Launching and marketing your project | Amanda Cassatt

Transcript

[Music] thank you well I'm going to talk about marketing web 3. you got to do it otherwise no one's going to find out about what you're building I'm going to start with a some tweets from 2021 from our very own Chris Dixon web 2 is built on Advertising big companies like Facebook and Google make most of their money on Advertising it's funny for Facebook it's still in the 90 something percent of their revenue for Google it's in the 80s and many web 2 startups build their customer base using advertising when you build a business on Advertising the theory is that if you retain enough customers the long-term economics will

work out and you'll eventually be profitable web 3 takes a different approach by letting users and Builders participate in the growth of networks as genuine owners that means you no longer need advertising tokens are self-marketing when someone genuinely owns something and feels skin in the game they want to evangelize it and I actually added something here to his tweet which is Nuance the marketing just becomes the mechanism design and implementation of the self-marketing machine that process still requires a marketing type skill set but we're applying it in a new way so that sets the stage web 2 marketing

is really different from web free marketing some things are the same some things are different we're going to talk about how marketing works we're going to talk about how web3 marketing is different how to start marketing and what we've seen work well we have between um building the first web3 marketing team at consensus and serotonin we've probably seen more web 3 projects launch and go to market than anybody else and there are a lot of patterns of what we've seen work and we're going to share I think the highest impact ones some themes require so Community is going to be something we talk about and that can be kind of a hand wavy word but we're going to be really literal and tactical about it it

means something very specific incentive design so how are we going to motivate people to do stuff on their own of their own accord and then trust trust is a really big deal in our space we talk a lot about trustlessness a lot of the technology we're building is designed to take human subjectivity groups of humans deciding things in opaque rooms we're trying to take that out of the equation but getting people to actually start using our technology often requires having them trust us so there's a bit of a bit of a human element um okay let's get started so marketing fundamentals these are true in web 2 they're true in

web 3. there's nothing you can do about them um you got to know your product and right now you guys are founders so you know your product really well a lot of you are probably technical a lot of your engineers but you might not be or you might be employing someone at some point who is a marketer who's a CMO or a head of marketing and that person might not have a computer science degree and they need to and you need to really know your product um if they're not technical they need to ask technical people about how it works and to really understand how it works as best as they possibly can in order to be able to talk about it especially if you're marketing to a technical audience the next is know your audience true in

the traditional World true in web 2 very true in web 3. and just because you're building a web 3 product doesn't mean you're going after a typical web 3 type of audience you could be going after a new kind of audience that hasn't been introduced to web3 yet you could be going through a very specific Niche within web3 so you have to know who those people are and really talk to them and not fake it identify your audience channels so those people that are in your target audience what are they paying attention to what do they care about what kinds of problems do they have that they actually want to solve Define your key message how are you going to reach them on those channels that they're paying attention to and what are you going to say

build a marketing funnel so when you first reach them they're discovering you your message your brand for the first time and then then what do they do you have to have some way to engage them then you have to have some way to convert them to using your product then you need some kind of mechanism to retain them that thing is called a marketing funnel we're going to go into that in a lot of detail because it doesn't make sense to start doing the activities at the top until you build out the funnel because you've got to capture the energy that comes in from the top and turn it into stuff otherwise imagine like a funnel that's broken and water or something under pressure going through it just comes out the sides so you gotta send people down the whole thing measure

how it's working so at each of the catalysts of that funnel let's say people discover your product then you're converting them to engaging with it then you're converting them to using it you need to measure how well each of those Catalyst moments is actually going in order to make sure there aren't certain spots in your funnel that are broken and it's cool if you identify spots that are broken because you can do something else and optimize them so you got to set your metrics at each of those Catalyst phases in order to understand what's working and what's not at optimized so those are truths about marketing just in general web 2 web 3 traditional world but there are some really specific

things about Marketing in web 3. what is marketing in web 3 a lot of times we think of marketing when I first started the marketing team at consensus there was sort of like a hangover from web2 about the word marketing where it conveys this idea of trying to sell people things they don't want you think of influencers on Instagram Hawking vitamin waters with hashtag ad and the early people in our space and in the ethereum community very academic or they're kind of basement hackers and they don't like that kind of thing and so they're worried about starting a marketing team or starting to Market ethereum but marketing web 3 is more like a matchmaking exercise or it's a good way

to think about it you're almost like a market maker you're connecting people who would use a product If Only They knew about it with the product and so you're matching people up connecting dots and then you're solving the zero to one problem of building early community no matter how well you've designed a self-marketing system like what Chris Dixon was tweeting about it can be the best design system in the world that's going to intrinsically motivate people to go out and grow your project but you need to tell people about that in the first place so they get plugged into your incentive design system and that's the problem you guys are all solving early on is that zero to one problem of plugging people into your incentive design so a lot of the activities we're talking about in here are a zero to one stuff

