CVA Open Stage Night with FlowBank, Arcades Digital, Promote & Scale, Digital Oracles

Transcript

so thank you so much for joining today's cba open stage night this is um our new initiative only happening for the second time uh we had one last year uh basically we wanted to create this event that's very um organic and natural for introducing some of our cva members and giving a platform for networking um so by no means this is a very formal event um we want people in the audience to be interacting with us throughout the event so feel free to put your questions in the chat or the q a and then i can unmute you or bring you into the camera so we can have a bit a little chat at the end

um also this is the very first time that we have a 100 female panel uh which is very exciting most of the time we we see mostly men on these panels so this is really nice um to have you all ladies here um and i guess the theme of today in a way is community um slash marketing branding in the crypto space um because most of you operate in this in this field so i'm gonna start with a very brief intro um on all of you well at least just your name and where you work and your um your role and then you can feel free to introduce yourself

so first we have laura bernier co-founder of arcades digital we have sara simeone founder of digital oracles we have maryam farhat from flowbank and she's the head of digital marketing and we have yashi zheng and we're supposed to have ivana as well but unfortunately she couldn't join today from promote and scale um they are both co-founders of the company um would you like to say something about yourselves ladies quickly before we begin the presentations or do you want to include it in your presentation maybe that yeah okay so basically the

the agenda for the event is that we're gonna hear from these amazing female leaders from the space on what they do in their companies um and we'll have a short presentation from each of them and then we're going to go into q a and uh a short panel so laura do you want to kick off sure thank you thanks nikki and um thanks to the crypto valley association i'm really happy to be here with all the panelists here who are doing great things so thank you for the invitation um i will just share my screen i have a little presentation a very short presentation prepared for today's session

um my name is laura as nicki said i am a co-founder of our kids digital um you see here we've changed and updated our logo a little bit because we're moving a little bit into an incubator space we started off as focusing on nfts and now we're kind of exploring where we can go with arcades digital uh because there's so many venues where we can we can have a place so my background is an art art history digital curation digital preservation photography so i'm really in invested with the artistic side of blockchain technology so essentially this means nfts i find it a very exciting place to be

everything moves so fast and it's amazing to see how the technology is growing and changing especially in the past two years um so let's see okay so what we are we are a we're based in geneva uh we're a blockchain company specializing in the high value digital assets and nfts um we provide a number of services they're usually direct to client and we're also working as i mentioned as an incubator for stan for spin-out projects and stand-alone projects so we really have a wide variety of um projects that we work with right now um the majority of our work is really

non-fungible tokens and increasingly joining the metaverse um we have joined with metadigital uh which our partners in zurich called kubler we have a we have a house in decentraland and we do events like um italian what is that a treasure hunt we do treasure hunts in decentraland which is very fun and i'm sure we'll send out the invite so you can follow us and participate and win some great stuff so we do those occasionally um dossier digital is our spin-off based in new york and this is really one of the close to my heart one of the projects that's closest to my heart because we're

using archives and the archives of architects to develop um metaverse architecture it's absolutely fascinating um and our newest project is called nomica and this is going to be an esg platform um where nfts are the product so esg is environmental social governance and this is going to be a platform um which i'm sure we'll hear about uh quite a bit i know chris is very passionate about this so i'm sure he's going to be speaking about this soon um so art was really the first part of our of our company that's our foundation um when we founded the company in 2020 we realized the potential for blockchain

technology in the art space not just digital art but fine art um what you can really do with the technology to transport value and this kind of has informed the the beginning of our company and we've just been so surprised at the applications that we've had since then so we work with artists creators collectors investors to create entities and ownership experiences which includes display and also projects in the metaverse here we have the metaverse um a great topic i love talking about the metaverse um it's really exciting that non-functional tokens are so such an integral part of the metaverse you have wearables you have

digital art you have in-game play to earn assets the nfts really are the assets of virtual worlds and it's it's wonderful to see how they converge um so again we're we work with our partners to conceptualize um metaverse experiences we also um are an nft incubator so as i mentioned we work with the architecture from dossier digital which is actually the first project is live right now if there are any um soccer fans in the audience i highly recommend following meta soccer um we will be providing the um the digital assets for the stadia within the play to earn game and we're working with an la firm called nice architects who

built the crypto.com stadium for example everton stadium really world-class architects to build in this new environment and of course nomika which is our very exciting reward protocol uh tokenization project and um going back to the art we have been invited to participate at the venice biennale um as part of a nft dao curating um within the cameroon pavilion this is the very first time that a pavilion will be presenting um just purely nfts so it's very exciting um the nomika launch will be happening very soon and the meta soccer stadium drop by

dossier digital will be happening within the next few months um that's that's kind of a general overview of what we're doing um you can follow us arcade stuff digital arcadesvision.io and dossierdigital.io um thank you so much and i'm really looking forward to hearing from the other panelists thank you thanks laura it seems like you guys have been expanding and like what started as a as an art uh tokenization product now is becoming so much more this is really um later we're going to talk about this more in in the panel but thank you so much for the

