Author: sleepy, founder of WeirdoGhostGang

We have been thinking and making adjustments during this period. Today's Web3 entrepreneurial environment has changed a lot from when we started. After many rounds of iterations, our cognition may be completely different from what it was at the beginning.

This article shares 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 Web3 business.

If you want to make quick money, you should be a hacker or trade cryptocurrencies, don’t start a business

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

Being a hacker or speculating in cryptocurrencies is the fastest way to make money, but the difficulty lies in the fact that you have to learn. Needless to say, being a hacker requires you to understand technology; speculating in cryptocurrencies is a job with a low entry threshold and a high threshold for making money. If you can make money without knowing anything and just operate it casually, 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 in-depth analysis of some projects. Value investment or emotional investment all 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 successful entrepreneurship is less than 1%, which is an extremely low-probability event.

Of course, if your goal is not to make a project successful but to do a quick Rug-Pull, I don’t think this article can persuade you. I can only tell you that everyone in the circle is broke and there is no money to be made.

The bonus period of bottom-up projects has passed

At the beginning stage, there is a popular saying in the industry: Web3 projects should grow from the bottom up, with a community first and then the community deciding how to develop in the future.

Here I can tell you readers very clearly that if this statement is still used today, it is likely that the team itself has not thought clearly about the subsequent development plan.

In fact, I think the reason why such a statement was spread at the beginning was that people confused Web3 startups with DAOs, and for a long time, there has been a lot of controversy in the industry about whether Web3 startups should choose corporate operations or DAO models. If they do not operate as a company, it will seriously affect efficiency, and if they do not adopt the DAO model, they will worry about not getting support from the community. In fact, I have always felt that many of the contents that are hotly discussed in the circle have already been concluded and verified in Web2. For example, this issue can be completely referenced by the early Xiaomi.

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

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

The speed of Web3 hot spots iteration is much faster than other industries. In a bull market, there may even be a new story every day, but in a bear market, it may be miserable and there will be no story to tell. Completely virtual industries are the best for storytelling. Unless you have a technical team with strong execution capabilities and you can discover each wave of hot spots at the earliest stage, it is impossible for you to seize the hot spots and launch a product. In addition, you also have to consider that it may soon become outdated, and your investment cost performance will be very poor.

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

Industry genes determine that it is impossible to "consume" in the circle

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

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

Some time ago, I found that a project in the consumer track had stopped operating, so I asked my team members to learn from it, and the feedback they got was "low willingness to pay." This actually falsified the story that many people in another circle had told.

Why is it so difficult to be in the consumer track in this industry? I worked for a new consumer brand for a period of time during my internship in college. I would like to share with you briefly. The description may not be completely accurate, but it is enough for you to get the point I want to express.

The general process of selling a product is as follows: user sees - becomes interested - clicks on product details - places an order. At each step, the vast majority of users will not proceed to the next step. If the conversion rate from "seeing" to "ordering" can reach 0.5%, it means that the product is very sellable. From the perspective of quality, design to price, the product is excellent.

Web3 users are also human beings, and they cannot escape this objective law. However, Web2 has hundreds of millions of users, and Web3 has only a few real active users. So rather than saying that people in this circle have a "low willingness to pay", I prefer to understand it as "too few active users".

After reading this, you may wonder: "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 view is that you can quickly gather a community through the sale of NFTs. Ideally, community members will take the initiative to build the community, promote, and CX in order to increase the price of NFTs, so some people think that this is a "loyal fan." But in fact, this is a misappropriation of Web2 terms in the context of Web3.

"Consumption" is to sell the products that fans like and need. The underlying logic is "like" and "need". Once Web3 adds the attributes of financial products, it is easy for the entrepreneurial team to make wrong judgments. You think he really likes it, but he just wants to find someone to take over. If you can't understand the true attitude of your users, this will become a fatal problem.

Therefore, in terms of Web3, it is better to make good use of its financial product attributes and give back to your community after you make a profit, whether it is legal "dividends" or token repurchases.

