Six web3 concepts businesses and creators must plan for in 2023

Transcript

gmgm welcome back to web3 Academy a place where entrepreneurs business professionals and creators can learn how to use web3 to build thriving communities and sustainable business models today on the show we had an absolute Legend an OG in the space Amanda cassette joined us to talk all about what you need to know for web3 in the coming year she's the founder and CEO of Serotonin which is deleting web3 marketing agency and product Studio from 2016 to 2019 she was the chief marketing officer at consensus she's also the co-founder and president of mojito which is a nft Commerce Suite that is used by

Sotheby's CAA and many other major brands engaging in d-commerce in web 3. she also worked at The Huffington Post with Ariana Huffington I mean Amanda's bio is just off the charts she's a giga brain that just brought so much knowledge to this episode this is a must listen for everybody Kai what'd you think about today's episode it's always special when you bring someone that's been in the space for so long that just gets it and she just really gets the space she gets the whole thing and that's why we actually covered so much in this episode I mean it was you know it's called six web three concepts businesses and creators must plan for in 2023 but we went through the future adoption of nfts we went into what

community means in web 3 we talked about web3 marketing which she just wrote a book on that's coming out soon which sounds like it's going to be absolutely incredible so we talked a little bit about that we talked about your creator economy and how web3 is going to change that and social media there we even went into metaverses we even talked about Dows and kind of like where that's all going to go we talked about some of her predictions of 2023 and into the future of like what are the main drivers of adoption in web3 just so much and I loved it I love having this kind of conversation you just get to learn just so much and think differently about the things that we are interacting with and using every single day so it's just a pleasure to have a brain like that on a

podcast yeah couldn't agree more so buckle up this is going to be a good one before we get into the show let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsor don't trust verify that's the unlock of blockchain Technology the ability to store information in an open transparent and permissionless manner that information may be in the form of money value Access Data content and so much more regardless this Innovation is going to change the way that we use the internet and the way business and economies function forever how valuable would it be to you if you were ahead of one of the most influential technological innovations of our lifetime staying on the Forefront of web3 will teach you where and what to build if

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Community Access event tickets are all forms of memberships one of the most common business models for creators and entrepreneurs today building an nft membership opens many new possibilities for your members everything from tailored multi-platform experiences to the ability to sell an unfinished subscription on secondary markets these are things just not possible in web 2. however in order for this business model to work creators need nfts which are time-bound or have built-in recurring payments unlock protocol does this for your nfts better yet with a few simple steps you can create your own nft

contract without code what WordPress has done for websites unlock protocol is doing for membership nfts if you're an nft Creator you can't rely on royalties as they are likely going to zero you need recurring Revenue you need unlocked at web3 Academy We Believe nft memberships are the future of business and community and that's why we decided to build on unlock learn more at unlock dashprotocol.com Amanda welcome to the show thanks so much for having me guys Happy New Year happy New Year Happy New Year to everybody good riddance to 2022 in many ways exciting to move in to 2023

Amanda we were so excited when we planning out this episode and you know chatting with you and your team and really wanted to give the listener an opportunity to get ahead of 2023. what are the concepts they need to be thinking about and so we've got six Concepts that came from both our brain and your brain Amanda that we really want to lay out for business professionals and creators to make sure that they are prepared for you know what do you need to think about when you're writing your 2023 strategy how do you plan for web 3 and obviously I mean it's it's not it's not easy with so much going on and so much change happening and your brain is really the perfect person to give that overview for audience so super excited so let's start

out with nfts and nft Mania is over whether that's a good thing or a bad thing we'll debate on a separate time but you know really I think in 2023 we're going to see real utility come for nfts not just speculation so I want to start with what are the categories of nfts that you're most excited about in this coming year yeah absolutely so are a tool people tend to think about technology in terms of the manifestations of it that they see and so maybe they think of an nft as a piece of monkey cartoon artwork but that's not what an nft is right it's

a substrate or a clay or a set of tools that people can mold to do all kinds of things that they want them to do and there's a way in which the art use case for nfts is almost like using an army tank to transport a kitten because it's such a powerful technology that's linked to the the it's very personalized right that's linked to the decentralized ethereum blockchain and it's it's the same thing as other types of tokens except for that it's non-fungible so each one can have this individual Identity or properties that make it not be able to be easily exchanged with other tokens the way that a single eat token is fungible with

another if token so art has been one of those use cases so far one of the use cases I'm seeing a lot of is membership and reward programs we saw that with Starbucks we saw it starting with Chipotle we get to see a lot at serotonin before it comes out to the public because we work with a lot of these Major Brands and it takes a long time to launch these types of programs so there's a lot more of that it's basically the best ever version of airline miles and there's no reason for Brands to not start building their communities in web 3 so they can develop that CRM that customer relationship management database on chain that they can then use forever to continue

retargeting the same customers that have gotten energy from them so I think we're going to see a lot of more a lot more of those airline miles style rewards programs the second one is membership so whether it's an expensive membership or an inexpensive membership we're seeing a lot of Brands and also really expensive luxury Brands saying maybe if we have a club that costs a hundred thousand dollars for a membership people would be more willing to purchase that membership if it were an nft so then they can trade out of that membership if they stop wanting it anymore if they don't want to use it anymore and so then you get customers with a mentality that they're

not consuming the funds that they spend on that membership they're rather investing those funds or even just parking those funds because they would be able to trade out of it and this starts to get to a concept that Glenn Weil introduced in radical markets which is an economy and in this case a digital economy where people are buying things temporarily intentionally using them while they have them and then reselling them to someone else and you get a buyer with a really different kind of mentality that would potentially be more willing to purchase a higher price item in that case so it's really exciting for brands then we're also starting to see a lot more digital I don't love this word I didn't come up with it I take no

