fomo創辦人專訪：130萬用戶、日增3萬，用影響力驅動產品

Podcast from Maurits

Compiled / Odaily Planet Daily Golem（@web 3_golem）

Editor's Note: Recently, the social-driven Meme trading platform fomo has attracted significant attention. As of press time, according to Dune data, the fomo trading bot has become the market leader in both trading volume and market share, dramatically disrupting the current landscape of Meme trading platforms. 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.

During the interview, Se Yong stated that fomo has reached 1.3 million users, with approximately 30,000 new daily users, but fomo's goal is not to become an existing professional Meme terminal. He also believes that market competition is a good thing, but fomo's core objective remains growing the "pie," with a focus that extends beyond just the crypto Twitter circle and crypto user base. This perspective can perhaps also be seen as a response to Pump.fun's recent heavy spending to recruit top traders from the fomo platform.

Odaily Planet Daily has compiled and condensed the core content of the interview as follows, enjoy~

Founder's Personal Crypto Journey: Made First Fortune on Avalanche, Not a Natural-Born Meme Trader

Early Entry into Crypto

Se Yong: When I first got into cryptocurrency, it was also through trading. In 2021, on the Avalanche platform, someone leaked an RPC. 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 did I know what an 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 the 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 that's an important moment for everyone involved in crypto trading. From then on, I started trading on all blockchains, from the Ethereum mainnet to BSC, then Tron, Solana, and all Layer 2 networks, as well as 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 began to take shape in my mind.

About two years ago, my friends discovered a coin called Keeta on Base. They each bought around $10,000 worth, and they all ended up making seven figures. At the time, I thought I should buy some too, but I didn't have any 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 just too much. Something that should have taken only 45 seconds became so complicated. I thought to myself, since I have this obstacle, others probably do too, and I need to help solve this problem for them.

Personal Trading Style: Not a Natural-Born P Trader, More Suited to Being a Diamond Hand

Se Yong: I've never been a typical Meme trader, like using Telegram bots or web terminals. But I did try that lifestyle of spending 16 hours in front of the computer, meticulously researching every Meme coin, trying to understand their narratives. To be honest, 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 master, they can quickly grasp the narrative of certain Memes, but someone like me, even in a bull market, only makes about three trades a week. Some tokens fascinate me from a narrative perspective, and then I'll buy. For example, the GME token. After the Roaring Kitty documentary came out, I felt the token had a great narrative, and many people were discussing it, so I quickly bought in. Pandora is another example. It's an ERC 404 token, which is both a token and an NFT. I thought it was cool, so I entered early. That might be one of the most successful trades I've ever made.

Overall, my entry and exit points aren't the best. I'm the kind of diamond hand who holds, maintaining conviction even during dips.

Who Are Your Top 5 Favorite Traders, and Would You Ask Them to Join fomo?

Se Yong: The first is GCR. I think he's a phenomenal trader with a legendary story; the second is Kobe, especially when he was younger; the third is Flood. I think he's definitely one of the top figures; he was very early on HYPE; the fourth is Ansem. Although he receives some criticism from time to time, his judgments over the past five years have been pretty accurate, like precisely predicting SOL and being early on some Meme coins.

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

Actually, I'd prefer for fomo to nurture a new generation of traders, people who grow publicly from start to finish. fomo can document their entire journey, allowing users to clearly see where they started and where they ultimately end up. I believe every social platform needs a place that can cultivate native heroes. We need those who truly started 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 top trader is change. He's currently number one on the fomo leaderboard and has held that position for a while now.

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 gets 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 think about how to make it easy for all 7.8 billion people globally to get started. This requires a seamless user experience, social interaction, and excitement. Therefore, fomo is attempting 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 a product's development.

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

How Did fomo Navigate Its Early Startup Stage?

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

The process wasn't as easy as people imagine. People often only see the final product and think it was too easy, but in reality, at the beginning we raised from 140 angel investors, yet didn't have 140 users for several months.

It took us a long time to accumulate a base of users who would come back daily to give us feedback and test the product. I'm still extremely grateful to the early users from May 2025 to July 2025, who gave us feedback every day, telling us what was broken and how we could improve.

Entrepreneurs really need to listen intently to their core 5,000 users, because if you build a great product for them, you can build a product at scale for other users. 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 Been Able to Attract So Many Users?

Se Yong: We founded fomo on two core principles: first, how to make the platform as easy as possible for the average user, and second, how to build user trust.

The average user doesn't understand the difference between SOL, ETH, and BNB, so fomo simply tells them it's just a cash balance, making it very simple to use. While we haven't fully achieved it yet, fomo aims to be 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 have to switch back and forth. This takes up a lot of the user's time—figuring out how to set up the trading system, setting up wallets, managing private keys, and so on.

