Beginners’ Guide to Bitcoin Investing, Chat With Julian Liniger

Yasi: Let’s welcome Julian.

Julian Liniger: Hi Yasi. Thank you very much for having me. This is awesome, it’s gonna be fun.

Yasi: Yes. And also, it’s very spontaneous, but I like spontaneous, make it more exciting. And very glad to have you here, Julian.

Julian Liniger: Exactly. What was it yesterday that we chatted on Twitter and now, like 12 hours later on the call?

Yasi: Yes. Yes. For the audience who are not from Switzerland, just to let you know, spontaneity does not exist in Switzerland.

Julian Liniger: It’s better. It’s good. It’s getting better with the younger generation. Or like the traditional Swiss people. Yes. They need to know, you know, one week ahead, when is the timing, and then they’re there 15 minutes before, and then you get there, they get ready and everything. So yeah, usually this, this does not work with Swiss people.

Yasi: And here we are. Today, I will ask you a lot of questions about how you founded Relai and Bitcoin investment and all your personal investment and money philosophy. And let me start with the first question. So Relai is like upcoming, and it’s growing so fast. Recently, your call series A round funding, and what made you start this company in the first place?

Julian Liniger: It was a mix of a personal problem and a problem that I observed in a lot of people that I liked, like people in my environment, and the problem was it was not easy enough; it was too complicated to invest in Bitcoin. Like myself, I wanted to have an easier way. I was invested in Bitcoin for quite some time since 2015. But I wanted to have it easier, especially also, to set up a savings plan because that was on a weekly or a monthly basis; I had to sit down and wire money somewhere to an exchange and then exchange it to Bitcoin and withdraw it to my wallet and everything.

So I did this on a regular basis, weekly or monthly, and I wanted to have this automated, but there was no way to automate this easily. So this was kind of the problem I wanted to solve. But also I observed a lot of people that had issues, getting into Bitcoin, people who are not tech or finance savvy, but just, you know, normal people, like my mom or friends of mine who worked, you know, whatever, on the construction side or as hairdressers or whatever; they wanted to get into Bitcoin, but it was just way too complicated for them.

So I wanted to make access to Bitcoin very easy and smooth for everybody; basically, that was the big problem I wanted to solve. And there, in my opinion, was not a nice solution back then.

Yasi: Right. And I remember back then, I think I bought my first Bitcoin, BitPanda and the transaction fees were extremely high that you have to know where to transfer to.

And it was a little bit complicated. And how did you start it with crypto investment or Bitcoin investment? Where did you hear about this?

Julian Liniger: First heard about it in 2015, beginning of 2015. I was never really a tech guy, but I was very interested in finance and, you know, stock investing and stuff like that.

So I was always on under local, on new alternatives to investing, and my friend was the exact opposite. He was a very tech guy, but he didn’t have any idea about investing. And so he told me, Hey, there’s this cool thing called Bitcoin. It’s like internet native money, you can send value around basically without a bank.

It’s like internet money. It’s pretty cool. You need to check that and stuff. And then he showed me, and I initially really thought, you know, it’s a cool thing, might go away again. It’s probably an experiment. It’s very speculative, but it’s interesting. So let’s try it. So I bought a Bitcoin for like 500 bucks back then. I didn’t really go deep into the nitty-gritty data, so I didn’t really understand it. I just thought it’s an interesting speculation and short-term, you know, experiment. And so I invested, and it went up, and they sold again basically.

And from there on, it didn’t really pay much attention. Fall for another one or two years, obviously followed it a little bit but was not really into it. I had other priorities, you know, it was the studying and stuff. Then 2017, beginning of 2017, again, I felt like there’s more and more interest also in my environment about this, and people started asking me because I already kind of knew a little bit about it and asking more and more and kept get excited about wanting to invest in it.

So then I was like, okay. This thing is probably not going to go away anymore. So I probably better, you know, dig deep a little bit and then understand it better. Back then, it was then already more than $1000 per Bitcoin, it doubled in two years, there must be something behind it. And then, when I really did my research and homework and really understood it better, it was clear to me that this is revolutionary shit, and this is very, very cool. And I want to spend more time with it in my leisure time, but also in my professional time. So then, in 2017, I invested more of my money.

Obviously, 2017 was a good year for all Bitcoin investors, and so by the beginning of 2018, I then decided I want to do this as my profession. I really want to devote my career to this.

