Louise Ivan

Filipino founder based in Amsterdam. I took Ryder from a 5K grant to $4.8M raised. This site is the whole thing: the places, the companies, the growth playbook, and the fitness work that keeps it standing.

Louise Ivan

Recent projects

Ryder
Ryder ryder.id

Hardware wallets for normal people. 5K grant to $4.8M raised, shipping worldwide, securing millions in assets. I'm Co-founder and CXO.

Stacks
Stacks stacks.co

Stacks makes Bitcoin programmable. I helped grow the community bringing user-owned internet to the world.

Hiro PBC
Hiro PBC hiro.so

Developer tools for Stacks, the network that enables apps and smart contracts on Bitcoin.

Freehold
Freehold freehold.earth

A community of hodlers building for hodlers. Community work before anyone was paying attention to the space.

Coeus
Coeus

A community of entrepreneurs providing digital transformation for everyone. My first lesson in turning a group chat into an organization.

The Crypto Community Handbook
Crypto Community Handbook

A bi-monthly newsletter on building crypto communities from scratch, written with Jun.

My story

I was born on one of the small islands of the Philippines. No network, no capital, no tech scene within a thousand kilometers. What I had was the internet and the stubborn idea that where you start doesn't get to decide where you finish.

Work took me through startups across Asia, Europe, and the United States before I found home in Amsterdam. One year on the road looked like 64 flights across 9 countries, including one hotel room that flooded in Osaka while I slept. I still made the morning meeting.

Three things kept showing up everywhere I lived: arts, technology, and community. I stopped treating them as separate interests and started building at the point where they overlap. That's Ryder.

Where life has taken me

  • The PhilippinesBorn and raised on a small island
  • Asia, Europe, the USStartup years, different timezones, same laptop
  • Osaka and 8 other countries64 flights in a single year
  • AmsterdamHome

Teams I've built with

Ryder logo Stacks logo Hiro PBC logo Freehold logo Coeus logo

The playbook

Growth notes from taking a hardware company from a 5K grant to $4.8M. None of this is theory. Every line here cost money, time, or sleep to learn.

Community before product

We had people waiting for Ryder before we had hardware to ship them. Build the room first, then bring the thing into the room. It works in crypto and it works everywhere else.

Take the small yes

Ryder started with a 5K grant. Small money starts the flywheel that big money later joins. Founders who hold out for the perfect round usually just hold out.

Ship quietly, then talk

Our best expansions had no launch campaign. The product showed up in more countries and the announcement wrote itself. Proof beats hype and it's cheaper to produce.

Founder-led content is free distribution

I write on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X where our users already scroll. It costs me an hour a day and outperforms anything we could buy at this stage.

Track everything you want to improve

Growth, burn, training, sleep. If it isn't logged, it didn't happen. This rule runs the company and, as you'll see below, it runs my body too.

What I'm writing

I also write longer pieces from time to time. The subjects range from building communities, cryptocurrency, economics, and society.

2021

Growth tips from me

Smaller lessons that didn't fit the playbook. Content, money, body, road. Each one is something I did, not something I read.

Content

  • Get your X monetizedI got mine monetized and it changed how I treat the platform. The unlock was not one viral post. It was showing up every day for months and writing replies that were better than most people's posts. Hit the requirements, turn it on, and suddenly your daily writing habit pays for itself.
  • Replies are underrated distributionA sharp reply under a big account gets more qualified eyeballs than your own post on a slow day. I treat replying as prospecting.
  • Write where you already areI post from airports, hotel lobbies, and between meetings. Waiting for the perfect writing setup is how drafts die.

Money

  • Monetize the habit you already haveX pays me for writing I was doing for free. Look at what you already do daily and ask who would pay for it before adding anything new to your plate.
  • Grants are money tooRyder exists because of a 5K grant. Founders sleep on grants because they're small. Small is fine. Small starts things.

Body

  • Log it or lose itEvery session and every protocol goes in the tracker. The log is what turns effort into a system you can actually improve.
  • Design the routine for your worst weekA program that only works when you're home and rested is not a program. Mine survives airports because I built it for airports.

Road

  • 64 flights taught me to pack onceOne carry-on, one packing list, zero decisions. The energy you save on logistics goes back into the work.

Fitness, run like a company

Building a company on 64 flights a year will wreck your body unless you treat training with the same seriousness as the cap table. So I do. Same operating system: set the target, log the data, review weekly, adjust.

I track every session, every metric, and every protocol, down to building my own tracker when the apps out there couldn't keep up with what I wanted to log. Recovery gets tracked with the same discipline as training. Hotel gyms, resistance bands in carry-on luggage, and a routine that survives airports because it was designed to.

The honest version: consistency beat intensity every single time I tested both. The company taught me that. The gym confirmed it.