ep 22 – Marketing web3: Audience, Community, More

Transcript

[Music] welcome to web3 with Asics and z a show about building the next generation of the internet from the team at Asics and Z crypto that includes me your host Donald Jackson this show is for anyone whether entrepreneur developer business leader policy maker creator gamer or marketer and today's episode is actually all about marketing relevant not just to marketers already in web 3 but also to anyone doing community management devrel or developer relations or simply doing marketing and web 2 or classic growth marketing and wants to understand some of the latest trends it's also one of our special book launch episodes because we have the author of the new book just out web3 marketing a handbook for the

next internet Revolution which covers everything from what is web 3 to web3 Marketing in theory and practice we'll also cover a lot of the themes that are in the book and which are also top of Mind questions for many Builders out there including finding your audience and product Market fit to tactic such as Community marketing the author and our expert guest today is Amanda cassette who was the first CMO at consensus helped bring ethereum to Market and also founded and leads the pioneering and Native web 3 marketing agency serotonin also joining this episode to share insights and ask questions is Kim malasevich CMO at Asics and Z crypto who oversees brand marketing events and Communications and before that was VP of communications at coinbase where she

took the company through its direct listing while leading internal policy product and corporate Communications internationally as a reminder none of the following is investment business legal or tax advice please see asicsency.com disclosures for more important information including a link to a list of our investments [Music] so anyway this is a big topic top of mind for many crypto Founders which is how to do Marketing in web3 and by the way marketing I feel like is like a big bad m word it can mean all kinds of things for people I am curious maybe just to kick us off Kim how would you describe marketing that's kind of a very big question I don't know if I can make it concise it's really like a promotion

of something whether that's a promotion of an idea a person a product a category you name it that's a really great point because the product can be a person as well which is actually kind of very relevant in web 3. Amanda how would you define marketing broadly sure I think of marketing as a matching exercise between a project or a product and people that would use it if only they knew about it the reason I describe it as a matching exercise is actually when I came into consensus the reputation of marketing was damaged from web to style marketing which involves influencers on Instagram Hawking vitamin waters all these ads

constantly in your feed for products that you don't want and there's this idea that marketing is putting things in your field of attention that you wish weren't there and that it's trying to get you to do something that's not in your interest like buy a product that you don't really need and so this idea of marketing is a matching exercise is about finding the people that actually want or would want the product If Only They knew about it and that matching exercise isn't always possible because not every product or project has people out there that would want it not every project is actually solving a real problem but really starts with understanding what that product is very deeply even if you aren't technical

being able to understand how your product works what it does and then understanding your audience who are they what do they pay attention to what are the channels where they live not just digitally but physically environmentally what kinds of messages resonate with them what kinds of price points are appealing to them and then figuring out how to bring those two things into closer proximity so you can test how well they match up with each other it's a part of the product Market fit process to match the product with its audience and see how that match is going and then to feed data from how that's going back into the product development process so the other thing I would say is if a

product or project is struggling to get that match it could just need a few tweaks so that process informs a cycle that goes into product building that's great Amanda I never heard marketing describe that way as a matching exercise that's super interesting and what does it Encompass my friend Eva Bayland tweeted something really smart that I included in my book which is there's either building or trading everything in between is marketing marketing is a much more expansive activity than perhaps some technical Founders originally believe it's everything you do from your name of your company to your logo to Which social and Community channels you choose to use to if you decide to go out to the press to earn media coverage

to any kind of blog content you write or even any kind of developer documentation you're putting that out into the world and it's causing someone to respond to your project or your product in a certain way and job descriptions right as they're trying to hire and recruit I mean that's all marketing too totally the blurb at the bottom of your email about what your business is all of this is marketing right right but why do you think Founders and builders in crypto and web 3 don't get why marketing matters a lot of our listeners are not familiar with the world of marketing but I believe a lot of them probably even have this idea quite frankly which I think is kind of a mistake I mean let's just jump right into this of

if you build it they will come which seems like a very big faulty assumption and I think we should help our listeners think through that I mean they might have some truth to that because some of the most viral products are natural Word of Mouth marketing but that doesn't mean that's not a former marketing so I want to dig into that a little bit Kim from your perspective why do you think because I wonder if it's even just lack of awareness yeah I think you have a lot of technical Founders who are very focused on building the product the architecture and as you know so when you have technical Founders As Leaders the focus really is on the product which is where I think the focus really should be in the beginning but that often means that they are rarely marketing experts or have marketing experience so their

core expertise is not in marketing which is fine it's a muscle that you can build over time or you can look to augment that by hiring great people whether that's in-house or Consultants that it's not as much of a focus for them and it maybe comes into focus a little bit later it's often something that they're just not always thinking about early but I'd say in web 3 they probably should be because so much of it is about building communities and those communities those don't just develop overnight you of course have to have a good product you have to be solving a need as Amanda said but you also have to kind of bring people together and and now with so many competing communities within web 3 what make sure is different you know how do

you stand out from the very beginning well how is your proposition different and look if you're marketing your product to very technical people then it's okay for that message to be fairly technical it will always kind of stay at a smaller audience but if you're trying to Market to more of a consumer audience or a wider audience you obviously have to start distilling the core message or benefits and getting it to a higher level abstraction in terms of what you're trying to say earlier on in order to reach more people so I think it starts with just it being a function of having a technical founder and maybe they just don't have as much experience with it but I would say that the marketing needs to start happening

earlier now because there's just naturally more attention you know Amanda when you were in the early days of building the ethereum community I'd be curious for you to talk about this more you know what you guys were doing it was fairly novel right I mean it was sort of like the first real composable blockchain so that concept of building a community it was also very new now you have a lot of blockchains and people that they're trying to build communities around them and so I think mistakes are a bit higher and it's just harder to get attention to yeah early ethereum day is really interesting because you realized early on that the web 2 style marketing skill sets aren't going to work to popularize ethereum when I was hiring the first web3 marketing team at