responsibility for it but do you have another do you have another word that you do like we use physical back tokens a lot we like that more than digital I find you know if there's one thing I've learned about mimetics once it catches on it's here to stay I actually tried to have icos not be called icos because it rhymes with IPO and I knew eventually that would upset somebody and so at consensus we actually very mildly tried to get people to call it tge's token generation events but Ico had already caught the World by storm so so we were we were fighting against the grain and so I think we might be stuck with digital digital it is tough world but we're seeing a lot more digital so at

the at the most fundamental level an nft can serve as a more robust version of a receipt and that's a super simple nft that just confirms that something is authentic and that you own it basically a digital non-fungible rarifiable version where you can track provenance of the certificate of authenticity that has traditionally come with a specially higher price items or a more advanced version of a receipt that would come with lower price items that's the lightest weight version of this digital concept all the way to the heaviest weight version which is where the digital piece is also its own artwork or has its own utility or has its own value in some way that

corresponds creatively with the physical piece in some Manner and those things can be sold separately they can be sold together there can be all kinds of incentive links that make a buyer want to keep them together and I think we're going to see a lot more creativity of those links between the physical and the digital all across the Spectrum from a really Advanced receipt to its own kind of separate work or piece of art or utility-based token so those would be my three I just want to jump in and go back to the first part on the the Loyalty Rewards and and memberships I guess kind of you can combine them you said brands are moving into this because they see this as kind of like a CRM as a way that

they can remarket or retarget their users years down the road and I'm just curious how you or the brands are thinking about this now and it's such an early stage and not a lot of people have wallets right because it's what you're referring to in terms of like being able to retarget or remarket is when they get an nft or something in their wallet that's there for forever kind of thing how do you guys think about this where not a lot of people have wallets yet so do we have to then get their wallets first in Starbucks case they sort of just made the wallet and they made it kind of in this sort of closed system and then also the wallets that we currently have let's say they have a metamask well do we think that this is the wall that we're gonna have five

years from now or do we not think there's gonna be better Tech and we're probably going to end up having different wallets and now it's like you're kind of collecting these wallets that aren't really relevant two three years from now I'm just curious on your thoughts on that yeah so I'll go in order a lot of the big Brands miss the web when it first came out and eventually the web became a heterogeneous mix of existing companies that managed to adapt quickly enough and web native companies and so many types of businesses got their lunch eaten by web native companies because they were too slow to adapt that they are correctly in a rush to make sure they're in the first wave of web free so they're less concerned about the number of existing web 3 users than the rate of onboarding new web

through users and that rate is spectacular there was a great quote that I want to maybe add to the the show notes it was a tweet from Andrew steinwald that I'll share with you from spermian which is a big nft investor about the growth rate of nft adoption in 2021 and that was something like 21 000 and when Jeff Bezos first started Amazon he saw web usage growing at something like 2 000 so that's a lot higher and and those are the numbers that brands that are smart are thinking about when it comes to being on the first train to start in web 3 every company is going to become a web 3 company it's just a matter of time it's

a matter of who's going to get there first and whose lunch is going to get eaten because they were too late so I think that's the correct mentality and on the second question so I was part of consensus I was Chief marketing officer there from 2016 through 2019 one of our most prominent products at consensus was always metamask which is the most popular web3 native self-sovereign wallet really don't think there's been a lot of wallet Innovation actually since the original metamask frankly and it's done a great job of serving users we learned a lot in 2022 about custodial wallets and wallets that live on exchanges where users don't actually have the keys and metamask has

provided a really high quality self-sovereign alternative and it's been cool how nft onboarding unlike crypto trading onboarding is immediately self-sovereign so immediately people that are new to nfts come into self-sovereign wallets generally whereas people that get into trading usually come in through these big custodial centralized exchanges so actually nft adoption has been huge for getting people their own self-sovereign wallets in in terms of the future I think it's really possible that every single brand would have its own white labeled that brand branded wallet it it's a little strange for a Big Brand to want to bring

a a second party brand name into the funnel when they're transacting with their business that's why businesses that use Shopify for example shopify's humming in the background or ones that use Salesforce demand where that's humming in the background because they don't want to bring other brands and logos into their experience so I would guess that in the future we're going to see white labeled versions of wallets and in terms of custody one thing that we're pioneering at mojito which is Conan's first spin out it serves Sotheby's metaverse CIA a bunch of other marketplaces with nft e-commerce infrastructure kind of like Shopify so what we're seeing there is a

lot of new newcomers come into a given nft sale they need a wallet they don't currently have a wallet you can also come into that with metamask and they aren't ready in their web 3 journey to solely take the keys so what we've pioneered there and what I think others are also going to do are progressively custodial wallets so you start with something like the gnosis multi-cig contract where you have all sets of keys to the wallet perhaps the platform owns one perhaps the vendor owns one perhaps the user maybe there's another trusted party and then as the user gets educated about web 3 and if they decide they can boot everyone else out of the multi-stig

and have self-sovereign unilateral control over the wallet with their own set of keys that way if someone who's pretty new to web 3 loses their seed phrase right out of the gate and loses control someone else can come and help them get the assets but that they still can choose at their own free will to move the assets out of that wallet into another wallet that they solely control or to take sole control of that wallet and I think that's really important because if all you're doing when you're making nfts or you're onboarding into web 3 is bringing people into the world of web 2 style custodial Solutions that's not actually web 3 onboarding that that's that's just uh more more of the same Jay you've been

