The Web3 Founder’s Playbook | Imran Khan, Qiao Wang, AllianceDAO

7. Can’t just raise money and become a DAO, that won’t work. You have to build a product, you have to build a mechanism to keep the product and the community sustainable, and you have to make people love the product and pay for it. Sooner or later, you can let the community take over and let them think about where the product is going.

11. Coinbase is moving towards crypto-native, and FTX is moving away from crypto-native, so Coinbase will be the winner of Crypto, and FTX may be the winner of other markets.

Takeaway: 1. This is the first cycle in which crypto is intertwined with the rest of the macro economy. Traditional funds and their portfolio companies agree on that each founder should limit their budget and keep improving.

8. One question I tend to ask founders is: How many prospects have you talked to? This question alone can give you an idea of what founders think about the product and the market. Suppose you are building tools for DAOs. I might ask: how many DAOs have you talked to? What did you learn from those conversations? I like founders with a unique perspec... See more

10. A lot of founders are too addicted to operation numbers. The number of followers on Discord, the number of Twitter followers. These are the worst vanity tricks, and I ask founders to ignore these numbers because often quality is more important than quantity.

6. Don’t start out with a DAO. A lot of our internal governance/decisions or interactions between members is not what you usually see, and I think community governance is extremely inefficient and makes no sense for most products. I think DAOs only make sense for a few small categories of products.

2. If you are in the Pre-seed stage, the first thing is to go out to raise funds and prove the value of the group. In fact, some of the founders we work with have started lowering the valuations to find the funding they need over the next two to three years. In this case, you just need to raise money and go back to work.

3. I think this will most likely be the last cycle of cryptocurrencies. Because last cycle Bitcoin went from about 1200 to 20 000, it increased about 20 times, and this cycle from 20 000 to 60 000, it increased 3 times. The increase is much smaller than in the previous cycle. I think it is very likely that cryptocurrencies will trade like Nasdaq in... See more

4. This may be the best time to launch a product. There is too much noise in a bull market. As these startups face reality, they begin to understand that without the traction of the product, the token price will eventually drop and be blamed by the holders.

5. I suggest that startups should not use tokens as a way to attract users in the early stage, but use products as a strategy to enter the market, and build their products into a basic layer to serve the community. Without the product as traction, the token itself will just make more noise.