Thanks to Marc (Aave), Patricio (POAP), Gregoire (Snapshot), Stefan (Gnosis), 0xMaki (SushiSwap), Dee (Zora), Kris (L2Beat), Alexander & Evgeny (Zerion), Seb (Zapper), Dan (Farcaster), Anjali (CollabLand), Eliott (Safary), Moritz (Fluidkey) & others for sharing their growth stories via DMs and my podcast.

If you look at successful crypto projects, they don’t grow the same way.

Ethereum spread through Bitcoin community.
Tether spread through BD deals with CEXs.
Polymarket spread through Twitter.

As the classic goes, finding the channel that works for your product is 50% of building a startup:

So how do you do it in crypto? Which paths could lead customers to your product? And what can we learn from successful projects like Aave, Polymarket, Lido, and many others?

Let’s start. 

The sad truth is that people don’t always use “the best” products.

For engineers who like to rationally compare features, this looks unfair. Why would a worse product win? 

But products don’t compete in a rational vacuum. They compete in a complex web of people’s social feeds, habits, social pressure, concerns, and limited time to decide which product to choose.

Sometimes people use Google Docs because they never heard about Obsidian. Sometimes corporations force employees to use Teams instead of Slack. And sometimes it’s just more convenient to pick a Coca-Cola than searching through shelves for a better soda.

All these products didn’t win because they were better at what they do. They won because they had a better Go To Market (GTM). Which means they were better than competitors at reaching their target users.

It also happens in crypto. That’s one of the reasons why people keep using MetaMask since 2017 and why airdrops are used to override this reluctance to try new things. 

This is also why a marketing strategy based on giving away T-shirts and tweeting 'gm' might not be successful. As everyone in Silicon Valley says, you need to have a good product AND good distribution to win.

And Uniswap is a great example. It’s often remembered as a technical breakthrough, but it was also a great GTM execution.

You might think Uniswap became a multi-billion dollar DEX because it was the first one that worked well. But when you look closely, you notice that Hayden started a marketing campaign a year before he launched his product. 

How come?

Hayden built the first Uniswap PoC in late 2017, inspired by the famous Vitalik post about AMMs.

This PoC was presented at Devcon 3 by Karl Floersch, giving Uniswap some initial attention.

Then Hayden spoke about Uniswap at NYC Mesh and discussed the concept with Vitalik. He did 3 days of demoing Uniswap at Edcon 2018, promoted it at NYC blockchain week, and let the whole EF know about Uniswap existence by applying for and winning a grant.

He also spent weeks working on Uniswap at Balance and MakerDAO offices where he discussed the project with crypto natives, went to ETHIS conference in Hong Kong, and Shanghai blockchain week. He also reached out to anyone who expressed interest in providing liquidity at launch.

So a big part of Uniswap promotion was one-to-one interactions with the founder at conferences, crypto offices and via DMs. A GTM channel perfectly tied to the revolutionary nature of Uniswap, as it gave a lot of space for educating the end users.

So when Hayden launched Uniswap at Devcon 4 in Prague, the project was already well-known in the space (and the space was way smaller than it is today).

As Hayden says:

"I spent about an hour sitting alone on a bean bag, writing and re-writing the launch tweets. Fortunately, my friend Ashleigh walked by and helped review my tweets.

I clicked the button, nervous but excited for what the future would hold. What followed was a huge outpouring of support, ideas, and collaboration beyond my wildest expectation."

As you can see, the history of Uniswap isn’t the history of a “dev building in stealth who launches his app and becomes an overnight success”.

There’s been a lot of promotional work done before the product even launched. And I would be surprised if Hayden actually thought about his actions as a ‘Go-to-Market campaign’. I’d bet he was just talking about his product because he found it interesting.

But Hayden was aware that he needs to think about marketing:

"Up to this point, I considered my role in Uniswap to be mostly a technical one. When someone asked how it worked, I often started by telling them the mathematical formula behind it. Many people walked away confused.

Richard [Burton] helped me understand that people not understanding Uniswap it was a me-problem, not a them-problem. Developers were just a small part of a bigger picture. If I wanted people to use my project, I needed to talk about it on their terms, in ways they understood. Uniswap’s biggest outstanding challenge was a social one."

