A founder's reflection: Starting from the same point, why did fomo outpace us?

Original article by Phil Jacobson

Translated by Odaily Golem (@web3_golem)

A few years ago, we built Vector, a mobile social trading app for on-chain assets. Our growth was explosive—going from zero to a peak of over $20 million in daily trading volume within a very short time, with cumulative trading volume of roughly $1 billion. In the first few months after launch, as growth accelerated, our user retention resembled that of a social network rather than a traditional trading app—exactly the shape we had originally set out to create.

But at the end of 2025, we sold the company to Coinbase.

Since then, I've been watching how fomo has taken a product with a similar philosophy and pushed it in a different direction, achieving outstanding execution results. They've successfully broken out of the CT (crypto Twitter) sphere, drawn a large wave of new users into the on-chain world, and recently surpassed $100 million in daily trading volume.

Seeing their success, I don't feel like "that should have been ours." On the contrary, I think what they've accomplished is remarkable. They took the product vision we deeply believed in, focused it on a market we never truly tapped into, and scaled it far beyond what we achieved.

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

All interesting products initially look like a "toy"

Vector actually originated from Tensor, the Solana NFT marketplace.

Before joining Tensor as VP of Operations, I participated as an angel investor in its only funding round, when the project had almost no market share. By the time I officially joined, Tensor had become the dominant NFT marketplace on Solana, at one point holding over 80% market share with billions of dollars in trading volume.

Around my second day on the job, Ilja came to me and essentially said: "We're not sure where the NFT space is heading, but we think the next wave will be memecoins, so we're planning to build a product for that."

Our insight wasn't just that memecoins would become the next hot asset class—we also believed the bigger opportunity within that trend was "social trading."

Trading itself has already become social. The GameStop saga and the WallStreetBets community are obvious examples. More and more people are investing on their own, and their actions are increasingly driven by trusted figures online rather than traditional financial advisors or institutions.

The crypto space has made this behavior even more visible. There are always people on X who catch major trading opportunities early—Ansem is a great example, championing Solana when it was trading at around $8. If you trusted his calls and acted on them, the returns were extraordinary.

The problem is that discovering an opportunity and executing a trade are often completely disconnected.

You might see someone you trust post about a token in X or a Telegram group, decide whether to get in, and then hunt for the correct contract address. On mobile, the actual execution experience is terrible: you have to open Phantom wallet, then open a browser, find Jupiter, connect your wallet, paste the contract address, verify the token, set the trade size, and finally execute. For memecoins, time is money. By the time you finish that sequence, the opportunity may have already slipped away.

So we firmly believed that social signals and trade execution should be integrated into a single product, with the distance between them compressed as close to zero as possible.

a16z crypto founder Chris Dixon famously argued that all interesting products initially look like a "toy." That's exactly how we viewed memecoins—they were the "toy" that could bootstrap a social trading network.

But our long-term vision went far beyond that. As more mainstream assets move on-chain, this network would naturally expand into those assets. Once you own the user base, the social graph around trading and excess returns, and deliver a best-in-class execution experience, the leap from memecoins to stocks or other assets becomes far less daunting—especially given that these assets themselves are increasingly migrating on-chain.

Granted, stocks are typically backed by real businesses while memecoins often aren't; but there's mounting evidence that the way people actually trade both is strikingly similar.

The GameStop episode was an extreme early case, but this behavior is now becoming increasingly common. Look at memory chip trading, next-generation cloud service trading, or trades in hyperscaler names—these all carry a strongly social character, heavily driven by narratives and market momentum.

Leopold Aschenbrenner is a recent example. He built enormous credibility through his distinctive views on where AI is heading. Today, investors closely track and mirror his positions in companies like Bloom Energy, CoreWeave, and Micron. His reputation and conviction have become part of the information set people use to evaluate and execute related trades.

Some of these investment theses will ultimately prove correct and others won't—that's only knowable in hindsight. But what's clear is that the information layer around investing has already become socialized.

We believed that the behavioral patterns most extreme in memecoins are not unique to memecoins. They are an amplified expression of a broader market trend.

What it felt like to realize true PMF

The simplest way to explain Vector—or fomo—is as a combination of Instagram and Robinhood. Instagram's core element is photos, TikTok's is short video, and for Vector, the core element is charts.