and then once you've plugged people into that incentive system if you're a true web 3 project that means you want to decentralize your marketing over time to your community so you want to pass off functions maybe like growing your code base bug bounties meme contests but also a bunch of marketing functions to your community as you go web2 marketing is different from web3 Marketing in some really notable ways so if you've ever done Marketing in a web 2 context you notice that you are constantly using these third-party platforms like Google ads and like the various meta business Suites and in the

web 2 world marketing is basically an Arbitrage between the cost to acquire a customer and lifetime customer value and that Arbitrage takes place on these third-party platforms so that you're constantly paying the piper to keep spinning the flywheel of growth and continue being able to Target your own audience and you get addicted to that in web 3 there's much more of an emphasis on owned and earned marketing and we're going to talk about what those things are part of that is because of the stage a lot of web 3 startups are earlier stage and before you can measure things like lifetime customer value and Roi it

usually doesn't make sense to actually do big paid marketing campaigns because you can't measure that stuff so earlier stages generally more owned and earned but we see a lot of that in web3 and it's cool because it means that a lot of web 3 projects haven't and won't pay the web to Piper to Market themselves the way that um companies did in the last big technology movement so that's interesting um so instead of that marketing taking place as this Arbitrage in the middle um what you're doing in web 3 is building an incentive aligned Community that's going to be motivated to go out and grow your project and if you just look at that contrast you see that probably web3 marketing is more

sustainable over time because you don't have to constantly pay it's not this top-down thing you're incentivizing people to take actions themselves from the bottom up um so in web 2 your incentive as you grow your spend as those as you define those margins is to build this large centralized marketing team made of hundreds thousands of W-2 employees in web 3 what we see a lot especially as projects are Dows or decentralized or really invite their communities into their incentive systems you see really flexible and Lean Marketing teams that are sometimes composed of of investors and Builders and users taking the

initiative to help you Market your project and then also in web 2 you see these top-down marketing functions where you as the marketer or the CEO or the CMO is making all the decisions and you're coming up with everything yourself but in web 3 the pressure is actually off you because you are identifying the locations in your community where there are sparks where people are doing stuff that has growth potential and you're blowing oxygen onto those things and so you're facilitating growth and noticing what people are doing organically rather than having to come up with all the great ideas yourself just an example from early ethereum land when we were trying to spread the word

about ethereum in 2016 at consensus one thing we noticed organically is that meetup groups were springing up all over the world in San Francisco but also in Bucharest also in uh Istanbul really truly Sao Paulo really truly all over and so either we could control the messaging and say these need to be our meetup groups what are all these people doing they all need to carry our message or what we chose to do was to organize the organizers so we had all of the folks that were Meetup organizers that started a new ethereum Meetup all over the world we invited them into a

community where we would exchange best practices where we made sure all these meetup groups had money for beer and pizza or the culturally appropriate equivalent and we you know offered them standard decks and templates so they could make their meetup groups more official we offered them standard images and language if they wanted to use it and we also curated this kind of roving content series of new daps that were being built on ethereum to go visit all these meetup groups and talk to them which was great for new projects because they were able to get feedback they were able to acquire users and the Meetup organizers would always have fresh interesting content so it really worked for everybody

and in that way we identified something that was already happening we identified Sparks we facilitated rather than controlled we blew oxygen on it and that grew into fires so just as a thought just as an example for how you might do that rather than having to come up with everything all on your own uh community so this is a big talking point in web 3 you'll have heard everyone speaking about Community I'm actually going to just go ahead and Define it because um I was eating a bag of kale chips the other day and it said on the back we designed these kale strips for the community of people that eat multiple snacks a day like there's no community

of people like that like I've never spoken to someone else that does that about that that's so weird like that word's so overused and it's certainly overused in our space but it means something really specific so web3 is a substrate it's a clay it's a set of tools for building incentive alignments right that's what it is and Community is the incentive align group that works together toward the success of a project there are these three categories Builder investor user and we're here sitting in the office of an investor but this investor also helps you get users also um you know can is Technical and can contribute to code your the users of

your product could also contribute to your code uh these groups used to have bright line distinctions between them in the web 2 world and even sometimes adversarial interests with each other right the company wants to sell you the cheapest possible product at the highest possible price you want to buy the best possible product at the lowest price the investors want to take the money out of the company while still letting the company grow like everyone's misaligned even sometimes adversarial and web too what you do in web 3 is you use the substrate of web3 to collapse these three groups into a single incentive align Community incentive aligned thing and that thing is called community and the distinctions between these groups often collapse and become pretty

fluid you see this with like GameStop and you see this with the popularity of crypto I think we're gonna just live in a world where everybody will have some maker activities so some Builder kind of activities some investor kind of activities and some user kind of activities like no longer no longer is investing reserved for only certain people no longer is building reserve for people with only a certain kind of skill set right these things are all collapsing and we're all taking on all these characteristics ourselves individually and participating in groups that do this um I think that's where we're going this is a really simple marketing funnel um you can make a more complicated one

