It’s Sunday again. We just celebrated 9 years of AirdropAlert this summer, so while I’m floating in the pool with a nice lemonade, I’m thinking back on the good old days. But also on the first airdrop bear market, and the days that didn’t go as planned.
Everyone loves the origin story. The world trip, the first mass airdrop contract on Ethereum, the money rolling in while I was living out of a backpack. If you missed that one, the AirdropAlert origin story is right here.
Today’s story is the other side of that coin. The 2018 to 2020 chapter, where I fumbled a life-changing deal, watched our treasury melt, raised money from friends, and failed to deliver. It’s the most expensive education I ever received.
Riding the ICO Wave
In 2017, airdrops rode the coattails of the ICO mania. I can’t claim we created the whole industry, but we were definitely part of the reason it took off the way it did. Projects needed users, users wanted free tokens, and we stood in the middle connecting both sides.
Value was everywhere back then. People were used to earning $100 or more just for following a few accounts on X. Our community grew fast, clients paid well, and everything pointed up.
Then 2018 hit.
The First Airdrop Bear Market Hits
The crash was worse than I envisioned. Airdrops kept going through 2018 and 2019, but the value fell off a cliff. The same tasks that paid $100 six months earlier now paid pennies. Naturally, visitors lost interest. You can’t blame them.
Around this time, I made a decision that cost us serious revenue. We stopped doing exclusive airdrops, where we hosted the full airdrop campaigns for ICOs. Plenty of projects still wanted to pay us for that service. The problem was quality. I couldn’t find projects worth putting in front of our community anymore, and pushing garbage for a paycheck would only hurt us in the long run. So I cut the service.
That call I still stand behind. The next mistake, not so much.
The ETH Treasury Mistake
My absolute biggest error was keeping company funds in ETH.
All of our clients paid in ETH or tokens, which I converted to ETH. We had a very healthy balance, in theory enough runway to fund the company for years. As a maximum crypto believer with my entire life all-in on this space, holding it felt completely natural.
Then ETH went down 90%. Meanwhile, I had to pay my team of 14 people in euros every month. Our runway for years turned into runway for months.
Let that sink in. The bear market didn’t kill our business model. My own conviction nearly did.
The Mid-Seven-Figure Offer
While all of that unfolded, an acquisition offer landed on the table. Mid seven figures, for a website I started during a world trip, barely a year earlier.
Picture the spot. A young adult, first real exit offer, VCs sliding into my DMs asking if I wanted to raise instead. Not a bad position, right?
This was before the AI days, so my advisors were Google and my friends. Most of my friends come from poker, so obviously we approached it like a hand. We worried about liabilities, we calculated outcomes, and we tried to maximize the EV of the deal.
Then I made the rookie mistake. I hired a traditional M&A lawyer to go over the contract. A conventional legal mind, reviewing the sale of a crypto site, in a niche that didn’t exist two years earlier. He saw only risk, everywhere, and the deal slowed to a crawl.
All while ETH kept nuking.
In the end, the buyer stepped away. Crypto wasn’t as hot as six months before, revenue was sliding, and the contract had dragged on far too long. I can only blame myself. The right play was the handshake deal: wrap it up fast, sign, move on. Instead, I tried to outsmart a situation I had never been in before. That’s not smart. That’s expensive.
Plan B: The Startup Way
With the sale dead, I went to plan B. Buyer interest existed, VC interest existed, so the logic seemed simple. If we can’t sell now, let’s go for maximum growth, help the airdrop industry expand, and let AirdropAlert grow with it.
I got an office in the heart of Rotterdam. I raised low six figures from 7 friends, while keeping the VC connections warm for a proper seed round later. Six of those friends came from my poker days, and half of them from my hometown. That city shaped my whole crypto journey, which is a story I told before. They all still believed in AirdropAlert, and they made a bet on me to take it to the next level.
To be responsible with their money, I scaled the team down a little. Max growth sounds great, but the real game is surviving long enough to see the next bull run. Burning through a friends-and-family round in a bear market is not a strategy.