Okay so if even Uniswap launched in cozy 2018 needed GTM, then probably your product launched in noisy 2025 needs it, too. 

So how exactly do you do GTM? Do you just talk about your product with people you randomly meet at conferences? Well… it's a bit more complicated.

I sometimes speak with the founders and they ask me:
“So should we do Twitter? Or KOLs? Or maybe just go to conferences?”.

And it’s hard to say which channel is best for your product unless you set up the fundamentals right.  GTM is not about going all in into the 1st marketing channel you thought about.

It only works when three things line up:
1) The right market
2) The right segment in that market
3) The right channel for that segment

If you have the wrong market and wrong segment, even the best channel might not work.

For example: It would be way harder for Uniswap to take off if instead of promoting it to Ethereum devs & OGs, Hayden spoke about his DEX to consultants running enterprise blockchains in Europe.

You need to set up fundamentals before you set up funnels.

So how to do GTM the right way?

First you start with the market.

Startups are all about finding Product-Market Fit. Yet most founders spend 99% of their time thinking about the Product and only 1% thinking about the Market.

They talk to a few people, something sort of resonates, and boom: that’s “our market!”. It’s like marrying the first girl that you liked. It might work (if you are lucky or have a great intuition), but most of the time, it’s not a good way to make such a decision.

So what else could you do? Closely evaluate options and double down on the best fit for your product.

Look at Coinbase. They started by being exclusively focused on the Bitcoin market.

If Coinbase supported Litecoin, Namecoin, or Dogecoin instead, they'd never become as big as they are today. They picked the right market and it paid off. And they remained solely focused on Bitcoin for 4 years until they added Ethereum in 2016.

Blur is a similar story. They focused on pro NFT traders who generated over 90% of OpenSea volume and by putting all efforts to onboard them to Blur, they reached escape velocity. If they focused on Average Joes who stopped trading after the 2022 crash, it wouldn't work.

Another good example is Rainbow. They focused on Ethereum users who were looking for a mobile wallet that's useful yet doesn't look like a banking app. Rainbow was fun, colorful and NFTs were first-class citizens there. That's how they captured a significant part of the mobile Ethereum market.

A good framework for choosing your market is answering three questions:
Where is the pain? Where is the money? Where are the battles?

No pain, no gain.

If users' problems aren't painful enough, they won't care enough to look for a solution.

When Coinbase launched in 2012, storing BTC was hard - Trezor and Ledger were not around yet and many people stored their coins on hard drives. That's why the first version of Coinbase was a Bitcoin wallet. Then they figured out that purchasing Bitcoin was hard, too, so they let people buy and store their Bitcoins and later trade them, too.

These were all hard problems to solve and that's exactly why this market was attractive.

Money talks.

But if people feel the pain and can't pay for the solution, it's not a good market. They need to pay you for the product, so you can build a sustainable business. If they have enough money, you don't even need that many users to make it work.

Here's a good example from my previous post on building in consumer crypto:

"Last month on Ethereum Aave charged over $60M in fees with about 25k monthly users. That’s over $2,400 in fees per user per month. And that's because some whales borrow and lend millions of dollars. Of course not all fees go to Aave treasury but it's still a wild number."

Choose your battles.

Some markets have a huge need, people ready to pay, but there are many obstacles on the way. The best markets are the ones with some challenges (so others don't enter easily) but you know how to overcome them.

Polymarket decided to go through the SEC regulatory hell. zkSync chose to spend 6 years on R&D to build the right tech. And Sorare faced the complexity of closing deals with Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. Although these battles were hard, knowing what you're signing up for can help you decide if this is the type of challenge your team is ready (and qualified) to face.

***

In other words, you want to be like XVI century Portugal. Thanks to Vasco da Gama, Portugal set up a highly profitable spice trade with Asia (a painful problem with people ready to pay) and kept the monopoly for decades, because only they knew the sea route to Asia (a big obstacle they knew how to overcome).

Once you have the market, you need to double down your focus.

Your market is like watermelon. If I asked you to eat it, you wouldn't put a whole watermelon in your mouth, right? You would (hopefully) slice it. These slices in marketingspeak are called segments and - when picked right - they amplify all your growth work.

There are many ways to segment the market. 

