Teenage Indian Girl Responds To LinkedIn Ad, Lands A Deal For Her Cryptocurrency App

When Sean Walsh posted an advertisement on LinkedIn for a direct-to-consumer cryptocurrency app he didn’t expect to attract many enticing opportunities. Walsh, the founder of California-based crypto-asset venture capital firm Redwood City Ventures, felt it was a bit of a shot in the dark since the handful of potential responses may not have what he was directly looking for or might have an asking price that was out of his range.

But not only did Walsh find an app he liked and at a negotiable price, it came from a coder and designer he would not have expected: a 16-year-old girl in India.

Harshita Arora, the industrious home-schooled daughter of a financier father and homemaker mother in the northern Indian city of Saharanpur, launched Crypto Price Tracker in January and in just one day it surged to the top of the Apple App Store.

The app has received very positive reviews, earning a 4.7 rating out of 49 reviews. With the constantly fluctuating prices of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Ripple and the countless others, investors will likely maintain interest in apps like Crypto Price Tracker for quite some time.

It wasn't a bad start for a young woman who only started learning digital design and coding at the age of 13. Arora grasped the iOS concepts from tutorials on YouTube and through online courses.

“I didn’t have any idea how old she was,” Walsh said in a phone interview with International Business Times. “She just seemed like a professional software developer.”

Arora and Walsh spoke on Skype, with Walsh struck by her maturity, intelligence and flawless English.

“It was quite a surprise when I learned her age,” Walsh said with a laugh.

Walsh had taken a look at her app and believed it fit his criteria based on the collection of products and services he was trying to build out.

It didn’t take long for Walsh and Arora to strike a deal. Less than two weeks before her email to Walsh on LinkedIn, Arora had received her first wire transfer.

Scrolling through the Apple App Store there are countless cryptocurrency options available. But Arora feels her Crypto Price Tracker stands out from the rest due to its user-friendly interface. She said she decided to create Crypto Price Tracker because she was frustrated by poorly designed apps that often had inaccurate prices and alerts.

“Users have loved the gold gradient color scheme and have commented that prices are more readable,” Arora said in an email to IBT.

The app provides prices of over 1,000 cryptocurrencies from over 20 exchanges and in 32 fiat currencies. It also shows historical data of the prices for every cryptocurrency in a price graph, while offering time-based and price-threshold-based alerts. The portfolio allows users to see their overall gain or loss, their 24-hour gain or loss, as well as additional information for investors.

Walsh admits that the Crypto Price Tracker isn’t an amazingly innovative product at the moment, but agrees with Arora about the elegant user interface and likes the app's overall potential for Redwood City Ventures.

“The idea that I had, and the reason I bought it, was to act as an easy beachhead to access for my expansion into direct consumer tech-related businesses, which sort of transcends a lot of the crypto mining that I have invested in over the last several years,” Walsh said.

Arora became interested in cryptocurrencies and blockchains in 2016 after learning about them in a tech magazine. Her intrigue led to more research, so when cryptocurrencies became the hot topic of 2017, she decided to seize on the opportunity to combine her knowledge of cryptocurrencies with her app-making skills.

“I thought there's probably a need I could address with my skills in app design and development. That’s how the thought of having a redesigned price tracker and portfolio management app started,” she said.

Walsh is aware of the heavy competition in startup apps but is confident about this venture and calls the app “a meaningful step” towards Redwood City Ventures’ evolution since it “transcends cryptocurrency mining and gets into direct consumer financial-technology product services.”

He believes Arora's technology makes Redwood City Ventures "more competitive in the global marketplace" and has created something valuable to the ecosystem that is "amazing and exciting." Walsh also likes how Arora helps build a strong human narrative to the company’s progress amid a political climate that is perceived to be less receptive to both immigrants and women.

“It’s really exciting to participate in her acknowledgment and reward,” he said.

Arora isn't taking her recent cash windfall from Redwood and calling it quits. While she hasn't decided how she will spend all of the funds, she says she plans to devote some of it to pay for books and to help pay for an 0-1A visa application to someday make the move to Silicon Valley to work on more startups.