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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

9. There is a lot of noise in crypto, and founders often forget that their purpose is to build a great product for people. Some founders have lost their way when it comes to tokens, and token economics has become an important topic for many founders. But I don't think there is a real valid token economics, we are still at the stage where token econ... See more