Since the beginning of the consumer internet, investors and builders have regarded Product Market Fit (PMF) as the north star for any startup. A start

Crypto Market Fit: Redefining Product Market fit in web3 — Chapter One

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2022-10-05 22:30:52

Since the beginning of the consumer internet, investors and builders have regarded Product Market Fit (PMF) as the north star for any startup. A startup isn’t actually a company until they find PMF. Instead, they are a founding team who are hypothesis testing and proving a set of assumptions to be true.

Before finding PMF, founders are lab scientists preparing, testing, and evaluating new reagents and controls. After finding PMF, these scientists masked in Warby Parkers graduate from the lab and are immortalized as real entrepreneurs, upon which they enter the pearly founder gates of Silicon Valley and all of its glory.

But PMF is not a single victory; it’s a constant war. Once you win the first PMF battle, competition will arrive and you will be battle tested every day. Your competition dreams of unseating you from your throne of PMF and finding victory at your expense — or so this was the war that we fought in web2.

In 2021, the term “web3” became part of internet vernacular. The decentralization ethos and community focus suggested that finding PMF through your actual product was just a small part of the early stage founder journey. We were introduced to new growth levers including tokens, airdrops, and DAOs with composability and ownership at their core.