[17] The First Trough
Dear Readers,
Hope you had a great weekend!
It feels like things are crashing down all at once… especially in Web 3 over the last few weeks. For many in the industry, this is their first trough and first down cycle. We want to use today’s piece to put things into perspective… perspective is important. ✌️
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Daily Mail, Dec 5, 2000
If you’ve been following anything “macro” or “Web 3,” then you’ll know things haven’t been looking so great.
Many are already calling it a bear market or a crypto winter. We imagine many people are questioning whether Web 3 is real or was it all just a faux.
Fear, uncertainty, doubt or FUD is everywhere.
Is this the end of it all?
For many folks who jumped into Web 3 during the bull market (when everything felt like “up only”), it can be hard to stomach what is happening right now.
If you are a relatively new builder in this space, you may begin to wonder whether you should be building in Web 3 at all.
This is the first trough for many of us.
The First Trough
The first bump in any journey is high stakes from an emotional standpoint. All the points leading up to the first trough were filled with highs and ambitious dreams.
The first trough is the reality check that hits you!
This is especially tough for builders or leaders who have convinced their teams on the promise of Web 3. Even as the builder or leader, you begin to question things.
Maybe the plan you had for your project isn’t going to work out. 🏗
Maybe you aren’t moving as fast as you thought you would because life happens. 🏃🏽♀️
Maybe you didn’t realize that competition is fierce and you actually have zero right to win. 🥹
It’s easy to say that highs and lows are a natural part of the journey. If the journey was all/only highs, you wouldn’t actually appreciate the highs as “highs”. The winding nature of the road is what makes it filled with adventure because you don’t know how your journey will evolve throughout this winding road.
But yet, when you find yourself in the first trough of a journey or cycle… it still feels terrible. 🤢🤮
It feels like nothing is working and everything is crashing. The people involved are losing steam. Maybe they start to get distracted and focus on other things.
Your customers, users, community members have very high expectations, and their patience is also thinning. 🪨 👷🏽♂️ 🪨
Everyone in the market is selling or pulling out.
You naturally fall into this spiral, and now you are questioning whether your involvement is worth it or is it better to just call it quits.
This happens a lot in (company) building, it’s a constant battle between “this will work out” and “nothing is working out.”
Let’s take a breath. 😮💨 😮💨 😮💨
Pushing past the First Trough
Pushing past the first trough is a key turning point for any person or team setting out to do something ambitious. Because in the surviving of the first trough, there is a figuring out, an overcoming, a learning and positive signal for the growth mindset.
In pushing past the first trough, you appreciate the reality that you find yourself in, which is that your ambitious goals are just that… ambitious. And ambitious should not be easy by definition.
Pushing past the first trough is a function of a few things:
1️⃣ The first being communication in an honest and transparent way. Do we think things are working, if they aren’t, we shouldn’t celebrate it or pretend like they are… instead we should talk about it openly so that we can course correct. Coordination in these moments ends up being critical.
2️⃣ The second being patience… sometimes nothing happens… actually often times and during most days, nothing happens because it’s all just baby steps. But with some patience toward whatever you are doing… all of a sudden everything happens. When things are down, continuing the course and actually building ends up making a difference.
3️⃣ The third is just accepting reality and the natural challenges of any journey. You might end up learning something new from the overcoming of the challenges. You cannot problem solve if you are refusing to see the reality in front of you. Yes, it’s a down market, yes the trough is painful… great… now we can potentially do something about it.
On a deeper level, overcoming the first trough of any cycle is about building resilience and mental fitness/fortitude.
Friendly Reminder: A successful company, project or any endeavor did NOT succeed because there were no challenges… it actually succeeded because of the challenges … it figured things out.
This applies at a more micro level on teams overcoming challenges and on a more macro level on industries overcoming downturns.
Putting things into perspective
Okay, so back to Web 3 markets … it looks bad right now … but this is not the first time it’s looked bad.
Like most industries and quite frankly most things in nature, Web 3 runs on cycles. Bear markets are natural and a part of the process for Web 3 to go mainstream.
For some of us, this is not our first trough in Web 3.
In 2018, Crypto was also in a winter / bear market. Things weren’t looking so great, and a lot of people left the industry and understandably so.
At times, it felt like the whole industry was dead, just like in 2000 it probably felt like the Internet was dead too. (See image above)
But in the 2018 / 2019 crypto bear market, the builders stayed around. And on the back of the bear market, some of the biggest projects and companies were built: Solana, Polygon (was Matic back then) and OpenSea among many others.
Cycles are inevitable in all industries. There are things to learn at the top of a cycle, and there are things to learn in the bottom of a cycle.
The transition to the down part of the cycle is painful, and nothing we say will make it easier.
But given cycles aren’t something any one of us can really control, the best thing to do might just be to accept the reality and act accordingly.
People, teams, companies, industries are built on the back of failures and downturns.
Embrace the trough, albeit painful.
Building is the only thing that really ever made a difference.
Keep calm and build!
🙏 🛠 ☕️