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An Entrepreneur's Reflection: Same Starting Point, Why Did FOMO Run Farther Than Us?

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Other meme platforms focus on capturing the existing market, while Fomo is committed to the incremental market.

Original Title: What Watching Fomo's Rise Taught Me About Vector
Original Author: @philjacobson, Altitude
Original Translation: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

A few years ago, we developed Vector, a mobile social trading app for on-chain assets. Our business grew rapidly, starting from scratch and quickly reaching a peak daily trading volume of over $20 million, with a total trading volume of about $1 billion. In the first few months after the product launched, as growth accelerated, our user retention resembled more of a social network than a traditional trading app, which was exactly the shape we had set out to build.

However, by the end of 2025, we had sold the company to Coinbase.

Since then, I have been closely watching how Fomo has taken a concept similar to ours and steered the product in a different direction, achieving remarkable execution. They successfully broke into the CT (Crypto Twitter) community, attracted a large number of new users to the on-chain world, and recently surpassed a daily trading volume of over $100 million.

Seeing their success, I don't feel like it was "supposed to be ours." Instead, I think their achievement is truly remarkable. They adopted the product concept we had previously believed in, and focused it on a market we had never truly ventured into, achieving this vision on a scale far beyond ours.

The whole process fascinates me, and I can't help but imagine that in some parallel universe, perhaps we might also have taken a completely different path...

All interesting products initially look like a "toy."

The birth of Vector actually originated from the Solana NFT trading platform Tensor.

Prior to joining Tensor as Chief Operating Officer, I was an angel investor in Tensor's only funding round when the project had almost no market share. By the time I officially joined, Tensor had become the dominant NFT trading platform on Solana, with a market share of over 80% and a trading volume reaching billions of dollars.

On my second day at work, Ilja approached me, essentially saying, "We are uncertain about the future direction of the NFT space, but we believe the next wave of trends will be Meme coins, so we plan to develop a product for this."

Our insight lies not only in recognizing that Meme coins will become the next hot asset class, but we also believe that the greater opportunity it holds is in "social trading."

The transaction behavior itself has already possessed social attributes. The GameStop event and the WallStreetBets community are obvious examples. More and more people are starting to invest on their own, and the basis for their actions is increasingly coming from trustworthy individuals online rather than traditional financial advisors or institutions.

The cryptocurrency space has made this behavior even more prominent. There are always some people ahead of the game who can capture important trading opportunities. Ansem is a prime example; when the Solana price was only around $8, he was a strong advocate for the project. If you trust his judgment and act accordingly, you can achieve amazing returns.

The problem is that discovering opportunities and executing trades are often two completely separate steps.

You may see a trusted individual posting information about a token in X or Telegram groups, decide whether to enter, and then look for the correct contract address. On mobile, the actual execution experience is very poor; you need to open the Phantom wallet, then open a browser, find the Jupiter platform, connect your wallet, paste the contract address, verify the token, set the transaction amount, and finally execute the trade. Time is of the essence, especially for Meme coins. By the time you complete this series of operations, the opportunity may have already slipped away.

Therefore, we firmly believe that social signals and trade execution should be integrated into a single product, with the distance between the two minimized to zero.

a16z crypto co-founder Chris Dixon once put forward a famous view: all interesting products look like a "toy" at the beginning. This is how we view Meme coins; they are the "toy" that can kickstart the social trading network.

Our initial long-term vision extends far beyond this. As more mainstream assets move onto the blockchain, this network will naturally expand into these asset realms. Once you have control of the user, the social graph around trading and excess returns, and provide the ultimate execution experience, the barrier to transitioning from Meme coins to stocks or other assets is no longer as high, especially considering that these assets themselves are increasingly becoming blockchain-native.

Admittedly, stocks are usually backed by real-world businesses, while Meme coins often are not; however, more and more signs indicate that the actual trading mechanisms of the two are astonishingly similar.

The GameStop Event was an extreme early example, but such behavior has become increasingly common today. Look at trades involving storage chips, next-generation cloud services, or hyperscale cloud providers, all of which have strong social attributes and are deeply driven by narrative and market momentum.

Leopold Aschenbrenner is a recent typical example. With his unique insights into the future of AI, he has built a high reputation. Today, investors closely monitor and emulate his positions in companies like Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Micron. His reputation and strong convictions have become part of the information people refer to when evaluating and executing related trades.

Some of these investment theses will eventually prove to be correct, while others will not, a fact that can only be known in hindsight. But it is evident that the informational aspect around investments has taken on a social character.

We believe that the behavior exhibited most extremely in the Meme Coin space is not unique to Meme Coins; it is actually an amplified manifestation of a broader market trend.

