Web3 growth strategies and the challenges marketers face

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web 3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web 3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gm gm welcome web web3 academy it's the weekly spotlight uh where we spotlight uh some web 3 doers people that are doing taking action and building this super exciting space of web 3. as always i'm here with uh my brother my founder kyle reed head what's up kai what's up friends how are you uh and today on the pod we've got two awesome dudes that are really pushing uh the research side of web3 and the growth

side of web3 uh first up we've got mathias mathias is the director of growth at talley so he's currently on the web two side uh but he's researching and writing papers to figure out how web 2 growth tactics can be applied uh to web3 uh welcome to the pod matthias uh hey guys and hey everyone uh super excited to be here showing some of the frameworks and conversations that we've been having around uh growth for web3 superintendents interesting stuff happening awesome and also uh we have with us uh jay key j key is the creator of safari dao which is the number one destination

for web3 growth leaders to exchange tactical insights and learn about everything to do with growth in web3 j key welcome to the thanks pod i really appreciate it and like really excited to be here web three growth is uh very very much on the frontier and i think we'll shape how we see the rest of web three to come amazing it's amazing well i gave a brief intro to you guys uh but obviously you guys can tell your story much better than i can so let's just let's just start by uh why don't you guys tell us a bit of your background and uh your story so far sure jk do you want to take it first sure happy to do so um so my personal

background is that i led growth in web 2 companies over the past few years left my job late last year and soon found myself fully immersed in web 3. i started chatting with lots of web 2 growth leaders like matthias who are exploring web3 and also with web3 growth leaders who are actively looking to connect and learn from the strategies being deployed by other fellow web3 growth leaders and our community came about pretty organically from there lots of me connecting web three growth leaders together and eventually um a group of us just posted on our linkedin saying that we're creating a web3 growth community and got about 200 applications in the first week um and then soon

launched with a initial batch of 40 that have been defining web 3 growth since since february so really exciting stuff and excited to be on the frontier yeah awesome how are you matthias yeah on my side so um moved to the u.s about five years ago to do uh uh growth for web 2 companies i've been most of that time uh focused on fin on the fintech side uh but since i moved i kind of like found ethereum and bitcoin people were chatting about it on the bay area and uh yeah i just fall in love with the concept of crypto overall and for the last few years i've been a

passive investor but i would say the last six months it's been where i started to push myself much more out there to try to figure out like what does growth actually means for web3 companies and the crypto ecosystem so uh that's how i met jk and how i basically ended up like joining safari and it's been just like an incredible journey i think uh it's there's so many things that we can bring from the web to into web3 but there's so many new things that are happening and being built that it's just it resembles what happened early on on the internet era so i'm just super super bullish to be now here uh like being

able to to talk about this and discuss about these ideas and putting the frameworks in in place for what's going to be growth in the next few years in this space i love it and i'm excited to break down some of these frameworks and mental models actually the reason we got you guys on the podcast is we came across your articles and they were they were awesome uh is one of the first people i saw writing i think about growth in web3 so super interesting but i'm just curious um i mean most people get into this space because they invest in bitcoin and ethereum and number goes up and they're like sweet i want to learn more about this when you did that what was the thing that like excites you the most specifically about like web 3 and and even more specifically about growth

or or marketing or whatever you want to call it uh in web 3 because obviously you guys are doing your thing in web 2 side what was that thing that just made it click or made you go oh i got to go deep into into this side of it yeah on my case um so coming from the fintech space um and obviously being uh someone that have spent a lot of time thinking about these growth frameworks and applying them into into fintech uh what really sparked that uh fire was uh seeing first the speed at what things were being built and the thing that at the speed that uh these teams were shipping which was super it's super still like very very exciting uh i think the decentralization component was

something that uh brought a lot of questions that are still to be answered but like sparked that curiosity to understand like how this decentralization applies to these companies and how then that apply actually to your growth model i think that's like really interesting stuff to to discuss about and then the third piece which uh is one of the things that gets me the most most excited about in web 2 it's all about this idea of like product led growth so how does your product uh is the first enable or the the biggest driver of growth for your company or that's what you you should strive for but

looking at these web 3 companies it was all about community and in a way like i think started to change this mindset of like hey you need to build an amazing product to hey you need to create and engage with these amazing communities and that was something that it was like just a change on the model and like the order of the operations uh which still i don't think that's gonna impact the outcome but just changing the order of those operations uh was something very very interesting to see from the outside and that led me to hey let's jump into these communities let's participate let's learn from them and then how this is shaping the different growth models for the current like very successful web 3 companies

interesting jk what about you yeah on my front i mean i think that the first really big one both on growth and web 3 is thinking about it as a open design space like we're not just debating the color of cta buttons but we're really thinking deeply about what the future of product building and growth marketing will look like in the future and i think that to matthias's point as well like the notion of community and community-centric growth creates this much more collaborative ethos that's a lot more fun too this is something that we talk about a lot in safari of you know web 3 as a space has yet to cross the chasm and so we need to all be marketing web3 as much as we're marketing our own companies and so there's actually a lot of benefit that

