Juno Acquisition

What is Juno?

Juno is a two-in-one crypto and banking platform that serves individuals in the United States. Juno was founded in 2020 by Varun Deshpande, Siddharth Verma, and Ratnesh Ray, 3 crypto native builders. They had previously built Nuo Protocol which was a top 5 DeFi project in 2018, having more TVL than current leaders such as Uniswap and Aave.

Across seed and series A rounds, Juno has raised over $23 million so far from top investors like Sequoia, Polychain, GIC, Dragonfly Capital, and prominent angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Sandeep Nailwal, and Joseph Lumin (Co-founder of Ethereum) among others.

What is Juno solving?

Traditionally, going from cash to crypto and back has been a slow and laborious process, especially in the United States with financial rails that take 1-3 days for payments. Additionally, some crypto exchanges enforced a 5-7 holding period on crypto withdrawals. This meant that going from salary to crypto in your wallet could take 7-10 days 😵

Time was one problem. Another problem was that banks would block customers if they sent money to crypto exchanges like Coinbase because they deemed it to be too risky. Not only would they not be able to fund their crypto accounts, they would also lose access to their hard earned dollars. This is just one example out of thousands of such complaints across multiple banks.

This problem further extended when users wanted to cash out their crypto to pay their bills, pay their mortgages, pay their landlords, etc. Going from crypto in a crypto exchange to cash in a checking account was time consuming and led to a risk of being blocked.

Juno solved all these problems by building one app for cash and crypto. Juno is available on iOS, Android, and Web. Juno provides

• a cash account for their users from which they can pay bills, mortgages, rent, etc. using ACH and Wire transfers. Idle cash also earns up to 5.00% APY.
• a crypto account so that they can go from cash to crypto within the same interface and then withdraw it to their self custodial wallet instantly. Juno supports over 10 blockchains.
• a debit card for them to use their cash on daily purchases. Purchases on certain brands earn 5% cashback.

Great, a problem exists. But is the market big enough for us to go after it and who are the competitors in this space? Let's find out 👇

The Market

As of August 2023, revenue in the crypto market in the US was projected to reach $23.2 billion in 2024 and $32.9 billion in 2028. With the recent approval of Bitcoin ETFs in the US, this number will likely go higher.

Capturing even 0.1% of the projected revenue will lead to a revenue of $23 million for Juno in 2024 alone. With Juno's annual gross revenue ending at ~$6M in 2023, the $23 million number looks very achievable.

From January 1 to September 30, 2023, Coinbase (the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US) reported revenues of $2.15 billion with $936.94 million of that coming from consumer crypto transactions.

source: Coinbase earnings report Nov 2023

The competiton

Who are we competing against for a slice of this massive revenue pie?

*based on market data in February 2023

We currently only compete with Coinbase in the United States since majority of the other players have shut down or gone bankrupt in the United States.

However, Coinbase does not offer the core banking capabilities that Juno offers. This Twitter thread is a clear validation of Juno's value proposition.

What customers can do on Juno that they can't do on Coinbase

Now that we know what Juno is and the potential market size, who are Juno's ideal users?

Ideal Customers of Juno

ICP prioritization framework

Prioritization order:

🥇First Priority - ICP 2 - Opportunist

🥈Second Priority - ICP 1 - Onchain OG

🥉Third Priority -ICP 3 - Offramper

The Prioritization Explained

• The Opportunist will have the fastest adoption, has the highest frequency of use case, and will be the easiest to find across channels
• • The opportunist is always looking for ways to make their life easier. They are always on the lookout for upcoming crypto projects and ways to access different crypto networks easier and faster.
• The Offramper has the lowest frequency of use case (1-2 times per month) and will be difficult to find since not many people get paid in crypto as of now

How to find these ideal customers at scale? Let's identify which channels to use

Channel Selection and Experiments

Channel selection framework

Product Integration - Phantom Wallet

Our ICP is the Opportunist. They will explore all opportunities to make their crypto life faster and easier.

Age - 25-35 years old

Product Integration Framework Explained

• The Phantom Wallet is the best candidate for our product integration.
• High frequency of interactions
• These interactions are important
• Juno can add value to these interactions (how we can add value is explained below)
• Phantom is the most popular wallet on Solana and it now supports Ethereum and Bitcoin. This means that the wallet has massive potential for scale

What is Phantom?

Phantom is a cryptocurrency wallet where users can store, send, or deposit crypto. Phantom also has an in-built browser where users can interact with multiple crypto protocols for lending, staking, NFTs, etc.