calling on the roll up for the last few weeks that all these companies are going to have their own wallets so I love that that Savannah just said that as well thanks thanks for the confirmation yeah I got my calls they're not all right they're not all right but sometimes don't trust my nft investing advice that's for sure Starbucks and loyalty I think so my prediction is this is going to be one of the biggest onboarding ramps of 2023 I think Starbucks is going to onboard Millions assuming they get out of beta and into Mass Market and I just want to chat a bit about that and what what your thoughts are on like why loyalty is such a good use case what I'm seeing that is so interesting to me

is the current loyalty programs all they can do is basically offer you points and then offer you discounts as a result of having those points you get discounts or you get free things there's never been this opportunity where now I can create something else digital that is very low cost to give you as opposed to having to go make a physical item for you I have to go make a certain mug or make a t-shirt for you because you reached a certain number of points and I think that there's this huge unlock in the ability to give somebody a digital good assuming we all care and want digital Goods this sort of connects to what you

were saying about the the receipt in a way in that when we buy something for physical if we care enough about that physical thing just having that digital receipt is also cool it's almost like a flex item to be like yeah yeah I own this and now I have proof of this so I'm just I'm curious what is it about loyalty that gets you and rewards that gets you so excited in web3 yeah sure so you can obviously send people rewards in a natively digital Way by sending them fungible tokens or nfts to those addresses there are also a lot of restrictions around storing identity data and basically what that blockchain CRM is is buying Behavior without identity data attached to it so when

you're using something like Facebook business Suite you're extrapolating buying behavior from Identity data so this is pure buying Behavior without any stored identity data also you're not storing this massive Trove of data and information yourself it's out there on the public chain you're just indexing it which is going to be a lot more accurate and a lot less vulnerable to theft manipulation hacks issues it's going to be really highly accurate data because it's going to go back to actual purchases and history it'll withstand the updating of computer systems that large businesses use and all the all the kinds of issues that come with that another really interesting one is if you're another business and you're

looking at someone else's customer set you can actually Target someone else's customer set like let's say let's say Starbucks has all of its rewards data out on what public ethereum blockchain you as Keith's coffee would be able to potentially Target that audience or some segment of that audience with an nft a fungible token a claim an airdrop that would give you give them some kind of special benefit so it's great for Partnerships friendly or unfriendly and all kinds of cross targeting very interesting let's move from nfts to community community is the other very important part of web3 and yeah I guess I'll just put it out to you what does what does community mean to web3

why is community so important in Webster yeah so the word community in one three can sound kind of high-minded but I actually think it means something very specific which is the fact that web3 collapses the category of investor user and team into a single economically incentive aligned category which is called Community the potential there is to bring the consumer who was a consumer they were at arm's length from your business into your actual process and have them aligned to make your project even better so you don't have to do any everything yourself anymore once you build a community around your project you can lean on that Community to help you with your marketing you can lean on

them to actually build or audit the code you can lean on them to test your product for bugs and so you can gradually decentralize a lot of functions of business away from a core team and toward a group of people that's actually motivated to to help you which is a more efficient long-term model for marketing a lot of web 2 marketing and this is this is a lot of what my book is about I wrote a book called Web free marketing that's one of the first business books about web3 to be published by a major publisher that's coming out from Wiley in April of 2023 April 4th and we should have we're so stoked I can't wait we should have the pre-order link live

pretty soon if not already I think that'll be maybe in the show notes as well but one of my ideas there is that this community building exercise is a more sustainable way to do marketing over the long term than the way that marketing was done in web 2. in web 2 marketing is basically an Arbitrage between customer acquisition cost and lifetime customer value that takes place on a third-party platform maybe that's one of the Facebook advertising Suite maybe that's Google ads and you're paying that platform over and over you're hooked in order to just reach your own audience and keep spinning that Revenue flywheel and if you stop then that revenue and those results are going

to stop but with web 3 marketing you're Gathering a group of people with all kinds of different skill sets and you're using the substrate of web 3 to build an incentive align system such that they're going to be motivated to do all those kinds of things for you in a long-term way I love that analogy of community being a much better form of marketing and not an extractive form of marketing as we currently have in the web 2 world I'm just curious when you talk to Brands about building Community I think the difficult part is we've seen a lot of people in web3 build community that's not sustainable right we've seen a lot of people do big air drops and Community goes up and everyone just expects to

make money and then falls off Cliff right so what are the ways that you see as the best ways to build sustainable community so at serotonin the way we always talk about Community is like a group of aliens on a spaceship come and they come to planet Earth and they drop a ladder down somewhere and people get on the spaceship then the spaceship flies away then those aliens are stuck with those people indefinitely and those are the people that are in their community and so if if that's what's at stake you want to be really careful about where you land your spaceship where you choose to put down your ladder and who you let on the ship at the very beginning of a project the project Founders will have a lot of control over who joins their early community

and that's the moment they can really have an impact selecting and welcoming people with the right skill sets to offer with interest in actually using the product not just in some kind of airdrop or reward maybe if the project is more focused on developers they're folks that are interested in that technology or contributing to that code base maybe if it's an nft project people that are interested in that artist or in or in that style of art it's about getting people in there that are there for the Long Haul and that that care about your project and want to contribute to your project then those early people are going to set the tone disproportionately of who else feels the desire to join and eventually the community gets to a scale where it's

out of the original Founder's hands what the tone of that Community is and that's why it's so important to make those right choices early on now for Brands a lot of Brands when they first decide to do something in web 3 they don't know that they're going to have to put a full team on it for the indefinite future and at serotonin we only work with brands that are in it for the long haul that plan to actually grow projects build projects have real road maps are ready to staff Community channels make them really fun entertaining always have something around the corner you can't just suddenly drop a project and then go away and I've seen exactly what you've seen which is if they're big brands or if they're web3 native projects that

