Mac Budkowski on Go-To-Market for Crypto Startups: Segments, Channels, and the Rebels Worth Arming

While studying psychology in college, Mac Budkowski discovered something useful about math tutoring. He could charge twice his usual hourly rate by targeting wealthy suburban families. The parents were executives and company owners who watched their talented kids underperform in school, and as Budkowski put it, "their soul was crushing." The willingness to pay was there because the pain was real, the budget existed, and those parents talked to each other. Within months his calendar was full. He did not set out to build a go-to-market framework, but he had just stumbled into one.

Years later, after stints at a market research startup, a telecom R&D company, and an explainer video agency with clients like Intel, IKEA, Pfizer, and Mastercard, Budkowski ended up in the Ethereum ecosystem co-founding Kiwii. When he left, he started running office hours for founders and noticed a pattern: people kept arriving with narrow, almost superstitious ideas about growth. You just need to go viral on Twitter. You can only grow through KOLs. You need to run an airdrop. He wrote a long free blog post to push back against that thinking.

Arm the Rebels

Budkowski publishes all his writing for free, and when asked why he does not put it behind a paid course, he was straightforward about his reasoning. "I got a lot from this community, I mean like Ethereum community in general, and I want to give back," he said. "It's like a parallel of like writing open source software probably."

But there was a second motivation. Budkowski is bothered by a specific kind of injustice he sees in product markets, where a technically weaker product beats a stronger one because its founders are better at promoting it. He wanted to correct for that. "I kind of wanted to arm the rebels, like arm people who are good at building but they don't know how to promote things they built." The free guide was written with those builders in mind.

His entry into crypto followed a recognizable path. During COVID, stuck at home and looking for something new, he called a friend who had been talking about Bitcoin since 2013. The friend told him Bitcoin was no longer the thing to watch and to buy Ethereum instead. Budkowski bought ETH first and did his research afterward, working through Vitalik Buterin interviews, the white paper, CryptoZombies, YouTube, and roughly 47 Discord channels by his count. He eventually wanted to build something in the space but felt crypto was different enough from traditional startups that he started a podcast, Web3 Talks, to interview founders and figure out how they had actually grown their products.

Build and Pray

At one end of the mistake spectrum, Budkowski places founders who do not think about go-to-market at all. The logic behind "build and pray" is that a technically superior product will find its own audience. The problem is that the founder knows the product is better because they built it. No one else has that knowledge. Without some effort to educate potential users, there is no mechanism for them to learn it exists.

At the other end sits a different failure: founders who acknowledge marketing but treat it as inherently dishonest and opt out entirely. Budkowski points to Hayden Adams and Uniswap as a counter-example. "When Hayden started Uniswap, he didn't lie about his app, he just shown what is possible with his protocol, with Uniswap app, and it was just like market education, it wasn't manipulation."

Somewhere in the middle sits a third mistake: doing a little of everything. Two tweets, one YouTube video, five direct messages, and then concluding that marketing does not work. Budkowski compares this to writing two lines of code in one file, three in another, and declaring that the product does not work. Growth requires a focused sprint on one thing long enough to get a real signal.

Crypto adds a fourth failure mode: layering referral programs, points, yield, and airdrop promises onto a product before there is any organic demand. The result is that the founder can no longer tell whether people came for the product or for a lottery ticket.

The Watermelon Analogy

Budkowski uses a watermelon to explain market segmentation. The market is the whole fruit. Segments are slices. A segment is a group of people who share the same problem in the same context, tend to gather in the same places, and talk to each other. That last quality matters because word of mouth travels through those conversations. It is the same mechanism that filled Budkowski's tutoring calendar.

In crypto, segments tend to fall into three categories: geographical (crypto traders in Singapore), vertical (DAO asset managers with more than one million dollars in assets under management), or social clusters (people active across a specific set of Discord servers). Size matters. A niche needs to be narrow enough to be reachable but large enough to support a business. A segment of a hundred solidity compiler developers might be too small unless the price point is very high.

The same product addressed to the wrong segment will fail even if it is excellent. Budkowski makes this point with Uniswap: the protocol would have found no traction among European private blockchain consultants, not because of anything wrong with the product, but because that group had no use for it.

Traction and the One-Channel Rule

For channels, Budkowski recommends Gabriel Weinberg's book Traction, which catalogs nineteen distinct paths to user acquisition. He suggests founders go through the full list, add a handful of crypto-native channels, and brainstorm ideas against each one before filtering. The filtering criteria are cost per acquired user, ease of testing, and time to signal. Product fit matters too: professional software for portfolio managers is probably not a TikTok story.

After ranking, Budkowski recommends picking three channels and then committing to one for two to four weeks. The logic is simple: someone new to TikTok will make bad TikTok videos. That does not mean TikTok does not work. It means they are bad at TikTok. Getting better at a channel requires time and focused attention, which is impossible when effort is spread across a dozen activities simultaneously.

The R&D Scientist

When campaigns fail, which they usually do at first, Budkowski frames the situation using two mental models. The first is about understanding the difficulty of the game. Even Steph Curry, shooting from half court, does not have fifty percent accuracy. Early-stage growth is genuinely one of the hardest problems a startup faces, and expecting any given idea to work on the first attempt is the wrong baseline.

The second model is the R&D scientist. Each channel attempt is an experiment. Some produce no signal. Some produce a small signal. Occasionally one produces a real result. The job is to update the mental model after each experiment and form a better hypothesis for the next one.

His most direct advice is to start distribution before the product is finished. A group chat for people who have the problem the product intends to solve counts as distribution. It generates feedback, surfaces real pain points, and builds early trust. "Just spend at least one hour per day on distribution. Really, trust me, it's going to help."

The math tutor who doubled his rate by picking the right parents, and later watched that same market research startup become one of the biggest in Poland, is making a consistent argument across twenty years of work: knowing who has the problem, where they gather, and how to reach them is not secondary to building the product. It is the other half of the job.