When You Realize What True PMF Feels Like

The simplest way to explain Vector or FOMO is to view it as a combination of Instagram and Robinhood. While photos are core to Instagram and short videos to TikTok, for Vector, the core element is charts.

Upon opening the app, users are greeted with a social feed. When someone shares a trade, users see the real-time chart of that token, and users trading through Vector have their buy or sell actions directly reflected at the corresponding points on the chart.

The feed is algorithm-driven, aimed at presenting the most valuable trading signals in the network. Upon seeing a signal, users can execute trades almost instantly. Our goal is to shorten the path from "social signal to trade execution" from minutes to seconds, and ideally milliseconds, a stark contrast to the poor state of mobile trading back then.

One of our original ideas was to display user avatars and trade activity directly on the chart. At that time, no one else was doing this, and I remember seeing this design internally and thinking, "This is just genius." Now, this UI pattern has become standard in various trading apps, and it's really great to see.

For Product-Market Fit (PMF), our founding team has a simple definition: PMF means that users have an intense demand for the product to the point where you can't supply fast enough, and they will eagerly "grab" the product from you. Even before the official launch, we realized that Vector was a success because during the beta testing phase, this frenzy was already evident, with users constantly urging us for invite codes to bring their friends on board.

We launched at the end of November 2024 and quickly gained popularity within the cryptocurrency community on Twitter (now called X). Our daily trading volume soon reached around $1 million; by late January, during the release of the Trump-related meme coin, the daily trading volume even peaked at over $20 million.

User retention was equally astonishing. Though I don't remember the exact numbers, I remember that the 7-day retention rate was between 60%–70%, and the 30-day retention rate was around 40%–50%. Users would actively use Vector for trading, interact with each other, share investment views, invite friends, and follow others to engage in transactions.

At that time, our team was less than 25 people, and the pressure from this explosive growth was overwhelming: system failures were frequent, transactions occasionally failed to go through, the customer support team was overwhelmed, and the list of features to develop was always longer than the available manpower.

This experience made me truly understand what real PMF is—it was the most profound lesson I've ever had. Demand was creating pressure everywhere, driving everything forward at a pace faster than the company's actual capacity to endure.

It also reinforced my firm belief in company building—small, highly talented teams can achieve remarkable results, and nothing is more important than staying closely connected to customers. Being customer-centric is a corporate culture that must be exemplified by top management. If you don't engage with users on the front lines, provide support, and understand the product's shortcomings, it's easy to lose touch with reality and miss the true needs of the product.

A Misstep: Betting on the Professional Trading Market

However, as the meme coin market later cooled down, a structural issue became increasingly apparent.

Ordinary users often ended up losing most of their principal capital, leading to a decrease in trading or even a complete exit; professional traders, on the other hand, were different. They could make money, continue trading, and contributed significantly to the trading volume. This economic structure exhibited an extremely concentrated nature, with about 5% of users contributing to approximately 95% of the trading volume.

Therefore, we made a rational choice at the time to target the professional trader market. Their needs are different from those of ordinary users. They usually work with multiple screens, monitor several charts simultaneously, and engage in frequent quick opening and closing trades. Vector is a mobile product that is indeed used by many professionals, but for them, the mobile device is often only a complement to their main trading environment, not the primary place of trade.

At the same time, market competition has become increasingly fierce. Axiom has created an excellent product, and competitors such as Photon and BullX are also vying for the same group of users. Given that professional traders contribute the vast majority of the trading volume, we started developing the Vector desktop version, which at the time became the preferred trading interface for professional traders, seemingly the best way to capture the market.

Today, I still believe it was a very feasible strategy. Our desktop product is outstanding, early beta users had a positive response, and we had a confident marketing plan in place. However, we ultimately did not launch it publicly, so we never truly validated this strategy.

Looking back, I have another perspective on our choice at that time. We focused on winning the existing market rather than committing to the incremental market. We spent too little time contemplating the question of "whether we could significantly expand the market by attracting new users who had never conducted on-chain transactions."

And this was the path that fomo ultimately chose.

The Unique Success of fomo

One aspect of fomo that interests me the most is its strategic focus. When we were developing a desktop product, the obvious opportunity in the market was to serve professional traders. At that time, Axiom was growing rapidly, professional traders were driving market efficiency, and numerous products were fiercely competing to attract this group, which was also the focus of the entire industry at that time.

However, fomo chose a completely different path.

They turned their attention to audiences outside of TikTok, Instagram, and the crypto Twitter community, many of whom had never conducted on-chain transactions before. Instead of competing for seasoned traders, they targeted a massive consumer market, which most other companies in the industry overlooked at that time.

