Things We Learned Talking to 1,700 Projects

1. Lessons learned

During our time at Kronos Research and now at Proxima, we spoke to roughly 1,700 projects. What we learned is not especially complicated: the bottleneck is usually not technical ambition. It is everything that comes after it.

A lot of founders can tell you exactly what they want to build. They can walk through the architecture, the mechanism, the stack, the roadmap, the token, the throughput, and all the reasons they believe the product is technically superior. What they often cannot explain is who the product is actually for, how large the real market is, how to message that market, why someone should switch, and what remains once the incentives run out.

That gap is one of the clearest recurring patterns that we have seen. Crypto has no shortage of smart builders or technically serious teams. What it has a shortage of is founders who can connect the product to a real market in a way that survives contact with reality. Once you have seen enough of those misses, they stop feeling like isolated founder mistakes and start looking like the default failure mode.

That is also why these conversations have become more useful over time. Once you see the same mistakes often enough, you stop only screening for them. You start getting better at helping teams avoid them.

2. Where projects usually break

In our experience, a lot of crypto projects do not fail because the tech is fake. They fail because the path from product to market is weak, confused, or mostly imagined.

2.1 Confuse incentive traffic with real users

A lot of teams think they have early users when what they really have is temporary incentive traffic. The "user" is a points farmer, someone chasing token upside, someone trying the product because the narrative is hot, or someone crypto-native enough to tolerate friction that normal users never would.

That is not the same thing as product adoption since it is just temporary traction. You usually find that out later, when the farming period ends and users go back to whatever they were already using. At that point the truth becomes hard to avoid because the product never really had any real users in the first place.

2.2 No real go-to-market

For many teams, go-to-market still means some combination of CT hype, KOL marketing, token incentives, and vague community growth talk. This creates noise and short-term attention, but it does not generate a clean signal towards end users.

A real go-to-market strategy means understanding how the right user discovers the product, why they try it, what gets them to stay, and what still works when the market is no longer carrying the story. We find that too many teams never answer that and just outsource the whole thing to sentiment and hype.

2.3 No wedge

A lot of projects have a product, a narrative, maybe a token, maybe a category story, but no clean entry point. The wedge is not the grand vision. It is the first real reason someone should use the product now.

Who is the first user? What painful thing does it solve for them? Why is it better to switch? Why would they stay? A lot of teams do not have good answers to those questions. They have something built, but they do not yet have a believable path to adoption.

2.4 The product only makes sense to insiders

This comes up all the time. Retail products are built for power-user onboarding. Developer products get explained like consumer apps. Infrastructure teams talk as if they are launching mainstream consumer products. Products that are supposed to be simple come wrapped in enough jargon to make even technical people lose patience.

The result is friction, and friction still kills crypto products. Even technical users have a threshold. If switching is annoying, unclear, or more work than it should be, the product has to be dramatically better to justify it. Most are not.

2.5 The user never really feels the advantage

We hear some version of the same claim all the time: faster execution, better throughput, cheaper infra, stronger performance because of better technology.

Sometimes those claims are true. But the end user still does not feel enough difference to care. A product can be technically better on paper and commercially irrelevant in practice. That happens much more often than founders want to admit.

2.6 TAM gets treated like a vibe, not a real constraint

A lot of founders still talk as if crypto markets are large by default. They usually are not.

Crypto-native TAM is still relatively small and highly cyclical. Bull market TAM and bear market TAM are not remotely the same thing. Many teams never really get concrete about who the real market is, how large it is, how durable it is, and whether the product has any real path beyond a narrow crypto-native audience. Too many teams are building for a user who only exists inside a thin slice of crypto attention.

3. How founders fake depth

One of the clearest warning signs is when a founder is riding a hot topic, but once you start pressing on why the product should exist, the whole thing starts thinning out.

3.1 Fake complexity

We have seen founders over-explain basic ideas, hide weak product logic behind technical phrasing, or wrap fairly ordinary concepts in faux research language to make them sound deeper than they are. We typically find top founders take something complicated and package it into something that their actual users will love to understand and use.

3.2 Pitching the sector instead of the product

A lot of founders often say that the category is exploding, the market is growing fast, or the trend is inevitable, and therefore their project must matter.

We find that is not a product argument. It is a trend argument. The real question is never whether the category is hot. The real question is whether this project deserves to exist inside it once the narrative cools off.

3.3 Borrowed credibility

Namedropping still works on too many people. We believe it might be helpful to gain initial traction, but it should not be a key pillar of depth.

Who is on the cap table might get attention, but it does not answer the hard questions. Strong logos can buy momentum, but they cannot replace diligence. We do not care much who invested if the project still collapses under basic scrutiny.

3.4 A weak answer to the why

A lot of founders can explain what the product does and what trend it fits into. Far fewer can explain why the product should exist at all.

That gap matters more than people think. If the why is weak, the rest of the story is usually hollow too.

3.5 Fake vision

Weak founders often come in with a big story and a lot of language. But when you push, the story does not get sharper. It gets thinner. They keep repeating the same phrases until you realize there is not much underneath.

Real vision gets clearer under pressure. Fake vision collapses into slogans.

3.6 The next wave of fake depth will look better

As vibecoding gets easier, more founders will be able to produce polished demos and convincing prototypes without having the underlying depth to support them.

That means the market is going to get even worse at distinguishing surface area from actual founder quality. The easier it becomes to fake competence, the more valuable judgment and experience becomes.

4. What strong founders usually have

At the early stage, this is still mostly a founder bet. Not in the lazy charisma sense, and not in the sense that a good storyteller automatically equals a good company. We mean founder quality in a more practical way.

