Why crypto still can't tell it's story: Lessons from 200+ web3 brands

Transcript

[music] >> I was not live yet. Apparently the mayor is really bullish. He's going to apply to be the French president so Here we go. Cool. Yeah, welcome to my talk. It's all about what what we've learned by building over 200 plus brands in Web3 and the lessons that we've learned. Um you know the next sort of 15-20 minutes is going to be about how better stories create better content. If you want content to perform better and I'm assuming you do otherwise you wouldn't be here. Um you don't need a bigger budget and you don't need a rebrand and you don't need another Twitter space. What we fundamentally need to do is rethink how we tell these stories and you know I'm

lucky enough to spend and speak a lot to Steven Bartlett and listen to how he's told his story and if you look at the growth of that podcast, when we met him it was 800k views. It's now 16 or 15 million subscribers. Um I'm Harry Horsfall. I'm the CEO of Flight Three. Um I've I've launched 14 companies, failed 11. Um I I built a music festival which is um and I went to a school that always spoke about community. So sometimes in Web3 we hear community branded around um and and as as as I built a big London event, um community is such a big part of marketing but it can be branded around in the in the wrong way.

Um yeah, so lucky lucky enough to have um helped build Superteam. I don't know if any of you know that. This is this is Lana sort of grassroots community we're building. Stand with Crypto. We worked with we worked with Ripple and lots lots of big brands. So um you know the the the the problem is crypto is really really really complicated and and as we saw in the early 2017 there was a few different chains but now there's you know 11 million dapps and tokens, 2,500 blockchains, 27% more tokens created. And what and what we're really What we're really struggling with is an attention problem. The users exist, the demand is real, and there there is money moving, but why does it feel like nobody

can find you? And it's because you're not competing in a market, you're competing in a war of attention, where everyone is screaming the same things. You know, the amount you would be surprised the amount of inbound leads we get. I want to be the hyper liquid where this new perp. And of course, it's really really hard to create that attention, and hyper liquid did it in such a good way. Just recreating that is not easy. As we're targeting the same people in the same places, and most of us are losing that war without even knowing it. Um And you know Oh, yeah. When you find another person stealing your market share. Um And here's Here's the most uncomfortable truth in the room. If you hear crypto, as marketers we have failed. When we

look at Facebook, uh even though meta has been an absolute disaster, 80 billion down the drain. But when when when when we see Facebook, we're not we're not hearing web two, Zuck stealing all of our data centralized app. We're like, connect with your friends anywhere. Um And And if a normal person outside of this room, cuz this is obviously a very educated room, re- reads reads the word crypto in their marketing, and we saw the bitpanda um UK campaign, which was quite interesting. But it's it's it's we've already lost them. The word carries too much baggage, scams, volatility, complexity from FTX. People don't always buy the product, they buy the story and the feeling, the problem that they want solved and to be gone.

Nobody trusts just a logo. You know, we make lots of logos, but until I associate it with um with a person or a feeling. You know, when when I think of Coinbase, I think trust. You know, we've used it for 12 years. Apart from it going down in bull markets, it is actually a very very good solution. So, the question isn't how do we market crypto better? The question is how do we make people care before they even realize that it's crypto? Um and and if we look at sort of like 2014 hype versus 2026 performance, you know, there's there's the the funnel that we like to look at there, you know, mind share focus is dead, airdrop farming is pretty dead, you know, the DJ mascots, institutional crypto leads,

internal accounts, it's all all kind of dying a little bit. You know, how many people are actually hosting and listening to their Twitter spaces at the moment? It's really really died down. So, these tactics, they were really built for 2021 when the novelty was enough. You know, this this was this was a time when we were at NFTs were ripping through 5 million sell outs instantly of the FOMO. Um and the market that sort of market is gone. And what what's replaced it is better, but it is actually harder, but it actually works. Performance marketing that you can measure found is brands people actually follow. You know, I often say this to people, why do you want 100,000 followers if it costs $1,000 to use your product and they're all based in a in a

region where the average wallet size is $10. You know, we've seen that a lot where people have pumped up their socials, but actually, if you have uh I spent a lot long time working for Luno, which is um a big exchange based in South Africa, Malaysia, Nigeria. So, there when we were investing in users, it was okay to spend $8 to acquire a user that would spend 50 $50 in Nigeria or Malaysia, but if we're if we're spending all of our marketing budget and we're acquiring users that can't afford to use our product, but the metrics look great cuz the VCs are happy, in the long term and and what we've learned from Web 2 funnels, that's not going to bring the users and create the flywheel.

