The world’s easiest Bitcoin investing app made in Switzerland was born, and the team as well as the users who anticipated the app for months already celebrated its public launch with this small little video, which received more than 10’000 views on our different online platforms.
It took the team months of conceptualizing, designing, researching, tinkering, pitching, failing, learning, fundraising and developing to finally give birth to our baby: Relai – the world’s easiest Bitcoin Investing App. Everything from the idea to the finished app is “made in Switzerland”. A big and long-awaited moment for the team as well as the numerous partners, supporters, test customers, supporters and the whole Swiss Bitcoin community. We worked hard and shed many drops of sweat and tears. All the better it felt on the day of truth when the app went live and the first positive feedback came in. 😍
But let’s start at the beginning. The night before the official public launch of the app we still had nightmares and big doubts. Because the app is still far from perfect, there are still many bugs and countless possibilities for improvement. The actual development of the mobile app only started on April 1st, 2020. And now we already launch this thing only three months later? Are we crazy? Is the product even ready for the market? Is it good enough? Will people like it?
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
Reid Hoffman, Founder of Linkedin
Since the beginning of the project, the founding team has always referred to the Lean Startup principles and cultivated a “move fast get shit done” approach. In our opinion, this includes moving fast, maintaining a laser-sharp focus, and taking risks. It was definitely courageous to launch the app publicly so early. Despite the countless internal tests within the team and external tests with the beta test group, it felt like a “Leap of Faith”. Not only from a technical point of view but also from a market perspective: Would anyone even care that the app is finally live? Will people even care?
Despite all these uncertainties we dared to release the Relai App into the wild on 3rd July 2020, which turned out to be a great decision, especially because July 2020 was a strong month for Bitcoin from a price perspective which helped us attract many first users. Welcome to the fam Relaiers! ✌️
Relai was flooded with positive feedback in the first 24 hours and there were no serious technical problems. What a relief, which was of course celebrated in style at the exclusive Relai Launch Party in our office in Zurich’s Langstrasse. The interest in our app was greater than we had dreamed of! The fear that not a single soul would be interested was quickly dispelled. To illustrate: The tweet “Relai is live!” received more than 100 likes and more than 6’000 views.
The first reactions and comments we received via social media and our community chats also surprised and delighted us positively. It seems that our service has really struck a nerve in the European Bitcoin community and beyond, which was not so clear to us yet, at least not to that extent.
«Perfect! This is exactly what I needed.»
@niclick (Twitter user)
In the next few days, the positive vibes continued. The first Relai users seemed to be satisfied with what they got delivered so far. After one month, the app already received over 90 5-star ratings and has an average rating of 5.0 in the Google Play Store and 4.7 in the Apple Store.
For a very short time, Relai was even the No. 3 of the “most trending Finance Apps” in the Google Play Store and the No. 63 of all Swiss Finance Apps! We were also pleasantly surprised by the first business-relevant figures: After one month we had already registered well over 1,000 app downloads in 20 different countries and investments of over 100,000 CHF. By this point in time, people have already bought more than 10 Bitcoin using the Relai platform. 💪
But not everything was perfect. We also quickly realized that the product was indeed only just a version 1.0 and far from perfect. In addition to the countless positive feedbacks, we also received numerous bug reports, change suggestions, support requests and critical comments. So we had to collect ourselves and get back down to earth. The Relai team cannot – and will not – rest on their laurels, but must get back to work and step on the gas. The journey does not end here, it is just beginning. We have a lot of work ahead of us: perfecting the product, building effective marketing, starting the company, raising money, developing new features, and so on and so forth.
This first launch-hype was nice, but the team was also happy to get back on that horse and concentrate on Relai’s daily business again: making Bitcoin easy and available to everyone. Step by step we keep on building the world’s easiest Bitcoin investing app – made in Switzerland! 🇨🇭 🙌
«The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.»
Lao Tzu (Chinese philosopher)