if you've ever read a marketing book I bet they had a more complicated one but this basically works you want to have your message be on a channel where your target audience is going to reach you and Discover it and there are some examples on there of what those channels typically are in web 3 if you're targeting a web 3 kind of audience then there's a catalyst or look over on the left a CTA a call to action that's going to take you to the next step of the funnel that next step is engagement engagement is a contract between you and the potential user where they say you're allowed to reach me again so whatever you've said when you first

reach them in Discovery has gotten them interested enough for them to say to you okay you can reach me again and maybe I've signed up for something maybe I've joined a community maybe I've followed you on a channel but whatever it is congratulations you can now reach that person again potentially then the next step is converting them to use your product and by the way you can hold people in an engagement holding tank AKA Community for as long as you want even before you have your product ready and that's all right as long as you have stuff to engage them with and I would definitely recommend actually starting to build that engagement holding tank even before you have your product ready the moment that you have something to say the moment that you know who you are and what you're

building I would start actually building this and keeping people in there it's almost like an engine full of you know electrons that are moving at a certain speed and you have to keep them moving and then you can activate them and catalyze them to do the next thing you want them to do which is moving on to using your products when you're ready so then you catalyze them to using your product maybe maybe that call to action is download maybe it's connect your wallet maybe it's trade swap stake depending on what you're doing and then your work is not over you want to keep them coming back and they're also going to be competitors potentially who are trying to lower your user away so there

has to be some reason why they stick with you as opposed to leaving for the competition and that's retention and there's some really cool stuff in the retention department that can send people all the way back to the top of the funnel if you want to incentivize people to refer their friends that can be a really great channel for Discovery and a great way to spin the flywheel of growth so um now we're gonna do an exercise for five minutes you have a pen yeah got a pen got the papers so there's there's a the marketing funnels up here and you've got it there and then there's a blank one kind of like a Mad Lib

and so if you want to take five minutes and fill that out for your startup what is your channel for people to discover your product or project what's your Catalyst or call to action for people to start engaging with it then what kind of Engagement holding tank are you going to keep people in and keep them active in then how are you going to action them into starting to use your products and then what's the channel where they're actually using your product and then how are you going to catalyze them into staying and coming back and using it

again doing the thing again and then are you going to send them back over the top back into the top of Discovery so I'm going to be quiet for five minutes believe it or not and uh go on adventure all right did that work was that interesting to think about well it's not random you're on a planet great so this is also on the next page of your packet

and might offer some inspo for what you want to put in that funnel if you're filling this out later or playing with it but these are some examples of organic owned organic earned and paid channels and you want to maybe keep this and look at it when you're thinking about your marketing either now or later because it could inspire you to think of a channel that you wouldn't have used perhaps otherwise as we mentioned earlier there is a lot of use of owned and earned channels in our space because it's zero cost other than the overhead of maybe hiring a PR person let's say so

own channels are things that are on surfaces that you control so that's your website website is really important we're going to talk about that it's an email newsletter if you're sending out the email newsletter it's a Blog if it's your blog if you have a community Channel or a social Channel That's owned because it's yours although you know these platforms these web 2 platforms are censorable so they could take it all away in a moment but let's call that owned um events if you're hosting them yourself you control what's in there so that's owned earned is something that involves a third party allowing you to use their Channel and

what's cool about using a patchwork of owned and earned is that when you show up on an earned Channel it means that somebody else was willing to carry your message and thinks okay this project or product is good enough for me to co-sign it by talking about it on my own channel and so you want to have both and it doesn't have to be traditional media not every project goes and gets traditional media coverage or even Niche media coverage but you can and you should if you can um but there's also earned speaking at conferences or meetups being a being a mentor at a hackathon these are all earned opportunities then there earned

content opportunities so if you can write a guest post or op-ed if you can [Music] write a guest post on the blog of another company and then there's partner co-marketing so if you have a B2B partnership with another company cross amplifying on each other's channels then there's organic influencer we're going to talk more about that so showing up on the channels Community channels social channels of aligned people those could be investors they could be users they could be B2B Partners those are all examples of earned and you want to have a patchwork I really think there's no such thing as pure PR anymore there's no such thing as

pure content it's just a big old soup of attention and you got to figure out what your target audience is paying attention to it can be a lot of different channels and then you've got to have your message be on all of them and be really consistent across them so don't think you just get to pick one of these you're going to pick the ones that correspond with where your audience is you're not just choosing randomly from here you're choosing based on the data of what your audience is paying attention to so then there's paid and people in our space do use paid you want to have some kind of way to measure Roi once you're doing paid spend otherwise you're spending money into a vacuum and you really want to only grow your paid campaigns once you have some kind