So after reading this, I think we have reached a consensus, that is, to make money from Web2 after Web3 is capitalized. After that, it is very clear that you should enter the market where the money comes from and make localized changes to that market, just like you can't use the strategy of entering the Japanese market to enter the European and American markets. If you want to make money from Web2, then participating in Crypto's Twitter Space and participating in the Web3 offline summit every day is meaningless.

Don't be superstitious about any KOL, project party, or capital

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

There are too many cases where people ask others to take over the orders in order to ship their goods, so this article will not go into details.

You should not blindly believe in the opinions of some relatively "positive" KOLs, project owners, and investors. As an entrepreneur, you need to have your own clear judgment on the current market situation and the future. You can use their opinions as supplements, but you must internalize these contents into your own opinions and constantly improve your cognition. You are starting your own business, not working for KOLs, project owners, and investors.

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

I wrote in an article before: "Are we Web3 people overestimating 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, when we emphasized Web3 Native (Crypto Native), it was actually more like putting a label on ourselves, claiming that we are different and have been involved in this industry early. The main purpose was to show our differences.

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

In the past, I have seen many teams claim that their biggest advantage is Web3 Native, but they can’t explain what advantages nativeness brings to them; I have also seen many communities say that they have hundreds of active users in the community when doing external BD, while a hot pot restaurant downstairs from my house has more than a dozen diners at its peak; some time ago, our team recruited and interviewed dozens of people, and it was obvious that the interviewees with a Web2 background had higher average abilities.

In the past, people in the industry looked down on those who came from big companies, but those who can withstand the polish of Web2 are likely to 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, I will definitely choose the former. Frankly speaking, I don’t think there are any things in Web3 that only native people can learn.

Marketing is more important

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

In fact, marketing is a very important job in any industry, but due to the particularity of our industry, marketing has become more difficult. The 24-hour trading market, constantly changing hot events, cross-cultural memes... Entrepreneurial teams need to work harder in the marketing link to continue to attract attention. Moreover, don't equate data with marketing.

Depending on the industry, you should choose to jump out of the "Web3 self-entertainment circle" or follow the Web3 sentiment

Web3 often talks big on itself, and I think this is something that needs no proof.

How to make a choice on this issue actually depends on where you want to make money. This does not mean that choosing A means disrespecting B. After all, doing business is not charity, and you always have to choose a more suitable track to start with. The unique charm of Web3 is that it often bursts out with emotions that are contrary to the macro level. This sentence actually means the same thing as "self-entertainment". Entrepreneurs need to choose according to what business their company is doing, whether to jump out of the self-entertainment circle or follow the market sentiment to make emotional money.

Both paths will face great challenges. The former means that you will enter a more competitive environment, and you need to choose the right weapons from the Web3 arsenal to differentiate yourself; the latter means that you need to discover and tap into market sentiment again and again, and guide the direction of sentiment instead of being led by it.

Reduce ineffective social interaction

This is what I have been doing for some time. As an entrepreneur, the problems that need to be solved at work every day are heavy and trivial. I am not like an employee who can focus on a certain detail, nor am I like a freelancer (KOL, full-time cryptocurrency trader, etc.) who has a lot of free time.

You need to ensure that your work is progressing normally, the company is operating normally, and your cognition needs to be constantly improved to ensure that you are at the forefront of the industry. With all these things added up, you have almost no time left for socializing. Therefore, before the company becomes big, remember that your every move must be for a purpose. Although I strongly advocate a combination of work and rest for more sustainable development, if you start a business, you must be prepared to be a workaholic.

Find time every day/week to step out of your information cocoon

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

But after a while, I didn't feel any extra gains. Instead, I was trapped in the Web3 information cocoon. I often learned about various things in Web2 only after a week, far behind my friends. I realized that this is actually a dangerous signal. Whether it is Meme, news, economic situation, fashion trends, or business models, entrepreneurs cannot fall behind. "Self-entertainment" is okay, but "self-entertainment behind" is terrible. I have had similar experiences. Sometimes during team discussions, I would put forward some ideas that I thought were very clever. After the meeting, when I did further research, I found that this was actually a company in the Web2 field that had already played with it, or many things that we thought were very interesting were not of interest to the public from a data perspective.