The 90-Day GTM Plan For A Seed Stage Crypto Project
The seed stage is when a project's market position is at its most flexible. The product is still evolving, the narrative is still taking shape, and the community is often in its earliest stages of development. Decisions made during this period have an outsized impact on how the project is perceived as it grows.
Projects that reach later funding stages with strong market awareness, an engaged community, and a clear narrative position rarely build those assets overnight. In most cases, they are the result of consistent work that began long before larger funding rounds, major announcements, or token-related milestones entered the picture. Establishing that foundation early allows the project to build momentum gradually rather than attempting to create it under greater competitive pressure later.
A 90-day GTM plan provides the structure for that foundation. It helps define the project's narrative position, establish early community growth loops, develop relationships with creators, media, and ecosystem participants, and create a reliable measurement framework. These elements become increasingly valuable over time because they influence how future marketing efforts perform. The objective is not simply to generate attention in the short term, but to build the systems, relationships, and market understanding that support long-term growth.
Key Takeaways
The 90-day seed stage GTM plan has three distinct phases: foundation work that has no visible output but determines everything (days 1-30), infrastructure deployment where the project becomes publicly visible for the first time (days 31-60), and distribution and amplification where the audience grows (days 61-90). Rushing to distribution before the foundation is finished is the single most common mistake.
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Narrative positioning is the first deliverable. Everything else is sequenced around it. A seed stage project that starts community building, KOL outreach, or PR before the narrative is clear wastes the activity.
The community built at seed stage has a different composition and different value than the community built at TGE. Seed stage community members are collaborators and early validators, not an audience. They should be treated accordingly.
The founder's public presence is the highest-leverage marketing asset available to a seed stage project. No content budget, KOL spend, or PR campaign produces a comparable return per dollar at this stage.
Measurement from day one matters more than measurement at any later stage, because seed stage data is the baseline against which everything is calibrated. Teams that start tracking on day 30 have already lost 30 days of the cleanest signal they will ever have.
Why the Seed Stage GTM Problem Is Unique
Every stage of a crypto project's marketing has a different primary constraint. At the growth stage, the constraint is usually distribution efficiency and retention. At TGE, it's demand generation and price support. At the seed stage, the constraint is something more fundamental: legitimacy.
A seed stage project is asking the market to pay attention before there is much to pay attention to. The product is early. The team is relatively unknown. The community is empty or close to it. The task, which is essentially "believe in this enough to invest attention and potentially capital before it's proven," is a significant one. The marketing challenge at seed stage is not to generate demand. It's to build the credibility that makes future demand possible.
This changes the goal hierarchy entirely. At the seed stage, the right question is not "how do we get the most people to know about us?" The right question is "how do we get the right people to form a strong early opinion of us?" The two questions produce very different plans. The first leads to follower campaigns, broad KOL activations, and press release distribution. The second leads to targeted relationship building, substantive content that demonstrates expertise, and a community architecture designed around quality rather than quantity.
The 90-day plan described here is built around the second question. It is not a plan for maximum visibility at seed stage. It is a plan for building the foundation of credibility, narrative, and community that maximum visibility requires before it can be useful.
There is also a timing consideration specific to crypto. Market cycles move faster than company development cycles. The narrative windows that are open at seed stage, the categories gaining attention, the investor themes being explored, the communities forming around specific problems, may not be available in the same form 12 months later. A seed stage project that correctly reads the current market and positions itself within an ascending narrative benefits from tailwinds that don't cost anything but do require you to be in motion. The project that waits until it's "ready" to market often finds that the narrative window has moved.
Days 1-30: Foundation Before Anything Else
The first 30 days have one job: build the foundation on which all subsequent marketing activity will stand. The output of this month is almost entirely invisible externally. No campaigns run. No KOLs are briefed. No press releases go out. From the outside, nothing is happening. From the inside, the decisions being made in this period are the most consequential of the entire 90 days.
The Narrative Audit
The first task in the 30-day foundation period is a rigorous audit of the current competitive narrative landscape. This means mapping every project in the relevant category that is currently active in the market, understanding the narrative positions they occupy, identifying which positions are crowded and which ones have a credible gap, and assessing where the current market cycle's attention is flowing.
