# Nick Sawinyh

> Writing on AI, engineering, product, and crypto business development by Nick Sawinyh.

Nick Sawinyh builds and ships AI products and leads product for technical teams, with a decade across consumer apps, crypto, and DeFi. He is the founder of DeFiPrime.
Canonical: https://sawinyh.com/

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## Writing

- [How to Clone Pretty Much Any SaaS](https://sawinyh.com/blog/how-to-clone-any-saas/): A field guide from two SaaS clones built with coding agents: a Pipedrive replacement and a Sessionboard replacement entered into swyx's kill-my-SaaS competition. The capture-first playbook, the five sins agents commit even with guardrails, and the six-layer testing stack that actually catches them. (published 2026-08-13)
- [I Proposed a Metric. Then I Tried to Compute It.](https://sawinyh.com/blog/proposed-a-metric-then-computed-it/): Cost per verified outcome needed a denominator. Building it on real repository data revealed that 'verified' is never observed, only inferred, and that most codebases cannot see their own failures. (published 2026-07-20)
- [Two Labs, One Desk: Why Your Code Reviewer Should Be a Different Model](https://sawinyh.com/blog/two-labs-one-desk/): Claude writes the code, a rival lab's model reviews it, and the point is that they fail differently. A look at cross-vendor AI code review with codex-plugin-cc. (published 2026-07-01)
- [You're Measuring AI Spend, Not AI Value](https://sawinyh.com/blog/measuring-ai-spend-not-value/): Engineering orgs spend millions on AI credits and can't say whether it works. Here's the case that spend isn't value, and what to measure instead. (published 2026-06-05)
- [The IPO Boom Kept Its Retail. VC Tokens Spent Theirs.](https://sawinyh.com/blog/ipo-boom-vc-tokens-retail/): Retail shows up in crypto only when it believes it can win. 2025 ran that test twice — a hot IPO market and a wave of VC token launches — and only one cohort rewarded the people who bought it. (published 2026-05-21)
- [The Rolodex Myth: A Well-Connected BD Hire Won't Scale Your Web3 Sales](https://sawinyh.com/blog/connected-bd-hire-myth/): Founders chase BD hires with a big Rolodex, believing warm intros are the golden ticket. Networks open doors. Selling, especially displacing an incumbent, closes them. (published 2026-05-20)
- [Canton DevEx for EVM Migrants: The Paradigm Shift No CLI Can Fix](https://sawinyh.com/blog/canton-devex-evm-paradigm/): A practitioner read on the Canton/Daml learning curve, what the Q1 2026 developer survey said, what shipped in response, and where the EVM-to-Canton paradigm still bites. (published 2026-05-18)
- [Crypto BD Is Displacement Sales: A Field Guide for the 99% Problem](https://sawinyh.com/blog/pipeline-is-positioning-crypto-bd/): If you've been hired as a crypto BDR, you're doing displacement sales. Greenfield runs on founders. Here's how to win when the prospect already has an auditor or a market maker. (published 2026-05-11)
- [Crypto BDRs Are Pitching Strangers: A Field Guide to BANT for Web3](https://sawinyh.com/blog/bant-qualification-crypto-bd/): Most crypto BD time gets burned on prospects who were never going to buy. Here's how to use BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) to disqualify faster and protect your AEs. (published 2026-05-10)
- [CIP-0114: Treasury Companies as Super Validators](https://sawinyh.com/blog/canton-cip-0114-dat-program/): Canton's new Digital Asset Treasury program lets public companies trade $100M+ of locked CC for protocol governance weight. A walk through the spec, the precursor (Tharimmune), the securities question, and where the supply math is fair. (published 2026-05-02)
- [Greenfield AI, Brownfield AI, and the Vibecode You Just Inherited](https://sawinyh.com/blog/greenfield-vs-brownfield-ai-codebases/): Three codebases walk into 2026: one built for agents from commit #1, one built by humans years ago, and one vibecoded six months back with no rules. The playbook is different for each, and only one of them is genuinely hard. (published 2026-04-25)
- [Bittensor and TAO: The Tokenomics, Under the Hood and Under Stress](https://sawinyh.com/blog/bittensor-tao-tokenomics/): TAO's elegant fair-launch tokenomics and flow-based emissions meet a 10-40x subsidy-to-revenue gap. A deep analysis of dTAO mechanics, the Covenant AI exit, BIT-0011, competitors like Prime Intellect and Nous, and explicit scenario math on fair value. (published 2026-04-23)
- [OpenClaw Cron vs Hermes Cron: Two Schedulers, Two Philosophies](https://sawinyh.com/blog/openclaw-vs-hermes-cron/): Both projects give their agent a cron system. The file layouts rhyme, the feature matrices overlap, and the design bets underneath are almost opposites. (published 2026-04-19)
- [OpenAI Wants to Give Everyone a Stake in AI. Would It Break the Economy?](https://sawinyh.com/blog/openai-public-wealth-fund/): OpenAI's proposed Public Wealth Fund meets Citrini Research's doomsday scenario. A deep analysis of whether redistributing AI-driven gains would cause inflation, reshape asset prices, or arrive too late to matter. (published 2026-04-08)