Yasi: Okay. And did you, again, start it, or you didn’t this time?

Julian Liniger: No. Since then, I didn’t really sell a lot. Since then, that basically tried to accumulate more.

But what I did is I did a lot of speculations with different altcoins, shitcoins, ICO’s, DeFi stuff. So I did a lot of experiments. I made a lot of money, lost a lot of money. This led me now to be kind of a Bitcoin maximalist. And right now, I’m more really focused on Bitcoin, a lot in my investments.

And I think this is really what makes sense long-term, and so I didn’t really sell, but I speculated and lost a lot of money there. And I also spent a lot. So, for example, for half a year that I was spending in Silicon Valley, studying at a small university for a semester in California, I basically financed my whole stay there with my Bitcoin earnings basically.

But no, I’m not selling, only if I really need to. This is very rare. I am more in accumulation mode. I try to buy more and more every week.

Yasi: And I can really relate to that. I think in 2017, I also did a lot of experiments with Bitcoin and trading with other altcoins or shitcoins. And then the end, I did the math; if I don’t do anything with my Bitcoin, I might have earned more.

Julian Liniger: Correct. It’s really just bought and hold, buy more.

And then it would have made sense the last ten years, for sure. People get tricked into short-term; I can make so much money with this ICO, now this DeFi thing gives me a 10% annual return, so I should probably do that.

Obviously, you know, people are attracted to this. In the end, as you say, this is completely right. Probably if they would just stick to Bitcoin, buy and hold, accumulates or buy some more with the savings, like automated savings plan every week, then for last certainly 2, 3, 4, 5, and up to 10 years, that was, this would have been the best investment strategy probably.

Yasi: Yeah. It really applies to most other investments as well in traditional finance. If you do dollar cost average, this is like one golden strategy, and then buy something is proven. And then you diversify with time and diversify with the price in the market and over the long-term, like most of the time.

Yeah, for sure, you will make a profit. I have a question related to the dollar-cost averaging method in your app because one of the key functions in Relai is to allow people dollar-cost averaging Bitcoin. And what is the reason behind the design of this?

Julian Liniger: It’s exactly what you said. It doesn’t really matter which asset, be the traditional asset or crypto asset or Bitcoin or whatever, and even gold or, you know, stocks, whatever it always has been in the last couple of decades, the best investment strategy to just take a certain amount that you can afford per week or per month. Ideally, it’s best to have a short time period. So daily would be ideal, but weekly is almost as good or monthly. And then just invest this amount of FIAT money like US dollar, Euro or Swiss francs or whatever your currency is, at a certain time, and in the recurring fashions.

So, for example, every week into this asset. This has been proven to be better than basically any, you know, actively managed strategy, or there are so many algo trading kinds of fancy things, but in the long run, it has been proven to be most effective to do dollar-cost averaging. And that’s why we really want to support this because a lot of people are, especially in Bitcoin, but, in investing in general, are looking for this because they learn about the strategy and it being so simple yet so effective.

And it also makes sense. You don’t have to think about it. You’re investing in it in the long run in the volatile assets. So the price might go up, might go down, and you will never be able to really buy when it’s low and sell when it’s high. This is obviously the ideal, but it’s never going to work in the long run.

Maybe you get lucky for a week or two, but in the end, you will always win and lose. And then, in German we have this proverb call “Hin und Her, macht Taschen leer.” So that means the more you trade, the more actually using them because you can never pick the right moment. And with dollar-cost averaging, it makes sense that it works because if you invest the same amount every week, then one time the price might be higher, then you automatically buying less of the asset.

And one time, maybe the price will be low, and then you’re automatically buying more. So in the end, you will have the best average price. The longer you do this, the more effective it will be. And if you assume that in the long run, the trend is going up, and you accumulate more and more to the best price.

And this will make you wealthy in the long run. So that’s really kind of a magic strategy, especially with Bitcoin because it’s a different deflation area asset.

Yasi: And earlier you mentioned that you have the problem, you want to buy it frequently, but there’s no easy way to do that. In the development of the Relai app, have you thought about just allowing people to buy and trade cryptocurrencies, or that’s from the very beginning, the principle is to focus on dollar-cost averaging? Because many apps are about buy-trade, buy-sell cryptocurrency.