The output of this audit is not a list of competitors. It is a map of the narrative territory. Which claims are already occupied and defended by credible players? Which claims are being made by many projects but aren't owned by any of them convincingly? Which gaps exist between where the market conversation is currently happening and where this project's actual product differentiation sits?
From that map, the project's narrative position emerges: the specific claim that is both true about the project and uncrowded in the current market. "Uncrowded" doesn't mean no one is making similar claims. It means no one is making this specific version of the claim with the specific proof points this project can offer. A DeFi protocol building in a competitive category can still have a distinctive narrative position if the specific differentiation, the specific audience, and the specific timing of the positioning are well-chosen.
The competitive intelligence work that underlies this audit is not a one-time exercise. It becomes the ongoing market monitoring that keeps the project's positioning calibrated as the category evolves. But the initial audit is the foundation, and it should be completed before any other marketing decisions are made.
The Brand and Messaging Framework
Once the narrative position is clear, the brand and messaging framework is built around it. At seed stage, this doesn't mean a full visual identity overhaul, although brand positioning that includes visual identity is worth doing correctly from the start. It means a documented messaging framework: the one-sentence project description that every team member uses, the three primary proof points that support the core claim, the answers to the five most common objections, and the vocabulary the project uses consistently across all channels.
This framework is not a marketing document that lives in a folder. It is the operating system for every piece of communication the project produces. A team of five people who all have different answers to the question "what does your project do?" is not a team with a messaging problem. It's a team with a strategy problem. The messaging framework is how that problem gets resolved before it costs the project in investor meetings, community conversations, and press interactions.
The founder funnel begins to take shape during this period. The specific claims, perspectives, and narratives that founders will carry publicly need to be calibrated against the messaging framework so that the founder's public voice and the project's brand voice are complementary rather than contradictory. A founder who is publicly bullish on a narrative angle that the project's official communications don't support creates confusion. A founder whose public takes consistently reinforce and extend the project's narrative position creates credibility.
Community Infrastructure Setup
The community infrastructure, Discord, Telegram, or both depending on the project's audience, should be built correctly in this period even before the community is invited. This means setting up the channel structure, the moderation approach, the onboarding flow for new members, and the content cadence that will be active from the day the community opens. A community that opens with nothing in place and figures it out as people join produces a first impression that is difficult to recover from.
The Discord or Telegram structure should reflect the kind of community the project is trying to build, not just replicate the default structure that every crypto community uses. If the project is targeting builders, there should be channels where builders can discuss technical problems related to the space. If the project is targeting DeFi power users, there should be channels with the depth of information that DeFi power users actually want. The community architecture signals what kind of space this is before a single moderation decision is made.
The community growth strategy for the first 30 days is not about growing the community. It's about building the conditions that make the community worth growing. A community infrastructure that is ready to receive the first 500 members and create a strong impression is more valuable than a community that opens unprepared and has to backfill the infrastructure while managing first impressions.
The Content Architecture
The content architecture for the first 90 days should be planned in the foundation period, even though most of it won't be published until days 31-90. Planning the content calendar 60 days in advance is not premature. It's the difference between a content strategy that builds toward something and a content strategy that produces whatever was thought of this week.
The content architecture at seed stage should cover four categories that map to the four jobs content needs to do: educate the market about the problem the project is solving, establish the narrative position within the category, demonstrate team credibility through specific expertise, and build community by creating genuine reasons for the target audience to engage. Each piece of planned content should map to one of these jobs. Content that doesn't serve any of them shouldn't be planned.
Days 31-60: Deploying the Infrastructure
The second 30 days are where the foundation work becomes visible for the first time. The project's community opens, the founder's public presence activates, the first pieces of content go live, and the first targeted outreach begins with investors, KOLs, and media. This is the period when the project becomes a public entity rather than a private one.
Opening the Community
The community launch should not be a public event at seed stage. A Discord or Telegram that opens with a public announcement and immediately fills with airdrop hunters, bot accounts, and low-conviction followers is not a community. It's a number. The alternative is a seeded opening: the first 100 to 200 members are specifically recruited, not publicly invited.
