We beat every campaign target and said traffic was the wrong score.

The challenge

The client wanted to offer exchange-traded portfolios built on pools that never took custody of anyone's assets. The thesis was written down in April 2021 with the partners named. The product depended on outside protocols, and the core portfolio feature sat on hold for weeks in August while a partner caught up.

The brand had three demands that pulled against each other. It had to feel like the subreddit to millions of members who would reject anything corporate, stay legally separate from it, and still look credible next to a fund partner.

What we did

1. Write the thesis first

   Before there was a landing page, we wrote talking points and a four-month build calendar covering profiles, voting, the first portfolio, pool analytics and mobile web. When the client told us in May that the voting story was not landing, we kept that note and adjusted.

2. Ship the identity as a working site

   We replaced a cartoon trader with a neon street sign, a mark that works on a token icon and a term sheet alike. The system shipped as a live site with palette, logo variants, social kit and typography, and the relaunched home page went up on August 9, 2021.

3. Report every week, in the same format

   Each status report covered milestones, marketing, design, development, QA and security. Security had its own section every week. On August 5 we delivered a penetration test report with a 48-hour fix estimate that nobody had requested.

4. Measure the launch event daily

   For the September 2021 Diamond Hands event, we built and instrumented the landing page and tracked three key results on an OKR board from September 12 to 22, logging a confidence score each day.

The result

The landing page went live on August 4, 2021, and the Macro Hedge portfolio went live in October after QA. The event beat every target: 13,806 visits against 1,000 a day, and 5,733 emails against 2,000. ETH address submissions also passed their goal, though we count those as form entries, not people.

Two problems stayed open. The word Bets in the name tripped anti-gambling ad policies, and the ads account was suspended. Then the community split, the token lost value, and the files stop in May 2022. None of that was a build failure, but it ended the project.

What this means for your business

Hitting input targets is not the same as hitting business goals. We said so in our own reports, and we would set revenue or retention targets earlier next time. Keep a written record of what is stuck, even when it stays stuck, so the owner can decide with the facts in hand.

This project was delivered by the Innovation Theory team, the Denver firm behind InTheory, before InTheory existed as its AI practice.