Julian Liniger: Yeah, that’s an interesting part. And we really came from just allowing a savings plan, only the dollar-cost averaging tool, because we also thought, you know, there are others like BitPanda that you mentioned that there you could trade all the cryptocurrencies. That’s fine.

But then we also very quickly saw or understood that a lot of our users also wanted to do single buyings. So they want to do both. They want to set up their, let’s say, 50 bucks per week and then let it flow. But also whenever they think it’s not a good price to invest some more, or for example, to get a bonus or a pay raise, or they have some money by the end of the month that they want to invest, they also want to do a single buy, and they also want to sell it from time to time because, you know, they need to pay bills, they have an emergency or whatever. So that’s why we also want to have this kind of trading tool. But it’s not, definitely not set up for like the high-frequency traders, then you’re better off with your BitPanda, Kraken, or traditional exchange.

It’s also way more complicated, though. So for us, in our app, everything is very easy. But it’s really more for the long-term investor who wants to have peace of mind. And the cool thing is as well, where we differ a lot is that we don’t have all the complicated, cumbersome user onboarding like you have another exchange.

So with us, you can really start within one minute. You don’t have to create an account or getting registered or verified or anything. We don’t even require your name or other personal information. You can just really start, and it’s very easy. And that’s why people use us. If you want to do a lot of trading, different cryptos, and stuff, then there are other solutions.

Yasi: I see. So Relai is designed for people who want to invest long-term and to use the dollar-cost averaging method. I like simple finance. Investing is simple. I would say investing is easy and also should be simple, but to stick to it, it’s not easy because when it fluctuates and then people start to panic, sell and react to it, and it’s most of the time, you will incur a loss. So for those who really understand the long-term investment, I think dollar cost averaging is the way to go. Don’t worry about it, that your bank and Relai do the job, and then five years later, ten years later, you look at your account again, may be surprised.

Julian Liniger: Yeah, exactly.

And this is exactly what you say. A lot of problems and losses incur when people get emotional with investing, and that’s why it’s important to automate it because you can do dollar-cost averaging on your own, you can sit down every Friday at 11 o’clock and make your trade.

And if you do this, like religiously, every week, at the same time, the same amount, then that’s fine. But guess what, people are not able to do this. People are not rational and disciplined creatures. So what they do is okay, it’s Friday, and I will do it later, or I will do it, it’s a good time now, I will put more in. And then the other days, the prices are going down, I’m going to skip this, and then sometimes you’re too lazy and just get bored, but people are not designed to do that. Machines can do that, apps can do that very well. So that’s why it’s good to automate. So you can also get into these frenzies and FOMO, oh, I need to pay more now, I need to sell now, panic selling and stuff like that. This is what’s going to make you poor. What’s going to make you rich and the long run is really the consistency, and that’s why you should automate it with a tool.

Yasi: Yeah. Take away the human factors. And also, like in the app, there is no possibility for someone to place an order at a fixed price. So it just, I liked that because when I buy myself dollar-cost averaging as you said, sometimes say, yeah, but last month the price is slightly lower, maybe I just place my order, like same as last month, but then, in the end, the order’s never fulfilled. Then the price keeps going up, and I never fulfill my order this month.

Julian Liniger: That sucks.

Yasi: Then the DCA doesn’t work. Yeah. So I like

Julian Liniger: Exactly, you never know where the prices go. You can’t anticipate, you can’t speculate on this. If you get into this mode, you think you can be active and do things. You can hit the best price and everything.

Then it makes you go crazy. You won’t sleep at night, and you will check the price every day. And you will have fun if it works, but you will be sad when it doesn’t, it’s like in the casino, you know, you will win at one point, you will lose at one point, in the end, you basically have nothing.

You’ve spent a lot of time that you could have spent more wisely.

Yasi: Yeah, unfortunately, but not everybody understands the basic principles of investing, so not trading, but investing. I’m glad that you introduced this app. And then with a little bit more education, I think for those who are used to, you know, investing in cryptocurrency or equities, they think about trading.

But if you think long-term, that’s with high probability, you will make a profit is dollar-cost averaging and then automated. Actually, I’m very interested in how you, as a management consultant, got into the topics of investing, personal finance, because from our experience, because we have this Fast Track Money Course that people don’t learn this at home if they don’t have banker parents or they don’t learn it in school because no one teaches you, where did you get this knowledge from?

