From +528% ROI with crypto trading to Cryptopy SaaS

I developed a +528% ROI crypto trading strategy with friends in 2021. We outperformed the market (e.g: investment in BTC that year couldn't have made more than +100% if they bought at the lowest price and sold at the highest price). Then we decided to create Cryptopy, an SaaS to send the alerts we created for other traders.

Here is our story:

Crypto familiarization

A few years ago, I created an account on Kraken, a website that allows you to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.

At that point, 1 BTC was worth around 1000€, which I thought was a lot, but I decided to try cryptocurrencies and buy 1 BTC to use as a conversion asset to buy multiple coins. My first investment was a cryptocurrency called 'XLM' which I bought for a total of 80 euros.
After 4 days it was worth €688. x8 in 4 days! Wow, I couldn't believe it, isn't it crazy? I have purchased stocks before, I know there are risks, but I've never found such a profitable investment.
My family knew about my investment, some laughed at me and said: 'This is a bubble, you're going to lose everything’ or ‘this is not real money, you might not be able to get your euros back’ etc.

I heard warnings but I knew the risks, and wanted to continue exploring the crypto world. I increased my budget. I bought more BTC to reach a total of 1,5K€ investment, and I told myself that was my limit.

This investment limit is an important concept in finance: don’t invest the money you need. That amount varies from person to person. Basically, 1,5k€ may seem a lot to some, and nothing to others. I knew that even if I lost 1,5k€ my life wouldn’t change, I could always eat everyday, sleep in a bed and sometimes enjoy a beer.

Another important investment concept is diversification. Investing 100% in one asset is risky: if the asset crashes, or if you buy on an exchange that disappears you may lose all your money.

That’s why I bought different assets on different exchanges. I’ll explain later.

To choose which assets to buy, I spent hours - almost everyday - researching information on crypto. When I believed in a crypto, I went to Coinmarketcap. This is a crypto bible where you can find a lot of information. I used it to find out where to buy the crypto. That’s how I ended up subscribing to several exchanges such as Bittrex, Poloniex, Binance… Some of them no longer exist, Cryptopia for instance.

I had a mid/long term approach, most of the time I held crypto for a few months/years, depending on the news.

I was spending a lot of time buying at a good price, and it was very difficult to decide what portion of my budget to allocate to each crypto. My portfolio increased in a crazy way and I remember how exciting it was to check my total balance everyday.

However, there is a famous rule: You don't make or lose money while you're not selling. I knew that. Then I decided to take 1k€ profit for every 10K€ reached. It may not sound like much in terms of income, but I dreamed about a bigger amount.

I reached 10K€ after a few months, and I saved 1k€ in my bank account as planned.

Opportunity discovering

After looking at the charts daily for a while, I noticed some patterns and found correlations between trends and indicators. I tried to trade manually when I found interesting patterns but going through each chart one by one was very time consuming. I could spend hours fixing my screen to find great opportunities. It couldn’t stay that way. I had a life to live.

That’s how in 2018 I decided to develop a simple script to notify me when a crypto was in a certain pattern. I had the chance to know a bit about coding but I wasn’t good at that time. I didn’t automatize my script to scan all charts and send notifications, I had to manually launch the script every time I wanted to find opportunities. It wasn’t perfect but it saved me time, and I was quite profitable using it. I reached 20k€ in a few weeks and I saved 1k€. My initial budget (1,5k€) was refunded, with a profit of 1,5k€: I doubled my investment in a year.

Enjoy before falling

I will always remember reaching almost 30k€ on New Year’s Eve 2016. I was really happy to see how the investment paid off. All good things have an end though. With my work and new personal activities I spent less time monitoring my portfolio and I stopped trading with my signals script. Bull market (i.e: a period where trend is increasing) turned into a bear market (trend is decreasing).  All my assets were falling: my almost 30k€ became 20k, then 10k€ and I didn’t have the energy to analyze crypto.

I closed many accounts I had on exchanges as it was complicated to monitor them all. I stopped looking at prices, my portfolio was worth about 2k.