Specifically recruited means reached out to individually, by the founder or a team member, with a personal and specific reason for the invitation. "I think you'd find what we're building interesting given your background in X" is a specific invitation. "Join our community!" is a public announcement. The first produces members who joined because they were personally engaged. The second produces members who joined because they were in the right place at the right time.
The first cohort of community members has disproportionate influence over the community's culture and quality. The conversations they start, the questions they ask, the standards they set for what gets engagement and what doesn't, all of these shape the community that the next wave of members joins. Seeding the first cohort with 100 to 200 people who are genuinely interested in the problem space is one of the highest-leverage decisions in the entire 90-day plan.
After the first cohort is established and the community has its initial culture and activity level, the opening can expand gradually: first through creator-driven referrals, then through the project's own social channels, then through broader distribution as the community is ready to absorb new members without diluting the quality established by the first cohort.
Founder Content Activation
The founder's public presence should activate in this period across the social platforms where the target audience is most active. For most crypto projects, this means Twitter/X as the primary platform and LinkedIn as a secondary one for reaching investors and enterprise audiences.
The content approach for a seed stage founder is distinct from a growth stage founder. At seed stage, the founder is not yet amplifying a product with an established user base. The founder is building credibility as a thinker in the space who happens to be building something relevant. The content that works is specific, opinionated, and demonstrates genuine expertise: a specific take on why a common assumption about the category is wrong, a specific analysis of an on-chain trend that the founder understands deeply because of what they're building, a specific question that the founder is wrestling with that the audience will find genuinely interesting.
What doesn't work is promotional content about the project itself, which is not credible at seed stage because the project hasn't earned the market's attention yet. A founder with 800 followers who posts about why their project is the most important thing happening in DeFi right now is not building credibility. A founder with 800 followers who posts a specific and insightful take on a question the DeFi community is actively debating is. The promotional content comes later. The credibility-building content comes first and makes the promotional content possible.
The posting cadence should be consistent from the day it starts. A founder who posts every day for two weeks and then disappears for three weeks is building an unreliable signal. Consistency is the metric that matters more than volume. Four posts per week, consistently, for 60 days, produces a stronger foundation than 30 posts in the first two weeks followed by silence.
First KOL Outreach
The KOL outreach that begins on days 31-60 is not a campaign. It is relationship building with a small number of specifically chosen creators who are relevant to the project's category and audience. The objective of this outreach is not immediate content production. It is getting the right people familiar with what the project is building before any campaign brief is sent.
A creator who has been in genuine conversation with a founder for 60 days before they're asked to post about the project has a completely different relationship with the content than a creator who receives a brief and a payment without prior context. The former produces content that reflects genuine familiarity. The latter produces content that reads like a brief. Sophisticated crypto audiences distinguish between the two, and the distinction affects conversion.
The influencer marketing relationships started at seed stage are not selected for follower count. They are selected for audience composition quality and for genuine relevance to the specific problem the project is solving. A creator with 30,000 followers whose entire audience is DeFi-native and actively evaluating new protocols is more valuable for a seed stage DeFi project than a creator with 300,000 followers whose audience is broad crypto retail with limited protocol engagement.
The first wave of creator relationships should be limited to 10 to 20 creators. The goal is genuine relationship depth with a small, well-selected group rather than broad awareness with a large, poorly-selected one. These are the creators who will eventually provide the most credible early coverage because they've been genuinely engaged with the project rather than paid to post about it.
Initial Media Outreach
The public relations work that begins in this period is similarly relationship-focused rather than campaign-focused. The journalists who cover the relevant category should be on the project team's radar. The team should be reading their coverage, understanding what they cover and what they don't, and beginning to build context about how the project fits into the stories they're already telling.
Seed stage projects rarely have announcements that are genuinely newsworthy on their own. The first media work is usually about the team and the problem being solved rather than about the product, which isn't ready for product coverage. A feature about why a specific team with specific backgrounds is working on a specific problem in a specific market context can be genuinely interesting to the right journalist. A product announcement about a product that doesn't have users yet is not.
The media relationships built during this period become significantly more valuable when the project has something meaningful to share, whether that's a fundraiser, product launch, partnership, research report, or unique data point. Establishing those relationships early makes it easier to secure attention and coverage when the announcement is ready, rather than starting from scratch and relying on cold outreach.
