How to Successfully Launch Your Project Through a Launchpad

Transcript

uh okay all right then let's start the event and then the topic of today is how to launch your startup successfully through a launch pad why Launchpad because Simon has started a very interesting project called Eclipse 5 and they are also a Launchpad and besides that they also successfully Lo the token and successfully built a very engaging community and starting from 2016 he has been very active uh in the crypto space and as a investor as well so I will give the floor to Simon he can make um an introduction uh for himself and then you guys know a little bit more about his background and later on you can ask questions that related to your projects all right yeah how's it going guys um Simon

from Australia living in in barley um and very excited to be jumping on on you know this uh event with with yasi who invited me and and very excited to you know be able to sh maybe some value um that might be helpful for you guys in terms of like building your startups launching your startups and go to markets which is you know one of the big challenges of cryptos is how or or blockchain is how do you actually launch your token successfully um so I'm Simon I've been in the space since 2016 um I haven't been building in the space NE necessarily since 2016 but I was around Ico days um I uh was involved U you know as an investor and as a Trader through 20 you know 18 17 um and then coming into the bull market was

early def5 summer I ended up getting very involved with the ter ecosystem which you know was a bit of a disaster in the end but I worked closely with a fair few projects there um advised some projects and also ended up building um the tfl funded the uh education for the entire ter ecosystem um which I actually helped to build and worked with a lot of different projects such as astroport Mars and various other startups in terms of like creating um kind of like an earn tolearn uh an engaging Quest platform in the earlier days uh post that um actually you know the Terra collap and that was quite disastrous I end up putting my focus more on the cosmos ecosystem and starting to build Eclipse fire which is you know currently the

protocol that I the founder of um through that time uh in the bare Market it was obviously a very different situation in terms of building communities U bootstrapping tokens um was quite challenging for protocols raising but also challenging um for those that were brave enough to try and launch in the bare Market was very brutal um but it was very much like a a time we spend a lot of time with quality builders um we actually built up like heavily our own network across um you know centralized exchanges K's um VCS Angels chains projects and everything um so spent spent a lot of that time in BD initiatives and really doing that um also helped to support and advise uh a fair few uh good quality good Cosmos projects including neiru and nus um bonus block and and many other projects

in the space um then fast forward come to to up to now in December Eclipse we actually launch launched and launch our on token and there was a buildup to that um we ended up doing about $1.5 million fund raise or just in public across multiple launch pads um we uh actually then the token launched successfully um and since we've been able to you know support projects uh from early stages of fundraising througho like onboarding uh key opinion leaders U Landing centralized exchanges such as buybit and then launching so there's quite there's quite a lot of noise in the space there's quite a lot of different things you have to factor in um but we'll cover off like I guess the pros and cons of launchpads go to markets with tokens and

different ways of doing it in this call um and I'm sure you know he as you ask some good questions so it gives you a bit of background yeah thank you so much I will start with some very simple questions just to give the audience a little bit background about some basic information and if you have other questions feel free to raise your hand there's a reaction button at the bottom in in zoom and then or if you prefer you can also type your question in the chat okay so let me start with the very first uh basic question is what exactly is a launch pad and how does it work for startups yeah perfect so I'm GNA answer this two ways I'm answer what a launch pad should be ideally and what a Launchpad is um in the space because um

they the launch pads comes in in a Vari different forms and some of it's better than others and some of it's suited to different projects differently so um a Launchpad you could call it an Launch Pad but there's different variations so if you're Foundry for example on LBP platform you could classify as a launch pad um same thing with coin list is coin is is more of an Ico Launchpad and more centralized player sorry and then other Ido then you got Ido launch pads such as Dow maker and cify and ape terminal and Eclipse fire and various different forms of launch pads um the the ideal behind a Launchpad is actually more of a marketing tool than just a fundraising tool and it's why there's different categories of launch some of them act more as fundraising tools like a f

Foundry or a coin lless it's both a marketing and a larger scale fundraising tool um Ido platforms typically do smaller ticket sizes so they act Less on the I would say the fundraising side like if you looking to to raise many millions of dollars it's less kind of the ideal route at least at this current stage and more so as a marketing tool they act as kind of uh really a way of Distributing and launching the your token and and a way of actually getting um I guess community and hype and Noise Stu behind your token the reality of the industry at this current state with many I guess like Ido launch pads especially um is um they often act as kind of like um hype marketing tools so they're not always great value ads over the long

term at least in the current state um so depending on the the type of project that you're building it can be a difficult route to go down because sometimes you have to then weigh off okay do we go through a Launchpad and we're going to get a lot of noise we're going to get a lot of hype but is that going to lead to long-term value right and you're going to get a lot of noise and this might be an Avenue for a lot of projects to get listed on specific centralized exchanges to really kick off their project and and really bootstrap that Community um with kws and all this sort of stuff but then it's up to the founders to also determine whether that hyp value is a you're able to then translate that into longer term value or is that going to add enough benefit so

we'll touch on that through this core and the pros and cons of all of this but really looking at like launchpads can be a good tool for marketing and hype especially around your token launch and tge but as a Founder you have to weigh up the different types of launchers and the different types of platforms to weigh up whether you can translate that into like the long-term value that you need um so yeah are you muted still yeah oh sorry okay then let's touch on the second subject you mentioned like what are the pros and cons during a launch pad yeah I can touch on that so um and so come back my last question I didn't really tell what a Launchpad was but a Launchpad is uh let's say an Ido

