a16z: How Can Crypto Startups Pitch Themselves?
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a16z: How Can Crypto Startups Pitch Themselves?
It all starts with the mission statement.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Pyrs Carvolth and Maggie Hsu, Partners at a16z crypto
Translated by Luffy, Foresight News
For founders, clearly communicating their company’s vision is critical—this includes articulating the company's stance, future direction, and differentiation from competitors. Early-stage companies, especially those without a usable product yet, may feel it’s too early to define their mission. However, well-considered core messaging can unify teams, help founders establish credibility and clarity of purpose, and more effectively bring products to market.
There are many resources available on building a brand and crafting a mission statement that reflects team values. But integrating these elements can be challenging. In this article, we’ll focus on how to distinguish between a mission statement and value propositions, and how to refine your elevator pitch for partnerships, sales enablement, fundraising, and beyond. We’ll also share essential materials founders need before bringing their product to market.
A brief note on ideal customer profiles (ICPs), and how to use them in crypto
In this article, we will use the concept of ideal customer profiles (ICPs)—a widely known business development tool used to define potential customers most likely to purchase your offering, based on behavioral, contextual, and demographic dimensions.
Why does this matter? ICPs help you understand your target audience—the people you’re “selling” to—and tailor your messaging accordingly when receiving feedback. For example, technical audiences require more technical detail; business professionals need less detail but care more about benefits and outcomes.
This sounds great, but in crypto—especially for pre-seed companies—defining ICPs can be tricky because it requires thinking immediately about business outcomes and goals while the product is still evolving. It’s hard to define an ICP when the product isn’t fully formed. So we encourage companies to think about their desired end users, partners, and customers, then craft go-to-market messaging that can easily adapt across different customers, conversations, and contexts.
In short: it’s all about being able to clearly and concisely explain to anyone why you’re building your product.
That said, one piece of messaging should remain consistent across all audiences: the mission statement.
Start with the Mission Statement
There’s already plenty written about how to write a good mission statement. At its core, a mission statement answers the “why”—it succinctly describes the reason the company exists, its goals and values, and what sets it apart. This is crucial for positioning across pitch decks, website copy, follow-up emails, sales conversations, and more.
Importantly, a mission statement tied to go-to-market strategy is not about “how,” or even “what.” It doesn’t need to dive into the specifics of what the company does or the exact plan to achieve its goals. Instead, it outlines the company’s overarching purpose and helps define its place in the industry. A strong mission statement also serves several key functions:
1. Provides a central goal that unifies the team
An effective mission statement offers much-needed direction when innovation and rapid growth risk derailing important objectives, helping founders stay focused on the idealistic long-term goals set at the company’s inception.
This central goal becomes especially important when markets heat up and teams need to scale. They can embed the mission into interviews, onboarding, performance reviews, strategic planning, prioritizing product roadmap features, and marketing initiatives.
For example, Coinbase’s mission has long been “to increase economic freedom.”
Over the years, Coinbase has rolled out a centralized exchange, wallet, NFT marketplace, Layer 2 network, and more. Focusing on any single initiative might obscure the broader principle behind the mission. Yet it’s broad enough to keep the team aligned with the principle, incorporating it into decisions around cultural values and product investments—even as Base appears to extend beyond its core centralized exchange business.
On the other hand, many startups want to focus on perfecting a specific product or staying tightly aligned with a particular technology or ecosystem. For instance, Blackbird’s mission is “to be a loyalty company that rewards people who love restaurants.”
With this mission, target audiences—partners, customers, investors—can expect that as the product evolves, Blackbird will prioritize and enhance experiences for diners and restaurant operators, building loyalty and trust within a specific customer segment.
2. Differentiates the company from competitors
The crypto industry is still early but rapidly advancing in areas like scaling solutions (e.g., rollups and staking). Combined with the open-source nature of crypto, this means many different vendors offer products that appear superficially similar.
Companies in these competitive spaces must dig deeper into both product and narrative to highlight their unique advantages. The first step is ensuring these differentiators are embedded in the mission statement. Even if a startup is still exploring its differentiation, establishing this early can be as impactful as providing a feature comparison chart against competitors.