If you picked a 90s marketing book they’d tell you that you segment people based on demographics, geography, and some basic psychography. So you'd target "Boomers living in New York who like being outdoors".

And this is a great way to segment your customers when you have a 139 year old brand with distribution in almost 200 countries and a $5B annual marketing budget like Coca-Cola. It’s also a terrible way to segment your users when you’re an unknown startup with $5k for marketing.

It’s like trying to copy the US Army strategy when you’re just a pack of rebels with AK47s, hiding in the jungle. You can’t just send F-16s and B-2s to dominate the battleground. You need to be way more scrappy and precise.

You need a beachhead market.

When Satoshi launched Bitcoin in 2008, he didn’t buy a SuperBowl ad.

He sent the whitepaper to cypherpunk mailing list and discussed it with a few thousands privacy & tech nerds. This was his GTM - the way he found the first users (and partners) for his project. Very narrow, very targeted. 

Even on HackerNews - which is a nerdy place compared to Twitter - Bitcoin whitepaper got shared over half a year later.

This narrow way of promoting your project is an example of a beachhead market - the concept inspired by World War II. 

When Dwight Eisenhower wanted to liberate Europe in 1944, he needed a good place to land the Allied troops. But there was a problem. Germans already built the Atlantic Wall - a 2,600 km chain of beach fortifications, minefields, machine gun nests and steel obstacles that went from Norway to Southern France.

Thankfully, the Atlantic Wall was uneven. Although it was heavily fortified in places like Pas-de-Calais, it was weaker in Normandy. And this is why Allies chose these beaches for D-Day.

Allied forces knew they couldn't win the war in one strike. Their only way to win was securing a small strategic foothold to send more tanks, soldiers and supplies to liberate France and whole Europe. They had to win this small piece of land at all costs, so that's why - if you watched "Saving Private Ryan" - the soldiers went on, despite heavy losses.

In startups, this Normandy-like strategy is your beachhead market. You want to secure a foothold where it’s going to be easiest to enter (for Satoshi it was a cypherpunk mailing list, for Hayden it was Ethereum devs & OGs at the conferences), and then expand from there. 

So just like Allies didn’t go directly for Berlin (they actually never did!), you don’t go directly for the whole market. You find one segment, dominate it, and then go further.

So how do you choose the right segment?

There’s this groupchat where I hang out called Cryptotesters.

Since the chat is full of DeFi OGs, we often trade notes on different crypto products. And whenever someone asks for a tool for farming APY, people bring up Vaults.fyi:

So when you look at Telegram and see the same product being brought up in the context of APY, you get the feeling that "Vaults is the tool that all pros are using". Especially since you know that these people are not paid shills - they just like the product.

Is that the right segment?

Well... That groupchat is pretty small - there are around 700 people hanging out there. But if Vaults decided to go after "advanced DeFi users looking for maximizing risk/reward ratio on their yield who hang out on Telegram and Discord groupchats", that would easily be a few thousands users. Enough to move the needle, especially if you onboard some whales.

So a good segment for a startup is a group of people who:
- have similar painful problems that your product can solve (how to find the best APY?)
- experience these problems in similar context (I'm an advanced DeFi user looking for advanced product)
- are reachable in a similar way (hanging out on 10 specific groupchats, following the same 20 people on Twitter, going to the same 3 conferences each year)
- talk to each other (they meet at all these events and groupchats and trade notes so you get organic word of mouth).

Good segments are often geographical ("Let's dominate crypto meetups in Argentina!"), vertical ("Let's target DAO treasury managers with $1M+ AUM!"), or focused on social clusters ("Let's get popular on these 5 DeFi groupchats and conferences!"). 

One caveat here. Sometimes the segment that looks the easiest to enter isn't the best one.

Our first segment for Kiwi was "Farcaster users who are looking for long-form content". This channel seemed to work as we got our first 1,000 users from there but... most of these people churned. And that's because our Ethereum-first content wasn't the right fit for most of them.

So the fact that you know many crypto devs in Buenos Aires, doesn't always mean you should start from this segment.

The right segment - just like the right place for troops on the French beach - should not only be relatively easy to win but also help you expand further. And sometimes order matters a lot.

It is easier to start from a more aspirational market (advanced users, exclusive access, expensive product), and then enter the wider market, than the other way around.

