Ahoy
Strategy
Product
We had an ambitious goal: to be the first company to bring peer-to-peer transactions to the masses. People were frightened of crypto and didn’t know how to use it. I tried to take these new concepts and make them familiar.
Ahoy had a ton of functionality to allow people to create proposals for things they want to happen, define the terms (i.e. who gets paid in what circumstances), and deliver the funds to the eventual party without sending money until the moment of payout (unlike GoFundMe, Kickstarter, etc., who hold and sometimes withhold payouts).
It was an engineering feat. The site was built on Solana, which was unknown territory. This presented a difficult design problem: How can you make the layperson understand something so convoluted?
There were few accepted conventions, and people came at our site with many different levels of understanding. Showing all of the available features without descending into jargon was a tall order, but we were all proud of the result.
Brand
Copy
Over the couple decades, people have become used to a very specific way of transacting online. Crypto puts a wrench in a lot of this familiarity, and part of the trouble was teaching users fundamental concepts about wallets, public/private keys, etc.
I tried my best to cut jargon and technical concepts, but the site ended up being very copy heavy – which slightly grated against my minimalist nature. But sometimes, verbose is better.
On top of site copy, much of my work was working with the other co-founders to write pitches, blog posts, and an extensive FAQ.
Process and Learnings
Ahoy never came to fruition, and after 8-months of work, it didn’t get much traction. In the end, we had no choice but to move on. There’s a deep lesson here: building needs to be a done in tight feedback loops with the eventual user.
Looking back, Ahoy was an odd but critical part of my journey, a major step into the heart of the tech world. I got a broad overview of all of the roles it takes to create and maintain a tech product. Learning to organize, communicate, and align my vision with a team was a steep learning curve, but it was rewarding.