SEO Infrastructure
The SEO infrastructure should be deployed in this period, even though the results won't be visible for weeks or months. The domain authority that determines organic search performance is built over time, and the time to start building it is as early as possible. A seed stage project that starts publishing substantive long-form content in month two of its existence will have meaningfully better organic search performance at month twelve than a project that waits until month eight to start.
The content that builds SEO at seed stage is the same content that builds credibility: in-depth, specific, expert-level writing about the problems the project is solving and the landscape it's operating in. The keyword research that identifies what the target audience is searching for in this space should inform what gets written, so that the educational content the project produces is also the most useful answer to the questions the target audience is already asking.
Days 61-90: Distribution and Amplification
The third 30 days are where the infrastructure built in the first 60 days starts to generate visible returns. The community has its first cohort and is ready to grow. The founder's social presence has enough history to establish credibility with new followers. The KOL relationships are warm enough to move toward content. The media relationships are established enough to support the project's first genuine announcement. The SEO content is indexed and beginning to generate organic traffic.
Distribution and amplification in this period should be sequenced to build on each element of the foundation rather than running all channels simultaneously from zero. The sequencing matters because each channel amplifies the others when they're coordinated. A KOL posting about the project to an audience that can look at the founder's Twitter and see 60 days of consistent, credible content gets a different conversion rate than a KOL posting about a project with no founder presence and an empty community.
Community Growth Acceleration
By day 61, the community has a culture, an initial cohort of quality members, and an established content cadence. It's ready to grow. The growth tactics appropriate for this stage are different from the tactics appropriate for a large community trying to sustain momentum. At this scale, the growth is still personal enough to maintain quality if it's managed deliberately.
The most effective community growth at this stage is creator-referred growth. When a creator with a relevant audience mentions the community specifically as something worth joining and explains why, the conversion rate of their audience into community members is substantially higher than any other acquisition source. The creator's credibility is transferred to the community invitation, and the people who join through that channel arrive with more context and more pre-existing conviction than people who join through a generic awareness campaign.
The referral mechanics within the existing community are the second growth lever. Community members who are genuinely engaged and genuinely believe in the project are the most credible possible advocates for the community itself. A referral from a community member a prospective member already follows on Twitter carries more weight than a direct community announcement. Building the conditions that make existing members want to refer others, through genuine value, through genuine access, through genuine community that the member doesn't want to be the last to know about, is more sustainable than incentivizing referrals through reward mechanics.
Community management in this phase needs to scale with growth without losing the quality that the first cohort established. The team member responsible for the community should be actively engaged in the conversations happening, not just moderating them. The difference between a community that feels like the team is present and one that feels like the team has handed the keys to a moderation bot is significant and immediately perceptible to new members.
First KOL Campaign Wave
The first organized KOL wave in the 90-day plan runs in this period, drawing on the relationships built in days 31-60. The objective of this wave is not maximum reach. It's a targeted introduction to the right audience segments through the most credible possible voices.
The content for this wave should be designed to introduce the project's narrative position, not to sell the token or the product. At seed stage, there is no token to sell and the product is not complete. The content that works in this context is narrative-level content: why is this problem important, why is this team the right one to solve it, what does the solution look like and why is that approach compelling? The creators who can communicate this with genuine credibility are the ones who have spent 60 days in actual conversation with the founder and understand the project from the inside rather than the brief.
The briefing for this wave should be specific without being prescriptive. Each creator should receive context about the project, the specific audience segment the project is trying to reach, the narrative angles that are resonant with that audience, and clear information about what to say and what not to say. What the brief should not do is dictate the format, the exact language, or the content structure. Creators who are given genuine creative latitude within clear parameters produce better content than creators who are told exactly what to post.
The geographic scope of this first KOL wave should be limited to the markets where the project needs the most visibility for its seed-stage objectives. For most seed stage projects, this is the primary English-language market and one or two specific regional markets where the project's audience is most concentrated. Regional marketing expansion comes later, when there is more to say and the community infrastructure to receive the traffic it generates.