construct their Community wrong that bring in everyone through extrinsic incentives without any kind of intrinsic incentive just through rewards just through airdrops you get a bunch of people saying when moon on those channels instead of offering to help and contribute and I think an uneducated after or potential user participant might look at that look at that Discord Channel or might look at that telegram or look at that Twitter account and say oh there are a lot of followers here but if they actually look at the quality of the content it's no good and I think educated investors users Builders can look at that community and not be fooled by surface level numbers and metrics and

actually look at the content which is what's really important there I think one of the things that surprised me in 2022 was the amount of big brands that launched Discord servers I was just like this is for some reason surprising to me and I mean some have done a great job of it um I think maybe just didn't know what they were doing and everyone's launching Discord this is the way we do it so we got to do it too do you think that Discord is the way that we go and continue like do you like the platform Discord and do you think that that's where Community is going to be made online or do you think that this is just a in-between thing and eventually we start to do something else with Community because it's just it's odd to me that all these really big Fortune 500

companies and big brands are all launching Discord servers yeah so I think Discord became the chat platform of choice for web free communities early on for a couple of reasons one there's a lot of Venn diagram overlap between Gamers who traditionally use Discord and the people that are technically Adept enough to use web 3 and interested in web3 and then the second reason is that Discord was very early to integrate web 3 mechanisms like token dating that allow people to enter channels based on whether they hold a web 3 crypto token and because of those two factors Discord took off as the de facto Community platform of choice that being said there are a lot

of communities on Telegram and I know maybe five different projects that are working to build web 3 native chat tools and web3 Native social it seems really obvious to me that there's a way to build that from the ground up you should be able to sign in with your wallet and be able to chat with someone that's provably the owner of another wallet and whether you want to identify yourself with a real name or with a handle is up to you but it seems obvious to me that the that the wallets are kind of the base layer of a communication system that's based on a value system and it's interesting because the current web 2 is a communication system that has the value system layered on top and and we're just

flipping that we're going to get down to having the value system at the core and the communication on top people are trying to do this I think eventually we're gonna see a heterogeneity of platforms I think we're eventually going to see a web free platform win and or Discord update itself to be more web3 native if it wants to stay winning one thing I'm really excited about for 2023 is web3 social I think lens protocol coming out of Ave is pretty interesting they're really starting at the protocol level for building reputation for letting people communicate using wallets as a base layer and people are building all kinds of different social applications on top it means that your audience can be

portable your reputation can be affordable your content can be portable you can you can chat from a specific wallet I know exactly what what the right social app is but I know that the answer is a protocol and then there will be dozens of right apps right yeah let's move on to web3 social you actually just queued up the next concept so well that's perfect so I think that the foundations have been set for web3 social as you said we've got we've got the foundation set but now we're sort of at this place where I'm not sure what is what's the next step do we need more users to come on web3 social but we also need more dapps to be created on web3 social what do you see

what do you think is coming in 2023 is it the creators that need to be focused and if it is the creators what's the Playbook that they should be focused on well a lot of people are saying that crypto token prices are expected to be more or less flat through 2023 and so it's a great year for building and it's a great year for all kinds of activities on web3 that aren't as correlated with trading activity and one of those is social activity building reputation doing stuff that doesn't involve trading massive amounts of currency betting that the Market's going to go up or go down so I think it's a great time for web3 social even if it starts in that building phase with a smaller number of users optimizes how it actually looks

and feels so that people want to play with it and then as the next wave of new entrants come into web 3 that it's ready and then and then it's exciting and so I think there are a lot of people starting to build on lens protocol right now I think having as many at bats as possible of the right social app it just makes it more likely that one of them is really good I think starting with a small but devoted Community that's how I'm going to identify that one of them is really good right not because they're a million users or a billion users but because there are a thousand ten thousand users that are coming back to it multiple times every day starting with these Niche communities making them bigger right Facebook started just at Harvard

maybe it'll have some kind of aspirational appeal to begin with or maybe it'll be Niche and it'll be more targeted toward a certain type of person or a certain type of community at first those are probably what I would expect once we have those Niche communities in the strong communities on an app that is performing well and has great ux what makes people finally make the jump from one app to the other because for me when I look at web3social I mean I love it but I had my Facebook account banned and blocked when I was running a business on it so I lost everything right so like for me the moment I heard of of ethereum number one I was like oh this is perfect and then when I heard of web3 social what lens is like oh this is amazing like of course we need this I

can move from any application no one can ban me I own my content I own my profile this is perfect for me most people don't have that experience though and so I think most people struggle to wrap their head around that or even if they do wrap their head around that they're still like whatever I don't really care I don't run a business on social I just use it to interact with friends and to like view other content Etc so I'm just wondering is there is there something in your mind where you're like this is the thing that's going to get people to finally move over and get a wallet and join in on lens or whatever other web free social a couple things on that I think a lot of us have a certain incumbency bias where we assume the big leaders today are always going to be the

leaders people were saying that Facebook and Instagram and Twitter were the last big social platforms that it's not worthwhile to invest in or try to found another social platform because it's saturated then Tick Tock comes along and I think I think it'll be that same thing right it's not done it's always going to involve second I had a bunch of friends who spent a lot of time building their Facebook audience and now they look at that and think of it as time very poorly spent because that audience isn't portable off platform onto a new platform they can't convert them because the audiences are all off of Facebook I think for creators the promise of portability and not being locked into a single platform will get them to adopt

web3 social because they know they could always Port Their audience over to another web3 social platform so it's a lower threshold for them to decide to experiment with a platform because that time isn't going to go to waste then you get the chicken and egg effect between creators and audiences where creators come audiences come where creators come more audiences come and so I think that's going to be the trajectory creative focus makes sense you got to get the creators over I get that let's touch on your book you teased it a little bit earlier we're all super excited for your website marketing book to come out titled web3 marketing I believe in the title so and it's coming out in April first of its kind can you give us a sneak peek is there a framework or a model that you can share

