Alex Fatuliaj Mentors at Solana London Build Station

Alex Fatuliaj, co-founder and COO of Simplicity Group, joined the Solana London Build Station as a mentor.

Build Station is Superteam UK's residency format: a physical space in London with more than 60 co-working desks, running daily sessions for teams building on Solana and finishing with a UK Demo Day. Registering for Build Station also enters a team into the concurrent Solana hackathon, so most of the room is shipping against a deadline rather than planning in the abstract.

Mentoring inside a build sprint

Mentorship during a sprint is a different job from mentorship in a twelve-week programme. Teams are two weeks from a demo day, the product is half-built, and the questions are narrow: what goes in the deck, which metric to put in front of investors, whether to launch a token now or later.

Alex's sessions covered go-to-market and token design. The recurring problem was sequencing. Teams tend to plan a token launch and a product launch as one event because it looks efficient, and the two need opposite conditions to go well: a product launch wants a small group of users giving honest feedback, whereas a token launch wants liquidity and a wide holder base from day one. Running them together usually means the feedback loop is drowned out by price.

What Simplicity brings to Solana builders

Simplicity Group runs token economy design, audits and Machinations modelling on one side, and go-to-market strategy and execution on the other. Build Station teams sit at the point where those two meet: far enough along to have a product, early enough that the distribution plan and the token model can still be changed cheaply.

Superteam UK's Build Station closes with a UK Demo Day, where teams pitch to investors and ecosystem partners.