presentation sarah would you like to go next yes sure i'll try to share my screen let's see okay so let me know if you see the full screen not yet we see the yeah now but it hasn't gone on full screen just yet yeah what about now no but let's see not sure why okay

well but you can still see it i mean it's pretty big so it's good absolutely sounds great so thank you everyone for having me here today um i'm sarah simeone i'm the ceo and co-founder of digital oracles we gamify and tokenize business growth so it's a little bit of a different use case from the ones that we usually hear about um but it is quite an interesting one so this is a little bit about myself um i have been like you know working for some of the world's biggest media companies and i mentor some of the most amazing startups uh in the blockchain and tech space um and uh i've definitely got quite

a lot of attributes similar to an nft series myself and the past two years has actually been a bit of a journey uh building this uh this project you know if i had like you know one dollar for every uh pitch presentation for every you know failed application for every investor inquiry for every node that i received i'd probably be rich or at least back then i could have probably filled part of my pre-seed round and i'm not alone because there are over uh you know millions and millions of entrepreneurs out there in the same situation so but we can actually change that and you know this is why we created digital

oracles as a grow to earn platform that monetizes and tokenizes the growth of startups and we're doing that in different ways first of all we want to turn all these meetings knows and work into liquid and tradable assets such as nfts and everything you know all of this is leveraged by our crypto community who give liquidity to the startups and support and signals to the investors and finally we want to remunerate all of those involved through royalties and rewards as part of this new growth economy and we are just like you know what we see as digital articles we are the missing piece of the early stage investment ecosystem because at the end

of the day everyone focuses on monetizing the investment and you know through equity success fees subscription fees whereas we have developed a way or a method to actually monetize growth so this is our ecosystem and how it works so we've got the deal flow providers or the investors who are the oracles we call them the oracles and the refer and support vetted deal flow we got the startups who are the engine of our platform who are you know turning growth assets and progress into tradable assets and then of course we got the liquidity providers so the market who can validate the growth and provide support to the whole ecosystem and this is how we're planning to use

this we want to basically give a true utility to nfts so by for instance you know giving royalties to you know those ones who are referring startups to the platform such as accelerators and incubators you know turning some of these documents such as pitch documents white papers and more intuitive content great rewards challenges tips grunts you name it and this is how it works a little bit from our live platform we will which will change in the next coming uh weeks anyway but you know you can turn pitches video pitches you know into into nfts uh you can earn from investors connections and of course i mean they can learn from growing by completed tasks on to our platform

we are going through partnerships so we are here of course and we've got crypto valley is one of our great partners and we got university spin outs such as university of manchester up here in manchester but many many more across the uk and other accelerators and incubators they all have different ways and reasons to actually use the platform from creating engagement to actually tracking the growth of their portfolio companies and segment their deal flow and we're actually seeing more and more vcs that actually want to monetize their deal flow and they see this is a great opportunity for them to do so this is our team we are totally decentralized we got experience you know spanning from blockchain to uh marketing communications private equity and much

much more illegal but i'm a lot about legal our supporters you know we've grown through grant funding we got some great names in there from universities to local governments and blockchains providers and we recently just finished our accelerator program uh powered by animoka brands and brink um we are basically uh already live on polygon and uh you know we're in the process of actually launching the second iteration of the platform so we are we're in on a mission really to turn growth progress into liquid assets and what we say is that what some box is to players digital articles will be to startups so it's a game changer and we really hope that you know we'll

be able to do this together thank you thank you sarah um that was very interesting i also feel like since the first time you guys have joined the cva um you have gone through a lot of growth and uh and this nft tokenization of growth is something very exciting and new and i haven't seen an nft like this before i feel like every day we see new and new um uses of nfts and this is really cool what you've done absolutely i think that was actually one of the key differentiation points for us to be accepted into the animoka brands you know program so but we look forward to actually exploring more use cases as we we grow

that's so cool and i want to hear more about uh the community that you have built and you know like all the startups that have joined um general oracles um so we'll talk about that in the panel at the end um miriam if you want to introduce yourself next and what you do at flow bank that will be amazing yeah sure thank you nikki for for having me i'm really happy to be on the stage so let me just share my screen for a second hopefully this works is it working yeah it's loading now we can see okay perfect okay

so yeah a brief introduction about myself um i'm miriam i had to start marketing at flow bank i come from a background of finance actually but i was never eager to work on a traditional uh bank so i got into crypto just after my studies um i used to be a crypto analyst but after a few years of doing that i wanted something more creative yet data-driven so i shifted to growth and marketing and uh yeah after crypto starter am at flow bank which is a digital modern banking solution um so flow bank was born from the idea of um

sorry you can see the right slides right because i am not sure of what you're saying right now we are seeing the very first light okay perfect so from bankrupt it was born from the idea of reshaping the swiss banking system uh we aim to facilitate access to global markets in general by making them accessible fair and transparent to to everyone uh so a brief uh introduction about who we are and how we get like to actually fund this company uh the bank was funded in 2020 by charlo isabe after like founding and leading traditional banks brokers and several companies it became clear that that the bank of the future