Julian Liniger: That’s a good point, same here. So, I didn’t really have this education from school or my parents. I think it should actually be in the curriculum of school very early on.

Like from first grade, people should learn how to deal with money. A kid learns everything, but not how to deal with money at all. The first time I maybe got interested in this was probably when I got to university when I was like 20, and this is way too late. You should start earlier with, you know, doing this at some.

Obviously then, because I studied business administration at some finance courses, and then I got kind of interested in it, but also in the university itself, it was not really the courses there, what we’ve learned. I was not really practical advice. It was not something you could really use for your personal finance or investment strategy.

It was corporate finance and stuff like that. But at least it gave the basics. And then, I met some cool people, and some friends of mine really started with this. So I learned a lot from them. Just trial and error, basically, see what works, see what doesn’t, do a lot of research. Today with Google, you have a plethora of information for any stock you can imagine, about any investment opportunity, about every asset, every crypto asset that you know, about Bitcoin, about all the investment strategies that there are pros and cons, you have all the information, so you can do a lot of research yourself. That’s also what I did, and there are a lot of good books and from great people, you know, like Warren Buffet who spent his whole life investing. They’ve learned a lot, obviously, and they share it in their books. So that’s what I did and what I would also advise to a lot of people is to get into it as early as possible and start maybe also doing courses like the one you do, or talking to friends.

To trial and error, like, invest a little bit of your money just to try how it works and to read a lot, doing your own research and read a lot of books about this. That’s why I got into it. You need to have this basic interest. Most people, I would even say, probably also don’t really have this interest, they don’t really like this topic of money.

Yasi: Oh, I would say like awareness, because for example, we went to school and then we were taught how to, you know, get qualification skills and find a job and increase your salary, be more employable. So that’s the one from the Earnin side, but we were never aware that, okay, we also need to pay attention to the savings side and investing side. Imagine like a bucket, and then there’s a hole, we were educated in a way that we need to find a faucet, like to fill the water in the bucket, but we never realized how to patch all the holes in the bucket.

Because I was one of those, you know, professional school always focused on earning, okay. If I want to be rich, I need to earn more, you know, but at the end of the day, no, if I just pay attention to your spendings, living below your means, invest smartly, like the DCA PTC, by the way, this is not investment suggestion advice.

Don’t take it, do your own research. I think you can achieve the same results without working 20 hours per day, you know.

Julian Liniger: That’s a very important point you’re making and the basic principle a bit below is that earning with working is less profitable than investing. So owning capital will always gain you more interest than just, you know, earning money. It’s a basic principle. Unfortunately, the people who have money make more money by just investing it correctly than people who don’t have money working and spending. So you need to get into this mode where at least 20% of the income you invest in assets.

That’s what rich dad pulled up, this book tells you so nicely.

Yasi: Yeah. So yeah, exactly. What you talk about actually is the concept from Rich dad, poor dad, the cashflow quadrant; E’s — you’re employee. Then you extend your time for money, and then you become self-employed, the S. Then you also exchange your time for money maybe, but you pay a little bit more hourly rate because you need to cover your business expense.

And then you have this business mode. The business owner is employees become more money because you have a system, more people working for you, generate more cashflow. And then the last one is like, I, investors is you have more money, and then the money generates more money. So the employee and self-employed quadrant, if you’re there is you are exchanging your time, but your time is limited. 24 hours is 24 hours, you cannot have 50 hours per day. But if you take yourself out from the quadrant to put in I, which most people can achieve by using savings and investing with Relai, okay, that actually is your money, or your Bitcoin creates more Bitcoin.

Oh no, your Bitcoin creates more money for you.

Julian Liniger: That’s a very basic principle that people should understand, and you can start so small, you know. A lot of people also think, you know, I don’t have money, so I can’t start investing. Yeah, you do earn some money.

So, in Switzerland, the savings rate average is 20%. So people actually take a fifth of what they earn and put it into savings, which is great. The problem is two-thirds of them are putting it on a savings account.

Yasi: Yeah, what’s the interest rate of a savings account?

Julian Liniger: 0.00005% or something. It’s truly ridiculous, it’s zero.

There’s no interest rate. There’s even a negative interest rate, from 100,000 on, they take 1%.