we can have as growth leaders by collaborating and talking about what we're doing what strategies we're using what we're experimenting with and that just creates a lot more more fun um to be working in the space and it also yeah i think it's for it's very much a positive sum environment people can clearly see that the work that they do to further the ecosystem will also further their own individual projects themselves so happy to hear you guys talk about collaboration positive sum i think that you know one thing that's quite unfortunate is the crypto space has a bad rap you know and there's a lot of negative image so uh it's so important that as you mentioned

we all promote web3 and all the good that we believe it can do uh so yeah kudos thanks thanks for being you guys that's awesome um so obviously we're here today to talk about growth and uh break down some frameworks web 2 versus web web3 but before we dive into those frameworks just define for our listeners what what does growth mean do you want to take that one first jk sure um web3 growth in my mind is some basically center is around community-led growth strategies so web3 created lots of powerful new incentive mechanisms but the underlying

need for community-driven approaches is just as clear in web 2 today and i can break down some of those reasons but it's covet escalating feelings of loneliness and a search for purpose it's acquisition costs driving up across every single channel in web 2 and it's web 3 presenting a new environment and one that has greater concern for privacy and where channels other than email are the most frequently used so i think that web 2 web web3 growth is just community-like growth and community of light growth is a reaction to the many challenges that we're having in our web 2 world today yeah i i cannot agree more with that um

a definition that i love about uh web 2 growth comes from andy jones he was the former president at welfare he worked at quora facebook twitter so all the big names out there and he defines growth at this like idea of like if finance owns the flow of cash in and out of a in and out of a company grows growth owns the flow of customers in and out of a product and i think at the stage where we are in web 3 we can change that definition of product by community so like i think growth leaders in the space and what growth means is managing that in and out flow within the community uh for these different projects and just in this idea of like

how the market has shaped um the current environment of growth for web 3 where we have all of these limitations that jk was talking about i think growth uh is becoming uh these perfect alignment on incentives between companies and uh its members and community and i think uh that's where magic is happening when we see these companies and these products building uh and aligning perfectly their incentives so they can keep growing organically with the community that has helped them from the start and then how they have expanded over time so i think it's growth

in my view is just this alignment on incentives in the right way where you couldn't find those uh in web 2 we are finding them in web 3. when we think of growth in web 2 i think a lot about like mainly marketing right you're thinking like ads you're thinking email etc is there different tools now or different means other than i guess community of course but is there other like when you think of growth in web 3 do you think of things outside of marketing or how do you think about that yeah i think um that's an interesting question because there's a lot of tools and ways that are still being developed in

order to be like on how we like start acquiring these new members and community is becoming like the main driver today what what might happen in the next five ten years could be very different from what we're seeing today uh but yeah in in my mind i i think there's still like a lot of things to bring from web to into what we're doing so uh i think email is not gonna go anywhere in the next couple of years so maybe the question is like hey how how can we start incorporating like emails within our user journey right on our web3 product um we can start thinking about like i think ads are gonna become less and less important in this world it's gonna

be much more about like where some of the either token economics like incentives that we can put out there so our community keeps being engaged like uh back bounties i think there's like multiple ways that we can start like defining what growth means but at the end of the day like i feel that there's still like frameworks that we can bring from web to you and right now we are building the tools for what's going to be the future of growth for web3 uh and i know that even at safari we're doing some like fun experiments with like uh notifications and like how do we communicate with these like non-identifi identifiable users uh so i think there's still like a lot to be done there uh but it's just fun to see that we are moving that direction

and that still we can bring some of those things from web 2 into how we operate on on on growth for web3 jk you have anything to add to that yeah i think that i mean when i think about how the question was around how growth uh is different from marketing in web 2 yeah so you know i think a lot about um you know in web 2 the funnel looks very different than a web 3. in web 2 you have all these different channels social media channels ad channels etc and you're essentially trying to drive awareness to your first party application from those channels so web 2 is very much about attention

web 3 is a bit different because the funnel ends up being cross-platform so you have twitter at the top of the funnel discord in the middle of the funnel and on-chain apps at the end of the funnel and this big difference causes that web 3 is very much about engagement what are people doing you're meeting them where they are and not on your first party application and engaging them in those channels and so i think that what we what we see and what what gets created from that is brands are now facilitating many to many format experiences beyond groups of people between groups of people versus before is more of an audience model in which you have a brand that's

communicating one-to-many across lots of different channels with tons of different users and i think that this will fundamentally shift how web 2 marketing is done as well in future yeah one thing that i really liked from the first article that you guys put out on on web3 growth frameworks was this uh this table that broke down web 2 and web 3 and how in web 2 it's business development engagement and retention and then growth hacking uh and how that pushes down into web three uh i don't know if you guys have that framework up in front of you

