Marketing 101 for Startups: Token Launches, Memes, Reaching Devs & More

Transcript

If I want to understand my audience and where developers are landing and what they're seeing, I need to be like fully integrated with developer relations. People just want to get out of their silos and to sit with somebody who's also trying to solve what seems like impossible problems. Welcome to Web 3 with A16Z. Since our show covers both tech trends and company building, today's topic is all about marketing, including differences between marketing in crypto and traditional tech. The conversation shares a candid

look at what works and what doesn't when it comes to building reputation and community, attracting developers, hiring teams and agencies, launching tokens, building founder profiles, and more. Our experts are Amanda Tyler, who was most recently head of marketing at the Optimism Foundation, and who was formerly at Polygon, Coinbase, and Google, Claire Cart, chief marketing officer at Aztec, who previously was at Risk Zero and SoFi. in conversation with Kim Mallosvich, CMO at A16Z Crypto, who is formerly VP of comms at Coinbase and who has spent decades in tech at A16Z, Skype, Yahoo, and elsewhere. As a reminder, none of the content should be

taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a 16Z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments. [Music] what role should we play as like marketing and comm's people? Like should we be out in front or should we be more behind the scenes? And I thought of you Claire because you've talked about how being out in front it's you know maybe also because you want to sort of build your profile yourself but also because it's been really just productive for you in terms of building your team and also for your own project. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that. I think

like, you know, in my time working as a marketer in in tech, it's always been the assumption that you're going to be behind the scenes, right? Um, and and I think that model works, right? Like I don't think that every marketer should be out in front necessarily. My time in crypto, I've worked for very deeply technical founders who themselves aren't always as comfortable putting themselves out there. And so we were often like missing that spokesperson or missing that opportunity to be like, "Okay, someone just tweet about it, right?" Like we have a question, we don't know where to go. You know, our industry is so small.

It's like you just need to discover that needle in the hay stack. So I started putting myself out a little bit because of that. But then also, you know, marketing is like so important in crypto. Building a community is so important. I think people just want to hear from as many executives as they can. So I think marketers have like a different role to play in crypto or can play a different role. I don't think we have to be necessarily 100% behind the scenes. And then yeah hiring like again it's looking for this needle in a hay stack, right? Like there isn't as much marketing talent in crypto as I wish there was. I wish there was more and like we all have to cultivate it and I think it's gotten better over the past five or six years. being a known brand,

like having people refer talent to you, and then also having talent be like, "Oh, yeah, you know, I've heard of you. Absolutely. I'll take this call even though I'm working somewhere else right now or whatever it may be." Right. It just really kind of like speeds things along. Yeah. And I think it's especially a superpower when you're working with really early stage projects and companies where maybe they just haven't built the reputation yet. So, for you to bring some of your own profile to the table, I think it helps move the needle for the whole the whole project. I think it's been helpful for me to build a presence on Twitter specifically for hiring because you can build that trust with people who are interested in working with you, right? And if you're especially working at an early stage

startup, it's like, oh, they don't really understand what the values and ethos are of that company yet, but they know what yours are, right? They trust you. Yeah. And so they trust you and they they are like, okay, I know what you've done before and I'm interested in doing something that you would be interested in doing. So yeah, let's chat. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think too, like I do feel like most people go to work for people and not companies necessarily, right? You want to like the company mission, vision, the work they're doing, but I definitely go to work for people. And so knowing who that person is that's DMing me to come and work for them, like I am going to take that call. Yeah. Um versus, you know, maybe feeling like, okay, I've never heard of this company because as

you said, a lot of them are early. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think like that is a cryptospecific thing or do you think that's just in general? And I'd just be curious to kind of like also take a step back and talk a little bit about what you guys think is really specific about crypto marketing versus more general tech marketing. I do think that crypto is more of a cult of personality. I mean there's always been cults of personality in TAC right like we think about Mark Zuckerber's Cheryl Samberg and you know and those people definitely did a lot to build their personal brand right to write books and to you know do all of these things um but I think crypto is is even more so that and I I am I'm not sure why I think cuz it's smaller and

it's more accessible like for me specifically um like when I was in my early 20s I built a really solid Instagram following based on like non-crypto stuff. That's cool. Yeah. Like mommy blog stuff. Um but then when I came to crypto, I saw this opportunity of like being a big fish in a small pond, right? As a creator and like a content person. I was like, "Wo, it's so accessible to just like put your voice out there." And there's so many little subcultures that exist within crypto that are very clear. You can kind of like pick one and understand the cast of characters really easily. Whereas like you know a Zuckerberg or so you know he wrote a book you said yourself like it's the the entry is so much like harder and crypto

we're so early like there's not many of us. Yeah I agree like crypto is still so early and most of the action is really still like on the infrastructure side if you think about it right so how do you differentiate yourself as a project and like go after that audience? Yeah, I think you stated the problem really clearly for us as marketers and that our addressable audience is so small. So if you think about it, yeah, I guess it's 30,000 now. I guess 2024 was 23,000. I know this cuz I often use it as my like ammunition to like, why isn't this going viral? I'm like, okay, there's 23,000 people a month actively contributing to repositories in our industry. And I worked at Google like eight years ago uh

for developers. I worked in the Devril side. So I've always worked in marketing for developers. And even at Google, I often would be like, well, there's only 28 million software developers in the world, so we could only earn 28 million if we reach everyone. Views, my friend. Right? So they're same problems, but obviously the scale is like it's 0.08% of software developers in the world that are contributing to crypto projects. 0.08%. And I I know that cuz I use it as my I'm sticking this up here. Yes. And it's really important to remember that and to remember that your addressable audience is not a general audience. Yeah. It is

truly a very niche small general audience. And how you differentiate your product with a very niche very niche small audience is by understanding them onetoone. That's the literally the only way. So there's what do developers want? You have to think about that, right? If you're trying to solve the problem of oh my god, our audience is so niche. How do we reach them? Well, what are their problems? Composability in rollup world. Number one, to build an application that is composable. Number two, economic upside, right? So how can I benefit from this very tiny industry, right? Where I'm maybe not getting paid for providing public goods and software. And then number three is a value system. So, how

