The Rise of Founding Influencers

Content → Community → Code → Company or Cryptocurrency

By doing things in that order, you ensure you’re solving real problems for an organic community. This approach has been made much more feasible by ubiquitous social media; it wasn’t really a web2 strategy.

Founding influencer is now on par with the founding engineer. An influencer with an organic community can identify a problem, pair with a technologist, crowdfund a solution, and continuously communicate progress along the way. The community derisks the process of market discovery.

People will often debate whether the team, product, or market determines winners. In the influencer-first approach, the community helps define all three. It creates the market, articulates the problem, and pre-identifies at least one credible team member in the persona of the influencer. You don't need a large following to bootstrap a new product. Even a few thousand folks is enough to start testing out ideas.

Remember, the upper limit of your company size is determined by how large that community could be in 10 years, not the size of the community today.

*Note: This is a bonus section from The Anthology of Balaji, which was edited out of the final published version. Enjoy this section and join the email list for updates, new material, and upcoming products.