Eight years ago, Vimanga was a beginner trader in Sri Lanka, staring at charts and trying to make sense of the markets. Today, he's recognised as a top Deriv partner: the builder behind an entire ecosystem of trading platforms that now serves many traders worldwide.
What started in 2018 as a personal frustration, the desire to automate the tedious, time-draining parts of trading, quietly grew into a business built on trust, reliability, and long-term thinking. In this interview, Vimanga walks us through that journey: the technical challenges of building unforgiving trading systems on his own, the shift from developer to business owner, the philosophy behind each platform he's launched, and the advice he'd give both traders and aspiring partners.
Quick Summary
- The spark: Vimanga started building not to chase a market opportunity, but to solve his own problem as a beginner trader glued to his screen, automating the discipline and timing that software does better than humans.
- Early challenges: Reliability was everything in trading systems, where even a 30-second stall can mean a missed entry or a costly error. Working alone, he built on a serverless, edge-based architecture to scale without a funded team.
- From developer to partner: As his tools attracted thousands of users, the Deriv Partner programme let him earn through shared revenue instead of charging users directly and aligning his success with theirs.
- The ecosystem: BinaryBot.live, NexTrader, DayTrades.live, and Tuplemint each emerged to meet traders at a different stage, from ready-made automation to fully autonomous, server-side trading, to AI-powered strategy building.
- Eight years, one word: Compounding. Consistent, incremental progress backed by genuine collaboration with Deriv on authentication, smart routing, and partner portal access turned a personal fix into a business serving millions.
- His advice: For traders, survive first, profit second. For partners, earn trust before income, because trust compounds and hype expires.
How to identify high-value gaps in the automated trading market
What was the initial spark or gap that made you say, “Okay, I need to build something here”?
Vimanga: I’ll give you the honest version, because it’s more interesting than the polished one. For me it wasn’t a gap in the market, it was a personal frustration. In 2018 I was a beginner trader, and like most beginners, I spent my days locked to the charts: watching, waiting, trying not to miss the one moment that mattered. After a while it struck me that I was doing a machine’s job. The discipline of watching the market and the precision of timing an entry are exactly the things software does better than a human.
So I asked one simple question: could I automate the part of trading that was draining me? That question led me straight to the Deriv API documentation. The moment I read it, it clicked, everything I needed to automate my own trading was already there, fully exposed and ready to build on. I started writing small tools purely to solve my own problem. There was no grand vision, just a trader who wanted his time back, and an API that made it possible. Everything I’ve built since traces back to that.
Looking back at those early developer days, what were some of the biggest technical challenges you faced when launching your platforms?
Vimanga: The first and hardest was reliability. A trading system is unforgiving in a way ordinary software isn’t. If a normal app stalls for thirty seconds, the user sees a spinner and forgets it. If a trading system stalls for thirty seconds, it misses an entry, duplicates an order, or holds a position it should have closed and every one of those failures carries a real cost. So the engineering bar was never “make it work.” It was “make it never fail.” Persistent connections, clean reconnection logic, ensuring a single dropped tick could never cascade into a bad trade. That’s where most of the early work went.
The second challenge was scaling with almost no resources. I was one developer, not a funded team, so I couldn’t buy my way out of infrastructure problems. That constraint became a design philosophy. I built on a serverless, edge-based architecture so my systems could run independently of any open browser, serve users on every continent, and operate at near-zero cost. In hindsight, those limitations made me a far more disciplined engineer than abundant resources ever would have.
And none of it came quickly. In those early days I’d work twelve to sixteen hours straight, for weeks at a time, just to get a system stable enough to trust with real money. There was no audience watching yet, I did it purely because I wanted it to work.
A lot of developers tend to stay purely on the tech side, but you eventually expanded into our various Deriv Partner programmes. Walk us through that transition. When did you decide to cross over from working with APIs to being a business owner?
Vimanga: It wasn’t a single decision so much as an evolution. For the first stretch, I was purely on the tech side: building tools to solve my own problems and then sharing them. AI trading insights, cloud-based strategy copy systems, an AI strategy builder with automated bots, communities on YouTube and Telegram. Each one answered a specific need I’d run into. There was no roadmap; there was momentum.
The real turning point came when those tools started attracting serious numbers of users. Once thousands of people are relying on your platforms every day, you have to answer a basic question: how does this sustain itself? I never wanted to charge my users heavy fees or lock features behind paywalls, that went against the kind of product I set out to build. And that’s exactly where the Deriv Partner programme made everything click. Instead of monetising my users directly, I could earn through the partner model: a share of the revenue Deriv generates when the traders I bring in are active on the platform.
That single shift changed how I saw the whole thing. Suddenly, my own results were tied to whether my users actually succeeded, rather than coming at their expense. I only do well when they’re genuinely trading and getting value from what I’ve built. When a trader does well and stays engaged, the model is working exactly as intended. That’s the point where a collection of useful tools quietly became a real business.
Structuring a multi-tiered automated trading system architecture
Looking closely at your path, you didn’t just add a referral link, you built an entire ecosystem with platforms like BinaryBot.live, NexTrader, and DayTrades.live. How do these platforms differ from one another? Is there a specific type of trader or strategy you designed each one for?
Vimanga: People assume those products were planned together from the start. In reality they emerged one at a time, each solving a problem the previous one didn’t.
BinaryBot.live is the entry point: proven, ready-made strategies for traders who want automation without complexity. You select a bot, you understand its logic, you deploy it. SafeBinaryBot extended that same principle, with transparency and safety at the centre.