uh cannot operate with today's structure and costs while remaining competitive so there was like a clear need to undertake medications with a focus on applying uh advanced technology to the business and the entire value chain so by leveraging technology and fintech and adding the security of a swiss bank flow banking to to to future so we have been developing our services aiming to become an international player in digital banking so we offer a wide range of financial services we have online market making direct market access multi-currency bank accounts you can deposit you can do payments

uh we have algorithmic trading we are actually now a primary brokerage and custody and all of those services can be packaged for private and institutionals um flo bankston stands out from the competition uh thanks to its technology the most competitive fees and switzerland i mean mostly for forex and cfds we have the swiss banking license um and we are multi-asset platform i mean traditional asset classes and crypto assets are in general too fragmented market people earn money through crypto but like sometimes they don't know how to cash it out like easily with flu bank you don't need to even think about it you can actually like treat your crypto and cash

it out all in one platform and uh with a tab like a finger so to achieve this we have built two platforms i mean whether you are experienced or just getting started we have a platform for you so we first launched the flow bank app which is our solution for investors which is more swipe platform very easy to use intuitive like you can convert money in seconds manage your money on the goal buy traditional uh buy a fraction of shares actual access global markets and it's only mobile and you have flow bank pro which is more for advanced traders you can trade over 50 000 instruments from stocks bands options crypto cfds

uh etfs and soon direct access to crypto have multi-multi-currency accounts uh you have the basket trader risk management tool it's a very flexible and customizable platform and it's on desktop and mobile as a startup of course we are in a continuous innovation we recently introduced our statistics partner uh you may already like familiar with uh with this company it can share their pioneer in the crypto space um through them i mean they enable digital access digital asset exposure for investors on traditional exchanges and thanks to their offer now our client can access to crypto cfds and utps and we are working on a direct access to crypto very soon

so i mean merging kind of the traditional banking and uh the defy word like it's kind of a sign of industry transformation and we think that it will take our product offering to the next level so what is in the roadmap for the near uh future um we will soon launch the multi-currency debit card we will have as i said crypto trading and custody tokenization market makers and tokenized asset classes like private equities real estate etc and apis for brokers and high quality i mean high frequency traders sorry yeah that's it for me thank you for your attention and if you have any question

don't hesitate thanks for the presentation miriam it seems like so many exciting things are happening at slovenk this is such a cool process to be part of right and actually you just saw like our new rebranding because before we were like in a more like very green vibe etc and now we decided to really focus on trading and uh and investing and became more like techy and more focused on technology and like your the front end of our rebranding that is coming actually public on the 7th of april nice it looks really nice i was actually looking at the the illustrations and i was like wow

this looks really cool good job um amazing i have a lot of questions for you at the end um but let yashi take the stage now um and talk a little bit about promoting scale and what they are doing there and then we will circle back to all of you all right yeah thanks nikki to you know for organizing the events and also i see a lot of participants here okay thank you guys even though i don't know who you are but you know we know that you are here and uh together with us is a very interactive session so feel free if you have any questions please leave it in the comment section so as nikki said our company is called promo and scale so by the name you would have guessed what

we do yes we are a digital marketing agency so we help startups promote and scale so we founded this company and in zug switzerland because here people call it crypto valley right and there are so many companies right here but in the past few years while me and my co-founder ivana were working in this space and what we have observed is that a lot of web 3 or blockchain companies tech startups they are led by tech founders or maybe in-house they don't have marketing expertise so they tend to de-prioritize go to market or de-prioritize marketing as a result so most of people might hire you know friends and family members to

help them out with marketing or they hire freelancers here and there and in the end you know everything is fragmented and then you don't achieve the highest ri so what we want to do is that we really want to change that and bring the professional marketing services to the space and help tech startups that really level up their go to market and there are all their marketing activities so they can achieve the roi because what we say is marketing is an investment okay so a little bit about our company i'll just have few slides to um take you through so a bit about myself so in the past 10 years i've been working in uh international companies on international

brands mainly about marketing campaign brand management i work in northern europe europe africa congo singapore and then a few years back and then i moved to switzerland i joined the crypto valley space and i had my marketing consulting company in singapore back then it's called expand and then right now it's very fortunate that we get to know so many startups so also i work as a startup coach for the cv labs incubation program or oasis protocol accelerator and advisor for blockchain tech startup and i have my co-founder so we are a female team and the same was here i like it as a female team so she used to work in banking by ubs and also bitcoin swiss and also she had her own podcast in the past and

she's also a startup coach at cv labs incubation program so working with us we have a small team and also we have few service providers that work with us long term so we are pretty much decentralized and it's very close-knit to the team and we're very eager to you know work with tech startups and the founders and the problem we really want to solve is to help them that when they have limited resources unlimited experts in-house and we help them to go to market we help them achieve business objectives so the main service we provide uh nowadays it's there's a huge demand from my aft projects so i'm sure like previous few speakers already mentioned aft we have like about eight to nine

