Josipa Majic recounts her entrepreneurial career from a hardware plush-toy startup (licensed to Hasbro) through discovering blockchain in 2017, to co-founding Revuto — a fintech/crypto subscription-payments startup. After failing to secure VC funding because of the crypto roadmap, the team ran the first ICO on Cardano in May 2021, which sold out in minutes: they raised an equivalent of US$10 million, attracted a 3 million user waitlist, and created 60,000 Cardano mobile wallets on their platform. The narrative highlights the risks, stress, and accelerated pace of building a crypto startup versus traditional startups.
Questions this video answers
2017
May 2021
An equivalent of US$10 million
3 million users
60,000 mobile Cardano wallets
Chapters
So my entire journey started when I was 22. My first company was a hardware device. It was a plush toy with embedded sensors. We've raised a London based angel investment round with the goal of then negotiating large scale manufacturing and distribution. I ended up in the US in Silicon Valley, and we've signed a multi million dollar term sheet with one of the biggest baby monitoring companies in the world. I was incredibly excited. It was such a big milestone. But the deal, after months and months of due diligence, ended up falling through. So it didn't happen. The realization that we took all of that time and energy and effort to build a product, go through the licensing, get all of the approvals, and then realizing that the industry is so capital intensive and that the margins are so laser thin, it was just horrible. By sheer luck, I then met the team at Hasbro, the innovation department, and we ended up licensing that product. We then took that money to build another company. My first introduction to blockchain started in 2017 when it was both the best and the worst thing that I've ever seen because it was such an incredibly exciting period. Prices were rising, it was an incredible bull run, but also so many smart and vocal people were starting to wake up and see what blockchain and crypto can bring. But then reality kicked in, or in that case, the bear market. And it was just a big blow. And all of us co founders, we were working on our existing companies and we just kept our heads down and kind of forgot about all the excitement that happened in 2017. And then when Corona kicked in, when the first lockdown happened, Vedran called me and he said, listen, I think we can really address this incredibly big market of subscriptions if we take a blended approach of fintech and crypto. So issuing virtual debit cards on one end, but then on the other side having our own cryptocurrency and enabling people to use that to pay for subscriptions. And I immediately said yes, because it's such a big market and it sounded like such an interesting opportunity to get back into crypto and really to get engaged with the community once again. It was a much more realistic period because prices were relatively, you know, modest at the time. And we started building revuto. We used our own funds and we used our own spare time. And the moment when we had a prototype, we said, okay, we have to find some external capital in order to put this on the market, so it has to be a VC round. And we went, we talked to every VC fund that we could, both in the US but Also in Europe and globally. We talked to fintech, specialized funds, we talked to investors that had a range of experiences. Everyone said no. The moment they heard about our crypto roadmap, they said our LPs. So their investors do not understand crypto. They're terrified of it. They think it's connected to illegal activities. In such moments, you know, everyone was questioning our plans, friends, family. Everyone was saying, you know, why do you need to put the crypto elements into the company? Obviously no one understands it. And it was a really discouraging moment because it just felt like everything was against us. And at that point, May of 2021 approached and we had little to no cash. We spent our own money. We dedicated most of our working hours to Ravuto, but nothing was happening. And at that point our co founder Vedran said, I think we should do an ICO and I think, you know, we should just move ahead with our plans to develop on Cardano and just run with it. And it was terrifying. There was little to no reasoning why that should work. Like no one reacted to any of our social media posts, to any of our small scale interviews. Like everyone just ignored us. And we decided, let's go ahead and do the ico. And I remember the moment when we had a live stream to announce our ico. Our voices were shaking. We were just incredibly terrified of, you know, it's going to be such a public blow and nothing will come out of it. But the complete opposite happened. We had an overwhelmingly positive response. Our ico, which was the first ever ICO on Cardano, it had so many technical and logistic and legal challenges around it, but it was sold out and minutes. We raised an equivalent of US$10 million, we had a 3 million user wait list and they created a total of 60,000 mobile Cardano wallets on our platform. I remember standing there just completely terrified. We were watching as the dashboard was filling in for the first ICO round and we were just kind of deers in the headlight, confused look, because we had no clue what was happening. It was a complete plot twist. I would say the journey has been tough and exciting one, but also a very rewarding one. And I would also say working on a crypto startup is so much more faster, exciting and also stressful than working on a normal startup. It's literally an order of magnitude in terms of the change.