Yasi: On active interest rate

Julian Liniger: So there’s a negative interest rate, there’s no positive interest rate. And there are banking fees obviously, that we neglect. So a lot of times, and also there is inflation and Switzerland is not that bad, but maybe 1–2%, it’s still you’re losing money every year. Like your money loses purchasing power every year, and in other countries, it’s crazy; like in Germany. It’s starting now, in a lot of European countries. And then in the US, I think last month in July, they had like 5% of inflation. That’s a lot. Your money is basically losing 5% of its purchasing power. You should start early.

And people say, okay, I don’t have money. Yes, you do earn some money and just start with ten bucks a week and then maybe ten bucks a day. And then, you know, in the end, you will end up with, you know, if you own 5000, then you put 1000 per, per month into some good investment. And then you let it flow.

And after one or two years, you will also already found wow. And then, the more you have, the more you have to invest. And it’s an ongoing thing. And with interest rates and everything, this is cumulating. So you need to start somewhere. You should start now, basically now. Stop listening to this and start

Yasi: Stuck now, actually, like you said, including me, everyone who understands how personal finance, how investing, how the compound works, everyone, they said, I wish I should have started earlier.

Julian Liniger: It’s going to say everybody is like, oh, it’s too late now. I wish I started when you told me first trillion in 2015 and 16 and 17 and 18 and 19, because I tell everybody just didn’t have the money and there are still people now after six years, they say, oh, I should have started when you told me, but now it’s too late, but that’s what they said back then as well.

They said, you know, it’s too late. What would have been cool if I started one or two years ago when Bitcoin was at ten bucks, it’s at 500 now. No, now it’s a 50 K, and they say it’s too late. It’s going to be half a million at one point. And they say, oh no, it’s too late.

You have nothing to lose; if you don’t invest more, then you can lose. Obviously, but to start investing a little bit, and it’s getting more and more.

Yasi: Yeah. That’s amazing. And then, besides cryptocurrency, if I may ask, do you also invest in other assets? What’s your investment philosophy?

Julian Liniger: Yeah, that’s a good question.

For too long I ddidn’treally have a diversified portfolio and stuff. But now I have kind of a crypto portfolio, 80 or even 90% of this is Bitcoin. And I would say more than half of what I invest in is Bitcoin, more off of my kind of wealth. IIt’svery small. I ddon’thave a lot of money, but I have more than 50.

Yasi: Not yet.

Julian Liniger: And then I started the stock portfolio like one or two years ago when I also do dollar cost average, I put 100 bucks per week into this portfolio, and 100 bucks per week into Bitcoin, then I have some other small cryptocurrencies, but only like experiments. And so I do it all across the diversion into Bitcoin, to stocks, the stocks I’m basically stock-picking just some that I like, some dividend cases that gave a lot of dividends or just, you know, growth stocks, tech stocks that I like, or, you know, different industries that like basically stock picking.

And then, I will start a third pillar investment. So I still didn’t.

Yasi: You should start now the third pillar.

Julian Liniger: I know I will. I just don’t like the fact that I can’t access the money for a long time, but it is a good thing because of the tax reduction and

Yasi: But it prevents you from touching it.

Julian Liniger: Right. That’s maybe, maybe it’s a feature, not a bug. That’s true.

Yasi: I did so much research on the third pillar. I even wrote articles, a three A, three B as like a really amazing if you really don’t need money to spend, everyone should start the third pillar. Cause literally because now you can use the third pillar to invest in ETF.

And if you invest in, let’s say, up till you retire, I don’t know, 20, 30 years later, most likely you can really accumulate one million in your third pillar. And on top of that, if you reinvest all the tax money you save, I don’t know which canton you live in, is another couple hundred thousand. So it’s really crazy.

But if you want to invest in real estate, you know, a few years down the road, you can even use your third pillar for that. So actually, it’s not money you can not use, you can still deploy it and then can use indirect amortization. Okay. I don’t want to bore the audience here, but yes, do it.

Julian Liniger: Yeah. I also think so.

I mean, these are probably the three kinds of areas I want to have investments in Bitcoin and some stocks, stock portfolio, and the third pillar. And then, at one point, if I have some more money, then I would probably go into real estate as well.

Yasi: Yeah. Okay. I think that it will be very soon if we have a positive outlook on Bitcoin.

Julian Liniger: Hopefully.

Yeah. What about you? Would you agree with kind of this setup, or do you have anything that I missed?