or if you can sort of dive into that a little bit for us yeah so that's a framework done by ladies capital and basically um obviously i think they would be the best ones to like go in-depth into into whether they were trying to communicate in each of these categories but where i see the for example the area of the growth loops between growth hacking and then liquidity mining and talking ergonomics i think that's about like aligning inside incentives so how do you build growth loops within your web through web3 uh product that aligns incentives between your ultimate goal as a company uh your growth model and your actual uh

community and and your actual like uh user base right so i think one is about like alignment of you incentives the business side is more around uh from what i've seen in the space is about like finding the right partners i i think at the end of the day like what we've been talking about it's all about like uh collaboration and community on the space right now so there's a lot of projects out there that are working together in order to lift all boats at the end like we all want this space to succeed so there's a lot of collaboration happening i think there's a lot of for example protocols working with uh defy applications so they can like bring more users to to to use their their tokens or to use

their um native apps i think there's a lot of companies building right now the uh these omnichain solutions that are gonna help like expand the amount of the user base that can interact with all of these networks i think at the end of the day the solution for this is just like operating in a world world where my company and your company have alignment incentives and that leaves all boats for the whole industry so i think that touches two points on on that graph uh jake i don't know if you want to go a little bit more on these like community and loyalty i think that you you answered it well i think gladys capital would appreciate your composability there

so anyone who's used web3 understands that right now it's very clunky and quite difficult to use and so when as a growth marketer myself when someone comes to me goes hey i have this new you know web3 app or protocol they're like i want to grow it i'm like i have no idea how to do this for you right now like how about we wait until the tech improves um but i mean obviously there are ways but why don't can you guys just break down i think it was in the um the saffrondale vision page that talked about like the the four main uh challenges that web3 apps face right now this was super interesting um can you guys just sort of talk about that and then i want to dive into how we can solve some of these yeah happy to take that one um so the

four fundamental challenges that we see most web 3 growth leaders face or number one identity that the vast majority of on-chain activity is pseudonymous number two is fragmented ux so what i described before is the funnel is cross platform instead of on your first party application the third is communication so web3 native communication channels like email push notification and sms are and ads are still either very nascent or don't really exist yet um and then the fourth is platform limits so most web 3 products are constrained to the 30 or 40 million crypto wallet holders um and that's an interesting point most people compare uh crypto in

this way to mobile in that today we don't really think about mobile as being a constraint that app developers have to think about because most people on the planet have a smartphone today crypto wallets is kind of that analogous thing and that most people don't have crypto wallets today so it is a very real tangible constraint yeah i kind of see that as the biggest challenge myself as well it's actually what i wrote down was like you know you're trying to get to use your app but before you do that you actually have to teach them how to like use web3 it's like you got to get a metamask wallet and then you gotta buy some you know sign up for coinbase and and get some ether and then send it to your metamask wallet then you gotta learn how to connect in and like uh that to me is

like one of the greatest challenges but i think as you guys said it's something that once they use one protocol they're now onboarded and they're like they're in the ecosystem so i feel like we have a lot instead of just one person or one group like just metamask bringing people into web3 it's like everyone collectively is sort of doing that together and once they're in then it's super frictionless once you're in and you understand it and you can and you can use it all so i feel like actually in the end web3 gives so much more room for growth once they're actually in there's just that i guess friction to actually get into the system or into the ecosystem first what are your thoughts on that no and just to add a little bit into the previous question i think another big challenge that we're seeing in the space

is because it's so limited to a certain amount of users uh that we have right now using web3 and crypto overall that all of these protocols and all of these networks are and all of these steps are trying to acquire basically the same type of user so at the end of the day there's like this saturation of information and we're seeing this in discord we're seeing this with like all of the different like craziness and nfts and i i think we are just in twitter like it's just like so much information for the limited set of users that we have that i think we're getting to this like point of like saturation where we are gonna see the mission diminishing returns on our investment to try to

acquire these already crypto native users so i think is for the benefit of the whole industry that we like all of the projects that are working in web 3 today are supporting the idea of how do we onboard the next 1 billion users and we should all work towards that goal because that's gonna unlock the different like growth levels for like these these uh different projects but it's not gonna happen if we keep it constrained to i don't know 100 million users in the next two years it's just gonna get again like to this saturation point where it's just going to be

unsustainable over time so i think there's like going back to this idea of incentives the whole community and the web3 ecosystem should be thinking about how like each of the protocols and each of the apps and each of the projects out there are putting something out there that is helping onboard the next 1 billion users you guys have any thoughts on what you think is the thing that brings in the next billion users is there something specific you don't need to have the right answer here by the way i just just want to see what your guys thoughts are yeah i think that this is the really big question um and i think that you know there are an increasing number of apps like step in is the the new

