The go-to-market for onchain companies has evolved significantly since alternative cryptocurrencies began entering the market. Very early on, you'd have to setup nodes or miners in order to participate, so the first thing a development team would think about is how to get the miners in the hands of the many or how to get everyone setup with validators. Today, the sophistication of the go-to-market has evolved to the point where we can now apply KPIs and onchain strategies towards meeting the KPIs that will drive a successful go-to-market.

What is the only thing that matters?

There are various KPIs that we can evaluate in the go-to-market but what is the right one? Many teams talk about doing an airdrop to different communities, doing an airdrop. There are all point in time events, how do we layer a strategy in order to meet a single KPI and what is the single KPI. In 2017, token sales were the only activity that teams would do to generate a user base, however the strategy is very one-dimensional. The strategy involved setting up a website to accept community members into a sale, announcing the sale and undertaking the fundraise. This worked, but in today's day and age, how boring!

After watching countless successful projects launch on Tokensoft, its become very clear, the only KPI that matters is the number of token holders at launch. How many unique holders do you have when your token goes liquid? In order to evaluate the efficacy of this KPI, let's work backwards into the metric. What has to go right in order for this number to get as big as possible?

Teams have to nail several core activities that effectively educate the market on what their product does:

• Performing onchain campaigns to have the community interact and use the product

• Developing quality developer documentation and engaging in developer relations and education campaigns

• Maintaining a centralized communication platform which acts as a top of funnel for the community

The ideal solution is to launch a quality product and generating a large user base ahead of the token launch.

How to think about growing this KPI

The best way to understand a framework for the go-to-market is to think about it as an onchain marketing campaign. The goal is to increase the user numbers as much as possible. The next dimension that comes into play is time. So let's look at the onchain go-to-market as a series of announcements. These announcements can announce different activities that people can engage with and they may or may not be incentivized with special rewards, colloquially known as points.

Looking at it on a timeline we have:

Let's break this down, what should the announcements be? If the core KPI is number of users at launch, these announcements should be about community activities that drive growth in the primary social channel. As we hit every milestone, we want to track the user numbers in the primary social channel, this can be Discord, Telegram, Forecaster, wherever the development team feels is the most convenient place to congregate the entire user base.

How to think about community activities

We've seen quest platforms commonly drive users to follow projects on social media accounts. This does a great job of driving the social numbers and occasionally this activity is incentivized with points or some sort of reward. What this doesn't do is convert people into users. The best community activities are always onchain. When the activity is onchain, we can ensure that the user is learning about how the product works, learning how to use the product, overcoming any product or usability quirks. Most importantly, it is a lot more likely that this user will convert to a long-term recurring user of the product.

Less meaningful community activities:

• Follow us on Twitter or X!

• Join our discord

• Post about us on social media

These activities tend to be less meaningful, because anyone can do them. It is also more likely that people will create bots that masquerade as unique interactions at scale. As a result, we see projects with highly bloated social media numbers and anemic onchain participation numbers.

More meaningful community activities. We will use an AMM as an example application since the interactions are fairly well known:

1. Connect your wallet to our app

2. Get testnet USDC and ETH

3. Add liquidity to the USDC/ETH pool

4. Buy and sell assets

5. Buy the following:

   1. 0.0001 USDC

   2. 0.1 USDC

   3. 1 USDC

   4. 10 USDC

6. Then sell the following:

   1. 0.0001 ETH

   2. 0.1 ETH

   3. 1 ETH

Thinking about the progressive complexity

At Tokensoft, we've seen the best filters for a quality community come from projects that require a node to be setup in order to quality for points or to qualify for participation in a sale. However for your top of funnel, it may make the most sense to do something simple in order to generate the most awareness for your product. This means, it may be part of the strategy to have the first activity be simply, follow us on all of our socials. Given this is a fairly low effort activity, it makes sense to make successive activities more complex. For activity two we have add liquidity to the AMM. For this activity, a bit of context is necessary, the user will perhaps do some research to understand what opening an LP position really means, what the implications are, how to think about the ratio of assets that you're adding, perhaps they will learn about impermanent loss and question the oddity of the term impermanent loss. With additional effort, the project can ensure that the users are serious about learning about the product, are adequately engaged and are in-fact more likely to convert to long term users of the product.