Launchpad is a tool that facilitates token sales to communities so typically uh the Launchpad sells um let's say it's an ID launch pad and you're wanting to launch your token you need to um you know you need to obviously you need to set a price either through price Discovery or through you know U the market determining that or yourself um you need to see the pools or be listed on sexas and you need to launch your tge as your token so that's not always as simple as just creating a pool and setting um often times CU you know Bots might come into snipe it or you might have investors that might sell into the pool um and it's not you know always the best way to do it so launch pads is like a token sales like you'll sell tokens and distribute tokens out to a community

um and that'll be done through a token sale which will also raise Capital which will help you to see the the liquidity pool pros and cons of launch pads again there's different different forms and different types of tools for launch pads like from an LBP to Ido to a Ico to different tools some of them will be accessible like a coin list may be very hard to access unless a very premium top tier project other idos um I would say one of the biggest the biggest cons I think of the Launchpad space in general if we we took the term Launchpad and with down maker C cify AP terminal all this sort of stuff is that their focuses in and uh intentions are maybe differently aligned to what yours are as a founder and what I say by this is that their job and their intentions is to

make your token price go up that's the kind of relationship that they have with their communities is about like successful idos is about having the token launch go well and that doesn't always align with what's best for the project long term in terms of sometimes U you know if you if you don't have a lot of Leverage yourself of having an existing strong Community or strong tier one backers all this sort of stuff it can sometimes put you in a position where the terms are maybe unfavorable to you so many launch pads have introduced things like refund policies or they'll try and edit your tokenomics or they'll they'll do a whole range increase their fees or do sorts of things so that you know it falls in in in their terminology depending on how much leverage you have um so you have to kind of it's a bit of

sometimes a mindfield to navigate depending on the niche that your project is in um the amount of TR traction or hype that you already have behind you even though the launch pad is meant to help you build community and hype a lot of them are wanting projects that already have some legs behind them so that they can um you know obviously have high chances of success some of them will push into like incubators or they'll you know support from earlier stage at building up that traction so that you can build up your community before you come to the Launchpad but often times they'll be looking for um a project being in a very specific Niche to do that um it might not be favorable as well in terms of um valuations so you might have an idea of what your valuation or your Project's worth um and

it may be even reasonable but a launch pad may look at it differently so if you want to get on some launch pads they might actually want you to reduce your valuation for launch because they want to you know they want more like returns for their audiences and communities um cons as well is you have to also navigate whether the communities that are on boarded on launchpads are the people that you want in your project you are going to get noise you're going to get Carwell you're going to get people that are going to stick around and use your product but there's also going to be a lot of mercenary users that might be there for the wrong reasons so when you're doing this and you're building sort of stuff you have to weigh up like how do I translate these into real users is this specific venue going to bring in

users that I need longterm or is it going to just bring the hype that I need to step to the next level to then build that in on the pro side things that can come that are positive from a Launchpad from I guess and I'm generalizing when I say Launchpad in general they come in different shap and sizes is that they can um help you raise some Capital uh on a launch pad so that this might be to help build your project further or it might be to um it may be to actually uh seed your pool although I wouldn't recommend unless it's a bigger IO and LBP or or coinless to rely on a launch pad for your main funding because there may be other costs associated that may actually not be as much as you think there is like if you're paying for

centralized exchanges which some of them might require it's going to cost you a lot of money you're going to have to give money to the market makers to see the pools um so sometimes that money can be used towards marketing or seating the pool or you know some of it can be used towards building so fundraising other thing that it will help is exposure marketing and hype so you might come from a project that's not known by anyone to building up with to getting KS investing in your round um in C as are are influencers right to um getting PR to getting kind of noise built up around your project where you might have something really cool and then everybody suddenly hears about it because you're going to be on this Launchpad so it can definitely help with a marketing effect at least that you know initial surge but

that can also be shortlived so it's your responsibility to to really take that and use that to kind of springboard you to the next level the third thing that could be really good for it is the hype and marketing and the noise can actually get you in good position to fund raise before the Ido um it could also get you in a good position to get listed on centralized exchanges that might be really hard for you get listed on if you didn't have that so um you know for example we did bonus block which was a was one of our recent launchers um and you know we sort of we went a bit more Hands-On with them and really supported them um they they were they had a lot of high level partners ship they had over it was over a million users across the

different platforms that they had but they were still struggling to fundraise um as soon as we announced the idea with them and started working with them um they managed to we managed to raise direct introductions over 800k and then close out their round um thr on K around Ido they end up on AP terminal and then they end up on bybit so that was a really powerful result um which isn't guaranteed and was actually quite a lift from our side so it was quite difficult but it could show you how sometimes it can Catalyst and not all the time but can help catalyze some of the other elements as well if you're kind of stuck in a spot but then your job is to actually turn that into reality is now bonus blogs job is they've launched they've had the hype it's kind of cooled

off now their job is actually to take those funds of raids and everything and actually deliver on the product that's promised through through that launch um Cal exchanges are very tricky right they're very hard good ones to get onto a buy bit is very very hard to get onto a c coin is you know it's not as hard as binance but they're still TR difficult to get onto they cost a lot of fees so the high level you have the better um even secondary you know gate and things like that can end up like asking you for pretty high fees unless you have the leverage and the and the noise behind you so it can the Launchpad can also catalyze that hyper marketing noise can actually help lead you and spearhead you into where you need to go which gives you the springboard um what I would say

is in an Ideal World the Launchpad should be there to help you build community and this is kind of what we want to do over the long term or what I think the launch pad space should really move towards which is um not just you know creating marketing and hype but how you actually drive quality users into your protocol and gain that exposure and then funnel that in um currently Founders have to figure out how to do this themselves um which is like how to convert that into real users and activate them but I think over you know I think in an Ideal World the Launchpad should be helping to bring users in and become long-term quality users as opposed to just kind of mercenaries so I know that was a ramble but I mean I guess maybe that gives you a bit of a

