The Core Team Every Crypto Project Needs

This is Part Four in an 13-part Alpha Growth series breaking down the problems every blockchain project has and needs to solve to grow and scale. New to the series? Start here.

So you’ve got funding. Now what?

Yeah, I know: make token go up.

But there’s something in your way. It’s the next problem that every crypto project faces while trying to grow and scale. It comes after you have defined the problem, created a narrative around the solution to the problem and gone out for investment from crypto VCs.

The fourth problem: you need to build a team.

And you can’t build a team just by pulling in your friends or friends of friends. You need the right people. Not just people you know who can do the work. Each core team member has to be the right fit.

Don’t just hire the people you know. Hire the right people.

Yes, in Part Three of this series, I said making friends is crucial. And it is, especially when it comes to getting investment and building partnerships. But building the right team is incredibly hard, especially when you’re building the zero to one team in your project’s early days. At this point, each person on the core team needs to be able to do one thing extremely well.

Luckily, you only need four people:

Hustler | Hacker | Designer | Marketer

If you want to grow, this is the core team you need to build after you’ve got investors for your blockchain project.

It’s a simple structure, but let’s break it down. Here’s why each role — at a super high level — is important:

• You need a hacker because blockchain tech is difficult
• You need a hustler who can make friends, build community and scale partnerships
• You need a designer because everything today is visual
• You need a marketer to pump your product

The caveats and nuances:

You will allocate your team building resources differently depending on your founder(s), your product and your customer.

A project’s founder is probably either the hacker or the hustler. If you’re the founder and you’re neither of those things, you can try to bring on a team member who is. But this is the reality and the danger: if they’re good, it’s only a matter of time until they are starting their own thing.

As a founder, it’s far better to be either the hacker or the hustler than try to hire for one of these roles.

Hackers (good ones), are going to be the hardest to find and hire. Literally you cannot hire the best ones. They are already doing their own thing. Even the good ones are tough to recruit.

Real-life reply from a Web3 dev

You really only need one (maybe two) good designers. You don’t need a huge production team. Not at this stage.

Marketers are easier to recruit than hustlers and hackers. But there are many different kinds of marketers and many different marketing skill sets. Which kind of marketer should you hire? That depends on product.

For a prosumer product with degen customers, you need to heavily invest in marketing talent around social, content and events.

If you’re a API layer and everything depends on B2B partnerships, you need a hustler-marketer who can make those happen. You may only need very limited marketing outside of that to start.

So you’ve got the formula, but that’s not enough. This is the reality:

Recruiting is hard. And after raising money, recruiting is your next biggest priority. Buckle up. You’re going to be recruiting all the time.

Truth: you will always be recruiting

This shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s like anything else that’s valuable: there’s no free lunch in recruiting. To create a winning crypto team, you’re either going to build it (training) or buy it (pay a premium). Time vs. money.

Here are the two playbooks:

• Find a great person from Web2. Train them to Web3. This can work. But you need: time.
• Pay more to buy the Web3 people now. This works. But you need funding. If you do this and are running out of funding, you are going to need more funding.

You may ask, well what about finding someone great who is self-taught from Web2 to Web3 and can train other people to do the same? That person is probably already a founder. If not, you want that person as your co-founder. Go get that person.

You’re not only going to be recruiting, you’re going to be hiring. To do that well, you need a qualification mechanism. It has to go beyond what’s on a person’s profile, CV or resume. Hiring is expensive and time-consuming. Mistakes cost you on both fronts.

As you’re ramping up your team, don’t be fooled into thinking this is a linear process. The messy real life piece of this is that sometimes, as a founder, you’re in a loop going through the problems we’re looking at in this series:

Blockchain founder problems:

1. The problem itself
2. The narrative on solving the problem
3. Finding investors
4. Building a team

You’re putting your narrative out there, you get funding and you’re trying to build the team. But then you realize you need to solve a slightly different problem, which means a different narrative and maybe a different team. So you’re solving and building and recruiting and solving and building until you’re getting the growth.

You will know you’re edging up and out of problem four when you see a community. You know it is there when:

• People are telling other people the narrative on the solution
• You get a lot of inbound for your product and projects
• People are coming to your events (they are great recruitment tools, btw)
• Your socials are pumping

Now you’re ready for the next step. Which means another problem. But a good one. I’ll post that soon. In the meantime, hit us up for how we can help your project.

If you’re interested in learning about more growth strategies for your project, we encourage you to connect on Twitter @bryancolligan. Join our Telegram for members-only alpha on projects we’re watching and DYOR resources for creating growth, credibility and engagement for your project.