consensus and I was the first official marketing hire most of the applicants came with what have become standard marketing skill sets which is just running a paid Budget on meta's various business Suites so running a paid Budget on Facebook on Instagram on Twitter and at the time actually in 2016 2017 the major platforms banned crypto terms so you actually weren't allowed to use the word blockchain the word crypto Bitcoin ethereum in a paid campaign on any major platform or even many of the email platforms MailChimp had a ban at one point Google ads had a ban at one point and so we were forced to get back to the

growth hacker roots of marketing and move away from this calcified marketing skill set that had gotten used to these web 2 platforms and used to the web 2 style of Mark thing and what we learned is we're not a centralized comms Department we can't control what everybody is going to say about ethereum so all we can do is bottoms up exercises in order to make sure that correct information gets out there what do you mean by bottom up exercises in this context specifically let me tell you exactly so for example we noticed really early on that there were meetup groups bringing up all around the world not just in San Francisco and New York but

also in Budapest also in Buenos Aires also in Istanbul where individuals were stepping up to become their local ethereum Meetup organizers and instead of saying we as the ethereum foundation or we as consensus need to be the ones to run all of the different ethereum meetup groups around the world what we did was we kept an eye out for new organizers cropping up we invited the organizers into groups so that they could connect with each other and share best practices we offered standard materials like decks and design templates in order to help these Meetup Group Leaders standardize their presentations and look more official we also helped curate a roving Roadshow of

new daps and new projects to come to all these meetup groups and talk to them about what they were building which was great because it meant new content for all these different meetup groups and it meant that new projects building on ethereum could get feedback and get users in all these meetup groups around the world and this is one of the themes throughout my book is that in web 3 marketing instead of building a giant centralized full-time employee comms or marketing department it's about paying attention to what's going on organically in your community and figuring out how to blow oxygen on those Sparks in order to help them grow as opposed to assuming that all of the great ideas and all of the

work is going to come from you that's great and just to quickly Define for the listeners who may not remember this because that term kind of comes in and out of vogue's depths or decentralized apps or applications and what you're obviously describing about is the fact that ethereum is a platform for others to build on so in that note when you blow more oxygen on some of these organic efforts and it's bottom up it's decentralized as you said it's not centralized marketing department how do you then Market the things that are built on top of your platform because in this case and we'll talk about this a little bit more when we go into different types of domains but this is very novel for a lot of people because in crypto you often have layers I mean literal layers layers one layer two L1 L2 in your product narrative what

are the boundaries begin and end what I mean is theoretically anything built on top of ethereum could be marketed as part of ethereum so like where do you kind of Define those lines right so in the early days that I'm talking about I could name every project being built on ethereum so there wasn't really a need to define those lines because it was remarkable that anyone was building on ethereum and between consensus and the ethereum foundation chances were that we would know the people each of the projects that we helped grow at the time whether it succeeded or failed was a Showcase of what was possible with ethereum and oftentimes you saw a project fail to gain traction but then many years later

another project get inspired by that first and become successful just as an example ujo a really early music project on ethereum that was pioneering music nfts in 2016-2017 ended up helping to inspire audience Which is popular now yeah it's a decentralized botifies maybe how one can describe audience or decentralized SoundCloud right right so a lot of what we were doing was identifying projects that could succeed and if not could become Inspirations to others the way to Market something like ethereum was not run paid campaigns on Facebook targeted at developers to try to get them

experimenting with ethereum software and then somehow measuring what the ROI of that activity was for ethereum that would have been a laughable way to go about it when you're talking about a platform and getting as many at-bats as possible of Builders coming onto the platform trying their hand using their creativity to try to build against a use case and then Fanning those flames in injecting oxygen into that situation to help grow that product or at least make it a beacon so that others can see it and be inspired by it and does a project have to be successful in order to breathe more oxygen onto it because I sometimes wonder if the narrative is more compelling than even the track record and that could be a good or bad thing to be clear but just have to ask

you know I think of the relationship between marketing and product like muscle and bone the product is the bone and the marketing is the muscle and if you're going to take a walk around the block you need both if you're all product and no muscle you're going to sit on the floor you've got something solid but you're going to be stuck if you're all muscle and no bone you're going to be floppy there's nothing holding it together there's nothing solid so you need both very interesting okay anything to add from your perspective on this idea of you know you're marketing a platform your marketing an actual specific product this whole range I mean I think that's true of all technology really and even look at Apple in the App Store what

brings that to life is all the applications that are there right and what people can do with it I know for example they have a number of dedicated folks who are just there marketing the applications on the App Store and the same is true of developer programs or really any product it's like what are people doing with it and how does that really tell the story of the company and the product and what's possible and I think the same is true for here I think what Amanda is talking about though is in this sort of more decentralized world and web3 world is like you probably have a little bit less control you know Apple's probably going to be a little bit more heavy-handed in terms of what the people in their app Store can and can't say or do and I mean they are yeah

right absolutely I mean I remember dealing with Microsoft or other large companies like that and being on the other side where you are the application and there were so many do's and don'ts and you can't say this you can't say that and get the web through world there's both the sort of Beauty and the curse of like they can say whatever they want and there's very little can control there but how can you really arm them with the right kind of core messages help like you said resources to benefit you and I mean this is the best possible way it's just like how do you really help put them to work for you where it's a very mutually beneficial situation right they can mark it off of your platform which usually that platform will have a little bit more visibility

or higher reputation or a little bit more well-known so they can take advantage of that but then you also are really looking to show the value of what you guys are building so you need those applications it's a very mutually beneficial relationship and can be great but there's also obviously risks like some of those projects can flame out they don't all work so that's just the lack of control comes in but I think there's a lot more reward there than risk do you change the Playbook accordingly though given that there are those projects that can flame out from both of your guys's perspective does that change what you do or don't do or is it just like you just move on and it's like that happen and that's I'm guessing Amanda there's probably certain classes of applications that you guys are probably more interested in