hottest one the move to earn um that a lot of people are talking about um as being a great pathway for normal people to get involved i think that most will fortunately or unfortunately still have some sort of financial component to them and this is something that we talked a lot about in safari in terms of you know what are the non-financial based narratives that we can promote um to really evangelize web3 because we see it every cycle is that with financial based narratives um they're great in terms of aligning incentives but once the incentives run out then so do the attention and the engagement um and so i think that the big question to bring the masses to web 3 is what is

a non-financial narrative that's really really compelling to people that gets them curious about what three beyond just money yeah that's interesting sorry go for it yeah so um yeah i this that's a great point and just to add to that i think this for me the one of the big questions as well is how much do we need to rely on centralization to onboard these people into a decentralized world and i think that's gonna be like a very tough challenge for everyone in the space because the space was born out of this idea of decentralization but we are seeing that

uh centralization is actually the best way to get people on boarded and then show them the power of decentralization but then they like what happens with the interests of these centralized companies right so i think there's a there's going to be like an interesting debate happening in the next few years and i'll probably like we're going to see a lot of these apps coming that are more centralized that are gonna help on board that next billion users but then how do we move them into this decentralized world i think it's gonna be also like a tough question to answer right because if we're not moving into decentralized world then like what are we really doing here right it's kind of off for nothing uh this is actually is interesting it's like the the big ethos

of um of crypto and sort of web 3 is like owning your own stuff right without a custody and and decentralization and when i think about one of the things that are going to bring people on like neither of those is what the mainstream cares about right like most people don't think in terms of owning stuff so like d5 is great and bitcoin is great and whatever but like most people don't really care to own things it's not their mindset their mindset is earning things right so even nfts with art and stuff it's like it hit a subset community of people who like to own art but that's very small the rest of people like i don't really care and so i think what you said about the step in thing this is earning and we already saw this with axiomfinity is like i think once we nail

the earning aspect where it's easier or better to earn in a decentralized manner than it is to do it in the web 2 world that's when i think we onboard the billions of users where it's just like oh yeah i just need this wallet and i can earn this to browse the internet or to go for a walk or to play a game i think it's the earning things that start to bring them in and hopefully we can find ways to do that in a decentralized way and not centralized definitely there's a there's a couple threads i want to pull on here uh and uh so firstly this decentralized verse centralized um the question that i find i keep having with uh with web3 founders or people that are

entering the web3 space is how do you start how do you start what's the mix and i'm curious if you guys from your experience with safari dao or from your experience talking to other founders have an opinion on you know what is the best way in the beginning phases you know i know that not the end goal but in the beginning how do you see that as the best steps to getting a startup going and building something yeah i can talk a little bit about that um from what i've seen at safari even uh coming from an outsider to join what jakey and the team were are building and for me it's about finding

that initial um pain point that a set of like a niche community is having i'm building on that into that community so uh before even thinking about like hey what is the actual product that i want to build or what's the actual like audience that i want to nail down to build this product is i'm going to start building a community around this general idea that i have where i feel there might be a pain point um and in the case of safari is about like hey we have all these amazing growth leaders that are like starting to build a new frameworks on web3 how like how do we get them all together to shape the future of what growth means for for

crypto and web3 the ecosystem and i think what have happened organically which has been amazing to see is just that like the the engagement within the community i think and jk obviously like you can correct me if i'm wrong but i feel it's like just those conversations the the calls that we have like the the the the information that we are passing uh to each other is helping shape what is that potential market like how do we define the market that we want to go after it could be like do we want to go for executive leaders are these web three companies like bigger like uh let's say like unicorn level or do we want to start like with a product that might serve for

uh recent hires on growth roles for web3 like that could be a potential market and from there like once we find that market we could start thinking about like what is the actual product that we need to build uh and what are those characteristics so if i would start with um with an idea like a startup idea on web3 i would start that way obviously you haven't like you have a framework of like this is potentially what i want to build but then i would take it down to a net level where i can define like hey this is a community that might help me get there yeah let's hear his great thoughts there i think that for me um and i really learned a lot from

matthias's article on how how and why community needs to come before the market and really shaped a lot of my thinking so you know one big piece is that in whip three there are not really markets like it is very much a frontier field there are are what people expect will become markets in terms of like this worked in web 2 and this will probably work in web 3 this will be needed in web 3. but you know markets don't arise out of nowhere and what we see is communities really build markets communities are groups of people starting to talk about different ideas starting to identify pain points um starting to go and dose companies in certain ways and this sort of naturally creates an

ecosystem which becomes your market it's increasingly larger groups of people you know safari is the first web 3 growth community but i very much expect that there will be many more safari-like communities in the future and you'll you'll then say you know this is a market this is a web 3 growth market um and then people will start building products for that market these groups of people that become larger and larger and larger so i think that you know that's why i think community development is really at the heart of customer development for web 3 is that you know there are only theoretical markets today and communities are the ones that build those markets and so if you can be the one that creates that community