picture I've generalized launch pads as a as a basket as opposed to like different subset categories um but there's pros and cons to to using them and you have to weigh up where you're at what your goals are and there's different ways as well to distribute a token or to kind of get price Discovery can you give us a general overview what types of launchpads there are oh the the you mention about different like maybe segments of launch pads just give the audience a general over viw to understand that background yeah definitely um so uh different Launchpad segments so you'll have I iOS um such as coin list which are premium venues uh that are quite hard to get onto they've been around for

quite some time uh coin list does I would say coin has too many competitors besides maybe binance launch pool which is the way that binance launches that project which that one's very hard to get into typically binance back projects um the coin list is typically launching chains uh raising a lot larger quantities of capital like 10 Mill plus sometimes so they they're able to really move a lot of money typically much higher valuations um and they'll they'll be usually chains or very large info projects that they'll launch hard to get into but it can be good for catalyzing um then you go uh I would say a level below then you got uh iOS iOS can bring a lot of money and exposure and noise but they can also be quite predatory so iOS are initial exchange offerings um so

um you know uh you know gate and a few some of these others they structured they're all structured very differently and how they they operate them some of them um you know they actually don't raise you a lot of capital some do often times they're predatory in terms of the terms because they ask for all the tokens to be unlocked directly at launch or they're asking you know they'll put in contracts to have price performance um requirements or you know all this sort of stuff which I'm really not large fan of from a legal perspective and other reasons so you got to navigate iOS uh AR as popular these days I haven't seen many io's really really done that much recently um then a step below you have uh maybe launch pads or or more alternative launch mechanisms such as uh

liquidity bootstrapping pools FJ is kind of very famous for this it was initially balancer um that kind of brought these in um they're quite a complex model so they're not super retail friendly but it's essentially uh it's a algorithmic falling curve where the price Falls over time and people can then buy the in as the price Falls and then it sets price Discovery the issue with lbps that we're finding especially recently is they're pretty open so people can kind of really Buy in during during this time and it can absorb a large amount of liquidity so all the buyers that want to get in get in during the LBP and when the lbp's over there's they it's sucked up all the buyers that want to buy and so this this there's no more kind of uh interest or buy pressure left and so you often see

lbps uh being much higher valuation raising a large amount of money with a hype and then they end up falling off a cliff after launch um which we see happen quite a lot actually for for a lot of lbps but people get hyped they get excited they jump in it's all exciting about price discovery and then afterwards the the token falls off a cliff Which is less less fortunate that's liquidy bootstrapping pools they are a lot more complex for retail to understand um very Define native um then you got idos and there there's obviously different uh I guess subsets of idos from permission platforms to permissionless so pink sale um Gad a few of these are permissionless where you can actually go and you can um basically do your own launch right you can you you don't need anyone telling you what to do

if you've got a community you can go hey we're going to do the launch we're going to distribute it um to our community we're going to do it through this platform and no one's gatekeeping this like you you're not you're not really doing much but you you you run your own s through a third party platform like a tool and then you get like regular idos which are more curated they come in like different I guess tiers or categories in terms of like the amount of Leverage they have the the introductions they can get you into the um the sexors that they know so you know AP terminal down maker C to paid Network and then below it you might have commun U VSC engine starter gamei there there's different like categories

of this um the the pads that you pick will make a really large impact on the hype that you will get so if you try and go across too many launch pads or you're going on Lower tier launch pads in a market that isn't Super Hyper bullish it will have an impact on the hype that you have or the perception of the Optics so there's that to also weigh up um which is challenging but yeah that gives you gives you a a a category I guess an overview if that answers the question fully there's other alternative mechanisms we're playing with a couple at the moment like launch pools is something I really like um launch pools is essentially a mechanism where someone could like deposit the eth and use the yield to pay for an Ido so there's other different tools and things popping up

that are different ways of bootstrapping liquidity um there's other defi Decks that sometimes have their own Launchpad mechanisms like overflow farming and others but for the most part they're not as common right okay thanks it's a pretty comprehensive overview um and then coming back to the startups and entrepreneurs uh at what stage do you think is suitable for them uh to join or apply for launch pad I think you're muted S I am muted can you so it's a couple ways you can look at this um it depends on the if the launch pad is an incubator program for example that

might be something that you can go to an early stage like an accelerator typically Launchpad accelerators are not as orators are not as good as you're going to expect from you know some maybe third party ones but you they may be plugged into launch pads themselves so you might go through an accelerator and they might plug you into launch pads after the Court's done um but sometimes they also know how to get a launch successful but that the support value versus support's not going to be there but it does depend on on what type of project you have like impossible Finance if you're doing node sales or you're in infrastructure they've been incubating a fair few node sales and that's been quite successful uh node sales is actually a meta that's popped up recently for infrastructure that have nodes which is large amount of Nod sales

so that's another I guess Launchpad thing um typically launchpads you start talking to launch pads pretty close to your token launch so typically you want a product live with traction or at least a product in the right narrative that's going to be live pretty soon um you want to have some level of tractional Community uh if you try to approach a launcher pad with very little tractional Community you're going to run into issues where they're probably going to turn you down or give you bad terms um you could start talking to them but often times the same as a centralized exchange they might go no sorry um if your Project's in the right narrative or the right kind of section they may offer incubation or they might support the early stages to help build up but that's also it's a very challenging chicken and

egg situation because you want the launch pad to build up the the marketing and narrative and time but then you also they want to see Community interaction to build it up so you get in a bit of a funny situation where you do need to have your own kind of community or at least be a product in the right category before they they'll start taking you seriously um which I think is is a is a challenge a lot of projects faces how do I build up my community and build up my traction before I go into launches but it's also the same thing with fundraising right with a VC round like in this current markets they want to see adoption on your products but you need to raise funds to actually get that adoption right so there is a bit of grind involved in this um in this

