fomo创始人专访：130万用户、日增3万，用影响力驱动产品

Podcast from Maurits

Compiled / Odaily Golem (@web3_golem)

Editor's Note: Recently, the social-driven Meme trading platform fomo has attracted significant attention. As of press time, according to Dune data, fomo trading bot has become the market leader in both trading volume and market share, sharply disrupting the current Meme trading platform landscape. On August 12, fomo co-founderSe Yong gave an exclusive interview, discussing for the first time his early crypto experiences, the most successful Meme coin he ever traded, and the product philosophy behind fomo's bet on mobile and social trading.

In the interview, Se Yong said that fomo has reached 1.3 million users, with 30,000 new users added daily, but fomo's goal is not to become an existing professional Meme terminal. He also believes market competition is a good thing, but fomo's core goal remains to grow the "pie," with focus not limited to the crypto Twitter circle and crypto user base. This perspective may also be seen as a response to Pump.fun's recent heavy spending to poach top traders from the fomo platform.

Odaily has condensed and organized the core content of the interview as follows, enjoy~

Founder's Personal Crypto Journey: Made First Fortune on Avalanche, Not Skilled as a Meme "P-Soldier"

Early Entry into Crypto

Se Yong: When I first got into cryptocurrency, it was also through trading. On the Avalanche platform in 2021, they leaked an RPC, and the leaker was an account called sad start. I haven't seen him since. At the time, I didn't know what cross-chain was, nor what RPC was, but he explained these concepts to me step by step in a very interesting way. He said, "Ethereum is too expensive; there's another option here, which is EVM. Come trade here, and you'll find more opportunities."

I followed his advice, and my investment returns quickly grew from a few hundred dollars to five figures. I think this is an important moment for everyone involved in crypto trading. From then on, I started trading on all blockchains—from Ethereum mainnet to BSC, then Tron, Solana, all Layer 2 networks, and projects like Sui, Injective, and Sei. I've tried almost all of them, and each chain offers a completely different experience.

However, I always wanted to build something, and some ideas gradually took shape in my mind.

About two years ago, my friends discovered a coin called Keeta on Base. They each bought about $10,000 worth, and they all ended up making seven figures. At the time, I thought I should buy some too, but I had no money on the Base chain.

Moreover, cross-chain was very troublesome. I had to set up a Rabby Wallet, then find a cross-chain bridge, and figure out which frontend to trade on. For me, the workload was too heavy—something that should have taken just 45 seconds became so cumbersome. I thought to myself, if I have this obstacle, others probably do too, and I need to help others solve this problem as well.

Personal Trading Style: Not Suited to Be a "P-Soldier," More of a Diamond Hand

Se Yong: I've never been the typical Meme trader—using Telegram bots or web terminals and so on—but I've tried that lifestyle of spending 16 hours in front of the computer, meticulously researching every Meme coin, trying to understand their narratives. But honestly, I'm really not good at it. I think that's also one of the reasons I founded fomo, because I believe not everyone will understand these narratives.

If it's some Meme masters, they can quickly grasp the narrative of some Memes, but people like me, even in a bull market, only make three trades a week. If certain tokens fascinate me from a narrative perspective, then I'll buy. For example, the GME token—after the Roaring Kitty documentary came out, I felt the narrative was great, and many people were discussing it, so I quickly bought in. Pandora is another example; it's an ERC-404 token that is both a token and an NFT. I thought it was cool, so I entered early, and it may be one of the most successful trades I've ever made.

Overall, my entry and exit points are never the best. I'm the type of diamond hand who holds on, maintaining conviction even through downturns.

Who Are Your Top 5 Favorite Traders, and Will You Invite Them to Join fomo?

Se Yong: The first is GCR. I think he's an incredible trader with a legendary story. The second is Kobe, especially when he was young. The third is Flood; I think he's definitely one of the top figures—he saw HYPE early on. Fourth is Ansem. Although he occasionally faces criticism, his judgment over the past five years has been mostly accurate—for example, precisely predicting SOL and spotting certain Meme coins early.

Some of them are already trading on fomo, and I've talked to a few others, but they don't trade on-chain. Also, as veterans, they need to protect their reputations. After achieving success, most tend to fade from the public eye, except Ansem, who remains active in the spotlight.