calls every single day so we have to close our calendar and so for this aft project we have proposed that you know social media management twitter linkedin discord and we also run paid advertising if they have budget if it's fit into the marketing plan and we also set up email marketing uh do newsletter and also create video content as well as blogs and press release and last and most importantly people like to use influencer marketing now we are in this you know we talk about blockchain we talk about nft influencers and communities are two major components in the whole go-to-market strategy so i would say our services are very straightforward and then we work with a small group of clients and we are very

passionate about it and if you have any questions if you have a project on hand want to talk to us so feel free to reach out and here's our contact information all right thanks yashi that was quick but i i think we can dive into um all of the things that you do during the panel um because i know you have some great insights and you're creating a lot of content that's very useful for startups so first i wanted to tell the audience that if you have any questions to the panelists you can raise your hand or you can just type into the chat box and i can move you into the

speaker group and i haven't seen any questions so far um so maybe i we can kick off with the panel and then see if the audience has any questions let me just put us in a gallery view perfect okay so i was trying to find a common thread between all of us today besides of course being females in the crypto space and um i didn't want to just talk about how is it to be a female and you know female leadership and so on because um i am seeing that there's more and more females in the space which makes me very happy and i know

we have other platforms to talk about this so let's focus on what you do your expertise um you know all of the amazing things that you're doing in the space and um the common thread between us of course is community and you being part of the syria community um but also communities of your own that you're doing right like uh for example sarah is running a startup community um laura and yashi um nf i mean and mariam marketing community community outreach you know the nfd community there's there's a lot of overlap between us so maybe we can start with the marketing aspect of community and how to build a crypto community

um mariam and yoshi what is your experience in is in like building a crypto community is it very different from a marketing perspective to other communities is it special in a way what works in reaching the crypto community what's most important in building your community uh well as she said like in the crypto world like community is one of your most important assets like there is no formula i like of building a successful community i mean it doesn't exist but like being consistent and building trust um around your brand can actually speed up the process

um according to my experience but for sure like it how has more experience than me for me like the first thing is really creating a story about around your company like storytelling is really powerful to build a relationship to connect with people to attract like actually members like to your community because like people need to relate to something to a vision and a mission and by doing that like you actually give a human voice to your brand and and capture attention um for me something very important because i started in the crypto uh space when i was like super young and i didn't know anything about it i did asha citizen but believe me it was super traditional like they don't talk about now it changed but before they don't talk about crypto at all like what

attracted me in rivers company it was like why i wanted to do an internship with them it was because like they were like they were voice of education to newcomers and crypto is full of technical concepts and by providing a comprehensive educational material you can have an opportunity to inspire loyalty and then like you can engage and reward your members it's not just like by throwing one tweet from time to time you can like reward them boost the engagement uh creating a community token based on the proof of merits yeah i mean those are the most important thing in my opinion makes sense and i i mean so you were um working at swiss park which undoubtedly

has a really really strong community like it's amazing how loyal and dedicated people are to swissport like do you what do you think they were doing best in attracting this community like how did how were they able to build this amazing community around them uh to be honest the first thing it was like creating a mission and a vision when everything everyone like was like feeling like part of this like really shaping the financial ecosystem like it was amazing how they were able to i mean it's all the big companies right like with apple investing jobs like actually like elon musk like tesla he he did like he actually created this whole vision of

sustainability around around it so it was like the most important thing and and also they did a nice show so after they bought the whole story white paper etc like they did there so they were able like to actually uh they didn't have any investor that had to control it that were actually working for their money to actually be able to have return on investments but also believing on the vision of the founders um and then like you really focus on education it's the same thing we are trying to do today at swissborg uh but then also like everything was rewarded on the proof of merit so like people felt like they had they worked for

something and they get rewarded and it's very satisfying makes sense that's that's what they said before so basically like my takeaway what i'm hearing is it's really important to have a clear story or a clear vision of what's driving the brands so people can make an emotional connection with it right exactly yeah and then once you you have these people who are connected to your brand then make sure that you take care of them and involve them in your in your activities and like dowels and you know token helps in these things right exactly and now you're building the same thing

at flow bank or helping them build an amazing community as well hopefully yes we are we are i mean we are trying it's uh it's a different uh it's a different industry but like we are really focused on on education on webinars like we are really trying i mean the world is hectic but also like the traditional um asset classes are not really easy to navigate neither so like through really webinars events trading bars by launching our trading bars really soon uh i think in may the first one really to help people to give them all the tools to be able to become smarter investors and try to enter the space uh in a very confident way we're also

supporting the trading game at ashley and epfl it's actually the opening ceremony today uh to act so i mean it's a demo account but like we have 100 000 to be able to invest and trade and then you have prices it's uh it's a huge thing we on boarded i think thousands of students so through those little things um you actually like build the community community and do you see a big difference um between the community of flowbank who is a bit more traditional and not a crypto community by default and you know your previous experience at swiss work do they behave differently

do they require motivation the personas are different first like we are not like really a crypto focused um a focused company what we want to achieve is really a multi-asset platform is like having less because the market is super fragmented and because i worked in i worked at swissborg i worked at private bank and now i'm a digital bank and like it's like everyone is fighting you go to the crypto community and they're telling you about traditional finance it's bad additional banking is bad and you go to the digital banking and they don't understand crypto at all like for them it's pure speculation while for me it's it's really i'm saying