Gnosis multi-sig was initially a tool for ICO teams. When they expanded to normal users, it was easy to convince them that if Golem can hold 400,000 ETH on a Gnosis multi-sig, it's probably good enough for Average Joe's $5,000 portfolio.

Farcaster started as a gated SV & crypto builders community. When they opened up for normal users, it was already a desirable place to hang out, so the initial onboarding was easy.

Pudgy Penguins started with expensive NFTs. When they added Lil Pudgies, Rods, and PENGU memecoin, they already had a prestigious brand, so many fans wanted to join the community.

Now imagine starting with a normie segment and expanding to an aspirational segment. Would be way harder.

Okay, since we covered the fundamentals, let's get to the most important GTM question - where do you find these people?

Let’s say you want to learn programming. Do you learn a bit of C++, a bit of Java, Python, Assembly and Rust? Probably not. 

In most cases you either do a course focused on one particular language or pick a project you are excited about, and learn whatever language you need to ship it. 

Same with GTM.

You don’t “enter the market” by doing one tweet, one podcast, one YouTube video, sending one DM to a potential partner, and one TikTok vid. Your efforts - just like with programming - need to be way more focused.

You need to find the right channel.

Channels are basically paths that can lead customers to your product.

There are many channels to choose from - conferences, BD, ads, billboards, SEO, and so on. A canonical list was described in the book called Traction.

Here are some examples of channels from the crypto market.

Vitalik was already well-known in the Bitcoin community as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine and he discussed Ethereum whitepaper with many people from the space. Later he shared information about Ethereum on Bitcointalk.org and revealed Ethereum at Bitcoin Miami. Even the ETH pre-sale was denominated in BTC. (look how focused they were on this segment!)

In 2016-17 CEXs had problems with access to banking systems, so they were happy to implement an alternative dollar settlement. That's how Tether has grown 1,000X in 2 years.

Polymarket is about the current thing so they are a perfect fit for Twitter. They post memes. They share news. They share screenshots of interesting bets. And they are great reply guys. And they have Shayne who knows how to tweet.

During DeFi summer almost everyone was in multiple DAOs. So when they saw Snapshot working well for Balancer, they were like "Hey, let's use it for my DAO, too!". When they implemented it for their DAO, other people were like "It's cool, I'm gonna share Snapshot with three other DAOs I'm in!".

When Zerion launched their wallet, they created a Zerion DNA avatar which was a dynamic NFT, evolving based on what assets you held in your wallet. The more money you held inside the wallet, the more "advanced" the NFT became. So many people started sending money to their Zerion wallets and for a long time their NFT was the 2nd largest NFT collection on Mainnet (just behind ENS) with over 300k holders.

To make Lido work, they needed staked ETH to be convertible to vanilla ETH. So they spent millions of LDO tokens to incentivize liquidity for Curve stETH:ETH pool. Later they added a strong stETH integration with Aave since people who staked ETH were also looking for extra yield, so that helped to further promote the project.

It was tricky to promote Echo because the regulations didn't let people share information about the investments outside the platform. But Cobie has been one of the most influential people in crypto.

So he built in public on his private and project's profiles and described the early-stage funding problem (that Echo solved) on his Substack. Also, group curators (who were typically well-known crypto investors) would send Echo invite codes to people who wanted to co-invest, onboarding new people to the app.

In 2020 SushiSwap forked Uniswap and offered high SUSHI rewards to users who staked Uniswap LP tokens. With APYs reaching ~1000%, liquidity providers moved their funds, and in a few weeks SushiSwap amassed about $800M in TVL (about of 55% of Uniswap’s liquidity). This vampire attack jump-started SushiSwap into a top DEX and forced Uniswap to respond by launching the UNI token.

Back when ZORA was very art-oriented, Dee Goens started DMing people on Twitter and Instagram. He looked for sneaker customizers, illustrators and artists and cold outreached, trying to pitch them why they should mint NFTs. Despite a lot of inbound from big brands during the bull market, years later Zora team was still DMing potential users.

In early 2022 Safary launched their community for crypto marketers. It worked in batches that you had to apply to and then learn about crypto marketing together with your 60-100 people batch. In 3 years they received over 10,000 applications, and when they built their product for onchain marketing analytics, they already had a lot of marketers they could easily reach.