you'll be the one to see some of the pain points before anybody else and i think that that's exactly what we've we found within safari is that we we also thought about different segments right so our first batch that 40 that group of 40 that i talked about initially we let in four core segments so one was uh web 3 growth leaders web 3 founders web 2 growth leaders like matthias and then corporate innovators who are essentially like people leading uh web3 strategy at web at large web 2 companies um like head of head of web 3 at door dash for example um and so what we found is that you know we really

thought the web the web 3 native growth leaders and founders were going to be our target like that they would feel the most compelled by what the value prop we were offering was um but we found that like a lot of web 3 um they want to be part of safari so that they're aware of these conversations that are going on and so that they don't like miss anything that they don't know if that makes sense like they want to make sure that they're not like out of the loop um for growing their own product but they don't feel the same like jazz that web 2 and web 3 growth leaders feel of like talking about all the nuances of advanced growth all day long and so we really refocused when we did our second batch

which was about 80 different growth leaders that we led in about four weeks ago three weeks ago to be very geared on web 2 growth leaders and web 3 growth leaders because we kept seeing and matias is probably the shining example of this for us is there's so many amazing web 2 growth leaders who are at um who are currently still on their day job probably will be soon but are very very involved in web 3 projects and it's only a matter of time before many of them move on to web 3 jobs and i'm super super bullish that we'll see a cascade of web 2 growth leaders join the web 3 in the next six months oh yeah i think you've been seeing that

in the news like crazy as people leaving the big the big web 2 companies and moving and moving into webster what's interesting here is i like your approach of sort of phasing in allowing people into your community and i think i'm assuming that allows for a very quality sort of onboarding and quality like engagement and getting to know the community and then as you consistently bring new people in it just continues to be a flourishing community can you sort of just talk about your thoughts around starting a community because i know this is what a lot of people are starting to do and i get a lot of questions of like does the token come first does the token come after you have like the board 8 yacht club story which was the nft was the thing that made the community and now they can go and build

you know the most funding that you can possibly get and then there's the other way of like you don't do a token or an nft and you just build the community ground routes first and then eventually maybe you build a token with the community do you guys have any sort of mental models or just thoughts around this or experience um i have some thoughts so you know for us i think that what a lot of web 3 builders missed is that they lean too heavily into incentive design without understanding community fundamentals um and i think we saw the same thing largely play out in the early web two days with like financial incentives of non-token kinds uh people are like you know for all

these web web to marketplaces you know financial incentives referral programs etc are going to like solve all of our problems and we saw very clearly that that wasn't the case um and there were intense like experimentation platforms that are built later um but i think the same thing we see here is communities are super unique and super tricky and they're all based off of you know the common elements that we talked about before it's like is there a sense of belonging in this community for me do i meet other people that i want to talk to do i feel like the conversations that i have or that i hear about in this community are really interesting to me and i think that those dynamics are extremely hard to produce

but once you have them it keeps growing from there and i think that that's been a big part of safari's success is that we have extremely high touch onboarding we think about you know back to that audience model of web 2 versus the many-to-many model of web 3 is we think very deeply about uh as soon as somebody joins our community how can we get them to be in touch with another person who's not not one of the founders of safari um another random member and so the way that we select people is that we look for people who would be a natural match with another member so if we can't find you who we'd imagine

to be the fir the perfect match for you amongst all the people who apply then you're probably not going to feel the value prop as strongly as somebody we can find a natural match for and so we do that very high quality high touch matching in the beginning we batch everyone so everyone arrives at the same time that's the first off you know everyone joins at the same time per batch with the same expectations the same excitement people all jump into the channel at one time people were standing on by standing by to welcome them into the channel get them involved make sure that they have a a high touch experience at the beginning match them with all with a fellow growth leader and then begin and i think that setting those sort of expectations and showing that like really strong value up

front um is what drives a lot of early community success and what kept us going even when we're a small community right we were a group of 40 in safari for the first like six weeks um and now we're a group of 120 um and we have been for another three weeks um we'll open up our next batch another two weeks and so we've been able to i think that's the key of how we've been able to scale engagement even as we've tripled our our user base in in a couple weeks yeah sorry what's super interesting about what jk was saying as well is like you can even take a lot of like very successful web two companies and their own like growth models into the

onboarding experience at safari and like some of the like actual growth levels for like how they have been growing so far organically like we can take the example of robinhood right with their wait list i think just creating that fomo like i cannot count how many messages i've received over linkedin like hey can you like get me into the safari community like it sounds like very interesting so so i think like that facing approach and creating that fomo is just like one level in itself that can help like maximize that growth uh the other one is just what paul graham says from y combinator right like do things that don't scale at the beginning so doing that really concert approach of