promoting and talking about to show the value than you were of others obviously if you're a platform and you've got all these other you know you can't be playing cop or going deep on every single one of them right we Outsource our diligence to venture firms like you guys obviously things need to meet our own standards we're very diligent about checking that everything they're saying let's say in a press release is actually true we would never go out to press or to a partner or post something on social or help create a post with information in it that we deem to be inaccurate yeah so that's also really important to us that being said we certainly have projects that we wouldn't take on and I'll give you an example a really big meme coin project

reached out to us and said essentially our coin has been going crazy we just wish that there was some kind of utility can you work with us to create a message about what the utility is of this meme coin do you want me to create a utility for you thanks that's interesting I was just curious to meet them and figure out who they were they were Anonymous and it was very interesting to learn who the people were behind this project but I said you know I can't retroactively create utility for something yeah that's not how it works right yeah so an example like that is is something that we wouldn't do whereas you know something exploratory

is something we'd love to play with I mean this is true of any startup right most startups don't make it yeah and so especially in these early stages you know there's great ideas or they're building something you know all the momentum's there and a lot of them don't work out for a variety of reasons and the same is true of crypto and you know we are in a space where most of the companies are at these very early stages still that's just sort of a reality of it the flip side as you sometimes see some epic pivots oh yeah I remember working with the gnosis team for example on their original gnosis token sale which was one of the first token sales on the ethereum blockchain and they were focused on building prediction markets and today most people interact with the Nosa smart contracts

by using the multi-zig the noses saved exactly exactly that's a great point you guys so let me pick on a couple of threads so first one you mentioned that sometimes you are marketing people as well as products and users and other things one question that's really unique about web3 like when you think of classic web 2 marketing and even non-web do marketing just classic marketing period a big part is figuring out profiles in who to profile and who not to profile I mean Kim gosh we've been doing this for years at Asics and z and Amanda I'm sure you and your clients have worked on many examples of this there's like a fine balance between taking a Visionary leader like say a vitalik and when to have him be that Visionary spokesperson quote and when not to in a decentralized community a b

there's another Nuance where sometimes you have a very open source model obviously and you can see who made What contributions but sometimes an engineer might get called out more than a non-engineer or another person might get called out so that's the second point and then the third example kind of weird Nuance in crypto and web3 is you also have Anonymous and pseudonymous players who you don't even know who the heck they are so these are all weird nuances of crypto and web3 let's talk about marketing on that aspect and what that changes and doesn't change I think it's important for every project that has some kind of face that it can put in front of the project to go ahead and do that and to build in both those directions to build up profiles for the actual company to share product updates

to share community events what have you but also for the leaders to come out and be known one of the first things that I said to Joe Lubin when I joined consensus at CMO was that we were going to have to build his profile a ton and he wasn't super psyched about that he wanted to be less visible he wanted to be focused on building and I knew that a lot of people connect with ideas but even more people connect with people than ideas and I'd come from working with Ariana Huffington which was my first job out of college who obviously built an Empire around her own personal brand so I'd seen firsthand how

important those personal brands are yeah and if you look on crypto Twitter and look at leaders in the space versus companies in the space often leaders will have larger higher engagement accounts than companies and if you think of your own behavior on a platform like Twitter they're much more likely to engage with a person then engage with a company we've struggled sometimes with a non-founders and we work with a number of a non-founders of Serotonin we've struggled sometimes to get them as much visibility if they can't for example show up to a physical event because they're Anonymous but the flip side is non-founders can thrive on social media yeah they don't necessarily need those

physical events so you get someone like punk6529 who has a brilliant Twitter account and then you get an anti-hero like Chef Nomi who also had a highly followed Twitter account before that project blew up so you get both sides of the same coin with the nons they're just constrained to the digital world well and they can also go on podcasts and digital form which is what punk6529 did he came on with the voice modulator I think he also spoke at a conference like consensus via like virtually later yeah yeah and you get all kinds of funny combinations like what g-money did before he revealed his face oh yeah he always he would always yeah a cartoon image over his face in pictures yeah yeah that's right we had him on the

coinbase podcast when he did that yeah people follow people people become attached to people so it's hard to really give people a sense of why this one project is different than another without giving some of that color behind who started it and why they started it and how are they approaching it differently and why are they the best suited to start that project and for it to succeed and so I agree with Amanda I think there's this really interesting tension in web3 with that because I think that people are trying to go for that ideal of it shouldn't matter who vitalik is right it shouldn't matter who the leader is it should work without that person and the reason that we had all this focus on an individual or this hero is why we got into the trouble we

have with web 2. I think in the early stages it is important for those Founders and leaders to come out and really build their profile and help people understand who they are and again what makes them different and why they started that project but as the project becomes more successful they can step away a little bit more like with vitalik obviously everybody wants to hear from vitalik still and whatever he says has great meaning and has a lot of impact but there is a lot going on with ethereum these days with vitalik not weighing in right it has sort of created life of its own so I think as you go forward you can start to extract some of the leaders or Founders or other voices perhaps like the applications built on top Etc can play more importance but I

do think in those early stages that those Founders or whoever you want to put is the face of the project it is important for you to build that profile around them I really like what Kim is saying about phases because I think there are two phases to marketing a true web 3 Platform One is creating an incentive system and plugging people into that incentive system solving the zero to one problem of building your early community and the second is actually decentralizing moving away from Authority being overly concentrated in the original leadership and moving toward true ownership by the community and if those are the intentional phases then people matter a lot in the first phase that kind of maps really nicely into this concept of progressive

decentralization and you guys are both sort of saying that you can progressively decentralize away from your profiles too when you mentioned Amanda that and Kim when you mentioned that there are phases on the flip side you did say earlier that it is kind of chaotic in web 3 and sometimes you have like no Central corporate marketing that's deciding everything for everybody so like theoretically that means anybody who works on X can go and claim to be a spokesperson for that product like how do you tactically manage that I do want to get into a couple of tactics in here as well because that seems like insanity to me when I'm hearing this like what like just because I worked on a bunch of GitHub code on this one project I can now go and claim that like I'm so and so person like what do you tell people to