as marketers do we build a value system that can attract developers to our cult? The third one though really hits home for me because I think there's a lot of if if you go within a team and you you're the marketer and you're trying to talk to product and edge and crypto research and understand okay like what makes this different and what would make this attractive to someone. Most of them focus on like the things you can do with the technology, right? But there's not a lot of focus necessarily on that idea of economic upside because anyone who joins you and wants to build is essentially saying this is going to be their full-time job, right? They're hitching them to your wagon and you know it better be good, right? Cuz this is their livelihood. But then the values piece like I think

developers I found like they really do want to join a movement. They want to have a sense of identity and belonging because they're risking so much on this. You know, like these platforms are early, the tech is early, and they might be leaving a comfortable job or, you know, not continuing their PhD program. They're making really serious decisions. And so I think feeling that there's a sense of belonging and a sense of place is so important. Um, and so yeah, in addition to like, okay, this is what the tech can do and then what's it going to get you? It's going to get you this opportunity and it's going to get you entree into this group, club, cult, whatever you want to call it. And then the other thing I'd say is because there's so few people, I think in tech, like we are obsessed with this idea of

scale. And I think sometimes it really kind of like blinds us to how you bootstrap things when it's early and we're still early. And so I always tell my team like, okay, we'll find a couple things that we can scale. You know, we have email marketing tools, right? There are things, but don't come to me trying to scale our entire developer program if you can't tell me all their names, their dog's name, you know, I like these people, right? And that doesn't scale, but there's we do things that don't scale in marketing and crypto. That's just a fact. So, I I see a lot of people trying to skip to the scale phase. And I'm like, what are you scaling? Like, who are these people? Why do they care?

get your first 10 developers on board and loving you and that's going to yeah that that's going to move the flywheel. Developers are like very strong word of mouth demographic, right? They tell their friends if they've had a good experience. So focus on the things that don't scale and then that is going to create like this, you know, kind of like rolling stone that just gathers momentum. So you know there's a lot of these each of these like layer ones have their own kind of cult if you will and own personality and vibe and culture. you guys are both in the have been working, you know, very heavily in the Ethereum ecosystem and I'm curious like, you know, how much does kind of riding the vibes of that Ethereum econ like leaning into it, like how much does that

play into marketing for a layer 2 project or does that not matter as much? Amanda is more experienced in like the Ethereum ecosystem than I am. So I was at a layer 1 previous to Aztec and so this is actually something I'm thinking through quite a lot and also you know the kind of the vibes or the energy around Ethereum like eb and flow and there have been times when people are very excited about it Ethereum is going to save the world so many amazing things and then there's also been times where people are you know upset at the leadership of the foundation or they have concerns you know so it really es and flows um so this is something that I don't know if I fully figured out yet.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think like listen in rollup world every L2 is a cultural extension of Ethereum. Ethereum has built this culture and this like public goods infrastructure in a way where it's welcoming to everyone and anybody, right? It's permissionless. It's borderless. We really want to see technology built solving different issues across all of these rollups, right? So that's what's special about Ethereum is the fact that there are all of these competitors working together to scale Ethereum. And what that brings us is co-opetition, which is a word I use often, like even when explaining what,

you know, building on Ethereum is like or even when I'm explaining what the super chain is. Mhm. And I think that creates a very interesting place to be a marketer in because we're constantly trying to market the business, the L2 as a business, right? The business is incentivized. But as a marketer, you cannot forget why we're here and the foundational elements of why the rollup is doing what it's doing and all of that is to scale the world computer Ethereum. And I think if you weave that into messaging to answer your question specifically, um, that's helpful. But over the years of marketing Ethereum, I find that what's actually the most

powerful thing is if the technology can prove its value to Ethereum and then it gives us as as marketers ammunition and energy to drive the Ethereum messaging. It's one thing to put top of built to scale Ethereum and it's another thing to have your gas token be ETH, right? and not allow custom gas tokens in your standard config for your stack. Is that because you feel like the developers in the Ethereum ecosystem are that loyal or do you feel like it's I mean there you could argue like they just want to be building great stuff and it maybe doesn't matter so much that it happens to be part of Ethereum. There is an EVM developer like EVM compatibility is very

real. If you look at all the developer reports, there's definitely been a shift to other ecosystems like gathering steam, but I think Ethereum is still like the the hot molten core of where like crypto developers are. Yeah. Well, I also wonder just like so Bass has done a really phenomenal job and when people are drawn to Bass, building on Bass, do they really think about the fact that they're building on Ethereum or are they feeling like they're part of the base ecosystem and Ethereum sort of um value prop becomes more of a background? I when I think about this I sort of think about like the size and scale of an L2 versus like Ethereum and kind of like the resources

that they have to deploy. So in the case of base, obviously like they're part of a publicly traded company and they have a war test and a huge team and just a lot of resources, right? Mhm. I think for L2s that maybe aren't as well resourced, like either in terms of like the money that they have or the team that they have or the expertise that they have in house, you know, maybe sort of attaching yourself to Ethereum more is like a really smart way to, you know, kind of associate yourself with like a larger brand that has like more pool and more credibility, right? And you can kind of sort of like find your way in and and see how you can like get developers or users that way. Yeah, I think foreto toe with Ethereum, right? In

terms of like a lot of the resources that they have to deploy, right? Like build on base, build on base, and you don't have to wrap the Ethereum messaging in as much if you don't want to. I think it's a good point though, Claire, that some of these L2s, some of them are in better. it it's about the resourcing and so some of them are going to hitch themselves maybe a little bit more tighter closer to Ethereum if they haven't quite built out that resourcing yet whereas some of them they're farther along like base and like you said you know pulling in the resources from Coinbase like they can stand on their own a bit more I want to ask you too about you know the role of community managers developer relations devil and how that fits in with