like doing the matching manually making sure that that onboarding experience is as best as possible that that's going to have an impact in in the long term of the engagement of everyone in the community because of that first initial impression on that first initial experience uh through the onboarding process so i think those are elements that have exist for the longest time in web 2 that we are bringing to the web 3 world which i think is super super exciting and going back to maybe the the board a um kind of like i think also that goes a little bit into this idea of like human behavior like really like

pretty primitive human behavior of like social signaling right like i want to belong to this group because everyone says that this group is really cool and all the cool people in the world are participating in this club right so i think there's a a lot of that into the nft uh world as well uh which is super interesting to see so those are like different levels that you can start pulling which at the end of the day goes a lot into these like psychology principles that a lot of like growth leaders in web 2 have been applying for the longest time i think now we're seeing how they're being applied to web 3 which is very very interesting you know my favorite takeaway of this is we bring on two guys that are all about growth and you think when you first

learn about web3 and you learn about tokens you're like oh token incentives this is like the unlock of growth and as we talk to you guys about one of the best things for growth it has nothing to do with tokens it's actually the old school stuff right it's the the non-scalable things the sustainable things first that set you up and it's funny because it's like when you think about defy in let's say in the crypto world it's like you have like the avalanche and polygons that they went full-on incentives to get growth with tokens and tokens and we'll see if that works long term like who who actually knows um but i really just it's great to see you guys keep going back to the community into the non-scalable things um because i think tokens are great and they can do a lot for growth with airdrops and and you

know liquidity mining and all these things but it's like if you don't have that foundational stuff that community all of that ends up just kind of going to waste right it's not sustainable long term so it's like that's the thing that's on top it's like pouring the gasoline on the fire but you need that fire already kind of started it's the way that that's what i'm gathering from from you guys anyway exactly and i think at the end of the day what you want to build is this sustainable uh growth machine which in the longer term these token incentives yeah might be like a good way to ignite this but that doesn't like say anything if like hey this new protocol then launches this other token like people might move there if it is more economically like it makes

more sense to them right so you want to make sure that you're building in the mindset of like this has to be a sustainable sustainable strategy over a long period of time otherwise it doesn't worth the effort i love i love all the focus on community and um also just we'll get into later uh a bit more about safari dao and the next batch and how people can apply because i'm sure some of our listeners are already salivating about this because it sounds so exciting uh but before we get there um you mentioned uh that there was a few growth levers for web3 and community obviously is i think the big one and we're talking lots about it but you also talked about air drops and

integrations as growth levers uh i would be curious to hear you guys talk about those two growth leaders how you see them being used uh and the opportunities there yeah i think that so air drops for for your listeners are are the distribution of our project's own currency tokens to multiple crypto wallet addresses so they're users and this primarily has been one of the fastest ways to rally people to projects in web3 it's been extremely extremely powerful and i think that a lot of web two growth leaders were looking by saying oh my gosh how is all of this growth possible is it real um what's happening and i think that for me

one of the times that that i really caught notice of this was in december when um the sos airdrop occurred which was dropped to all the people who had purchased an nft from openc which is the largest nft marketplace and so this airdrop reached 340 000 wallet addresses um which you know are all public because all this information is public on the blockchain so this is sort of unique you can't really think about you know just like dropping a bunch of like anything to you know 300 000 facebook or instagram users and just like being able to access all of them so that was like

one thing that was pretty crazy and two like they went from zero to 150 000 on their twitter in like days and then also within days they had 60 000 people on their discord and just this insane growth engine from airdrops um i think is what drew a lot of web to growth leaders to be like what is going on here whoa that is like of a crazy scale that exceeds most of what anyone has or ever will do and we've seen lots of other crazy examples with looks rare driving like 15 billion in transactions in their first month of inception um and other things of that nature

i think that you know one of the things um which is why i think i and matthias and others continuously go back to community and the fundamentals is because a lot of these levers work very well in the sense that they're the first of their kinds so they're not saturated at all they can tap an entire ecosystem all at once and when there aren't that many of them it works really well and it's great for driving awareness at unprecedented scales but as more people use them these strategies will get saturated over time and i think we go back to what we saw play out in web 2 as well right and web 2 they're very powerful acquisition strategies from new channels

as acquisition became more costly people had to double down on engagement and retention um and i think that that will will quickly happen in in web 3 as well with web 2 growth leaders coming in and saying okay this is unprecedented acquisition but we know where how this will play out we need to really really focus on engagement retention if we're trying to build a long-term project yeah and i think what's interesting there is uh for for growth leaders in the space uh looking at these acquisition tactics going a little bit back to what we're saying is to look are are these levers gonna enable these flywheel effects that over a long period

