How Le Wagon enabled me to build a crypto project

Before Le Wagon, I was doing a Business Development internship at PayPal. There, I quickly noticed how important it was to have a tech skill set when working in a tech company but also how much I enjoyed digging deeper in the PayPal product stack. For example, I learned how to write SQL queries to retrieve information from the data warehouse in order to find out how consumers were using the product. That wasn’t really expected from my role as a Business Developer but I enjoyed doing it. I also found myself always hanging around with our software developers asking them tons of questions about their work.

I won an internal product innovation hackathon where I teamed up with two developers and together built a prototype for a product feature we had come up with. When my internship finished, it was clear to me that I wanted to learn how to code and a quick research showed me that Le Wagon was probably going to be the best place to do it.

The best part of the 9 weeks was clearly the last three weeks, where, after first going through the six weeks of learning to code , we were finally putting everything we had learned together, to build a full fledged web application. 
I loved everything about it: the team dynamic, the hustle to get it done in time and the excitement when finally presenting it to an audience in Berlin. I have always had this fascination for startups and tech products and here I was, learning how to potentially build my own. It was super intense and rewarding at the same time.

After the nine week bootcamp, I took another three months off to work on a project of my own, a social network to make list sharing (favourite podcasts, books, restaurants etc.) easier among friends. The pace during the nine week bootcamp had been so fast that I wanted to go through everything I had learned and build a web app from scratch all by myself.
Once I was done, I decided to go back to pursue a job in Business Development because that’s where I felt I could add most value to a team or project. However, as I didn’t want to abandon my coding skills, I always continued building little things and learning new frameworks and languages. Together, with two of my colleagues, I recently started a new side project called Cryptotesters. It’s a crypto product review platform for crypto wallets and exchanges.

I started this project because I’m fascinated by the potential of crypto. I find the idea of a decentralized global financial system outside the realm of any single government (similar to how the internet doesn’t belong to anyone) extremely appealing.

However, I sometimes have the feeling that the utility of crypto is not fully understood. It took me a lot of time and research to get up to speed on the topic myself. There’s so much developer activity in the space and so many different products to choose from. At Cryptotesters, we want to simplify the process of finding the the best crypto wallet and the best crypto exchange and answer questions like “where do I get the cheapest Bitcoin?” or “what’s the most secure way to store crypto?”. In short, we want to make it the go-to place for people new to the space, the platform we wish had existed when we joined/discovered the space four years ago.

For anyone interested in launching a project but unsure as to how to do it my advice would be: 1) learn to code 2) start it as a side project. Both will allow you to learn how to launch projects while not having too much at stake. Being able to code, you will be more independent and have a much better idea how to execute your idea.