process but I would say uh maybe a month or a couple months out from launch When You're Expecting to launch and and you want to launch a token that's when you should really start to um engage with launch pads and get into them um yeah and you mentioned about some launch P we'll look at how if you already have existing Community um I wonder how big is the how big the size of the community should should be give you a like you are good ground to apply for different launch pad um I'd said the bigger the better like it depends on um it also depends on your product it depends on your traction things will um things will will kind of

counterbalance like if you're a product that's in the right uh sectors like that is currently the that's currently in the meta for example that pressure will be taken off a little bit like if you're on AI or iwas you're building something pretty in Innovative you've got some Partnerships in a good place like they may go you're in the right category we'll help you build and bootstrap that Community they might be more kind of inclined if you're in kind of deep defi it's not really adopted not really being touched maybe it's a money market you haven't launch your product you got no traction no Community they may just go not yet come back later right and that might not be the stage for you to be launching a token anyway right um but what they're looking for is not just Community size but they'll be looking

for engagement of that community on socials on Discord telegram um you know they look at your post and there's zero retweets and it's completely dead they may go okay these you need to you need to do some work on building up that Community attaction First um same thing with Twitter if you've got 500 people on your Twitter then they want to see you've been putting some work into your socials first to be like engaging building the community attraction before coming to a pad because that's typically what will flag you um to be fair like a lot of these launch pads aren't doing well good due diligence um it's something that FR it's frustrating and it frustrates me a lot but like we'll go they won't even have due diligence person they would just look at someone's socials and they'll look at the narrative and meta and be like this can

be successful or not and it's it's actually bad about our industry for sure um but the reality is they're looking for kind of that the noise because it it takes the risk off their shoulders right um yeah but it depends again on the category of launch pad that you're interacting with if you got good backers that will help anything that you have that is uh leverage will also help with this but they often want to see that you've put in work in time of marketing Community Building before you get to the launch pads before the token launch and this is the case anyway like if you're launching a token you want to know that you've got a community behind it to distribute it to otherwise you know unless you're doing a very stealth launch and you're launching it yourself and doing an air drop to a bunch of

users that are very low valuation and you're looking to build the community token that way um if you're looking to get that marketing a hype they want to exchanges want volume um launch pads want price action and bu pressure and community so it's just part of part of it right U and in general what do you think either launch pad or V's or investors are looking at when they're doing proper due diligence of a project so that the project know that what kind of um items on the checklist they need to do well I mean to be fair a lot of these pads aren't doing due diligence I'll be I'll be completely honest like it's something tell us like we do very heavy due diligence which is a good thing because what we're trying to build long term but it's it's it's also slowed us down heavily because you know these

projects coming to us going oh these pads aren't doing due diligence and I'm like yeah but that's not going to stge what we do um so they're doing limited due diligence the the interestinger thing about DD and and again it's I think it's a issue in our in our industry heavily is that hype supersedes DD so what happens right like when you're raising a fundraising round and this depends on the category of VCS you're going after like if you're going after you're doing a bigger round you're an INF for project and you're or a bigger project and you're going after T1 VCS they're going to have very heavy due diligence but but you know youve got like a hash you've got an a16z you've got a coin fund right they're going to do heavy DD but then this tier 2 tier three tier fours of VCS that would

typically like do DD when you're kind of when you're one of the you know they're the first in the round or you're lower hype or they investing an earlier stage but if you get to launch and there's hype and their friends are jumping in that DD will go completely out the window and we've seen this happen time and time again where you know the the fomo and the hype will supersede it um so in in that sense with launchpads the the the the number one thing that helps in terms of you want to get into these launch pads you want to get into the exchanges is um is your product Within narrative right is it within the current kind of meta in the space of what's you know what people are talking about what people are interested in um you know Community is the community talking about

is do you have Partnerships like what is your kind of traction like do you have tvl do you have volume on your do you have volume if you got a pers or you've got a DEX do you have volume do you have liquidity do you have all this sort of stuff so looking at like the different traction metrics for essentially the launch pad is looking to go can we get people excited about this right is this is this going to be something that people going to be excited about because that's what they care about so as much as we love or hate it that's part of you know obviously uh that that section of the industry and the same thing with investors right investors like quality t1s and and VCS if your product is differentiated and strong enough and and they can see kind of the fit and the the

the financial model and the team and everything behind it um it's going to be easier to get them at earlier stages but then you know also sometimes that hype really helps with the fundraising round as well so yeah it's it's a it's challenging for sure but uh it's it's the current at least where the industry is currently in terms of the Cycles oh you muted yai sorry when you guys are doing due diligence okay what are metrics you looking at so we're looking at um we we go like a fair bit deeper um so typically like we've got uh we had three stages and we've cut them back more to two in terms of like DD stages um we're looking at a few things we're looking at like the team like their experience like

uh whether it's Web Two web three have they they successfully built you know products before do they come from you know backgrounds or or or or projects that are um that are that are solid from that front we are we aren't looking for anonymous Founders that's something that we're like obviously we push back against so we want like people that are either publicly docked or at least docked behind the scenes that we can kind of uh you know in the case of rug pools we've seen projects rug even with docks Founders uh so that's a risk um we are looking at backers um like investors behind the projects it is also some a situation where we we believe in all the other elements enough that we uh may take the project and support with the fundraising rounds at the earliest stage but that is more risk it is also more

