ABSRD Apes

Thoughts on building a company alongside a token that already exists, coming from someone that did exactly this with @CadeMarket: I want to start off by saying that in my opinion, 99.9% of founders should NOT fair launch a token to bootstrap the company. We have seen way too many cases of founders with the inability to scale a business whilst treating their holders with respect. For the 0.1% of founders that want to do this, study how I built @CadeMarket, and how @ConejoCapital built @clawpumptech. I'm sure there's more examples, but these come to mind first. This post should not serve as encouragement for you to go out and launch a token immediately. The goal of this is to almost serve as a warning, and tell you what you can expect by bootstrapping your business with a token. 1. The playbook is entirely different than starting a company in a traditional manner. 2. It most certainly is NOT for every founder. 3. It is substantially harder to scale into a venture backed business, but it *IS* possible. 4. Your early token holders should be held to an extremely high regard. These people allow you to bootstrap your business via trading fees. For me, this was a little over $100,000 from my token's Pump Fun creator fees. This money should be used to support you as you build your MVP and explore product market fit. 5. You have to give people a reason to trust you through continuous communication and explanations of how the token fits into your product. Your product needs to built around the token, not the other way around. You should not treat the token as a memecoin. 6. In many cases, creating a venture backed business is not your original goal. This was the case for me. The token was launched for a side project, but eventually the side project became my sole focus. 7. You will have a significantly harder time fundraising. There's no way around this. It's very non-traditional for VCs to have a token already trading in the open market. This is ultimately a problem that you NEED to deal with. You decided to launch a token. It's on YOU to deal with it, not your community. 8. You will have VCs that may love the product but pass on investing purely because of the live token. 9. You will have VCs that are willing to write a check if you abandon the token. This was VERY common for me. My pre-seed round could have been closed within a week had I listened to them and abandoned the token. Instead, it took 6 months. 10. Launching a new token is *NOT* the end of the world, contrary to the reactions you're seeing from CT regarding Percalator. If you do launch a new token, you need to take care of your holders though. You should have a migration plan that favors them. They supported you early, they deserve a very generous allocation of the new token. 11. After raising venture capital, you can not abandon your holders. If you fair launched a Pump Fun token, like I did, you should consider doing an ACE round (from @MetaLeX_Labs). This allows you to offer token holders the option to swap tokens for equity via SAFE. The same equity that your venture investors have. In the case of Cade, I had 1.5% of the supply at launch. I wanted it to be truly fair launched and community owned. By doing ACE, I was able to accumulate some of the supply for the company.