with us give us an idea of what we can look forward to yeah absolutely so the title isn't very creative just wanted people to know know what it was it's called web3 marketing but the subtitle is a little better a handbook for the next internet Revolution so hope hopefully people can get excited about it I spend a lot of time in the book going over the history of Bitcoin ethereum web 3 the metaverse how those things all came about going into a lot of detail over what our nfts what are fungible tokens what are Dows what's defy basically putting tools in the toolkit of non-technical professionals many for the first time so they can see all these

things as a substrate as moldable clay that they can use to achieve their particular ends and that's how I've really made the book Evergreen because I think that web 3 is really a set of tools and people come to it with different goals different intentions people have different kinds of organizations businesses projects and this is about teaching them what web3 is so the power is theirs and they can and they can use those Powers so I really spend over half the book on that because I think there's a real dearth of material for non-technical people who are interested in the space and what got us here won't get us there when I started working in the ethereum world in

2015 almost everyone was a developer a computer scientist an academic that was great it was some of the most brilliant people I'd ever met and I knew that this movement was going to take off because it had attracted such a special group of human beings but what got us to this threshold of adoption won't get us to the next one and I think it's going to be not just marketers in a in a narrow sense but Teachers Community leaders people that want to step up within their own companies and Lead web through transformation it's going to be people coming right out of college and deciding on a career path that that studied history or philosophy or economics that that get us there and so the first two

thirds are really about giving them everything they need to make this their own the last third is history it's about a lot of what's worked and what hasn't and why so how to think about Marketing in a web three-way we're not just paying the piper we're not just arbitraging cost of customer acquisition against lifetime customer value on these third-party platforms what we're doing is building sustainable incentive aligned communities using the substrate of web3 which is an incentive alignment engine in order to create these long-term sustainable motivated groups of people that'll go on to build code bases go on to Market projects go on to

come up with the creative ideas that'll ultimately make them successful so we outlined that kind of marketing Paradigm the the marketing funnel and the process that a marketer or someone with a marketing mindset should go through with a project from ideation to the zero to one problem how to get that community formed and Flywheel spinning to how to actually think about handing off a lot of functions to a community It's a Wonderful explanation of web food marketing by the way and we won't go too far into into the book because obviously I think everyone should just read it when it comes out but I am I'm curious when you think of web 3 marketing and you sort of touched on it there I'm just wondering what you see as like the main either main differences or I guess what

you would say is like the main strategy that you're thinking and again you don't have to go too far into it but versus web 2 marketing like web 2 marketing obviously is around ads and and a lot of things like you said I'm just curious what's that main difference there with web3 is it Community or is there more too yeah exactly it would be a framework there it's a building um Marketing System protocol level versus application Level in a certain way where it's a bunch of web 2 marketing is a bunch of activities that are going to be done by a centralized marketing function paying other centralized Platforms in order to serve ads whereas this is about designing a self-marketing system so even before you've built any Community even before you've decided on your name

it's about design designing a system of incentives using the substrate that is web 3 that's going to get people extrinsically and intrinsically in some combination motivated to to continue building your project and that's really what matters the only thing I would say is when people hear this I think a lot of people like you've got to give away money you gotta airdrop you gotta inflate your currency and get things away and we've seen time and time again like that works short term to get a bunch of people interested in your project and then it goes to zero right and it just happened so many times in 2020 2021 with nfts and with fungible tokens and so I'm just curious your thoughts on like how do you start to do that where you're not just inflating away token or just giving away free value that ends up obviously not holding

value do you have any thoughts on that yeah so here's what's totally not different about web 2 and web 3 marketing the first step is to know your product and to try to have product Market fit and the second step is to know your audience and you're trying to find that right balance between offering the right product that you can describe really clearly the Right audience that you know really well and wants the product and what you can't do is use web3 to get out of the fact that you need to find product Market fit for your product if it's some kind of web3 utility if it's a web through utility or software product who are the users with us do they actually want this are you solving a problem are you charging the right amount to solve the problem if you're trying to bring them into a

technical community are you building technology that's going to interest them and move the space forward such that they would care to engage with it whether it's intrinsic incentives or intrinsic or extrinsic incentives are they the right ones for the people that you're trying to attract if it's an nft series let's say it's a major brand dropping an nft series are there people in the web 3 community that would want this and that have said that they would want something like this are you charging the right amount for it if you're charging anything if it's people who are already fans of your brand have you done tests to prove that they would want an nft or a digital collectible or digital good that does X kind of thing or X kind of membership you can't use web3 to get around needing product Market fit you can't get around having a

good product you can't get around having to know your audience as a marketer tokens are not the product of the business they are a tool that helps you amplify your product or business or helps you provide more utility or whatever it is to your product business but they are not the product itself so I'm really glad here's what I I would actually I'd actually add this about tokens I think that there's enough hype around fungible tokens non-fungible tokens at certain periods in the market that people get the mistaken idea that by making it a token or by making it an nft that they can make something have value that doesn't have demand for it intrinsically what you're doing by making something a token or making it an nft it's just a mode for capturing and expressing a type of value and bringing

it into fungibility such that it can be exchanged for other blockchain based tokens of value what you're not doing is creating value out of thin air you're going and finding something that already has value and you're putting a certain type of cell wall around it so that can participate as part of some kind of like economic organism and so you're doing something very cool and you may look at the map and see that there's a bunch of value there that wasn't but what you're doing with these mechanisms with these tools is putting cell walls around value that already exists somehow like this art is so cool it already exists this tool is is so cool it has value and and you're just capturing that value in a novel way and bringing it into exchangeability but you're not you're not creating value out of nothing right