something very cheesy but it's like really the best of both worlds that will be able to achieve like a better financial ecosystem like we cannot throw away uh years of of of work optimization and involvement and just like saying that hey like bitcoin and crypto were even like a revolution like it's a revolution for me it's like we have to take like what is in the blockchain technology and we have to take the expertise and the expertise of swiss traditional banking and actually make something out of it like you cannot like train only crypto like the the main rule of finance is diversifying your portfolio to reduce the risk so it's it's a whole financial ecosystem we are not fighting against

each other and like at flu bank is like yeah maybe it's not only crypto enthusiasts like that actually have this idol ideology of of decentralization of like something borderless and social british resistant it's more people that we have like really early investors that actually start coming into into into the market and like they invest like they're super like f they have the fear of losing their money and they rest in one stock and one etf and you have people that are curious investors that actually like they know the traditional market but they don't want to be left behind the technology and they want to diversify their portfolio in in in crypto uh but like they know they want something that that

they know and like we have a customer support for our uh 24 hours and for so like they can call us we can help them we can advise them but still in boarding is digital everything is digital but like we are actually having this bridge between both of two words and bringing confidence to people to enter the space even if they don't know it great thank you um yeah from your perspective um you know obviously you're helping all these startups scale and help them out with creating a good narrative and enriching their community can you share some of your insights of what you're seeing like the biggest obstacles for startups um in reaching their

community or like do you have clients who do an amazing job at community management versus others who are really not great yeah yeah it's actually a very good question but also a very big question because in the past i was working as a head of marketing for a blockchain infrastructure company right so if you work in a segment that is more infrastructure based but more b2b i think community building is less important but if you are in the space such as nft or people who actually need the community to make sure that the project is going to be successful then the community building is very very crucial so i can only say um from our

experience that interacting or working with all the ft project that they need a community what we have seen that the the successful companies or successful projects they always have a very clear roadmap right they tell the community what is their vision what is the mission and what's the reason the why like why we are doing this and then for the communities or potential community person they read it and then they feel that okay i can resonate with the company's vision and mission and the purpose so they might be interested okay that at the beginning that we can call it like a worm lead if you say things the sales term and then they have the clear road map and they are delivering everything

on the road map step by step and if you join their twitter if you join the discord right all the communications are very transparent they keep the community updated and even the founder they will take time to have this armor session have direct q a so so as a community member you already share the vision right and you can have a direct dialogue with the founder so you even feel even more close to the project and on top of that within discord is a great tool um that then you can have a lot of games you can have lots of events you can have competitions and people are helping each other and people are talking to each other so again you have a sense of belonging right so in a way i would say for nft project or b2c type of project

that needs a big community it's very important to share i think i agree with marion said tell your story share your vision mission show your roadmap what's the plan stay transparent and stay connected and stay authentic right so you're not like a corporate talking to a general public you are the founder of the project or you are the project team member you are being authentic and you are true to your community member and that you do all the things that you promised to do so then you have people's trust i think that's very very important even a successful project recently we have seen that even a successful project later they have the fund then they use the fund to buy a piece of land it doesn't eat in

decentral land right it's part of their road map but they didn't communicate it with the community so in the end people are saying wow they withdraw all the funds so then the reputation was damaged so again stay consistent they communicated throughout the whole way so i think it's not easy it's definitely not easy need a lot of hard work but once you gain the trust from people your communities will even help you to support and to gain other you know new fans or grow it yeah that makes sense and so i guess there's a team coming on that there are certain things that needs to be checked like clear communication mission vision involving your community and make sure that they can trust you like trust

is also very important yes happy hands um sarah from your perspective you know you're working with all these startups um do you see um when an investor comes in do they look at what community these startups have built so far is it a value um and when investors are you know considering investing in startups yeah it's a great question and um i would probably say that unfortunately um for a lot of startups and a lot of investors is a must-have um so at the moment unless you you have a very solid community uh they won't even look into your project and i feel

like you know this is a bit of a short-sighted approach because a lot of these communities unfortunately are inflated with bots are inflated with spam are inflated with you know a lot of nonsense um that you know and this is basically what you know they all they they look at are numbers and um you know instead of looking at interaction it reminds me a lot you know what nikki of uh when facebook started like you know advertising um and a lot of advertisers were completely blinded by you know the likes when actually a like is a means absolutely nothing so you know we have lost a little bit of perspective in terms of like you know what is really uh you know traction traction is the amount of you know uh

here is the revenue of course but you know the amount of users that you're able to on board you know with free advertising most of the times uh you know organic mainly um you know or you know in if you are more of a depends if you are sales or b2b or a b2c or it really depends on your business model but we should look at you know the bottom line uh we shouldn't always focus on the numbers of community you know because a lot of these people unfortunately that are populating communities nowadays are mainly like you know looking at rewards looking for rewards like you know they if you look at like you know the longevity of some of these communities is actually extremely you know short uh you know and as soon as you are gonna

