Founder Interview: FOMO Creator Explains How They Gained 30,000 Daily Users and Became One of the Fastest-Growing Apps in Crypto

Original Title: How FOMO Became Crypto's Fastest Growing App (Founder Tells All)
Original Source: Maurits
Original Translation: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

Editor's Note: Recently, the social-driven meme trading platform FOMO has attracted significant attention. As of the time of writing, according to Dune Analytics, FOMO's trading bot volume and market share have both ranked first in the market, significantly impacting the current meme trading platform landscape. On August 12, FOMO co-founder Se Yong participated in an interview, discussing his early personal crypto experiences, the most successful meme coin he has traded, and the product philosophy behind FOMO's betting on mobile trading and social trading.

In the interview, Se Yong stated that FOMO currently has 1.3 million users, with a daily addition of 30,000 users. However, FOMO's goal is not to become an existing professional meme terminal. He believes that market competition is a good thing, but FOMO's core goal is to enlarge the "cake," focusing not only on the crypto Twitter circle and crypto user base. This perspective may also be seen as a response to last week's Pump.fun's significant investment to mine top traders on the FOMO platform.

Odaily Planet Daily has summarized the core content of the interview as follows, enjoy~

Founder's Personal Crypto Journey: Making the First Pot of Gold on Avalanche, Not Good at Being a Meme P Newbie

Early Crypto Journey

Se Yong: When I first got into cryptocurrency, it was also through trading. On the Avalanche platform in 2021, they leaked an RPC, and the leaker was an account named sad start, whom I haven't seen since. At that time, I didn't know what cross-chain was or what RPC was, but he explained these concepts to me in a very interesting way step by step. He said, "Ethereum is too expensive, there's another option here, which is EVM, come here to trade, you'll find more opportunities."

I followed his advice, and my investment quickly skyrocketed from a few hundred dollars to five figures. I think this is a significant moment for everyone involved in crypto trading. Since then, I have traded on all blockchains, from the Ethereum mainnet to BSC, to Tron, Solana, and all layer-two networks, and projects like Sushi, Injective, and Serum. I've tried almost all of them, and the experience on each chain is completely different.

However, I have always wanted to develop something, and some ideas have gradually taken shape in my mind.

About two years ago, my friends discovered a coin called Keeta on Base. They each invested around $10,000, and they all ended up making seven figures. At that time, I felt like I should also buy some, but I had no money on the Base chain.

Furthermore, cross-chain swaps were very troublesome. I had to set up a Rabby Wallet, then find a cross-chain bridge, and figure out where to make the transaction on the frontend. For me, the workload was just too much. What should have taken only 45 seconds became so complicated. I thought to myself that if I faced this barrier, then others might also have the same issue, and I needed to help others solve this problem.

Personal Trading Style: Not Good at Being a P-Gen, More Suitable as a Diamond Hand

Se Yong: I have never been the typical meme trader, using Telegram bots or web terminals. However, I have tried spending 16 hours in front of the computer, meticulously researching each meme coin, trying to understand the narrative behind them. But honestly, I'm not very good at it. I think this is also one of the reasons I founded FOMO because I believe not everyone will understand these narratives.

For some meme masters, they quickly understand the narrative behind some memes. But for someone like me, even in a bull market, I only make about three trades a week. Some tokens attract me from a narrative perspective, and that's when I buy. For example, the GME token. After the Roaring Kitty documentary was released, I thought the token's narrative was great, and many people were discussing it, so I quickly bought in. Pandora is another example. It is an ERC 404 token that is both a token and an NFT. I think it's cool, so I got in early. This may be one of the most successful trades I have ever made.

Overall, my entry and exit points are not the best. I belong to the group of diamond hands who will continue to hold, believing even when the price drops.

Who Are Your Top 5 Favorite Traders, and Would You Invite Them to Join FOMO?

Se Yong: The first one is GCR. I think he is a very remarkable trader, with a legendary journey. Secondly, it's Kobe, especially when he was young. Third is Flood. I think he is also definitely one of the top figures, and he saw the potential in HYPE very early on. The fourth spot goes to Ansem. Although he occasionally faces criticism, all his judgments over the past five years have been mostly accurate, such as accurately predicting SOL and early spotting some meme coins.

Some of them are now trading on FOMO, I have also talked to a few others, but they are not trading on-chain, and as senior veterans, they also need to maintain their reputation. Most of them will fade from the public eye after achieving success, except for Ansem, who has always been active in the spotlight.

