Distribution Advantage: how to set up GTM for your crypto product (without bs)

Transcript

from Votes FYI. >> Hey everyone. Uh did you like the breakfast or was it good enough? Uh I guess some people are still eating. Uh but I'm happy that some of you made it. Uh I'm going to speak about distribution which is basically a way to get your product in front of the users. But uh before I start, quick question. Uh please raise your hand if you ever used MetaMask.

Okay, almost I think everyone. Okay, Phantom. Who used Phantom ever? Okay, like threeirds. Zango, who ever used Zango wallet? Not a single person, I guess. And Valora. Okay, no one. And who here checked all 520 wallets recommended by Wallet Connect before they've chosen which wallet to use? Do we have any wallet nerds here? Uh, probably not that hardcore, I guess. Um, and have you checked every cola before you decided to

drink Coca-Cola? Or was it more like, oh, it was on the shelf? Maybe you saw an ad. Maybe your mom bought you a Coca-Cola and you started drinking it. So, as I see, probably not, we don't have people who are that hardcore when it comes to research. But the thing is that we very often think that our users will be that hardcore that if our product is superior they will somehow find it. But you know maybe there is the best wallet on earth somewhere on this wallet connect 520 recommended wallets. I just never bothered to uh you know dig in. And what I want to say is that best product

doesn't always win. The fact that we had the most raised hands for MetaMask doesn't mean the MetaMask is best wallet. I hope we all agree on that. Um, so what matters is is your product even on a mental shelf when someone has a problem and distribution is a way to build this mental shortcut between the problem and your product. So, okay, I'm thirsty. I will drink Coca-Cola. I want a wallet and I have this list of maybe three to five wallets in my mind that I'm going to use. Like think how you have used how you decided to use a wallet. Maybe it was MetaMask

that was recommended on every app back in 2020. Maybe your friend used the wallet and said, "Oh, you should try Robbie. It's really cool." Maybe you saw an article. Maybe someone on Twitter said it. But even we I I would say Dapcon audience is pretty pro when it comes to crypto experience. Even we use these mental shortcuts. So now the question is how do we even start building them for our users. So this is uh as you can see in the left top left corner unis swap demo. Um it's a slide from a demo at Defcon 3 when unis swap was shown by car flourish to

the audience and it's one of the things that Hayden did to promote unis swap. We often think about unis swap as a technical breakthrough because it was technologically superior to other exchanges. It provided better prices, better liquidity and so on. But we often forget that Hayden also did a lot of work to promote unis swap. Unis swap before launch before even the product got launched got presented at defcon free. It got pitched to Vitalik and Vitalik actually got very interested in that. It was presented at New York City Mesh, New York City Blockchain Week, ATcon, Ephis Hong Kong, Shanghai

Blockchain Week and pitched to countless people at balance and maker DA offices and Hayden also personally damped potential LPS. This is how much work he did pre-launch. Like I don't know many founders today that do that much work. And it was 2018, which meant that, you know, crypto was way quieter. It was way easier to get through the noise and get people's attention.

So today in 2026, the bar is way higher. Like you need to do way more work they that Hayden did to even get on the radar. And most people don't do it because they underestimate how much work should be done. So yeah, UniS swab not only had great tech, they also had great um go to market. So does it mean that you should be like Hayden, just go to conferences and offices and pitch your product? Not really. Uh imagine that Hayden pitched his product here. This is European Blockchain Congress 2018 in Barcelona. As you can see, the audience

doesn't look like typical Ethereum developers. People wear suits and they are like very elegant. They represent financial institutions, European Commission and so on. If Hayden took the same strategy, let's pitch my product and he went there, do you think he would succeed or the efforts might not be that uh good? Well, probably he would not succeed. Not because the channel was wrong, not because conferences doesn't work, just because the market, the people he would be after is wrong.