commit like you know a faux pas you know it's just you know they're going to really penalize you and they're going to leave you and they're going to you know troll you and you know this is not the kind of community that we want to build and we should be building and you know there is another problem as well there is the education of investors investors believe the community is the number of discord users telegram users and you know but it's much more than that in our case for instance we speak to startups on a daily basis through our collaborations with you know uh yourself membership associations accelerators incubators and we are top of mind when it comes to like you know you know coming to someone who can actually help them with that specific thing and it's not necessarily happening through a social media platform but it happens via

email it can happen via whatsapp it can happen there are so many touch points and this is like you know what startups should probably start focusing on like you know how do i build a longevity in my community and focusing on like you know the the short tail and just basically empowering these users these power users to become like you know their you know advocates within you know their community and you know that is how i think you know we should you know also start educating investors on you know don't look at the numbers look at you know what these members are doing for this company are they supporting them are you know through their fundraising you know are they you know that this is like you know some who you know the job

that we should all be doing because otherwise what's gonna happen and i've seen several times unfortunately women and we are you know it's five of us today and there are many more out there don't have like you know a very loud voice in this uh you know in in this space um and unfortunately we are not seen as you know these thought leaders as you know many our male counterparts but doesn't that doesn't mean actually that we don't have like you know the content actually is probably most of the times the opposite because women tend to speak less and do more um you know so and you know unfortunately i'm very passionate and very honest about this you know and and you know it is it is the case and unfortunately you know a lot of

the female-led projects have got very small smaller communities compared to the male counterparts but that doesn't mean that we are not operating in the right way so i think again this is a question of education so and yeah this is what my i'll shut up now oh this was great i mean i agree with you we see a lot of projects out there who like you go to their twitter account and they have 70 80 100 000 followers and then you look at the engagement and it's all very repetitive it's not real right and then you question okay so if this company decided to purchase these bots and followers then how much can i trust their project i mean that's already a red flag right

but um and i also agree with you i love the woman talk less and i mean yeah and do more i love it it's there are a very few um women in the space that are being um promoted to the cult level like there's a lot of males and and that's probably one thing that definitely needs to change um i agree um laura from the community perspective like obviously you work in a space where you're entering the nft community and helping artists to promote their art and nfds are just blowing up and there's so much noise how can you filter it one and like where

is the place to be if you're an nft artist like where can you get yours your art out there where it will be seen how can you make sure that it's being seen by the right people just tell us a little bit about the nf2 community and its world that's a great great topic nikki actually and nft communities are actually amazing um if you're really following an artist artists are born to tell stories they're born to tell visual stories that's part of what they do storytelling is very important and i think the successful um the successful nft artist let's say really build those communities and over

time um i think that in terms of weeding out the you know the good stuff from the bad stuff i think that quality will always be relevant that's very true in art and i think people are able to see and recognize that and many of the ways that you go to a museum with actual physical art if you're looking at digital art there's a difference between something that you can tell is is quality driven and something that's different um i i think we we also when we talk about community i think it's it's interesting to look at the history of the past two years or the past year when nfts have really become a household kind of well our households our community is a little different maybe it's not all

households but it's definitely um it's definitely become part of the normal discourse is about nfts i think i sorry to interrupt you i read somewhere that 70 of americans have heard of nfts that's mind-blowing to me yeah it's it's incredible and you see things every day like on my you know my crypto.com app they were like now you could put nfts in your wallet so samsung is partnered with nifty gateway just yesterday announced um that you'll be able to basically sit on your couch through your smart tv and purchase nfts through through that platform so you really see this progression of people exploring the potential from the

possibility of of this but getting back to the community question because i think it's really interesting because when when during the past two years or when when coveted hit we were all kind of searching for community in new ways and clubhouse became huge nfts were huge in clubhouse telegram discord you had all these people that were searching for for common interests and i think you you can't really ignore that this technology has brought people together in so many ways um and it's it's incredible and i think okay so your question how do you how do you kind of become successful or how do you if you're an artist how do you get your work out there i think building a

community is definitely key um you have to have the the discord the telegram you have to have a following i think if you're going to garner attention um and if you don't want to spend you know a quarter million bucks on the marketing that it takes to kind of get you to that point you you really start by building a community i think a great example of this is the artist people who one year ago had this magnificent christy sale of 69 million i think everybody kind of knows about this um but the thing that people i think don't necessarily realize who aren't in the space is that when that happened he had been doing daily artwork for 13 and a half years so he had for 13 years he was building this community giving away knowledge for

free connecting with people being very open and generous and kind of promoting other artists that he was working with like lady phoenix is an incredible nft artist i highly recommend following her she is fantastic um and she works with so many different i mean she it's it's amazing but people are kind of looking at i don't know like how do you transform like your community to do good you know how how can you get your art out there and then how can you reach a wider audience you're seeing that now um jr the artist jr is doing nfts for charity support um you see i mean the esg's nfts are moving into

the esg space there's i mean there are a lot of little mini communities that are that are growing out there we kind of circled around a little bit sorry maybe that's something to explore like the micro communities because i feel like with nfcs it's just an ocean and it feels so overwhelming and then how can you tell what's going to have value i mean obviously you should buy something that has value to you as a person but then of course you see all these people making all this money on left season it's hard to differentiate what is real and what has value behind it so maybe focusing on finding your micro community and being