risk and it's more difficult it's a quite a lot of work and a lot of lift but it will depend on on the project um we will look at community and it's similar thing as a last Point like if the if the product is and the project is is solid there's there's definitely ways you can support these Founders in terms of like we know that these are the levers that you need to pull to kind of help to Kickstart that Community Building efforts um we're very much looking at that um product Market fit and the product You're Building like are you going to be able to build a sustainable financial model or sustainable Revenue model or sustainable token model from the product You're Building um is the product You're Building going to be competitive within your space like if you're building the number 76 perss um on the same chain as

everybody else like how are you going to actually create a mo a long-term mode and compete with everybody else in the space right it's it's kind of a fair question you may have unfair advantages like you might come and say hey we've got you know $10 million of committed liquidity or the teams from this background or um you might have a new model that's completely proprietary um but we're looking for differentiators we're looking for Moes we're looking for um kind of exciting um new things in Industries and and and reasons we do somewhat look at like the narrative but we're not so narrative driven um us ourselves because we like to look at like we want to we want sustainable um projects and protocols um but it also needs to kind of have everything else

fall in line so that you know it's not like hey here's like the most boring thing the most unexciting thing in the world and here's a token and there's no Community or no backers or anything and then the community it's like very hard to get them excited about that or to actually get people to kind of invest same thing with investors so um yeah I mean we've got we've got quite quite the process we do look at things like Audits and all this sort of stuff but that's that's sort of more closer to launch um yeah I'm just trying to think whether I've missed anything there but um yeah typically like we we're looking quite deeply at at the product as well um and the tokenomics actually tokenomics is really important um you know the we're looking for Community Focus distributions I don't like when a

project comes across a deck and they have you know 70% for insiders it's not something I'm a very huge fan of um same thing with um yeah it is going to be things like unlocks investing schedules and uh distribution valuations are things that we' also do look at um quite a lot how about the size of the community for users I mean that's important but again as I mentioned before it's it depending on other factors right like if you coming to me with a deck and you go really strong Founders really strong backers um maybe there's traction on the product or is it fit in the narrative it's X then I might turn around and go okay cool we need to we need to build

some Community here but it's not going to be too hard to do like these are the leevers that we need to kind of pull to help build the community and some products have Community but it's not really activated or strong but that's not huge lift if if all the other things line up that stuff can happen pretty quickly like you can onboard you can do a k round and then start to really kind of drive that initiatives campaigns all this sort of stuff you can kick that off a lot quicker um I'd say the bigger the better like if if you've got a strong Community already that is a plus because it helps to obviously uh move things along like if you got a strong engaged Community we know that we're going to be able to build this and these guys are going to support the launch and they're

going to be kind of active um the other thing as well as traction like um I'm very big like if youve got a def5 product depending on the kind of product that you're looking at I like to see the product in the market before you go for a token launch depending guess it really depends on the type of product that you're after but if you're building like a DEX and you're like hey we haven't launched yet and we're doing this and this and this and your Dex isn't launched you got no tvl you got no volume got no traction it's like unless you really need the the token for that launch it's kind of difficult to look at like chains and stuff often need that token for the launch um because you know it might be the gas token or whatever for the network but they might already

have 50 projects committed they might already have 20 Partnerships or 30 Partnerships so the traction behind it is also very important of like what have you achieved until now until the token launch that is going to help to like just not ensure success but really help to like um help to create the P to Showcase like these guys are a winning team they're going to be a longterm you got to think of it in the investors perspective or the sex perspective they're like is this going to be a project that's going to be successful and sometimes their time frames might be a bit skewed um like we're kind of looking for more long-term success some might be looking for like short-term kind of hype and success but they're going to see like what what are the risks in the Catalyst of this not being a success so the more Partnerships the

better the bigger the community the better uh the more active and engaged they are it's obviously going to help a lot for sure if you've got five people in a telegram group might not be like constituted of what they call a community um they're looking kind of for numbers but if you have like a couple hundred people and they're super active and vocal and participate in everything I see that as to be honest stronger sometimes than having 2,000 people right like or 10,000 people but they're going to want to see the noise cuz the sexist want to see are you going to bring me a new users are you going to be volume are you going to bring me liquidity and that's kind of what they want to figure out would the criteria differ uh for protocol based project or like a user user based

project it does because protocol based projects you're not just looking at Community you're looking at adoption of of the protocol in terms of like if it's a money market you're looking at how much tvl the protocol has or you're looking how much um you know usage there is like if it's a DEX is the volume is it liquidity a user based protocol is going to be really based on M daily active users mon weekly active users monthly like active users like you might go hey we got this cool social provide platform we've got this cool tool um then like any kind of investor they're going to want to see um depending at the stage how many users do you actually have using this protocol like how many monthly active users do you have um and you know I'm I'm looking to see

distribution like what is your strategy for distribution for this like how you if you're building another Twitter like how are you going to compete like what is your advant unfair advantages um but then also like how many users are using and adopting this right um it could be user growth or it could be just number of users that you have because that's going to paint a pretty good picture in terms of like the adoption of that that tool because just doing a launch doesn't mean that you're doing a launch on on a launch pad isn't going to mean that your um product is suddenly going to require a whole bunch of users right it it might help with that but it it will more will fuel on the fire than actually bootstrap your entire user base so you want to make sure that you've got an active user

base of of users before you're getting into that token launch anyway yeah and wait neither tvl nor um daily active users mean that you have a community necessarily right this is the two different separate things it's like users can be that could really leverage to build a community but you might have a tour over here that has users using your plat but you want to go launch a token but you got zero Community who's going to buy a token like who's going to hold your token who's going to participate so they are very different things and it's it's understanding how to bridge one into the other or how to leverage like if it's a protocol that's got a lot of traction tvl user list stuff that might be strong enough to use to tell the story to build a community right or same thing with a social F

