This was the year reality set in. After the high of raising and launching in 2022, 2023 was about grinding through the hardest part of building a startup: finding out if anyone actually wants what you're building.
The core focus
Going into 2023, the goals were clear: make the product fully self-service, get more companies actively using it, and grow the developer community. The dream was reducing friction to near-zero—a company posts a bounty, a developer picks it up, work happens, money flows.
Simple in theory. Brutal in practice.
The marketplace problem
Early on, it became clear that the main challenge was one side of the market: companies.
Here's the dynamic that kills bounty marketplaces: if companies don't put real money on the platform, developers lose interest. They turn from active participants into passive fans who check in occasionally but never commit. The supply side of a marketplace is worthless without demand.
Our entire year became about one question: how do we convince companies to post bounties repeatedly?
What hackathons taught us about sales
Hackathons turned out to be the best sales channel we found. At crypto hackathons, there are typically 20-30 sponsoring companies with booths. Walking up to them, pitching on the spot, asking directly if they're interested in posting bounties—this worked far better than cold outreach.
We talked to hundreds of companies over the year. Some signed up. Some didn't. But we learned something important: the friction wasn't just about convincing them the product was good. It was deeper than that.
Why crypto-first was the wrong bet
Continuing with a crypto-native setup felt like pushing a boulder uphill. Here's what broke:
No proper invoicing. When escrow pays out through a smart contract, there's no receipt. Companies couldn't account for payments to developers. Their finance teams couldn't process it. This alone blocked adoption by any company with real structure.
No KYC or sanctions compliance. This might sound bureaucratic, but it's real. Larger companies need to verify they're not paying developers in sanctioned countries. In crypto, some teams just YOLO money to people they trust. But that doesn't scale. We had companies tell us they were interested but couldn't use us for compliance reasons.
These weren't feature requests—they were existential blockers. We added them to the roadmap, but building proper invoicing and KYC for a crypto escrow system is a massive lift.
The positioning problem
Even when companies were interested, they struggled to understand what bounties to post. We called the concept "atomic contracting" but nobody knew what that meant.
Should they post small features they don't have time for? Experimental tasks? Should bounties be a recruiting funnel where they excite developers first, then convert them to full-time?
We changed our elevator pitch constantly. Different narratives, different positioning, different explanations. We were testing what resonated, but the truth is we weren't sure ourselves.
The hiring mistake
I made a classic early-stage mistake: hiring for roles that matter after product-market fit, not before.
We brought on two people—one focused on token economics and ecosystem design, another on marketing and growth. Both were smart. Both were relatively affordable on long-term contracts. Neither delivered strong tangible value.
The main value they created was challenging my thinking and acting as sounding boards. But here's what I learned: early-stage startups must hire specifically for product-market fit expertise. You don't need people who help once PMF exists. You need people who know how to find it.
This was a misallocation of resources. Not devastating—the contracts were cost-efficient—but it taught me that hiring for marketing, ecosystem design, or token economics before you've found PMF is putting the cart before the horse.
The pivot toward hackathons
By mid-year, we were ready to pivot. Not abandon the marketplace entirely, but reposition hackathons as the entry point.
The logic: hackathons weren't the revenue driver. They were the distribution channel. Let companies use the platform to distribute hackathon bounties and manage the event end-to-end. After the hackathon, developers continue building on the company's stack using milestone-based payments.
This created a natural progression: hackathon → continued work → long-term collaboration.
The reputation layer we'd been building made this more valuable. Companies could see which developers delivered real value during hackathons, who was genuinely excited about their tooling, who engaged deeply. This reduced uncertainty when continuing work post-hackathon.
Developer-side PMF was clear. Hackathons resonated with developers—easy discovery, clear path to earning money, low friction participation. Even if we didn't have full platform PMF, one side of the market was validated.
The persistent company problem
But the company side remained hard. Companies control the money. Companies carry the friction. Making it easy enough for them to understand the product, trust the process, and commit financially—that's where we kept hitting walls.
Hackathons became a softer introduction. Show them the philosophy and value before asking for deeper commitment. Build the relationship through a successful event, then convert to ongoing work.
The strategic bet on community
We made a deliberate bet: if we build a large developer community, a business model can always be found later. Thousands of engaged developers are a high-value asset. Even if the main product fails, the community creates optionality.
This was our worst-case scenario thinking: strong builder adoption, high engagement, clear signal from developers, even if companies lag behind.
Founder alignment friction
Here's something I don't see discussed enough: founder alignment on exploration.
My co-founder Andrew was strongly focused on making one specific product work—the vision he signed up for. That's common and reasonable. But we were still a very young company. There should have been more openness to exploring widely different ideas, not just variations on the marketplace.
The risk of over-fixation: continuously asking "how can we make the marketplace work with add-ons?" might cause missed opportunities. We had strong investor support. We could have used it to explore entirely different products.
Two-sided marketplace reality
I read about 20 books on marketplaces this year. Plus countless articles and founder stories. The pattern is consistent: founders of successful marketplaces describe bootstrapping as one of the hardest problems in software.
Network effects are powerful once they exist. Getting to that point is painful, slow, and capital-intensive. We were also late to market—no structural advantages that earlier players had.
The fundraising question
A thought emerged this year that I'm still processing: fundraising before product-market fit might be a mistake.
I don't regret the experience. I'm grateful to have lived through it. But runway shrinking while you're still searching for PMF creates a specific kind of pressure. You're simultaneously trying to find what works and preparing to pitch investors on why it's working. These feel mentally incompatible.
The cognitive dissonance is real. Especially when your co-founder is mostly technical and business responsibilities—fundraising, strategy, market fit—fall largely on you. All while still coding.
Looking ahead
By the end of 2023, we had about 30 businesses actively using the platform in some way. Growth via this route was hard to sustain. Experiments felt increasingly constrained.
We had a strong lineup of hackathons planned for next year. The platform was ready to test assumptions in the real world—validate or falsify whether the two-sided marketplace concept truly makes sense.
But I was already mentally prepared for another pivot. The question wasn't if we'd need to change direction. It was when, and into what.
There's no single right way to build a startup. This year reshaped how I think about timing, risk, focus, and what it actually means to search for product-market fit.
Next: 2024