The Record · WallStreetBets
We shipped the rails.
The crowd ran the other way.
In 2021 the most famous retail trading community on the internet wanted the thing Wall Street said retail could not have: index funds with no fund manager. We wrote the thesis down in April, shipped the first products in August, and kept a status report every week so nobody had to take our word for any of it.
Everything below carries the date it was reported on. The wins are dated. So is the blocker we never solved, which sat in three consecutive reports, word for word.
Index funds
without the fund manager.
The thesis was written down in April 2021, with the partners named in it.
Exchange Traded Portfolios built on non-custodial pools, holding synthetic stocks tokenised through a synthetics protocol, governed by on-chain votes from token holders, running on Binance Smart Chain. That is what the talking points doc said before there was a landing page to put it on.
An ETP is a product design that combines DeFi protocols such as asset tokenisation (e.g., Synthetix) and non-custodial managed pools (e.g., Balancer) with traditional basket indices.
WSBDApp Talking Points
It’s like an ETP Printer, it makes a new copy according to the size of the request.
WSBDApp Talking Points
Voting story is not resonating.
Marketing Initiative 1.0, meeting notes
That third one is the client telling us our best idea was not landing. Governance was the part of the thesis the community cared about least, and we kept the note.
The identity had a harder brief than the product did, and our own published write-up states it better than we could restate it: the client needed a brand “distinct from the sub-Reddit” that would still be “welcomed and accepted by the community”, carrying “the values of the existing audience but, simultaneously, be able to attract more mature and professional clients.” Three constraints, and any two of them are easy. It had to read as the subreddit to three million people who would have rejected anything corporate, not be the subreddit for legal reasons, and still be a thing a fund partner could sit next to.
Every ship here
has a date on it.
Seven weekly status reports survive, each one built the same way: overview, milestones, project management, marketing, product innovation, branding and design, technical and dev, QA, security. Security had a standing section every week.
The goal was 2,000 apes.
The page logged 13,806 visits.
Decentraland’s side named 4,000 attendees as a successful showing for the September 20 event. WSB set its own contribution goal at half that, 2,000 apes, and supplied promotional content into a 250,000-subscriber newsletter. Marketing was pulled off the roadmap to run it. Three key results were tracked daily on an OKR board from September 12 to 22, with a confidence score logged every day.
Target was 1,000 per day. Cumulative visits to the campaign path crossed 1,000 on Sept 14 and 10,000 on Sept 19.
Target was 2,000. Collected through the event landing page we built and instrumented.
Target was 2,000. Submissions to a form, not people: the count runs past both the visit total and the roughly 10,400 wallets holding $WSB, so read it as submissions.
Daily new visits, September 12 to 22 2021: 234, 358, 661, 985, 1,169, 675, 5,175, 3,102, 1,044, 265, 138 — including the two days it fell off a cliff.
Underneath the campaign, the community itself: wallets holding one or more WSB tokens went 10,091 on September 12, 10,460 on September 20, 10,422 on September 22. Read off the chain explorer and written down daily. The NFT programme running alongside the event ran 15,000 Diamond Hands Passes against 30,000 raffle tickets, five tickets maximum per wallet, non-winning tickets refunded, burn to reveal on September 24.
Exceeded all targeted key results leading to successful Diamond Hands Event.
And in the same report, the challenges section opened with a problem that would repeat, word for word, in the next two.
The name in the product
was the marketing problem.
Our own product name got the ads account suspended.
The same paragraph went into three consecutive status reports, identical each time, because it was never solved.
Paid advertising and email campaigns continue to face compliance and policy issues (as do most blockchain campaigns). ‘Bets’ in our name trips anti-gambling policies and automated activity (such as email signups) flags us as potential spam.
By September 23 the consequences were concrete: the Google Ads account was suspended and under appeal, and a campaign was under review at a crypto publisher’s compliance office, targeted as betting. The name was the brand, so there was no fixing it.
ETP functionality is on hold currently because of balancer not being ready.
The core product sat for weeks waiting on a partner protocol.
Feature freeze and Maintenance commencement. Research on WSBPunks.
That is the Product Innovation section in full. The build slowed and the NFT work started in the same bullet list, in the same week.
Marketing’s success with traffic and inputs needs to be better measured in terms of business objectives, e.g., revenue, transactions, community engagement, token price.
We beat every input target by multiples and said out loud that inputs were not the thing worth grading.
Two of those three we could not fix from where we sat. The third we could have, and did not. Losses stay on the page for the same reason the numbers do.
The machinery held.
The market went elsewhere.
By November the value narrative had four silos routing into one token: the ETPs, the NFTs, Stonks, and an off-chain retail fund built with a partner. That document names the Nancy Pelosi ETF directly, as a product the community or its partners could spin up like any other. By March 2022 the Insider Portfolio had been drafted as ordinary shares of a protected cell company, to be listed on a real exchange, with a stated maximum divergence of five per cent per security from the holdings it tracked.
The Insider Portfolio aims to replicate the publicly disclosed stockholdings of Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, who have established a well documented and enviable performance record.
Written as a regulated instrument, not a joke. The record does not prove it reached the exchange.
Then the community split behind different leaders and ran to the NFT craze instead of the heavy funds. WSB came apart at the ownership level, the token lost value, and the leaders went to other WSB communities. The last files in the folders are dated May 2 2022. None of that was a build problem. It ended the project all the same.
One line in this project rhymes with a line from eight years earlier.
We never own your assets: they are yours and yours alone to trade. You are the custodian of your assets.
In 2013 we said the same thing a different way while helping build ShapeShift: we never held the keys. Eight years and a different client later, the rule had not moved.
Apr 2021 to May 2022 · 7 weekly status reports · product, brand, UI, delivery, QA, security, marketing lead
What the files hold, and what they do not.
Everything on this page carries the date it was reported on. Seven weekly status reports survive and are built the same way; the ship dates in the log are theirs. The oldest files in the project are a four-month product timeline and a logo, saved the same week. The daily visit figures were logged by hand on the OKR sheet, and the wallet counts read off the chain explorer and written down daily. The last files in the folders are dated 2 May 2022.
Where the claims stop. The 61,224 ETH addresses are submissions to a form, not people — the count runs past both the visit total and the roughly 10,400 wallets holding $WSB. The Pelosi tracker was written as a regulated instrument; the record does not prove it reached the exchange. Every figure visible in the product screenshots is the product’s own display, not a claim of ours, and the farm cards show an empty position: zero earned, zero staked.
The blocker. The paragraph about the ads account is quoted from the September 23, September 30 and October 7 reports, where it appears identically. It was never solved, and it was never quietly dropped from the reporting either.
How AI would help
this now.
Everything above this line is in a file somebody can open. Nothing below it is. This is how we would run the same engagement today, with AI in the work — written as an opinion, because that is what it is.
The community machine on this page — a podcast, recurring AMAs, listing announcements, explainers, a numbered weekly roundup, seasonal cards, all in one neon system — is the highest-volume production job we have ever run, and it is the thing AI changes most. That output is now a fraction of the effort. The DApp surfaces, the staking and voting dashboards, the fund pages and the OKR reporting would all come faster too.
It would not have heard the client say the voting story was not landing.
That line is in our own meeting notes from May 2021, and it is the client telling us our best idea was dead. Governance was the part of the thesis the community cared about least, and no amount of generated campaign volume would have surfaced it — more content aimed at the wrong story is just more of the wrong story, arriving sooner.
We shipped it. Then the market voted.
Now we check the bet first.
This one is on the record because the build was right and the question underneath it was never asked. That is what the assessment is for. Two days, no charge, answered in writing.
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