Exactly 5 years ago, I launched a top 100 NFT project on Cardano @VeggieMatesNFT Only to land square on my face... Here are the toughest lessons I’ve learned, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes 👇 1. Listen to your holders. But don’t follow them blindly. As a founder, you need to do what’s best for your project. Sometimes that means saying no to the people supporting you. Everyone has ideas, but you’re the one who has to deal with the consequences. → Rush a CEX listing? Hype leading up to the listing, then you’re at the mercy of market makers. → Token staking? An early rush followed by a slow bleed if there’s no reason to hold beyond earning more tokens. → New tech for a niche use case? You can spend a whole budget building something two people care about. Listen to the problems your community brings you. But think for yourself about the solution. A popular decision isn’t always a good business decision. 2. Pivoting does not equal quitting. Early on in @VeggieMateNFT, we had a tower defense game on our roadmap. After getting quotes for over $200k, it became pretty obvious that it would be a bad business decision. So we pivoted. People yelled. People screamed. People called us scammers. Then another project came along, spent the money on a tower defense game, and the results reinforced why we’d walked away. Could we have handled the expectations better? Absolutely. But spending $200k just to say we delivered would have been a stupid reason to spend $200k. A founder making a tough decision and being transparent about it can actually be a bullish signal. You want someone who can recognize a bad bet before they spend all the money. 3. Never forget the people who stuck around. About four years in our Discord was a ghost town. But a few people still showed up every day. Those people will always hold a special place in my heart. Before we launched @soladafun, I made sure they were the first to hear about it. Not because I had to. Because they believed in me for years, even when there wasn’t much to get excited about. Everyone is going to be cheering for you when you're winning, but remember the ones who were cheering you on when you're down. 4. Don’t be afraid to fail. This is the most important one. You’re not judged by the number of times you fail. You’re judged by the number of times you succeed. And the number of times you succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times you fail and keep trying. The same people burning you yesterday might be cheering for you tomorrow. You can’t let either decide whether you keep going. Failure is inevitable. Quitting is a decision BONUS: Be yourself. I used to be timid. I held back how I felt. I worried too much about what people would think. Then I stopped trying so hard to please everyone. And funny enough, people liked me more. When you try to be a people pleaser, you end up as bland as plain toast. Don’t let anyone steal what makes you unique. That’s what will separate you in the long run. Three years ago, I almost gave up. And if I had, there would be no @soladafun. Five years in the trenches. Still digging. What’s a lesson you had to learn the hard way?