from a from a influencer side being a micro influencer might be much better as a goal than trying to gain i don't know a million followers like this just seems unrealistic from from actually even from our experience that even when we help uh nft projects to to promote right actually most of the really good solid projects with uh founders have experience they have the funds they have a plan they have a road map we all agreed that sometimes maybe it's best to just approach the micro uh influencers right and because they create better content they're more engaging and they are even open to have

a like a zoom call with the project founder to understand why do you create this art what does it mean you know what's your plan what's your mission vision and then some of the influencers they can resonate with that probably they create a better content helping you to promote well even most of time the bigger ones they have a standard package like this is how much this is how much this how much and you are just one of the you know hundreds of tense uh projects in their video ad every single week yeah that's true um okay i think we have a question from christoph um sarah you said that i seen one question um asking from the audience um what would you advise for people who are

not in the crypto space and don't have a crypto background in in finding a job in this area i think it's not community related but it's a good question i think we can all relate to it any of you would like to take it or make a suggestion i think oh sorry laura go first it's okay no problem i think i love this question i think um it kind of brings it together if you know if you have no experience then search for a community you know there are so many so many communities out there that can be tied to your individual interest in your individual skills like the crypto valley association the fact that you're here listening to a panel about about these subjects already means that you're investing in a community um and

education there's so many free resources out there you don't have to get a degree at a university to to learn about this there's really so much out there so yeah find a community and just engage that's what i would say yeah like without understanding your background and which area you know what type of job you are looking for i think just in general my advice from my personal experience my advice would be i come from fmcg industry in marketing but now i'm doing marketing in the blockchain industry and tech startup so at that time what i did is that i know this is my personal interest and i have a very strong why and then i have the area like my expertise in this

particular area marketing but i don't have industry experience so what i did at that time is i participate in different hackathons i want hackathon and i develop mvp with hackathon teammates and then i read a lot of books about blockchain and i participate events and also i think once you equip yourself with certain knowledge you don't have to be the expert if you are not in the software development area uh just have have confidence you know you everything you can learn there's nothing you cannot learn and then pair with your background from your previous professional experience and find the niche for yourself and then go with what laura said you know attend events like this now you already get

advice from us and you already know us and you can connect with us on linkedin or you can go to crypto valley conference or you can go to you know blockchain week in paris you know church get to know people talk to people i think they'll you know the industry is growing every day we have so many female founders here and many of us are not founders in the past so as you can imagine how many job opportunities will show up in the last coming months yeah yeah i think and start knocking yeah go mariam no sorry it just wants to add something and i think like to be honest the crypto industry is more open like when you go to traditional world like they have like more strict standards like it has to be this the resume has to like have this and this and the the

crypto space is like open it's more like i don't know more helping each other in a very open way for the greater good and the whole philosophy about it is it's yeah it's easier to get into the crypto space i think yeah i was going to say that that i agree with you i feel like you get more responses if you knock on doors in the crypto space than you would get from reaching out to traditional um like traditional industries that's one thing and then the other thing is what i see from the cva side is that we get um individual members who are interested in crypto they have not entered the space they don't have anything they start joining working groups they come to these events and

then they find people from these working groups who are very open and very friendly and then they make connections and start working on projects together so it's all about just dipping your feet in the water and try to connect with other people i think it will come to you yes many people are entrepreneur entrepreneurs in this space so like you can be a little bit more entrepreneurial as well you know just send people email reach out to them on linkedin like miriam said if you are open right it's not like you have to talk to the hr submit your cv and go for interviews yeah and then if you have experience from a different market that experience translates to the segment of the crypto

market like if you were doing marketing in some other place of course those marketing skills are going to be just as useful in the crypto space um as before um we have another question that was sent to sarah sarah so i think this will address to you sarah first um the question is is in your experience are investors supporting your mission um with knowledge connections etc are investors part of your community or more like distant people who are like standing further away from the community yeah what an interesting question from christoph um so are they supporting my mission well

uh they struggled to understand my mission at the beginning because um we are looking as i said at the beginning like you know our key differential key differentiation point is uh to monetize the growth rather than the exit of startups so we are basically in a way creating a additional revenue streams a lot of these investors didn't even think about before so it was an interesting way for us to educate them on this but as soon as we set the words we're going to help you to monetize your dual flow and then they started to understand straight away what we were all about and i think you know using the right words with the right audience is key

and that is where i think yashi probably is you know can do a great job there because i mean it's all about using the keywords that your audience use on a daily basis without using a lot of jargon which is no using anything so they basically understood us there with regards to you know supporting us in terms of knowledge and connection you know it's a difficult one connections um you know if you are when i'm talking about like you know um establishing a relationship with an investor normally it's about like you know establishing a relationship with a potential girlfriend or wife you first have to take them out for you know you need to court them you

