A business development perspective on market cycles, the deals that actually matter, and why bear markets are where business actually gets built.
There’s a version of being a business developer (BD) that only exists at the top of the market. Your inbox is a firehose. Every founder wants a “partnership.” Every protocol wants an integration by Friday. People you’ve never met are calling you “ser” on Telegram at 3 AM about a co-marketing push for a project/token that won’t exist in six months. You close deals on vibes and a rising chart, and you start to believe you’re good at what you do.
You’re not. Not yet. The market is doing the work, and it’s letting you take the credit.
I’ve done BD through euphoric bulls and brutal bears. The single most useful thing I’ve learned is this: almost everything that feels like winning in a bull market is a trap, and almost everything that feels like losing in a bear market is the actual job. Here is what multiple cycles have taught me about growing a business in a volatile industry.
The bull market is a convincing liar
The dangerous thing about a bull market isn’t that people make bad decisions. It’s that bad decisions get rewarded anyway, so you never learn they were bad.
In a bull market, demand isn’t your constraint. Attention is cheap, capital is loud, and everyone says “yes.” So the natural instinct is to say “yes” back. You rack up partnership announcements. You count integrations. You put out announcements every week, and the numbers go up, and the group chats are euphoric, and it all looks like traction.
Most of it isn’t, though. A partnership that took one call and zero friction to complete will take one bad week to disappear. The “strategic collaboration” that was really just two logos on a graphic doesn’t survive contact with a red candle. Half the counterparties who were eager to work with you at the top will ghost you at the first drawdown, because they were never partners. They were tourists, and you were a stop on their travels.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. In a bull market, the actual skill isn’t closing. It’s declining. When everyone wants a piece of you, your scarcest resource is your own team’s time and focus.
What the bear actually teaches you
Here’s what happens when the music stops. For us, “stopping” meant watching Solana get left for dead. When FTX imploded in late 2022, SOL had already fallen from around $260 at its peak to single digits, and a large chunk of crypto Twitter wrote the chain’s obituary in real time. The consensus take was that Solana was a casualty of FTX and wasn’t coming back.
Suddenly your business firehose is a dripping tap. Nobody’s pitching you. Budgets are gone. The tourists have flown home. And this is the exact moment BD stops being order-taking and becomes the actual craft.
Now you have to do real outbound work. You have to build relationships with no chart to hide behind, no token to dangle, and no urgency you didn’t create yourself. You have to show up to a nearly empty conference room, on a nearly dead chain, and keep showing up. And something strange happens when you do: people remember. The founder you helped in the bear, when you had every excuse to disappear, is the founder taking your call first in the next bull. Reputation is the only asset in this industry that survives a 90% drawdown, and it’s earned almost entirely in the down years.
The bear is also the best filter money can’t buy. A down market quietly deletes the projects that were only ever a function of leverage and hype. Whoever’s still building when there’s no applause is, by definition, someone worth partnering with. The diligence you’d normally have to do on a counterparty, the market does for you. You just have to be paying attention while everyone else is panicking.
And the terms are better. Nobody has ten competing offers. Counterparties are motivated, reasonable, and actually pick up the phone. Some of the best deals are signed in a period when, on paper, there is “no business to do.”
The counter-cyclical rule almost nobody follows
If you compress everything above into one sentence, it’s this: do the opposite of what the market is telling you.
When everyone is greedy, and every deal looks urgent, be disciplined and take a moment to think it through. When everyone is fearful, and it feels like there’s nothing to build toward, that’s your signal to activate even more, develop relationships, and lay rails. The crowd is buying attention at the top and abandoning it at the bottom. A good BD function does the reverse. It brings discipline in times of euphoria and presence in times of despair.
This is hard, not because it’s intellectually complicated. It’s hard because it feels wrong. Saying “no” during a bull looks like you’re leaving money on the table. Doubling down during a bear looks like you didn’t get the memo. You will be second-guessed both times. The teams that come out of a cycle stronger are the ones willing to look wrong for a while in exchange for being right when it counts.
Volatility isn’t the weather. It’s the climate.
A lot of companies treat market downturns as an interruption. Something to survive until “real conditions” return. That framing quietly kills businesses, because it treats the exception as the rule and the rule as the exception.
The question at Solflare is never “how do we wait out the bear.” It’s “what do we build while attention is cheap and there is no added noise.” The answer is to keep shipping into the quiet. Our best development and partnerships have come out of bear markets, which have allowed us to be ready and battle-tested exactly when the next wave of users showed up and needed it.
Distribution is the only moat that compounds
If there’s one BD conviction that survived cycles, it’s this: products are copyable; features get cloned quickly; incentives get outbid. The one thing that genuinely compounds is trust and distribution. Distribution is built almost entirely in the boring middle, out of relationships that don’t pay off for a year or two. Every integration you lay down in a bear market is a rail that carries volume in the next bull, automatically, without a fresh negotiation. That’s the whole compounding thesis of BD. The work is unglamorous and lagging, the payoff is exponential and sudden, and everyone who only shows up for the payoff wonders how you got there so quickly.
People who think BD is a stream of announcements are optimizing for the wrong number. People who think BD is a slowly widening surface area of trust and integration are building something that a down market can’t take away.
Hold strong
Solflare launched in 2020 and went all the way into the top of the cycle. Then it went through the worst crypto winter in the space’s history, on a chain half the market had written off, and came out with more than four million active users on the other side. That arc isn’t luck. It’s what happens when you refuse to let the market’s mood decide your strategy.
Bull markets will make you feel smart. Enjoy it, but don’t believe it. Bear markets will make you feel like you’re losing. Lean into it, because that’s the season when the real work is available and fewer people are competing for it. The businesses that win across a full cycle aren’t the ones that caught the perfect wave. They’re the ones that were still standing, still shipping, and still showing up when the tide went all the way out.
Everyone can build in the sunshine. The whole game is who’s still building in the dark.
Hold strong.