Lab18 Ventures

Role: Product & Project Lead · 2020 — 2022 · Vietnam

The Problem

Vietnam was already among the most crypto-active countries in the world by 2020. Chainalysis would go on to rank it first globally for grassroots crypto adoption in their 2021 report, but the trend was clear before that. A large portion of the population was buying and holding Bitcoin and Ethereum, driven largely by peer-to-peer platforms and a tech-savvy younger demographic in cities like Ho Chi Minh City. The gap, however, was that almost none of that translated into actual spending. Merchant-level infrastructure for crypto payments barely existed. You could hold Bitcoin, trade it on an exchange, and send it peer-to-peer, but you could not book a flight with it, order food, or buy something from an online store. The asset base was there; the utility layer was not.

World Connect Vietnam had a network of members sitting exactly in that gap. Their bet was that a single platform where members could do everything using a native crypto token could capture that market at exactly the right moment. They needed someone to figure out what that platform should actually be and then get it built. That became my project.

The Solution

There was no spec, no wireframe, nothing to start from. I built the product concept from scratch.

The model I designed was a closed-loop super app centered on a native utility token. Users deposit Bitcoin or Ethereum, convert to the platform's coin, and from that point their entire activity on the platform runs on a single balance. Ecommerce, travel booking, food delivery, all of it on the same token. No switching between apps, no separate payment methods, no friction at checkout.

The utility token was not just a convenience feature. It was the core product decision, and the reasoning behind it mattered. For World Connect, it meant every transaction stayed within their ecosystem and they owned the value layer instead of paying fees to third-party processors. For users in Vietnam, where crypto holdings were high but practical spending was limited to a handful of use cases, it created something that had not existed before: a way to use the crypto they were already holding on the everyday things they actually needed.

The scope was ambitious by any standard. Building an integrated platform covering ecommerce, travel, and food delivery is what Grab and Gojek spent years and enormous capital building. We were doing it on a crypto-native stack in 2020, targeting a market that was more positioned for this than almost anywhere else in the world at that time.

The Execution

I was the only person accountable for both the product and the delivery, which meant every hard call was mine to make.

The first real decision was sequencing. A super app has obvious scope risk. You can spend months building features across three modules and end up with a platform where nothing works cleanly end to end. I made the token wallet and the core transaction flow the first milestone. If users could not deposit crypto and move their balance without friction, the ecommerce module and food delivery were irrelevant. We got the wallet right before anything else was touched.

From there the build followed a strict priority order, mobile and web running in parallel, sprint cycles managed tightly, and scope cuts made early rather than late. When features came up mid-sprint that were interesting but not essential for launch, they went to the backlog. Getting a coherent, working product was the goal, not the most complete version possible.

The roadmap also had to serve the investment process. The $1.5 million raise was running in parallel with the build. That meant at every phase, what we had built needed to be credible enough to put in front of investors. I structured milestones specifically so we always had something real to show, not just a pitch deck with mockups.

The cross-country coordination added its own complexity. Lab18 is a US-registered company with development teams in both the Philippines and Vietnam, and I was leading both. Building a product concept that was genuinely new, coordinating engineers across two countries, and managing the client relationship with World Connect simultaneously required keeping the product direction clear and communicating it consistently across teams and time zones every week.

The Result

The platform launched with real users on it. Ecommerce, travel booking, and food delivery all running on the native utility token, working as designed.

The $1.5 million investment raise before launch was the clearest signal that the product thesis was sound. Investors backed a crypto-native lifestyle platform in one of the most crypto-active markets in the world. Some committed Bitcoin and Ethereum directly rather than fiat, which reflects a level of conviction you do not often see from early-stage backers.

The original idea held up. The model I designed from a blank page attracted real capital and real users in a market that was ready for it. Getting that right in 2020, before blockchain lifestyle apps became a recognized category, required reading the market correctly and executing on a compressed timeline with a distributed team across two countries. Both of those things happened.