How Crypto Startups Can Structure Their BD and Growth Teams: Lessons from the Trenches

When building a business development team in crypto, founders often make a critical mistake: they assume Web2 playbooks will work. They won’t. The crypto ecosystem operates under fundamentally different rules, and getting your team structure right from day one can mean the difference between explosive growth and wasted resources.

This guide draws on real-world experience from builders and investors working across protocols, platforms, and infrastructure projects. Rather than a one-size-fits-all blueprint, it’s a framework for thinking through the unique challenges of hiring BD talent in crypto—authored by industry veterans including Mehdi Hasan and others who’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

What Makes Crypto BD Fundamentally Different

Before you hire anyone, understand what’s actually changed. In traditional business development, you negotiate with a central decision-maker and move forward. In crypto, you’re navigating a more complex landscape:

Token mechanics matter. When and how you deploy tokens as partnership incentives directly impacts user acquisition costs. Get it wrong, and you’ll burn capital on low-ROI experiments. Get it right, and tokens become your most powerful growth lever.

Distribution happens on-chain. Forget email lists and paid ads as your primary distribution channels. In crypto, you’re designing airdrop mechanics, wallet engagement strategies, and task-based incentives. This requires a different kind of strategic thinking.

Governance is often your negotiating partner. Some of your biggest deals won’t be closed with a CEO—they’ll need DAO approval. This means managing community sentiment, building relationships with token holders, and understanding decentralized decision-making processes that can take months.

The ecosystem is radically open. Most crypto projects run on open-source code, which means successful strategies get replicated almost overnight. Your competitive advantage comes from execution speed and cultural understanding, not from keeping secrets.

These dynamics reshape what you need in a BD hire. If any of these are core to your growth, they’ll determine your hiring criteria, the level of crypto fluency required, and how quickly someone can start delivering results.

Step 1: Define What You Actually Need (Not Just “BD”)

The biggest mistake founders make is lumping everything under “business development.” In reality, you need to hire for one of several distinct roles, each with different skill sets:

Business Development (BD proper): This person closes strategic deals—exchange listings, wallet integrations, enterprise partnerships. They’re focused on expanding your distribution channels and securing credibility through marquee partners.

Growth: A growth hire optimizes the funnel. They build referral programs, understand network effects, and continuously improve the user journey from awareness to retention to monetization. They’re product-focused and data-driven.

Partnerships: This role is about product integration and co-marketing. Can your product be embedded in other platforms? Can partners build on top of you? These hires focus on creating win-win integration scenarios.

Revenue: Once you’ve found product-market fit, revenue hires scale customer acquisition and manage enterprise deals.

Ecosystem Development: Especially important for protocols. This includes developer relations (DevRel), community incentive programs, and grassroots network effects. This person thinks about how to attract builders, not just customers.

The critical insight: these roles are not interchangeable. Trying to hire one person to handle all of them is a recipe for underperformance. A talented BD person might completely fail at growth optimization, and vice versa. Before you hire, be ruthlessly specific about the impact you want and the metrics that define success.

If you can’t articulate what you’re hiring for in one sentence, you’re not ready to hire.

When Product-Market Fit Changes Everything

Timing your hire matters as much as who you hire. The needs before and after product-market fit (PMF) are completely different—and confusing them is expensive.

Before PMF: You need a flexible operator. Someone who can wear multiple hats, test different partnership models, validate which go-to-market strategies actually work, and even help shape the product based on customer feedback. Speed and adaptability matter more than specialization.

Before PMF, a common trap is chasing big partnerships. Landing a major customer feels like progress, but often it just locks your team into building custom features instead of finding the core use case that works at scale. The goal is learning, not revenue.

After PMF: Now you hire for scale. You want someone with proven experience building replicable sales processes, managing teams, and hitting predictable growth targets. You need systematization, not improvisation.

The implication: don’t hire a Chief Revenue Officer or Chief Growth Officer before you’re ready. These roles make sense only after you’ve proven a scalable GTM engine exists. Early-stage startups need “player-coaches” who can close deals themselves while starting to build out the team behind them. If you’re unsure whether you need a C-level hire, you almost certainly don’t.

Crypto Experience: Required or Not?

This depends entirely on your product category.

If you’re building infrastructure (Layer 1, Layer 2, protocols): Crypto industry experience becomes crucial. The technology is complex, deeply interconnected with other ecosystem components, and cultural fluency (understanding memes, incentive structures, community norms) can be the difference between adoption and failure. You’re hiring someone who gets how this world works, not someone learning on the job.

