High-signal teams

If your team is like ours and has onchain operations, check out Teams. The functionality and security of modern banking — 2FA, role-based-permissions, shared accounts — with the speed and programmability of Ethereum. Join Daimo, Clanker, and Ponder by leveling up your onchain ops.

You can't buy taste, which is why it's so valuable.

The earliest customers of a new product become a signal about who you are, as founders and as a company. For one thing, your earliest customers probably come from your personal network; if your peer group is excellent, people will judge you accordingly.

The first teams that adopt your product contribute to your brand story. Their own reputations speak to the caliber of service that you offer. Consumer companies have a different dynamic, but as a B2B startup, we put a lot of effort into recruiting the right users.

We want to onboard the teams whose problems we can solve, of course, but also the ones whose taste and judgment are respected — whose taste and judgment we respect.

An important factor: Early user feedback gets incorporated into the product as part of the flywheel. So the better your early users' feedback, the better your product will be:

This is not to say that we exclusively invite our friends or "influencers" to try Teams. In addition to being distastefully elitist, that would be stupid; obviously we don't know every quality builder out there! However, we do want the overall cohort of beta users to make us proud, to be a group that we would approach for advice about onchain operations.

In fact, doing exactly that was part of the building process. Many of today's Teams users (such as Fabric and Transient Labs) were the folks we reached out to learn from before we set out to build Teams. We wanted to see how they had solved this problem, and what pain points still rankled them.

Adoption by high-signal teams is a force multiplier. It becomes a proof-of-concept for everyone else. Tastemakers have options and high standards; precisely because they are discerning, their choices carry extra weight.

Accordingly, word-of-mouth recommendations from high-signal teams are worth the most. When a respected founder tells a friend, "We use Splits to manage our money," that imparts more credibility than any marketing campaign we could run.

That is our current go-to-market strategy: Win over the leaders who others look to for direction. Let them pull the rest of the market along behind them.