of time is going to bring incremental growth to the business and like sustainable growth again so this idea of like are these users retained are they engaging are they providing value to to to our project or or our product back right so um it's going to be interesting to see what is the ultimate outcome of all of these different initiatives but i would always push even web 2 or web 3 growth leaders to think about sustainable growth and how the different tactics that you're putting in place are enabling you to activate these flywheels that are going to enable you to sustain that growth over time but that is healthy growth not like one of things

that are yeah like these magic tricks or like things that gets everyone very very excited but then poof like there's nothing nothing backing back in actually the what what really happened right have you guys put any thought into uh and i actually think this is what safari dao is supposed to build is what i thought i saw on the site but a playbook or or like a strategy right now do we have anything that you got and i know everyone's experimenting there's lots of different things but like have you guys narrowed it down into like here's a way to create a growth strategy that is like long-lasting and sustainable or or what are your thoughts there yep that's certainly things that we've talked about and uh we're actually just chatting about it more earlier today we have two groups in safari one is the

the lions which are our web 3 growth leaders of today and the second group is our adventurers who are the web 3 growth leaders of tomorrow so many of those people that we expect to convert to web3 growth leaders in the coming months but yeah this is a key topic for us and we've been thinking about what thought leadership we can put out there there are very very clear strategies that are being used by lots of different projects across web3 verticals on twitter and on discord and i think that it would benefit the space for us to share some of those tactics that are being used across verticals more publicly than than we've done so far yeah to to that question uh we were

discussing about this uh this morning but for me what is interesting is to we were talking about this idea if we go back five ten years back in in in time to read the what what what people in marketing and growth were chatting about it it wasn't actually like about the models and the frameworks it was much more about like the tactics right so when seo was a like it's still a big thing but when when it was this new thing it was much more about like what tactically i can do to win over on seo or email marketing or facebook ads right and then once that basically all the all of these different channels started to

get to the saturation point where everyone was doing the same tactics we started to talk about like frameworks and models and actually how do we implement this at an infrastructure level within our companies i think one interesting thing that came up today was should we be talking about specific tactics that people can start implementing and testing with or should be talking about like more the frameworks and the models and i think it's going to be interesting to see how it's shaped because we were talking this is like a very new frontier within web3 everything related to like actual like growth so this becomes more of a mainstream thing within the ecosystem we're gonna start seeing more of these like sustainable like growth models over

time right now we are seeing like what works and what doesn't so does it make sense to talk about more about tactics or does it make sense more to talk about like overall like frameworks and models so let's let's jump into a little bit about safari dao and um you mentioned you know that you're you're what you're talking about now what does that look like what does it mean to be part of you talked about a few batches what does it mean to be part of one of these batches uh you mentioned weeks like a couple things you've thrown out throughout the podcast uh can you put that all together for us and give us an idea of what that looks like definitely so safari in terms of who we are is a community of world class class growth leaders and community

builders exploring the web 3 ecosystem our members are from uniswap open c ledger unstoppable domains coin market cap zapper labs and many many many more um and so our mission is to build this web 3 growth playbook together collectively with data we have an internal platform that we use to be able to visualize certain on-chain and off-chain metrics and growth leaders are currently commenting on what they see in the data and where they think that those projects what tactics they were using to grow at different points in time but our overall vision is to to make growth collaborative so something i've talked about before web3 growth is very much positive some we need to be working

together and share what works to evangelize the web3 ecosystem so in terms of the community itself there are a couple core activities one is this matching that i discussed before whenever anyone joins they're matched immediately with another web 3 growth leader the second is that we have weekly calls so um for the for those that are in the adventures or growth layers of tomorrow uh we do break downs of various topics with case studies so uh today we talked about web 3 growth loops last week we chat about web3 funnels and the week before we chat about you know what is web3 growth um so we take people through these different batches of trying to educate them and getting them

ramped up on the collective knowledge that us lions have been uh chatting about over the florida sorry six weeks beforehand um so yeah and now it's gonna be about producing more thought leadership together and making sure that uh more and more people are thinking about web3 growth and in the types of ways that that we feel really strongly about in terms of making a positive sound making it collaborative um and yeah really just a an open and free exchange of ideas and where do you where do you see this going like it sounds like it's like almost like a mastermind right now um which is awesome uh for web3 growth so i love that

where does it go does it turn into a bigger community that creates a product of some sort does it turn into a like a tokenized dow do you build courses like what any ideas on what you're going to do with it yeah so you know right now we're experimenting with uh analytics so thinking about what these growth leaders will need in the future and i think that that's just one piece of the puzzle you know web3 growth um will look in terms of the products that are built based that will be will be created based off of the ethos of what these web 3 growth leaders are talking about now so like obviously a big question that many web 2 people are thinking about is well let's just you know go ahead and create