Um and so, surviving the meta is not easy. And like we're seeing a lot of, you know, short form clip is reaching people who have never heard of crypto Twitter. Sometimes we are definitely in our echo chamber and and people always ask me, "Should I be on LinkedIn? Should I be on crypto Twitter? Should I be on Reddit?" And I actually don't think it matters, but I think it matters that you authentically decide where your audience live. Especially when you're when you're at the start, really double down on that one platform. Really really get good at that because what what we see is small teams will sometimes put their content across four different platforms without it being optimized.

Um So, this is this is some of the conversations I have with very very intelligent CTOs who are telling me, "This is the DEX. It's decentralized. It's consensus mechanisms, etc. etc." But that is what it is and that's actually really really hard in in a world where we have about 4 seconds. I think I actually do have ADHD, but I think everyone has ADHD from scrolling Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. We're we're addicted that dopamine. And I think if we if we look at this, "Send money anywhere, keep it." That it it does all of those things. It is decentralized. It is etc. It's ZK. It's all of those amazing things. But when

we're when we're talking to a new audience, what I call an iceberg method. So, it everyone's attention is really really valuable and and we've got to respect their attention. No one cares about your new project, you know? But if if Oh, I like the sound of that, I'm going to go to the website. I'm going to go further and further. Oh, I might actually invest in your project. I'm going to read your white paper. But we're inviting people to go further and further down the funnel without um bombarding them with all of the the jargon at the start. And and the brain's primary job is to put conserve energy.

And if your message requires effort to decode it, the brain rejects it, moves on. Simplicity isn't dumbing it down. Simplicity is respecting your audience enough to say one clear thing instead of five complicated ones. And and you know, like I often say I'm a good test. I've I've been in crypto since 20 2012. And I'm not a smart dev, but if I can't understand it after a 45-minute convo with you, how am I then going to go tell the 10 50 million users that you want? And I love what some of the the cards are doing in in in that sort of tech tech stack.

So um Once you committed to simplicity, you need a positioning statement, not a mission statement. You know, um the the product for X. That's it. And if you can't fill in these two blanks cleanly, you don't actually have a position, you have a vibe. And vibe marketing is kind of dead. You know, a decentralized derivatives protocol, the trading platform for people who got burned by FTX. Not a modular L2, the fastest chain for gaming studios. Not a stablecoin infrastructure layer, the payment rail for Latin American freelancers. The blank for blank forces a choice.

And the projects that are afraid to make that choice, the ones that are want to be for everyone, unless you're Binance, end up being for no one. Um and now, this is kind of the mega mean mouse. And it's it it's it's it's a lot a lot of the time when we're fighting for attention, we actually get to the actual craft of writing content that converts. There's a sort of three steps. Problem match. Before you say a single word about your product, prove you understand their exact problem. Use their words, not yours. If you're talking to a trader that keeps on getting liquidated by BitMEX, you open with that feeling. They need to read the first line and think that person gets it.

Then we want to agitate the mouse. Make the problem feel worse before you offer the solution. What does it cost them to keep living with this problem? What have you already tried that didn't work? The goal is to manipulate it's isn't to manipulate is to make sure your solution feels proportionate to the pain. And you know, there's one stat that I really love. Apparently, you're more likely to get divorced than change bank. So, when we look at the booming effect of Revolut and how quickly they have grown, um I don't know, you know, they are actually a crypto company now in disguise. They really solved that problem for us when we were abroad and we could just spend and we all used it just like a spending card. And now it's a real UK and they really really solved that solution. And

then the mouse trap. Only now do you introduce the product, not a feature list. That's boring and as a relief the specific answer to the specific problem you just made sting. The reason that a lot of crypto content fails is it starts at step three um as opposed to leading with this product and hope the audience catch up. They don't always catch up. So, breaking the crypto Twitter bubble. So, I love I love crypto Twitter, but it is not a market. It's a waiting room full of people that are already in crypto.

