the company that died under us
Garden didn't start as Garden. It started as Catalog, a cross-chain exchange.
Our founders came out of Ren Protocol, a Bitcoin infrastructure project. When the Ren founders sold it off and moved on, they helped us raise for Catalog, and in return we took the contract to maintain Ren's tech. A lot of Catalog's early community came straight from Ren. Our product was built on Ren's tech too.
Then December 2022 happened. FTX collapsed, Ren had ended up under that umbrella, and the whole thing died overnight. Right after our alpha, the tech we'd built on was suddenly gone.
It got worse. Ren holders had been told they'd get an airdrop, and a lot of them had joined Catalog on that promise. With the Ren founders gone and FTX imploding, they turned to us for answers. We were a software contractor, nothing more, but that distinction meant nothing to people who'd lost money. Two communities, Ren and Catalog, both at our throats. A year into building, our tech was worth nothing, and we were back to zero.
why we didn't fight it
When the news broke, we did the crisis comms. Showed up, answered what we could, took the heat. The community stayed toxic anyway.
We could have kept fighting it out in public for months, spending goodwill we didn't have to win everyone back. We didn't, and I still think that was right. In strategy there's rarely a clean solution where everyone walks away happy. Reconvincing two burned communities wasn't going to give us, or our investors, a return worth the time. So we made the harder call: stop explaining, and go build something new in stealth.
We still tried to leave it clean. While building Garden, we helped the Ren community get recognised as a DAO, and handed the committee that stepped up all the grant funding earmarked for Ren on-chain that the FTX collapse hadn't touched. They stayed salty about us regardless. That's fine. You can't win everything, and in time we all went our separate ways.
garden, from zero
We spun up a new brand, Garden, and built it quietly.
This is where we made the decision that mattered most. Catalog was an "any asset" exchange, which meant it had no real wedge. When we grilled what edge we actually had, the answer was Bitcoin bridging. With Catalog we'd had the Ren community carrying us. Garden had nobody. A stealth project from semi-anonymous builders has to stand on its own legs, which means it needs one sharp reason to exist. So we bet the whole brand on one thing: Bitcoin bridging.
marketing it alone, on a shoestring
The week FTX fell, our Head of Growth left. So the marketing was mine, all of it.
We had two hard constraints. Keep the burn low, because Garden was really a hypothesis and we needed it to be survivable if it failed. And keep our faces mostly out of it, so we needed a short-term team to be the front.
2023 was a bad year to buy marketing. Funding from 2021 and 2022 had bloated everyone's rates, and most agencies charged a fortune to hand you a strategy deck and no execution. I interviewed more than 30 agencies and freelancers. With money tight and the usual metrics useless in crypto, I had to do second-order analysis on everything: read past the vanity numbers and the basic work dressed up as wins, and spend my time in their actual portfolios.
After a few rounds I stopped chasing the "good" names. I went after small, hungry outfits still looking for the case study that would let them raise their prices. People who did real organic work and actually understood web3 culture. You can tell from a portfolio whether someone's been in the trenches. I brought in a 20-year-old who'd dropped out to hustle in crypto: raw talent, light on process, which suited the budget and which I could build a system around. That became the team.
community from customer support
With the product ready, we started beta testing through our friends in crypto. A slow trickle at first, then it picked up as people shared it around.
I pulled the early users into a group and made them feel like insiders: early updates, their feedback in our designs, 1-1 calls. Those were our first advocates, and later became a program we called Chief Gardeners.
Then the real lesson. This was a fintech product, so every stuck or slow swap meant real money hanging, sometimes thousands of dollars, and scared people on the other end. We had a lot of worried users to talk down. I learned to be patient, to give people confidence. And I realised what a gift that direct line was. While I was calming someone down, I was learning who they were and how they behaved, building a real picture of the user. I taught the team the same. We pulled shifts, talking to users all day and the devs in parallel to fix things. Pure early-startup madness, and we loved it.
waiting to party
We didn't have a brand yet, so we built culture out of shared pain.
Garden is peer-to-peer, so every swap needs a market maker on the other side. In the early days, under load, that took a while, and the UI just said "awaiting counterparty deposit." Our Telegram filled up with it. Someone mistyped it once as "waiting for party," and a meme was born. When the devs patched the bottleneck, I posted "counter party waiting to party." From then on people reported the issue in some variation of that line. It became an inside joke.
That's when it clicked. These were enthusiasts testing a beta. They knew things would break. What they wanted was to feel like we were in it together, not handed a corporate apology. Get that right and the bugs become bonding. That's how the first real community formed, and eventually the Chief Gardeners ran most of it themselves, so we barely had to spend on community at all. It peaked north of 5,000 members and still sits around 3,700 today.
what it added up to
Once the foundation was there, an incentive program lit the fuse (the creative side of that is its own story, in the branding case). The jump was absurd: everything we'd done up to the end of 2023, we matched in the first week of January.
In its first six months, Garden did $813M in volume. From a dead company, two hostile communities, and a marketing team of one.
what i'd take anywhere
When the ground gives way, the job isn't to save what's broken. It's to find the one real edge buried in the wreckage and rebuild around it.
All of it travels. Cut to your actual wedge. Keep burn low while you're still a hypothesis. Hire for hunger over credentials and build the system around them. And when you have nothing else, get in the trenches with your users, because a brand built on "we're in this together" is a lot harder to kill than one built on a logo.