Milk Road's Wasted Research

A story about how Shaan's crypto newsletter Milk Road gathered valuable market intelligence but didn't realize its full monetary potential.

"At Milk Road, we would interview whales - 25 of the biggest crypto whales who were placing tens of millions or hundred million dollar bets on NFTs and coins. In crypto, if you're a whale, you have multiple characteristics: First, it's a small market. Second, these guys have a big check. Big check plus small market equals they can actually move the market. Third, they're very influential - when they do something, everybody follows because they have a reputation. They became a whale because they picked something early on, so everybody thinks this person's the oracle.

We interviewed them about their bullishness, sentiment on the market, and which projects they were most bullish on. Instead of selling this info to crypto funds or hedge funds, we were like 'this will be a great lead magnet for free newsletter subscribers.' We gave it all away for free as a PDF if you referred people.

That thing was so valuable that we didn't even really understand the value we had. It's like somebody who now Airbnbs and makes 100k a year off their kid's bedroom that's unused - at the time it just seemed like an empty room. We didn't understand the value of that unused asset."