And if your entire distribution strategy lives on crypto Twitter, you're marketing to people that have already made their decision about you. You're already you're either already in their feed or not. The next 100 million crypto users are not on crypto Twitter. They're on TikTok, YouTube, Reddit. They're watching short-form videos on on their lunch break. They're not going to find you through a thread. And this is this is a lot what we see cuz there is some stuff that you need to broadcast. We've just done a new product announcement. We've done a partnership. We're great great great great. You need to do some of that broadcasting in your marketing mix, but I don't care if I don't know who you are. I don't care that you've done a partnership with Stripe or Privy or whoever whoever the partnership is.

It's the the playbook of finding new people is we've got to make make them care and that's where content needs to be authentic rather than just boasting about how great your partnership is. Dedicated short-form video operation, high-volume UGC, global networks of creator posting natively. I think one of the big shifts we'll see is in the early stages we saw a lot of influencers being like, "This is an amazing token." That is quite basic, like buy this token. A lot of what we see like when we're working with um like a bet fair with big big big sort of footballers is we'd have them using the product or playing fun games, and the branding would be in the background.

They wouldn't even be talking about necessarily about the the betting platform. The the the brand awareness would be there, and I think we're going to see a lot more. And we're seeing that a lot um in Can last year, MetaMask taking everyone on a helicopter, and they were using the MetaMask card. It was a great way of showing the brand without being like, "Buy the MetaMask card." cuz you're using their audience. The ROI is proven. 5 to 12% of views convert to website visits, half a percent to direct app downloads, and these numbers compound. And hopefully we're going to get to a point where we can work out lifetime value of a customer cuz we know when we acquire someone in everyone's so busy here. You've all flown into Can. But if I get you on my dapp, and then it

doesn't work on day one, the cost of reactivation is one of the most expensive marketing spends that you've got. Okay. So, this is something that I I think about a lot and uh everyone's like, "Oh, Harry, how am I going to do amazing marketing?" And and and it's that you know, as a as a as an agency we raised over 200 million dollars for various projects. But that's not cuz we did amazing marketing. It's cuz we did good marketing. There was a good product, and there was a right timing. You know, if you were trying to sell institutional crypto to Goldman in 2017, you'd be laughed out the room. Or if you did speak to someone there'd be a bit of an outcast, and they wouldn't have quite

had the clout to go up the chain. What we're seeing right now is institutional crypto, and especially in London, is absolutely booming. This is the perfect time to be making um institutional crypto. You still But you still need a good product, and you need a good timing. And I think that is really um you know, as we work in those that worked in bigger companies know product marketing can sometimes blame each other. But when those two combine, but I think even more in Web3 and crypto and ETH, is when the right timing hits, that's when the magic flywheel really really starts to to go.

And then hopefully I've got my sailboat. Yes. So, what you know, when we go into the sailboat, there's the the the sail is your marketing effort, the wind is the matter, and the marketing contents that you're operating in. If there's great sail but no wind, you're dead in the water. A project in hype meta with 100,000 followers will always out-convert the same project in a dead meta with the same followers. The meta is the wind. You still have to sail. But, for the love of everything, sail with the wind. And I think that's what we've seen with you know, Slack. I don't know if people use Slack. It was a gaming gaming channel that now pretty much most startups are using to communicate, especially in Web2. And

that pivot is is really really interesting. And when I when we look at AI and the pivot, the the moat of marketing is going to be even more valuable. Growth So, the growth flywheel, everything we've I I've covered so far connects into one system. Target. You know exactly who you're speaking to, cuz you filled in the blanks. And I think as as as a as a you know, you see it even in with the conferences, when we were ETHCC2, it was like, "Do you like crypto?" "Yeah, I love crypto. Wow. You know, um my first meetup was like quite a niche niche group of people that we we we gathered together. But now when we're seeing the side events, there's there's a whole array of people