marketing like do you feel like that should sit as part of marketing do you think that should just be a really tight collaboration and how have you seen that work? I've built and led teams under both models like one where it's kind of like an integrated like fullfunnel marketing team where everything from you know awareness consideration trial conversion and I would consider Devell like you know to be middle and lower in the funnel right they're trying to support the builders who've already heard about you to now take their first step or support them through like a deployment right I think like there's pluses and minuses to both I think with Aztec like our devrils are much closer to our product team and our PM like our PMs

because of the complexity of what we've built like I actually think that that's a good thing but it does require there is like quite a lot of friction right just to coordinate like making sure that we're all targeting the same type of user that we want to move through this funnel making sure that all of our programs are linked so that we're not bringing someone in and then you know Devrell is sort of getting a hand off and speaking a totally different language to um or vice versa that we're bringing the wrong type of developers in at the top. Yeah. What do you think? I believe that developer relations and advocacy should sit with marketing just maybe it's just like my marketing experience in Devril but things like documentation being the primary surface top of funnel as a marketer like I think

of documentation as being like you know a developer Google how do I build with the OP stack where do they land they land on the documentation who's owning the documentation who's owning that language who's owning the kind of like consist consistency of of the funnel. It's it's Devril or product managers or product. So if I want to understand my audience and where developers are landing and what they're seeing, I need to be like fully integrated with developer relations. I also see in crypto specifically, Devril is turning more into like this public facing kind of like yeah content creators and they need to because there are so many problems with developer

tooling today that are causing so much friction for anything of value to be built in our industry that I think it's so important to see a face on a video explaining This is where you find the thing and the documentation. This is how you build. These are the problems I'm solving. I've gone through like we had like an hourong coding sesh video. God, it got so many views and engagement. People just want to get out of their silos and to sit with somebody who's also trying to solve what seems like impossible problems. So, I think Deborah in crypto specifically should probably have more of like a

marketing flavor. It's really important for all of these projects to be, you know, promoting and um kind of raising up the developers that are building on their chains. And I'm curious like how do you guys think about that? You know, how much focus do you put on it? How much focus do you think should be put put on that? My sense is it kind of depends on where you are in your, you know, L1 L2 journey. I think if you're farther along you're a Salana or whatever, obviously a lot more of the focus should be on, you know, what are people building on our chain where you're maybe a little bit earlier like an Aztec. You kind of have to do a little bit of both. But I'm just curious how you guys think about that.

Developers really like hearing from and about other developers. And so I I think like the more that you can highlight success stories, it goes to the upside, right? Like what's in this for me? It lets you project the culture of the community of the chain of the tech, right? Like we're building in the privacy space. So that obviously attracts people with like a very certain values orientation. So I think like showcasing developers who are active in your community and who are finding success is a really really effective way to market to developers like that really does hit like what can the product do, what's in it for you and like what are the values and cultures that you're going to find here. It's a little bit of a cold start problem, right? because when you're trying to

attract your first couple developers, there's there aren't success stories to tell, right? And so then you do really have to focus on things outside of that. Like, okay, what are the use cases? What are you think maybe the potential economic opportunities? But yeah, like for my team, as soon as we get those couple builders, okay, they're building and maybe they've raised money and you know, there's all these different kind of milestones I think that we're looking out for where we really want to try to champion them like as much as possible. And I I say this to my team and and I say it I say it pretty openly like yes I'm the CMO of Aztec but I actually consider myself more to be the CMO of people who build on Aztec and so if you come and build on Aztec and you need marketing support like you can call me

you know I'm I'm your girl and I place one of our builders on Laura Shen like I I will go to bat for whoever builds with us because that is something that you can do that's so high leverage for people in your ecosystem. they don't have the resources to hire a full-time marketing hire yet. So, how can we get them there? Um, very similar to my world, actually, where it's your portfolio and how do I support the portfolio? Exactly. It's kind of that's my portfolio, right? Doesn't always scale. Well, but no, to your point, the wins that you get are very high leverage. Yes. Yeah. It doesn't it doesn't scale. And sometimes, you know, you're supporting projects and, you know, it's just it's all across the board, right? market's a priority for them one day and you build this whole plan for them and then the next day

there's a fire going on in their codebase and they can't you know so it's not always linear but I think it's one of the highest leverage things like a marketer at a project can do in their ecosystem or in their portfolio of projects yeah I agree I look at marketing in this industry like similar to how how you just positioned yourself as the human coordinator like across as the ecosystem. Yeah. Because it's not only lifting the developer stories up, but it's also being able to find them and deliver them to product managers and be like, "Hey, this person is having an issue with X, Y, and Z, and I nerd

sniped them into like, you know, helping us refine the product here. Take them, support them, help them." So it's yes the visibility but also like simply can you build the thing better with our direct onetoone support. I found you in this repo asking a question like I found then I found you on Twitter then I found you on telegram. Let's get your product into a place where it's really sexy and get you that support and then we'll tell your story. Right. It's like yeah Amanda's online so soothing skills for developers is next level. She she should tell you should tell them. You should tell them. That's actually one of my questions is like how do you keep a pulse on your community so hard? Yeah.

How do you, you know, and how do you kind of al filter through that feedback of like you know the noise and the signal and um especially like there's a lot of bots out there. There's a lot of fake stuff out there. Um yeah, I'd love to hear your tips. Um, so we had just released a token standard that is an interoperable token standard and I wanted to see if people were immediately using it and to understand like where they were were using it. I wanted to find somebody integrating it into their launchpad like at the very early stage.