So, I sometimes get asked by crypto founders like, should we do Koss or should we do Twitter, should we do BD? I'm like, I don't know. I like there are more things than just choosing a channel to get your distribution. And there are four elements. First of them is market. And what I want to say is that these boring fundamentals like choosing the right market can be more important than having a flashy campaign. If you have a fleshy campaign targeted at wrong people, it just won't work. It's like very logical when you think about it. So to give you an example, this is a Coinbase website from 2013.

Do you notice anything special about this website? Apart from the fact that it's old because the design is, you know, 13 years old. I'm going to give you a clue. What is Coinbase for? You go you open this website. What is Coinbase a tool for? >> Yeah, kind of like a wallet. Yeah.

And what are they focused on? >> Buying and selling. >> Yeah, buying and selling Bitcoin. Actually, Bitcoin is mentioned nine times on this small website. For the first four years, Coinbase was exclusively focused on Bitcoin. Not saying, "Oh, let's add every, you know, color coin to our website." They were only serving Bitcoin. And there were a few reasons for that. First of all, as we know, storing and Bitcoin and buying Bitcoin was hard back then. um especially you know since some exchanges had problems with you know storing securely your money. The second reason

was because Bitcoin had a market cap of around $1 billion already. So even if they captured small percentage of that $1 billion that could already be some substantial business for Coinbase and is that they had a very unfair advantage. you know, most exchanges back then were not as professional and you know um tratfi oriented as we have today. But Brian Armstrong had co-founder in Fred Ersome who was an ex goldman trader. So he brought a lot of credibility to institutions and banks and when during bare market most

exchanges got unbanked, Coinbase managed to keep these relationships and keep operating and keep growing. So they have chosen the right market. But do you think if Coinbase in 201 uh 13 decided okay we will be the number one place on earth to buy namecoin or litecoin or dodgecoin. Do you think that they would be a $50 billion public company today? Probably not because the market would be wrong.

So you know market is 50% of product market fit and it's the more important 50%. Yet most founders don't think about it at all. Most founders think okay how can I make my product great but the first question is who should you even serve with your product or even if your product is ready how should you market it where should you market it to which kind of people so this is a a screenshot from a viral video of a guy who's eating a watermelon in under 10 seconds it's pretty funny um recommend watching but like this is how I the founders who say, "Okay, I have a market.

Let's take it over." But it's like trying to eat a whole watermelon at once. It's just like very hard. Uh the proper way to eat a watermelon is to slice it and just eat it slice by slice. And these slices in this distribution speak are called segments. So you pick some part of the market and are focused on that. So, Satoshi Nakamoto, people know him, but like he didn't buy a Super Bowl ad to promote white paper. He didn't even share white paper on hacker news that had a very sophisticated developer centric

audience. He sent it to a few thousand people on Cippher Punk mailing list because these people were the most likely to get engaged in the crazy back then idea of digital money. And that's the level of focus that you should have when you are launching your product. It could be this people hanging out on these free group chats or people building DeFi apps that went to DAPCON 2026. Otherwise you as a small startup you wouldn't have enough money and power to capture attention of a whole market.

So don't try to eat the whole market. Slice it and just try to do it side by side because this is uh the way to do it. And you know you probably know these logos. So we get to the part when we talk about channels. So channels is this question like should we do Kos conferences Twitter or whatever. So Ethereum do you know how Ethereum have grown? Where did they got their first users? >> Bitcoin. Yeah. Bitcoin Miami. Vitalik was actually an editor of Bitcoin magazine. Even the E race was denominated in Bitcoin. You could say it

was a vampire attack if you want to be. And probably some Bitcoiners think that way that's why they don't like us. But like they were exclusively focused on capturing existing community. Teter they have grown thanks to partnership with centralized exchanges because these centralized exchanges got debanked and they needed dollar settlement. So Tedar said, "Hey, we can give you a dollar settlement with our stable coin." Poly market. Well, Poly Market is all about the current thing.

