Here are the detailed show notes for the Deli podcast episode with Noah from Pump.fun.
This episode reveals Pump.fun's ambitious strategy to evolve from a memecoin launchpad into a social trading super-app, leveraging its massive revenue stream to directly challenge established tech giants like TikTok and Twitch.
Introduction to Pump.fun's Vision
- Anil and Yan from Deli introduce Noah (Twitter: Sapijiju), a co-founder of Pump.fun, to discuss the platform's future beyond its current market perception. While widely known for its explosive growth in the memecoin space, Noah clarifies the team's much larger ambitions.
- Yan provides a snapshot of Pump.fun's recent performance, highlighting approximately $50 million in revenue over the past month, which translates to a $600 million annualized run rate. This revenue is being used for aggressive token buybacks, a key point of interest for investors.
- Noah explains his role has historically been more on the private investment side, but he is now speaking publicly to articulate a broader vision. He reveals the team is not a small operation but a 70-person company actively hiring to build a globally competitive product.
The Founder's Journey and a Critique of Crypto
- Noah shares his unconventional background, starting with GPU mining in his high school bedroom at 16 and moving through roles like Discord moderator and business development at NFT Perp before co-founding Pump.fun at 19.
- He expresses a deep-seated frustration with the crypto industry's lack of innovation and real-world usage, citing that most projects lack genuine Product-Market Fit (PMF)—the degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand.
- Noah argues that many large crypto companies, like Coinbase, have grown primarily due to Bitcoin's success rather than their own product innovation. He states, "The way I would see this is I think most of these like large crypto companies have grown because of Bitcoin and not actually because of their underlying products."
- Strategic Insight: Pump.fun's founding ethos was to build a product with tens of millions of users, breaking free from what Noah calls the "crypto matrix" of recycled ideas and VC-driven narratives.
The Grueling Path to Product-Market Fit
- Before Pump.fun, the team experienced a series of failures, building and launching eight or nine different products that gained no traction. These included an NFT launchpad, an NFT AMM (Automated Market Maker)—a type of decentralized exchange that uses algorithmic "liquidity pools" instead of traditional order books—and platforms for tokenizing creator income.
- Noah emphasizes that Pump.fun's success was not an overnight phenomenon but the culmination of these past failures. The final product is a "mush together of all the past failures," incorporating UI elements and concepts from previous unsuccessful attempts.
- This iterative, failure-driven approach continues to define their development process, where they constantly experiment with new features like live streaming, social chats, and a mobile app to find what resonates with users.
The Vision Beyond Memecoins: A Social Trading Super-App
- Noah reframes Pump.fun not as a memecoin platform but as a social trading application designed to make every piece of online content—from live streams to short-form videos—investable and tradable.
- The platform's core is intrinsically social; for a coin or piece of content to gain value, people must talk about it, creating natural marketing loops.
- The team's goal is to build a "super application" that combines the features of TikTok, Robin Hood, Twitch, and Pump.fun, targeting the younger "zoomer" generation that spends hours daily on content platforms.
- Actionable Insight: Investors should view Pump.fun not just as a crypto launchpad but as a competitor in the multi-trillion-dollar social media and creator economy. Its success hinges on merging financial speculation with content consumption.
Disrupting the Creator Economy with 100x Better Monetization
- The conversation highlights the recent introduction of enhanced creator fees, a strategic move to make Pump.fun dramatically more lucrative for streamers than any other platform.
- On the first day of the new fee structure, creators earned a collective $2.4 million. Noah shares an anecdote of a new streamer with only 20 viewers earning $300 in just eight minutes—an income level impossible to achieve on platforms like Twitch or Kick.
- The strategy is to create a product that is "100x better than the competition" by focusing on the primary incentive for creators: monetization. This superior earning potential is designed to attract an initial cohort of creators who will then bring their existing audiences to the platform.
- Strategic Implication: This creator-centric model is Pump.fun's primary user acquisition strategy. By attracting creators, they aim to onboard a net-new audience to crypto, solving the industry's persistent challenge of expanding beyond its existing user base.
Product-First Strategy and Scaling
- Noah emphasizes a "product-first" philosophy, believing the best product always wins. He cites the story of Airbnb competing with a copycat in Europe, where the superior product ultimately dominated.
- The team is focused on small, granular updates based on user feedback rather than large, disruptive changes. This approach is modeled after successful apps like WhatsApp, which have scaled to billions of users through minor, iterative improvements over time.
- To seed the creator ecosystem, the company spent half a million dollars on "starter streamer kits" (webcams, monitors, etc.) to send to aspiring creators, aiming to grow the market from the ground up rather than paying large sums for established influencers.
Future Ambitions: Stablecoins, M&A, and Global Domination
- Noah discusses the long-term potential for ecosystem expansion. With over $1.6 billion in Solana locked in its liquidity pools and daily volumes reaching nearly $1 billion, Pump.fun has the foundation to build its own financial primitives.
- A proprietary stablecoin is a potential long-term goal. By integrating its own stablecoin, Pump.fun could capture a significant share of the market, potentially creating a top-three stablecoin by transaction volume almost overnight.
- The company's nearly $2 billion treasury is viewed as a "weapon" for strategic growth. This capital will be used for targeted user incentives, experiments, and potential M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions), either to acquire impactful technologies or to absorb emerging competitors, similar to Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.
- Investor Takeaway: The deployment of this massive treasury is a key catalyst to watch. Strategic acquisitions or the launch of new financial products like a stablecoin would signal a major escalation of their competitive ambitions.
A Scathing Critique of the Crypto VC Landscape
- Noah delivers a sharp critique of the mainstream crypto venture capital world, recounting his experience being dismissed by firms like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) because Pump.fun was perceived as a "memecoin startup."
- He contrasts Pump.fun's transparent nature—where users know they are speculating for fun—with what he calls the "daylight robbery" of many VC-backed infrastructure projects that raise huge sums on complex narratives but have zero users.
- He argues that memecoins are a cultural backlash from a younger generation fed up with a system where traditional paths to wealth are closed off and the crypto alternatives are often opaque, VC-controlled projects designed to extract value from retail.
- "If you buy into any of these coins on pump like you're not being lied to. Like you know what it is. It's a coin. We're here to have fun."
Tokenomics, Buybacks, and Future Communication
- The team has shifted its token buyback strategy from 25% of daily revenue to 100%, a move inspired by the success of platforms like Hyperliquid. To date, over $71 million worth of the PUMP token has been purchased from the open market, representing over 5.3% of the total supply.
- Noah candidly admits that the communication around the token launch "could have been handled humongously better" and was a significant error.
- He commits to greater transparency and accessibility moving forward, encouraging listeners to reach out directly via Twitter DMs. This podcast is presented as the first of a two-part series to better articulate the company's long-term vision.
Conclusion
- This discussion repositions Pump.fun as a strategic challenger to the creator economy, not just a crypto-native platform. Investors and researchers should monitor its user growth metrics, particularly from non-crypto natives, and its capital deployment strategy as key indicators of its potential to disrupt the multi-trillion-dollar social media landscape.
