Author: sleepy, founder of WeirdoGhostGang

I have been thinking and making adjustments during this period. Today’s Web3 entrepreneurial environment has changed dramatically from when we started. After many rounds of iterations, our understanding may become completely different from the beginning.

This article will share 10 tips based on my entrepreneurial experience. I hope it will be helpful to those who are starting a business or want to start a business in Web3.

If you want to make quick money, it’s better to be a hacker or a currency speculator, don’t start a business

If your goal is to make quick money, don’t start a business. From my perspective, there are too many stigmas in this industry; from your perspective, there are too many ways to make money faster than starting a business.

Being a hacker or speculator is the fastest way to make money. The difficulty is that you have to learn. Needless to say, to be a hacker, you need to understand technology; currency speculation is the kind of job with low entry threshold and high profit threshold. If you don’t know anything and can make money just by doing random things, it can only be said that you are lucky. But if you want to seriously use it as a means of financial management and making money, you need to learn some financial knowledge, secondary trading knowledge and Conducting in-depth analysis of some projects and making value investments or emotional investments require a basis.

Starting a business is a much more complicated matter. You need to consider compliance, team building, development planning, capital investment, etc., and you must know that the probability of success in starting a business is less than 1%, which is an extremely small probability event. .

Of course, if your goal is not to complete a successful project, but to quickly Rug-Pull, I don’t think this article can persuade you. I can only tell you that everyone in the industry has no money now and has no choice.

The bonus period for bottom-up projects has passed

When we were just starting out, a popular saying in the industry was that the Web3 project should grow from the bottom up, with the community first and then the community deciding together how to develop.

I can tell you readers very clearly here that if you are still using this statement today, there is a high probability that the team itself has not thought clearly about the subsequent development plan.

In fact, I think that such a statement was originally circulated because people confused Web3 startups and DAO. Moreover, there has been a lot of controversy in the industry for a long time about whether Web3 startups should choose corporate operations or DAO model operations. If it is not operated in a corporatized manner, efficiency will be seriously affected, and if it is not adopted the DAO model, it will be worried about not receiving support from the community. In fact, I have always felt that a lot of the content that has been hotly discussed in the circle has been concluded and verified in Web2. For example, this issue can be taken as a reference from the early Xiaomi.

Don’t try to catch hot spots, be forward-looking

This refers to the choice of entrepreneurial direction, not marketing direction.

The iteration speed of Web3 hot spots is far faster than that of other industries. In a bull market, there may even be a new story every day, while in a bear market, it may be more miserable and there will be no stories to tell. A completely virtual industry is best suited for telling stories. Unless you have a technical team with strong execution capabilities and you can detect each wave of hot spots at the earliest stage, it is impossible for you to seize the hot spots and launch a product, and you still have to Considering that it may become obsolete quickly, your investment will be poor value for money.

Therefore, you need to have your own knowledge and understanding of the industry and the macro. Don’t be a trend entrepreneur, but always be firm in the direction you are optimistic about and wait for hot spots to come to you.

Industry genes determine that “consumption” cannot be achieved in the circle

We encourage this together. If you want to work on the consumer track, don’t define yourself as a Web3 project, and don’t spend too much energy in this circle.

In fact, coming to this conclusion is closely related to what we are doing, and it is what we are doing that pushed me to think in this direction and come to this conclusion.

Some time ago, I discovered that a consumer project had stopped operating, so I asked my team members to learn from it, and the feedback they received was “low willingness to pay.” This actually falsifies the story told by many people in another circle.

Why is it difficult for this industry to enter the consumer market? I worked for a new consumer brand for a period of time when I was an intern in college. I would like to share with you briefly. The description may not be completely accurate, but it is enough for everyone to get the point I want to express.

The general process of selling a product is as follows: users see it - are interested - click on the product details - place an order. At each step, the vast majority of users will not go to the next step, but start from “seeing” "If the conversion rate to “place an order” can reach 5 out of 10,000, it means that it is a very easy-to-sell product. This product is excellent in terms of quality, design and price.

Web3 people are also human beings, and they cannot escape from this objective law. However, there are hundreds of millions of people in the big funnel of Web2, so the number of real active users of Web3 is only that high. So rather than saying that people in this circle have “low willingness to pay”, I prefer to understand it as “the number of active users is too few.”

After reading this, you may be wondering: “Isn’t it said that Web3 makes it easier for users to become loyal fans?” Let’s see how this view is formed.

In fact, the original meaning of this point of view is that you can quickly gather a community through the sale of NFT. Ideally, community members will actively build communities, actively promote and actively CX in order to increase the price of NFT, so some people think that this Just a “loyal fan”. But in fact, this is a misappropriation of Web2 words in the Web3 context.

“Consumption” is to sell products that fans like and need. The underlying logic is “like” and “need”. Once Web3 adds the attributes of financial products, it will easily cause the entrepreneurial team to make wrong judgments. Do you think He really likes it, but he just wants to find someone to take over. And if you are unable to understand the truest attitude of your users, this will become a fatal problem.

Therefore, when it comes to Web3, it is better to give full play to the attributes of its financial products and give back to your community after you achieve profits, whether it is legal “dividends” or token repurchase.