do in that scenario yeah I think it's really important to sort of set a standard tone and behavior within that community and that starts with those early founders how do people talk to one another you know how positive are they how technical is the conversation how responsive are people I think setting that kind of culture and tone for the community is really important totally who you have in your early Community is that kernel that's going to attract everybody that comes on later at seroton we think about this almost like imagine an alien spaceship descends from outer space puts down a ladder somewhere on the planet has room for 20 people 20 people

wherever the latter was get on the spaceship then the spaceship flies off that's how important it is to form your early community thoughtfully and how much those people really matter because once it's larger you lose control over the tone because you've decentralized away from that original founding team so things like crypto events are super important the crypto space loves going to physical IRL events because that's how you build that first kernel of community and build that trust to plug people into those incentive systems so you can eventually decentralize and pass off a lot of those responsibilities to the community When you mention this analogy of like the spaceship and like how do you pick the 20 key people that get a seat on that spaceship it's not an

elitist thing it's actually about how you curate this community so that it sets the right tone and value and I bring that up because Chris Dixon on our end has often talked about how even if you have like a bunch of marketplaces and they're open-ended and their code is shared actually the right Marketplace is the one that has the right community and that is such a key differentiation in web3 when you don't have that same moat that you might in another model where you're locked in in a different way so that's kind of an interesting note I say the mentality of a traditional or web 2 comms or marketing department is to Silo information and to control who represents a project this is the opposite you have to move away from the mentality of top down

control and move into the mentality of Bottoms Up support and that means making if everybody is going to be a spokesperson you need to bring their ideas into your messaging the flip side is if you're a centralized corporate comms department and you emit a certain thing you're held responsible for that but if you're a totally open community of contributors and one nutty person of their own accord came and contributed to your project goes and says something your accountability for that as the project is a bit different and you can handle that as a community and you can vote and decide whether that person should have certain rights and responsibilities maybe they shouldn't

anymore you like Kim was saying can set standards at the beginning and then adjudicate whether that behavior made sense according to those standards especially if you got that person's explicit agreement to those standards yeah and again open source communities have been around for a while you know for example like GitHub they had something similar I don't believe they had a policy internally like I think internally anybody could be a spokesperson for example oh yeah I didn't know which for somebody who's coming from very corporate comms background it's terrifying right and I can understand that once again it's sort of that lack of control but I think that there can also be a lot of power in empowering the community so on that note I think this is a good time to dig a little deeper into just

what is community and Community marketing and what that entails one question here is first like what is a community and you have a nice neat definition in your book of like what is a community so let's talk more about community and what that is what it isn't what that changes behaviorally in marketing and what are some of the things that you guys wish web3 marketers knew about marketing community so I'll start with the definition of web3 community which is an incentive aligned group that includes team or Builders it includes investors and it includes users and in the web 2 world those groups have brightline distinctions between them and sometimes even adversarial interests and

you can think of web3 as an incentive alignment engine or as a substrate for building incentive alignments and what it basically does is allow you to collapse those categories into a single Blended group where you could have an investor who's contributing to the code base and acting as a builder or you could have a user that's acting like a member of the team and that's helping with the marketing of a project and all of those categories merge together and everyone is incentivized to contribute however they can to the growth of the product or the project and oftentimes marketers talk about Community channels and that can be Discord that can be Twitter that can be slack or telegram

but the idea of web3 community isn't confined to any particular channel it's that constellation of people that are plugged into that incentive alignment system yeah I think that what it changes for marketing is that it's really a two-way conversation without a community it's more of a kind of one way or you're sort of telling them what you want them to hear with a community type of approach you have to be listening you have to be incorporating the feedback you have to be treating them like they are a true member or an equal member and that's to your point Amanda too like that's also how the incentives light up too that's the beautiful thing about web3 because in web 2 people talked about Community people talk about video

but web3 is actually encoded in the way it works so you have an actual vote you can exit if you want and take what you have with you Rage Quit yeah yeah exactly so in web3 it really takes Community to the level at which I think people really had in mind when they throw that word around but was never really possible before because you know sure like some of these web 2 companies that had a community and some of their folks would complain but they could easily ignore and just walk away right whereas in the web 3 world can't ignore it they absolutely are like a part owner in this whole thing absolutely the consumer who was held at arm's length in the traditional world and in the web 2 world is being brought in and as we move

forward a huge proportion of people are going to see part of their economic activity as investing activity and part of it as Builder or maker or creative activity we're no longer going to see a certain group have to only do that we're going to see it blend yeah and we're seeing that Trend with the blending of these categories yeah so with what both of you just said the fact that it's a two-way street that gets democratized as you just mentioned this sounds like utter and complete chaos to me as a marketer and I don't mean this in terms of just like oh this is chaotic like we all acknowledge that what I mean though is how do you then decide what to do what not to do what to prioritize what not to prioritize because I'm listening to this and a lot of these teams have

very Scrappy budgets or maybe they can extend their budget by having you know volunteers and community members who are really dedicated do more with less there's a lot of different things there's a lot of you know asymmetry powerful asymmetry and like guerrilla marketing and viral memes and Vibes but I I'm just trying I get to the bottom of like well what do you do and what do you not do like how do you actually even come up with a strategy in some in a world like this so I think it's actually super efficient for marketers to plug Community into incentive systems and then have them help grow the project as opposed to needing to buy everything themselves web 2 marketing is basically an Arbitrage that takes place on these third-party platforms and you're constantly paying the piper in order to spin the flywheel