Campaign Development and Measurement
The campaign development work in days 61-90 is as much about establishing measurement as it is about running campaigns. The data that the first 90-day campaigns generate is the baseline for every subsequent quarter's performance benchmarks. A team that runs campaigns without measurement in the first 90 days loses the baseline data that would tell them whether quarter two performed better or worse than quarter one.
The measurement priorities for seed stage are different from the metrics that matter at later stages. Follower count is among the least useful metrics at this stage. What matters is the quality of the engagement with the community and content: are the right people engaging, are they engaging substantively, are they coming back, and are they converting from passive followers to community members and eventually to ecosystem participants?
The on-chain dimension of measurement, which is among the most valuable in later stages, is limited at seed stage by the fact that most seed stage projects don't yet have on-chain activity to measure. The proxy metrics that matter most are community retention rate, content engagement depth rather than breadth, and the conversion rate from each acquisition source to active community members. These metrics, tracked consistently from day 61 forward, provide the data that optimizes the campaigns that follow.
Investor Narrative Reinforcement
Seed stage GTM is not purely audience-facing. It is also investor-facing. The public marketing activities of a seed stage project are a signal to the investment community about how the team thinks about market positioning, audience understanding, and execution discipline. A seed stage project with a clear narrative, a quality early community, and a founder who is demonstrably credible in the space is a materially better investment prospect than a seed stage project with the same product but no visible marketing intelligence.
The investor narrative at this stage is built partly through the public marketing activities, which investors observe, and partly through direct communication. The go-to-market strategy document that underlies the 90-day plan should be shareable with sophisticated investors who are evaluating the project, because demonstrating that the team thinks rigorously about how to reach and retain an audience is as valuable as demonstrating that the product roadmap is sound.
The specific things investors are evaluating in the seed stage marketing work are: does the team understand the market narrative clearly enough to position against it rather than within it? Does the community demonstrate genuine conviction or manufactured engagement? Does the founder's public presence build credibility or undermine it? These signals matter to investors at seed stage in ways that they matter less at later stages, when the product metrics speak for themselves.
The Seed Stage Budget Allocation
Most seed stage projects have constrained marketing budgets. Seed rounds in crypto range from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million, and the portion allocated to marketing before product validation is typically small. This makes the allocation question more important, not less.
The highest ROI allocation at seed stage is almost always founder time rather than paid spend. A founder who spends 10 hours per week on credibility-building content, direct investor and KOL relationship outreach, and community engagement is generating a return on time that no equivalent spend on paid distribution can match at this stage. The founder's authentic voice and genuine expertise is the asset that no budget can replicate. Paid distribution amplifies existing credibility. It cannot manufacture it.
Within the paid budget, the priority order at seed stage is: content production first, community infrastructure second, targeted KOL relationships third, and paid distribution last. The reasoning follows the logic of the 90-day plan. The foundation that makes paid distribution effective has to exist before the spend is made. A $20,000 KOL campaign that runs before the narrative is clear and the community infrastructure is in place will generate less return than a $5,000 KOL campaign that runs when those things are established.
Content production at seed stage means long-form writing that builds topical authority, founder-voice content that builds personal credibility, and the visual assets that make the project's communications look professional enough to merit attention. Skimping on content quality at seed stage is a false economy because content is the primary evidence the market has about how the team thinks.
Community infrastructure also needs attention early. The Discord or Telegram structure, moderation processes, onboarding experience, and initial community activities all play a role in shaping how the community develops over time. These decisions influence who stays, how members interact, and what kind of environment forms around the project. Putting these systems in place at the seed stage creates a stronger foundation for future growth. As the community expands, the benefits of having clear processes and a positive member experience become increasingly valuable.
The paid distribution and KOL spend at seed stage should be concentrated rather than spread. Ten focused KOL relationships with depth are worth more than 100 shallow ones. A targeted media placement in one highly relevant publication is worth more than broad press release distribution. The concentrated approach produces better results per dollar and is more manageable for a small team.
