Excerpts from Team Flint's podcast with Scenes - a white-labeled community solution like Discord

The Guest: Mohit Sidhwani is a founding team member at Flint. Along with this team, he has on boarded users from over 100 plus countries in a span of three months. They even had a 250K+ users on a waitlist.

The Host: SidBoson is a master community builder with 10 years of experience. Having started his journey working with Harvard University’s CS50x at age 17, Sid has catalysed growth for communities across domains. Currently, he leads Community at Scenes - the ultimate community platform.

Without further ado, let's dive in. 

Boson: Yeah. So you basically told me that there were like about 240,000 people who were very interested in this app and you guys were like, so thrilled about it. There was this organic growth explosion where you had this massive wait list and people were like, I wish my country changed its rules so that I can use your app. And there was this huge hype about people wanting to use Flint. Tell me about it.

Mohit: I sort of understand where the user comes from, right? For, a product that gives you fixed returns on an asset you very much believe in - That's just a game changer for anyone who understands it. So, when we first made our announcement that we are building something cool, and we launched our waitlist, we saw tremendous interest from across the globe.

I mean, our expectation was that people from India and, and even outside India, some of the more, tech-advanced people would be sort of interested in signing up for something like that. But that was not the case. We've seen, huge, huge users from, countries in Africa, countries in South America, CIS countries, Russia, and Southeast Asia. 

Boson: And, how, how did that happen? Like how did it just spread like that?

Mohit: To be honest, we did a post-mortem of that. We seeded some of it and, talked to people that, Hey, this is what we're doing. Please share it. And, whatnot.

Some of it was seeded. A lot of it was organic because of, maybe they were finding it cool. When we did the post-mortem, we found out that there were, telegram channels that were communities. We've shared, the link to our waitlist in these communities, organically without us nudging them.

Boson: Telegram communities are like a huge part of the world of finance. Like, um, there are like so many of these communities where, and like I know about so many telegram communities, there are communities where people come and give, like these stock tips, where they do like this live day trading and they sort of invest money live.

And, there are a lot of these communities in crypto. Nice. It's nice to know that this was like a very important medium for you guys in order to get that initial, um, spike up to get the hype out there.

Mohit: Correct. So, in a way, that has sort of shaped what, our major decisions would also be, right, because if you have hundreds of thousands of people from across the world, people who have potentially invested in crypto earlier, right in your waitlist.

Boson: That was kind of like validation for you guys as well. That's like shit, people actually want something like this and they really want it. 

Mohit: Correct. And, and more than that, it is also the fact that these people have been involved in product development and shaping our, key decisions also. So, we keep shooting them surveys, talking to them, and getting their opinion.

We do, teardowns of our product with them. Right. And this sort of helps us build the best product. 

Boson: So you've kind of led the community to sort of define what it wants and how the product should actually like what direction the product should go.

Mohit: In a way, yes. It just helped us double down on the idea key this, what we are building actually has a lot of demand in all these regions across the world. People are actually bullish on crypto. They store crypto. They want to keep earning returns on their crypto. Why not? That was the idea that got validated. 

Even to date we constantly engage with our community members to, get opinions on certain key, key features we are building and, get a sense of how they look at the crypto market, where did they buy their first Bitcoin, or how did they enter the space? 

Boson: So if I download Flint mm-hmm and if I'm like, Hey, I just downloaded this app called Flint. What can I do with it? What would your answer be? 

Mohit: At the moment, to set some context, we are just a few months old. But at the moment, if you are someone who downloads Flint from Playstore or App Store, you can deposit up to 13 of your, major coins, which you are holding on any other platform on Flint, and earn certain returns on those coins.

For example, if you are a Bitcoin believer, you have like, one Bitcoin or two Bitcoins or whatever, 0.5 Bitcoins with you, and you would want to, hold your Bitcoins because you believe like 10 years down the line, the price of Bitcoin will be 10x, 15x as to what it is right now. Right. What would you do?

What would, what are your ways to, maximize your belief, right? You just keep holding onto it. What you can do with Flint is deposit those coins on Flint. In addition to what you would be making with the price increase in Bitcoin, you can also earn a return on top of it every second.

Boson: Right. So it's almost like I have an FD on Bitcoin for the lack of a better way of saying it. 

Mohit: I mean, yeah, to, to be honest, I don't like myself saying that, but. But yeah, you can put it that way.

Boson: Okay. Got it. So it's like more, okay. Okay. I know, I can see that you hate the word FD. So let's just say that, um, this is like a stabler way of getting returns from Bitcoin. 

Mohit: Let's call it savings account for your crypto. Okay. That's perfect. Savings are gone for crypto. 

Boson: Okay. I like that. I like that.

To listen to the full conversation, listen to the audio podcast on Spotify.