So after reading this, I think we have reached a consensus, which is to make Web2 money after Web3 is capitalized. After that, it became very clear that wherever the money comes from, we need to target the market and make localized changes. Just like you cannot use the same strategy to target the Japanese market to target the European and American markets. If you want to make money from Web2, then it doesn’t make much sense to participate in Crypto’s Twitter Space and attend the Web3 offline summit every day.

Don’t be superstitious about any KOL, project parties, or capital

I am personally a project developer, a small KOL, and have also worked in capital. This is a very sincere suggestion based on my own experience.

There are too many people who ask someone to take over the goods in order to ship the goods themselves, so I won’t go into details in this article.

And the views of some more “positive” KOLs, project developers, and capital cannot be superstitious. As an entrepreneur, you need to have your own clear judgment on the current market situation and future. You can use their opinions as supplements, but you must internalize these contents into your own opinions and constantly improve your understanding. You are starting a business for yourself, not working for KOLs, project developers, or capital.

Don’t regard Web3 Native as a necessary and sufficient condition. In many cases, it is not even a necessary condition.

I wrote in an article before: “Do we Web3 people think too highly of Web3?”

Does Web3 Native still seem important now? From the perspective of entrepreneurship and work, I think it is not important at all.

In the past, we emphasized that Web3 Native (Crypto Native) is actually more like putting a label on yourself, flaunting that you are different and having been exposed to this industry for a long time. The more purpose is to show your difference.

This artificial threshold we set often blocks people who want to enter the circle, and also makes people in the circle gradually disconnect from the world.

I have seen many teams claim that their biggest advantage is Web3 Native, but they cannot tell what advantages nativeness brings to them; I have also seen many communities say that there are hundreds of active users in the community when talking to external BD, but my building A hot pot restaurant I visited was full with more than a dozen diners; some time ago, our team was recruiting and interviewed dozens of people. It was obvious that the average ability of the interviewees who came from Web2 was higher.

In the past, people in the industry looked down on people who were “from a big company”, but people who can withstand the polish of Web2 most likely have their own working methodology. Which is more important, a mature methodology or familiarity with Web3? I hope to have both, but if I can only choose one of the two, I will definitely choose the former. Frankly speaking, I don’t think there are anything in Web3 that only Native can learn today.

#Marketing is more important

I’ve seen people compare this industry to the entertainment industry before, and I think it’s very accurate.

In fact, marketing is a very important job in any industry. However, marketing has become more difficult due to the particularity of our industry, including the 24-hour uninterrupted trading market, constantly changing hot events, and cross-cultural Meme. … Entrepreneurial teams need to put more effort into marketing to continue to attract attention. Moreover, do not equate doing data with doing marketing.

Depending on the business type, you should choose to break out of the “Web3 Self-Entertainment Circle” or conform to the Web3 mood

Web3 is always happy with itself. I think this is something that does not require proof.

So how to make a choice on this question? In fact, it depends on where you want to make money. This actually does not mean that if you choose A, you disrespect B. After all, doing business is not charity. You always have to choose a more suitable track. as a start. The unique charm of Web3 is that it often bursts out emotions that are contrary to the macroeconomics. This sentence actually means the same as “self-entertainment”. Entrepreneurs need to choose based on what their company is doing, whether to jump out of the self-entertainment circle or to Make emotional money by following market sentiment.

Both paths will face great challenges. The former means that you will enter a more complex environment, and you need to choose the weapons you can use from the Web3 arsenal to create differentiation; the latter means that you need to do it again and again. Discover and accurately measure market sentiment, and guide the direction of sentiment rather than being led by market sentiment.

Reduce invalid social interactions

This is what I have been doing during this time. As an entrepreneur, the problems that need to be solved every day at work are arduous and trivial. Unlike workers who can focus on certain details, nor like freelancers (KOL, KOL, etc.) Full-time currency speculators, etc.) have a large amount of time at their disposal.

You need to ensure that work is progressing normally and the company is operating normally, and your knowledge needs to be continuously improved to ensure that you are at the forefront of the industry. With all these things added up, there is almost no time left for you to socialize. Therefore, before the company becomes bigger, remember that every move you make must be for a certain purpose. Although I strongly advocate the need to balance work and rest for more sustainable development, since you start a business, you must be prepared to be a workaholic.

Find time every day/week to get out of the information cocoon

In the past, I was always used to immersing myself in Web3 information. I was checking Twitter and listening to Space all the time… for fear of missing some news.

But after a period of time, I didn’t feel any additional gains. Instead, I was trapped in the Web3 information cocoon. I often didn’t learn about various things about Web2 until a week apart, leaving me far behind my friends around me. I realized that this was actually a dangerous sign. No matter it was memes, news, economic situation, trends, or business models, as an entrepreneur, you must not fall behind. “Self-promotion” is okay, but “laggard self-promotion” is terrible. I have had a similar experience. During team discussions, I sometimes put forward some ideas that I think are very clever. After the meeting, when I do further research, I will find that this is actually something that a certain company in the Web2 field has played with a long time ago, or many that we think Very interesting stuff that the public is not interested in from a data perspective