of growth continue reaching your own audiences and bring in Revenue whereas web free marketing is actually more sustainable because once you push out your message of why what you're building is interesting on the channels where your potential target audience lives and bring them into your community and bring them into your incentive system they can go and help create for you and you don't need to be constantly paying out some ad budget in order to make that happen just to give you an example on the software side that can look like bug bounties having the community participate in battle testing your code on the marketing side it can look like meme contest yeah where you have the whole Community come up with the best meme about your project and help circulate it

on crypto Twitter or whatever platform your audience lives on yeah I think what every Brand's dream is for their consumer or user to feel like they are kind of part owner of that product that that's how engaged they are that's how much they care but it's never been a reality until you have web 3 where they actually are a part owner right and yeah they have a deep passion and conviction and they they have a lot of care for where it's going and yeah to your point you can scale the marketing to a much greater degree like you're not thinking about okay what are the 10 events that we're going to do this year you are empowering that whole community and they're creating those 20 events or what have you so then just to dig in a bit more because this is another question

that's super top of Mind both of you mentioned audience both of you mentioned community and Amanda you've mentioned a few times you have to go where they are how do you actually even find where they are how do you know who they are this is a big question so in the book I actually have have a list of questions that marketers can ask to learn more about their target audience who has the problem that your product solves do they already know they have the problem how are they solving the problem today what are the flaws or shortcomings of the current solution what value proposition of the product that you're building resonates with them what platforms is that audience currently on is there a particular kind of content or signal that that audience pays attention to are there other

products they like is there something that those products have in common what other communities or groups is this audience part of are they allergic to any particular Channel or messaging Style how do they respond to Intrinsic versus extrinsic incentives in what ways are they able and willing to help with a project what kinds of activities is our community already engaging in what do members want from this community from this product why do they leave and why do they come back for more and no matter what stage you're at with your audience these are questions you can ask to get to know them better and to shape your product to be a better fit with them that's a really great list Amanda so is there an ideal phase because sometimes

it feels like are some of these questions too early or Kim the opposite version of this question especially given your background at coinbase where it was a much more mature product and Market I'm curious for how you think that changes or doesn't change like was there a form of community marketing there is there less of that there because at that point they've gotten quote more accepted and known you know coinbase is probably a little bit more of a traditional approach that we maybe saw a little bit in the web 2 world in the sense that it's a little bit more of a closed product if you will they certainly get a lot of feedback from their consumers on every channel that you can imagine so you can take a look at Twitter yeah but it's a little bit less of a two-way conversation as it is

for more decentralized projects especially where there's tokens involved and people have a vote and there's more kind of ownership there but I would say early on that Brian and Fred had to go through the same process at every startup does to Amanda's point right they had to go to all the meetups at the time it was all Bitcoin meetups how are you buying Bitcoin how are you getting it what is the friction that you're experiencing how do we solve that how do we make connections to Banks how do we make it easier for people to gain access to these new digital assets so they had to go through that same process that every startup has to go through and is crucial to go through to understand okay what is my market and is this a product that people really need and want I would

just note as a point of Distinction that coinbase is a centralized exchange and it offers people access to the upside from web3 digital goods and tokens but not by default in a way that involves root ownership in a self-sover wallet although that is possible in some contexts and so a lot of the web 2 style marketing strategies work for a centralized exchange which is why you do see centralized players with big ad budgets on the standard marketing platforms and why that converts really well for them but Amanda this is worth pushing on especially for our listeners you've kind of said this a few times you're just clearly not a fan of web 2 marketing like you know use a meta tool

kit and the paid and Etc does that mean is there no paid marketing and web3 even for non-centralized players and entities that are more established with the true web3 startups that we work with and that I worked with at consensus there's a lot less emphasis on paid marketing on standard social media channels but there is paid marketing and you see that in the form of paid podcast sponsorships you see it in paid advertising on media websites and print media even sometimes you see it in environmental ads so in the physical world around conferences and events and you see it in paid

investments in physical things so meetups events these are huge in the space and yes you also see a Twitter ad you'll see the occasional Facebook ad or Instagram ad from a decentralized or decentralizing project that has web 3 style goals but you see a lot less of that and I wonder whether that's permanent or whether that's just this moment time yeah when a lot of those startups are earlier and smaller I would argue it's more of a function of the stage that we're in right now with web3 and it just being very early I mean I want to kind of hit here like where are places where you can do classic tactics and they work in web3 it seems like

don't throw the baby out with the bathwater I recommend usually that startups start doing big paid growth campaigns especially on social media platforms only when they can really measure the ROI and an earlier stage startup has more trouble measuring that Roi so either we're going to see the web 3 ecosystem as it matures not use those platforms as much which I would predict is the case but that also will see them using them more over time just as they get bigger and as they can measure their Roi better the baby not to throw out with the bathwater is understanding your product understanding your audience figuring out the channels where your audience lives distilling your message and pushing that out over those channels setting up a funnel to see how well that

audience converts toward whatever goal you want that's the baby from the traditional world and web 2 that should certainly not be thrown out with the bathwater because that's the fundamental practice of marketing yeah I would say to Amanda's point it's all about who your audience is and and how to reach them and it really is what stage we are in as a space but then also just zeroing in on who your audience is the web 3 Community has come up with a lot of new novel ways to use native digital platforms like social Etc to really reach their audiences in a unique way it's a great example of that is other deeds and all the various things that they're doing I think they do a really

amazing job of engaging with their Community online in a really great way as you have products that are reaching a more mass consumer audience you have to use every tool at your disposal and some of those are going to be more traditional methods targeting the people who are just coming in and buying you know their first Bitcoin or their first Ethan it's less trying to maybe reach a very Niche audience of let's say folks in weathering infrastructure right yeah if that's who you're trying to reach then paid marketing is probably not going to do a lot for you then I'd say that we are at that phase where coinbase kind of stands alone and probably reaching a very Mass consumer audience I think some of the nft projects have