of traction or product Market fit and some mechanism for measuring the ROI of paid campaigns um but you can do them and basically your early your early startup marketing activities are just mechanisms for probing the market for early signs of traction and product Market fit and so they shouldn't be super expensive because you're just probing that surface to try to see where you find some traction and then when you find that traction when you find those first kind of granules of fit then you want to start throwing money after them and in our space you know we know that there's paid social um there's when I was building the the original marketing team for web3 at consensus almost everybody who applied

to those jobs had this very kind of calcified web 2 marketing skill set where they were really used to managing these big paid campaigns and optimizing them on the various Facebook now meta business Suites but at the time in 2016 2017 those channels that actually banned all crypto language so you couldn't say Bitcoin you couldn't say ether crypto blockchain or your ad would literally get banned you couldn't use on Google none of the meta Suites Twitter you couldn't even use MailChimp if you were doing paid crypto stuff because everyone was terrified everyone still is terrified um but now you can do that and um so we had to return to the original

roots of the marketing discipline which are much more kind of growth hackery routes and get out of that kind of calcified running a big paid spend web 2 mentality which is how we kind of retrograde backtracked into this mentality of okay what's up with your product what's up with your audience where are they paying attention let's just go to those channels let's not do it do it the traditional way let's not do it with this big paid spend so we know those platforms are available now we can use them as crypto projects as web3 projects that's fine and maybe there's a time to do that but there are a lot of other great things you can pay for so sponsorships of conferences side events at conferences those are really popular in our space paid media so there are a

lot of podcasts that people in the web 3 space listen to a lot of different uh YouTube shows you can pay influencers but I don't really recommend that if you're marketing to a webto a web 3 audience actually because you really want to emphasize authenticity it's actually different in APAC markets where people assume that messaging by kols is all paid and they don't mind that so it's very culture and Market dependent so be aware of that um and then everybody forgets about environmental ads but we do environmental ads with clients all the time we just did a big campaign um one of our partners block Damon launched a institutional self-custody wallet

recently and we we blanketed the Austin Airport for consensus with ads that institutions can solve custody too and then the ads end up on social and then they get actually a lot more reach than the Austin Airport it's funny you can repurpose a lot of these traditional channels like environmental or even like print and end up actually getting most of your distribution on crypto Twitter so for example my successor Neil who's now Chief marketing officer at consensus did this really cool thing where he placed a an ad just information about the ethereum merge in the Wall Street Journal took out a full page there was a

QR code we could go learn about the ethereum merge and download and earn an nft for reading all about the merge and people took pictures of this Wall Street Journal ad and that ad got all over crypto Twitter it definitely got way more Distribution on crypto Twitter than it did in the Wall Street Journal but it was just a cool juxtaposition to have something like the ethereum merge on a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal so I say this just because some of some of the things on here sound like old school but there's sometimes a new school way to reimagine some of these some of these platforms so here are some of the audiences that we talked to in web 3 and your audience for your project or your product may not

be an audience that already exists in web 3. one of our very first Partners at serotonin was audios and audios is like a decentralized SoundCloud and they were going after music fans and music creators so these aren't the web 3 audience you don't see any of those on here so a lot of web 3 projects are going after some kind of new audience that isn't in web 3 yet so this may not apply to you and they didn't want to talk to the web three people so this is dependent on your audience actually being this but if you are trying to talk to web 3 people these are the three types um so or the largest three types developers so b2d marketing um

there are kind of two main categories of developers there are sort of solo entrepreneurial basement hacker types sometimes formally trained sometimes not formally trained they're doing it themselves they're doing it with small teams and then their Enterprise or institutional devs often more formally trained often working for a larger company a more established startup so it depends and they often know different languages and are using different kinds of software and have different kinds of mechanisms for selecting which software they want to use so you got to know your audience a great way to Target developers is with hackathons and meetups so then there's B2B

um Enterprises are institutions we know what those are and then web3 startups so you want to think about am I targeting a big Enterprise or an institution am I targeting a startup and then you want to think who inside of that institution or who inside of that startup is going to be the decision maker about whether they want to use my technology or not and then who are the people that are going to influence their decision and those might not be the same people so for example a developer could be influential in recommending a piece of software that their engineering team wants to use and they recommend it to their startup CEO or CTO who then makes a decision

so you want to understand all those Paths of influence about the kinds of decisions that matter for your business in the company that you're thinking of when you when you think about marketing to a company when you think about B2B marketing how do you reach a company how do you reach a business well businesses are just made of people and so you want to think about who these people are and reach them as people think about them just like your other audience groups where are they where do they live what are they paying attention to what kinds of content what conferences are they going to what meetups are they going to what do they care about what kinds of problems are you solving for them what's their job what's hard about it what's expensive about it what's annoying about it talk to them because businesses are just made