Yasi: Um, I think it’s, yeah. I mean, because we are more in the same, I don’t know, industry or, you know, investment or I dunno generation, I think I would also do the same, so like real estate and equities and cryptocurrency.

Probably I don’t do stock picking. I mean, I just buy ETFs because it’s too much brain work for me to pick and then to bet. I just buy the market and do DCA., and then I don’t care.

Julian Liniger: It makes perfect sense as well. I kind of also maybe like the adrenaline a little bit, or like, I don’t know. I like to pick stocks.

I also like to do some research on them and stuff. That’s probably more like a hobby that does as a normal person. And also say definitely just do ETFs, you’re not doing anything wrong. You will have a couple of percents up to like 10% or 15% per year or so. What else do you want, right?

Yasi: Yeah, indeed.

I would say, for the audience information, like, we don’t really advise you to do anything, do your own research, try to understand what’s the investment you want to invest in and what’s the risks involved. So it’s all personal. And, what we talk about here is just basically we exchange information with each other, right.

Julian Liniger: Absolutely. I would be the wrong person to get investment advice for sure.

Yasi: Back to the Bitcoin DCA. So, I think, yesterday I downloaded Relai, and I started to try out the DCA, and I was so surprised because I started this process before I realized, oh, I already started it. Do you know how fast it is?

Like once you finish the whole process, oh, I already finished. There’s no, like my name, my gender, my address, like nothing, nothing. It’s just, what do you want to do? Frequency? Here’s the bank account. Transfer this money and then done. And then just let the app do the work. It’s really amazing.

Julian Liniger: Yeah. That was the goal. And a lot of controversies, actually, we have a lot of discussions internally, but also externally with users and stuff, because for some people, this is too fast. Some people feel like, oh, it’s this even secure? Like they don’t trust it because they think, you know, this can’t be real because why would all the other apps do all these neat, all this information because people don’t kind of feel. In a weird way, they feel secure if they have been given some information. It doesn’t change anything, but like, people feel like, okay, if I created an account, it must be secure. In banks, you do that. So they think about it as well, but we’ve found a solution how we can circumvent that. And I personally think this is great. I really liked this kind of short, fast onboarding. And I like to use anonymous services, you know? It’s a pro and con, but it’s good to hear from you. And basically I’m on the same line of it. How did you feel about that’s a big problem still? We have a lot of users that feel like, okay, now it’s done. I did the process, and then they go, they do not actually pay, you know. Did you kind of understand, oh, I have to go and pay now?

Yasi: Yeah.

Because I have to go to my iBanking and to make the transfer. But what I like it more, I don’t know if it’s possible. It’s like linked to the credit card and do auto deduction, which I was doing was another trading for equity investments. DCA.

Julian Liniger: Yep, absolutely. This is on the horizon. We do have this on the roadmap. It should even go live by the end of this year or certainly, beginning next year. That’s something that’s very important. because it would make it easier for people right now. They have to leave the app and log into the broken copies on the information, you know, the payment message and everything.

So that’s kind of still a hassle. It’s easy, but it’s still kind of hassle. It would be way easier if you could just put in your credit card or pay with Quint, for example, there’s something we are working on. Yeah, absolutely.

Yasi: It’s again, a human behavior. It’s like you make it easy for them to invest long-term, but people’s behavior coming to oh, I have to give my money away that I don’t see the return immediately. So it’s a little bit burial, I have one last question for today’s session. It was really a great chat. It’s about entrepreneurship. Since you started this company, a couple of years ago, what would you say is like the most challenging thing for you in being an entrepreneur?

Julian Liniger: It was right at the beginning, I feel like it gets proportionally easier with time. The longer you stick with a project, the easier it gets, the really big hurdles and big problems. and pains were right at the beginning, the first couple of months, because you’re really looking for you. So, you know, you have a problem and you have a passion for it and you have a vision how you could solve it.

And that solution, then you start, you get excited, but then all the problems are coming in until you did your first steps, you know, if you run a marathon, also, the first step is the hardest and then you do the second and it always gets easier than at the beginning. There are a lot of things that were really hard.

The hardest was probably to get the first support from other people. Because you can’t do this alone, right? Maybe the entrepreneur is the one who gets, you know, the Hail Mary at the end. Well, he did this all on his own. No, no, no, this is always a big group project. You can do shit on your own.