Back in 2020 Aave made a bold move. They integrated Chainlink (which was on Mainnet only for about 7 months) as their oracle provider and let people use LINK as their collateral. That move turned (very vocal) LINK marines into big Aave cheerleaders who helped promote the product.

When Fluidkey announced the product, he set up a Frame where people could sign up for the waitlist. They got about 6,000 signups, but they knew that not all of them are high-quality users.

So when the product was ready, Moritz started manually onboarding users who were among the first 20,000 Farcaster users (which meant they were a pretty curated group of people). After they got the first few hundred users on the app, they built a bot that would DM about 100 users from the list every day and share an access code.

POAP launched at ETHDenver 2019 and Patricio would go person to person asking for people's addresses and mint the POAPs manually for them (which was hard). But this channel still works for them and since 2021 over 7,000 real people got the "I've met Patricio" POAP.

***

Of course, mature products typically have more than one channel.

Lido has been very active on EthResearch, EthStaker, and r/ethfinance. Fluidkey got support from ENS & Safe. Polymarket closed partnerships with top media companies. And so on and so forth.

But if you are a startup with limited resources, it's way better to master one channel and only then expand further.

A canonical way to pick a channel is:

• going through the list of channels,

• coming up with ideas that might work for your startup,

• scoring them by cost, ease of testing, time to signal, and fit with their product,

• picking 3 channels to test,

• choosing which channel do you start with.

If you want a more elaborate description of the process, just ask your favorite LLM for "Bull's Eye framework by Gabriel Weinberg".

Once you pick the channel, you need to find out if it's going to bring you users.

And here's bad news - just like most product features won't improve retention, most channel experiments won't drive more users.

In other words, growth is probabilistic, not deterministic. It's a game of bets. So you need to find the surest (highest Expected Value) bets you can take.

When I did growth for Kiwi, I decided that our best bets were newsletters, r/ethereum and BD.

We thought newsletters were a good bet because we saw many blogposts on Kiwi. So if someone reads newsletters, they might also like our app as they could discover more interesting things to read.

With r/ethereum the logic was that these redditors liked discussing Ethereum content. And since they cared about decentralization, they might find Kiwi (a decentralized Hacker News/Reddit-like app) interesting. So I shared weekly recap posts there and tried to invite these people to our newsletter which later would educate them about the app.

For BD, we organized writing contests with Gnosis, Nouns & Lens. We asked Kiwi & our Partner's community members to write blogposts, submit them to Kiwi and compete for a few thousand dollars prize pools. It was a lot of work, but co-marketing with much bigger projects elevated our brand and let us reach new people.

My personal approach to choosing these bets is picking ones that - even if we don't eventually reach the growth goal - would still leave us with better brand awareness, connections or understanding of the user needs.

In our case, newsletters and r/ethereum experiments didn't deliver much growth. We reached new people, though, and it resulted in one podcast invitation and a few new users. Writing contests on the other hand worked well, so after the first experiment, we doubled down on this channel and we organized 6 contests in 8 months.

You can typically see if the channel is working after 2-4 weeks of honest effort. So in a year you can test 12-24 channels which is a lot of new information to work with.

When you examine a channel, there are small details that can make or break it.

When we tested if podcasts can work for Kiwi, it turned out that most of our appearances didn't move the needle. But there was one ENS Ecosystem Call that ended with 10+ new paying users signing up right away. When we dug in, it turned out that - since Kiwi integrated ENS - their community wanted to test and support our product.

There are many small details like that and that’s why testing channels “by the book” is basically a full-time job.

Once you have the results in, a simple way to examine your channels is to answer three questions:

1) How much does it cost to acquire one right user through this channel?

By cost I mean not only how much money you spend, but also time, energy and other resources.

By right user I mean someone who is not a bot, is not farming airdops, and is not "just looking". In other words, the right user is someone who could become a long-time product user and is the right fit for your product stage. Product stage-fit is important because you don't want a flood of normies when your product is in alpha and still needs some crypto expertise to use it.

2) How many users are reachable via this channel?

If you have 10,000 users and need to onboard at least 100 new users per week to meet your goals, then a groupchat with 500 users might be too small for you. But if you're just starting, it could be just about right (like it was for Satoshi).

