The amount of Monerica copycat sites keeps growing, and this is both annoying and flattering. But what exactly lead to the rise of Monerica from a site barely scrapping by to pay for hosting with donations to a full time job? In short, it was sponsorship that a person on the now team came up with. But moreover, what expanded it from there was more detailed.
Many people in Monero are so caught up in the technology that their passion for it, that sometimes the business advice they need to hear just never gets considered. There is actionable advice that matters which was used to grow Monerica.
The most important advice and concepts come from Alex Hormozi, a famous business YouTuber. I watched many of his videos and eventually read his book: $100M Offers. The core takeaways that I got were about building an offer and also about having scarcity. The offer is the advertising of the Monero listings but the really important thing is limiting it. It may sound counter-intuitive but also having high prices helps.
Charging the cheapest rates means getting the cheapest people. To pay $50 as an exchange for a month of sponsorship comes off as not worth it. They make more than that in one transaction, so what message was I sending when I am setting that price for an entire month? It means to the buyer: this doesn't work, I just want to exist. That doesn't impress them.
Now, I am not saying you can charge thousands of dollars out of nowhere, it needs to build up. But an important lesson in the Hormozi teachings is that you cannot help the business succeed by charging them so little. What exactly can you for an exchange for $50? Basically nothing.
Once I started to understand that Monerica was essentially a marketing company, I decided to invest in it by getting more attention. The breakthrough was when Monerica sponsored MoneroKon back in 2025. That sent a message to everyone that Monerica was not just some cheap blog site, but that it had something to offer. It was not cheap to do this and at the time was a gamble, but it aligned with the whole marketing concept that was necessary.
After the sponsorship of the conference, it was possible to start charging more for Monerica's own sponsorship. It was easier to sell it and it was a form of leverage since some of the sites at the time did not want to pay to sponsor MoneroKon and they didn't feel they needed to if they got it by proxy through Monerica.
The practices that really helped were: pay for marketing where Monero users are, raise prices, have exclusivity. While there are 5 main sponsors, there was a point where someone wanted to be a 6th and they were pretty demanding. But I said no. Not only would that betray the people who bought thinking there would be only 5 sponsors, but that also reduced the exclusivity. It's possible even 5 sponsors is too many, it's hard to say.
The other thing that matters that people tend to not understand with business is that you don't really want that many customers. By this I mean, it's easier to have 5 customers than 500. It depends on what you are selling of course, if you are trying to appeal to everyone in the world then this isn't true, for example if you are selling a toothbrush or paper towels then okay. But generally speaking, you only want to sell to rich people. There are fewer of them and they have money.
Working with a few exchanges is so much easier than begging every listing on Monerica, many of which do not get any XMR transactions, to give money for sponsorship. So, less is more.