We told a founder to kill their token. It was not a popular recommendation in the room — the token was already announced, the community was expecting it, and the deck had a whole section built around it. Here’s what changed after they did it anyway.
Why the token didn’t have a job
The product was a B2B infrastructure tool sold to enterprises on annual contracts. The token’s only proposed utility was “governance” and a vague loyalty-points mechanic — neither of which their actual buyers, procurement teams at mid-size companies, had any use for or interest in. It was a consumer-crypto mechanic bolted onto an enterprise sales motion. Nobody on the buying side was ever going to hold it, vote with it, or care.
The hard conversation
Killing an already-announced token means admitting publicly that the plan changed, which every founder’s instinct says looks like weakness. We framed it differently in the update that went out: not a reversal, but a decision to focus the roadmap on what buyers were actually asking for, informed by twelve months of enterprise sales conversations that didn’t exist when the token was first announced. True, specific, and defensible — not spin.
What happened next
Sales cycles got shorter almost immediately — enterprise buyers who’d been quietly wary of a “crypto company” re-engaged once the pitch was unambiguously infrastructure software. The engineering time that would have gone into token mechanics went into the actual product instead. Eighteen months later, the company is larger, better funded by investors who specifically valued the discipline of the reversal, and the token has never come up in a single customer conversation since.
Sometimes the right token strategy is no token. We’ll tell you which one you’re in, honestly — talk to us.
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