up of people um I remember uh watching this was over a decade ago I remember watching slack spread like wildfire through companies where I worked and it was funny because here's how it worked a bunch of kind of random people in the company started using slack to talk to each other so suddenly a bunch of business processes are happening on slack in the company and then other people need to interact with those business processes and then somebody usually someone higher up needed to approve some kind of Enterprise license because everything was happening on slack already think about that like the influencers the decision maker how it all happens right it doesn't always start at the top down sometimes it starts from the bottom

out or the middle out made of people and then Traders so everything once it gets sophisticated enough becomes a financial product right even if you're weaving baskets if you get amazing at weaving baskets you're going to start an awesome basket weaving company that's going to IPO and then suddenly you're selling a financial product not just baskets and in our space a lot of a lot of what we do financializes earlier because of the nature of tokenization and so you might find yourself wishing to talk to Traders or you might just find that the truth is that Traders are looking at what you're doing and it matters what they think um there are two kinds of Traders there are a lot more kinds of Traders than that

but there's obviously institutional Capital but there's within the web 3 space there's D5 Traders so people that are using D5 platforms protocols they're usually trading a little bit more in the fungible token world and then they're nft Traders um so something like blur that comes about suddenly that's really appealing to nft Traders right um and those people are quite different from the people that are using Ave and compound and maker um when you're talking to Traders or when you care what Traders think when they're visiting your site they just need to understand like you want to broadcast to them true metrics about your project so they can understand how it's growing and so they can understand

like the tokenomics and how demand here or growth here might result in some kind of change in your your company's how your company you know values things they need to understand the the levers and pulleys for how value gets created in your company through like demand over here turning into value over there that makes sense um so this is startup school a lot of these projects that you're working on are early some of them I know are further on but I made a checklist of the MVP marketing assets that you kind of need in order to start doing marketing um we talked about this before with the

funnel but unless you have a funnel built out that's able to at least capture the energy from the discovery top of the funnel at that in that engagement holding tank you're just going to have all that energy fall out of the funnel so I would never send a partner to go let's say speak at a conference or I would never have them place an op-ed or do a big press interview unless they at least have these things ready because otherwise that energy gets created and takes effort but then it just goes out into space and It's Shouting into the void so this is what I would have ready before you start doing all that stuff that sends energy through the top of the funnel what you're doing so your brand and your key message what are you call

called and what does your logo look like and you can change this a lot later try not to change your name it's great to check out if anybody has trademarked your name uh it's it it's a whole complicated mess changing it some people have to but it's better to know from the start that you can keep it um otherwise you're going to lose some people and then your key message what's that sort of what's that elevator pitch for what you do that's really tightly aligned to solving the biggest problem that your target audience cares about the most one Clause two clauses you need your marketing strategy your marketing strategy actually is actually basically that funnel thing so what channels are you going to use what

are you going to say what are the catalysts that bring people through calls to action through each of the various steps that's your marketing strategy your website so your website is your storefront and everything that happens on there is your fault or your opportunity right so you completely own that page and so every you need to use real estate on that page to convert people into taking the actions that matter the most for your business and if your page fails to do that it's on you because you can change everything about that page unlike let's say placing a story in a media Outlet you kind of can't control a little bit

about what goes on there but this is the place you can control it's your storefront it's your store window you can put whatever you want there and we're going to talk next about what to put there because it matters a lot but you need a website social and community so we have this list on a previous page of all the different social and Community channels you can use do not start a social or Community Channel unless you have a plan and the Staffing for how you're going to put content on that channel there's a great analogy from City design people get scared walking around cities when this when the sidewalks are empty but they feel safe in cities when the sidewalks are full and so you don't want any channel you start that has your

branding on it to ever look like a ghost town so that might mean if you have a small team to begin with having fewer channels picking the ones that your audience is most present on and making sure they're actually really populated with content and that there's someone on your team that's responsible for growing them maybe with some metrics but don't start them if you can't stop them content this can be really basic your website needs to say something on it and we you probably need a deck if you're here you probably have a deck of some sort you might want some kind of blog saying that establishes your SEO key term saying this is what we are and what we're doing we exist we're building this

that's often very discoverable when people start searching for your company when they first meet you at that event or when they see your podcast or when they notice your fundraise announcement they're going to Google or you know now people are using other things they're going to ask gpt4 once it has a web access or maybe Sydney Bing because it already has web access about your website and then they're going to go look at your content or they're going to go to your blog um you need all these things to get started you don't need a million pieces of content you don't need every social and Community Channel but this is kind of the basics to get started we're going to talk about a website because it's so important and it's so

important is because this is the moment people people come off Discovery to engagement often on your website and so this is your opportunity to in an environment that you completely control convert people into taking an action that has a lot of value for you and so you might want to screenshot this this is a if this if this were the website of like a series C company it would be really lame but this is this is an MVP like early stage product website it's just a sample website let's not over index on it probably once you start looking around at other web 3 startup website you'll see a lot of them look like this to some degree and let's just talk about what's on it a little