If you’re building at the application layer: Technical understanding of wallets and blockchains is valuable, but not essential. Your hire doesn’t need to be a crypto native—they need to understand your customer and communicate clearly. Someone from fintech, gaming, or open-source communities can bring fresh perspectives unburdened by “how things have always been done” in crypto.

Don’t overlook talented candidates from outside the crypto world. The industry is still young, and some of the best strategies come from people applying ideas from other cutting-edge fields. Skills like customer empathy, communication, and deal-closing can’t be trained; crypto education can.

The Interview Process: Go Beyond the Resume

You can’t assess a BD hire with just a resume. You need to test how they think, communicate, and execute under real-world pressure.

Run real case studies: Give candidates actual (or anonymized) partnership scenarios from your business. Ask them to walk through how they’d evaluate the opportunity, structure the deal, and manage stakeholders. Listen for how they think about incentive alignment and second-order effects.

Simulate the actual work: Present a vague inbound inquiry (like “let’s explore partnerships”) and have them walk you through their qualification process. Watch how they ask clarifying questions, prioritize information, and develop a negotiation strategy.

Involve cross-functional teams: Have your product, legal, and marketing leaders interview candidates. Some partnerships that sound great in isolation will fail without product support or legal compliance. You need alignment.

Founders should meet early-stage BD hires: The first BD person sets the tone for how you operate externally. Make sure they align with your values and vision.

What you’re actually testing: Can they learn quickly? Can they stay calm under ambiguity? Do they have conviction about what matters and what doesn’t? Can they communicate a complex idea simply?

Team Structure for Scaling: Common Models

As you grow, the question becomes: how do you organize BD, Growth, and Marketing?

Early stage: One strong leader can manage all three functions if they’re talented and have the bandwidth.

Growth stage: Separate these roles. BD focuses on deals and partnerships. Growth focuses on funnel metrics and product-driven loops. Marketing focuses on brand and storytelling. They have different cadences, different success metrics, and different mindsets. Keeping them bundled leads to each being underdone.

For protocols specifically: Think in terms of multiple complementary roles. You might have a core BD team hunting for developers and projects, an ecosystem team managing grants and governance, a technical integration team supporting deployments, and regional teams handling local markets. The goal is orchestrating network growth across multiple dimensions.

Customer Success for complex products: If your product requires significant implementation support (especially infrastructure or protocol tools), invest early in dedicated integration support. It doesn’t have to be called “Customer Success,” but it needs to exist.

On geography: Don’t hire regional marketing positions until a region shows real traction. However, a junior community manager in a country showing early interest can amplify local engagement. Let adoption lead your expansion strategy.

The Crypto BD Reality: Governance and Community Building

For protocols, especially, BD isn’t just traditional sales—it includes managing governance. When your product scales across chains or requires protocol upgrades, DAOs and token holders vote on the decisions. Your BD person needs to understand this completely different game.

This requires more than sales skills. It requires:

• Product and historical context expertise: Governance forums span years of discussion and iteration. Your hire needs to understand the full context of a proposal, not just pitch a feature.

• Whale relations and community management: They need to win over large holders through direct outreach while also building credibility in community forums like Discord and X. It’s retail and wholesale simultaneously.

• On-chain and off-chain fluency: Proposals often start as off-chain discussions but lead to binding on-chain votes. Your hire needs to navigate both spaces and ensure transparency about where decisions are being made.

• Patience and coordination skills: Multi-stakeholder alignment across time zones is hard. Decision fatigue is real. You need someone detail-oriented who can keep momentum without cutting corners.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Bundling roles for too long. Resist keeping BD, Growth, and Marketing under one person after the team grows past 3-4 people. The skill sets diverge, and some areas will start underperforming.

Specializing too early by vertical or geography. Before you understand where real demand is, vertical specialization (hiring a DeFi person or a gaming person) can waste resources on unproven markets.

Hiring too senior without an execution framework. A VP-level hire needs mature systems, clear metrics, and a stable pipeline to be effective. Early-stage startups need operators who close deals themselves.

Vague success criteria. “Do BD” isn’t a job description. Define specific metrics—number of pilot integrations, leads in priority verticals, key partnerships closed. Tie compensation to these metrics.

Ignoring technical requirements. For infrastructure products, a non-technical BD hire will struggle. For application-layer products, it’s less critical but still valuable.

The Bottom Line

Hiring for business development in crypto is harder than hiring for traditional business development, but the principles remain the same: hire for clarity, hire for stage, and hire for the specific dynamics of your product.

Get clear on what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Understand which of crypto’s unique mechanics matter most to your growth. Then hire for that specific need—not for a generic “BD person.”

The right hire at the right time can unlock exponential growth. The wrong hire can slow you down for months. The difference is often clarity and precision in what you’re looking for.