Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics - a16z crypto

Developer grants are grants made from a protocol’s treasury to individuals or teams who are contributing in some way to improving the protocol. This can serve as an effective GTM mechanism for DAOs, since developer activity is such an integral part of a protocol’s success. 

With new go-to-market strategies for web3 come new ways of measuring success. For DeFi apps, the canonical success metric is the aforementioned total value locked (TVL). It represents all the assets using a protocol or network for things like trading, staking, and lending.

One of the key measures of health of a DAO is quality engagement of the community, which can be measured through the primary communications and governance platforms it uses. For example, a DAO can track channel activity on Discord; member activation and retention; attendance on community calls, governance participation (who is voting on what, and h... See more

What allows for long-term success in web3 is clear purpose, having an engaged and high-quality community, and matching the right organizational governance to that purpose and community.

For social, culture, and art DAOs, go-to-market means building a community with a specific purpose — sometimes even starting as a text chat between friends — and growing it organically by finding other people who believe in that same purpose.

Web3 changes the whole approach to bootstrapping new networks, since tokens offer an alternative to the traditional approach to the cold-start problem. Rather than spending funds on traditional marketing to entice and acquire potential customers, core developer teams can use tokens to bring in early users, who can then be rewarded for their early c... See more

Traditional web2 GTM frameworks are a useful reference, and offer some helpful playbooks — but they are just a few of the many frameworks available for web3 organizations. The key difference to remember is that the goals, growth, and success metrics of web2 and web3 are often not the same. Builders should start with a clear purpose, grow a communit... See more

In web2 companies, founders not only set a top-down vision but are responsible for growing a team and planning and executing against that vision. In web3, founders take on more the role of a gardener, helping cultivate and nurture potentially successful products but also setting up the space for it all to happen.

For web3 organizations, GTM strategies depend on where an organization fits in the below matrix, according to its organizational structure (centralized vs. decentralized) and economic incentives (no token vs. token)