and that cell wall that that package you're saying which could be an nft or functional token doesn't even have to have value right it's just also just another way to exchange move things around track things on the internet right so it doesn't even necessarily have to wrap value it could wrap non-value but just something that someone wants to hold on to or move around to someone else right which like you're not the one of our content totally and and you're not the one who decides whether it has value right I mean if you decide to put that cell wall around something that other people in a Marketplace deem is valuable and and the supply matches the demand correctly then it can have value but it's ultimately going to be the market that determines whether something as well you can have a

thesis about something having a certain type of value and deciding to put that cell wall around it because you believe that but it's going to be buyers and that contrasted with Supply that's going to determine what anything's price is I want to use this analogy as a jumping Point into the next concept the fifth concept we want to talk about which is around metaverses and the way I'm going to jump into it is that there was a time in 2022 when there was probably six or seven projects that did create value 100 million dollars of value a few times just by selling metaverse land which whether or not that is truly valuable or

not in the long term time will tell but there is certainly consumer interest in the metaverse a lot more than crypto right now a lot of studies and surveys have shown and that might just be the word metaverse is more friendly to to the consumer but I'm curious what's your view of the current status of the metaverse how do you think about it how are you talking about it with your clients at serotonin is is this something that you see brands spending time on or do you still think this is like far away yeah so I think everything is going to be a a supply and demand thing I think metaverse worlds are going to be able to attract participants when there's a

great fit between what they're offering in their world and what people that would participate in something like that wanted and a great way to think about the web 3 enabled metaverse worlds like decentraland and sandbox is really like a town if you measure their performance by Gaming metrics it can sometimes look like a game where nobody's playing or one day it'll look like a game where everybody's playing but really it forms much more like a town people buy land people develop the land then because there are more people using it they can afford more kinds of interesting Services they attract more maybe musical events maybe cool venues maybe maybe brand sponsorships maybe stores and shops and games and then they grow and so we're just at that very first inning of that evolution of these kinds of

towns we have some really exciting I think the Central and sandbox being a leader are really interesting worlds to explore and to build in we actually so one of our so we work with Adventureland and we also work so it's essentially as a client we often work with sandbox as well Sotheby's who we've done their whole web through transformation partnered with them very closely we have help them build a replica of the New York Sotheby's auction house into Central land where people can actually watch live auctions because the auction house in New York can't fit everybody and they started accepting bids in each and more people come to watch those auctions in the decentraland location than in New York which is very special

and so it's totally a matter of usage is a matter of product Market fit we're trying to encourage our partners to create storefronts there that really have their personality and will attract their kinds of consumers and that's been going really well I think ultimately for Brands the metaverse is Rodeo Drive Madison Avenue I think it's an updated version of the shopping mall and when I say shopping mall I don't mean in some kind of materialistic plastic way I mean my shopping mall of the 90s which is where I hung out with my friends which is where I played arcade games and got food and hung out maybe occasionally bought something but often not and so I

think it's going to be this new this new social meeting place that has a commercial side to it and that's really how we're encouraging them to view it and then for businesses that are thinking about e-commerce and payments that whole e-commerce experience is going to need to be recreated in a 3D metaverse context people are going to want to try on clothes people are going to want to see what furniture would look like in their house and then people are going to want to check out in some kind of Novel way and I think that the feel is really open for experimentation there yeah I think that it is very powerful to think about it like the mall of the 90s it's like the place that you go to hang out I think that the question on my mind when you're talking to a client

obviously there's not a ton of users there yet so is the reason that a brand would build in the metaverse again is it come back to your first point of don't miss out and don't be too late to the party and so you just build to be there or is there is there economic value to be gained for a brand from being there yeah so whenever a brand goes into web3 they're going to get a mix of existing web through users and people that are fans of their brand noticing that their brand has done something new so if your brand goes and does an activation into Central and some portion of the people that come to what your brand does are going to be people that were using the central land and some portion of them

are going to be people that are excited about your brand and want to meet your brand in a novel more engaging super exciting kind of way and so a a brand or a company that's that's doing something in a in a in one of these worlds they should probably go with one of the larger more more established ones in order to maximize folks coming from that partnership to their activation but they're also going to bring a lot of people with them and be able to engage those people in a really new way it's the thing that is the most interesting about web3 I feel like is that there's so many different Industries and niches and brands that are in so many different areas that are all bringing people into web3 like the whole idea is like you need people to have a wallet right let's get people

wallets and that's like what we're all trying to do regardless who you are and it's funny that you have the degens over here that are getting people with wallets because there's yield and whatever and they're like we need more people with wallets and they have Sotheby's over here in decentraland it's also bringing people with wallets you have Starbucks Reddit everyone is just doing their part right now to bring people in and like get them their wallets I think ultimately that's why web3 which you talked about the beginning has such a fast adoption rate which I'm assuming is very similar to the internet right there's all these businesses that started and you get a few people here from this industry from Sports from this from this and it's just like all of a sudden everyone's just on the internet and I feel like the same thing is happening with web3 and

ultimately I guess with the metaverse as well but it's just cool to watch this all kind of play out I don't know if you see it yeah anything totally I think everyone is following their incentives and all incentives lead to web 3 and many of them lead to web3 enabled metaverse worlds I like that way to way to run with it we might we might make that the new tagline for our podcast it's very good okay let's move on from metaverses to Dao's our Dows working are they working and what's working and what's not working and then I guess curious from your perspective on working more on the brand side on how you see the future of Dao's or the usage of