Treat this as an early branding opportunity. Focus on what makes you, the founder, unique; what makes your team unique; what makes your company unique; and what makes your product vision unique. Even companies offering very similar products can have vastly different styles, and partners and customers will ultimately weigh these factors when comparing options. Why not help them reach that conclusion and equip them to advocate for your product internally using your own language?
For example, Towns—a way to build hometown communities on the internet—quickly established a distinct philosophy of social networking, favoring intimate, curated, and more localized gathering spaces over massive global networks.
3. Re-centers the company when market dynamics shift
Mission statements aren’t set in stone. Consumer attitudes change, products pivot, and companies launch new initiatives. Founders will inevitably encounter situations where the company outgrows its original mission.
While it’s important for teams to adapt and communicate evolving priorities, the mission statement should remain flexible enough to accommodate necessary strategic shifts while still reflecting a unique vision.
Mission statements that reflect what keeps founders up at night and the problems they’re solving for users are the ones that stand out in noisy markets and endure over time. This is better than chasing fleeting market trends, which can ultimately confuse internal teams.
In summary
When mapping out your messaging roadmap, start by writing your mission statement, then build more specific value propositions on top (discussed next). Every company is different, but here are some general guidelines:
Do:
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Focus on long-term vision
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Differentiate from competitors
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Think big-picture—emphasize principles and impact over product or features
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Seek input from co-founders or employees across functions
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Use messaging as an early branding exercise by asking: What change will my company bring? What do we value as a company, and why?
Don't:
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Get bogged down in product and feature details
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Communicate different mission statements to different audiences
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Write a generic statement that could apply to any company in your industry
Again, every company has different needs and should assess its own approach. But once the mission statement is set, it’s time to develop value propositions.
Best Practices for Value Propositions
At some point, startups need to shift focus from describing their core mission to helping customers understand why they should care about the product. If the mission statement answers “why,” value propositions answer “what” and “how.” Grounded in the mission, they use concise, customer-centric language to outline the primary benefits of the product or service.
Value propositions are vital when pitching your product and appear across marketing and sales materials. They serve several purposes:
1. Provide context using meaningful, tailored language
Crypto products often require defining new terms during go-to-market efforts. It’s crucial to frame new concepts using language and ideas familiar to customers.
Using common industry terminology is necessary—the goal is always to avoid alienating your target audience. For example, crypto-savvy audiences are familiar with acronyms like DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). If a value proposition spells it out or explains it in detail, they may find it tedious. Conversely, failing to explain the concept risks losing broader audiences who still need onboarding.
Determining which terms work and which don’t is actually difficult. Many founders assume, “My audience is smart—they’ll get it.” But jargon is used and understood differently across groups. If unsure, don’t guess. Survey your audience or take time to clarify terms to ensure alignment.
For example, Alchemy states its Node API allows customers to “connect to top-tier L1s or L2s, with RPC infrastructure handling over 30 billion requests per week at 99.9% uptime.” Here, there’s no need to explain L1 or L2, or even spell out RPC. Their customers—likely crypto developers and engineers—are probably fluent in these terms. And while these value propositions include some detail, they still align with the company’s mission (a full Web3 developer platform).
2. Get to the point—focus on how the product makes customers’ lives easier
When writing value propositions for prospects and partners, emphasize real-world outcomes, not just technical specs. For example…
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Alchemy: Launch reliable enterprise-grade scaling solutions and instantly reach millions of developers
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Base: A secure, low-cost, developer-friendly Ethereum Layer 2
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Solana: Meet your business’s unique needs with Solana’s high throughput, low fees, and minimal environmental impact
All these value propositions position the product around efficiency—how they help customers achieve goals faster or better than before.
For products targeting entirely new audiences—when something has never really been done before—describing how it’s better is more challenging. In such cases, founders might compare product benefits to adjacent existing domains, or abstract away certain technicalities to make them more accessible.
For consumers, Blackbird strips out specific crypto jargon, firmly positioning itself in restaurant loyalty. For example, it describes its points as “universal reward currency” spendable at participating restaurants. For diners unfamiliar with crypto, this is far clearer than terms like “transfer-restricted tokens.” Crucially, it taps into the desires of food lovers who enjoy dining out, leveraging existing behaviors instead of requiring new ones.
