From Audience to Exit Liquidity
Rethinking ACP in Crypto GTM
"Build an audience. Foster a community. Launch a product."
It’s the playbook everyone in web3 seems to know by heart. And on paper, it makes sense. Distribution first, trust and vibes second, product last. Greg Isenberg’s ACP framework—short for Audience, Community, Product—has become gospel for founders, creators, and meme accounts pivoting to protocol builders.
But if you’ve spent more than five minutes in crypto, you know how this story usually ends. What starts as a community-led growth movement turns into a slow rug pull. The audience gets farmed for attention. The community gets airdropped into irrelevance. The product? Still in beta, but now with a governance token.
So the question is: does ACP actually work or is it just another pitch deck fantasy?
The Framework We Want to Believe In
Let’s give it credit. The idea behind ACP is solid.
Start by building an audience—people who vibe with your vision. Then give them a place to gather, share ideas, and build momentum. Finally, once you’ve earned trust and attention, launch the product they’ve been waiting for. You’ve got built-in distribution, immediate feedback loops, and a launchpad powered by users, not paid ads.
It’s web3’s dream of bottoms-up everything. No VCs gatekeeping innovation. No reliance on Web2 platforms. Just a direct connection between builder and believer.
In theory, it’s a beautiful vision for building the better world we know is possible. In practice? It’s usually just a farm.
Where It Falls Apart
Crypto turns ACP into an extraction engine.
You build an audience, but you do it with shallow content—engagement farming, endless hype, reposted charts. That “community” isn’t here for your mission. They’re here for alpha, giveaways, or a shot at the next airdrop.
You spin up a community channel, but it’s a Discord graveyard by the end of the month. Nobody talks because nobody has anything to say. You never gave them a reason to care beyond token price and launch date.
Then you drop the product. It’s half-baked, forked, or irrelevant to the people you supposedly built it for. But hey, at least it has a token. Maybe we can get some PR to pump the price and get our community back.
This isn’t ACP. It’s ARP: Audience, Rug, Price action.
The Real Problem: Everyone Wants Distribution, Nobody Wants to Do the Work
ACP fails when it’s used as a content calendar, not a commitment. Most teams think they’re executing the ACP playbook. What they’re really doing is dressing it up and hoping they can make a quick exit.
The audience becomes a follower count. Community becomes a server. Product becomes a landing page with a “launch soon” banner and a docs link to tokenomics charts.
There’s no real feedback. No obsession with the user. No willingness to sit in the discomfort of slow, silent building. Just the fantasy that if you post enough memes and spin up enough Spaces, PMF will magically arrive.
It won’t.
How to Actually Make It Work
ACP isn’t dead. But if you want it to mean anything, you have to stop treating it like a shortcut. You have to dig deeper.
Start with the audience as a thesis. Don’t chase vanity metrics on X, share ideas. What do you believe about where the space is going? What are you building toward, even if the product doesn’t exist yet? Signal your lens, not just your link.
Build community around commitment. Give people real ways to contribute. Let them test things, propose ideas, write docs, host calls. Make it real. Otherwise, they’ll bounce the second they get what they came for.
Ship products that prove it. Don’t rush to tokenize your MVP. Don’t airdrop the prototype. Use the thing. Show the impact. Get user feedback. Then let the product earn the token, not the other way around.
Look around. The projects that are still standing didn’t just follow ACP. They lived it. Uniswap, Aave, Lido—they all have different plays, same pattern: deep conviction, engaged contributors, and products that didn’t rush to tokenize before they could deliver.
What’s Left After the Hype?
Most crypto projects will fail because they don’t want to do the boring parts. They want the vibe, not the work. But that’s also why this moment is such a cheat code for those who are willing to go deeper.
If you can build something people actually want, and you can keep them around long enough to shape it with you, you’ll be ten steps ahead of the next tokenized attention trap.
ACP works. But only when you treat it like a practice, not a pitch deck.
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