Timing was also crucial. fomo emerged after the Meme coin frenzy had subsided, and the market environment was no longer as crazy and speculative as it was during our operation. I am not sure if the same strategy would have been as effective during the peak of the frenzy, but they aimed at a different user base at the right time and executed it exceptionally well.

They have found a way to reach users outside the traditional cryptocurrency community, onboard them to use the product, and facilitate their first on-chain transaction. This is no easy task, as it requires a robust distribution channel to complement an excellent product, making the concept of "on-chain transactions" easily understandable to the average person, converting users successfully, and providing reasons for them to continue engaging.

Fomo accurately pinpointed the product experience details valued by this target audience. If we do not tailor the product to these users and simply launch the original Vector into these distribution channels, we will not achieve the same results.

However, I do not believe our initial decision to cater to professional traders was wrong. I still firmly believe that our desktop strategy could have been highly successful. The more valuable insight is that beyond the market we were focusing on at the time, there was a much larger market that we did not dedicate enough time to explore, and Fomo did, successfully gaining traction.

It turns out that the market that helps you achieve Product-Market Fit may not necessarily support you in achieving significant growth.

The first target market entrepreneurs find may indeed be the perfect "beachhead," but it may only represent a small portion of the ultimate market opportunity. Once a product that users truly desire is found, another question worth considering is, in what other areas can this product excel?

Hindsight is always 20/20, but in the operational reality, gaining insight into this is much harder. Your data comes from the market you currently serve, and while this data can strongly guide you on how to win within the existing market, it is challenging to reveal untapped user segments or untested distribution channels.

For us, the data at the time showed that professional traders dominated the on-chain Meme coin trading ecosystem. However, what the data could not predict is what would happen if a social trading product were introduced to an entirely new audience who had never conducted on-chain transactions before.

Fomo has already provided the answer.

Is Social Trading a Trillion-Dollar Opportunity?

One thing Fomo has further convinced me of is that the initial thesis on social trading was not only correct but that the growth rate and scale of this opportunity far exceeded our initial expectations.

We live in an increasingly financialized world, with more and more people starting to independently invest and trade, market dynamics becoming a widely discussed topic, investment ideas spreading through social networks, trust being built in specific traders, investors, and creators, and capital flowing along these information and consensus networks.

Transaction and investment inherently have social attributes. This applies to all types of assets, whether it's a meme coin, cryptocurrency, prediction markets, or even the stock market.

I believe this trend will only accelerate. The world is becoming increasingly interconnected, information spreads ever faster, and AI will greatly enhance the ability for information discovery and integration. Meanwhile, more and more assets are moving onto the blockchain — stocks, prediction markets, options, real-world assets (RWA), and even various financial products we have not yet imagined are converging on a progressively more global and 24/7 financial infrastructure.

If you can build a high-quality social graph around transactions and alpha generation and couple it with excellent execution, you will be in a very advantageous position. Meme coins can be an entry point, but the product development goes far beyond that. As the financial world migrates more to the blockchain, asset classes will become increasingly modular.

This has always been a part of Vector's vision, but the growth of FOMO has given me a more concrete sense of its scale and timing. People are ready to transact on-chain and embrace a socialized financial experience. FOMO has proved that this experience can reach a much broader audience beyond the crypto-native market.

I think they are in a very favorable position. They have started to venture into perpetual contract businesses, transcending the realm of mere meme coins. If they can maintain strong execution, their growth opportunities are vast. A typical analogy is Robinhood, but FOMO has built social graphs and an on-chain asset system into the product from the outset.

Conclusion

If we had persisted in the beginning, could Vector have grown into a multi-billion-dollar company?

I believe it's entirely possible. Perhaps even more than that. We had excellent products, a talented team, and a strategic approach that I believe had tremendous potential for success. Maybe we would have used that as a starting point to eventually enter a broader consumer market; perhaps FOMO would still outpace us; or maybe we would have developed even more significantly than today's FOMO.

Perhaps one day, quantum technology might allow us to fulfill that wish in a parallel universe. Today, what interests me the most is watching another excellent team (FOMO) explore a path we never ventured into.

I am witnessing all of this from the sidelines. They have pioneered a market we didn't truly enter back in the day and have pushed the social trading model to heights far beyond what we did, and I have great respect for all they have built.

Most importantly, witnessing this process has made me even more convinced that the financial markets are inherently social in nature, and as more and more assets globally migrate to the blockchain, this attribute will undoubtedly be further strengthened.

Initially, we attempted to build an early prototype of this future form through Vector, and the evolving trend of FOMO is showing us how vast this field's future scale could be.