Currently, fomo's cross-chain transactions take about 3 to 5 seconds. In the future, we aim to bring that down to 1 second. We want trading to be so fast that people completely forget the concept of cross-chain, and with just a single account balance, they can trade anytime, anywhere.

The second point is that users want to accumulate social capital through their trading actions. Some traders have only 300 followers but personal account balances in the eight figures, while others with 100,000 followers and balances only in the six figures receive a lot of attention and even feel superior. People need to reach a consensus on who is the best. If someone claims they are the best, they usually aren't.

So I think building a public leaderboard makes a lot of sense. If someone thinks they're the best, they should come and prove it. Maybe some people don't care about rankings and don't want to prove themselves, which is perfectly fine. Essentially, over time, money fades, fame fades, everything fades, but legacy doesn't disappear. There will always be someone new stepping up. That's what fomo is currently documenting.

What Are the Characteristics of fomo's Users, and How Do You View User Growth?

Se Yong: We think ideally, as the platform grows, the median trade size should decrease, and 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, I want to say that much of our focus isn't on the Crypto Twitter (CT) circle, nor even on the crypto user base. I think it's no longer quite right to call fomo a crypto company. We want to be 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 cryptocurrency and the CT circle.

So, we've tried many things that Web3 companies have never attempted, like user-generated content (UGC) on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Many crypto companies consider these avenues useless for growth because their user scale remains at the 10,000 to 30,000 level. But we try many new things every day, and that's also part of the fun.

Will You Offer 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, the current fomo web version is a bit lacking; it's still at the level where it was when we first launched. We haven't made many improvements yet.

Currently, traffic on the fomo web version is approaching 25% of our total traffic. We're at a stage where we need to iterate and update, developing features that all users need, like token exploration, social discovery, easier ways to buy, and more. All these features 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, yet simple enough for users to get started easily.

What Are the Features of the Newly Launched Clans Feature?

Se Yong: On August 11, fomo launched the Clans feature, but it's still very basic at the moment. Users can see everyone in a clan, including the tokens they hold. Anyone can join a group and compete on the leaderboard. This competition has always existed; there used to be coin ranking leaderboards, KOL leaderboards, etc., 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 top earner, we'll prominently feature you. Clans are an excellent way to achieve this because trading should be social, and therefore should also involve teamwork.

Right now, the Clans feature is just a very primitive version. In the future, users can chat internally, recruit new members, offer subscription services, build a shared treasury, and even set up a shared clan address for teams to airdrop to. The reason could be: "You are a clan respected and well-known by all. You will hold these tokens forever, so we'll airdrop to you."

There are many ways for clans to monetize, much like monetizing influence. People have been doing these activities in the shadows; we want to bring everything out into the open, even if it causes some short-term pain.

fomo Was Initially Inspired by Moonshot

Why Did fomo Bet on Mobile and Social

Se Yong: The trend of trading on mobile is obvious, I think. Most services worldwide are migrating to mobile. Most people, young or old, use phones. This is a shift the world has been undergoing for a while, and we're now in the middle to late stages of this transition.

Next is social trading. The reason social trading has grown to its current scale, I believe, is largely due to the success of Moonshot around November 2024. Many people were trading on Moonshot then; they developed what I consider the first version of a mobile trading application.

At the time, I showed this app to all my friends, but only five of them ended up downloading it. They made a few hundred dollars on Moonshot. If you're an average person, earning $300 a week is a significant amount. You could save it, 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 popular token online, and they should put the money in the bank. But none of them listened, and in the end, they lost it all.

I tried to figure out why. Most people succeed on their first trade because they stumble upon some advantage, like spotting that viral hippo on TikTok. However, when they don't know what top traders are doing, or can't communicate with anyone in real-time, they basically have no edge.

So, my co-founder Paul and I agreed that trading must be social. Traders need to communicate with people, need to see timely information about the market and tokens, rather than searching through Telegram chat groups, Discord, and various other accounts. Users need real-time visibility into who's buying what, market trends, and how public sentiment is shifting. Thus, fomo was born.

How Soon Will the First Person Make Eight Figures in Profit on fomo Appear?

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 within six months, many people will be making that kind of money. The top 100 names on the leaderboard might be completely different from today. There are always opportunities, and 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 consider competition a good thing.

This has 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, that's great. But if it isn't, it means we were destined not to succeed.

Second, competition is something you'll face sooner or later. No company can become great without going through competition. So our philosophy is that if we're destined to fail, let's fail now. Failure brings many lessons. I'd rather accumulate these experiences of failure today, tomorrow, the day after, and on every single day of the company's life cycle.

My board member Chetan once said 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 shouldn't it be us?

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fomo創辦人專訪：130萬用戶、日增3萬，用影響力驅動產品