The go-to-market for onchain companies has evolved significantly since alternative cryptocurrencies began entering the market. Early on, you’d have to set up nodes or miners just to participate — the first thing a development team thought about was getting mining infrastructure into the hands of many. Today, we can apply measurable KPIs and onchain strategies toward a successful launch.

The Only KPI That Matters

There are various KPIs you can track, but after watching countless successful projects launch, one stands above all others: the number of token holders at launch.

How many unique holders do you have when your token goes liquid?

This KPI matters because it captures everything. To maximize unique holders at launch, teams must nail education, community building, onchain engagement, and product-market fit simultaneously. Work backwards from this number and you have your entire go-to-market strategy.

What Has to Go Right

Teams need to execute three core activities that effectively educate the market on what their product does:

  1. Onchain campaigns — have the community interact with and use the product
  2. Developer documentation — quality docs plus developer relations and education campaigns
  3. Centralized communication — a primary platform (Discord, Telegram, Farcaster) that acts as top-of-funnel for the community

The ideal: launch a quality product and generate a large user base before the token goes live.

Think of It as an Onchain Marketing Campaign

The go-to-market is a series of announcements, each introducing activities people can engage with — optionally incentivized with rewards or points. Each announcement drives growth in your primary social channel. Each milestone gets tracked against your user number target.

Less meaningful community activities:

These are easy to fake. Bots masquerade as unique interactions at scale. The result: bloated social numbers, anemic onchain participation.

More meaningful activities (using an AMM as an example):

When the activity is onchain, the user is learning how the product works, overcoming usability quirks, and far more likely to convert to a long-term user.

Progressive Complexity

Start simple to maximize top-of-funnel, then increase friction with each successive activity. Activity one: follow our socials. Activity two: add liquidity. Activity three: run a light node.

The strongest filter for community quality: require meaningful technical engagement before qualification. Projects that required node setup to qualify had the highest-quality communities at launch — people who understood what they were participating in.

Cadence

Too fast: New activity every other day. Community doesn’t have time to learn and participate.

Too slow: Monthly cadence. They forget about you.

Right cadence: Weekly. Participants span all timezones, varying skill sets, many with full-time jobs. One week to complete each activity keeps you top of mind without overwhelming.

Announce → track KPIs → adjust. If you’re 40,000-user target is being hit at 7,500 per announcement, add more activities to the end of the chain and extend your timeline.

Healthy User Targets

In the 2020 cycle: 10,000–20,000 users was a high-efficacy community launch — engaged, educated, present.

In the 2024 cycle: 50,000–75,000 is achievable given the larger base of sophisticated users in the market.

When evaluating your community health, look at three numbers:

These give you a perspective on whether enough liquidity will circulate at launch.

The Launch Decision

Hitting your user number target gives you maximum optionality: public sale or direct airdrop.

A public sale draws on the existing community and can raise capital — 10,000 investors at a $1,000 cap = $10M raised. A direct airdrop foregoes fundraising but maximizes community goodwill. This is a stylistic decision, not a logical one. Both can work.

The Bottom Line

The market is more sophisticated than it’s ever been. There’s never been a better time to launch. But the fundamentals are the same as they’ve always been: build something real, grow an authentic community onchain, and let the token launch be a celebration of what you’ve already built — not a speculative bet on what you might build someday.