4.1 Strong teams are usually complementary

A lot of better projects are not built around some mythical all-purpose founder. They are built around a pairing that actually makes sense: a technical founder with a commercial complement, a strong product thinker with a strong executor, or someone who really understands the market paired with someone who can actually build.

That kind of complementarity matters a lot more than the myth of the perfect solo founder.

4.2 The product starts to click

With weaker teams, the story gets fuzzier the deeper you go. With stronger teams, the opposite happens. The product becomes more legible.

That aha moment does not automatically sell us. It usually just shifts the conversation from skepticism into genuine curiosity and opens the next round of diligence.

4.3 They feel genuine

A big part of early-stage investing is deciding whether this is someone you actually want to help for the next few years.

At this stage, you are not just investing money. You are also investing time, judgment, intros, strategic help, pattern recognition, and trust. So yes, one of the real filters is whether the founder feels genuine and worth backing as a person, not just as a deck.

4.4 They react well to hard questions

One of the best signals we have found is how a founder reacts when they do not have a good answer.

Weak founders bluff. Strong founders come back later with better answers. Sometimes they even thank you for the question because it exposed something they had not thought through properly. That tells you a lot, not just about intelligence, but about humility, coachability, and whether the founder actually wants to build something durable.

5. What stronger projects do differently

Once the founder clears the trust and vision bar, the project still has to hold up.

5.1 They market the product, not just the token

Weak projects try to manufacture attention through tokenomics. Better projects build attention by making the product feel useful.

When we ask about marketing plans, weaker teams often default to token hype, incentives, and amplification loops. Stronger teams usually come back to a much simpler question: how do we show the right user that this solves a real pain point?

5.2 They respect onboarding and UX

Even technical users do not reward unnecessary friction forever.

A lot of crypto teams still underestimate how much switching cost lives inside onboarding, product design, and clarity. If getting started is painful, the product needs to be much better to compensate. Most are not.

5.3 Their tokenomics have a real role

We still think tokens can matter when they are used properly.

Good tokenomics should not just spray incentives and hope activity appears. They should help bootstrap the right kind of user, create actual participation, and fit into the ecosystem in a way that makes sense. If the token only exists to manufacture temporary activity, the product usually pays for that later.

5.4 They document the product properly

Documentation is part of the trust surface. It tells users, integrators, exchanges, and counterparties where to start and what rules they are signing up for.

Without it, the whole thing starts to feel like some version of "trust me bro." That is not a serious operating standard.

5.5 They take security seriously

Too many teams still wave away security questions by pointing to strong engineers or someone on the team who used to audit. That is not enough.

We care about external audits, the quality of those audits, operational controls, who can access what, and whether there are systems in place to stop people from doing something stupid or malicious. One bad hack can kill a project. Teams that do not think seriously about security are usually telling you something broader about how they make decisions.

6. What founders still misunderstand about investors like us

A lot of founders think a polished deck, a hot sector, and an investable-sounding narrative are what create conviction. That may work on funds chasing the latest thing. It is not what wins us over.

We prepare hard before calls, usually somewhere between 30 minutes and two hours depending on the situation. That is partly diligence and partly respect. Founders put real work into these projects. The least we can do is meet them with context.

That prep also tells us a lot before the call even starts.

A polished deck does not create conviction. A hot sector does not create conviction. A slick presentation definitely does not create conviction. What creates conviction is much simpler: serious work, clear thinking, real commercial viability, and a founder who can keep making good decisions once the story runs into reality.

A great call usually leaves us refreshed, even if it runs long. A weak call usually leaves us fatigued. That is not random. Good founders tend to create clarity. Weak ones create fog.

And the best projects are not really pitching a get-rich-quick scheme. They are pitching an answer to a meaningful problem. That still matters.

Crypto did not start as a funnel for short-term token extraction. At its roots, it came out of a real frustration with broken systems and a belief that better ones could be built. In the pursuit of profit, a lot of people have forgotten that. The stronger projects usually have not.

7. What 1,700 conversations actually gave us

The obvious thing 1,700 conversations gave us is pattern recognition. The more important thing they gave us is usable judgment.

Once you have seen the same commercialization mistakes, founder mistakes, and trust failures enough times, you start recognizing them earlier than most people do. And once you can recognize them earlier, you can do more than just screen for them. You can help founders fix them before they become fatal.

That might mean sharpening the wedge before the product drifts into genericity, forcing clarity on who the first real user is, pressure-testing whether the GTM plan is real or just outsourced to hype, flagging onboarding friction before it kills switching, catching weak token design before it attracts the wrong users, pushing harder on documentation, security, and trust surfaces, or helping a founder explain the product in a way that actually makes it legible to the market.

That is where this experience becomes more than just an investment filter. It becomes part of how you help a project get to fruition.

A lot of early-stage value comes from surfacing painful truths early enough that a good founder can still do something about them. That is also one reason our diligence process sometimes helps us get into rounds that are already full. Good founders can usually tell the difference between someone who is just evaluating them and someone who might actually help them think more clearly.

8. The real lesson

After 1,700 project conversations, our biggest takeaway is still pretty simple. The winners are rarely the teams with the most ambitious technical story. They are the teams that can connect a real problem, a real user, a real reason to switch, and a founder who keeps making good decisions long after the hype has passed.

A hot category can get you a meeting. Borrowed credibility can get you attention. A polished deck can keep the conversation going for a while.

But once the noise fades, what remains is the use case, the defensibility, the quality of the work, and the people building it.

That is what we learned. And increasingly, it is also where we think we can be most useful.