3) If this channel works, does it scale without blowing up?

Can you double down on this channel and go from 10 users per week to 1,000 users per week while still geting “right users” at roughly similar cost and effort? Or does it saturate and get worse fast? It tells you whether the channel can become your main growth engine, or if it’s a small, spiky or quickly-saturating channel.

Once you pick the market, segment and channel, you need to pick the message.

Message is basically what you tell (or show) to your users to convince them to try your product. Your message is what users see in your ads, DMs, your landing page, your blog posts, presentations and BD calls. What should you keep in mind?

When someone hears about a new product, they silently ask themselves three questions:
- does this solve any immediate problem I have,
- does it meet the requirements I have for this type of products,
- and how do I know I can trust it’s going to work as advertised.

If you don’t help users find answers to these questions, you end up confused why people “don’t get it”. 

I wrote a separate guide on messaging, so I won’t dive deep into this subject - you can read the guide here. What I will say though is that messaging is not just what you write on your Landing Page (guide is focused on that) but it's what you say via your channels.

When L2Beat launched, they immediately got attention from different teams asking “why our project hasn't been listed among L2s?”. 

This spurred a lot of debate about what L2s actually are. Then Polygon tried to convince everyone they’re an L2 and L2Beat team pushed back. By having this discussion on Twitter they educated the crypto community about the differences between a sidechain and L2 and how L2Beat can help everyone stay informed. 

Another example of messaging via channel is educating users about your product through podcast appearances like EigenLayer did. Or you can be like Hayden who personally explained why Uniswap makes sense.

That being said, it’s safer to assume your users know nothing when they land on your website and educate them from the ground up. Remember, Coinbase used to explain "what is Bitcoin" on their 2013 website.

One note before we finish - GTM is often emotionally hard. 

And it's hard because you have to make hard decisions and 'get out there' to face the cold feedback from the real world.

Here are a few things to bear in mind:

When you pick your market, it will often feel too small. It’s fine. 

It's typically the signal it’s just about right. But remember that a good market should be the one that’s growing - the faster, the better - because when the pie is growing, it’s easier to get a slice. That’s why VCs love ‘high CAGR’ markets in pitch decks.

When you pick the segment, you will doubt if it’s the right one. It's normal. 

Remember, you are betting - assume you might not get it perfect at the first try. So when you coin your segment as: “DeFi whales in Hong Kong who do $100k-$500k OTC trades” your instinct will tell you to broaden. Resist that. A real beachhead always feels too narrow - that’s what makes it conquerable.

When choosing channels, you might want to do many at the same time. Don’t.

It takes some skill to verify if a channel is the right fit. If you spend 5X more time on doing one channel, you obviously will become better at it compared to dividing the same amount of time on 5 channels. Also, if you can wrap up the tests in 4 weeks, you will still have plenty of time to explore other channels.

When doing messaging, you’d feel that you’re dumbing down. You’re not.

Ask your favorite LLM about the ‘Curse of Knowledge’. It’s really important to make your messaging idiot proof. Not because your users are idiots, but because they are busy. And if they skim through your message in an elevator while running for a meeting, they should be able to "just get it". You can always expand more in the Docs or on your website.

Your GTM work might feel awkward, slow, or uncertain. That's okay.

That’s okay because it should feel awkward (as you’re doing new things), slow (as you’re learning new channels) and uncertain (as you’re making bets). Good news is that you only need one channel to click to take your startup to the next level.

I know it's a lot to digest, so remember to bookmark this post and come back here from time to time.

And if you’re building an Ethereum startup, I’d love to hear what you’re working on. I run free office hours for founders and I also work directly with teams on strategy and operations. If you're interested, you can find more details and book your office hours call here.

If you wanted to get better understand the mechanics of GTM, here are some materials for each stage:

Step 1: Picking the Market - “Where to Play” by Marc Gruber and Sharon Tal
Step 2: Finding the right Segment - “Obviously Awesome” by April Dunford
Step 3: Testing the Channels: “Traction” by Gabriel Weinberg
Step 4: Messaging: “How to talk about crypto products without confusing the users” by me :) 

PS: I’m also working on a talk version of this post. So if you wanted to do a GTM-focused Q&A for your community or invite me for a talk at a conference, hit me up.

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