started to go into that Arena a little bit more but again it's going to be more successful for them to Target the pretty engaged web3 Community than it is for them to go to mass consumers who still don't really understand what Bitcoin is yeah great by the way Amanda you mentioned the funnel one of the key points in your book is that it's a slightly simplified funnel because it only includes Discovery engagement use and retention do you want to quickly spend like a couple of minutes kind of giving a high level summary of that page of what is the web 3 marketing funnel so the web 3 marketing funnel as described in the book isn't so different from the marketing funnel in web 2 it's just that the actual tools that are used at each

stage can be a bit different so everything starts with Discovery Discovery is the phase where your potential user your potential audience member first meets you they see your brand for the first time they see your key message for the first time on some kind of Channel maybe that's at an event where they stumble on you speaking maybe it's a media article maybe it's social media but for whatever reason they've seen you they've seen your message and at that moment there's a call to action and if they take that action then they come to the next stage of the funnel which is engagement and what the engagement stage basically does is it forms a contract between you and the potential user or audience

member where they agree to let you reach them again your message in the discovery phase was good enough that they're going to agree to let you retarget them that could be through an email newsletter that could be through a follow-on social it could be by joining your community but whatever it is you have them in some kind of Engagement holding tank and we've talked a lot about community in web 3 Community is the ideal engagement holding tank in the marketing funnel because people are in there they're engaged they're excited they're motivated to help grow the project and whenever you have a new feature or a new product or something that you want them to do or something that you want help with they're there and so I think in web

3 we almost get a really bloated kind of middle of the funnel because we have so much emphasis on community and having people stay in that tank and ideate and come up with stuff there and that becomes really fertile ground to convert people into using your product and then those people are motivated intrinsically and or extrinsically to go ahead and refer your product to more people bringing more people into that community and so it looks a lot like a web 2 marketing funnel but it ends up working a little bit differently in the Middle with these Community platforms that was a great summary I'm hearing a couple of really resonant themes like it might depend on the phase of the project but the time we're in but I'm also hearing you both say in terms of what's working

in terms of for your marketing effort to be able to measure that Roi I think it's worth also adding those Nuance which we've actually covered in a classic past podcast about just growth Marketing in general which is if you do do that paid thing too soon you don't even know it's working in your product and that's kind of a false signal so it can be very dangerous sometimes to get those mixed signals so now you both have mentioned Roi and metrics and what's working was not working a few times I think this is a great point to maybe spend a couple of quick minutes deep diving on what are the kinds of metrics that matter then in this kind of marketing in web3 because you can't just go back to like your CMO or your CEO and be like yeah okay Vibes are great like that's that's the answer

like that's obviously lives are important yeah I do agree with that but like talk to me about metrics and how to measure what matters so early on there are obviously both quantitative and qualitative metrics their metrics around Community size how many people are in let's say your Discord server and then who those people are how they're engaging are they actively contributing or are they just asking when you're going to launch your token are they coming up with ideas what are their profiles why are they interested in the project are they motivated intrinsically extrinsically are they referring other new community members a lot of times early projects over focus on size and under focus on

quality they focus on these vanity metrics like having a ton of Twitter followers or having a ton of people in their Discord server without paying attention to who those people are and what they want because Founders are going to be stuck with those people and new potential members coming into that Community are going to see those people they're going to see the content that they're sharing they're going to see the nature of their engagements and decide whether they want to be part of that Community or not so I definitely encourage not just thinking about size but also thinking about quality early on and then their metrics you know if you're a D5 protocol you're going to think about something like total value locked tvl yeah tvl if you're an nft collection you're going to

think about things like the mint price that you can sell things at you're going to think about the volume in the secondary Market you're going to think about price but you also want to think about quality you know are great people buying into your community are they participating and that may be more important in the long term than the prices day over day so I think for me it's probably a lot more qualitative than quantitative especially in those early stages which is again where most of these projects are I think you can get a little bit more quantitative as as you scale to a good size but even with a let's say you get a good press article it's fairly qualitative what the ROI is going to be for that right it's going to be like how many people are reaching out

to you is it going to be easier for you to get the next funding round because people know who you are or recruit that great talent because yeah a huge one yeah I was thinking that it probably does come down a lot to Talent great okay so we did a big kind of overview on the mindsets and the differences in web 3 versus not we've gone into like different aspects like community and some of the nuances and the chaos and what it means to actually market decentralized we've touched a little bit on some of the strategy and some of the high level tactics and things like finding your audience let me switch then to now talking a lot more about some of the tactics around hiring and the talent that you hire for building an org even if it's not classic centralized marketing org I would love

to hear from you guys on everything from like org structure where they should sit in the org how they should report not report I think this is where we want to go a little deeper for a couple minutes let's first just maybe break down some of the high level functions that are often included in marketing so it's everything from you know obviously we talk about Community marketing that can include users consumers customers Advocates evangelists it could also be developers and be classic devrel like developer relations we also have comms and Communications and PR then we have like brand which is obviously more than just an identity system and a logo and bran can often be a moat in web3 then you also have go to market and the motion of going to Market in web3 I'm just like making like a quick laundry

list so let's talk through what I'd love from both of you here is to give me a little bit more texture about who people should hire or not hire or what to look for sure so when I was building the web 3 marketing team at consensus my goal was a mixed Department between full-time internal hires and external agencies I wasn't able to accomplish that because I wasn't able to find any external agency partners that knew about crypto or web3 and eventually that was my motivation after my time at consensus for starting serotonin so that the next generation of marketing leaders at new projects in the space could form the ideal structures

for their departments as I'd seen But as I had been unable to actually execute because it was early so I think the first marketing hire should be a generalist Swiss army knife hire and that needs to be someone who can understand the product what it is how it works they may need to be an engineer or a developer depending on what the product is they may not need to they need to be able to be a counterparty to an agency or any kind of external partner like an event and they need to be able to represent the project and they need to understand what the other basic marketing functions are they need to basically understand earned media media relations they don't have to execute everything themselves but they