bit so logo word mark up at the top on the left it can be somewhere else too but that's really common you see some some links maybe there's an about page with more info maybe there's a page about your team that's really great it warms up a project it shows that people are willing to lend their name to it and people are behind it then maybe if you have some social or Community buttons I have Twitter and Discord up there don't let that make you feel like you need to have a Twitter and a Discord then if you're a web 3 project often there's a place to connect your wallet sometimes that's up on the right I don't know how it ended up like this some conventions in our space just

bootstrap themselves into existence then here's our primary CTA text do the thing we want so that's the main thing you want people on your website to do and you can say that to them pretty literally or you know it can articulate exactly what your value prop is um and we'll we'll talk a little bit more about how to decide what's there and then there's a button to actually do that thing um and then on the right you'll see this a lot you don't need it but you can have it as a product snapshot and that product snapshot conveys that once you convert over to the other side of using this thing it's going to solve a problem it's going to look really simple it's not going to be crazy it's going to be kind of what you expect or it's going to

be even cooler and so that's kind of perceptually conveying that that's going to be what happens when you get to the other side then under that we have what I call a wall of trophies so that's logos if you're a B2B product of other companies that are currently using it maybe someone lands there it's aspirational they see a company they wish their company was like they fomo they want to use your product and then maybe you have some testimonials the best product I've ever used even if you don't have users yet you have investors they have something to say you can put something on there that offers that cosine that third party confirmation that it's not just you saying great things about yourself that other people whether they're users

whether they're investors say great things about your project and on the right you see I've labeled this thing the hero you could call it the Splash and that's what pops up when you click on the website very few people scroll you lose people when you scroll people only scroll up they're really curious about what's going on and so the most important things to you for your user to do on your website need to have proportional real estate on your hero because if you need people to scroll to do the thing you want them to do you're going to lose a lot of people so that thing needs to be there right when people land on the page and then another

way to say is that's everything above the fold which is an analogy from old newspaper days then under the fold okay now you're talking to the people that really care they're doing a little bit more research how it works why it's great I don't know what's there those are some examples you can have a list you can have a chart depends on what your project is maybe you have some more info about your team maybe have some photos that warms it up for people to see that they're actually people behind the project maybe you're a nons and you can't do that and you can use like an nft or a pfp or something all right at the bottom ways to stay connected but let's not worry about that almost no one made it to the bottom um okay so five minutes

you have this in your packet and then you have an empty Mad Libs version of it for you to make your own product website see you in five useful exercise Fab okay so we have five more minutes um so what we're going to do is talk about this really quickly so um a lot of people think that your brand will get community and attention and traction linearly gradually with a smooth line but actually happens really jaggedly and there are these certain moments that

catalyze a lot of growth and as a marketer you really need to spend a lot of time making sure those moments are maximized in order to get the most value out of them this is in your pocket but we're not going to take time to do this maybe you can take time to do this on your own to look at what these catalysts tend to be something like your first fundraise announcement something like your first big blog post your first partnership announcement your first traction story from a major media Outlet figure out what those things are for you and for your long-term plan and you're going to want to do continuous marketing activities like making sure all of your Social and Community channels have content but you also want to pour your most effort and most resources into making sure all of these big Catalyst

moments are really well taken care of and so you want to think about in advance what those are for you and there's another empty sheet in the little workbook for you to figure those out super quickly gonna go through some things that we've seen work really well and some examples so there's this concept that we call instant incumbency so trust one of our big themes especially if you're some kind of financial application or something that involves value you are going to need your user to trust you with their assets and that means that even if you started existing yesterday that you need to convey that you're legitimate that your experience that you're going to be around a long time and you can do that visually through visual design you can

communicate that to people so this is alchemy it's one of our very first Partners at serotonin they have a wonderful website I think that conveys that they are legitimate and incumbent and will be around even though they were actually the newcomer in their category the Challenger here's another example I wanted to throw this on here because this this platform is actually really new and the splash page is really simple it's just this but it's just so well laid out and it's so gorgeous that it conveys that they really know what they're doing and it inspires a sense of trust because it's so well done knife's Edge message so you should be able to distill the problem that you

solve and what you do into a clause maybe two Clauses but one Clause is better this is one of our partners collab land communities with skin in the game what they're doing is token gating various communities to make sure you have a token to get into them and that is what it is right like you're joining a chat Channel you're joining a community but you own some token you have skin in the game for what that thing is this is back to the Alchemy site the wall of trophies this is all a bunch of different companies that are using Alchemy and it's right there you don't have to scroll very much to get there it's right on the website and you don't want to hide your light under a bushel if there are a bunch of people using your company a bunch of businesses you

