20 Lessons for Crypto Founders (Breakpoint 2024)

0:00Hey, everyone. As you know, Solana is one of the ecosystems I'm the most interested in. I've been incredibly bullish. I love to see the vibrancy of what is happening in the space. Unfortunately, I couldn't make Breakpoint this year, but the stories have been amazing. I heard the talks are incredible, and we're really proud of Real Vision to give you talks from Solana Breakpoint 2024 in Singapore. I really hope you enjoy them.

0:37How's everyone doing? All right, so over the past four years of building Alliance, what we've realized is the fact that founders need two key areas of focus. One is be relentless on their vision, but two, also be flexible as they're building their startups. Paul Graham once famously said, building a startup is a lot like building a rocket ship in parallel to writing it. The key is to stay close to users, iterate, be stubborn on your vision, but also be flexible on your details. So, I know I have five minutes, but I want to give you 20 key lessons that I've learned building a startup, and also alongside that building startups with founders like Tenzer, Pump, and many others.

1:28As you know, Alliance has been around for about five years now. Here are some of the startups that we've incubated. we've had about 150 startups that have came through our accelerator program and about 11 billion dollars in valuations and so what I want to like spend the next four minutes on is talk about the 20 lessons that I've learned and many of our founders have learned and if I could and if you could take away one lesson out of this whole presentation I've done my job the first is always start with a small problem don't go after that you know VCs always will tell you go after to the biggest market ever, you know, give me the total addressable market, blah, blah.

2:08Usually that's wrong. And the right answer is go after a small group of users. And two is either look for a design space that's new. I mean, crypto, we're lucky enough that we have many areas of places to experiment. And so those are two things I want to leave you with there. Go after, avoid consensus ideas. A perfect example of this is prediction markets. We've had like, I don't know, 50, 60 prediction market pitches. And we continuously hear that over and over again. Avoid it. Find something that no one's looking at. It gives you time to build on it, experiment. And then once you're ready, the market will come carry you the rest of the way.

2:53Build for a small group of users. Find maybe 25, 50 users. I'll talk a bit more about that. Within 30 days, if you have 30 days, you build an MVP, a concept to help validate your thesis. So let's say you have an idea that you want to go build after and you want to validate it, build an MVP first. And push yourself to launch within 30 days. Do things that don't scale. So an example of this is we have a startup that we're incubating today called AliveVet, which is a live streaming tips, prediction market, bounties app. And what we did here was instead of resolving using UMA protocol or whatever, the team themselves are resolving in-house.

3:41Don't overbuild. Use the tools that you have necessary and just be bare bones as possible. but launch quickly. Recruit your users one by one. You know, famously, and the best example I can give you is the Tensor team, when they first came out with their kind of bare bones MVP, they recruited 50 people in their Telegram chat just to validate their product. Ask for feedback and continue to iterate. And if it turns out that the feedback is wrong, that's something that you as a founder will have to decipher. And this is what I meant by that. So don't take feedback literally. Use your intuition as to where you think the product's going to go, and try to build a product based on where the puck is going.

4:28Get the consistency. Get 50 to 100 daily active users that are, so on the chart you'd want to see kind of like a bounce. That means that you're building something and people actually like it. And then from there, once you have some sort of steadiness, and you see it kind of like an upward trajectory, then what you want to do is start to kind of think about what your business model is going to look like. Drill down on your metrics and figure out what is causing the growth. Look at organic usage. Look at how referral systems work and how users are actually coming and discovering the app itself. Do people love the product?

5:10and if they don't love the product and you're starting to see that you're stagnating within the DAUs, then you may have a leaky bucket. Be persistent. I'm always going to tell the story where Pump.Fun DMed 3 ,000 people just to use a product, which shows you the combination of relentless focus and focus on acquisition. Celebrate small wins. Building a product, especially an MVP, takes a lot of time. Work hard and be available all around the clock. And one more thing, I think remote work is dead. So if you aren't remote working, if you are remote working, I would say don't do it. And then finally, protect your equity.

5:53Always raise small, 500k to a mil once you get to like 50 to 100 users and then slowly grow from there. Raising little will teach you to do more with less. Be frugal, be frugal, be frugal. So hire and stay lean and stay lean as long as possible. Tenzer famously had two stars. It was just Ilya and Richard for a very long time. Thanks, guys.