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Scaling in minutes, not days with AWS – Swyftx is riding the rocket of the crypto revolution
“Part of being a founder is you have to wear every hat there is.”
Scaling in minutes, not days with AWS – Swyftx is riding the rocket of the crypto revolution
The wild fluctuations in digital currencies have made and broken many fortunes, but they have also created a massive opportunity for those entrepreneurs smart enough – and brave enough – to build the services that are making this new class of investing possible.
One of those is Swyftx, an Australian owned and operated crypto exchange that enables users to purchase over 300 crypto assets, including popular currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Early enthusiasm
Swyftx’s founders Alex Harper and Angus Goldman were still in high school when they first hit on the idea of building a business dedicated to helping others invest in cryptocurrencies.
The two met at a summer computing science camp held at the University of Sydney, and Angus says they immediately hit it off.
“Angus had been investing in crypto since 2014, and he helped me get started with buying Bitcoin in 2017,” Alex says. “Around that time people were having trouble moving money, and it was not helped by the big banks being anti-crypto.
“We also saw that the biggest exchange platform was a monopoly and was overcharging customers. That didn’t make sense to us.”
The pair decided they could do better and set about building their own crypto exchange platform. And in 2019, Swyftx was born, with a mission to bring fair pricing to investors in the Australian market.
Boarding the rocket ride
The pair divided up the early responsibilities, with Angus focusing on writing the software while Alex concentrated on the business aspects of the startup.
Unlike some crypto investment stories, they didn’t make their fortune overnight, with Swyftx generating revenue of just $80 in its first month. But despite this low return, they continued on undeterred.
“That was a lot of work for not much return, but it was a start,” Angus says. “But we had a strong belief from the beginning, and we doubled our revenue month by month.”
That belief has since paid off, with the company gaining 50,000 users by the start of 2021, and growing to employ 20 staff. This just the beginning, however. By the end of 2019, those numbers had grown to 180 staff and half a million users, and now in 2022 the company is achieving peak trading volumes of $3 billion.
Solid foundations for rapid growth
A key reason why Swyftx has grown so rapidly has been the stability of its underlying cloud architecture. Alex and Angus decided early on to host much of Swyftx’s systems on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which enables the exchange to handle rapidly increasing transaction volumes without overinvesting in computing resources.
The pair also benefited from the AWS Activate startup support program, which provided the team business mentorship. “I did a startup to scaleup program in Brisbane,” Alex says. “AWS was a big part of that. On the less technical side, the amazing networks and instruction throughout that program and other programs that AWS has supported has been instrumental. Our co-CEO was someone that I met through those programs, so it’s had a really positive impact.”
Swyftx also received crucial technical guidance through AWS. Angus says, “Having an AWS technical account manager on call, literally, to be able to ring up and go ‘I’ve screwed something up, something’s not working as I expected it to’, or ‘we’ve got to challenge and we don’t yet know how to solve the problem’.”
With their Activate cloud credits, Swyftx was able to conserve cash flow in its first year, Angus mentions. “AWS Activate credits allowed us to be able to pay for our infrastructure bills for 12 months. We were able to focus on other aspects of the business or other costs within the business, like paying wages or software licences, without having to worry about the infrastructure build.”
Angus describes Swyftx’s rapid growth as a rocket ride, but despite the growing volume of money flowing through the company, he says he and Alex have always taken a frugal approach to everything they have done, including staffing.
“Part of being a founder is you have to wear every hat there is,” Angus says. “Product, engineering – whatever it takes. We split all our bills and worked long hours.
“We nearly sold 50 percent of the company for $150,000 in the first three months, because we didn’t know how we would grow it without capital. Luckily, we didn’t do that!”
Customer obsession
Today, Swyftx is recognized as the highest rated crypto exchange in Australia – something Angus attributes to the way his team obsesses over its customers, and the time they take to understand their issues.
“Customers love us,” Angus says. “We’ve scaled from zero customers to over 600,000 today, and the vast proportion of those have come through word-of-mouth – our marketing budget for two years was nil.”
Angus says he and Alex have also been heavily focused on building the company’s culture – something that has been made easier by the laid-back Brisbane lifestyle. The company now employs hundreds of people in its Brisbane office, which also features a ball pit and a slide; with additional staff in Sydney and other locations around the world.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora provides built-in security, continuous backups, serverless compute, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services.
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
Amazon EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
AWS CodePipeline
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps you automate your release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
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