Tipping point: COVID

And then COVID happened. After the lockdown I went on holiday, I took the train and went for a week to visit a couple of friends in northern France.

My friend is someone I know well, she was my roommate for a year. We used to share “silly” activities together: money betting, casinos, scratch games. We don’t really expect to “make” money with these games, but we enjoy that special moment where you think “What if we get rich”.

One day I told her about my signal script I developed for crypto, and I asked her if she would like to work on it with me. Her day-to-day job is Java developer, a perfect fit. She said yes. I wasn’t surprised as I know her, but I was a bit scared it would become one of these projects where you say “yeah cool, let’s do it” but nothing happens next. It wasn’t our case. I showed her my script, explained patterns and a few hours later we started to work on a better opportunity finder. She coded a better alert system in Java. We were focused on the Poloniex exchange, as it was the one I used the most at that time.

The first prototype was completed in a few days. We analyzed all signals to see if the results were what we expected. It worked, but I had a hard time changing the code. We finally redeveloped the tool in python, it’s well adapted for scripting. In a few days our initial Java code was finished in python and we added automation and discord notifications to be notified whenever an opportunity happened.

We were excited about it. Her husband helped us to improve our strategy over time. It was amazing, it worked very well. We were able to know in real time when crypto charts matched our strategy: crypto below Bollinger, RSI < 30 and a variation percentage. And this for all Binance crypto, futures & spot.
As our strategy was great we wanted to automate our trades.

We switched exchange Poloniex to use Binance as they offered “OCO” orders (specific orders where you can set a take profit and a stop loss.

Everytime our script (let’s call it our ‘bot’) saw an opportunity, our bot bought the crypto, and set an OCO order. When it was ready, I invested 4,6k€ to trade with the bot. My friends did the same. We didn’t share the money at first. Every time our bot bought or sold a crypto we were notified.

Our model worked well and was profitable from day one. It was hard to believe that we built such a good bot.

We improved our bot over time. For instance, the first version was able to buy and sell with BTC. We created other bots to trade with other assets (USDT & ETH). Also, bots traded on Spot section only: we added Futures trading, with leverage.

Leverage is insane, some days we won as much as our monthly work salary. In a week, starting from 1,5k€ we reached 27,5K ! However, it’s not paradise: crashes with leverage were rudes.
Very rude.
The day after reaching 27,5K we dropped to 10k€.

There’s no secret: if you can earn more with an investment, it’s often more risky, you can also lose more. Adding Futures was not that easy as Futures OCO orders do not exist on Binance. We had to develop our own OCO order.

At first we used to have bugs: orders not placed, duplicate purchases were made, etc. It wasn’t easy, but after a few months of iterations we obtained stable bots, and my initial investment of 4,6k€ turned to be 28,2k€ .

Cryptopy SAS creation

1st launch

End of 2021 we created our company Cryptopy to mutualize the money with my friends and to monetize our alerting service. Users could set their strategy (MA crossing, ADX, drop, short, long…) to receive real time notifications whenever a coin matches strategy. In addition to this, we opened a free discord community to discuss with traders.

This alerting service was the first product we monetized. And it was a failure. Why?
- Too many choices kill the choice. People didn't know what strategy use.
- Traders are difficult to reach

2nd launch

That time, we decided to listen to users and review our offer.
We now propose our own alerts, the ones we used to make +528% ROI.
Traders receive the same alerts and can talk about it on Discord -> community spirit.

Also, we redesigned the website to give a better look to Cryptopy (our first website looked old)

Launch was very recent, so time will let us know if we were right to do so.

Bonus: A product change can lead to other opportunities

We recently talked with a crypto influencers. He told us he needed a tool to inform automatically his audience whenever he buys or sells crypto on Binance , by sending them a message on his paying Telegram group. We had all the code to do this, so we accepted to let him use our tool for free, with a commission fee.
If by chance you are a crypto influencers and want that tool too, you can write to me: Pauline_Cx .

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