Welcome to the Startups of the Year Winner Interview Series. Congratulations for being one of the top 3000 startups worldwide! The HackerNoon team is thrilled to know more about you!
What follows is an interview with Mark Zalan, CEO of GoMining, winner of the HackerNoon Startups of the Year 2023 in the British Virgin Islands Misc, Oceania.
What does it mean for you to win this title?
We are pleased and gratified at the recognition of our contributions. We are constantly looking for community feedback to improve our products, and this kind of appreciation helps make our efforts worthwhile.
Winning the Hackernoon community recognition is a significant indicator for us that our team is moving in the right direction. Since our product targets a fairly broad audience, the trust of the audience and feedback help us better understand user needs, and Hackernoon provides the perfect environment for addressing this task.
What sets you apart from the competition?
We are focused on making the superior economics of Bitcoin mining accessible to everyone. In building products that allow our users to start mining Bitcoin within a matter of minutes and at a cost as low as $25, we are unique. The explosive customer demand we’ve seen over the past 2 years is a confirmation of that. Check out our
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
\We are irreverent around challenging every assumption and traditional way of doing things. Obviously, this can be a strength and a weakness, and if not done right, can lead to reinventing the wheel. However, we’ve managed to maintain a healthy balance between blazing new trails and inventing a new product (that hundreds of people told us couldn’t be done), making the economics of Bitcoin mining accessible to non-industry insiders and leveraging traditional approaches that we’ve confirmed are useful in what we are trying to do. This blend of questioning the way things are and inventing new and better ways while staying practical and leveraging that which works for purpose has allowed us to offer a successful product that is posting world-class growth rates.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
My other passions are history and political science, as well as understanding how our societies function and evolved to where we are today. In another life I would likely be lecturing at a university and writing history books.
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
We are seeing double-digit monthly growth rates while working hard to expand the business that is profitable, positioned in the middle of an industry that is projected for staggering worldwide growth. All of the above are how we think about success and how we want to position our ecosystem to take advantage of the global and industry trends we see for the near future. If I had to narrow it down to one metric, it is definitely the customer growth rate, which tells us we are tackling a significant pain-point that exists for a large number of people, in a way they appreciate.
Tell us how your startup is changing the world.
We make the excellent economics of Bitcoin mining available to regular people. Getting a financial return with Bitcoin mining traditionally required millions of dollars in capital and highly specialized technical skills (that also cost money to develop or hire). We’ve built a product that obfuscates that complexity and allows customers to start participating in Bitcoin mining in minutes and with as little as $25, with the first profit landing in the customer’s Bitcoin wallet the very next morning. By lowering the barriers to entry for normal people to earn rewards, while strengthening, securing the Bitcoin network infrastructure, we make our positive impact on the world.
How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2024?
We believe the best way to contribute and to give back is to do what we do best, continue to innovate, while lowering barriers to entry, and to be a good citizen of the Bitcoin and broader technology community.
The recognition from users and the community serves as a driving force for our continued advancement and, as I mentioned earlier, provides vital feedback on the quality of our product.
What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2024?
We expect 2024 to be transformational for us through a variety of factors. Firstly, the Bitcoin halving will impact our business and our vertical in a significant way. The economics will change, and the market participants will change. We’ve been preparing for this event for the past three years ensuring our business is cost optimized and as efficient as possible, as we expect this will allow us and our user community to pass through the upcoming disruption, and to be best positioned to take advantage of the changing economics following the halving. Secondly, our user community is scaling by orders of magnitude, and we place a major focus on ensuring our support and engagement processes are peerless in creating a world-class user experience.
Which trend(s) are you most excited about in 2024? Share your reasons.
2024 Is a paradigm-shifting year for the Bitcoin mining community with the ETFs and the halving taking place within three months of each other. We are very excited to see the ways in which our industry and the broader technology space will transform to take advantage of the changes.
2023 had been another crazy year, especially in tech, with layoffs and the Generative AI takeover! Which trend are you most concerned about? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.
I wouldn’t say concerned, but we are very cognizant of the pace of change. It seems things are speeding up, paradigms are shifting quickly, changes that used to take decades now take years or sometimes months. The way the world became location-independent in the past four years is very illustrative of that. We expect changes of the same scale to happen as quickly or faster going forward, so it will be important to be diligent in always learning, looking for ways to do something better, and being flexible, adjusting to take advantage of new trends, technologies, and opportunities.
We don’t know what specifically those will be, five years ago, hardly anyone would have said that remote work, generative AI or Bitcoin ETFs/general institutionalization would be a thing over the next 5 years, so we don’t think it's worthwhile to predict specifics. We do think it's important to understand that changes happen quickly. They bring threats and opportunities, and figuring it out is a fun and exciting part of it.
Share your biggest success so far and/or your biggest failure so far.
Building a career out of always learning, developing, and pushing myself into new pursuits, taking advantage of opportunities that may have scared others off, is probably the biggest success. In terms of failure, I certainly wish I was smarter along the way, and figured out many things faster than I did! :)
We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?
HackerNoon is an excellent platform for showcasing our technological solutions to a wide and relevant community capable of providing objective feedback. We closely monitor all materials about our product appearing on Hackernoon and pay attention to UX moments that require improvement.
In a broader sense, your platform is a great place to feel the pulse of Web3, track emerging trends, and receive important insights directly from where they originate.
Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?
Not wildly original here, but the advice I most want to pass on to my children is to enjoy the journey, whatever destination one travels. This is one of the things I wish I would have figured out sooner.