Product Integration Flow:

Product Discovery

Phantom has a section to buy crypto which is facilitated by Phantom's partners. This section currently features two providers: MoonPay and Coinbase Pay. Both of these only support buying crypto via debit card and wire transfers in the US.

current screen on Phantom

Opportunity for Juno

Juno supports funding methods that MoonPay and Coinbase don't like CashApp and ACH transfers which customers long for in the United States. Highlighting this in the buy section would be a great opportunity for Juno to be discovered by Phantom users.

Integration on Phantom

Account Creation on Juno

Clicking on Juno on Phantom would lead to the account creation screen on Juno.

Fund Transfer

At the end of the account creation process, users will be shown their account number and routing number for them to transfer cash via ACH or their debit card number for them to transfer funds via Cash App.

Receive crypto on Phantom

As soon as the cash hits their Juno wallet, Juno will initiate a crypto transfer to the users Phantom wallet and the user should receive their crypto in seconds.

What's the incentive for Phantom to integrate with Juno?

Juno would pay Phantom for every transaction on Juno that comes via Phantom. Juno would also provide US customers of Phantom the ability to buy crypto using Cash App (or other P2P methods) and ACH - accessing crypto with traditional banking rails.

Long term outlook

Phantom will continue to grow along with the crypto market as it is deemed to be the best crypto wallet experience. It majorly supports the Solana blockchain which is also growing significantly. This provides a long term opportunity for Juno to acquire users at scale.

Referrals

Our ICP - The Opportunist, is active in many communities on Telegram and Discord to try and find new opportunities in crypto. Referrals targeted towards this persona can help them gain two things

• Social capital - Sharing a great product in these communities will help increase this persona's social capital in these communities. This is commonly referred to as alpha.
• Money - Juno charges fees on crypto withdrawals. Waiving these fees on referrals will reward our ICP when they use the use the product more.

Juno's current referral program

Referrer reward: 10,000 Juno Points when referred user completes success action

• Juno Points can be used to redeem Gift Cards

Referred user reward: $25 when they complete the action

Success Action: Buy or deposit crypto worth $50 or more on Juno

Primary communication mode

• Web: one-to-many - Twitter
• iOS: one-to-one - invite contacts via iMessage
• Android: one-to-one - invite contacts via WhatsApp

Discovery

Gift icon in the app's navbar

Referral Nudge after a successful

crypto buy

transaction

Bottom banner in all successful transaction emails

Gaps in Juno's current referral program

• Rewards on both referrer and referred user's end don't incentivize usage of the product
• Rewards can be gamed and fraudulent users can earn dollars and Juno Points without much action on the product
• Rewards don't incentivize users to continue referring
• Referral discovery is only limited to
• • the gift card icon
  • referral nudge on successful crypto buy transactions
• There is no way for users to track referrals

Here's how I would improve Juno's referral proram

New referral program

New Referral Incentive: The referrer and their friend both get 10 free instant crypto withdrawals

Why this is better:

• Both users get "platform currency" and are rewarded more the more they use the product
• Instant withdrawals is a core action in the product and is more aligned with product usage than gift cards and Juno points
• Less chance of gaming the referral system
• Cost of referral remains $20-$30 per referred user
• Juno makes revenue on crypto buys while gift cards is a burn for us - this program aligns revenue incentives

​

Referral Discovery: How would a user discover Juno's referral program apart from the existing ways without

• making the app cluttered
• intervening in positive transaction flows
• a lot of spam communications (US customers read all their emails and churn a lot due to frequency of marketing communications)

In addition to the existing touchpoints of discovery, I recommend the following

Referral nudges on successful crypto withdrawal, deposit, and sell transactions similar to the nudge shown on a successful buy transaction

In-app popup on a user's 1st, 15th, and 30th successful crypto withdrawal

Email about the referral program once every 60 days to users who haven't landed on the referral screen - including new users who have signed up in these 60 days

Referral Sharing: How will users share their Juno link with their friends, colleagues, and family?

To start off, we will prioritize one-to-few communications. Why?

1. Hypothesis 1: one-to-many channels like Twitter won't work for us
2. 1. Many crypto Twitter users have low follower anonymous accounts. Low roi on sharing to small audiences
   2. Since they like being anonymous on the internet about their crypto usage, they won't share on their personal Instagram account
3. Hypothesis 2: one-to-few channels like Telegram and Discord communities might work best for us as these channels are usually anonymous but have high potential for social capital

An average crypto native in the US spends a lot of time on Discord, so we will experiment with Discord being the primary sharing channel across all 3 platforms.