So I went into the repo. I saw who was like cloning the repo. I was like looking through all of the names. I click each one and on GitHub you there's like GitHub is like a social profile kind of so you can see like how long they've been a GitHub like developer you know like on Twitter it's like been on Twitter since whatever so all of the names were like created their GitHub profile 20 minutes ago created their GitHub profile then I'm just scrolling scrolling scrolling and finally I'm like okay we just released a token standard in New Year's I guess people think there's going to be an airdrop associated because the word token is there, right? So, it's like I'm looking I'm looking and finally I find a couple

like real GitHub developers, right, that are in there using it. Find their name, find their Twitter, message them on Twitter, ask them what they're leveraging it for. Ask them if they understand the benefit cuz I just written up all the content, right? I want to know like, does this make sense? It's a novel idea. Like, this has never been created before. do you understand what the use case is for it um direct onetoone got great feedback like implemented it in the messaging passed them over to product was like this person is using the standard right now teach them how to use it in in an even more efficient way um this is what makes Amanda great by the way it's like one to one to one I'm not kidding like

it's like fully in the trenches yeah well speaking of tokens so you know there are a lot more network tokens. So, speaking of not network tokens, I'm not talking about meme coins and so that's that are being launched with the regulatory environment starting to clear up a little bit. People are seeing blue skies ahead. They're feeling like, oh, this is our opportunity. We have companies our portfolio sometimes are asking us, I want to hire a marketing/com person who has done a token launch before. Claire could have anything to do with that. I'm kind of cur I'd love to hear your thoughts on like how you prepare for a token launch.

Um I want to know too what happens after a token launch and how specialized is that? Like how is that different than a product launch for example? Should it be positioned as a product launch? So love to hear your thoughts. There aren't many marketers who've had a successful token launch. Yeah. That's why when they're like I want this these people that have done I'm like okay so we're talking about five people. Yeah. there just I mean there just aren't many there aren't many people but I also don't think that it's you know sorcery or alchemy right I think there's there's things you can pull in from like other marketing disciplines right marketing is I always tell my team you know marketing is an 8,000y old practice and people have PhDs in it right so we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time like we can look

outside of crypto to like how can we understand this I think the thing with tokens is that they do function as a as a product right like there's there's certain ways in which they're structured which kind of dictate in many ways if they're successful or not launch or long-term and so you have to understand what you're launching just like anything so I think saying like we're launching a token you know it's like okay like you know what are the tokconomics and then how do you use that to build a strategy I think a lot of people approach token launches as I need to pour all this gas on the fire and go super hard right away maybe based on your tokconomics and what things look like, maybe you should kind

of start quiet and slow and build momentum. I mean, there's so many different ways to approach it. So, I think the first thing I'd say is try to sit down with whoever structured this product and understand what it is you're taking to market, right? Don't be fooled by just token. Um, there are so many different types of tokens. And then also I'd say like just get started early because launching a token really is a global exercise and if you've mostly been speaking on your brand channels in English to oh interesting you know European and US audiences and you haven't managed to go all over the world where are people using tokens in their daily lives what does that look like

where are people trading tokens like what does that look like and trying to understand the different markets is like its whole own exercise and if you can't hire one of the five people who've done a successful token launch, you can educate yourself, right? Just like you would if you were to do a global product launch. And then I think the other thing is like I I do think that I I tell the team like the day we launch our mainet, the day we launch our token, that's day one of the work that we now need to do, right? Don't see it as the end point. Yeah. It's the beginning. Yeah. Similar to an IPO, right? It's similar advice.

Exactly. If anyone said let's go on a road show, do our IPO and then you know hope for the best like that project would never get listed and their investors would have a fit. You know the whole idea is this is your opportunity now to you know access capital markets newly recapitalize the project. What are your goals around that? And so figuring all that out and then also seeing it as day one like because once you launch the token there's a whole other host of dynamics that now come into play is your team ready for that? You know now there's a global community that may feel one way or another about the token on any given day. Those pressures can really affect the team both because they're hearing these things externally

but also now because a lot of their compensation is tied to something that on any given day goes up and down just like if you've ever worked at a publicly traded company you know like that comes into play. And so I think there's a lot of things from traditional tech that come into play the day you launch a token. Are there any concrete things that people can take away? So one thing in particular is you know do you have a white paper talking about the token structure tokconomics that you can put out there and you know make transparent. That's something that we advise our companies to do. Um what are some other kind of concrete things like you know you talked a little bit about the feedback and managing some of that kind of feedback after the launch like what kind of systems can you set up? Is it,

you know, making sure you have your Discord channels and your other various channels like really monitored, you resourced so that you can have people engaging and following that? Like I have this model for like community strategy and theory and I won't get into all of it, but basically like I think you need to set out to decide like what type of people are you wanting to invest company resources in engaging with long term. And what I mean by that is because you brought up earlier, you know, there's there's bots there, right? There's now there's like LLMs that tweet and you don't know if the person being very vocal about the progress of your project is a real

person or not a real person. You have no idea. And so I think you have to get laser focused on like who are the type of people that we really want to tune into and listen to. You know, we can take in feedback from across the market, but who are the people we want to tune into? Hopefully by the time you've launched a token, you've done a test net and you've cultivated that community of people who are like deeply aligned. And so I would say yeah, getting your Discord really well structured, making sure that you have things in place like you know weekly or monthly community calls where you actually get to talk to the people that helped you launch the network and you know if if you're in like proof of stake, right, which I am and have been, those people are operating the network. So they're

holding tokens in size and and that's to perform this like activity that's really central to keeping a decentralized network running. So I think like you definitely listen to those folks, right? You listen to your node operators, your validators, whatever you call them in your system. So I think like understanding how to listen to these big players who, you know, may not be institutions, they might be homestakers, but they've really helped you bootstrap the network. Um, tuning into their feedback and then figuring out what other people that you want to tune into. But I think if you try to like listen to everything online, you're going to get a lot a lot a lot of noise. To switch gears a little bit, I mean, I think one of the challenges in the crypto world is that you have these split organizations, right? You have like a foundation and

you have labs. And I think marketers really struggle with, you know, figuring out like the role of each. They're also resourced differently. Sometimes you have marketing resources on both sides. And I was kind of curious how you think about that, how you work within that world, you know, how do you maybe stay kind of in line but not too in line, right? Because they have to be separate organizations. But what are your thoughts on that? What are the challenges of working in that kind of environment? I've personally never experienced having a marketing team on both sides. Um, my team services both sides. Um, in my experience in work, if you're specifically for you're working for

both, you have to understand how to weave both in together, but almost like separate the story in a way if you're thinking about it tactically from like a social handle perspective. Um, I try to find thought leaders on the lab side to tell the story rather than labs telling the story itself. So, I'll get like a product person, right? I'll give them a Twitter badge, which I've seen you do, right? and saying, "Hey, we need you to distribute this information, these updates that we're making to, I don't know, custom gas tokens." And that person will deliver the information and I'll repromote right from the lab side.