Black graphic titled "Seed-Stage Budget Allocation Priority," ranking where a crypto project should spend first. A highlighted top item, 00 Founder Time, is marked "start here" — highest ROI at seed stage and free. Below it, in priority order: 01 Content production (long-form authority and founder voice); 02 Community infrastructure (Discord/Telegram, onboarding, cadence); 03 Targeted KOL relationships (10–20 deep, not 100 shallow); and 04 Paid distribution, dimmed to show it comes last, only once the foundation exists.
The Metrics That Matter at Seed Stage
Measuring the right things at seed stage is one of the more commonly overlooked parts of the early GTM work. Teams default to measuring what is easy to measure, which is usually follower counts and impression volumes, rather than what is predictive of the outcomes they actually care about.
The metrics that are genuinely predictive at seed stage fall into three categories. The first is narrative clarity metrics: can someone outside the team accurately describe the project in one sentence after six months of public communication? Is the project appearing in conversations about its category on social media and in community forums organically, without the team prompting it? Are investors and other founders describing the project in terms consistent with the narrative the team has built?
The second category is community quality metrics: what is the week-over-week retention rate of community members in the first month after joining? What is the ratio of active to passive members? Are community members creating content about the project organically? What is the quality of the questions being asked in the community, as a proxy for the depth of genuine interest among members?
The third category is relationship pipeline metrics: how many tier-one investor relationships have been initiated and are in active conversation? How many KOL relationships have moved from cold outreach to genuine familiarity? How many media relationships have been established with journalists who cover the relevant category? These pipeline metrics don't show up in any analytics dashboard, but they are the most predictive of the outcomes that matter at seed stage.
The measurement infrastructure should be set up to track all three categories from day one. The teams that have the clearest picture of what is working and what isn't in their seed stage GTM are the ones who built the measurement system before they needed it, rather than trying to understand what happened after the fact.
Black three-card graphic titled "The Metrics That Matter at Seed Stage," subhead "Not followers. Not impressions." Card 01 Narrative Clarity: can outsiders describe you in one sentence; are you named in category conversations organically. Card 02 Community Quality: 30-day retention rate, active-to-passive ratio, organic member content. Card 03 Relationship Pipeline: investor convos in progress, KOLs moved cold to warm, media relationships built.
What the 90 Days Should Have Built
At the end of 90 days, a seed stage project that has executed this plan correctly should have a specific set of things in place. None of them are spectacular in isolation. Together, they are the foundation on which every subsequent phase of growth is built.
The narrative position should be clear and documented. The messaging framework should be deployed consistently across every channel and every team member. The competitive landscape should be mapped and monitored. The brand identity should be established.
The community should have 200 to 500 quality members who are genuinely engaged, with a retention rate above 60% at 30 days. The community culture should reflect the kind of project this is: substantive, credible, and worth being part of. The community infrastructure should be ready to scale without losing that character.
The founder's social presence should have 60 days of consistent, credible content behind it. The audience is small at this stage. The quality of the content and the consistency of the posting cadence matter more than the follower count. The foundation being built here is what makes the audience grow predictably rather than in random bursts.
Ten to twenty KOL relationships should be warm: people who know what the project is building and have a genuine opinion about it. Not briefed, not paid yet, just genuinely familiar. These relationships are the seed of the creator network that will carry the project's narrative when the time is right.
The first pieces of SEO-optimized long-form content should be indexed and begin to generate organic traffic. The first media relationships should be established. The campaign development infrastructure should be in place, with measurement tracking the metrics that matter.
And there should be a clear plan for day 91 and beyond: the next phase of community growth, the first organized KOL campaign wave, the Series A fundraising narrative, the product milestone communications plan. The 90-day plan doesn't end at day 90. It creates the conditions for the next phase to be meaningfully better than the first would have been without it.
How AP Collective Approaches Seed Stage GTM
At AP Collective, seed stage GTM starts with understanding where the project sits today and where it needs to be over the next 90 days. Every engagement begins by looking at the current market position, the competitive landscape, and the level of awareness and understanding that already exists around the project.
From there, the focus shifts to building a plan that closes the gap. The narrative framework, content direction, community strategy, partnership opportunities, and distribution efforts are all aligned around the same objective rather than operating as separate marketing initiatives. The goal is to create consistent momentum that compounds over time rather than isolated bursts of activity.
