(Product) Marketing in Web3

Transcript

thank you [Music] [Music] hi everyone welcome thanks for coming so I'm going to talk about marketing web3 today there's a little bit of an issue with my laptop so I'll have to look back because I don't see anything on my own screen um so what we're going to talk about today is and I think it's something that a lot of marketers feel with me that whenever we talk about marketing it's mostly people will talk talk to you about you know PR events advertising and the problem with like these separate you

know topics is that it's not marketing those are tools for marketing and if you really want to understand marketing strategy you actually need to zoom a little bit out and that's also what I'm going to talk to you guys about for today so I'm going to start with a pretty easy case study with a protocol that you guys are probably all familiar with sushi Swap and then going uh on to you know what is marketing the differences between marketing and web 2 web 3 and then ended off with a little bit of alpha so who am I um well nice to meet you all I'm Xerox Bella that's what I go by I have a previous web 2 background as a product marketing manager at Google and as a business unit manager at Hewlett

Packard I dove into web3 while I was in crypto along for a longer time when a doe full-time web 3 and end of 2020 and started out with Opex which is a decentralized options exchange on arbitrim set up the marketing team over there and then basically Port it over to Sushi Swap and headed as a CMO over Sushi swap I recently left Sushi swap so I have something exciting coming up but follow me on Twitter to see more so let's start with sushi swap so um Sushi swap I think everyone knows about it um raise your hand if you haven't heard of sushi swap so just to give a quick introduction of what it is

um so Sushi swap is a decentralized exchange it's very similar to a centralized exchange that you all know of what it means to be decentralized is that you're permissionless and non-custodial so you're basically the boss over your own wallet and you know your own tokens and it has its you know own challenges as well as um I think within crypto everyone who really wants to be owner of their own keys so that makes sense um but how it came into existence is um I think a few years ago two years two and a half years ago um Unison was the first Dex actually that came into existing venture-backed and um it wasn't the first no okay sorry I got corrected it's not the first decks

but basically what Sushi swap did is they copied the code they forked the full like code base and deployed it and and it was pretty a funny story because they knew nobody's going to come to like a random you know food decks so what did they do they launched the token and the token was actually a little has had a little bit more of utility than most of the tokens right now on the market so you were actually a part of the equity owner of the the basically the decks and you were able to get fees they did that to your LPS to two to decks and then afterwards they launched the farming incentives as well farming means that you get rewarded for putting an LP in index and with

those farming incentives I think they reached a height of 1.5 billion tvl which is really really good especially for a copy after that um uh the the founder of sushi swap pulled an exit scam they and the reason for that was because you know you know how it works people Farm a lot of the tokens a lot of whales form the tokens once they have enough tokens they dump it to lock in their profits and then you know the price of the token declines the founder exit scam um I think it was a pretty young person got scared gave the money back to the treasury and then it had a new kind of like a new start with a new Chef which is which goes by the name zero xmaki who is now transitioned over to layer zero as well and under his leadership Sushi

actually became to to be one of the largest dexes in existence so what is a marketing case here and I think if you look and dissect it a little bit it's really kind of like a customer acquisition through um I guess airdrops as well as like you know incentives that you give um you know kickstarting a small did it um was it able to raise like runway for the rest of the team a lot of the people actually stuck around because you know a food token is quite interesting this is part of growth marketing and you compare it to like web2

what you see is that in web 2 we like we work a little bit more in a traditional sense and if you look at the marketing funnel a marketing funnel is actually um I would say a tool that well a funnel that everyone goes through so whether you have like a service or you provide like a product all of your users will go through each of these stages sometimes they skip stages sometimes they you know fast forward but for the ones that are unfamiliar with what this is I'll quickly give you an example of how to go how to look at this so let's say you have um let's take an example of a wool code whenever you you know walk past in your city you see an advertisement you know you see you acknowledges you're like okay whatever you walk past it that is

where it basically where the awareness stage is at and then you know the second time that you walk past it maybe you notice the model and maybe maybe you notice the brand that is basically the second interest stage the next stage is consideration that is when you know it gets a little bit chilly and you're like hey maybe I should start you know buying a wool coat but you haven't decided on anything yet because you know you procrastinate on it a little bit the stage after that is intent where it actually gets cold and you're like hey maybe I should actually start considering buying that and this one like the intent and the evaluation phase sometimes get mixed together but the evaluation phase basically means that whenever you're researching you're basically comparing the prices and that is where you actually are considering to

buy and once you have decided to buy you reach the purchase phase which basically completes the transaction so that isn't a rough nutshell what it is if you look at marketing and how you can grow this funnel basically what happens is you have a part that is organic organic attraction organic user acquisition basically and unpaid user acquisition and basically for specifically the first part the organic part it really depends on your product Market fit because people have to really use or love your product before they start considering it or telling their friends about it but the second part of the paid acquisition is something that we see all over and in the in the web 2 world you see it with a lot of VC funded startups they get a lot

of money they put that money a lot in you know advertisements as well as affiliate programs so think about referrals cashbacks easiest example is for instance Uber you get you know really discounted fares and then a lot of people basically go on to your app and that is how you capture market share but in web 2 we see that too um basically the paid part in web 2 is like really easy like all the airdrops all the incentives programs and what it means is that it's good for kickstarting a community but they're not going to stay with you especially not if you know you don't have a product Market fit if people don't think your product is valuable to them um how you measure how how well you're doing is basically you need data to back

