What building Printr taught me about competing for attention

Building Printr meant entering a market where people already had somewhere to go.

Pump.fun was an established destination for token creation. Creators and traders had habits, existing communities and reasons to stay where activity already was. A new launchpad needed to explain why someone should interrupt those habits.

I cofounded Printr, helped raise $4.5 million and built a distributed team of 15. My responsibilities included product direction, partnerships and distribution. That gave me a fairly direct view of how often a product argument and a commercial argument turn out to be the same unresolved question.

What would make somebody choose us for their next launch?

A technical advantage needs a buying reason

Printr's initial proposition centred on launching across chains and reaching users and liquidity in different ecosystems. There was a coherent technical argument behind that.

The commercial question was whether enough creators considered that problem urgent enough to change how they launched.

That distinction became clearer as we developed the product. Our V2 launch put more emphasis on creator control and incentives, including choices about fees and how they were distributed. Those changes were covered in The Block's April 2026 launch report.

The lesson I take from it is to test the reason to switch independently from the product's technical merits.

For an AI company, a better benchmark or more capable model can matter enormously. But the customer still has to connect that capability to work they need done. A team may prefer a less impressive demo if it fits an existing workflow and requires less supervision.

I would ask a prospective customer what they would stop doing if they adopted the product. If the answer stays vague, I would keep working on the proposition before increasing the launch budget.

Distribution should influence what you build

Printr's relationship with Bybit was part of the company's distribution story from early on. The funding announcement described its support through Bybit Venture Studio. My commercial work also involved platform partnerships with companies including OKX and Axiom.

Working through another platform forces a useful set of questions. Where does your product belong in its user's journey? What does the partner gain? How much integration work are you asking it to do? What reason will it have to keep the relationship active?

You can't answer all of those after the product is finished.

For a small AI company, I would consider distribution while choosing the initial workflow. There may be an established tool, specialist service provider or platform that already reaches the buyer. If you can solve a problem within that relationship, you may need to create much less new behaviour.

There is a cost. Partners have their own priorities, and their incentives can change. I would want enough direct customer contact to understand demand independently, even when a partner introduces the user.

Attention has to lead somewhere

A launch can create a short period when people are willing to listen. That opportunity is valuable, especially for a new company. I would plan the next customer action before planning how to generate the attention.

For a launchpad, that might be creating a token or participating in a launch. For an AI product, it might be completing one real task with the customer's own information.

Those actions need to be observable. “People are talking about us” and “people are using us again” should appear separately in the review.

Elena Verna has argued that retention will determine which AI companies endure. I agree with the emphasis. My commercial interpretation is that every launch plan needs an explanation of what should happen after the initial curiosity wears off.

Printr ultimately wound down. I think it is important to say that when discussing what we built. Raising capital, assembling a team and generating activity were real achievements, but they didn't settle the question of whether the business could last.

What I would do earlier next time

I would put three questions in front of the team before committing to a broad launch.

Who has a strong enough reason to try this now? What is the shortest route from that person's interest to a useful result? What would we expect them to do again without another incentive or announcement?

Then I would choose the smallest audience that lets us test those answers properly.

AI makes it easier to build product variants, produce campaigns and reach prospective customers. It also makes it easier to stay busy expanding a proposition that hasn't earned repeat use.

If I were building the commercial function from scratch today, I would spend the early weeks making the reason to switch specific enough that a customer could explain it back to me. That would shape the product, the partner conversations and the launch.