platform it might be like you got or not a social file maybe it's a platform that's got users that aren't part of your community they might be like okay I can leverage this story to actually help build the community and get people excited about this which is potentially slightly different yeah right um I have a very um I have an interesting question to ask so sure go ahead I think for many projects or maybe some of the founders here uh they're at very early stage right so there is a road ahead of them how would you advise or in your opinion what is the best way to develop project and go through the token launch this path in terms of building a team and the

technology wise and uh uh fundraising how to use your small budget effectively like how what would you advise them to do I think it depends on your type of product and type of project um like similarly crypto struggles with this a little bit because in web you know in web 2 you're wanting to get an MVP or prototype as quickly as possible you want to test it you want to see if it's going to kind of get viral growth or product Market fit in crypto that might be a little bit harder because you might run into the situation where you've got to pay for audits the development to getting a product out might be very challenging but you can still create prototypes so so you can still create a prototype

maybe it's a a figma design or or or W frame test that with users um go to chains get grants that's a a really good way to do stuff is to is to if you're not building a chain if you're building on a chain is really trying to tap into the audience and the community of that chain and get support and backing from that chain so it might be like is it might be like build your vision build your wi paper and the idea what you want to build uh don't solidify it build a prototype test it with users figure out if it's something that people want do interviews like you would kind of normally building a product um get it to a stage where you can maybe get a grant from from a from a chain because that Grant is going to help anchor you

potentially with investors so you know you might if you can it's not easy to do either but if you can find the right ecosystem and matches kind of what you're looking to build um you've got quite a solid differentiator behind it like you really want to dig into the problems that you're solving and trying to figure out what is this a problem that's actually needs to be solved or is this something that's going to create he got a strong enough business model to to actually grow and scale um and then from that like create test this of audience this this is how I would do it is is test it as much as possible with the audience figure out with is something that people want sometimes it's Challen this is challenging too because it might be so far ahead of its time that you don't know how to classify it or to kind

of get this kind of feedback that you need um but for the most part you should be able to kind of to to kind of Build That Way Grants is a good way to get funding in the early stages to kind of deploy the early stages of your product some products is difficult because you need to build a lot before you can even launch it some products you can launch components of your protocol and start to get users at the early stages but the best the lowest hanging fruit are the users that are already using a specific chain so if it's a if it's a chain that hasn't launched or if it's a chain that has maybe they've got a points farming program or they've got uh some some campaign running this can give you a lot of Leverage to acquire a lot of users

very quickly because you can tap into those points farming campaigns pretty easily we did this with say even though that EOS I'm not a very big fan of that chain and we moved away from them that leverage gave us a lot of traction just being at the right place in the right time on the right chain um with a you know a pre-launch test net program that was running helped us to bootstrap a lot of kind of hyp and users even though a lot of them were mercenaries that gave us kind of the Boost that we needed and that can also help to validate your product because if you can check if those users are sticky you can really see the behavior of the users those some of those users might stay behind and become part of your vision so you can really I would say leverage the chains

leverage the communities that already exist there because that's going to give you like a very strong kind of Base to build off um anchors through grants are going to be like a great starting point um then uh if you can line up with any points farming programs or anything like that that's also going to give you a boost the next phase I look in is incubators and accelerators if you fall into that category where you've got kind of enough of uh some of these things where where someone might look at it like outly Ventures sometimes those things with chains long hash X this um what is it uh there's a whole range of these accelerators that are that are pretty good on that front so you know tap into those uh do co-marketing of other projects in the ecosystem build up that traction um so that's what I would

be doing at the early stages with when you're kind of running off very low budget um even if you don't have a team like you can be taking these actions day and day out to kind of building up your profile and trying to get kind of that exposure in the early stages um if you've got a really bullish product and you think you can kind of really you've got the background the experience everything you might be able to raise a friend and Family's round or a preed round which will give you some capital and kind of get you to that next phase Angel rounds as well angels are much easier to get in than than regular VCS or Capital so typically you might get them in after a phone call if they're bullish uh tap into your chain or your ecosystem um or your own

network if you've got past experience to really tap into these angels is going to help um if you've got credibility already from past projects those a the founder Angels going to be easier if there's a chain and they're willing to kind of introduce you to Angels or there's other Founders you might be able to raise Angel round from like people within that ecosystem um is going to be helpful um and then you're really like looking to kind of yeah uh either like it's something you need a lot of capital to build but it's really bullish so you'll be able to go into a seed round and raise that and someone's willing to back you over the long term because they know that it's going to be something the vision's great the problem you're solving is great you validated it's great or it might be something you're

going to need to launch and build up traction as you go um which might be seed rounds it might be an accelerate incubator um it might be just really focusing as much as possible on your traction building to get to the point where you can then raise a seed ra raise a raise a a private or strategic ground and then go into launch so there's different Avenues if you can go down the route where you're building info you're building something that's kind of big bullish you can get these T1 backers you're going to skip over some of these traction pieces for sure because they might back you at a much earlier level and then when you go to kind of a Launchpad you've kind of got all this weight behind you the other route is get as grind as you can focus really on building Community traction leverage as

much um as you can around you uh what levers can you pull that are going to help lead to Rapid traction because one plus one is very slow but if you can go you know times 10 and leverage the tools around you and and the narratives or everything it's going to help you accelerate um so I don't if kind of went on a long R ramble and I don't if I answer your question fully directly but that's how I look at the early stages and building up is like um when you know you've got that product Market fit you kind of know like your product and the users and they love it it's just going to kind of snowball a bit so um it's going to be much easier to gain that traction than if you're building maybe the wrong thing and it's really slow and