that are really interested in stablecoins, really interested in DeFi, really interested in ZK. And I think the message that we crafted, the psychological hook for that specific person using the magic mean mouse, you know, gets us that reach. You're scaling that message natively outside of the echo chamber through short form, through creators, through channels where your actual audience live. And don't be afraid at the start, you know, Steven often talks about this a lot. When we're online, we can get quite dis- dis- inbound if we only get 300 views. But if what a project we're working on with Google was talking all to CTOs, and it was a podcast series for that. And and we we had 50 or 60 people

join, but they are the decision makers. You know, we sometimes get so caught up in getting a million views, but if you want to talk to 50 CTOs that are going to sign off $1 million worth of cloud storage, you don't need crazy big numbers. And when these three three things work together, you get the hyperliquid proof point. They didn't build another exchange and then built a marketing strategy on top. They built a product that was its own marketing, trade generate fees, buy back the token, incentivizes more users. The narrative and the utility same thing.

Okay. Um so this sing- singularity timeline, I'm obviously seeing the crazy rise of of of AI. And sometimes when we're making our content, we got to realize that we're not always just making it for humans. Um and we what we call geo. Um so AI search is really scary cuz this this room as as crypto thinkers, we're thinking outside of We know um even my team the other day said there was a Unibot link and it was a a scam link. It's the first ad on Google. But we're quite good at scrolling down Google. When we look at what Geo's going to do, it only gives you three suggestions without scrolling.

Writing for AI is also going to be a big part of our content. And this is one of my fav- I share this with the team all the time cuz everyone's like, "Oh, Harry, are you going to be replaced by AI?" Like, "Is your agency gone? Is everyone's going to use a bot?" But people people people that are slow and and not good at marketing, w- yes, AI is going to speed them up and let let make thousands of images, but they're suddenly going to become slop cannons. And and and if we go back to my previous point about respecting all of your time and your attention, if I'm just seeing slop, I'm like, "Oh." You know, we saw with the Coinbase ad when they made that amazing GTA with humans,

not AI, and they sort humanized crypto by them being real. They could have just done that with AI, but what is really exciting for for the marketers in the room or the people i- the people that are hiring marketing or building their own, is if you have good judgment, AI can turbocharge what you want to create. It can speed up the ideation process. And so, it AI is really really exciting for marketers. I think taste is going to become even better. Like one thing I love to think about is music was one of these things, bit like crypto, that we used to buy $9.99 for CD. Once LimeWire came around, they couldn't put the genie back in the bottle, and it's the same with with

crypto. They can't Unless they can turn off the internet, they can't stop it. But the it's it's going to be that moment that um uh yeah, the the mo- the mo- the moment that people now know that they can do it. >> [snorts] >> So, yeah. Be careful with slop because you don't need to post 50 times a day if it's bad. Okay. My my final slide is how do we pull this all together? Um we figure out your users' real problem, not what you what you think their problems are, what they actually tell you and ask. And I would advise, please do speak to your users. The amount of people that I see spending life savings building a product without actually

speaking to people is is really is really scary. Listen to exactly what they say about these problems, the specific words they use, and those words are your copy. Make informed decisions about where and how to show up. Not everywhere, the right places, you know. We got to be really intentional where we're going to be. Gather your whole team into the story, not just marketing. Get the engineering guys to post authentically, and that may not be perfect. Product founders um and um everyone has a voice and everyone is a true distribution channel.

And especially as a lot of us have become becoming a lot more docs, adds even more value. Harvest that input into content earns attention, short-form, native, human, and repeated. Brilliant marketing is good marketing plus good product plus right timing. You control two of these three. The third you influence by choosing your meta wisely. And in crypto especially, the gap isn't always distribution is the story, and telling that story in a way that connects with humans. Okay. And then Yep. So, if if you're building in crypto and struggling to exchange, hopefully come to London. We're we're running Zebu Live, and yeah, have fun, experiment, be authentic. There's no there's no like

right way to tell your story, but the more stories the better detail. Thank you so much for listening. Hopefully I didn't go too fast. >> [applause] >> Cheers. >> [applause] >> Thank you so much. Is that okay? Yes. Thank you so much. Yes.