need to take them out for dinner a few days before your you know and it's gonna spend you know you're gonna spend a lot of time talking to this person understanding their pros and cons ups and downs and then finally you pop the question and you know that is a very so you have to build trust and the trust can only be built if both parties are actually you know talking in a transparent and honest way and that doesn't always happen with investors in the relationship between you know investor startups there is an asymmetry of information and will it will always be there but you know at the end of the day it's all about like you know staying you know on your on your path and uh keep doing what you really believe in and you know

hoping that other people you know will understand and will support you along the way one thing for sure we keep talking about you know female investing we talk about like you know a lot of there are not many female investors in the space especially you know when we're talking about fintech but even more so in the blockchain area um and uh you know i haven't seen a lot of support from other you know female entrepreneurs either uh to be honest in terms of opening up connections um i've seen that move from the male counterpart funnily enough simply because you know they have more connections themselves and sometimes you know they want to pass you you know the uh category b investors they probably

you know they they think like you know you could be potentially the suited you know for so um it is like you know but again it's all a question of um as i say uh pursuing what you believe in and do your homework and just chase everyone that you think that could be a good lead for you and in terms of investors being part of our community um you know yes we're seeing that some more and more investors big investors actually are part of our community um probably because they have bigger teams and they understand you know blockchain differently um but yes we're seeing that there is an increase in interest well we're running out of time but i

still wanted to ask one more question from all of you and maybe that's the closing question um [Music] and i'm asking this because a lot of like the audience for this open stage night is usually our startup members um so my question is how can you build the community and what can you do in terms of marketing when you have very little budget right you haven't been funded yet um and that's the case for so many companies would do you have an advice to them what can they do better what can they do with with small budget that will still get them attention or still build their reputation and yes do you want to take it first

i can i can take this um yeah so before in my presentation we talk about when we work for project we always look at how to increase the roi using marketing as investment so in this case if you have a small investment and i would really recommend also it depends on what type of company you are what type of you know target audience you have i would recommend that if you are a founder be proactive go out to reach out to other companies and projects that they have similar audience as your target audience and then try to create content educational content with them it can be on youtube it can be on twitter spaces it can be like um

how would i say maybe a cross promotion right if you want to acquire new users give their users some kind of benefit or discount so collaboration is a very effective way to penetrate into what we call earlier micro communities so i think that's uh very cost efficient yeah and the um is there from like what i see a lot of the times what startups don't do a good job about is being consistent um like making sure that your messaging on your website your social media accounts the way you talk is consistent it doesn't have to be complicated it doesn't have to be um very expensive but consistency in my opinion is key

yeah and it's free right like you don't have to hire somebody to just make sure that you're speaking consistently to your audience um the problem there though nikki is that um you know startups always have a moving uh goal post right so they keep changing uh you know their products they they tweak their products services and so on and so forth and when you start building your online footprint you have to remember that you actually have to change left right and center because otherwise this is not gonna work um and you know with regards to you know what your question i totally agree with yashi i think you know first of all is build your your your own persona or like your own reputation and then start

building it together with others so partnerships for us it's been like you know a key to actually start uh closing some good partnerships because i mean they are the only they are cheap uh you know it's all about relationships uh most of the time it's one one relationship with that their key stakeholders on the other side so it doesn't take a lot of resources from a startup point of view um and of course i mean then you can do ama sessions and much more you know so i think we are all aligned with that for sure anything else to add to the what they can do also with this low budget or that would be the main thing for you the partnerships are the things that you see that they're driving the

audience and are not very cost heavy yeah yeah i agree completely for me it's like partnering with other projects like you bring like a double value to the to your community or users or followers at that time um also like really meetups to be honest like when i used to work at swissbar by bringing this content like this educational content like we we sex we we succeeded of building a huge meetup community around the world like i mean in switzerland we had like six thousand uh members and each time we were doing a meetup at our office or somewhere at our co-working space like everyone was there like networking

sharing like ideas and talking about how we can all work together like for the mass adoption or the greatest good like years ago uh so yeah there is a lot of things but also like i'm talking about like now digital marketing like a lot of people i mean they underestimate the power of seo but like by leveraging content marketing and seo together uh you can really like increase visibility of your brand that's a very good insight because i yeah i i feel like seo is hard to do but once you get it done right then it gives you so much benefit so and i just i would just say um also

just i agree with with all the panelists here is really like building relationships and having those partnerships because you never know what someone else is going to bring to your life even if you're asking them for something you never know what connections they have and really being open and going out there as i think you said nikki the the crypto community is really open you can you have a bit more luck i think um communicating than in in more traditional places so okay i i mean i think you have all listed very amazing points and hopefully this will be useful to some of our members and will help them a little bit um in building their community better

which is communicating better um reaching out to people i think there were a lot of things that we meant you all mentioned consistently um you know storytelling uh creating an emotional connection with your community trying to reach out to micro communities rather than to everybody and appeal to everybody um building trust so those are really amazing things that they can take away thank you ladies so much for taking the time it was a real pleasure to have you all um and i'm sure we'll have you back on some other cva events on different topics because you're all leading the way in your own industries and thank you for that thank you nikki thank you

everyone thanks for the participation have a nice evening thank you so much thank you everyone bye