grindy to get things going right yeah actually you answered the question perfectly and um uh how what is the time frame would you say for project from start right from the beginning till they're ready to go to launch pad that's a really hard question it really depends on what you're building it just really depends on what you're building like I mean we're launching a project in May June that's been building for three years right and that could be depending on their timing the market timing as well depends on what kind of project You're Building um how quick you can kind of generate like we've seen these projects that build like telegram Bots right and they can they can grow a community very very quickly um they can launch the code pretty quickly they can bootstrap it and then

they've gone to a launch pad fairly quickly right from their launch like it's it's not a huge turnaround um but then the question is do they have a road map past what they already doing and is it just going to be a telegram bot it's not really going to do much and the token's going to launch and then die off which what is what we've seen happen a lot of times but you might be able to launch your token at earlier stages and then build alongside the community in that instance um if it's a big INF for project it may be maybe years before you're ready to do your tge chain or one of those things um but maybe an average of of one year or six months just really depending on your product how fast you build how fast you build traction the funding that you have there's there's a

wide range of factors it's very hard to give a straight straight answer to that yeah okay okay thank you no the reason I why I asked this question because I I talked to some project in the past or some project had a call with us want to work with us for marketing Services uh usually they're looking at like within six month and then to have a huge Community go for token launch uh I just sometimes I find it's a little bit too much a stretch you mentioned that you prepared for three years right for your project yeah it just depend like it's not that we prepared for three years it's that some projects just built for three years depending on the build that they've got projects always overestimate their token launch we always get we always get this a lot we have we toing a

six project they're like we're going to do our token launch in March and then it's not even launched in June do you know what I mean because it's just like's always this oversight of the amount of stuff that has to go into a token launch is actually huge underestimation by a lot of people you line up exchangers market makers um you know legals if you're fundraising there just so many moving Parts there so much you actually have to get off the checklist like you need to get on coin market cap coin gecko there's a lot that operationally that needs to fall in line depends how you laun your check if you just do an air drop to your stealth air drop to your community it's a different story but if you want to do a big launch and get on a big centralized exchange there's so many

things that actually have to line up for that to happen and I'm not saying this to scare you guys um it's just being prepared for that and understanding that it's all it's kind of like a startup like there's always a hundred things to do and you're never getting through the list and that's kind of what it feels like a little bit um but you do need time to prepare there is kind of a journey to doing it I'm not saying you can't do it in six months if you've got good resource behind you you've got a great team behind you you're efficient you can do it quicker than you expect but I think it's always going to take a little bit longer than you imagine and depends on your product if you're building in a very specific Niche and you're like let's say you're an AI

expert and you've built for a couple months you've been able to build the toolings that you want the narrative is right you're going to be in a good you might be in a better position to launch quicker because the Market's going to carry you a little bit more right like if you're building something that's maybe more Niche or more something that isn't the Market's not ready for it's going to be a lot more of a stretch and more of a push but if you're kind of aligned with what the market already wants and the Market's excited about it's going to be a bit of an easier carry um in terms of launching sooner as opposed to something else love it or hate it there is the market is kind of very narrative driven I'm not saying you should narrative hop but if you're within specific categories and you

you're kind of ready and in a good position that will help you um obviously yeah you mentioned about Market timing how important is it for token launch very but you can't always time it so Market timing pretty much a lot of the crypto Market is correlated right so it's not necessarily the Bitcoin but in cycles of liquidity and flows so if you look at most charts on coin market cap or most charts at the moment most of them have in a big draw down of 50% or 60% or whatever it is so there's huge correlation that happens with tokens and and liquidity cycles and you know there's obviously your project makes a big difference but actually more importantly than the project is the market has most of that impact or most of that decision-making power now you

can't control when you launch your token like from if you've got enough timing you can try and front run it and go okay the cycle is looking like this everybody's excited you know we've still got two months we're going to launch it in a month or two months and we're going to be ready for it but you don't know that you're you're going to set your loc token launch date and you don't know that three days before the Market's going to crash with bonus block is something we had to deal with where two days before Bitcoin crashed and everything tanked pretty hard we still had to launch the token into it it didn't do as well as it could have it still did I think 7x or something at launch but it it we couldn't have controlled that we couldn't have predicted fully that um and it just

happened and we had to just do the best that we could in that situation and it's the same with your launch um there's narratives there's Market Cycles there's things you could tell a little bit further out like if the Market's dead across the board you might go ah launching our token in two weeks a month may be not the best um decision unless you know that you've got enough hype you can cut through it um so yeah you can't always predict or control it but you can to some extent all right so actually when the general trend is going up or when there's something's going on in the market even though cannot time it specifically something might happen but it would have a higher chance to have a better results than basically you know uh how do you say low Market time right

so it's not just Bitcoin going up for example because Bitcoin can go up and the rest the market can still be kind of drained out but it's usually like you get a pretty good idea around the rest of the market and the performance of the altcoins and the and the liquidity and what people are doing across the market like retail hasn't really entered the market in this cycle we're still kind of playing this PVP game um so you know if you're you guys are all building now right and you you're just focus on building building the right products you know we I don't know the timing of if when and how you know new retail is going to come into the market but you will feel the impact of that like in the last cycle you know you kind of get the pre- ball and then you

get like kind of a low and then you know when that kicks into gear and you get kind of everybody starts like the old crypto people go oh I've got all this Bitcoin in my wallet and you know then you start getting people that got excited and they come into the market you really see large floods of liquidity flow back into the market and that will carry all the boats but yeah I mean um you can't fully time it but you can to some extent know that like you can make some predictions around you're in a deep bare market and You' haven't got a lot of hyper communial stuff around you you're not really in the narrative maybe it's not the best time to launch your token maybe you're better off waiting until either your what Your building's in the narrative or the Market's doing

better overall projects are launching there's there's liquidity there's excitement there's things going on yeah right okay uh we have a few minutes left uh I don't know if any of you guys have any questions to Simon or general comments uh feel free to you know speak up or type in the chat okay Josiah okay go ahead um thank you uh Simon um my question is we have um we building a projects and uh ouro our approach so far is to build community first because it's

going to be a token power project our approach is to build the community first um educate the community with what we're trying to build and launch the token before building out the full scale project although we've done the full background work of what we need to do how we need to build it and then what are the risk you know uh considering all the factors so I'm wondering if this is a right approach or a good approach it depends on what you're building and depends on your funding requirements right so there's a few ways you could probably approach this if you're able to bootstrap a pretty strong

