Common pitfalls for Web3 founders

 How do you “go to market” and convince potential customers to spend their money, time, and attention on your product or service? The response by most organizations in web2 — the Internet era defined by large centralized products/services like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, in which the vast majority of value accrues to

... See more

The earliest stage of building a crypto application requires all the ingredients of a normal startup: a great team, lean development, tight execution, and quick learning. During this phase, the only thing that matters is product/market fit. To move fast toward finding it, it’s important to avoid design by committee (or community!) A product n

... See more

Crypto founders have a unique challenge in front of them. In addition to building a product that people want, they also need to consider how that product can successfully run in a decentralized manner — that is, as a protocol owned and operated by a community of users. This is a difficult challenge because much of what it takes to build a suc

... See more

The Three Components of Crypto Success: Product/market fit, Community participation, Sufficient decentralization (community ownership)

The need for product/market fit is obvious. Without a product people want, there are no users, no business, and it will be difficult to sustain a community for long. Community participation and decentralized control

... See more

We are likely entering a 2-4 year period where founders — Web3 founders in particular — will overshoot in their reliance on token incentives to drive their communities. Like Charlie Munger, they are right, but not fully right. We will learn a lot from their experiments and mistakes, but if you want your project to succeed, don’t forget the heart.

1. You have to prioritize execution over vision/strategy.Web3 instead requires PMs to be more focused on execution: quickly hammering out a spec over Telegram with devs, QA’ing carefully and setting up a smart contract audit given the risk of vulnerabilities, building hype on Twitter, launching—and repeating.