Common pitfalls for Web3 founders

When you are finally ready to spend time on token design, it will seem like a daunting task. You wonder, “is there a playbook?”  The short answer is no, there is no playbook.  Tokens should absolutely be designed from first principles, according to the unique needs of your product.

In short, prioritize your product over your token.

During DeFi summer 2020, many of the best products, such as Uniswap and Curve, found product-market fit before they even had a token. There were also a few great products that had a liquid token before product-market fit. But they did not use token incentives.

But “go to market strategy” is the key word here. Again, most startups don’t even have a great product to go to the market with! If you use tokens as a user acquisition strategy without a great product, you are essentially wasting your marketing budget. And it’s a very expensive marketing strategy because the supply is limited and mistakes are irre... See more

I will argue that an engaged community is not what leads to a great product. An engaged community is the result of a great product.

Only after you’ve completely exhausted your personal network and your community should you consider using recruiting platforms like Alist, Triplebyte, Stackoverflow, coding schools, etc.

If you feel overwhelmed, the best solution is not to hire more, but to do less. Prioritize, focus, ignore.

team size is a vanity metric. It’s a useless metric to optimize for. In fact, more often than not a smaller team of A players can achieve more than a team 3 times larger of B players.

The truly Web3-native marketing strategy is tokens. And it's not just free token airdrops, but the mere fact of users owning your token. It's powerful beyond measure when used correctly.