So you need people to support you, you need to sell the vision and it needs to make sense to people. And you will hear a lot of nos, everybody names like, oh, you’re crazy. This is never gonna work. This is stupid, you know, do something else with your time. You will hear a lot of this negativity and that negativity to still keep going with your vision and get some supporters.

These are different people you need, you need co-founders and then you need partners and then you need investors. And then at one point you need employees. And then you need more of all of them. This is the hardest part, I guess, and for us specifically, it was the hardest was to get our first fundraising.

So in the meantime, this was our third fundraising and we are always basically 10 X, So we started with a 20,000 Swiss francs that we raised. This is really not a lot of money. It’s the

Yasi: Some money for you to register a GmbH, a limited liability company.

Julian Liniger: Yeah, exactly. We need to raise this money to actually finance the development of the first app.

And it was really hard. Like I talk to more than 100 angel investors and some of them, the watch that they had was probably more than 20,000 so they had money, but they wouldn’t give it to me because they wouldn’t believe in the vision. It took me like three, four months to raise this 20,000 and obviously within three months, we’ve burned it on salaries for developing stuff.

And then re-launched yet. And it went live and it was cool. People liked it. They started investing. So we kind of hit the nail, but then it took another three, four months to do the next fundraising. For this time, which has basically worked for free my co-founder and I, he was programming. I was doing all the business stuff and marketing and fundraising stuff for free for a couple of months.

And we didn’t have in salary. And this was, this is hard, really hard. And to not being able to pay a good friend who helped me with this, the co-founder and Then again, you know, so many discussions to raise 200,000 we then finalize the 200,000 round with different angel investors, I think in October or something last year.

And this was also very, very hard, but a little bit easier already, I must say, which is a paradox. It’s strange to raise 200,000 when you tend to raise 20,000. But it was because you’re already a step ahead.

Yasi: Because you have the app?

Julian Liniger: We already had the app, we had first good numbers. We could show, Hey, we already have more than thousand users.

We already earned a couple of hundred bucks, you know, so people are willing to pay. So it’s easier for people to understand, okay, if I invest in distance, it’s probably gonna be worth more in the year if they go on like this. The more you prove your case, the more you de-risk the case for your investors and what investors do not like is risk, right?

That’s why it’s so hard at the beginning. At the beginning, everything is risk. They basically just invest in you and the idea, and everything else is uncertain. And so the more you decrease this uncertainty towards investors, the more willing they will be to give you money. That’s what we did. So we grew further, grew a team, we grew the user base. We grew the volumes and revenues. So by beginning of this year, we already had like 2 million in volume per month. And we made like 30 to 40,000 in revenue per month and stuff like that. And we had a team of like three, four full-time employees. So this de-risk it, it made it even a little bit easier, obviously still very, very hard, but even easier again, to raise these two and a half million Swiss francs, which is another 10,000 of what they are just a few months back.

Strangely, it’s getting easier and that beginning is very, very hard, but still the hardest part I would say is, is the fundraising. Because that’s the fuel you need to support everything else. If you cannot fundraise, then the business will die, you will not make your turning.

It’s like the fuel you need for a car. If you don’t have fuel, the car will just stop running.

Yasi: Yeah. Even though you said the whole story in like a couple minutes, but I’m sure the work you put into it, the challenge and the resilience that you showed it’s beyond those few words, it sounds very short, but the work behind it’s tremendous.

Yeah. Thank you so much for being here and it’s really nice chatting with you. Do you have any like last message to our audience?

Julian Liniger: Thank you very much, Yasi, it was really, really a pleasure. You’re doing a great job. This is really a very helpful podcast for the people who are listening to it.

We will be happy to share those in our community because I think it’s important for people to think about investing and saving. And because I said in the traditional, just saving in the traditional sense doesn’t work anymore. Just putting some money aside and some cash under your mattress or some Fiat money on your bank account, this does not work anymore. Unfortunately will be less and less. It will make less sense in the next few years. My advice would also be, it’s important to get into it a little bit. You don’t have to become a professor in investing, but you should get educated. And two courses like the one from listen to podcasts and different, you know, reading books. Get started with investing, it’s easy.

It’s easy to start. There’s always a solution out there and you don’t really have an excuse. So yeah. Start now.

Yasi: Yeah, start now. Thank you so much for being here, Julian.

Julian Liniger: Thank you, Yasi. It was a pleasure.