
The launch exceeded our expectations.
People used it.
People paid.
The attention market was real.
But something unexpected happened.
A huge percentage of activity quickly concentrated around a single user.
Internally, we started joking that we should have called the product "ReachCZ" instead of ReachMe.
In theory, ReachMe was a marketplace for attention.
In practice, much of the market revolved around one person.
That created an interesting challenge.
The product worked.
The payments worked.
The incentives worked.
But much of the demand was concentrated around a handful of highly visible individuals.
The question became whether we were seeing a platform dynamic or simply the effect of one of the most influential people in crypto participating in the network.
As the initial excitement faded, so did much of the activity.
Looking back, I don't consider that a failure.
If anything, it was exactly what startups are supposed to do.
We had a hypothesis.
We built quickly.
We put it in front of real users.
And reality gave us an answer.
The Real Lesson
The biggest lesson wasn't about crypto.
It wasn't about fundraising.
And it wasn't even about messaging.
It was about execution.
Most opportunities disappear while people are planning.
By the time a committee has finished discussing an idea, the moment is often gone.
ReachMe existed because we moved before we had all the answers.
We built before we knew whether it would work.
We learned from reality instead of debating hypotheticals.
The second lesson was that attention is far more concentrated than most people realize.
The internet looks decentralized.
Attention isn't.
A small number of people command a disproportionate share of it, and markets naturally form around that scarcity.
ReachMe was one of the fastest products I've ever helped build.
It taught me a lot about attention, incentives, and human behaviour.
But more than anything, it reinforced a belief I've carried throughout my career:
The internet rewards builders.
Everything else comes later.