I'd actually prefer fomo to nurture a new generation of traders—people who grow up publicly from start to finish. fomo can document their entire journey, and users can clearly see where they started and where they ultimately end up. I believe every social platform needs a place that can nurture native heroes. We need people who truly start from nothing. Bringing in already-established traders isn't always beneficial; they often dilute or even crowd out the stage for newer traders.

Therefore, my fifth pick for the top trader is change, who is currently No. 1 on the fomo leaderboard and has held that position for a while.

What Is Your Personal Ultimate Goal for fomo?

Se Yong: I think the most important thing is impact. When we set out to build fomo, many of the questions we considered revolved around how to create a product that reaches users and delivers it into the hands of people we trust, and those who are eager to experience something unprecedented.

I think there are many great companies in the crypto and finance space trying to bridge this gap, but none have done it perfectly. So, we're thinking about how to make it easy for all 7.8 billion people globally to get started. That requires a smooth user experience, social interaction, and excitement. Therefore, fomo is trying to combine all these elements. People try to measure products by valuation, funding, fees, or other metrics, but users and impact are what truly drive product development.

1.3 Million Total Users, 30,000 Daily New Users—fomo's Goal Is to Grow the "Pie"

How Did fomo Survive the Early Stages of Entrepreneurship?

Se Yong: We currently have about 1.3 million users, with roughly 30,000 new users daily. Many founders ask me, "How did you so easily reach 1,000 users, 100,000 users, or more?"

The process is not as easy as everyone imagines. People often only see the final product and think it was too easy, but in reality, we raised funds from 140 angel investors at the start, and for months we didn't even have 140 users.

It took a long time to accumulate users who came back daily to give us feedback and test the product. I'm still very grateful to the early users from May 2025 to July 2025, who gave us feedback every day, told us what was wrong, and showed us how to improve.

Founders really need to listen carefully to the opinions of their core 5,000 users, because as long as you build a great product for them, you can build products for other users at scale. I think many people overlook this because they're fixated on reaching 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 users immediately, but that approach doesn't work.

Why Has fomo Attracted So Many Users?

Se Yong: We followed two core principles when founding fomo: first, how to make the platform as easy as possible for ordinary users; second, how to build user trust.

Ordinary users don't understand the difference between SOL, ETH, and BNB, so fomo simply tells them it's just a cash balance—very simple to use. Although we haven't fully achieved this yet, fomo will become the fastest way to trade.

Suppose a user has balances in both an EVM account and a SOL account on one platform; when trading on two chains, they'd need to switch back and forth. This costs users a lot of time, figuring out how to set up a trading system, setting up wallets, managing private keys, and so on.

Currently, cross-chain trading on fomo takes about 3 to 5 seconds, and in the future, we'll reduce trading speed to 1 second. We want trading to be so fast that people completely forget the concept of cross-chain, and with just one account balance, they can trade anytime, anywhere.

Second, users want to accumulate social capital through their trading behavior. Some traders have only 300 followers but a personal account balance that may reach eight figures, while some have 100,000 followers but a six-figure balance—and yet they're highly visible and even feel superior. People need a consensus on who is best. If someone claims to be the best, they usually aren't.

So I think building a public leaderboard is very meaningful. If someone thinks they're the best, then prove it. Some people might not care about rankings and don't want to prove anything—that's completely fine. Essentially, over time, money fades, fame fades, everything fades, but legacy doesn't disappear. Someone will always step up. That's what fomo is currently documenting.

What Characteristics Define fomo Platform Users, and How Do You View User Growth?

Se Yong: We believe the ideal scenario is that as the platform grows, the median trade size should decrease while the average trade size should increase. But reality isn't like that. More and more long-tail users are joining—they might not even have $100, but they're still trading and learning.

However, what I want to say is that a lot of our focus is not on the crypto Twitter (CT) circle, or even on the crypto user base. I think it's not even appropriate to call fomo a crypto company anymore. We want to become a platform where you can trade anything, and become the social graph of the financial world. I believe this goes far beyond the scope of crypto and the CT circle.

So, we've tried many things that Web3 companies have never attempted—such as user-generated content (UGC) on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and so on. Many crypto companies think these avenues are useless for growth because their user base is still at the 10,000–30,000 level. But we try many new things every day—that's also part of the fun.