Community you might be able to do like a steal launch where you launch the token as an airdrop or as a a a program that helps to kind of build community and you can distribute it that way and then you build the community with the token and then you you kind of you build up the community you co-build the community as the token price is live you probably don't have as many risks of valuation because it's probably going to be a much lower valuation and build with the with the community um but they're going to want to be you're going to have to be very transparent with the way that you build that Community the way you're building because they're probably if they're buying into your token or they're holding your token they're going to want to know Road M updates they're going to see this kind of build as it

happens right um that's one way to do it just depends then on the funding requirements um there's ways obviously you can sell tokens into the market as a way of doing it but it's it's much more challenging because your liquidity is likely going to be lower you're not going to benefit from the launch hype but maybe you can build the community enough to kind of build that kind of um up that's one way and then you've got issues around seeding the pool because you're likely going to be low liquidity um depending on the type of project that you're building I don't often recommend launching a token before you started building a product the main reason for that is that you're going to run into a situation where your token holders is going to hold your token and they're going to you know buy into the vision

and the vision is going to help them hold the token but that only happens to a point if you try and go to launch pads and you try to do this sort of stuff and you're not releasing new products or you're not able to do it unless your product is extremely Grand maybe it's an info solution or something kind of like much bigger scale build you're going to you end up in a situation where it's going to be hard to launch without a product to show people and have them play with um but also you're going to run into postlaunch token issues where realize how freaking hard it can be uh dealing with a community and a life token especially when they've bought that token um and then you've got the stress of building at the same time as trying to keep your token price up which

is quite challenging so I mean I think it really depends on what you're building but just understand that like having a to live token in the market and a community everything is a lot of work it's a full it's a full focus on itself so you got to kind of weigh up where you're at and how you want to do this yeah I understand actually what we trying to do in relation to that is not have the pro the token in the market but more like to let the community know there is a token coming and uh to prepare them towards that that's fine that's fine you can do a um points program there's different ways that you can kind of engage and activate communities in advance um to to help build it up but keep in mind one thing I

want to really say on this when you're building a community incentive only driven communities sometimes aren't always the best thing because if your community is just buil off an airdrop you're going to end up with the wrong behaviors and users so you want to build your your community off excitement uh identity culture uh some level of incentives because you know they'll stick around for the long term um but then there there other things like recognition ego U belonging you really want to like anchors within your community to build your community around if you just if you just create a points program and go on Z you're gonna end up with a ton of maybe third world maybe maybe not people that just farming your airdrop or they're like just around because they're waiting on that airdrop

and it's going to cause you pain cuz once that air drop happens those guys are going to fall off we've been we've been here before um it it can it can work in small elements as a bootstrapping again it's same if same thing with launch pads in a in a sense like if you want to get that kickart that you need you can sometimes leverage that to get the Kickstart but understand that that is fake data necessarily like if you could bring in 50,000 people into your community that are driven by an air drop that is fake data it might give you some leverage with a Launchpad with a VC with a sex but that isn't real necessarily real community and you will you suffer the price when you realize and that's over you end up with nothing left and you've actually got the the

penalty of having a 50,000 person community but then you you don't have the engagement people like what did you just buy bots like or you're getting penalized on Twitter because you haven't got the engagement so you got to get really good at like building people that belong and I'd rather have as I said a couple hundred really strong community members than you know the thousands like the VCS and stuff they want to see these big numbers but if you can build like a community very strong to a 900 and then leverage some Kickstart things to build up the numbers then at least you know you've got that solid base as the framework for for for growth yeah thank you very much uh we have a couple minutes left uh is there anybody else there you know having a question please feel free to

raise your hand or typ it here meanwhile uh would Simon would you be open to leave your contact information here in case some of the companies or entrepreneurs that want to contact you yeah for sure um feel free to reach me on uh telegram see if I've got the right one uh telegram it might get a little bit clogged in the inbox but um yeah I mean yeah that's probably the best way to reach me I'm usually pretty active um so yeah I mean good luck guys I'm I'm I'm excited for your Journeys uh I think that's the one thing that excites me the most is Builders um building things they believe in and and setting off into that Journey maybe it's their first or second or third or fourth or fifth thing they've built but there's

there's always like a lot of things to navigate and and our plans I think in in the future we we haven't gotten there because we' got so much backlog to catch up on we want to really create a lot of founder specific I guess like content just even Evergreen stuff out in the market that's either interviews with with credible sources or or parties in the market that help to navigate some of these go to market pieces like how do you pick a market maker like what things you look for centralized exchanges how to navigate these things because I think these are really important and really challenging um things to navigate like no better your experience it's just so much you got to know about and that can go wrong so yeah that's something I really look forward to in the future that's not ready yet but I'm excited for

you guys I'm excited for what you're building and uh look forward to hearing from you guys and um yeah okay thank you so much Simon For Your Precious time and sharing your experiences with us um and then I hope hopefully some of the entrepreneurs here they can get valuable um input and then probably some of them might contact you and uh thank you guys so much for attending this crypto valy Association startup working group events and we will have more online events or offline events coming for the rest of the year so stay in touch byebye and thank thanks for hosting azy thank you so much yeah welcome bye bye