So, I think there's like different ways to manage that. That's how I've managed it by making mouthpieces for labs and then running the foundation side from like the brand awareness kind of part of the strategy. I've worked under a similar model. I think the challenge for that is in any ecosystem like when you have a duplication of resources you're also paying all of those people and so I think it does get really tricky to h to have like both teams sitting in both orgs. So there were some things I liked about it and then there were some drawbacks. So yeah I see pluses and minuses. I think like maybe I would I I loved having another like strong

marketing lead in the ecosystem to collaborate with and you know we would have little marketing summits alongside um DevCon, Dev Connect, right to talk about like kind of our marketing goals for the ecosystem and that was really great to have someone else to work with and also maintain that really close relationship with all the contributors at labs, you know, because it gets harder to maintain that. You're growing your team at foundation and it gets harder. So there were some really good things about it. But I think like a lot of ecosystems especially when the markets are down you know treasuries are less and like maintaining you know a GC and a CFO and a CMO in both orgs can be a little bit taxing. So you know every founder out there or many of them are

looking to kind of figure out how to build their profile some more aggressively than others. Some maybe are coming at it and coming to folks like us and saying, "How do I do it?" Whereas sometimes folks like us are going to them saying, "You need to do this, right?" And I believe they all need to do it in some way. What advice do you have for these founders that you're working with and others because I know you're also working with some of the projects, you know, developers that are building their own projects. Amanda, you said this really well. It's like how do you build your profile without being cringe? So start with you. Yeah. Gosh, there's like like founders are people too, you know?

But I think like my my advice to a founder as I'm coming in to to support with marketing is always let's build you up as a domain expert and not as a brand shiller, which is cringe, I think. So what I mean by that is let's make sure that your communication is providing credibility. to the product without directly shilling the highle you know narrative for the product. So let's highlight the problems that the ecosystem is having from your domain expertise. Let's build in public through your domain expertise. Leverage your channels, whatever that domain expertise

is, right? Rather than yay, superchain interop is coming. Native interop is here. Go use it. When founders from optimism speak, they are heard because it's not often and they speak from domain expertise, which I think is special. I wish they did it more often, but but I think I think that they're following that formula pretty well. I think whenever I'm working with founders, what I advise them to do is like think about sort of like the lowest friction way that they could share their ideas with the world. So for some people, like for me, getting on a podcast like this is fun and it's energizing, you know, and I love it. If you asked me to sit down and write everything that I would have shared in this podcast in like a formal pros,

that's a lot higher lift for me like energetically and in terms of like mental friction, right? Like I'll I'll procrastinate, you know, I'll do all of those things. Um, for some people getting on a video is so easy. For others it's super anxietyinducing. So what I try to tell founders I work with is like first let's talk about the easiest way for you to communicate. Like what would be fun? You know, if fun is writing a 10,000word essay, like let's do it. You know, um if fun for you is like a casual conversation with some question prompts, like let's do that. And lean into their strengths. I mean, some are writers. They they prefer, but they're very effective. They don't necessarily have to be on stage. Right.

Exactly. And that's the other thing. It's like if giving big keynotes is like sucking all your energy and stressing you out, like maybe we don't need to. Maybe we don't need to do that. Maybe we do. let's just figure out the thing that is gonna excite you and figure out how we can kind of like make that even easier. Yeah. Um and then figure out like a distribution strategy for it. And then also just leaning into the things that they really love and care about. Um you know, if they're funny and creative or if whatever it may be, like if we can inject some fun into it, if that's working for them, like I think that we should try to do that. Um I kind of think of it as like what is your comfort zone and how do we lean into that? and to your point like reduce the friction

and then what are your our stretch goals for you so that you can continue to grow um but let's not maybe start there like I think if you have a founder who is just building their presence figure out the easiest thing it is for them to show up for and then do it well and put all your effort behind it like get everyone in the company to support it um when it goes out and just figure out like how you can kind of have those real foundational moments that you can build momentum off of. Yeah. Um as opposed to being like, "Okay, just get out there. You need to tweet 10 times a day." Now, I mean, have something to say, say it well. And then kind of see where it goes from there. Often times I have marketing folks coming to me

saying, you know, my founders are really coming to me to or expect me to figure out what they're going to tweet about, what they're going to write about, what the story should be. It's, I think, unrealistic to expect that a marketing person's going to come in and magically come up with the mission, the value prop, the really core thesis, the vibe, everything for the company. It really should come from the founders. I'm curious what you think. I see myself as a thought partner to my founders on whatever they need, you know, whatever whatever things they struggle with or whatever challenges there are or I know someone from outside that I can bring in, right? Like a really great ghost writer if they do want to write that

long form content and okay, I can help them source support but you know there's a reason I didn't found the company. Yeah. Right. And and I think like founders carry so much of that like culture, the founding DNA. They have the technical vision. I mean that's why they got backed. And so yeah, I think it's really necessary that that flows from them. Now what help they need with that is like a great conversation to have, right? like and if the answer is let's do an offsite and we need to lock ourselves in a room for a day and I really need to bounce ideas off someone I would love to do that but I'm not going to be leading that session in terms of like the idea generation exactly yeah so facilitator thought

partner um just assisting however I can what refinements do we need to put it through to make it you know coherent and like well packaged and how can we kind of make it land with like a punch you know totally a successful marketer It has to have a direct relationship with the founder. Like there's just no way to build the heart and soul in crypto of an organization without having that onetoone with the founder and understanding their like true vision and and why they're doing what they're doing. We're the support system for their story. Yeah. Let's talk about resourcing marketing. Resourcing. Um, I'm often asked, you know, when is the

