28 Success Criteria for Projects | Product, Token Economics, When to Launch Tokens

Former partner Jason Choi of The Spartan Group has compiled insights on cryptocurrency investments over the past four years, including the contradictions between tokens and products, as well as attracting users and venture capital funding.

This article is authorized to be reprinted from DeepTech TechFlow, the original source.

These are 28 principles about Web3 founders, refined through over 100 conversations and cryptocurrency investments in the past 4 years:

1. Quality over quantity, focus on one project and strive to make it create 10 times or greater value.

2. When building a dApp, think like a boss.

3. Making minor improvements to existing products is not a product strategy.

4. Metaphorization is not a business strategy. Inserting Web2 ideas into blockchain is unlikely to be the foundation of a scalable product.

5. Stay away from trends. If you are building DeFi or NFTs just because they are popular now, you will eventually run into trouble.

6. Some founders overly focus on building products for 1,000 crypto-native users.

7. Token rewards are a strategy to enter the market and acquire customers, not a business model.

8. Projects that require token prices to continue rising to function are Ponzi schemes.

9. Qualified founders often encounter some problems and are ridiculed by speculators, they just want to know why no one is using their products.

10. "Going multi-chain" is not a business strategy.

11. The cryptocurrency field is too obsessed with ideas and not focused enough on processes. Good builders optimize products, great builders optimize processes.

12. If you want to stifle your growth, launch token governance before the product is mature.

13. Build products to attract users, not to impress VCs, half of cryptocurrency 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 that the overlap between these two groups is higher than it actually is.

16. Only launch tokens when you are ready to manage a public company.

17. When growth stagnates, founders tend to focus on perfecting the token model. Optimizing token models (ve-token/purchase and burn) before generating meaningful revenue is a waste of time.

18. In a bull market, token prices rise excessively fast; this is not the case in a bear market.

19. While bad investors cannot kill your company, excellent investors can take you further.

20. Funds raised are for developing your startup. Pledging your treasury to earn 10%-20% returns will not bring you closer to success but may likely lead your company to bankruptcy.

21. If most of your users' activities are on-chain, leverage this data to make informed business decisions. Too many teams overlook existing user data.

22. Due to Crypto Twitter's promotion of "personal heroism," some founders believe they must build a prominent image for their products to succeed. This is wrong, and the opposite is true—popular products create outstanding founders.

23. It's not just about TVL. Have quantifiable metrics as goals, continually assess progress toward these metrics, and determine if the above metrics can serve as a qualified growth proxy.

24. The faster unearned value accumulates, the faster it is destroyed.

25. "Build it, and they will come" may work in a bull market, but it is not a scalable deployment strategy.

26. Pure technical superiority almost never wins.

27. Do not underestimate retail consumers who purchase your product for speculative reasons.

28. Early investors and users are the foundation of the community, tailor your actions to attract the type of users you want.