So, they've grown through Twitter snapshot. They have grown through Dows. So, like back in 2021, everyone was part of like seven Dows. So, you went to one Dow, they started using snapshot and you were like, "Oh, that's cool. So, let's adopt it in another DA where I'm in Zora." They were back in when they were focused on art, they were literally DMing people on Instagram and saying, "Hey, you do cool art, you can make money online. Just sign up."

Lido, they did defy integration. Like the biggest factor was when they started, they already had great liquidity pool between ST and Eve on curve. So you you know it was very you could feel that even if you get this weird new type of Eve you can easily get back normal echo you know known as an app that was built by Kobe it was mainly promoted through Kos because they created this investment groups they invited their friends and that's how it has grown rainbow took a totally different approach they created rainbow kit which is basically developer tooling and that's how they've grown POP.

Well, if you know Patricio and his famous red jacket, you know that it has grown through life on boarding people. So, what I want to say there is no playbook that always works. For one product, it's going to be Twitter. For one product, it's going to be developer tooling. So, you need to experiment. And the way to do it is to brainstorm three channels that might work and has the highest chances of working and then becoming a nerd of this channel. So if you choose Twitter for one month, you spend like 40 hours a week for four weeks just thinking about Twitter, learning about Twitter, tweeting threads, maybe short tweets, maybe

memes, maybe videos, maybe DMing people, maybe being a reply guy. This is the way of dedication you need to have to actually test a channel. And once you do it, you see whether it worked. You see whether how much money did it cost? How much energy did it cost? Did it bring some quality users? Can you scale this channel? Can you get another thousand users from that? Because you know if you focus for example on okay let's say get people from DPCON there's like a few hundred of us so if I need to on board 10,000 users it's just not enough. So I would need 10 DPC cons or 10 conferences to get enough

users. So this is a scene uh from big short a famous scene that's my quant and what Jared who is pitching hedge fund here does well is he he does a thing that every founder should do whenever they're building distribution because okay you got the market you sliced it so you get a segment you got a channel but then the question is what do you say to these users And what Jared did there, he's like, "Okay, what these hedge funds guys needs?" Well, they need ways to make money. So, here's the way to make money.

Short the housing market. Okay. Then they ask, "Okay, does the math add up?" And then there's this that's my quantine. Yes, the math adds up. Then they're like, "Okay, but how could we short it?" And he says, "Oh, there's credit default swaps." So these are the questions that every user silently asks whenever they see your product. First is like does it solve my problem? The second question is can I trust that it's actually going to solve my problem? And the third one does it meet the requirements I have for these kind of products. For example, it's sometimes it's regul some someone has a legal requirements or maybe it

needs to be be an iOS app, not Android and so on so forth. So you need to answer these questions whether it's your landing page, whether it's your blog post, whether it's your podcast, essay whatever it needs to be obvious that these questions are answered. So the good news is you only need one thing to work like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. You need only one shot at the Death Star to win the you know the fight for the galaxy. Same here. You can make hundred experiments that won't work but if one works it can bring you thousands sometimes even millions of users and be

a make or break for your uh startup. Uh so yeah that's the good news and uh I'm about to end uh with two things. First you know I only scratched the surface of it. There's a longer piece that I wrote and Arman asked me to present this today based on this blog post. So I'm going to show you a QR code where you can find this blog post and get more deep like deeper into this subject if you find it interesting.

It's free like you can just uh scan it. The second thing is since I am into testing channels I decided that I'm going to test if conference channel works for us. So I'm going to show you a QR code that if you build a DIY app when there's any earn experience or borrow experience so you interact with a morphol ID rocket pool whatever um you can use our API and get $50 of free credit so if that's your thing uh you can scan it um so yeah the blog post is on the left if you want you can scan it and bookmark it for later

The API credits is on the right. Uh the code for API credits is going to work until Friday. So you have three days. You can just make a picture and do the onboarding later with blog post. It's uh the same. So yeah, thank you. And we have a time for half a quest.