right time to hire the full-time marketing person? Um, when or should I bring in a consultant or should I bring in an agency? I know we all have a lot of thoughts about this. Go ahead. People ask me, "What's it like marketing in crypto?" Like people that have no idea. I'm like, "Well, we're oftent times marketing ideas and dreams, right? So, we're pre-product market fit. Oftent times, we're trying on new outfits, seeing what works, what doesn't work. And I think there is a time and place to bring in a storyteller and a a distributor for that like building in public stage, right? And I this is my personal opinion. I think the best time to do it

is no later than like 6 months before the product is ready because you don't want to be shilling something that doesn't exist for so long. Then you get into a hole of like, ooh, what is this project? Are they actually going to deliver anything? what is it even? You know, like there's just no point to hire a marketer before you even understand when your product is going to land. I would maybe caveat it by saying you could bring someone in earlier if a lot of teams are very committed to building in public and they need the participation of their community to get to launch, right? if you're running a really decentralized test net and actually before you have a quote unquote

product or before you have a mainet like you need an audience node operators to participate. So, I think like when I talk to founders, I usually just try to peel back the layers of like, okay, well, what do you need to get this work done? You know, um if if you were going to hire a marketer, what would they do? And just like really asking those basic questions, sometimes you peel back to like they feel a lot of pressure. That's not a great reason. Um, but if it's like, well, we want weekly retros and we want to really like bring everyone along with us, maybe you do need like a part-time or a full-time person inhouse to be like the driving force behind that. Yeah. And what do we think about consultants versus agencies?

Um, oh gosh, a I've had personally have had a lot of um trouble onboarding agencies. I think in our industry the domain expertise and knowledge base is so niche depending on what project you're at. You really have to take the time to educate the humans that are going to be participating and contributing to the marketing work and that takes time and if you want to work with an agency you have to spend time educating them on the domain expertise of your specific product or else it's not going to work. Yeah. agencies I find I mean there's the really large kind of one-stop shop agencies in our space I think you know there's pluses and

minuses to that then there's like the really boutique agencies that do very specific things if if you are skilled in marketing and you know how to assess agencies like I prefer to work with more boutique providers because I'm bringing them in to do a very specific thing and I can work very closely with them to make sure that thing is of very high quality and so if you have partners you've worked with over the years and you know they're going to dig in and do great work like those are gold to me but again founders don't necessarily have those trusted relationships and so I I think founders are a very tricky spot when it comes to like hiring an agency hiring an agency or getting a boutique contractors I think that they struggle with like vetting them right and managing them. I mean, it's one of many

things if they don't have an in-house marketing or comms person, like they're managing an agency. It's like, you can't do that. To your point, you have to get them up to speed. You have I mean, there it's only effective if you're talking to them constantly and bringing them in and treating them like, you know, a full-time person, which a founder just usually doesn't have time to do. And, you know, and then you have to know what good results look like. You have to know what the right expectations are. And I think, you know, founders, unless they're particularly talented in marketing or have done it before, they don't know where to start with that, right? So, I think they often times end up disappointed. Um, because they're like, "Wait, I spent all this money and they think time, but we would probably say, well, you spent should have spent

10 times more time to get what you wanted out of them, and then I just didn't get the results." And then it was like, "Well, what were you expecting the results to be?" There's a perception at least amongst the founders that I spend time with that the minute they sign that agency contract all marketing problems are solved. Yeah. And it's kind of like they've onboarded a marketing factory sometimes even just internally between your peers. It's hard to keep a handle on the narrative daily. So imagine bring layering in another layer makes it hard. I when I've worked with small smaller boutique agencies, I like to hand them a very small like campaign with boundaries and a very clear narrative that I know is not going to change too much and just kind of package it up for them in a

little brief and that seems to be the best way for me to work with with an agency. Oh, briefs. You said my favorite. Yeah, they're very important. So, in terms of structuring a marketing team, so let's say you know you guys come on, you're maybe the first marketing, full-time marketing hire. Who are your first, second, third hires that you make? I want to hear this from you cuz you just did it. I did just do it. I did just do it. Um, okay. The first person I hire is I just think about them as like my ride or die. So, I really look for someone who I've worked with before, um, who I know gets my leadership style and we're just going to be able to like get in person and like

hash stuff out and just get our work done, right? Um, cuz when you're the first hired, like, yes, I'm the CMO, but I'll run the Twitter account. I mean, I'm not I mean, you have to be a little jack or jill of all trades and no no no no project duty or whatever is too small, right? You just have to jump in, roll up your sleeves. Exactly. So, like I look for the person who is going to do that with me and be super cool and actually energized by it. And I think anybody who's building an early team, like hire someone you can really trust and work well with because it it it kills you building the team if now all of a sudden the person that you hired you're like not vibing with and you're not doing good work with, then your hiring plans get put on hold because

hey, wait a second, what about this first person you hired? You know, they're not quite up to speed yet. So, I really go with a known quantity. Um, that's a good point. I mean, I think look, hiring plans do change and so if you can find somebody in the first two hires that can do more than one thing, they're not overly specialized. It gives you more flexibility if you know the headcounts gets frozen all of a sudden. You have to pull back. Um, you can do more with what you have. Exactly. Everybody on on a marketing team at a crypto organization should be able to write a tweet, format an email, um host a a space or a podcast. Uh like everything you should be able to do everything. True. You should be a generalist. And then the second bit is

what vertical are you specializing in? What vertical can I go to you? Do you know the metas that are surfacing in the trenches this morning on the feeds related to DeFi? Great. That's how my team was built out. I didn't hire like a social person and a product marketing person and I hired on verticals and it seemed to work well on our tiny tiny team. Yeah. What do you think about hiring crypto specific people, you know, crypto experience versus not? This is a this a big question we get asked in our our portfolio or they'll just tell us I am looking for somebody who is crypto native, you know. Yeah. What does that mean though?

