Axal MoonPay Shipyard Testimony
Our experience as one of the first team's in MoonPay's Shipyard program.
Axal participated in MoonPay’s Shipyard program earlier this year.
To say that it was impactful would be an understatement.
Here’s our testimony about how we found out about the program and why it made such a big difference to Axal.
Serendipitous Circumstances
It took a while for us to get in touch with the MoonPay team.
Kozy from our team was a reporter in a different life, and had interviewed Ivan from MoonPay in 2021, so this relationship has actually been a lot longer than you’d expect.
We reached out to the comms team at MoonPay primarily expecting them to help with comarketing.
However, that all changed when we actually got a chance to sit down with Halsey, the first employee at MoonPay who now leads the Head of Strategic Partnerships, and talk about who we are.
He immediately started to give us sage advice, sharing advice about how companies in Web3 actually close business deals (spoiler: it is almost ALL interpersonal relationship management), and invited us to meet up in Toronto at Consensus.
Flash forward two weeks and Ash/Kozy from the team are trying to get into the very exclusive MoonPay event. Sadly, Ash wasn’t approved, but Kozy was → though this minor inconvenience ended up being an extreme value add!
At that event, Kozy ran up to Andres, probably one of the best BDs (if not the best) in crypto → and he helped with getting the Axal team in.
After a great day of partying, it was time for business.
After a few conversations, including an early one where Ivan + Keith from the MoonPay team swung by, we realized that there were a ton of synergies between our teams.
In particular, MoonPay had just acquired Iron, who built Virtual Accounts, and it turned out to be a near-perfect fit for what Axal needed.
Axal aims to be the best place to earn on the dollar. Part of our flow for doing this is to spin up a Privy wallet (this is to ensure that we at 0 point are custodying user assets/allows for us to have smart wallets that can automate tasks for users).
With MoonPay Virtual Accounts powered by Iron, users on Axal are able to completely abstract away ALL crypto knowledge from their DeFi experience → which is going to be vital towards onboarding normal people into crypto.
A Supportive Incubation
Once we realized it made sense to cooperate, we were ready to start getting down and dirty and build.
The MoonPay team created a weekly check in with us.
These checkins covered several verticals related to shipping a solid product: Marketing, Design, Branding, Engineering and Partnerships.
Beyond lending their expertise in each discipline, the MoonPay team often went out of their way to make useful connections for us.
MoonPay was a seminal support layer at this stage → helping us stay accountable and understand what to prioritize when considering Go To Market initiatives .
A really useful part of this collaboration is the access we had to MoonPay’s Otherlife Design studio (who BTW helped design GitHub).
Otherlife played a dramatic role in helping us change our UI to feel friendlier to normies and with finding our catchphrase “Earn More.”
Launch Week
Launch week is a scary time for all early stage companies.
We actually had launched our original trading platform earlier in the year to a relatively lukewarm reaction (We regrettably launched shortly after memecoin mania had ended, so people were nervous about where the macro tailwinds were heading.
Long story short, it was a nightmare.
This was actually quite useful for us. It was during this initial iteration stage that we realized that we wanted to hyper fixate on yield, rather than build just another everything trading app.
This time was different.
This time we had MoonPay.
From helping us with reaching out to reporters, to being a true tag team partner with amplifying positive posts about Axal, MoonPay led to us having a material difference in exposure.
As per Halsey, one of the main perks of being part of the Shipyard program is that no two teams will coincide with each other on launch dates.
It is worth mentioning that the support does NOT end after launch week.
A long-term partnership
We actually did a super viral video with Rama on the MoonPay team, where Ash accidentally put $1 million into Axal instead of $100,000.
As we continue on our journey, we know that MoonPay will be in our corner as we think of partnerships, go-to-market, design and engineering support!
We encourage everyone reading this post to apply to the program! It is truly game changing.