recreate user level targeting in web3 and that is obviously technically possible to do but is that what we want web regrowth to be about and so i think that many of the conversations about what school should be built in the future will stem directly from the safari community and the communities that get built around the safari community in the future too and so for those listeners out there that are interested in getting involved in safari what's what's the process what do they need to do to join this mastermind i want to join sounds amazing yeah very simply you can visit us on twitter at

s-a-f-a-r-y absolutely safari with the wide dot our dow d-a-o or on our website safari.club um and it's a very short application process and we'll we'll get back to you soon but yeah we're launching batch three in in the next couple weeks sweet so everybody out there get in for batch three you want to be part of this mastermind this one's going somewhere uh okay before kai do you have any questions before i go with a little bit of lightning round no let's do lightning round okay awesome uh so just to wrap up love to uh take a step back and just ask you guys some more fun questions um so uh let's start with uh your favorite

person to follow on twitter tyus we'll start with you uh [Music] that's a good question uh i would say the one that makes me cringe and laughs the most is elon musk by far he's out of this world like literally yeah he is so probably everyone in your audience already follows him uh for me i would say um defaults from real vision and raul paul uh because i i feel that

the only way for this whole thing to work crypto bitcoin it's to really connect these into the actual macro world and what's going on going on out there from a macro view and i think they do that i'm like an amazing work of like making bridges between what's going on like deeply into crypto but also what's happening on at a micro economic level so i just love their insights their conversation and what's going on uh there so those would be my recommendations great great plug i i helped with growth for real vision so great thanks uh for me

the one that comes to mind right now is uh punk 6529 um really appreciate their like macro level views on the space but also talking about totally not web 3 related things about like the passing of time and appreciating and cherishing different moments so i feel like it's a really great mix of content that comes out from that non-threat profile yeah he actually just was interviewed by raul pal on real vision last week it's like a two hour and i think 40 minute interview but it is mind blowing so definitely check that out if you haven't yeah it's free so just a real vision crypto i'll check it out other other than safari dao any other projects you're excited about

could be a doubt could be an nft it could be a protocol anything in the web through space uh mathias is part of this one too so let me sorry if i steal your your thunder um i'm not as directly involved with jump which is a marketing and brand agency our mark for marketing and brand at folks but i think that they are a super complimentary community to what we're building with safari is seeing much more about how to get many of these web 2 leaders who are going to stay in web 2 um on the chain of thinking about how to develop web3 strategies at these companies i think will really really shape

the space in the years to come yeah we actually have jeff from jump coming on the podcast next week so that's right so cool yeah i was going to mention jump uh they are doing amazing stuff in their really really cool community too super super fun to hang out uh in their discord uh how do i do this without shilling any of my bags no i think for me what what some of the projects that i i i'm super interested on is like uh two areas like one more in the infrastructure side so uh like all of these omnichain solutions

are coming up there like zero uh layer zero or or alexa xlr network sorry uh i think that's gonna help like just increase the size of the pie in terms of how like everyone interacts within crypto which is going to be very very interesting to see what happens and then the the other set of projects are more in these like like basically the the the front page of crypto so uh projects like zapper are very very interesting i think they're doing really really cool stuff even from a growth standpoint um ledger uh i think there's like some of them in the in that space are doing some really cool stuff but it's just like

there's so much to learn from what happens looking at these different uh sectors within crypto and these different like specific projects so axelr being one and stopper being another one i think it's just uh it's gonna be very cool and lots of learning from a growth perspective as well yeah yeah awesome um let's uh let's let you guys give your show you can show your bags all you want on this show we encourage you tell us where to follow you tell us where to follow you we'll put the links in the show notes uh tell our listeners anywhere that they can connect with you anything that you encourage them to do uh

by all means take the floor chill away um feel free to reach out i'm at linkedin i'm a twitter i'm a boomer [Laughter] i started with the worst thing ever in a web 3 podcast but twitter uh ad matty underscore onorato uh that's my twitter you can find me on linkedin reach out dm me i'm more than happy to to to keep collaborating on this space i'm just super super excited for what's coming same here um very simply you can find me on twitter at j key j k e y underscore e t h um great to connect there and looking

forward to it you can find us at safari s-a-f-a-r-y dot club and apply for batch three it'll be i think the batch three will be our best batch amazing and when are when our applications do for batch three uh hasn't been fully decided yet but sometime before the end of april for sure okay things in web 3 move very fast i haven't decided it but it's going to be within the next one this is the pace of web 3. yeah awesome well thanks so much for joining us today gents it's been an absolute pleasure to learn and listen from you guys uh and wish you nothing but the

best of luck and uh we'll have to get you back on in uh maybe a part two of the podcast uh in uh in the future to see uh maybe when you guys actually build the girls playbook or have those first versions out they'll be awesome to chat about absolutely amazing thank you so much everyone thanks guys a lot take care have a good one cheers you too thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the

description below and finally a quick disclaimer 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 implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one