Well, everyone does it mean and number two like you are immediately narrowing your pool. So, so it depends how grow I think it really depends on the project. If you are a contributor, you know, on the comm side or you know writing press briefs like you can learn there's we've all done it. We all were not crypto native from birth like you know we didn't come out crypton native like everyone has an opportunity to learn and if you have that like that passion and that fire I remember when I did I read every I still do I read everything like I'm so well read on

Twitter so anybody can do that if I can do it you know our our comm's manager can do it yeah I also think look There are other highly technical parts of tech. You know, you can recruit some of those people and bring them in. Now, I agree with you. They have to be raising their hand and leaning into crypto. Yeah. You can't talk somebody into this world. Yeah. I think like if you think about your business, are you a SAS product in crypto? Are you trying to attract application developers? Try to find someone who's done that before. Right?

like we we're we're in San Francisco right now. We're like in the home of SAS, right? And so is there a really strong SAS marketer and you have a SAS product that you're selling in crypto, but if you can kind of really think deeply, right, about what will this person need to do and then try to hire for that, you know, you might fill the role more quickly um and just have access to like a much bigger talent pool. It's also nice to get fresh perspectives on narratives. Yeah. Yeah, I find just simply a fresh perspective. Totally. Welcome. Yeah. I was thinking, you know, so as part of the marketing mix, I think more in crypto maybe than other areas of tech, you have founders wanting to have kind of an editorial component to the marketing mix, right?

So, you know, they want to hire a writer maybe a lot earlier than some other tech companies might. Um, I'm curious kind of what you think about building an editorial content operation, um, or having, you know, a few of those types of folks within your team and like when in kind of the life cycle building your marketing team, when do you see those roles most important? I think content writers, technical writers are only successful when they have a strategy road map in front of them. I see some Yeah, I see some companies like only hire like a technical writer and that person can translate the you know product roadmap right for

the organization but what they can't do most of the time is build it into that kind of bigger picture for the next 6 months you know when I hear someone wants to hire a writer I mean again I always go through this process of like okay why and what like what challenge are you facing right now that they would address or you know what would this person do? Um, and if the answer is just like, well, they would write, you know, it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. But write what about what? And you know, and who's going to sit down with them to provide support on their writing? Um, like, right. Like someone doesn't just magically join an organization and start writing like it's magic. It It's collaborative. Highly very collaborative. So, is the founder going

to give time with that person? You know, similar to hiring an agency. Like if you're an agency, like who's managing them, who's directing them, how are you bringing them in? How much information do they have? Right? If they if they want if if you want the writer to be effective, they have to be, you know, pretty um kind of like integrated into the organization with lots of access, which can also be challenging when you have a highly decentralized remote, you know, uh project, right? Um, so yeah, I think I I agree. Like I think hiring somebody like that kind of as a one-off before you have a marketing structure or leader in place isn't it's just like unlikely to be as successful, right? They need a

manager, they need direction, they need a plan, they need to be integrated um in order to be successful. Yeah, this might sound a little like silly, but I always if a founder is like, "Okay, I want to hire a writer." It's like, well, what's the one top, you know, what's the first thing that they would deliver, right? And then what I usually say is like, that's not a full-time job. I think sometimes founders just go way too quickly to like hire, agency, this, that, and the other, and they're not like drawing on, you know, they're and now you can't draw on your network like all the time to build your company.

Like, there's limits to it. But if if you really want someone to come on to put out this one piece, like how else could you get support on that that isn't hiring this person that I don't think is really going to be successful? Crypto is so incredibly international. And I think that these projects go international so much earlier than your average tech company, right? And we're often asked for like, do you know somebody, you know, do you know, you know, people on the ground in Vietnam that can help us or Turkey that can help us or all these different places. And how how do you think about resourcing things on the ground if there are launches or activities in some of these very specific and very global markets? It's all relationship based. You have to know

the person I think and I know that's so hard. That's a really hard barrier to clear, but I think like if you find yourself wanting to activate in a market and you don't have local contacts, contact your network and get an introduction because you know you just face a lot of challenges, right? you don't know how business is done in that country. So like someone could be proposing something that's really normal and effective and you're pushing back on them for absolutely no reason because you don't understand the context. People work very differently in different countries. Like a lot of work is more trust based. People won't necessarily require contract upfront which is like very odd in the United States, right?

But that's how people work. They want to work for a month and build trust. So there's just like so many reasons why I think you need a really warm intro. And then also just, you know, they're a world away and they're 10 time zones away and it's like very hard to actively manage and onboard folks. There could be a language barrier. We had localized Discord channels which made it much easier to identify humans that were participating and super engaged. And then Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. And then what we did was we we educated them on the documentation and we essentially had like you know somebody in Argentina who was you know handling the developer relations stuff. We're

building a decentralized network of culture. Like that's what we're doing and the best way to harness it I think is in like the tools that we use every day to build relationships online. So localizing channels and Discord was the way that I did it. I love the homegrown strategy for the community piece. I think there are those moments in every project's life cycle where you really are like trying to pull people in and rally them towards a central cause and when you see people who are super passionate and they're like I'm a native Russian speaker and like I've been waiting for this project all my life like this is what I live for and you see them showing up and contributing as a volunteer trying to find a way to like get them on board whether that's as a paid technical ambassador or hosting local meetups. Um, so I think you can

use that as well. Like hopefully when you decide you need to enter a market, you aren't going in cold being like, hm, you know, hopefully you already have some ties and then hopefully you can ask if you do want to go with like a paid service provider, right? Like, I need a PR firm in this market. I want a KO firm in this market. Hopefully you can get warm intros through that. Um, but yeah, it's really hard to like I think retrofunding has its pluses and minuses, but I think like one of the big pluses is you do get to see the see the work. Okay, events. We love our events in crypto.

Yeah. I'm curious like what do you guys think of the role of events? How successful they are? Um, how do you approach those? I'm learning and learning. I continue to learn how effective they are, how we can make them effective. So over the last year, I really when I joined optimism, Jen was like, "Okay, we spent a lot on events last year. What are you going to do around event? I don't want to do events." Well, Jen, you can't like just kind of 100% back off. But let's figure out how I understand though, right? I understand the hesitancy. There's a lack of ROI, right, that we bring home. Brand awareness is often very difficult to measure from a marketing perspective.