want to highlight them on there because it's going to convey to new users that they should use it too not every wall of trophies is names you can also have a wall of trophies that's numbers this is osmosis which is the leading decks for assets on Cosmos also one of our partners at serotonin and they are showing with a metric like total value locked that a lot of people are willing to trust their their platform with their with their value something like trading volume number of interchange transfers so you can have a wall of trophies be numbers if that's more appropriate for your audience and your product constant co-marketing when you're partnering with other businesses you want to make sure to cross amplify and reach each other's audiences and

channels it's good for everybody chain link is well known in our space for having had a machine around that since the very beginning check out their channels to see how they're doing it it's a great model I think this is something that we call endogenous influencer marketing or organic influencer marketing a lot of the time in web 3 when you're targeting web 3 audiences people really like authenticity and so they don't want to hear a page shill talking about your project they want to hear someone that's a credible actual user or someone that has skin in the game and is invested so what you want to do is take all of your friends all of your business partners all of your investors even if they have 500 followers to a million followers organize them into a channel maybe

that's a telegram channel so that they're leverageable repeatably to help you amplify amplify messages when they come out and just by being organized about that you can get a lot of momentum and here's an example of me doing that for a friend I have a friend doing that for me building a niche media brand or Community oftentimes we have this question of what do you do to start building your community and engaging people and keeping them engaged once they're in that holding tank if you haven't actually launched your product yet and this is the answer you think of your project or your company as a piece of subject matter so um we had a privacy a decentralized VPN company we started a privacy publication basically for them so that people would engage

with editorially relevant privacy content then join their Community then they had a lot of people in the community that they could then activate into becoming users once the product is actually ready so and this is Casper the mattress company this isn't web3 at all but they they started a kind of publication about sleep and they're publishing content that's editorally relevant so someone curious about sleep and then there's a call to action okay maybe Casper mattress improves your sleep in some way but you can think about the subject matter of your project or product as being like foundational to a niche media company and start publishing content around that that isn't just promoting your product but that's editorially relevant on its own then we're in web 3 and as marketers web 3 is the best toolkit that we can use to get people plugged into our incentive

system and and incentivize them to help work with us to grow the project some of the most successful token launches recently have been through the mechanism of retroactive distribution basically going ahead and rewarding everybody for their historical use of your product based on on chain some kind of on-chain freeze of activity great example one of the first ones of these was uniswap with the uni claimable where you could plug in your wallet and claim tokens that were retroactively distributed to you commensurate with how much you'd use the platform and then same with arbitrim recently and this is one of the best mechanisms to do token launches these days that we see really popular because it places tokens in the hands of the

people that already know and love your project and are active enough to go to a claim page um finally the community spaceship we often all right no graphic there but that's all right we often talk about Community as a spaceship at serotonin which is um imagine a spaceship coming in they put down a ladder they land somewhere random on earth a bunch of people walk onto the spaceship then they fly off forever and those are the humans they have to colonize their new planet or whatever they're stuck with those people forever your early community members are people you're going to be stuck with potentially forever so you want to be really careful about who they are what their intentions are you want to do things that don't scale talk to them

one-on-one make sure you're bringing people in that genuinely care about your project that want to contribute to it because they're going to set the tone for the future people that come in if you start your community with only kind of pure extrinsic incentives and people just waiting for you know when Moon we call them Moon boys when are you going to launch a token then other people that might be better contributors or better potential community members they see that and they don't want to join and so you're stuck so you want to be really careful about that early Community because that's going to be decisive to subsequent people and then you're stuck with them you have control as the founder at the beginning of who comes into your community you're going to lose control this is my book it's in the back some of

you have it a lot of this is from that book first uh web 3 Business book from a major publisher I think and also there's an nft in the front page of the book that you can use to join the collab land token gated telegram Community where we're all just chatting about web free marketing and getting our questions answered and meeting other Professionals in the space thank you here's my info please don't hesitate to reach out yeah thanks so much I'm Brandon I thought that was a phenomenal talk so we appreciate it um I think audience is a really fantastic example of a product that uses web3 technology but is marketing to a non-web three audience and it seems like that's specifically or in particular pretty challenging because if we're leaning on the incentives of

that token model but marketing to a group that doesn't really want to participate I'm just wondering were there any best practices or learnings from that process that maybe other companies can take advantage of yes totally and that's such a great question because a lot of web3 projects are going after new audiences that aren't in web 3 and bringing them into web3 but then they have some token and your token is going to have kind of web 3 traitery people interact with it by necessity right and so how do you segment that and so when audios came to us they're like we need we're going to launch our token and we want to put it in the hands of our creators that have been using our platform but we know Traders are also going to be looking at this and that web 3 people want to get involved here but

