Conversation with EthSign Founder: After Talking to 250 Investors, How Did EthSign Find a New Use Case?
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Conversation with EthSign Founder: After Talking to 250 Investors, How Did EthSign Find a New Use Case?
How did EthSign identify the market opportunity, and how did it find the right product positioning?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsOn July 22nd, during Module Four of Wanwu Creation Camp, Yan Xin, Founder and CEO of EthSign, shared his personal entrepreneurial journey in a two-hour dialogue session with the 66 founders from Wanwu Creation Camp Season 1. As a Web3 project backed by HashKey Capital, Circle, and Sequoia across the U.S., China, and India, EthSign has engaged in discussions with over 250 investors. Starting from a niche use case—digital signatures—the team has evolved their tool into a comprehensive suite of solutions and protocols covering contract execution and asset management. Below is an edited transcript of key Q&A highlights:
Wanwu Island: What insights have you gained at different stages of entrepreneurship?
Today I’ll share my experiences and reflections from the past two and a half years of building a startup, including how our product evolved through various phases, how we defined our role at each stage, challenges encountered when moving forward, and finally summarize my concrete takeaways.
I’m the CEO of EthSign, which we’ve been building for two and a half years now. Before that, I worked as a hardware engineer and entered the blockchain space via mining. I started working on EthSign in 2019 and went full-time into entrepreneurship in 2021.
First, entrepreneurship is a discipline in its own right. When I transitioned from being an investor to a founder, I initially thought I had a clear understanding of what creates value—I just needed to execute it. But I quickly realized founding a company is completely different. Issues like team management, aligning vision across members, developing meaningful products for market fit, achieving profitability—these form a complex system, not a linear, solvable math problem.
To sum up, I see entrepreneurship unfolding in several stages. First, you identify an idea after gaining deep insight into a particular market. Then, you collaborate with experts—product, marketing, frontend, backend—to turn this idea into a prototype, which you then present to potential supporters such as VCs. The second phase involves bringing the product to market, validating its commercial value, and finding users willing to pay. Finally, you reinvest that generated value back into rewarding early believers and supporters. This process can be replicated; to some extent, this methodology is universal and largely independent of industry.
Second, I believe entrepreneurship must be driven by passion. When starting something new—and even competing—with vastly fewer resources than established players, while facing real-life pressures and business incentives, your mindset constantly shifts. You keep asking yourself: what am I really pursuing here? If you think entrepreneurship is the best path to financial freedom, you might soon realize otherwise. During bull markets, others are spending or investing money, but you’re tied up in product development and team management—clearly delaying personal gains. Yet conversely, entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful ways to observe problems in the world and propose transformative solutions. This, I believe, is why true passion must fuel the journey.
Third, something interesting occurred to me yesterday while preparing my slides: entrepreneurship feels like illegal smuggling. You only have a vague conceptual understanding of your destination—you know it’s beautiful, but you don’t know the exact route. No one around you has been there before. Even if someone has, their experience can’t be fully copied—you still need to find a few comrades willing to charge forward with you and figure it out together. Along the way, your boat might capsize; you may reach your intended destination, or end up somewhere entirely unexpected. That entire journey closely resembles smuggling.
Wanwu Island: How did EthSign discover its market opportunity, and how did it define its product positioning?
Looking back at our own journey, the first phase was purely about building a tool. We created the project during a hackathon in 2019, when all of us were still part-timers—I was working at a VC firm, my co-founder was doing his master’s degree—we gathered about five engineers to join the hackathon. At the time, we wanted to test whether decentralized storage could actually work, so we brainstormed many ideas based on that, one of which became EthSign. We defined it as a pure utility—a type of tool I personally love. The interesting thing about tools is that they often represent a single function: a clear capability solving a specific problem, describable in one sentence. Ours? A decentralized e-signature platform.
Also, I think especially in the earliest days, it's critical to identify reliable infrastructure and communities to build upon. For most founders, we should aim to leverage existing infrastructure rather than build new ones from scratch—it's simply too hard. Try to stand on the shoulders of giants. Why do opportunities exist for startups? Because new infrastructures keep emerging, and to capture value, they require abundant applications and user-friendly interfaces—opportunities left wide open for entrepreneurs. Take Ethereum, for example: a stable, fair, censorship-resistant chain—this is incredibly strong foundational infrastructure enabling endless innovation. Similarly, OpenAI has become AI infrastructure, empowering countless secondary developers and startups.