When you open the app, the first thing you see is a social feed. When someone shares a trade, you see that token's live chart, with buy and sell actions from users trading through Vector appearing directly on the chart at the corresponding price points.

The feed is algorithmically driven, designed to surface the most valuable trading signals in the network. After seeing a signal, users can execute a trade almost instantly. Our goal was to compress the path from "social signal to trade execution" from minutes down to seconds—or ideally milliseconds—in stark contrast to the miserable mobile trading experience that existed at the time.

One concept we pioneered was placing user avatars and trade activity directly on the chart. Nobody was doing that then. I remember seeing the design internally and thinking: "This is absolutely genius." Today, that UI pattern has become standard across trading apps, and it's really great to see.

For product-market fit (PMF), our founding team had a simple definition: PMF means user demand for your product is so intense that you can't supply it fast enough—users are practically snatching the product out of your hands. We knew Vector was succeeding before we even officially launched, because this kind of frenzy was already happening in beta. Users kept demanding invite codes so they could bring their friends in.

We launched at the end of November 2024 and quickly went viral within crypto Twitter (now X). Our daily trading volume hit roughly $1 million almost immediately; by late January, during the Trump memecoin launches, daily volume peaked above $20 million.

Retention was equally impressive. I don't remember exact numbers, but my recollection is that Day-7 retention was between 60%–70% and Day-30 retention around 40%–50%. Users opened Vector constantly to trade, follow each other, share investment ideas, invite friends, and copy trades from people they followed.

Our team was fewer than 25 people at the time, and the stress of that explosive growth was everywhere: systems kept failing, trades occasionally didn't fill, support was overwhelmed, and there were always more features to build than available manpower.

That experience taught me firsthand what true PMF feels like—the most profound lesson I've ever learned. Demand creates pressure everywhere, pushing everything forward faster than the company can actually absorb.

It also reinforced a firm belief I hold about company building: small teams of exceptionally talented people can achieve remarkable things, and nothing matters more than staying deeply connected to your customers. Customer obsession is a culture that must be modeled from the top down—if you're not in the trenches talking to users, providing support, and understanding what's broken, you quickly lose touch with what the product actually needs.

One misstep: betting on the professional trading market

But as the memecoin market subsequently cooled, a structural problem became increasingly apparent.

Average users tend to eventually lose most of their capital, leading them to trade less or exit entirely. Professional traders, by contrast, make money, keep trading, and generate enormous volume. This economic structure is extremely concentrated—roughly 5% of users contribute about 95% of the volume.

So we made what seemed like a rational choice at the time: go after the professional trader market. Their needs differ from retail users. They typically work across multiple screens, monitor several charts simultaneously, and execute frequent rapid entries and exits. Vector was a mobile product, and while many professionals did use it, for them mobile was often a supplement to their primary trading environment rather than the main venue.

At the same time, competition was intensifying. Axiom built an excellent product, and competitors like Photon and BullX were all fighting for the same users. Given that professional traders contributed the vast majority of volume, we started building Vector Desktop, believing that becoming the go-to trading interface for professional traders was the best path to winning the market.

To this day, I still think that was a very viable strategy. Our desktop product was excellent, early beta users were enthusiastic, and we had a go-to-market plan we felt confident about. However, we never ended up publicly launching it, so we never truly validated that strategy.

In hindsight, I have another perspective on the choice we made. We were focused on winning the existing market rather than expanding the market. We spent far too little time asking: "Could we dramatically grow the market by attracting new users who had never traded on-chain before?"

And that is precisely the path fomo ultimately took.

What makes fomo's eventual success unique

The most interesting thing about fomo to me is its choice of strategic focus. When we were building desktop, the obvious opportunity in the market was serving professional traders. Axiom was growing fast, professional traders dominated the market's economics, and many products were competing fiercely for that segment—it was the center of gravity for the entire industry at the time.

fomo chose a completely different path.

They set their sights on audiences beyond TikTok, Instagram, and the CT sphere—many of whom had never traded on-chain before. Rather than competing for sophisticated traders, they targeted a massive consumer market that most other players in the industry were overlooking.

