Hoosling

My first real startup. I was 16.

The idea was simple: let anyone invest in startups using crypto. No accredited investor requirements. No geographic restrictions. Just a wallet and a dream.

Traditional startup investing is broken. If you want to invest in a promising company early, you need to be an accredited investor (meaning you already have money), know the right people, live in Silicon Valley or somewhere similar, and survive an endless legal process. With crypto, those barriers disappear. Anyone with a wallet can participate.

Three teenagers in Costa Rica building a crowdfunding platform. We didn't know what we didn't know. That was probably an advantage.

I designed the MVP in Figma and put it on WordPress in less than seven days. The full product took about six months of code. React frontend with real-time updates. PHP backend for user management. Smart contracts for escrow and fund distribution. Hotjar tracking everything users did.

Startups created profiles with their team, product, roadmap, and tokenomics. Investors reviewed and committed funds in crypto. Smart contracts held everything in escrow until funding goals were met. If a project didn't hit its target, investors got automatic refunds. Funds released to founders in tranches tied to deliverables.

In the first three months, we got over $60,000 in VC proposals. We hit $2K MRR. Not bad for kids who couldn't legally sign contracts.

The VP of Sales at Open English became our mentor. He saw something in us, or maybe he just liked watching us figure things out in real time.

Then it failed. Spectacularly. Publicly.

We couldn't navigate regulations. A lot of the "projects" that came in were obvious scams. Without a legal framework, protecting investors is almost impossible. We wanted to democratize investing. We almost democratized fraud.

We launched right before the crypto market crashed. A lot of our early adopters lost money. Not because of us, but because of the market. The distinction didn't make us feel better.

Put fiat and crypto in front of humans, they'll choose fiat. We learned that the hard way.

I learned more about business, regulation, and law in those months than in years of school. We were in love with crypto. We should have been in love with helping people invest.

Hoosling failed. But it taught me more than anything else I've done.