The foundation work is treated as a priority, not a box to check before campaigns begin. Positioning, messaging, and audience understanding need to be clear before significant resources are allocated to distribution. Moving faster rarely helps if the market is still receiving mixed signals about what the project is and why it matters.
Measurement is built into the engagement from the start. Early-stage growth provides some of the most valuable data a project will ever collect, and that information becomes the basis for future decisions. Understanding which channels attract the right audience, which narratives generate genuine interest, and which activities contribute to meaningful growth allows the strategy to improve as the project scales.
FAQ
When should a seed stage crypto project start marketing?
Earlier than most teams start. The instinct to wait until the product is more developed before investing in marketing is understandable but expensive. The narrative position, community foundation, and creator relationships that determine whether a project has a successful launch are built over months, not weeks. A project that starts these activities at seed stage arrives at its Series A or TGE with compounding advantages: an established community, a coherent narrative the market has had time to absorb, and media and creator relationships that are warm rather than cold. The specific milestone worth waiting for before going public is a clear and defensible narrative position, not a finished product.
What should a seed stage crypto project's first community look like?
Small, specific, and genuinely engaged rather than large and passive. The first 200 to 500 community members are the most important cohort the project will ever have because they set the community's culture and quality standard. These members should be recruited individually and specifically: reached out to because they have a genuine reason to care about the problem the project is solving, not because they're available. A community of 200 people where 40% are actively engaged in substantive conversations is a better foundation than a community of 5,000 people where 2% are active.
How much should a seed stage project spend on marketing in the first 90 days?
The honest answer is that the allocation matters more than the total. The most common mistake is spending on distribution before the narrative and community foundation are ready, which produces expensive activity with weak outcomes. At seed stage, founder time is the highest ROI marketing resource available, and it's free. Within a budget, the priority order is content production, community infrastructure, targeted KOL relationship building, and paid distribution last. A well-allocated $10,000 over 90 days will outperform a poorly-allocated $50,000 over the same period.
Should a seed stage project run KOL campaigns immediately?
Not in the form of a campaign, no. The KOL work at seed stage is relationship building, not campaign execution. A campaign requires a clear narrative, an established community for the generated traffic to land in, and content that makes the outbound attention worth converting. Without those foundations in place, a KOL campaign generates impressions that have nowhere to go and produce no lasting community or brand benefit. The right KOL activity at seed stage is identifying 10 to 20 relevant creators, building genuine familiarity with them, and preparing the relationship for a campaign when the foundation is ready.
What is the most important deliverable from the first 30 days of a seed stage GTM plan?
The narrative framework. Everything else in the 90-day plan is sequenced around it. A clearly documented narrative position, the messaging framework that operationalizes it, and the proof points that make it credible are the foundation on which community building, content, KOL relationships, and media outreach are all built. A team that reaches day 31 without a clear narrative framework is going to spend the next 60 days running marketing that doesn't cohere, because every channel and every piece of content will be communicating something slightly different. The narrative framework is what makes the 90 days add up to something rather than accumulate without compounding.
How does seed stage GTM differ from pre-TGE marketing?
The objectives are different. Pre-TGE marketing is building demand for a specific event. Seed stage GTM is building the credibility, community, and narrative position that make pre-TGE marketing possible. The seed stage is the foundation. Pre-TGE is the structure built on that foundation. A project that skips disciplined seed stage GTM and tries to do the pre-TGE work without the foundation will find that the community is too shallow to sustain TGE attention, the creator relationships aren't warm enough to produce authentic coverage, and the narrative isn't established enough to generate genuine market conviction. Seed stage GTM is expensive to skip, but the cost doesn't show up until the TGE.
What should be measured in the first 90 days of a seed stage GTM plan?
Three categories of metrics: narrative clarity (is the market accurately understanding and repeating the project's core claim?), community quality (retention rate, engagement depth, ratio of active to passive members, organic content creation by members), and relationship pipeline (investor conversations in progress, KOL relationships moved from cold to warm, media relationships established). Follower count and impression volume are the least predictive metrics at this stage and should not be the primary evaluation criteria. The metrics that matter most are the ones that predict how the community and creator network will perform when the project has something to announce.