From there, I hit the road. Malta, Berlin, Prague, Sofia, Belgrade, Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok. Conference after conference, connecting with industry peers, digging into the pain points of airdrops, and figuring out the next move. In between, I talked with VCs who wanted to lead a seed round in AA once the company was ready for it.
The company never got ready for it.
Scaling Down to Survive
By late 2019, the burn rate was weighing heavy while AA struggled to generate any meaningful revenue at all. Deep in the bear, I did the hardest thing I’ve done in business. I scaled the company down to the absolute minimum, just to survive into 2020.
Ironically, that happened right before DeFi summer. At that stage, no VC would touch us. Nobody invests in an airdrop bear market survival story. A company in survival mode is not a growth story, and growth stories are the only thing they buy.
Honestly, I lost my motivation around then. Look at the scoreboard: worth mid seven figures on paper in 2018, fumbled the deal, held ETH through a 90% drawdown when selling would have secured years of runway, raised money from friends in 2019 and couldn’t grow it. On top of that, I had given up poker to do this, which was very lucrative at the point I quit. The mistakes felt like they were compounding.
One thing remained, though. My freedom. I spent those days in Southeast Asia, wondering how to climb out of the hole I dug for myself.
The Market Threw a Lifeline
Then DeFi summer happened. The bull market followed, and after that, the NFT craze. Suddenly, every signal turned green again. Cash was coming in, opportunities appeared daily, and the balance kept climbing. By 2021, AirdropAlert held a mid-six-figure balance again.
So naturally, you’d think I would rebuild the team and call those VCs to raise millions, right?
Nah.
The truth is, I had felt stuck for a long time. Going back to poker was never an option, because that would mean letting my friends’ investment go to zero. Quitting AirdropAlert made no sense either, while we still had traffic and people who relied on us for the guides, even though we weren’t making any money. Responsibility was pulling at me from every direction.
I also knew I didn’t want the VC pressure and stress anymore. AirdropAlert was healthy, and with a small team, it can run forever. So I took back control by buying the investors out. Everyone was paid back in full, with 15% added on top for the trouble. Effectively, I bought AirdropAlert back for myself.
Here’s the thing: those friends never once asked for their money back. They took a risk knowingly, like the poker players most of them are. Still, it felt like a responsibility. They believed in me to take this thing to new highs, and I failed at that. Paying them back with some ROI was the bare minimum I owed them.
It felt good. More importantly, I felt free again.
Back to What Actually Matters
From that point on, we built the foundation of what AirdropAlert is today. Good content, trending topics, beginner-friendly airdrop guides. We created a home for airdrop farmers and for anyone looking to earn crypto, with every guide constructed in a logical format that any newcomer can follow.
That’s simply what makes me happy. Bringing new people into this space, helping them figure it out, and watching them make some bread along the way. It’s how AA started in 2017, and it’s exactly where we returned in 2021. Back to a small team, back to local crypto meetups just to meet crypto peers, instead of pitching a startup.
I tried the startup scaling playbook between 2018 and 2021, and I failed. I can accept defeat. It’s part of trying. But after I repaid the investors, the smile returned. You can see it in the picture above.
Final Words
Nine years in, I don’t look back at 2018 to 2020 with regret anymore. Those years taught me lessons no bull market ever could. Take the clean deal when it’s on the table. Don’t let conviction manage your treasury. And when friends bet on you, make them whole, even when they’d never ask.
The first airdrop bear market took the seven-figure exit, but it gave me back something better: a company I own outright, a small team I trust, and the freedom to run it my way, forever.
If you enjoy these throwbacks, there are more stories from the early days in the crypto archives. See you next Sunday.
WRITTEN BY
Morten ChristensenFounder, AirdropAlert
Crypto class of ’13, airdrop farmer since 2016. Avid trader and DeFi veteran. His market commentary has been featured by Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, and CNN.
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