In early 2021, Umberto founded The Kryptomon Company, a crypto-gaming business where Pokémon meets Tamagotchi and CryptoKitties. Set in the Kryptomon metaverse, this NFT Play-and-Earn blockchain game lets “Trainers” own individual monsters - each of which is a completely unique digital asset connected to an NFT.
The Kryptomon Company was started with just a €250 investment, which was used for Facebook marketing. From such humble beginnings, the company has now raised $10 million in Series A funding and serves a community of more than 450,000.
An entrepreneurial success story that brings to life Innoleaps’ core value of entrepreneurship and the value of our “build-measure-learn” methodology, The Kryptomon Company also owes its growth to the vision and aspirations of its founder. Umberto has always been entrepreneurial, starting two companies prior to Kryptomon. His latest venture has been backed by two Silicon Valley VCs and is set to play a leading role in a new era of crypto-gaming.
We caught up with Umberto recently to discuss his success so far and what he learned from his time at Innoleaps.
How do you think your experience at Innoleaps helped with the early success of Kryptomon?
Umberto: The Innoleaps process and entrepreneurial mindset have been fundamental to Kryptomon’s success - especially in the beginning. The idea for the company came to me in April 2021, but I’ve been in the crypto space more generally since 2011.
We launched the landing page and the whitepaper for Kryptomon on the 2nd of May and it went viral. I collected 80,000 emails in just a few weeks. Our Telegram group went from zero to 30,000 in a few days. I was actually scared to sleep during this period, as I was nervous about how fast the company was growing and wanted to make sure everything went well.
We set up a team that was very similar to the Innoleaps delivery team, consisting of a lead venture builder, growth hacker, and designer. We were basically duplicating what we were doing for our global clients where we test if there is product-market fit for a new product or service.
It sounds like things moved very quickly. How did your progress continue at Kryptomon?
In November 2021, 2,500 NFT Kryptomon eggs sold in 0.17 seconds (at $95 each). We did this three times, which served as validation of our business plan. It showed that this was a viable way of generating revenue. In June 2022, we are now a team of 30 people and continuing to grow rapidly. Born from a landing page and a whitepaper, it’s difficult to comprehend how far we’ve come already.
If you told me this time last year that Ktyptomon would achieve a valuation of more than $50 million, I wouldn’t have believed you. Nobody saw this coming - not even me! Especially because until February this year, I was working on Kryptomon as a side hustle alongside my job at Innoleaps.
What role has Innoleaps’ “build-measure-learn” methodology played in Kryptomon’s success?
The build-measure-learn process has been critical to the success of Kryptomon. We started the company in the same manner that we do with all our Innoleaps projects, constantly testing, iterating, building, and learning from the experiments we run.
My biggest tip would be to never stop this approach. I truly believe that it represents the ‘secret’ formula behind creating a future-proof business. Most people stop with this approach once they have found product-market fit, but in order to scale your proposition, you need to keep on using this build-measure-learn process.
Don’t get complacent and think you’ve got it all figured out. Keep testing and learning to discover what your end client really wants. The entrepreneurial journey is never complete. That’s something I’ve taken forward from my time at Innoleaps and which continues to inform everything we do here at Kryptomon.
