Author: Jason Rosenthal
Compiled by: DeepWave TechFlow
DeepChain Overview: Jason Rosenthal, Operating Partner at a16z Crypto, outlines three pathways for current crypto projects to achieve product-market fit: co-building with top-tier clients, positioning themselves on the exponential growth curve of AI agents, and being their own first user. The article expands on cases such as LayerZero, AgentCash, and ZKsync, offering direct insights for teams currently pivoting or尚未找到 PMF.
Product-Market Fit (PMF) is the most critical factor determining a company’s survival. Find it, and you have a chance. Without it, nothing else can save you.
@jasonrosenthal tweeted:
Finding and achieving product-market fit is the most powerful and important thing any early-stage startup can do. I’ve spent a significant portion of my career focusing on this across multiple companies. Here are five strategies for finding PMF in Web3.
Throwing more money in just extends the runway to a bad outcome. Growth hacking disconnected from real strategy and continuous airdrops are less a path to PMF and more a way to mask the fact that you haven’t found it yet. Some of the most powerful tools in the crypto industry—tokens and network effects—can even mislead projects about whether they’ve achieved PMF.
The good news is that top teams are now achieving PMF faster than ever. Killer applications like stablecoins have already been validated, and traditional finance and broader consumer markets are accelerating their entry.
Here are three models that are currently working. If your project is still before PMF or undergoing a pivot, pay close attention.
1. Bind top-tier clients and build products according to their needs
Find the most seasoned potential clients in your field and co-build your product with them. Their needs are your product specification.
This is slower than building a generic product and iterating publicly, but if your first customer handles trillions of dollars in transactions daily, their adoption is more valuable than any media coverage, TVL data, or retail attention. The essence of PMF is your product resonating with a broad customer base, and these flagship clients are the best indicators.
The product roadmap is being shaped by institutional clients, as evidenced by multiple high-profile partnership announcements and product launches between crypto startups and traditional financial firms. Blockchain is beginning to underpin the global financial infrastructure.
2. Find an exponential growth curve and position yourself ahead of the curve.
PMF sometimes comes from serving an existing market better, and sometimes from seeing where the market is headed before it fully realizes it itself and positioning yourself early enough.
The most obvious curve right now: AI agents are becoming economic actors. They autonomously call APIs, deploy capital, and execute trades at machine speed. The assumption that “humans are in the loop” is collapsing faster than most people expected.
In terms of agent commercialization, Samuel Ragsdale and Ryan Sproule at Merit Systems recognized this early on and are building AgentCash on the x402 protocol. AgentCash enables AI agents to pay for API access using cryptocurrency, providing the infrastructure for agents to autonomously execute programmatic transactions without manual bill management.
Payment is the key step that transforms an Agent from a "helper" into a "participant." Whoever builds these payment rails now will own a foundational layer when the Agent economy arrives.
3. Be your own first and best customer
The most enduring infrastructure companies don’t wait for external developers to validate their technology. They first build applications on their own tracks, proving their capabilities through real-world operation, and then invite others to use them.
Amazon has taken this approach to its extreme. AWS was not initially sold to startups; Amazon first built the infrastructure it needed for its own e-commerce business, refined it at scale, and then gradually opened it up to the public.
Alex Gluchowski of Matter Labs is running the same script.
He didn’t market Prividium as an abstract enterprise product, but instead anchored it in a concrete application: tokenized deposits. The result is Cari Network. U.S. regional banks such as Huntington Bancshares, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyCorp, and Old National Bancorp can now transfer customer deposits in real time across banks on a blockchain rail, with funds remaining entirely within the regulated banking system. ZKsync didn’t just build the rail—it found the killer app on it.
Three modes, one underlying logic: The fastest path to PMF isn’t trial and error in the dark—it’s choosing the right battlefield and moving forward with conviction before everyone else jumps in.
Co-build with clients who can compound through the verification effect. Get ahead of the curve before consensus forms. Be your own first ideal customer.
Choose a mode that suits your product and get started.