A project ships. Early contributors are close to the work, so direction feels shared without needing to discuss it. Everyone understands the decisions being made because they were there when the first ones were set.

Six months later, the dynamic changes. New people arrive without the same context. They see the project as it is now, not the reasoning that shaped it. Different teams begin interpreting priorities in their own way. Debates stretch out because people are working from different assumptions, not different opinions.

The project itself still works.

But without a shared narrative holding it together, decisions that were once straightforward start to feel harder than they should.

Decentralised projects that ship fast and gain early traction often hit scaling walls not because their product fails, but because they never built the strategic foundations to support growth. Retrofitting strategy after momentum is exponentially harder than building it from the start.

Early traction builds genuine confidence. A working smart contract. An initial pool of aligned users. The first treasury allocation. The vibe is strong.

Execution feels like enough because it is, for a while. In the beginning, funding is often pre-aligned from a core group, a grant, or early backers who believe in the solution. There's no need to convince the wider world yet, so the pace feels natural.

In decentralised environments, this looks like tools launched with minimal docs because contributors already know how it works. Treasury proposals passed quickly because the group is small and context is shared. Messaging mirrors what is built, not why it was built. In Web3 especially, early funding often comes from aligned backers or grants, so there's no immediate pressure to build a public narrative. Speed to market matters more than clarity.

These choices aren't wrong. They're adaptive responses to small team dynamics. But they skip over something critical. The foundational work of establishing what the project is and why it matters beyond the immediate circle.

When foundations are absent, every new decision becomes a micro-pivot. Without a centre of gravity, growth feels like spinning, not building.

The shift appears when the project starts to reach beyond its early users.

Referrals slow. Word of mouth hits limits. Governance gets noisier. Contributors ask for clearer onboarding. People want to understand the why, not just the what.

In DAOs, this can look like proposals dragged out for weeks because the underlying purpose is not shared. Contributors pull in different directions. External users are unsure where to start.

In centralised organisations, similar disagreement eventually gets resolved by leadership. In decentralised systems, there is no centre to converge around. Without a clear narrative, different groups form their own interpretation of what the project is for. Treasury thinks it is funding one thing. Governance debates another. Product ships a third. Each view is coherent on its own, but together they compete rather than compound.

You can see this pattern in large treasury systems. Arbitrum’s multi-billion-dollar treasury became the backdrop for repeated funding disputes, not because the proposals were poor, but because there was no shared framework for how decisions should be made. People were operating from entirely different interpretations of what the project was meant to prioritise.

It's like adding storeys to a building without reinforcing the base.

The project didn't break. It just never built the scaffolding to carry what came next. What felt lightweight and flexible becomes top heavy and unclear. The very things that made the project successful in its early phase become liabilities. Responsiveness, flatness, adaptability start to feel like constraints.

This is the moment many teams misread. Because execution is still happening, features shipping, calls running, feedback flowing, it feels like things are working. But the centre is hollowing out.

Growth starts to outpace meaning. Every addition, every integration, every partnership makes sense on its own, but together, they blur. Contributors can't explain the larger vision. Governance feels performative. Narrative falls behind the roadmap.

And because the team is still busy, the gaps get rationalised away. We're still early. It's a coordination problem. We just need better documentation.

But documentation can't replace foundations. What's missing isn't just information but the underlying structure that gives that information meaning.

This creates a unique kind of organisational drift. The project may continue to function. Treasury might still be deployed. Governance votes still pass. But the sense of building something together dissipates. Each contributor makes sense of things in their own way. Each part moves, but not together.

When strategy follows execution, things get retrofitted.

The mission statement tries to summarise what already exists. The docs read like instructions, not vision. The governance structure reflects how things were done, not what's needed next.

The brand becomes a surface layer. The strategy becomes a rationalisation. This reactive identity makes it hard to scale. The more a project grows, the more the gaps show up in onboarding, in community calls, in partner conversations, in contributor meetings. The pain isn't from poor execution but from lack of foundational structure.

Sometimes, projects attempt to fill the gap with design. A fresh visual identity. A cleaned-up pitch deck. A new onboarding flow. But these cosmetic updates don't establish foundations. They just smooth the surface.

Without underlying narrative structure, good design becomes hollow. The language sounds right, but doesn't hold substance. Contributors repeat talking points they don't fully understand. Community calls use the same phrases without clarity on what they actually mean or why they matter.

Most teams discover the foundation problem too late. They're already moving, already committed to certain directions, already carrying the expectations of early users and contributors. Building backwards becomes exponentially harder than building on solid ground from the start.

Retrofitting strategy feels like renovating a house while living in it. Every change disrupts something else. The mission statement has to account for contradictory features that made sense individually but don't fit together. The governance structure has to accommodate processes that emerged organically but don't scale systematically.

Teams find themselves in endless loops of almost-but-not-quite-right messaging. Brand exercises that capture part of what they do but miss the essence. Strategic frameworks that sound good in meetings but feel hollow in practice.

The cost isn't just time and resources. It's the lost momentum of teams constantly explaining and re-explaining what they're building. It's the opportunity cost of contributors who can't quite understand how to help. It's the partnerships that take twice as long to establish because the value proposition keeps shifting.

Building backwards is possible, but it's expensive. Much more expensive than taking time to establish foundations before the momentum gets too strong to change direction easily.

The teams that recognise this early enough can still course-correct. And that moment can often mark the start of a clearer, more confident phase.

Not to define. Just to notice.

This perspective is part of an ongoing series observing how trust, identity and brand coherence shift in systems undergoing change. Written from a background in brand and business growth within traditional environments, these reflections explore how familiar dynamics re-emerge in decentralised contexts.

For the traditional business angle, see the Substack version Building Backwards