Former Spartan Partner: 28 Principles Founders Should Follow to Build a Successful Web3 Project
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Former Spartan Partner: 28 Principles Founders Should Follow to Build a Successful Web3 Project
28 Principles for Web3 Founders
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Jason Choi, former Spartan partner
Translated by: TechFlow intern
These are 28 principles about Web3 founders distilled from over 100 conversations and cryptocurrency investments I've had over the past four years:
1. Focus on fewer projects—concentrate on one and strive to create 10x or greater value.
2. When building a dApp, think like a CEO.
3. Slightly improving existing products is not a product strategy.
4. Mimicking real-world objects isn't a business strategy. Reinserting Web2 ideas into blockchain is unlikely to form the foundation of scalable products.
5. Stay away from trends. If you're building DeFi or NFTs just because they're hot now, you'll eventually get stuck.
6. Some founders overly focus on building for 1,000 crypto-native users.
7. Token incentives are a go-to-market strategy and customer acquisition cost, not a business model.
8. Projects that require continuously rising token prices to function are Ponzi schemes.
9. Qualified founders often fall into traps mocked by speculators—they simply wonder why no one uses their product.
10. "Going multi-chain" is not a business strategy.
11. The crypto space is too obsessed with ideas and not enough with processes. Good builders optimize products; great builders optimize processes.
12. If you want to kill your growth, launch token governance before your product matures.
13. Build products that attract users, not ones designed to impress VCs—half of crypto founders forget this.
14. Founders should care about 100 highly engaged users, not 10,000 passive token holders.
15. There are two groups: those who use your product and those who buy your tokens. Founders often mistakenly believe these groups overlap more than they actually do.
16. Only launch a token when you're ready to manage a public company.
17. When growth stalls, founders tend to obsess over perfecting token models. Optimizing tokenomics (ve-tokens/buybacks and burns) before generating meaningful revenue is a waste of time.
18. In bull markets, token prices rise too fast; in bear markets, clearly not.
19. While bad investors can't kill your company, great investors can help you go further.
20. Raised funds are meant to grow your startup. Staking your treasury to earn 10%-20% returns won't bring you closer to success but may very well bankrupt your company.
21. If most of your users' activities occur on-chain, leverage that data to make smart business decisions. Too many teams ignore readily available user data.
22. Because Crypto Twitter glorifies "individual heroism," some founders believe they must build a strong personal brand for their product to succeed. This is wrong—and the opposite is true: successful products create standout founders.
23. It's not just about TVL. Set quantifiable metrics as goals, continuously assess progress toward them, and evaluate whether these metrics serve as valid proxies for growth.
24. The faster unearned value accumulates, the faster it will be destroyed.
25. "Build it and they will come" might work in bull markets, but it’s never a scalable growth strategy.
26. Pure technical superiority almost never wins.
27. Don’t underestimate retail consumers who buy your product for speculative reasons.
28. Early investors and users form the foundation of your community. Align your actions to attract the type of users you want.
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