…but why lie to ourselves?

Numbers move up and down, but value might remain the same. Number of certifications, work experiences… have nothing to do with how much value a person can contribute to a company. Now take that value, scale it, and measure the impact of network effects on decentralized ecosystems.

2017 might be remembered as the year which marked the beginning of the crypto bubble. Bubbles, however, are different from a ponzi scheme, a recession, or a wave of scams. Blindly chasing money out of thin air is what led to a marketing dystopia: a concept that, for the sake of this article, explains how investors buy into the thesis of a product without actually asking themselves what’s the need that will be satisfied by such product.

Narratives are the essence beneath the stories that companies tell to its investors. These narratives excel during times of uncertainty where the markets leverage intangible stories, but they fail to thrive during times of insufficient sales volume or lower liquidity. In one way or another, the latest bull-run of NFTs was reminiscent of DeFi summer. Furthermore, we can ask deeper questions about their lack of use cases, missing liquidity, and even the nonexistence of intellectual property and the appropriation of unnecessary funding rounds in many cases (wash trading not even being the tip of the iceberg in this case). Just think about how paradoxical it is that users were using Torrent for free streaming services and now we find ourselves paying from $20 to ~$200 in network fees just to compensate artists. Did a technology of distributed hosting services that benefited users suddenly become a platform where the users pay an extra just to show their gratitude for the artists they admire?

Web3, ve, (3, 3), blockchain immutability… and the contradictory observation that founders keeps upgrading their products makes investors question the essential nature of product/market fit. How long can one company plant seeds to sustain its investors harvest during a prolonged drought? Shouldn’t the investors be the ones planting seeds on the market?

Outsiders keep observing an obsession with tokenomics design and external opinions about funding rounds. Indeed, this is reflected in frequent workarounds in search for product/market fit during the early stages of a project. The markets laid the ground for the experienced participants that, despite the common belief that most founders are excellent at product building, it usually is pretty much the opposite. They can hype their products, but success is found when you get obsessed about your product and you become an actual user (part of the community that you are trying to build). When obsession becomes dedication, the product/market fit leads to a market strategy built upon the actual whitepaper’s value proposition.

Famous podcasters and conferences are looking for established product owners. If the product is not there yet, most silent geniuses are better off waiting on the sidelines and building the foundations of their product. From a worker’s perspective, successful founders are like magnets. Not much talk is required and, in fact, growing too fast usually ends up bringing more problems in the long-term, specially when the shares of the company are held in volatile assets under the control of weak hands.

How to recruit? Network hard by being loud enough. How to lead and coordinate the community? That’s all about the engagement and the principles behind the attention economy. Coaching your community members to deal with FUD can only lead to disaster. For investors, the more seamless the engagement is, the better for gaining insight. To be honest, claiming an airdrop sometimes sounds as nasty as stealing a kid’s candy. If you can build satisfaction for your users without leaning on the well-known growth hacks, the product will eventually reach an incentive for the network effects to start kicking in and making noise in the market. There is nothing more sad than claiming an effortless token following a call to action from the original team itself.

The most talented sports coaches excel at timing their teams’ tactics. Just think about Ethereum and how the “Internet computer” continues to update its tokenomics. The key here is to think in terms of a product, not a token. First principles and DeFi primitives call for efficient designs, not immutable architectures and short-term patches. There is white, dark, and gray sides when timing the markets. One can gamble on duck tape, but how long can the bids on a successful team support an increasing rate of innovation?

I wouldn’t be meshing with the engine during the flight