- [How I Built Myself an AI BDR Sidekick (And What You Can Take From It)](https://sawinyh.com/blog/ai-bdr-sidekick/): I used to spend my mornings doing research that didn't require my judgment. Here's what I built to stop, three AI skills, one orchestrator, and a CRM hook that replaced two hours of daily legwork. (published 2026-04-06)
- [Claude lets you export your data but won't let you use it](https://sawinyh.com/blog/claude-export-no-import/): Anthropic gives you a data export that satisfies GDPR but not the person losing their email account. Here's a workaround using a local MCP server. (published 2026-03-31)
- [The 2026 AI Agent Landscape: From OpenClaw's Big Bang to an Ecosystem That's Already Splitting Apart](https://sawinyh.com/blog/ai-agent-landscape-2026/): A deep map of the personal AI agent ecosystem — OpenClaw, Claude Cowork, Hermes Agent, and dozens more. What's real, what's hype, and what it tells us about where AI is heading. (published 2026-03-29)
- [Canton Coin ($CC) Tokenomics: The Institutional Blockchain That Pays Its Builders](https://sawinyh.com/blog/canton-coin-tokenomics/): A deep dive into the burn-and-mint equilibrium, fair launch mechanics, and economic design behind the Canton Network's native token. (published 2026-03-27)
- [Bitcoin Miners Can't Hedge on-Chain. That's About to Change.](https://sawinyh.com/blog/bitcoin-miners-cant-hedge-onchain/): Mining difficulty just cratered 7.76%. Hashprice is scraping the floor. And there's still no permissionless way for a miner to trade the one variable that determines whether they survive the next epoch. Here's why on-chain prediction markets for mining metrics are the most obvious gap in DeFi. (published 2026-03-22)
- [How AI Is Replacing SaaS and Why Tiny Teams Will Build Most of What We Use Next](https://sawinyh.com/blog/micro-team-token-economy/): AI is collapsing the cost of software, pushing companies away from generic SaaS and toward bespoke tools built by tiny teams—and crypto tokenization is emerging as the natural funding model for this new wave of builders. (published 2026-03-10)
- [The untapped power of narrative in token investor relations](https://sawinyh.com/blog/narrative-in-token-investor-relations/): Public companies are good at telling stories with their numbers. Token projects have the data — but not the delivery mechanism. (published 2026-03-06)
- [The End of Process Theater](https://sawinyh.com/blog/end-of-process-theater/): Your Sprint Planning Meeting Is Already Dead. You Just Haven't Noticed. (published 2026-03-05)
- [The Case for Conviction-Aligned Vesting](https://sawinyh.com/blog/conviction-aligned-vesting/): Why time-based token unlocks are broken, and what should replace them. (published 2026-03-03)
- [The Verification Economy and the Intelligence Crisis](https://sawinyh.com/blog/verification-economy-intelligence-crisis/): Two competing models for what happens when the cost of cognitive work drops below the cost of a human doing it. (published 2026-02-25)
- [Scaling Founder-Led Sales: Structuring Your Early Business Development Team](https://sawinyh.com/blog/scaling-founder-led-sales/): Practical advice on how to structure early BD teams, based on Web2 models that scale well. (published 2026-02-24)
- [The AI Shock is Coming. The Government's Panic Will Be Bitcoin's Macro Moment.](https://sawinyh.com/blog/ai-shock-bitcoin-macro-moment/): If artificial intelligence triggers a deflationary recession, the inevitable government response will structurally reinforce the macroeconomic case for Bitcoin. (published 2026-02-23)
- [The Pre-PMF BD Trap: Why "We Just Need a BD Person" Is Rarely the Answer](https://sawinyh.com/blog/pre-pmf-bd-trap/): Why hiring a BD person before product-market fit is usually wrong — and what actually moves the needle. (published 2026-02-14)
- [Crypto's Real Path Forward: Finance Leads, Everything Else Follows (When It Earns It)](https://sawinyh.com/blog/crypto-finance-leads/): Finance has been the clear winner in crypto for a reason. Non-financial experiments mostly failed to clear the bar. (published 2026-02-09)
- [Tokens Can Compound – But We're Bearish on Default Tokenomics](https://sawinyh.com/blog/tokens-can-compound/): Santiago Roel Santos' piece 'Why Tokens Can't Compound' is one of the sharpest diagnoses of crypto tokenomics I've read — but its conclusion is already being disproven. (published 2026-02-08)
- [Rebuilding Tokenomics](https://sawinyh.com/blog/rebuilding-tokenomics/): Most token designs feel like recycled 2021 tropes that misalign incentives. Here are novel mechanism ideas from first principles. (published 2026-02-04)
- [Most crypto people waste conferences.](https://sawinyh.com/blog/crypto-conferences-pipeline/): Here's how I use them to revive cold leads, close deals, and fill pipeline — step-by-step. (published 2025-04-23)

## Elsewhere

- [Writing index](https://sawinyh.com/blog/): Every post, grouped by year and filterable by tag.
- [RSS feed](https://sawinyh.com/rss.xml): Full post index in RSS 2.0.
- [Site index for agents](https://sawinyh.com/llms.txt): Every page on the site (llmstxt.org).

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Source: Nick Sawinyh, https://sawinyh.com/
Nick Sawinyh writes on AI, engineering, product, and crypto business development at sawinyh.com.
Site index for agents: https://sawinyh.com/llms.txt