it up it could be qualitative data it could be quantitative data I think a lot of people are very you know zoomed in on quantitative data which basically means you know Impressions how many people have you know have been acquired and these things are not always measurable especially not at the top funnel and awareness and interest phase sometimes you just need to go out there talk to the users and get feedback like face to face or through like a form um so what's different in web3 is that the first part of you know getting kickstarting a community is fine but how you basically create and you know get the community to stick with you is actually active Community Management you really have to love your users think you know think about your users and then

talk to your users um because they will notice it and making sure that they're part of your protocol is actually really important we have to look at all crypto projects as actual startups and startups don't necessarily have the money to keep incentivized you know a user acquisition what you need to do is get ambassadors get people create a meme create meme toolkits make sure that you share the content with these people so that they have something that they can use to promote you and that is something that has been very valuable um and it's something that I think what you see on crypto Twitter that does something that where you can go viral actually um one of the things that is a little bit harder in web 3 because we're such a

new and Small industry relatively small industry is that we don't have the tools to actually track a lot of the data that I was talking about earlier so like when you look at web 2 what they do is you know they have databases of whether that's their own tools where they track all of the user interactions or have a Google or Facebook ads Network that can that they can tap into we don't have something sophisticated yet I know that there's a lot of tools in web3 that are being built right now but currently I haven't found one that's like fully comprehensive that can basically see you know all Unchained transactions and translate that back to your user base um so it you know goes hand in hand with a little bit of creative thinking and that's why I say that talking to your users and making sure that you're really

active in the Discord is really important so what should you do as like a project owner what should you look at um whenever you start a project I think you need to find more of like a generalist rather than a specialist and what I mean by that is it's very hard to you know find all and even fund all of these people to to come join your marketing team so I think there's two roles that are essential um especially if you just sort out which is product marketing product marketing is the person that really translates your product and you know takes user feedback and then kind of like it gives gives the feedback back and forth you really have to you know E-Life 5 your

product make sure that the educational base is on top and then for growth and socials marketing it's definitely important to have someone funny on social media someone that can actually you know interact with the people that talk about you as well as get the memes ongoing this is not a checklist this is like kind of a few you know items that you can think about as a as a project owner depending on your product whether that's an nft a game or D5 product it's going to be different um but yeah this these are like the most important roles and once you've bootstrapped you have a little bit of Runway you did your let's say you're in you know token sale you can look at the other like more expansionary roles which basically is partner marketing uh the person that handles everything about you know with with the biz Dev team

um does all of the B2B things basically and content marketing so push out a lot of content so that people can find you but also that so that onboarding gets a lot easier people that you know get to know you they want to know a lot about you but oftentimes and that's what I see all the time with smaller projects it's very hard to find information and if even if you do find like docs or the blog it's very hard to digest that information and make sure that you you know Target different user bases whether that is retail users whether that is you know market makers or wheels or you know actual technical audiences that you want to build on top of you um here are some of the more Western channels for communication um because like most of the Asians have

their own channels and that they're on but I think this is a good way to look at you know how to utilize these channels and how to think of them uh make sure to you don't have to have a presence everywhere I think for a lot of like this projects that are starting with a western user base it's important to have like a Twitter Discord sometimes a telegram but make sure that you have like a community team that is on top of it because they're they're going to be the ones that are you know wake up and interact with these people think of it as a game back in the days for the gamers under us you know you log in you go into the game you chat with friends and that is something like this feeling is also something that you want to create with your own protocol where

people share a flower people share their daily things that's really your internet friends basically so to memes I think I have put a lot of emphasis on this but it it's not going to happen where you just put in you know the generic memes make sure that you have kind of like a mask or something that you your protocol can be identified with and then incorporate them into um basically the standard means that you've seen on on Twitter on crypto Twitter uh depends also on you know your basically your industry whether that's nfts whether that's gaming or other segments I'm mostly well first and D5 and defy we all cope with the same same kind of memes so if there's one takeaway it's just memes guys

so um I think I'm running out of time so I'll just give a really quick um uh sneak peek kind of like Shilling for my side unfortunately but it's really cool to know so what is dopex um dope is going to release a super cool thing but before you uh before I'm gonna tell about it um really quick the opix is decentralized options exchange on top of arbitrim and um same with social you know decentralized meaning that it's non-custodial and permissionless that is your Edge over something like something centralized basically um why would you do options um in a nutshell it would be like you know to hedge you can see it as an insurance or just make speculative bets through leveraging

um but most most of all it's a lot of people are just farming um or doing like you know neutral strategies I'm not going into that too much but a really really interesting thing right now is zopex has is going to change their whole design meaning that for anyone that is interested in derivatives we're going to have a unified liquidity meaning that there's going to be one bucket of liquidity so that buyers have much deeper liquidity to buy into um we're going to partialize collateralization if you're a writer of an option you can now definitely do much more buy much more options with with the money that you have and American options meaning meaning that you can always basically exit your position whenever

you want which is a really Game Changer I'm not doing it justice so please download the light paper as you can see we have a very lovely Diamond pipis which is also ties into my point of really use the memes to get people engaged and get people ongoing memes really do a lot to educate your user base of a complex D5 product as well um I hope you guys enjoyed this talk if you want to connect with me here's my Twitter and Linkedin I'm usually not on LinkedIn so please feel free to uh DM me on Twitter and if you have any questions [Music] um we really uh very sorry but we don't have time

but you can ask questions uh after this topic because we now need to go to the next topic and next topic it will be uh Community government models um cool so if you have questions you know where to find me um I'm happy to chat yeah thanks thanks guys thank you [Music]