3. Help founders operate more efficiently
Especially in early product stages, having a clear list of value propositions helps founders quickly orient conversations with customers, investors, vendors, potential hires, and other stakeholders. Teams can also adapt this list for sales enablement and marketing—on websites, social media, GitHub repositories, sales decks, and more.
Strong value propositions follow the core principles above. They make products and services clearer, deepen customer understanding of the company and its offerings, and make early conversations more efficient.
Here are some tips for writing value propositions:
Do:
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Use language your customers use to resonate with them
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Get feedback on value propositions from customers, employees, and other stakeholders—but ensure messaging stays product-relevant
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Re-use value propositions across sales enablement and marketing materials
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Link benefits back to the mission statement—it also helps internal teams like product, design, and sales
Don't:
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Write overly broad or wordy value propositions
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Overuse jargon, especially with audiences unfamiliar with it
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Try to cover multiple distinct audiences with one value proposition
Once value propositions are defined, consider combining them with your mission statement to form an elevator pitch.
Honing Your Elevator Pitch
You’ve likely heard of the “elevator pitch”—a brief spiel you’d use to sell your product or company during a short elevator ride. It concisely captures the company’s “what,” “why,” and “how.” Most founders have practiced this extensively during investor pitches and can recite it fluently, but it’s still worth discussing in depth because it’s so important—and appears throughout your go-to-market materials.
First, start thinking about your elevator pitch as early as possible. Founders must continuously evaluate their ability to bring the product to market and articulate core messages clearly. Their pitch should not only brand the company but also brand the founder—showing who they are, what they’re building, and why they’re the right person for the job.
The elevator pitch also saves time. Founders can deliver it in under a minute, and if done well, quickly determine whether they’re speaking with the right person. This helps with partnerships, sales, and fundraising, while also enabling immediate, useful feedback. For example, founders can instantly assess whether their pitch resonates and decide if messaging needs adjustment.
Like mission statements and value propositions, the elevator pitch reflects company values and culture—and evolves over time. Regularly revisiting and updating it ensures alignment across co-founders, employees, and external advocates.
Finally, here are some tips for refining your elevator pitch:
Do:
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Practice your pitch at events and conferences, both inside and outside crypto
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Get feedback from both crypto advocates and skeptics—the latter are harder to convince
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Run A/B tests to refine your message for different audiences
Don't:
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Undermine your pitch at the last minute due to poor preparation
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Use the exact same pitch for every audience: tailor it depending on who you're speaking with—technical decision-makers vs. business leaders, for example
Putting It All Together: Four Essential Messaging Components
All this messaging should be consolidated into a few key documents. Here are essential materials every team should have before launching go-to-market efforts:
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Standard intro paragraph: Heavily borrow from your elevator pitch. Founders should be ready to deliver this orally and in writing—include it on the website’s “About” page and in introductory emails.
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One-pager: A single-page overview of the company, including potential use cases. Incorporate content from the elevator pitch, mission statement, and value propositions, plus relevant data or proof points like customer growth, uptime, or key partnerships. Teams can send this as pre-read material before meetings or follow up with it when stakeholders request more information.
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Sales deck: Slightly different from an investment or pitch deck—ideally two or three versions tailored to different ICPs. Each version should adjust messaging appropriately and include a “next steps” slide. Note: We generally recommend founders walk stakeholders through the deck rather than sending it ahead, as conversation guides optimal slide order and emphasis.
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Company website: Early-stage companies sometimes rely solely on a GitHub repo instead of a website for go-to-market. A website should combine company messaging with key assets like developer docs and case studies, which can be highly useful across conversations. While these can be shared ad hoc, consolidating everything fosters better partner and customer discussions.
When ideas are flowing and founders are heads-down iterating on product, defining messaging may feel difficult. Still, starting early is critical. Founders who do will have more valuable materials for conversations with investors, customers, and potential partners. Companies with strong messaging also gain a key advantage in a noisy industry: they can concretely articulate work culture and values—from product roadmap to hiring. Don’t skip this step.
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