Additionally, you need to identify your target community—where your product will resonate most. Ideally, join that community early, co-create with its members, validate demand firsthand. This saves tremendous cost and avoids building in isolation.
From the name “EthSign,” it’s obvious what we do. In the beginning, our goal was product completeness: simplicity, clean boundaries, high openness, and integrability—so others could plug into us easily and we could become a Lego block within the broader ecosystem. So we built a fully decentralized app using many underlying layers and middleware—no servers at all, even our code runs on decentralized storage. Our product was simple. In 2020, we tried raising funds at a $3 million valuation but kept failing—perhaps because Web3 wasn't hot yet, and people weren’t ready to pay. Still, our core vision hasn’t changed: remain a clear, focused tool for managing agreements and assets.
Back then, investors noted our product had broad horizontal applicability: though seemingly just a signing protocol, it could apply to lending, real estate leases, employment contracts, etc. So we had to consider: which angle should we take to go-to-market? Should we serve all scenarios on one platform, or focus vertically on a few? And how do we build moats? How can we better capture value from the powerful infrastructures we rely on?
Early on, many investors said, "Someone could rebuild this in one or two months." They weren’t wrong—we were immature, lacking the engineering maturity of established firms. So I asked: how do we capture more value in Web3? Or put differently, under such competitive conditions, how do we secure funding? That sparked a shift in thinking. My initial idea was simple: blockchain’s greatest strength lies in public-private key accounts and smart contracts. We used accounts well—for signatures—but could we also use smart contracts to automatically enforce contractual terms? We found this idea compelling. Though contracts seem highly customized ("one size fits one"), they can actually be templated. After identifying use cases, we began crafting a clearer, more transparent, and efficient marketplace.
So starting last year, we packaged EthSign’s signing and management workflow into a unified product. This year, we’re thinking ahead: how do we move toward real-world business and larger markets? Personally, I long struggled with questions like: What’s your business model? How do you generate revenue? For early-stage startups, these are painful to answer. Maybe you argue, “We don’t need revenue—we’re building a protocol. TCP/IP didn’t have a business model either.” Is that really valid? Another question: should we serve outsiders (non-crypto natives), or only insiders? Some say adoption by outsiders isn’t our job—that’s Vitalik’s concern. Others believe mass adoption won’t happen until infrastructure matures, so let’s wait two or three years for tech curves to rise and users to come naturally. But is that accurate?
For most of us, we’re startups with products and value-capture mechanisms. Without revenue, reaching a billion-dollar valuation becomes extremely difficult. All previous unicorns (> $1B valuation) had clear revenue streams. Without a viable business model, no matter how elegant the design, it’s merely art—not a product.
The second issue—serving outsiders—is crucial. Recently, I attended Zuzalu in Montenegro and spoke with many people. I suddenly realized that after years in Web3, I’d developed a completely different language framework—so alien that communication became difficult. Things I find meaningful—account abstraction, zkEVM—are nearly impossible to explain to outsiders. Do you feel this too? Explaining technical value beyond the circle is tough. Compare this to anti-aging biotech or large AI models—those values are intuitive and easy to convey. Many assume mass adoption isn’t their responsibility—they’ll just perfect current work and expect users to come later. That’s naive. Industries compete for talent and capital. When AI boomed, talent and capital poured in, creating more value. Meanwhile, Web3 risks entering a bear market—not just due to capital outflows, but brain drain. If everyone focuses narrowly on today’s tasks, the industry could die. We must make technology’s value simpler and more accessible, actively pulling outsiders and capital in.
So this year, we’re doing things we previously avoided but are now essential. For example, we partnered with Cooley, a top global law firm, to launch a contract library covering most legal templates early-stage teams need. We now have a clear product roadmap. Today’s agreements are highly customized. We’ll first offer widely acceptable paper templates to help users adapt to fixed rules. Then, we’ll vary only parameters inside. Over time, as certain templates gain widespread usage and standardization, we’ll convert them into executable smart contracts. Long-term, I believe all paper-based agreements will disappear. We want our product to be genuinely useful—solving real problems, not just feeling cool.
