The memo that became Binance Academy

In 2018 I was a community manager at Binance. The same questions came up in the chats every day, so I built a Telegram bot on the side to answer them. Nobody asked for it. I showed it once it worked.

That bot was the first product work I did, and it made the next step obvious: the questions weren't going away, and a bot in a chat was the wrong place to answer them properly.

The proposal

I wrote a memo to the CEO titled "Binance Academy: a community education initiative". It covered what the platform would be, what it would do for the company, and what it would take to build. No slides. A document with a clear ask.

It was approved. Academy launched in 2018 in 15 languages. Within a year it had 300+ articles, three million users and ten million page views. Over two years the team grew to a designer, three developers, two writers, an SEO specialist and me.

What the plan got wrong

The memo assumed the community would write the content. The launch plan leaned on a writing competition to source articles cheaply and get people invested.

The competition happened. The content didn't. Community submissions weren't consistent enough to build an education platform on, so we hired writers and wrote almost all of it in-house. That was the right call and the memo didn't foresee it.

The competition still paid off, just not how it was designed to. It surfaced one strong video creator. We contracted them long-term; later the company's marketing team hired them outright. The plan's mechanism failed and its by-product was the best hire it made.

Takeaways

• Build the small version first. A working bot made the memo credible. It wasn't a pitch for an idea; it was a pitch to scale something that already helped.
• Write to the reader's question. The CEO's question was "what does this do for the company and what does it cost?" The memo answered that in order. Vision came after.
• Plan the resources, not the tactics. The team ask was right and held up for two years. The content-sourcing tactic was wrong within months. Ask for the people; let the tactics change.
• Keep the failed experiment's by-products. The competition failed at its stated goal and still found a person we'd never have found otherwise.

Why it matters

Titles catch up to work, not the other way round. The role I did for the next two years didn't exist until the memo, and the memo didn't get written until the bot showed the problem was real.

Binance Academy on the Work page