A new crypto trading education platform that doubles as a general self-improvement group has been ploughing through its growth targets, according to one of the two Melbournians who launched it just over two months ago.

MTC Education has attracted over 1,000 paying members to its “My Trading Community” group of crypto enthusiasts engaged in short-term crypto trades.

“We’ve grown very, very quickly,” co-founder and 33-year-old former schoolteacher Craig Latham told Stockhead. “Our goal was to get to 300-500 people in the first 60 days and we’ve more than doubled that. It’s been beyond wild, to be honest, and very exciting. At times you feel you’re struggling to keep up, because there’s so many things to do and everything is so new.

“There have been challenges along the way as well, so it’s learning to adapt and be resilient and overcoming the challenges and obstacles and keep moving forward.”

The business, which is already profitable, evolved out of a free crypto-trading Facebook group that has about 4,200 members, Latham said.

But MTC offers far more than that – market analysis five days a week by full-time coaches, live and recorded courses on trading, plus additional courses on personal development and mental toughness. There’s even access to 400 recipes and meal plans, Latham says.

MTC Education team members (l-r) technical operation Leslie Chow; co-founders John Gryzbowski and Craig Latham; chief visionary officer Michael Sloggett; executive assistant Lyly Bui; and community ambassador Renae Burton. (Supplied)

Personal development goals

Self-improvement, Latham says, “just links so well with trading. It just goes hand-in-hand. So that’s why we have that community aspect, just as a goal to kind of lift everyone up together. So we have a really healthy, vibrant community of people who celebrate each other’s success.

“It makes everybody feel good, it makes people feel welcome and part of the community and that’s what we want to achieve.”

Members – who pay $199 or $299 a month – socialise on a purpose-built social media platform that’s available as an app on iOS and Android, as well as via web browser, Latham said.

The app was created by developers in London, with the website designed by graphic designers in Las Vegas and built by developers in India, Latham said.

The team wanted to have its own platform because social media apps like Facebook are very distracting, he explained, and “we want people to be laser-focused”.

About 35 to 40 per cent of the community is women, Latham said. There’s a “ladies group” for women who are fearful from past experiences they might be mocked for asking dumb questions – even though that wouldn’t happen in this group, he added.

About 80 per cent of the members are from Australia and New Zealand, with the rest from places like the US, the UK, India, the Netherlands, the Cook Islands and elsewhere in Asia.

“Our goal is to expand globally and be a global company,” Latham said.

MTC has five “market scan” coaches, a new coach who is joining to work on personal development, several people in the corporate office and a sales director.

MTC Education co-founder John Gryzbowski and Craig Latham; chief visionary officer Michael Slogget; technical operations officer Leslie Chow; and executive assistant Lyly Bui. (Supplied)

It’s one of several crypto-education businesses that have sprouted up in Australia in recent years. Others include The Crypto Den, My Bitcoin Academy, Trader Cobb and the Crypto Collective, all of which are focused more on short-term trading and technical analysis; and Collective Shift, which highlights fundamental analysis and longer-term buys. (Latham said he trades mostly on the four-hour and the daily charts, while for Collective Shift, a short-term position would be three months).

Top crypto influencer joins

MTC scored a coup when Queensland crypto-influencer Michael Sloggett, who has a large following on Facebook, agreed to join as a chief visionary officer. As Sloggett recounted to Stockhead recently, the team reached out to him after he had gone through a rough patch. He agreed to join the company in January after initially rebuffing their offer.

“He’s such a good leader, and he knows what needs to happen, he knows the direction,” said Latham, who learned trading from Sloggett and considers him a mentor.

“Michael really does have the grand vision. He sets the direction, and we work with Michael to put in place that vision…. I think that’s really been the key to our success, because Michael works with such speed and aggression, really like no other person that I’ve ever seen.  He was a key person that we knew we had to get.”

Sloggett recently came up with the idea for the group’s first in-person meetup, a two-day conference on the Gold Coast in May, Latham said. It quickly sold out, with 120 people expected. There’ll be training and education, as well as an event Saturday night at a rooftop pool bar. The group has spent $13,000 on alcohol including six-litre bottles of vodka.

“It’s gonna be a good party, we’ll keep it sensible maybe,” Latham said with a laugh.

Vaccine mandate cited

Latham left his job as a special needs teacher at a school in Melbourne’s western suburbs on October 15 to launch the business with his co-founder, John Grzybowski.

Although the project was already in full swing, Latham said his departure was accelerated by Victoria’s vaccine mandate, after teachers received a mass email from the state Department of Education saying they had two weeks to get vaccinated for Covid or lose their job.

“They told us that if we didn’t get it (the jab), obviously we couldn’t work but also lose all of our leave. They sent us out a really nasty email telling us that if we mentioned anything on social media, we would face disciplinary action. And I just didn’t really feel right about it. I didn’t feel like I was in the right headspace that I could make a decision that it was right for me.”

Latham said he wasn’t against vaccination, just mandates. He said the school was in a low socio-economic area and children came to it from some of the worst backgrounds imaginable, including drug abuse and domestic violence, so the tone of the email made him feel unappreciated.

“We had all kinds of horrific things happen in our school, kids would come to school with knives and stuff, really messed up, really hard kids,” he said.

He said that 11 teachers left because of the mandate, including one woman who had worked 30 years at the school and was one of the best teachers he’d ever seen.

“She had some of the hardest classes, because no one else could handle ’em – and she was good at it. She loved it. And it made me so angry, when she’s done all of that. And it just doesn’t matter. It’s like, well, sorry, but you gotta leave in like a week.

“I just felt like it was really unfair and really not right what happened…. I was just lucky that I had trading up my sleeve, and I knew that I was launching this business, so I was fine,” but the others who lost their jobs included a teacher whose pregnant wife was about to give birth.

It was a lesson, Latham said, that to employers you’re “just a number” and it’s better to work for oneself through something like trading.