should understand it as that department grows the important thing to think about is permanent versus intermittent functions you're not always going to be going out to press you're not always going to be starting a new social media channel and so as functions become constant you want to consider having an internal higher or some kind of permanent consistent partner that's doing that thing whereas you want to be efficient by working with some kind of external player like a contractor or an agency if something is intermittent like needing to create a video or doing PR they should understand content marketing and how content gets distribution they should understand brand and how to create a package of verbal and visual

brand that's going to resonate with a target audience and they should be able to do research on target audience what channels to use in the space By the way when you said that generals was army knife Amanda and then you went and listed that list I was like that sounds like a unicorn to me I guess that person doesn't need to know how to execute every bit of that function they just need to know what good would look like and be able to find someone that can do it yeah I agree with you that you need sort of the Swiss Army knife Jack or Jill of all trades who is not afraid to kind of roll up their sleeves and do a lot of the work I think that's why more Junior to mid-level folks are often some of the first hires because they're kind

of willing to just kind of do whatever needs to get done um they're not too precious around well that's too below me or that's out of my job description or that's not really marketing you just need people who are very very passionate about what the project is doing what the product is and I'm just really excited to get a ton of experience I would say that I tend to advise that for marketing in comms in particular that they hire Consultants or agencies in those early stages because to Amanda's point they tend to be a little bit more intermittent needs versus full-time needs it's also a great way especially if you're bringing on a consultant to see if they are a good fit a good cultural fit and somebody that you could maybe bring on full time I've

seen that happen quite a bit and that works quite well I definitely sympathize with what you're saying about it was really hard to hire people early on I found the same thing early on too people were I think intimidated by the space it was very technical they also weren't quite sure where it was all going to go I think that's changed a lot in the last year in particular and it's wonderful to see so many people self-selecting into the space I think that more than any other part of tech I've ever worked in you really are looking for the True Believers as much as possible the people that are self-selecting and they're excited about where the future of this is going they have had some EXP experience with it that's brought them into it and they really believe this is

the future I think it's harder to have folks who are like oh I did a little bit of security and then I did a little bit of Enterprise and now I'm just going to try this out right because we do go quite deep and it is very all-encompassing and as we all know it moves incredibly fast and it's very very Dynamic not everybody has a stomach for that so you need folks that are really willing to dive in and to jump into some of the chaos that we live in especially in the last year yeah but yeah I'd say usually it's good to bring in Consultants or folks from the outside in those early phases and then as you start to grow to start investing in a Swiss army knife who can do it all like okay we need to get a website going we need to think about the brand but

then we also need to start thinking about what we're going to do on the pr side and then we also need to think about we want to represent ourselves at this event or we want to do our own event and how do we put that together and you know it's sort of a little bit of of all of that I love what you said about these first hires needing to be willing to roll up their sleeves and the litmus test that I had for that was always will they tweet and will they pick up beer bottles we came in sometimes with this mentality that running social media accounts was for a more Junior person or someone in college or straight out of college and then it turns out in our space having an interesting Twitter account is one of the most valuable things your business

or your founder can have yeah I usually tell our Founders when you're hiring that first marketing person like you you don't want the person that's been a CMO somewhere and is really great at building large teams because the chances of you having a large team in the next two to three years or so is probably pretty low right and so you're optimizing for the doers who love the work and are able to start recruiting and bringing on a couple members over the next couple years but who are not managers that's not their main strength it's just being a manager building a team and managing you will get there at some point and you'll need that person but probably not for many years let me just ask you now another quick question

which was you guys in an answer which is where should this function report or not report into what a quote decentralized or web3 org like who's the best reporting structure for the functions of marketing web 3. the marketing leads should report to the CEO yeah I second that the more connection that they have to the founders the better they need to understand the major business decisions that are being made they need to be able to run things by them very quickly they need to be kind of at that nucleus otherwise they just can't do their job totally the biggest failure modes we see in serotonin projects are when marketing is in a silo and if there's not a lot of access to the ultimate decision maker perhaps a Founder perhaps a CEO then the

actual marketing activities no matter how well planned or executed they are can actually see the light of day yeah I definitely feel like you're preaching to the choir in that one because Kim has been on podcasts we've done in the past about just PR in general and comms and that was a theme that came up over and over and over again which is not only that that person should report into the CEO but that you're not even going to retain the top talent or attract the top talent if you know that isn't the case both for context and just being able to do the job really well and I think you guys even said Kim that even if that person has like a dotted Matrix so like the COO or CFO they still need access to that CEO in an extremely tight way yeah they need to know what that CEO or

founder is thinking at all times right how we feel about things why are we making these particular decisions something happens there's a security Bridge or some other crisis like having good conversations about like what are we going to do and how are we going to handle this and you know a true partnership I think without that partnership that role won't be successful that person won't be successful and to your point they're never going to be able to attract the right level of great talent without showing that they're taking that role seriously I think separately you mentioned developer relations I think that it's a separate thing I'm curious Amanda how you guys handled that ethereum Foundation but I think it's probably the most in-demand role in our portfolio so if there are people out

there that see themselves as developer relations like you can have a fantastic career in crypto and web three I think that that is probably one of the earliest role if you are indeed developers are your Prime audience which many of the companies in the space are it is a very important role to get but I think a very difficult one to hire for what sometimes happens is that you start to build that community and if you can find people who might again like self-select in and want to be more involved in your project or somebody who you feel like is particularly passionate really understands what you guys are doing that somebody who can naturally take on that role but I would sort of separate that from Marketing in comms if

you will I agree with a ton of that a lot of the best Engineers developers computer scientists want to focus on their work they want yeah code with music or in silence and they don't want to build community maybe they enjoy Tweeting or social media to some extent but maybe they don't enjoy going to events it's a personality thing so finding folks that are technical that are developers that are Engineers perhaps even that are computer scientists that also just personality wise enjoy talking about their products with new people that love to host that love to bring people together whether it's digital or physical those people are ideal candidates for

