Alpaca & Llama College
DeFi content aggregator. Built it twice, two years apart, neither found traction.
Llama College (2022)
At that time in DeFi, information was scattered across tweets, articles, YouTube videos, podcasts, Discord servers, and governance forums. Useful content would appear once and be lost forever. I thought there should be a single organized place for all of it.
I built it in Bubble, starting with the Curve and Convex Finance communities. Users could save and organize content from anywhere, filter by project, and browse community deep-dives alongside official posts. I also built a Twitter bot where you could reply “save @projectname” to any thread and it would archive the content to the site — and a Discord FAQ bot, which was novel pre-ChatGPT.
Alpaca College (2024)
Two years later, similar concept but with AI automation. RSS feeds piped into OpenAI for automatic categorization and summarization. Personalized feeds where you could follow specific topics.
But I didn’t even fully believe in it. My bull case for crypto is that it succeeds in the background and nobody cares it’s crypto — which contradicts building a crypto content aggregator. Retail interest in DeFi peaked in 2020-2021 and has been declining since.
Minimal traction. I could tell from showing it to people that the interest wasn’t there.
What I think about it now
Two related but different approaches to the same problem, and neither found a real audience. I spent a decent amount of money on both. They were useful for learning how to work with developers and manage product builds, but the core idea probably wasn’t strong enough either time.