What I Wish Someone Had Told Me As a Crypto Founder
Crypto is unusually good at making weak signals look convincing. A token incentive can make acquisition look like demand. A rising market can make retention look optional. A loud Discord can look like a durable community, right up until the price chart turns around.
I’ve been building Highlight since late 2021. We started during the boom and kept building as the market cooled. Living through both sides clarified most of the advice I now give new crypto founders: figure out what is real, then build around it.
Learn What Is Real
Crypto is a technology, a market, a culture, and a casino occupying the same browser tab. If you don’t know which one brought your users in, you’ll misread what the numbers are telling you.
1. Don’t Confuse Speculation With Product-Market Fit
Speculation drives much of the crypto market. A token launch, an airdrop rumor, or a rising floor price can produce extraordinary growth. It can disappear just as quickly.
Ask a simple question: if the financial incentive vanished tomorrow, what would these users still do? If the answer is unclear, treat the spike as a trade, not product-market fit. Tell your team and investors exactly what is driving the numbers and what you expect to remain when the trade is over. An upward chart is not retention.
2. Know Why People Are There
People care about profit, but also status, identity, belonging, curiosity, competition, romance, and fun. Usually several at once.
Have a clear model of your user. Know who they are, why they showed up, what they do repeatedly, and why your product makes that behavior better. If the product requires people to behave unlike people, change the product before trying to change humanity.
3. Get Close Enough to Be Wrong Quickly
Data can tell you what people are doing. It rarely tells you why. Talk to users directly. Read their support messages. Sit in the Discord. Send the cold DM. Watch where they get confused and what they do without being prompted.
Look for evidence that could change your mind instead of evidence that helps you win an internal argument. Investors, influencers, and industry friends can be useful. The person using the product still outranks all of them. A forty-post thread is not customer research, even when the author has a reassuring avatar.
Build What Survives
Once you can see demand clearly, product strategy becomes less mysterious. Build for the behavior that remains after the subsidy, excitement, and easy money are gone.
4. Start With the Problem, Not the Technology
Blockchain makes new products possible. It also produces plenty of products that would be easier without a blockchain.
Being uniquely onchain clears only the first bar. The result still needs to be meaningfully better than the offchain alternative. Changing consumer behavior usually requires something closer to a 10x improvement than a 10% one.
This applies to infrastructure too. Trace the technology all the way to the end user. Know whose life improves, what becomes possible, and why they will care. Novelty can get someone to try a product once. You still need a reason for them to return.
5. Ship to Learn
Brian Armstrong has a line I return to: action produces information.
Early-stage companies learn by putting real things in front of real people. Build, release, watch, and revise. Each cycle should replace an assumption with evidence.
Speed matters because it increases the rate at which you learn, not because shipping more features is inherently virtuous. A team can move very quickly in a circle.
6. Treat Compliance as Product Work
Some constraints are too expensive to discover by shipping into them. Understand the laws and regulations that apply to what you are building. Bring in qualified counsel early, especially when your product touches money, custody, securities, or consumer assets.
Compliance affects the product, the market, and sometimes whether the company can continue to exist. Treat it as product work from the beginning. If you do not know the answer, do not improvise one in Slack.
7. Use Advice Without Inheriting It
You will need outside advice, legal and otherwise. Use it without outsourcing your judgment. General startup principles can be useful. Crypto playbooks age much faster.
There are still too few durable companies and too many changing variables for anyone to have a complete recipe for growth, product strategy, or distribution. Listen to people who have built through multiple cycles. They can tell you which mistakes still look tempting the second time. But pay just as much attention to new users and emerging communities, because the next important behavior rarely arrives with a case study attached.
Be wary of anyone selling certainty. A perfect crypto playbook is usually a consulting business with page numbers.
Build a Team That Can Stay Sane
Seeing reality is hard enough. Continuing to act on it through volatility requires a particular kind of team.
8. Hire for Judgment, Not Proximity to the Last Boom
Crypto is young, technical, and full of ambiguity. Some of the best people will come from non-obvious backgrounds. Look for curiosity, judgment, speed of learning, and the ability to work through uncertainty.
An impressive resume can help, but it does not prove someone can build in this environment. The 2021 boom attracted excellent people, along with people who mainly wanted to work in the hottest category. Resumes did not tell us which was which. Motivation did. Small, focused teams often outperform decorated ones because they can make decisions, communicate clearly, and keep moving.
9. Clarity Is a Form of Expertise
Look for people who can reason from first principles, explain difficult ideas plainly, and answer specific questions without hand-waving. The best experts know where their certainty ends.
Technical fields create plenty of cover for people who sound impressive without saying much. If an answer needs fourteen acronyms before it reaches a verb, ask again.
10. Demand Ambition and Integrity
You need both. Crypto gives ambitious people enormous leverage, which makes integrity more important, not less.
Surround yourself with people who tell the truth when the truth is inconvenient, treat others with respect, and take responsibility for the consequences of what they build. Assume positive intent, but do not lower your standards. The industry is small, and memories are long.
11. Protect Your Attention and Your People
Crypto can be brutal. Prices move around the clock, the dominant narrative changes every week, and someone is always getting rich in a group chat you muted for your own health.
Take care of yourself and the people around you. Protect sleep, relationships, and enough distance to make good decisions. Every new meta will demand attention. Most do not deserve it. Focus gives the team’s effort time to compound.
Keep Looking
Crypto produces a lot of fog: price movements, influencers, jargon, hype, fear, and greed. Underneath it, genuinely new financial, cultural, and social infrastructure is being built.
A founder has to avoid both traps: believing every story and dismissing the whole field. Find where the technology makes something materially better, build for the people who value that improvement, and keep testing the thesis against reality.
Keep shipping, but keep looking. The market will provide all the drama you need.
Thank you to Richard Chen, Todd Goldberg, Mags Kala, Sam Rosenblum, and Linda Xie for reading drafts of this post.