Founded and acquired, 2021 to 2023Founded and acquired

Mocean Technologies

A research-distribution platform for Discord. Founded at 19 on a gap year, scaled to acquisition.

Watch the story

THINK Business LIVE with Jon DwoskinMarch 2023

Recorded weeks before the acquisition: the full story, from washing dishes to building Mocean.

The story

Mocean was a research-distribution platform for Discord, and I started it at 19 on a gap year, splitting my time between recovering from ACL surgery and helping care for my mom as she fought ALS. The opening was structural: more than a thousand Discord communities were each selling their own market research, but every server was an island. The research was real and it was everywhere, and none of it could travel. The bottleneck was never the research. It was distribution, so I built software to fix that.

I built a branded distribution engine that took one piece of research and mirrored it across hundreds of client communities at once, with per-server templating and category- and channel-level syncing, so every client received exactly the streams they paid for. On top of it I built a fleet of custom market monitors across NFTs, crypto, and equities, and a self-serve dashboard that turned the whole operation into a product: pick your feeds, point them at your server, and start receiving branded, real-time research in minutes. Forty-plus analysts produced the signal; the software is what let it scale.

At its peak more than 100,000 people read our research every single day, across 1,000-plus investor communities, on a pricing engine that set every contract to the client's willingness to pay. Our best months were clearing almost $60K, on $400K+ in all-time revenue. I sold the company on May 1, 2023.

Underneath the research business I was working toward a bigger idea: a self-serve platform for people selling their own research and information. Mocean taught me the lesson that still runs through everything I build: distribution beats production. A good thesis matters less than being able to put it in front of a hundred thousand people at once.

From the interview

“Don't go for the gold yourself. Always ask: is there a way I can sell a shovel for other people to look for the gold? Because then you'll always have customers.”

“You don't have a business until you can step away and nothing changes.”

“At one point, over a hundred thousand people were reading our research every single day.”

Under the hood

The core of Mocean was software. I built a fleet of custom monitors in Python that scraped NFT mints, crypto markets, and equities in real time and pushed branded, formatted alerts straight into client Discord servers through webhooks. Here is one of them, lightly trimmed.

eth-mints.pyMocean monitor

# Pull every collection minting today from rarity.tools
r = requests.get("https://collections.rarity.tools/upcoming2").json()
 
desc = ""
for drop in r:
    if drop["Sale Date"] == today:
        desc += f"{drop['Project']} -> {drop['Website']}\n"
 
# Push a branded embed straight into every client server
requests.post(WEBHOOK_URL, json={
    "embeds": [{"title": "ETH Mints", "description": desc}]
})

NFT mints & sales

eth-mints.py
free-mints.py
hourly-mints.py
hourly-sales.py
trending-collections.py
upcoming-drops.py
crypto-punks.py
top-buyers.py

Crypto markets

coingecko-marketcap.py
coingecko-rockets.py
coingecko-dumps.py
coinmarketcap.py
exchanges.py
volume-traded.py
top-sellers.py
currencies.py

Equities & macro

dow.py
nasdaq.py
spy-monitor.py
gold.py
oil.py
bonds.py
company-holdings.py
top-stock-gainers.py

The fleet grew to 33 monitors feeding over 100,000 readers a day.

Key numbers

All-time revenue: $400K+
Peak monthly revenue: ~$60K/month
Total users: 100,000+
Investor communities served: 1,000+
Analyst team size: 40+
First month, solo: $12K
Per-client pricing: $500–$2,000/mo
Outcome: Acquired May 1, 2023

What this taught me

Distribution beats production. I had 40-plus analysts producing research, but the software that let me mirror it across 1,000 communities simultaneously is what made it scale.
The edge in research is packaging and delivery, not just the insight. Writing a good thesis is the easy part. Getting it to 100,000 people at once is the harder, less obvious part.
Founding a company during personal hardship (ACL recovery, mom's ALS) showed me that necessity is a sharper motivator than opportunity.