This is how the referral screen would look with Discord as the primary sharing channel

Referral Tracking: It is important to introduce a way for users to track their referrals so we will build a system which allows users to do the following when they refer someone:

1. See how many successful withdrawals they've completed
2. See which stage of the process their referred users are in
3. Nudge the referred users to complete the success action via email
4. See their progress towards tiered referral rewards

Screen 1: On their main referral screen they will be able to see:

• How many referrals till their next milestone
• Number of incomplete referrals
• Remind button to remind referred users via email
• View all button for complete referral details

Screen 2: Complete referral details + tiered referral tracking (more details below)

Tiered Referral Reward System: To incentivize users to continue referring, we will introduce a tiered referral structure with the following incentives:

• Get 10 free crypto withdrawals on each successful referral
• Get a Juno hoodie on 3 successful referrals
• Get a new Ledger hardware wallet on 10 successful referrals

Sharing message: The pre-written copy to make sharing easy for users.

Points to consider:

• Should mention incentive to join
• Should mention value prop/brag worthy element
• Should be tailored for a one-to-few channel

Referred User Experience: Once the user clicks on a referral link, they will go through the below flow.

Landing page: Main message is about the incentive. It also contains trust elements and information about supported chains

Onboarding: User will go through the full sign up and KYC flow with the reward of 10 free instant withdrawals clearly shown throughout the process

Redeeming the reward: Once the user purchases crypto and goes to the withdrawal screen, they will see "10 Free withdrawals remaining" in the withdrawal fee section

​

Organic (SEO)

Gap 1: Technical fixes

Juno has a domain rating score of 50 and a health score of 38 on ahrefs. This can be improved by improving loading speed and better usage of the robots.txt file.

Simple fixes to improve the health score:

1. Add missing H1 tags (197 pages)
2. Fix duplicate pages without canonical (52 pages)
3. Add more pages to the robots.txt file to block the crawlers from crawling certain pages

Gap 2: Not ranking for crypto keywords

All top ranking keywords on Juno are banking related and there are only 2 mentions of crypto in the top 100 keywords that Juno ranks for

To fix this we have to target crypto keywords. Based on the following research, the best approach will be programmatic SEO.

There are 4 types of searches that we can rank for

1. Use case: how to buy, how to send, how to sell, price. These keywords can be targeted using a programmatic SEO approach.
2. 1. Make one set of articles for bitcoin
   2. 1. how to buy bitcoin
      2. how to send bitcoin
      3. how to sell bitcoin
      4. bitcoin price
   3. Programmatically create similar pages for all coins offered on Juno.
3. Competitor: Our competitor is only Coinbase and Juno already has blogs explaining Coinbase fees and how to close Coinbase accounts. Other Coinbase related keywords are not relevant to us.
4. Product: Our product is usually described in 3 ways:
5. 1. Instant crypto onramp/offramp: There's not enough search volume for this
   2. Crypto friendly bank: Regulatory limitations and we can't use the word "bank"
   3. bank and crypto in one platform: Regulatory limitations and we can't use the word "bank"
6. Brand: We add long tail keywords to use case to rank for the brand related terms. We are already top ranking for the keyword "Juno Finance"

Estimated time of implementation: 1 month

These keywords will not just increase traffic, but also increase the quality of traffic as we are targeting only crypto natives and a core banking audience will not fit our product.

​

Solana Bot

Opportunity: Attract more traffic from Solana users on Solana blockchain explorers

• Blockchains are open and nature and everyone can read everyone else's transactions
• People use blockchain explorers to check their transaction status and view other people's transaction histories

• Solana is a cheap and fast blockchain that is increasing in popularity
• There is a naming system on Solana which can make wallet addresses easy to identify by choosing a short name. Like a domain name for wallet addresses. (Eg: abhishekpatil.sol, growthx.sol, sushil.sol)

Experiment: Create a bot on Solana that

• Tracks when someone send SOL or USDC from a US crypto exchange to their Solana wallet or vice versa
• Make a small transaction ($0.001) from junofinance.sol everytime the above transaction is detected
• We create articles on our blog, Reddit, and Twitter on why people are receiving these transactions
• When a user sees the transaction on Solscan or any other blockchain explorer, they will search on Google, Reddit, or Twitter

This is how it would look on a Solana blockchain explorer

While the potential traffic is much lower compared to other channels, this will ensure a highly crypto native audience is engaging with Juno.