Web3 Marketing is already here. Where does it go next?

Transcript

thanks for joining me today i know it's really hot in here so i appreciate it uh today we're going to talk about what i call web3 marketing marketing is maybe not the best term to describe this but i hope that you'll get the gist of what i mean by marketing in the context of web3 i'm patrick i founded lighthouse which is an attestation service what that means is that it's it's an environment in which a community can spin up its own sort of environment and collect contributions from members of the community and then attest them so basically validate them and put them on chains so that the community can use those attestations however they'd like so what's the goal of web 2 marketing i think we've all had enough experience

with marketing in web 2 to kind of understand that for most companies it's about making money [Music] in in the web 2 paradigm the whole idea is for a company to be able to own a user and what i mean by own a user is basically collect their data and use that data to its own ends so in if you take a company like google it's collecting data on users and it's doing it without your knowledge a lot of the time and it's doing it freely it just collects it and then the whole idea is to use your data to be able to predict your behavior or create a behavior for you and monetize that behavior in web3 data works a little bit differently so there is public data it's on chain and anyone can use it

and you can choose what you decide to put on chain you can have off chain data and you can make that data on chain so that it's verifiable and shareable and there are different ways of doing that that's what lighthouse does and you also have this notion of communication so today when you're surfering around the web you get served ads you can receive emails as well that are unsolicited and right now although there are a lot of projects working on building web3 based communication it's still really nascent so we don't really know what it's going to look like how it's going to be facilitated or to what extent you'll be able to opt in or out of of those services i'm going to work a lot with this paradigm here so there's a venn diagram

in web 3 we have sort of three stakeholders we have an investor a user and we have workers or contributors but before we get into this i want to go over like what's the goal of web3 marketing well ironically it's kind of similar we're all looking to to get more value out of the token um that's part of a protocol or a dap or whatever so it's not super different from web 2. what's interesting about it though is that is who benefits from the value that's created in adapt or on a protocol right now there are different tools that we use to do this so we can contrive value so we can try and limit the supply by introducing staking by incentivizing

holding behavior uh by using vesting tokens there's all these different ways that we try and reduce the amount of tokens on the market so that we can increase the value we see a lot of like airdrops whitelist spots raffles and these are ways of bringing people into new communities new dapps and you're basically getting free stuff which can be really cool and then you also have this whole idea of social status so if you get an early nft collection that symbolizes something that indicates something to other people and in and of itself that might have some value and then there are other ways of doing it that are a little bit more inherent to the creation of a dap or a protocol or or a web 3 project it's building real utility in and

in terms of workers you want to be able to pay them so that they can live their lives maybe get some governance over the protocol or the application itself what's cool about this is that we already started using these tools but we're not necessarily using them with a clear objective in mind so what i've done is i've taken this sort of venn diagram and i've broken it down into different parts so you have overlaps between these circles you have investor workers you have user contributors you have some people that are all of these things and if we want to translate what that means into say real groups we might have something called most valuable members these are people that are all investors users and contributors to a project or paid users which is kind

of a weird term but basically people that hold the token to use adapt or use a protocol or you can think of this maybe as a as a sas like model where you have free users that are able to use a service without actually using the token to use the service and then you have on the contributor side people that are freelancing so people are just contributing to a project you're just paying them maybe usd usdc but they don't have any stake they don't have any they don't own a piece of the project um and then you have people that are really invested in this these are like passionate builders people that are part of the core team that have tokens in a project that are invested in it and then you have what i call speculators so these are people that just own tokens or trade the token but

they don't really take part in the actual community or project so i'm not saying this is the right way of going about it but this is one way of going about it you might want to favor certain groups over other groups so you might want to incentivize people that are actually creating value contributing value or have the potential to do so in the future and you might want to disincentivize people that aren't creating value the whole idea is to align these stakeholders as much as possible so a perfect alignment would look like this it might be something that we strive for it might be unattainable though if you have a completely contrived system then you're basically setting up a system so that the incentives amongst

these three groups are misaligned and you even exclude some of the overlaps that we saw in the previous diagram and this might not be super beneficial to the community in the long term so if you have a lot of people that are contributing to a project and don't have stake in that project what are they really doing there how how are they really like part of your community or team um so uh in web 2 marketing there's this concept called r it's the pirate metrics it's called it stands for acquisition activation retention revenue and referral and all of these are sort of user journeys that you build into a product in order to get people to stay on the product longer in order to extract value from them in web 3 it's a little bit different so