Personally, I hope that FOMO can support the new generation of traders. A generation that grows publicly from start to finish, with FOMO documenting their entire journey. Users can clearly see where they started and where they ended up. I believe every social platform needs a place to nurture local heroes. We need those who truly started from scratch. Bringing in already famous traders to the platform is not always beneficial. They often dilute or even monopolize the stage for new traders.

Therefore, my pick for the fifth top trader is change, who is currently the first on the FOMO leaderboard and has maintained that position for a while.

What is the ultimate goal of FOMO for individuals?

Se Yong: I think the most important thing is influence. When we set out to build FOMO, many of the considerations revolved around how to create a product that can reach users, put it in the hands of people we trust, and those who are eager to experience unprecedented things.

I think there are many excellent companies in the cryptocurrency and finance fields that are working hard to bridge this gap, but none has truly achieved perfection. So, we are thinking about how to make it easy for all 7.8 billion people in the world to get started. This requires a smooth user experience, social interaction, and excitement. Therefore, FOMO is trying to integrate all these factors. People often try to measure products with valuation, funds, fees, or other metrics, but users and influence are the fundamental drivers of product development.

Total users reach 1.3 million, with 30,000 new users per day, and FOMO aims to expand the "cake"

How did FOMO navigate the early stages of entrepreneurship?

Se Yong: We currently have about 1.3 million users, with approximately 30,000 new users per day recently. Many founders ask me, "How did you so easily reach 1,000 users, 100,000 users, or even more?"

The process was not as easy as everyone imagines. People often see only the final product and think it was all too easy, but in reality, at the beginning of our startup, we raised funds from 140 angel investors, but after several months, we didn't have 140 users.

We spent a long time accumulating users who would come back to us every day to give us feedback and try out the product. I am still very grateful to the early users from May 2025 to July 2025, who gave us feedback every day, pointed out issues, and told us how to improve.

Entrepreneurs really need to listen carefully to the opinions of the top 5000 users because once you build a great product for them, you can scale to build a product for other users. I think many people overlook this point because they are too focused on quickly reaching 1000, 10000, or 100000 users, but this is not effective.

Why Can fomo Attract So Many Users?

Se Yong: When we founded fomo, we followed two core principles: how to make it as easy as possible for ordinary users to use the platform and how to build trust with users.

Ordinary users do not understand the differences between SOL, ETH, and BNB, so fomo simply tells them it is just a cash balance, making it very easy to use. Although we have not fully achieved this yet, fomo will become the fastest way to transact.

Assume a user has both an EVM account and a SOL account balance on a platform. When trading on both chains, they need to switch back and forth between the two. This takes a lot of time for platform users, who need to figure out how to set up the trading system, set up wallet custody of private keys, etc.

Currently, fomo's cross-chain transactions take approximately 3 to 5 seconds, and in the future, the transaction speed will increase to 1 second. We hope that the transaction speed will be fast enough for people to completely forget the concept of cross-chain and only need one account balance to transact anytime, anywhere.

The second point is that users want to accumulate social capital through their own trading behavior. Some traders may have only 300 followers, but their individual account balance may reach five figures, while some with 100,000 followers may have only a six-figure account balance, yet they are highly regarded and may even feel superior. People need to reach a consensus on who is the best. If someone comes out and says they are the best, they are usually not the best.

So I believe that establishing a public leaderboard is meaningful. If someone thinks they are the best, they should come and prove it. Some may not care about rankings and do not want to prove themselves, and that's perfectly fine. Fundamentally, over time, money will disappear, fame will disappear, everything will disappear, but the legacy will not disappear, and there will always be someone else to step up. This is what fomo is currently documenting.

What are the characteristics of fomo Platform users, and how do you view user growth?

Se Yong: We believe the ideal scenario is that as the platform develops, the median transaction size should decrease, while the average transaction amount should increase. However, reality is different. More and more long-tail users have joined, some of whom may not even have $100, but they are still transacting and learning.

However, I want to say that many of our focuses are not within the Crypto Twitter (CT) circle, and not even within the crypto user community. I think calling fomo a crypto company now is not quite right. We want to be a platform where anything can be traded and become a social graph of the financial world, which, in my opinion, goes far beyond the scope of cryptocurrency and CT circles.