Timing was also critical. fomo rose after the memecoin mania had faded, in a market environment far less frenzied and speculative than when we were operating. I'm not sure the same strategy would have worked at the peak of the mania, but they went after a different user base at the right moment and executed exceptionally well.

They found ways to reach users outside the traditional crypto ecosystem, onboard them, and get them to make their first on-chain trade. That's no easy feat—it requires exceptional distribution paired with an excellent product, one that makes "on-chain trading"—something alien to most ordinary people—simple, while successfully converting users and giving them reasons to keep coming back.

fomo nailed the product experience details that matter to that target audience. If we had simply pushed the original Vector through those distribution channels without adapting the product for these users, we wouldn't have achieved the same results.

But I don't think our decision to serve professional traders was wrong. I still believe our desktop strategy could have been a major success. The more valuable lesson is that beyond the market we were cultivating, there was a far larger market that we never devoted enough time to exploring. fomo went after it and cracked it open.

The market that helps you achieve PMF may not necessarily be the one that supports large-scale growth.

The first market a founder finds may be a perfect "beachhead," but it might represent only a fraction of the ultimate market opportunity. Once you've found a product users truly want, the next question worth asking is: where else could this product shine?

Hindsight is always easy, but in the thick of operations, seeing this is far harder. Your data comes from the market you currently serve. That data is powerful for guiding how to win your existing market, but it tells you little about users you haven't acquired yet or distribution channels you haven't properly tested.

In our case, the data showed that professional traders dominated the economics of on-chain memecoin trading. But what the data couldn't predict was what would happen if you took a social trading product and pushed it toward an entirely new audience of people who had never traded on-chain before.

fomo has provided the answer.

Is social trading a trillion-dollar opportunity?

What fomo has made me even more certain of is that the original social trading thesis was not only directionally correct—the opportunity is growing faster and larger than we originally anticipated.

We live in an increasingly financialized world. More people are investing and trading on their own, market dynamics are a staple of public conversation, investment ideas spread through social networks, people build trust in specific traders, investors, and creators, and capital flows along these networks of information and consensus.

Trading and investing are inherently social. This applies across asset classes—whether memecoins, cryptocurrencies, prediction markets, or the stock market itself.

I believe this trend will only accelerate. The world is increasingly connected, information travels faster than ever, and AI will dramatically enhance information discovery and synthesis. Meanwhile, more and more assets are migrating on-chain—stocks, prediction markets, options, real-world assets (RWAs), and financial products we haven't even conceived of yet—all converging onto an increasingly global, always-on financial infrastructure.

If you can build a high-quality social graph around trading and excess returns, paired with excellent execution, you'll be in an extremely advantaged position. Memecoins can serve as the entry point, but the product extends far beyond that, as more of the financial world moves on-chain and asset classes become increasingly modular.

This was always part of Vector's vision, but fomo's journey has given me a far more concrete sense of its scale and timing. People are ready to trade on-chain and ready to embrace socialized financial experiences. fomo has proven that this experience can reach a broad audience far beyond the crypto-native market.

I think they are in a very favorable position. They've already begun venturing into perpetual contracts, moving beyond memecoins alone, and if they maintain strong execution, their opportunity is enormous. A natural comparison is Robinhood, but fomo has built the social graph and on-chain asset layer into the product from day one.

Conclusion

If we had kept going, could Vector have grown into a multi-billion-dollar company?

I think it's entirely possible. Perhaps even far beyond that. We had a great product, a brilliant team, and a strategy I believed had strong potential for success. Maybe we would have used it as a springboard to eventually reach a broader consumer market; maybe fomo would still have beaten us; or maybe we would have grown even larger than fomo is today.

Maybe someday quantum technology will let us find out in a parallel universe. For now, what fascinates me most is watching another excellent team—fomo—explore a path we never took.

I'm witnessing it as an observer. They've opened up a market we never truly entered and pushed the social trading model far beyond where we ever took it. I have tremendous respect for what they've built.

More importantly, watching this unfold has reinforced my conviction: financial markets are inherently deeply social, and as more of the world's assets migrate on-chain, that quality will only intensify.

Back then, we tried to build an early prototype of this future through Vector. The trajectory of fomo is showing us just how massive this space could ultimately become.