hitting 100 million is easy. staying there is hard

Every month some team asks me to teach them how to launch a token. Let me tell you what I actually know.

A token is two things. Liquidity and narrative. If you have one, someone will bring the other. If you have a big community, a market maker will give you liquidity. If you have capital and know how to market-make, we’ll give you attention. If you have neither and you’re asking for both, what exactly are you needed for? We’d go to a market maker and do it ourselves.

Pumping to 100 million is not hard. If a key opinion leader (KOL) corners 95 percent of the supply, 200 million isn’t expensive. Sustaining is the hard part. The market discounts you and your life becomes hell. People now question why pump and Hyperliquid are valued the way they are. A v1 team with no revenue can’t answer that question. Category leaders can launch easily. Everyone else needs volume or fees to justify the number.

So don’t launch before the numbers. The term sheets you’re getting that are all token allocations exist because the VC knows a 21 year old team will do something stupid. And once a token exists, the north star becomes the price. Not the product. Every eye is on the chart and you’ve lost control of what you optimise for.

If you do launch: every meme coin that worked had a face. One person on a podcast saying buy my coin. If the founder can’t do that, don’t. Put both tokens on one chain, not one on Monad and one on Solana, that just confuses both communities. No foundation retweets a token. Foundations retweet product launches. The token sells on community you already have.

On fundraising with tokens: a private round exists because you don’t want governance. Get a Shayne Coplan and tell him the community will vote on things and he’ll tell you to fuck off. He doesn’t even want his VC to vote. The strongest founders want more ownership and they keep going private as long as possible, because that’s where king-making happens. A 50 angel round on a SAFE beats a launchpad full of 10,000 people putting in 500 dollars each.

The exit math nobody tells you: at 100 million you can’t exit without a token. With a token, everyone vests before the founders. Four years, if it survives. The alternative is a Series A, which means real profitability that gets dug into. Your paths fork here and you have to pick.

Last: listings don’t matter. Binance, Coinbase, Robinhood. The industry’s biggest carrot. Do the math on what a listing earns you and I’ll get you that from a client.

the call where i said it best

A well-known content creator wanted to launch a coin on Monad. I told him the story of the creator before him. Biggest attention on the chain. Launched the coin before the non-fungible token (NFT) everyone was waiting for, couldn’t protect against snipers, raised money, ran it up, snipers dumped. The whole community’s airdrop went into it and nobody made money. Then the NFT collection did extremely well and nobody sells it. He went with the NFT.

do this this week

Write down the volume or fee number that would make your token’s market cap look reasonable to a stranger. If you don’t have it, you’re not launching this quarter.

the line to remember

hitting 100 million is not that hard. sustaining at 100 is very hard. it’ll be discounted and their life will become hell after that.