Yeah. So, how do we measure the success of an event? There are many different types of events, right? So, you can't say all events are bad. I found in the last year that I was the most successful in hosting small really really targeted like VIP dinner type of events, right? What is our goal? Our goal our goal is to earn business, build relationships. Why do we go to events? We we go to events for BD. I don't know what they do. They shake hands. They sign. I don't know exactly what they do, but they're bringing home they're bringing home good stuff. So, why don't we create a space for them where we can bring all the big players, high signal folks into one place and get business done. Like that's why we go to events, right? We also go to events to build brand awareness.

Yeah. And I found in the last year that I can do both spending a quarter quarter of the amount right while getting work done and being able to come home and saying, "Okay, these are the individuals we met with. These are the deals that we've signed. These are the relationships that we've built." You can't do that when you're hosting, you know, 3,000 person event. You just can't. I think it's also really hard for smaller brands to be effective with events. Yeah. It's so noisy. I think if you've already got a decent amount of brand awareness, people know like what to expect when they come to an event. Um it's effective for us, you know, they know that they're going to get like, first of all, a high quality event.

There's going to be good people there. Um networking. Yeah. Yeah, the networking is great, but I agree. I'm like, do we need to be at every one of these? I don't think so. We should be really, really targeted. Yeah. I think for us, I usually try to sit down at the beginning of the year, map out our product roadmap and our objectives because I think your event strategy changes as your product roadmap matures, you know, um yeah, timing. Um if you look at your calendar and realize that you're going to do a massive launch, could you do it in tandem with an event? Does that make sense or not make sense? So I I think like trying to map the event calendar to your product goals, your product roadmap is really

important. And then I think like one challenge with events is there's often this kind of like there's this event budget and I think people sometimes see it as like a little bit of like a slush fund in a way in that crypto is really like relationship driven, right? And I think that's really good. And so often times without strong marketing leadership, I think what you see is, you know, people's friend, hey, can we co-sponsor this event? And of course, you want to build the relationship. You want to support the project, right? The intention is really good. And so it's like, yeah, let's go in for a 5K and let's get our logo up there. So oftent times I find in find when I come into a team, one of the first things I have to do is I look, what's the last event like sponsorships that we've done all last

year? What were our goals? What were we trying to do? You know, does that make sense from an ecosystem alignment perspective? like should we be aligning with the modular ecosystem or more with Ethereum like where should we be and then just kind of trying to talk to all the people and like close some of those things down you know let them know that like we're not going to be spending our money that way next year and map it back to the business goals. So we've also had a lot of success focusing on like one small private dinners and then secondly we started doing a developer conference last year and now have done two and I think for us cuz we have a DSL and it's like this really emergent community of developers. There's still ties as well into like the research community and they're really used to kind of like

symposiums where they get to present their work. So, kind of trying to bring all those things together to get people to really sit in a room and learn about the state-of-the-art and then trial it and then see from there, okay, who were the 10 incredible people who attended this conference who we now want to get to build on our platform. Um, and that's really hard to do digitally, right? It's really hard to like see the sparkle in someone's eyes and and for the Devril and product to get a sense that, oh my god, that person is just so good. Like, it's really hard to figure out your ideal user. I think sometimes when it's super niche and it's very emergent tool set. So I love events for that. It's just yeah you find your one or two people and then you find out they're part of a whole community in Turkey or

India that's also jazzed about this. Okay, now you have an entry into that. Um so I love events for that. Developer IRL engagement is a great thing. Yeah. Yeah. To provide to the community for sure. Yeah. So, I wanted to end on memes and crypto culture. Oh. Um, we love our memes and you know, the culture is both like very deeply technical, but it's also silly and irreverent and inappropriate often times, you know, how should you this great question, Amanda, like how serious should crypto marketing be? Um, and how do you sort of balance the kind of this

sort of fun side of crypto with also the kind of very technical serious side? I think it's part of the cult building exercise of like us having our own language that we all know but using it to tell different stories I think is a fun way to think about. Um, there's definitely brands that really just use memes as their primary function of like storytelling. Yeah. Which is one way to do it. And then there's the other way to do it where you could use memes to just help identify with your audience, right? Um, in little pieces where it makes sense. I love memes. I I just same. I see them as a tool, right? It's like one way to

express an idea or story. Um there is that meme about you know like sorry that happened or I'm happy for you I don't have time to read that you know that one where it's like I say that in my head almost every day and I actually I think about that meme a lot when I think about how to use memes. So meme meception um to create some rules I guess rules tone rules like what works for us what doesn't work for us. Yeah. ones that are like lighthearted and really seem to touch a nerve of like, oh yeah, you know, if you loved what we were doing, you would be so upset if this happened and like getting a really good caption, I think it's fun. And then social media managers are people, too. And I think, you know, if you tell them like, hey,

the entire account is going to be super serious. And, you know, I think letting them have a little bit of fun in their job. And like memes are a part of how our industry communicates. So, usually I feel like the social managers do a lot better work if you give them a little bit of room to run. Um, and sometimes they come up with memes that also energize the team, you know, where you'll see it's shared on Slack. And yes, I I think they're great communication devices if you know kind of how they fit into your strategy. Do you use any memes in your job? You know, not too much. I mean, I think we we do a little bit here and there, but um I think we're just trying to more support like the projects that are doing it and support what they're putting out there

versus like maybe injecting too many of our own. Yeah. But I agree like I think we should have fun and some of our tone things are like we're never going to be negative on a founder project for example. So even if people are having fun and people are being like silly maybe dunking on somebody like we're never going to join in on that. Yeah, but it's just good to know kind of like what those barriers are, I guess, like the the borders of, you know, where we want to stay within our own tone. Yeah. Um, but we have a very active channel of sharing them all, which just is great.

That is fun. That is fun. Well, thank you both. This was amazing. Thanks so much for having us hang out. [Music]