Will You Provide a More Professional Terminal for Professional Traders?

 Se Yong: We will never become that kind of professional Meme terminal. But at the same time, we're not stubborn—we listen to our users and understand what the best use cases are. To be honest, right now the fomo web version is somewhat lacking; it's still at the level when we first launched, and we haven't made many improvements yet.

Web traffic now accounts for nearly 25% of our total traffic, and we're at a stage where we need to iterate and update—developing features that all users need, such as token discovery, social discovery, and more convenient purchase methods. All of these can be implemented on the web terminal, but we won't design it to be as complex as a spaceship. Our goal is to make it more advanced while still simple and easy enough for users to get started quickly.

What Makes the Newly Launched Clans Feature Special?

Se Yong: On August 11, fomo launched the Clans feature, but it's still very basic at the moment. Users can see everyone in the group, including the tokens they hold. Anyone can join a group and compete on the leaderboard. This kind of competition has always existed—there were coin rankings and KOL leaderboards before—but they weren't as transparent as fomo is now.

Our goal is to make all information public and transparent, including traders, prediction markets, spot markets, and even earnings. For example, if you're the highest-earning trader, we'll highlight you. Clans are an excellent way to achieve this goal because trading should be social, and therefore, it should also involve teamwork.

Right now, Clans is just a very primitive version. In the future, users will be able to chat internally, recruit new members, offer subscription services, build a shared treasury, or even set up a community public address for teams to conduct airdrops, with the reasoning being: "You are a community that everyone respects and knows. You will hold these tokens forever, so we'll airdrop to you."

There are many other ways for Clans to generate revenue, just like monetizing influence. People have been doing these activities in the shadows; we want to bring everything into the open, even if it brings some short-term pain.

fomo Was Originally Inspired by Moonshot

Why Did fomo Bet on Mobile and Social

Se Yong: The trend toward mobile trading is obvious, I think. Most services in the world are migrating to mobile. Most people, young or old, are using phones. This is a shift the world has already been undergoing, and we're now in the middle-to-late stages of it.

Second is social trading. I believe social trading has grown to its current scale largely thanks to Moonshot's success around November 2024. At that time, many people were trading on Moonshot, and they developed what I consider the first version of a mobile trading application.

Back then, I showed the app to all my friends, but in the end, only five people downloaded it. They made a few hundred dollars on Moonshot. If you're an ordinary person, earning $300 a week is already a considerable sum—you can save money, or even order takeout several times a week. My friends made money, and my advice to them was to cash out immediately, because it was just a viral token online—you should put the money in the bank. But none of them listened, and in the end, they all lost everything.

I tried to figure out why, and I found that most people succeeded on their first trade because they stumbled upon some kind of advantage—like following that viral hippo on TikTok. But when they don't know what top traders are doing, or can't communicate with anyone in a timely manner, they basically have no advantage at all.

So my co-founder Paul and I agreed that trading must be social. Traders need to communicate with people, need to check market and token information in real time—not dig through Telegram chat groups, Discord, and various other accounts. Users need to know in real time who's buying what, how the market is moving, and how public sentiment is shifting. That's how fomo was born.

How Soon Until the First Person Makes Eight-Figure Profits on fomo?

Se Yong: We've been in a bear market, so it's hard to imagine what a bull market will look like. But I estimate that six months from now, many people will reach that number, and the current top 100 on the leaderboard might be completely different. Opportunities always exist; new things always emerge.

How Do You View Market Competition?

Se Yong: We created fomo to grow the pie and make this space better, so we believe competition is a good thing.

This includes two aspects. First, competition is good because, ultimately, people will choose the best product, so the product is what matters most. If our product is the best, then great—but if it's not, then it means we were never destined to succeed.

Second, competition is inevitable. No company can become great without experiencing competition. So our philosophy is: if we're destined to fail, then fail now. Failure brings many lessons. I'd rather accumulate these lessons today, tomorrow, the day after, and every day of the company's life cycle.

My board member Chetan once said that the biggest existential crisis a company faces is never having experienced a crisis. So for us, competition is a good thing. Someone has to grow the pie—why can't it be us?

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