Dallas for a corporation for a brand or if you think yeah sure so so first of all our Dow is working our Dow is not working I would remind everyone that dowels are not to be a broken record but they're a substrate they're a substrate toward building governance machines governance machines being built out of people and a lot of dows allow our investment-focused dials that allow people to vote proportionally to what they've invested on the investment decisions of the group like the original ethereum Dow and we all remember what happened to that then you get governance doubts like maker where you have some of the governance token and the governance token entitles you to make decisions proportionally to a lot

of how the platform after the protocol actually works in a D5 context those are probably the two most prominent kinds of dows and they work so so maker is governed by Adele and that has worked really well we've seen all kinds of stable points blow up and have problems especially centralized stable coins more really poorly constructed algorithmic coins but die has been incredible and the maker platform has been working this whole time even while we've seen centralized platforms collapse and go up and smoke so that's a dow that's doing an incredible job doing a lot of the governance related to one of the largest defy lending protocols and we're seeing a lot of defy going in that Dow

Direction and I think we're going to see a lot of them maybe throw off some of their entities we've seen shape shift move in that in that Dow Direction and I think it's it's really important for D5 in terms of these investment Dows that's where you get a lot of this proportional weighted voting according to how much of how much you've invested in the Dow I think that works really well too so Flamingo Dao is one of the biggest nft collecting Dows they had over a billion in assets during some of the heights of the bull market I'm not sure exactly where that's at now but they do have some of the most exciting assets in the space also pleaserdale has done an incredible job getting some very cool web3 native assets into a pool where people own them collectively and

make decisions collectively on what to buy and what to sell and can also withdraw their funds whenever they want and there's some kind of schedule on which they take distributions so it's really good for making these kinds of governance decisions because you can get to Market immediately without having to form a kind of official investment vehicle and you can even do it legally tribute louds I mean it's not it's not up to me to say whether there's something is legal or not but tribute Labs which came out of open law from consensus and is led by Aaron Wright who's one of the Premier legal scholars in the web 3 space he's a professor of law Cardozo he has created this framework called the law for how Dao's can have an Associated legal entity that leads to them in his opinion to to

function properly and with with Regulatory Compliance and so you can have these structures that are very easy to spin up you can create governance very quickly and get a bunch of people in quickly to make these kinds of decisions together and have a great outcome where where Dows can run off the rails is if the type of activity that the Dow wants to do isn't a great match for the governance structure that it's architected for itself like the kind of governance structure where anyone with a token can decide how a protocol Works where the governance structure where anyone can decide on can make decisions proportionally to how much they've invested that doesn't work for everything right it might not work for a software company it might not work for

even like a college Club there are all kinds of organizations that don't necessarily benefit from that structure but could configure a doubt that has the correct structure for how their organization functions optimally just because you have a doubt doesn't mean you have to have governance work that way it just means you're using web 3 substrate to architect a governance system so you're not under the umbrella where all business ends up becoming a dow in the future you're under the world where Dows just make sense in certain in certain aspects and certain Concepts in certain ways but not for everything I think that Dows make sense for lots of organizations and that organizations can

configure daos to have the governance stroke structure that's appropriate for their organization functioning optimally right so just because you have a dow doesn't mean it has to be a flamingo Dao style proportional weighted voting decision-making down right for example you could have a Dao where people buy in and then it's only one person who makes all the decisions and everyone's happy with that or it looks like a company like a traditional C Corp or LLC where maybe someone's making decisions then there's a board of directors and then that board of directors can hire or fire the CEO type person that's making decisions web 3 is just a substrate and there's no reason why a web 3 substrate for governance can't be used to create

something that's shaped exactly like a traditional C Corp style organization the question is just well people do that because we have c-corps and so maybe they'd prefer to use a C Corp do you see then big companies having multiple Dows inside of their company like maybe there's a dow for the C Corp there's a dial for I don't know the charitable part of the company do you think that they end up having just a bunch of branches of dows within a large corporation like maybe five ten years in the future it's just what as you speak it's kind of just what it made me think of yeah I think I think that the reason Dao's tend to have the use cases they do right now is because there wasn't an as easy a structure within the existing range of corporate governance structures that are Incorporated in countries to do

the kinds of activities they wanted so I think we're going to see Dao's proliferate the most where they add some kind of utility that isn't being served by a traditional corporate structure so I don't think that necessarily will happen I think if people feel well served by traditional corporate structures they'll keep them and where they don't feel served by that they'll create Dows that they'll custom configure to have the structures they want yeah I think the example of what consensus did with their charitable or grants Dow last year was really interesting where they put all their employees in a dow and allowed them to vote on the governance of a charitable fund like that to me is very interesting or I think about I remember I used to

love Cheetos back in the day and I remember Cheetos used to do like a new flavor every year and you could vote on what you wanted the new flavor to be and there was this like not competition but this like friendly governance of the new Cheetos flavor like I could see something like that being a dow where everyone could come together across the world and be part of the governance of a flavor right and then because you voted you now get to see how that flavor gets distributed and maybe you get to vote on the bag and the logo and whatnot I can see corporations using Dows for small very specific projects like that right but I I think they'll get more use out of them if they couldn't have used another mechanism to do the same thing I

think if they already have an existing web 3 community and they're trying to get people to vote on stuff like that from their web 3 wallets and maybe giving them voting proportionally to how much they've interacted with the product from those wallets then it would make sense to spin up a dow to do that but if they're working with a normal registration system of previous customers then they can use some kind of web 2 system to gather those types of votes I don't know that would be adding extra utility so I think Dows are going to proliferate the most where they're adding speed to Market or some kind of utility that people wouldn't have otherwise another one of those utilities can be pseudonymous participation right like that's another that's another one Jay any more questions on Dazz if not I have a a question I want to ask which is

