Recruit the Supply Side First
Win the operators who'll suffer for something rare before you chase mainstream users.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 83%
Solana's first customers were validators: technically deep operators who already ran nodes on other networks, mined, and tried every new piece of infrastructure for the pleasure of it. They were recruited not by lowering friction but by raising interest — asked to call a data centre and install a machine, which is not something you do at home. Because they had chosen difficulty, they stayed through a launch that crashed in twenty minutes and a second that crashed in two hours, found critical bugs under bug bounties, and funded rounds without asking questions. The general mechanism: when the supply side is small and expert, the recruiting lever is exclusivity of capability rather than ease of use, and the cohort you attract that way doubles as your QA, your security research, and your first capital.
Origin
Extracted from Acquired. Yakovenko describes discovering a community of validators during the bear market who came into every round first, ran the earliest software, and absorbed every failure — teaching the team that the job was not reducing friction but offering something unavailable elsewhere.
Core principles
- 01In a two-sided system the supply side has to exist before demand can be served.
- 02Early operators are not buying convenience; they are buying access to something rare.
- 03Friction is the wrong dial when your first hundred users are enthusiasts.
- 04People who install your software in a data centre will also debug it for you.
- 05The hardest early users become your security researchers, funders, and evangelists.
How to run it
- 1
Decide which side must exist first
Establish which participants have to be live before anyone else can get value. For a blockchain that is the validators running the nodes, not the application developers.
Pro tip Whichever side has to buy hardware or make a commitment is usually the one to recruit first.
- 2
Find the people who already do this for fun
Look for operators running every competing network out of curiosity. They are technically deep, already own the skills, and treat new infrastructure as a hobby worth their weekend.
Pro tip Existing rival communities are the highest-yield recruiting ground; go where they already gather.
- 3
Lead with the rare capability, not the easy path
Give them something they cannot get anywhere else and let the difficulty stand. The pitch is interest and novelty, not a smoother onboarding flow.
Pro tip State the hard requirements up front — they filter for the cohort you actually want.
Watch out Sanding down the difficulty this early attracts people who will leave the moment something breaks.
- 4
Ask for real work
Have them call a data centre, install a machine, and understand what they are doing. The size of the ask is part of the selection mechanism.
Pro tip Write the runbook with them rather than for them; they will improve it and own it.
- 5
Ship early and fail in front of them
Give them the first builds and let them see how the sausage is made, including the launches that crash. Being present through the failures is what converts operators into believers.
Pro tip Publish post-mortems immediately; transparency is the currency you have when reliability is not.
Watch out Hiding failures from this cohort destroys exactly the trust you need from them.
- 6
Pay for the failures they find
Run bug bounties and give public credit. Operators who found critical bugs in Solana's early code went on to found their own security firms off that work.
Pro tip Make the credit portable — reputation compounds for them and for you.
- 7
Then bring in the demand side
With operators live, court the builders who need that capacity — the exchanges, applications, and developers whose products only work because the supply side already exists.
In the wild
Solana started with roughly forty dedicated operators who stayed through a first launch that crashed in twenty minutes and a second that crashed in two hours, and kept coming back. Some were early enough to find critical bugs under bug bounties and later founded security firms on the strength of that work. The same community came into every funding round first, without asking questions, having been the first people the team ever shipped software to.
→ A functioning validator set, an early security practice, and a funding source — all from one recruited cohort.
The lesson Yakovenko draws is counterintuitive for consumer instincts: the team stopped trying to reduce friction for users or developers and instead offered something so interesting that people were willing to do hard work to build and deploy on it. Asking someone to provision a machine in a data centre is a high bar, and the people who clear it are the ones who stay when the network falls over.
→ An early community selected for tolerance of failure rather than for ease of acquisition.
Common mistakes
Optimizing onboarding for the wrong cohort
Reducing friction is the right instinct at scale and the wrong one at forty users. It attracts people who leave at the first crash and tells you nothing about whether the capability is compelling.
Hiding early failures
Operators who watched two launches crash stayed because they saw the failures and the fixes. Concealing outages converts the most valuable cohort into the most sceptical one.
Recruiting demand before supply exists
Application builders arriving before the operating side is live encounter a network that cannot serve them, and the first impression is expensive to reverse.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders bootstrapping infrastructure, marketplaces, or protocols where the operating side must be live before demand can be served.
Not ideal for
Single-player products where value is delivered on first use with no counterparty required.
From the transcript
“And that process really taught us that it's not about like reducing friction for users or devs. It's about giving them something that they don't…”
“And we started with like just 40 of these dedicated people that were just there through our first launch that crashed in 20 minutes, the…”
“These are the first folks that we ship software to that ran it.”
From the episode
Special: Solana (with CEO Anatoly Yakovenko)