Thinking about timeline

The timeline and cadence is the most important part. If the cadence is too slow, then community members will lose interest and forget about the program. If the cadence is too fast, then the community may not have adequate time to educate themselves and participate. Its important to keep in mind that the participants in these activities are:

• International - Meaning that they will exist in any and all timezones and speak a variety of languages.

• Varied in skill set - Meaning that you will have a mix of veterans that do this as a part-time or full-time job (yes, really!)

• Employed - Many of the folks that participate in activities like this have a full-time job and families.

What is too fast?

Too fast is a new activity every other day. A practical cadence that can be considered fast in tempo is a weekly cadence. You may find that a lot of folks get to these activities during nights and weekends or even if they are bored at work. It's best to give people one week to complete newly announced activities.

What is too slow?

Too slow is a monthly cadence. Thinking about it from a user perspective, they may forget about you by the end of the month. With a one week cadence you're top of mind, with a monthly cadence, you may be forgotten when the next buzzy app comes about.

Thinking about KPI tracking

After each activity announcement, it's important to evaluate your KPIs. Are you hitting your KPIs and how quickly are you hitting them or are you not hitting your KPIs? It's ok to not hit targets as long as there is a plan in place. Like most things in life, it may not work out the first time. This means that it's important to zoom out and evaluate what is working well and not working well. The most common thing that may not go well is when a marketing campaign does not plug into generally accepted marketing terms. For example, when thinking about incentivization programs, where community members complete tasks for rewards. We may see a term surface from several years ago, "Join our incentivized testnet". While this is an equivalent terms to a Points Program, it may not work as well in marketing. This is because the market has been trained to look for Points Programs and is familiar with that means. It means they will receive rewards for completing tasks, and that's what the market is after.

Adjusting when targets not met

When targets are not met, that's ok! If you have four activities planned over four weeks, spend some time brainstorming to add more activities to the end of the chain. If you have four activities, your target is 40,000 users by launch and you're only attracting 7,500 users per announcement, add a couple more activities to the end to elongate your marketing cadence into a second month.

Adjusting when targets met too quickly

When targets are met too quickly, that's a good thing. You can either evaluate launching sooner, evaluate whether your onchain campaign is too easy to complete or evaluate ratcheting up your KPIs to something more ambitious.

Thinking about a healthy user target

Several parameters may come into play when considering what a healthy user target is. A healthy user target in the 2020 market cycle was around 10,000–20,000 users. This is where we saw high-efficacy community launches where the user base was highly engaged and also well educated on the project. In this market cycle, the 2024 market cycle, it's likely that there are more sophisticated users in the market. If the market does not have a cold-start problem and the user base is more sophisticated, it may be possible to launch with and manage a community that is around the 50,000–75,000 number.

Here are a few factors to consider when thinking about your community at launch:

• Number of users

• Median and average tokens held per user

• Median and average tokens held per user in dollars

The reason that these numbers are important is that it can provide a perspective on whether enough liquidity will circulate in the market at launch for the token. This is a question only the launch team can answer as it carries many dynamics beyond your go-to-market for launch.

The Launch

Hitting your user numbers at time of launch provides the most optionality for projects. This means, at this juncture, there is the option for both a public sale or a general airdrop. If a public sale is announced, the project can draw upon their pre-existing community, or use it as an opportunity to draw in additional token holders who perhaps prefer to invest for a larger allocation of tokens. The tradeoff simply being that a direct airdrop to users foregoes a fundraise. This means that the capital on hand must come from private investors versus community members. If a sale allows for 10,000 investors with a $1,000 investment cap, that can mean $10 Million raised in a sale. This decision is solely up to the project founders and is more of a stylistic decision than it is a logical one.

Welcome to 2024 and beyond

Relative to previous markets, it's quite impressive how large of a sophisticated user base exists in the market. That being said, there has not been a better time to launch in the market. We now have a broad, diverse, sophisticated set of users out there that projects can attract to their products. We also have better infrastructure than we've ever had before. In the last market cycle, it was nearly impossible to purchase a non-Ethereum token on an exchange. Today, fiat on-ramps support an extremely broad and diverse set of assets and have become even faster at integrating new assets. This market cycle will prove to be one of the most exciting yet, I wish you a lot of success, feel free to reach out to me on X if thinking about your onchain go-to-market.