we don't want to bother our music fan Community with all this web 3 nonsense and we also don't want to be you know shoving music down the throat of God forbid of our of our web 3 Traders although they might you know enjoy it but the um the segmentation was what it what it came down to and the truth is if you set up like what we did is you set up a page that is about the tokonomics of the project and like it said audio on it which is the name of the token and that was a page on the website that you could go to and if you Google like audio's audio it would take you directly to that page and people that were just the music fans wouldn't even look at that page and so so I would just have a page like that

that's going to Auto segment and then what we did was actually so cool so we launched the token um we had dead mouse do uh this is during covet do a um twitch live streamed concert that was live streamed on the front page of twitch and we had a code in the concert where you could text a number to claim your tokens um and also they they retractively distributed a lot of tokens to the artists and the users on the platform a lot of artists made more money that day than they had for a year during covid and a lot of them were tweeting about it which was really exciting so that plugged them into the token incentives even if they weren't going to pay attention to every darn thing about the token yeah so last question real quick um I think as Founders we're kind of on the

hook to educate not only the the market but also you know the market segment that we're going after but also our internal staff and new people that are joining the company I'm wondering is there any strategy that you've seen where you can leverage internal messaging and maybe like all hands material and things like that and then almost Syndicate it in a public way and what do you see a future where like decentralized organizations kind of have similar messaging to internal stakeholders as they would to external they should so if you're going to decentralize stuff don't say stuff on the inside that you don't want on the outside and also just don't put stuff in emails that you don't want on the front page of the New York Times you know the inside and the outside are the same we're no longer in these centralized comms departments where this thing is

controlled they're only these spokespeople things are going to go everywhere as you decentralize so keep the message inconsistent it's great to be the same you know as below so above and you want to educate your full company if you're bringing in non-three web3 natives about the technology in an accessible way one great way to do that is my book which explains the history of of web3 from its origins in the early web they're also really great pieces of coursework like shifa that you can license or bring people in to you know educate your company about the origins of web3 and they're starting to be good non-technical content about web3 and everyone in the company should know that stuff I hope that everyone in our organization whether that's someone that

works in HR whether it's someone that is an assistant everybody knows about how web3 Works everyone has done transactions everyone used it has used a D5 protocol it's really important cool thank you hey thanks for the great talk this is just from blockus and so we're building the B2B space and we're bringing Web Two game studios to web3 so really my question is just like what are the most effective strategies for uh B2B and yeah what do you recommend totally so B2B it's really hard to think about how to Target a business because it's hard to identify with a business a business isn't paying attention to anything but businesses are made of people so it comes down to identifying who the people are within the business

that are the decision makers about using what you've built or that are the influencers that are going to influence that decision like people that have recommended or used like a freemium of the technology and you want to treat those people like any other audience and really understand okay where are they what are they paying attention to what do they care about what kinds of problems can you solve for them and Market to those people as people is what I would say makes sense another question is more related to budget right so B2B SAS a lot of in person so conferences events things like that but for a company that haven't raised that much money like it's always a trade-off so like how much would you recommend like budgeting for those things early stage so when you're really early every marketing activity you do is probing the

surface of the market for fit and that's going to be a very smooth surface at the beginning and you're eventually going to find a little bit of texture and you're going to want to increase spend proportionally to the amount of fit that you've identified right and so oftentimes events are a great top of funnel I would recommend going to events that don't involve like a huge expensive plane trip maybe ones that happen to be closest to you maybe organizing meetup groups maybe having local ambassadors anything you can do to save money like early ethereum days we didn't go to every single Meetup all over the world and incur you know Infinity travel costs we talk to those people virtually and had them organize things within their own communities so anything you can do virtually anything you can do to activate people on the

ground that are going to get excited about what you're doing anything you can do that's local that makes a really big difference love it love it so let's say you have a studio in Europe that's like your number one fan right but you don't have a token yet because you only have 10 customers so how do you incentivize them to or organize a meet up on your behalf I mean I would say that when you have 10 customers personally you shouldn't have a token yet you want to build like like the ideal token launch in my mind at this point is having a bunch of time of building on-chain history and data so you can actually do a freeze of that and have a retroactive distribution that rewards People based on past Behavior I think like web3 native people believe that when they're using a platform that involves like

on-chain interactions that perhaps there's going to be a token later so that belief tends to be the case and often people who are in like college University blockchain programs are really excited to just like be affiliated with the company as ambassadors so there and it does something for them in their own community so I would find people that have that kind of corresponding reason and people can do stuff for intrinsic reasons not just for extrinsic reasons when we were spinning up those Meetup organizers we were giving them like beer and pizza money but we weren't like paying them to do anything the the API of identity was kind of open for ethereum where people wanted to add that brand in a way to their identity they wanted to say I organized this in my community you can do that with Brandt super cool thanks

awesome well thank you so much for that Amanda that was a fantastic fantastic dog please join me when thanking Amanda Castle [Music] thank you