How do we expand beyond crypto circles to serve more people? Though we grew from Ethereum, we won’t limit ourselves to it. We aim to support more ecosystems—different chains, private key formats. We’ve submitted an EIP to enable DID-based identity signing, not just private keys. We’ve added password vault features to help users better secure their accounts and contract data. We do many things to lower barriers instead of forcing users to learn everything themselves.
These are our updates so far. Looking ahead, my dream is for EthSign to become a true protocol. Only through protocolization can we unlock network effects, scaling across more use cases and users. Fundamentally, many businesses revolve around traffic. Our current matchmaking service connects investors and projects—essentially a traffic business. But traffic isn’t universal—internet access remains uneven across countries, languages, cultures, each forming isolated silos. We aspire to become common infrastructure bridging these platforms. Protocols offer superior interoperability—the holy grail of crypto and Ethereum-based smart contract platforms. With a few verified smart contracts, any related scenario can integrate seamlessly. Just like a digital safe deposit box can serve family trusts, protocolization enables broad reuse. We must open our capabilities widely so others can integrate at low cost. We’ll accelerate exploration in this direction.
Wanwu Island: From a senior founder’s perspective, what advice do you have for founders validating赛道 and business models?
Finally, sharing some final reflections. First, don’t overthink the idea phase. Honestly, at the start, your options aren’t infinite. Look at what cards you hold—what you know, what suits you—and find a concrete problem within that domain. Don’t immediately chase huge problems promising hundreds of millions in value. Such problems exist, but may not suit you. Start by solving a small one well.
Second, ideas aren’t valuable. Investors receive dozens daily. What matters is execution—actually building and launching. Investors fund execution, not ideas.
Many get stuck obsessing over ideas—like designing a logo meant to embody every dream. Impossible. Just pick one. People grow fond of your brand because of continuous effort behind it, not because the logo looks good or carries deep meaning.
At first, we considered building a Web3 version of DocuSign. But adding private-key signing to DocuSign wouldn’t be technically hard. Why haven’t they done it? Because it’s too radical—potentially disruptive to their core business and regulatory standing. As a public company, leadership prioritizes protecting existing revenue over risky innovation. That’s why legacy automakers couldn’t invent Tesla. Likewise, I don’t recommend framing your startup as “Web2 X in Web3.” While helpful for explanation, such labels blind you to native opportunities. Real innovation comes from native thinking—not copying existing models into a new context.
Start low, move fast. Begin with small, foundational tasks—but execute rapidly. Avoid grand visions requiring massive funding and large engineering teams upfront. Instead, quickly build an MVP from a tiny idea, test it in market, iterate fast based on feedback. Never overcomplicate your initial concept—spending huge effort only to find the market doesn’t need complexity wastes resources. Now, we can go from idea to MVP within a month. Beyond our engineering team, we even have a dedicated prototyping team focused solely on MVP validation.
Lastly, I encourage spending time outside China and the U.S. In both places, infrastructure is already rich and mature. It’s hard to grasp the real needs of developing markets unless you experience them directly.
Wanwu Island: Everyone thinks your fundraising was highly successful—what lessons can you share?
Investors typically don’t invest during bull market peaks—they start pouring money in during downturns. There’s a lag between primary and secondary markets—usually six to twelve months. For instance, when a bull market arrives, LPs begin funding GPs, who then fund startups. Our fundraising journey was tough: took three months to close the first round, eventually raising $600K total, plus personal funds to survive eight months until the bull market hit. Even at peak euphoria, we had no time to trade coins—had to self-fund another five months before securing Sequoia’s investment. It was grueling. I’ve probably met more investors than almost anyone—over 250 in total, averaging 2–3 meetings per day for six straight months.
It was exhausting but rewarding. One upside: treat it as free English practice. After 100 investor meetings, your fluency improves dramatically. Also, investors give invaluable feedback. To prove your idea’s worth, you’ll face skeptics challenging you—debating helps you deeply rethink solutions to their objections. Crucially, maintain communication even if they pass. Ask clearly why they declined. Don’t accept vague replies like “we’ll keep watching”—push until you get honest feedback. Don’t fear embarrassment. Whenever your product or business makes progress, proactively update previous contacts—even those who passed earlier.
Finally, don’t overly respect investor opinions. Traditional investors often ran successful public companies—their advice reflects proven experience. But many Web3 investors haven’t built truly successful projects themselves. Their views are often investment-focused, not operational. So don’t blindly follow their suggestions. Keep building what you believe in—until you achieve results. That’s what truly matters.
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