if you have people that are interacting with a community or a product but aren't getting any value out of that you might want to create a journey for them a user path for them to move from someone who's not really engaged with a product project to be more engaged with the project you might want to expand the user base so this is just pure acquisition you want more people to join your community so that you have a user base to draw on to convert those people into contributors or stronger stakeholders and ultimately you kind of want to create a path so that they become your most valuable members um then there's this whole notion that's kind of on the side which is what is the desired level of decentralization and i'm not talking about technical decentralization i'm talking about people participating in an organization should everyone have the same say should

people have different says in the governance of an organization and what does that actually look like like do do should financial value and governance power for example be correlated the reason i bring this up is because over the past six months with lighthouse we've interviewed something like a hundred different dows decentralized communities projects and what consistently comes up is how they want to value members and currently for a lot in a lot of cases you're kind of limited to one single native token that you'll distribute for a bunch of different things so someone who's working might receive tokens as payment and then they have to sell those tokens to buy food to pay rent and they actually lose their governance power in doing so so is there a way to maybe create more interesting incentives

around this so one way of doing this is taking contributions on chain off chain anything that represents something that benefits the community attesting it so validating that someone actually did that so that you can draw on that to be able to do different things so what can you do you might give compensation so this can be in usdc this can be in the native token it can be however you decide to remunerate someone and it doesn't really matter it's purely financial it's the money part of this the second part is governance so as people begin getting more implicated into a community you might want to give them ownership in the community so you you might want to separate the whole idea of governance from compensation

and you have this whole whole notion of reputation that a lot of people are working on today and this is something that we see pretty often and it takes so many different forms so this this whole idea of soul bound tokens for example is part of reputation but it's not just nfts it can be normal non-transferable tokens that work like points for example or they can be rebased tokens that rebase based on the proportional contribution of individuals so that that represents the governance that they the the amount of governance that they have uh in a protocol or adapt so if you imagine the system sort of beginning to take hold and forming what this ends up doing when you begin generating attestations within a community is it lets a community decide who has value

and how that value should be denominated in tokens whether that's a reputation token whether it's a governance token whether it's a financial token it gives communities a much wider much much wider flexibility and how they just decide to deliver value to the members of the community um you can also so what this does is it creates a market for talent so if all of these attestations are on chain and we know who the leaders in the community are other communities might see that and say that that person looks interesting so we begin to create a market for talent and this is what i mean by marketing this whole idea of marketing isn't about just getting users to adopt a community to adopt a protocol or adapt or participate in a community it's really about encouraging people to

contribute to a community in order to create value for everyone that's why marketing is at least in the web 3 context quite different than than marketing in a web 2 context the other thing this enables is this whole idea of fluid hierarchies so some of the things that we see are can the top five contributors in marketing um uh have access to or govern um discord or twitter or or something like that um and so that can be really fluid so you just look at who's who's ranked at the top of the community and you give them rights to be able to uh govern these different services um and then uh this this whole idea of focusing on utility or or social value people people can build communities

around different ideologies or philosophies or different types of value using the same attestation service some of the challenges we face today in getting there is this idea of communication so you don't have a way of really reaching out to people sometimes you'll get airdropped like an nft or something in your wallet and you're like what's that and then you'll go and look it up and maybe it interests you maybe it doesn't um we don't know what the right level of decentralization is so should a core team be five people 10 people a million people who actually is contributing to what extent and why do you want it to be a large number of people versus a small number of people we're still building early tooling so if a billion people adopt web3 technologies in the future um what does that look

like probably like we have to invest a lot in user experience in ui and those tools might look very different than what is being built today um and then just simply there's not that many people working on this stuff today i mean there can always be more people and that could lead to a lot more interesting ideas that emerge and actually get adopted by by us so that's my talk if you have any questions let me know [Applause] is there any questions yeah sure so um when i started working

on lighthouse with my co-founder back in december uh the whole idea was to try and build reputation systems so we started thinking about how we could build monolithic scores for say um like credit scoring or d5 or something like that or just social scores like you know like a diamond hand score or something like that and when we started interviewing all these different communities everyone had a different interpretation of what that actually meant what data is included how you work that data and how that actually translates into a score um so over the course of these six months we basically iterated on that concept and essentially we said why don't build the most generic thing ever which is anyone can determine what a contribution is and just log that on chain and then value that subsequently so you don't have to

force anyone to create a score or value something in a certain way you can do that after the fact so if you go to lighthouse.xyz you can test out the app it just we just launched it in beta on monday so it's still really really early thanks guys