NexTrader is the platform for serious traders: advanced charting, MT5 signals delivered with full trade setups, and deep chart analysis built for people who want to study the markets closely and execute with precision.
DayTrades.live is the most ambitious of the three: fully server-side, autonomous trading. It packs in professional trading indicators and strategy copy systems, and your strategy keeps running even after you close your laptop, with daily take-profit and stop-loss discipline built in. In many ways it’s the complete answer to the problem I set out to solve in 2018, trading that no longer demands you sit and watch the screen.
And Tuplemint is the newest direction, an AI-powered bot builder that lets traders describe and construct their own strategies rather than relying on fixed ones. It’s automation for a generation that wants to create, not just consume.
So these aren’t four competing products. They’re a progression, meeting traders at every stage of their journey. And alongside the platforms, we’ve built a growing library of educational blogs and resources, because helping traders actually learn matters just as much as giving them the tools.
How would you describe your overall journey as a Deriv partner, and how has the support from the team shaped your growth along the way?
Vimanga: Eight years, and if I had to choose one word, it would be compounding. There was no breakthrough moment, only consistent, incremental progress, one product at a time, until it quietly amounted to something serving millions of traders. And there’s an irony I genuinely appreciate in that: I started all this because I was a bored beginner who wanted his time back and today, after years of building, most of it runs on its own. There are stretches now where I do very little; the platforms largely run themselves. The thing I built to free up my time ended up doing exactly that and the success that came from it has been very real.
Deriv’s support shaped that in ways that aren’t always visible from the outside. A platform like mine depends entirely on the stability and openness of the underlying API, and Deriv kept investing in both. But beyond the technology, the support has been outstanding across the board. Whenever I ran into something, whether a technical problem or a compliance question, the team was genuinely there and handled it well. When I raised technical issues, including detailed proposals on authentication, smart routing, and partner portal access, they engaged seriously, and some of what they built reflected input from partners like me. My country managers have been just as supportive every step of the way.
To me, the whole thing has been a real win-win. I’ve gained a great deal from this partnership in very real, tangible terms - both personally and in my career - and I’d like to believe I’ve given something valuable back to Deriv in return. That kind of two-way relationship, where an independent developer can meaningfully influence the roadmap of the platform he’s building on and both sides grow together, is rare in this industry. That’s what shaped my growth most: not simply being given tools, but being treated as a true partner.
You wear two distinct hats. You understand the technical, strategic side of trading, but you also understand what it takes to build a business. What is the number one piece of advice you’d give to someone looking to succeed as a trader, and conversely, what advice would you give to someone wanting to follow in your footsteps as a Deriv partner?
Vimanga: For traders, my advice is deliberately unglamorous: survive first, potential profits second. Most beginners fixate on how much they can make. The ones who endure are obsessed with how little they can lose on their worst day. Risk management isn’t a footnote to trading, it is the discipline itself. A strategy that works ninety percent of the time but ruins your account on the other ten is, by definition, a losing strategy. Protect your capital the way you protect oxygen, because without it you’re out of the game entirely. There are no shortcuts and no guarantees. Anyone who promises otherwise is selling something.
For those who want to follow my path as a partner: earn trust before you pursue income. This industry is crowded with people chasing fast commissions through hype and inflated promises. They profit for a season and then vanish. The partners who build something durable are the ones who genuinely serve their audience, who would recommend the same product whether or not a commission was attached. Trust compounds; hype expires. Commit to the long game, become the partner people still rely on five years from now, and the success can follow.
You’ve been with us for a long time now and have seen the ecosystem evolve. Out of everything you do, what is it that you enjoy or appreciate the most about being a Deriv partner?
Vimanga: The reach, above everything. I’m just one person, and something I build at my desk tonight can change how someone trades in Lagos, Jakarta, or São Paulo tomorrow morning. That scale still genuinely moves me.
But more precisely, it’s the creative freedom. Deriv provides a powerful, open foundation and then steps back, leaving me room to build whatever I can imagine on top of it. I’m never confined to a single product or idea. The same curiosity that led me to automate my own trading in 2018 is the one I still get to follow today, whether that’s an AI bot builder, an autonomous trading engine, or a fully automated content platform. For someone who genuinely loves to create, a stable foundation paired with complete creative freedom is as good as it gets.
What is the biggest piece of advice you’d give Vimanga from 2018 about trading and being a Deriv partner?
Vimanga: Three things. First, that frustrated beginner trying to automate one tedious task is laying the foundation of something far larger than he realises, so build it properly from the start; the shortcuts you take tonight become the debts of three years from now. Second, the business side is not a distraction from the “real” technical work; it is the work, and the sooner you respect that, the faster everything compounds. And third, the one that matters most: be patient. The version of you desperate for results this month would be astonished by what patience produces over eight years. Don’t abandon it during the quiet stretches. The compounding is already happening, long before you can see it.
And to anyone reading who finds themselves where Vimanga was in 2018 - a beginner trader, a little frustrated, wondering whether they could build their way to a better solution - his answer is simply: “build it. Start before you feel ready. I’m proof that one curious person with a laptop and a measure of persistence can turn a small frustration into something that lasts.”
"I'm proof that one curious person with a laptop and a measure of persistence can turn a small frustration into something that lasts." — Vimanga Pramodh
Connect with Vimanga
Website: vimanga.lk
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/vimanga-pramodh
GitHub: github.com/VimangaPramodh
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