nothing to do with these six Concepts but just feel like it'd be an interesting question did you have anything else on the last concept there no bring bring in the cherry on top what surprise question do you have so a conversation that Jay and I have had a couple times the last couple days is what's the next thing that onboards a lot of people into web3 so you had 2020 we had like D5 Summers it was like yield everyone was like oh my God there's yield and it brought a bunch of people in 2020 2021 2021 no no d57 was 2020. 2021 was NFL sorry yeah was nfts 2022 I don't know probably nothing but maybe like Reddit nfts to be honest is probably the thing about the most people into this space uh maybe there's nothing in 2023 I don't know

because you did say you think prices will be flat and it's just more of a build year is there anything in 2023 where you're like this could happen it might bring in a bunch of people or are we farther out and whatever time frame you have what is that thing that that finally does it you think yeah so a couple of different options I think web3 social could bring in a lot of people as we as we've spoken about I think that real world assets on chain so if people are using nfts or fungible tokens to buy physical things or to buy let's say real estate that'll bring in a lot of people in a way that's decorated with the market also large-scale companies doing rewards programs or web3 native projects that people get really excited about doing their own things that look look like

those sort of massive Rewards or membership programs could could do it I think L2 is really taking off is going to enable a lot of Gaming use cases so I think that's one one way a lot of people are going to come in then it's easy to forget that genuine defy Innovation brought us into our last full Market I think that genuine defy Innovation is going to keep happening I think this time it could happen with ZK and zero knowledge proofs polygon which is one of our incredible Partners is building a lot in CK ethereum is really integrating a lot of ZK ilio who we also work with is the bkl1 and that's super exciting I think the potential for

configurable privacy for certain kinds of transactions has been a blocker for all kinds of businesses and individuals getting into the space and I think these UK World enables new D5 use cases to take off that haven't existed before in a way that could help bring us back into that energy interesting you think any of those are going to happen in 2023 I think they could I mean I think it's just based on Innovation right like people disagree about who invented yield farming whether it was Kane from synthetics whether it was Andre Cronin with yfi but there was a moment where that happened and suddenly there's a novel mechanism that a lot of people are excited about that's using the web through substrate that's only possible because of web3 that

brings a lot of people in you pair that with the natural Bitcoin having cycle being at a good moment you pair that with interest rates being low and tech stocks and riskier Investments taking off you pair that with that 69 million dollar people sale at Christie's to Medical events and sudden and you pair that with Michael Saylor putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet and interested a big moment for institutional adoption and you've woven together all the pieces you need for another another bull market so a lot of it is cyclic or in my opinion right a lot of it's cyclic or related to macro macro policy but a lot of it is actually kind of innovation and

event based and there needs to be the the right amount of oxygen and then the Tinder catches fire love it thank you yeah okay so before we jump into a speed round just a couple of fun questions for you Amanda I want to jump back to the book quickly when is it coming out how can people get it definitely we'll put a link in the show notes for I believe the pre-order that's coming coming out or will be out by the time that this time the show airs tell us a little bit more about it because I want to make sure that everybody listening gets this book because it's going to be so great yeah absolutely so it's called web3 marketing a handbook for the next internet Revolution it's coming out from Wiley on April 4th 2023 the pre-sale link should be in the show notes and you

can grab your copy now and you'll get it in April is it digital is there an nft oh there is yeah okay it's a unique claim code inside every book and a website where you can go to enter your claim code which gets you an nft which gets you into a web 3 marketing Discord Community where you can get access to regular content about three Market web free marketing a peer group mentors basically people to ask all your all your questions to help you along to create new projects together amazing the book is going to become a community that makes so much sense I love it okay let's jump into speed round

couple quick questions for you before we wrap first one what's an nft you'll never sell ooh an nft I'll never sell so on the front cover of my book is a chromey squibble from art blocks and Eric Calderon AKA snowfrash is a really great friend and he allowed me to license a squiggle that I personally own to use on the front cover I feel like that the image of that squiggle it's an up Arrow but after a little bit of quilting progress I think it really conveys the the message of the book and and the fact that we've used an nft I think is really significant and that Community will really recognize it and I would never sell that that's awesome I love

squiggles such a great project okay one thing you've bought recently for under 100 that brings you Joy does not have to be digital token could be something physical a standing desk I definitely have enjoyed enjoyed and one of my New Year's resolutions is to is to move between standing and sitting all day so I can stay stay focused and not get too sleepy but I'm on the computer I was starting to get carpal tunnel and instead of getting surgery and wearing a brace and

obviously some people do need surgery I got these funny little these little rubber bands that you use to connect all your fingers people who are professional climbers actually use them to strengthen their grip I think they might be called grippies and I do some hand exercises with them and it totally stopped my carpal tunnel pain and I do that every every morning and I've never had it come back again and never had to have any physical therapy or surgery so that might be a hack for some people out there that also are spending a lot of time on the computer it's a great hack and that's actually probably under 100 bucks I was like where are you getting a standing desk for under a hundred dollars oh I think I think it was under a hundred dollars I think it's on Amazon and then these

grippy things must be like 7.99 or something yeah that's great I love that and it's and it's a routine too which also is such a great way to start the new year so that's awesome okay final question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it hmm I think right now I might write not your keys not your crypto and maybe you have some kind of QR code to teach people about root ownership of assets and self-sovereign control of your own value you can tell you're a crypto OG I appreciate that and you're actually the first person that said that and we asked that to every single person yeah so surprised no one has said that yet because like everyone should be saying that so well done

thanks Amazing Amanda thanks so much for the time thanks for sharing all these concepts with us today super helpful wonderful conversation I really appreciate it I'm very excited for the book to come out thank you so much guys thanks for having me thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should

not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one