Choosing a launch venue
A framework that turns eleven properties into one decision, weighted by what the launch is actually trying to do. Includes the questions worth asking and the ones that waste a week.
Choosing a venue, and changing your mind
A property matrix is not a decision. Turning one into a decision requires a weighting, and the weighting comes from what the launch is actually trying to do, which is a question most teams answer far too late and far too vaguely.
These two notes handle the decision itself and its reversal. One builds a weighting from the goal down. The other sets out what genuinely changes if a team launches on a different venue next time, which is less than the marketing of either venue implies and more than the team usually budgets for.
- Input
- The eleven properties recorded in the ledger
- Weight
- Derived from the launch goal, not from reputation
- Output
- A venue that fits, with its trade-offs written down
- Reversal
- Cheap in state, expensive in habit and audience
The questions that actually decide it
Most venue debates are conducted on the wrong questions. These six are the ones whose answers change which venue is correct, and they are worth answering in writing before anybody opens a launch interface.
Who is supposed to buy this in hour one?
The honest answer decides the discovery surface, and the discovery surface narrows the venue list faster than any other property. A venue whose audience does not overlap with your intended holders is the wrong venue regardless of its fees.
Question 01How much distribution do you want before graduation?
This is a question about curve shape and graduation measure together. Wanting most of the supply in many hands before the pool exists points at a different combination than wanting a fast primary phase.
Question 02Does the creator earn from trading, and should they?
Some venues route a continuing share to the creator. Whether that is an advantage depends on whether your holders will read it as alignment or as extraction, and they will read it either way.
Question 03What has to integrate with this token later?
Staking, vesting, cross-chain bridging and custody all impose constraints on the token account model. Discovering a constraint after launch is the most expensive ordering of that discovery.
Question 04Who needs to be able to verify liquidity?
If a counterparty or a listing process requires provable non-withdrawable liquidity, the destination and the provider position handling stop being preferences and become requirements.
Question 05What happens if the venue changes a parameter?
Every venue can change its fees, thresholds and destination. A choice that only works at the current settings is a fragile choice, and the fragility is worth naming before it is tested.
Question 062 ledger notes in this section
Turning the property matrix into a decision. Which differences matter for a given launch, which are noise, and what genuinely changes if a team moves to a different venue next time.
What changes if you switch
Nothing migrates between launchpads except the team. What has to be rebuilt, what carries over as knowledge rather than as state, and the specific costs of an ecosystem change.
A decision you can explain is a decision you can defend
The value of a written weighting is not that it produces a better venue. It is that six weeks later, when somebody asks why you launched where you launched, there is an answer that does not consist of the phrase everybody else was there.
Launchpads
Venue profiles. What each launchpad is as a product, who is standing in front of it, what its interface makes easy, and which of its properties are actually different rather than differently named.
Open this sectionMechanics
The four decisions every launchpad has to make: the shape of the pricing function, who pays what to whom, the condition that ends the primary phase, and where the resulting liquidity is put.
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