So, we have tried many things that many Web 3 companies have never attempted, such as User-Generated Content (UGC) on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and others. Many crypto companies believe these things are useless for growth because their user base is still in the range of 10,000 to 30,000. But we try many new things every day, and that's where the fun lies.

Will you provide a more professional terminal for professional traders?

Se Yong: We will never become that kind of professional Meme terminal. However, at the same time, we are not stubborn. We will listen to users' opinions and understand what the best use cases are. To be honest, the current functionality of the fomo web version is a bit poor; it is still at the level it was when we first launched, and we haven't made many improvements yet.

Now, the traffic of the fomo web version has approached 25% of our total traffic. We are in a phase where iterative updates are needed to develop all the features users need, such as token exploration, social exploration, and easier ways to purchase. All these features can be implemented on the web terminal, but we won't design it to be as complex as a spaceship. Our goal is to make it more advanced but also user-friendly enough for users to easily get started,

What are the features of the newly launched community feature (Clans)?

Se Yong: On August 11, fomo launched the community feature (Clans), but currently, this feature is still very basic. Users can see everyone in the community, including the tokens they hold. Anyone can join a group and participate in leaderboard competition. This kind of competition has always existed; there used to be Binance leaderboards, Kol leaderboards, and the like, but they were not as transparent as they are now in fomo.

Our goal is to make all information transparent, including traders, prediction markets, spot markets, and even earnings. For example, if you are the top earner, we will highlight you. Community is an excellent way to achieve this goal because trading should be social and collaborative.

Currently, the community feature is just a very basic version. In the future, users will be able to have internal chats, recruit new members, offer subscription services, establish a shared fund, and even set up a community public address for team airdrops with reasons like, "You are a well-respected and well-known community, and you will forever hold these tokens, so we will airdrop them to you."

There are many ways the community can profit, similar to influencer monetization. Previously, these activities were always done in secret, but we want to make everything public, even if it may bring some pain in the short term.

fomo Originally Inspired by Moonshot

Why fomo Is Betting on Mobile and Social

Se Yong: The trend of trading on mobile is, in my opinion, quite obvious as most services in the world are migrating to mobile. Most people, young or old, use their phones, which is a transition the world has long been going through, and we are now in the mid to late stages of this transition.

Secondly, social trading. The reason social trading has been able to grow to its current scale is, I think, largely due to the success of Moonshot around November 2024. At that time, many people were trading on Moonshot, and they developed what I believe was the first version of a mobile trading app.

At that time, I showed this app to all my friends, but only five people ended up downloading it. They made a few hundred dollars on Moonshot. If you are an average person, making $300 a week is already a significant amount—you can save money or even order takeout several times a week. My friends made money, and then I advised them to quickly cash out because it was just a popular token online, and they should put the money in the bank. But none of them listened and ended up losing all their money.

I tried to investigate the reason and found that most people's first successful trades were due to accidental discoveries of some advantages, such as being able to follow the viral hippo on TikTok. However, when they didn't know what the top traders were doing or couldn't communicate with anyone in real-time, they basically had no advantage.

So my co-founder Paul and I both believe that transactions must have a social aspect. Traders need to communicate with others, they need to quickly access information about the market and tokens, instead of looking for information in Telegram chat groups, Discord, and various other accounts. Users need to know in real-time who is buying what, how the market is moving, and how sentiment is changing. Thus, fomo was born.

How long until the first person earns an eight-figure profit on fomo?

Se Yong: We have always been in a bear market, so it's hard to imagine what a bull market would look like. But I estimate that in six months, many people will be able to earn this figure, the top 100 in the current ranking may be completely different from now. Opportunities always exist, there will always be new things emerging.

How do you view market competition?

Se Yong: We created fomo to make the pie bigger, to make this place better, so we believe competition is a good thing.

This includes two aspects. First, competition is good because ultimately people will choose the best product, so the product is the most important. If our product is indeed the best, then that's great, but if not, it means we are destined to fail.

Second, competition is something we will inevitably face sooner or later; no one can become a great company without experiencing competition. So our philosophy is, if we are destined to fail, let's fail now, failure will teach us many lessons. I would rather accumulate these experiences of failure today, tomorrow, the day after, and every day of the company's lifecycle.

My board member Chetan once said, the greatest existential threat a company faces is never having faced a crisis. Therefore, for us, competition is a good thing, someone will always have to make the pie bigger, why can't it be us?

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