these kinds of devrel roles whether they're formal official devrel titles or whether they're just that engineer in the organization that's the one raising their hand to go out and to speak at conferences and they don't necessarily need to have that official devrel title if they're doing work and I wouldn't see a devrel title as lesser than an engineer or a developer or you know another title in the organization because oftentimes those people are doing both they're contributing extraordinary things to the code and they're also warmly bringing people together around a project and I think it's a personality thing and you get all types yeah I mean to be very clear I don't think it's lesser even if they're not coding because there's a certain sense of deborahl is King given the rise

and importance of developers communicating with developers retaining developers you know incentivizing Developers all right so now I'm going to do a couple of wrap up lightning rounds what I'm trying to do in this section is just quickly go through all the different domains of webview and have you guys just quickly add some Nuance about what are some key mindsets or things to know about so let me start with a very simple one which is just defy simple as in it is the most popular established category like a key thing you would want someone to know about marketing and D5 for web3 you should remember that a D5 user is probably being asked to trust a protocol with money and accommodate the fact that they're probably a bit nervous about

that you want to make sure it's really clear what steps they need to take and to show them that there are other people using the platform for example by broadcasting a tvl number in order to get them comfortable or to show that other businesses are using the platform also it's important to Showcase how battle tested or how audited a D5 platform is and to be transparent about risks that folks may be taking by using the platform I was going to say like I think trust and security are Paramount when it comes to D5 and unlike traditional centralized institutions it's less than trust in people and more

trust in the code and the product and to Amanda's Point that's you know how battle tested is it but if you're going into that space as a marketer comes person you just have to walk into it knowing that policy is going to be a big part of your role it's something you can't ignore you have to think about and you have to think about even more so in defy great now let's do nfts what would you guys say about marketing nfds and it's probably a very Broad category but just anything that comes top of mind I'd say that there tends to be more of a consumer angle to nfts and you have to really nail kind of that culture tone Whimsy you name it that is sort of associated with that kind of community because oftentimes you know it's not

about that specific nft that they're buying into or want to be a part of it's they want to be part of that community and what it stands for and sort of what the language of that group is and I think that as a marketer you have to really understand that at a pretty intuitive level like okay what's going to work with our community what's not because I feel like things can backfire very very quickly in that world whether that's how a drop is done or mint is done or how things are communicated how things are explained I think that the sniff test on that for the community is just like very very sensitive so you have to really be just really sensitive

the needs of that particular Community absolutely lately so think about giving before you ask anything from a community I think creators that are native to web3 and web 2 players coming into web 3 have a failure mode where they expect to sell some high priced nft right out of the gate as their first experiment in web 3. I would advise those folks to offer something first whether that's a free mint whether that's a membership that's awarded by retroactive distribution to folks that have interacted with a brand in the past there's something that you can give there's a way to start actually building on-chain community and transaction history and web 3 without demanding upfront that people pay and you earn the trust of that group that

you bring into your community on chain and you earn the the right to offer them something at a cost you mentioned a retroactive distribution and I think you meant an airdrop or maybe you didn't so a retroactive distribution is when you reward a group of people for a past on-chain activity so for example when uniswap launched a token it launched by retroactive distribution such that you could go ahead and connect your wallet on a website and claim tokens commensurate with how much you had used the platform in the past so that's a retroactive distribution an airdrop is one way that you could execute that retroactive distribution by

sending tokens to certain wallet addresses a claimable is a way that you could execute that by creating some kind of web page or address where you could go ahead and connect your wallet and claim the tokens that are yours there's actually an interesting distinction here where if you go ahead and just send tokens to addresses that have interacted with your smart contracts by some formula of you know how many times they've interacted how much value Etc some of them might not even notice you did that or some of them might not be interested in using your platform anymore and might just go ahead and sell your tokens so a lot of projects have decided to do claimables so that a person has to actively go and claim their tokens and their idea is that that

person's more likely to be active as a community member than just sending out tokens great infrastructure and that is really broad so let's break that down to include l1s and then separately l2s and then let's also cover developer Tooling in this one I think it's a more technical message especially in the early days and having the sort of technical Builders and founders from the project very out there in the different forums and out there talking to people explaining things breaking things down that's going to sort of build a lot of trust in that infrastructure and then after a certain point it becomes more about community and Partnerships and all of that but I'd say in the early days it's really convincing people that you have a really

strong technical solution you really need to show that people are using your tool also which is why there's this huge prevalence where someone will build an L1 or an L2 or a tool and notice that nobody's actually coming in and building with it so the organization that built that tool or that L1 or L2 then goes ahead and itself funds like what consensus did or itself builds some of that tooling to Showcase what's possible with what's been built so if you've built an L1 or an L2 or a tool marketing is going to be really focused on showcasing that there are businesses or individuals depending on who your target audience is using it and partnership marketing making sure that

you're cross amplifying with your users your core messaging getting it out into the market that you are there and that you're solving a problem and that these are the kinds of use cases and that's going to end up inspiring way more people a story that's in the book that perhaps not many people know or remember about ethereum and it's fairly early days is that what set off a lot of the price action happened on January 28 2017 and that was the launch of the eea the Enterprise ethereum Alliance and for the first time it brought together companies like Microsoft JP Morgan Santander Intel Accenture to announce that they had groups inside their organizations that

were experimenting with ethereum and working together to build a common set of standards for Enterprises the cool thing about this in terms of marketing and public perception was that before if you Googled ethereum you would get metallic buterin 19 year old russian-born Canadian computer Prodigy creates amazing thing and that's going to resonate with a lot of people but it's not necessarily going to resonate with large institutions or large investors and so suddenly after February 28th this ended up having a huge impact on the market it generated lots of different news stories in most major Publications that spread the word about ethereum far

and wide to the point where it brought in price action that took East prices from you know single dollar ranges up in a matter of days and then led to one of the fastest price run-ups in crypto history from then until the summer when it hit you know astronomical new highs for the project and the funny part was the early ethereum Community was and is very kind of anti-corporate a lot of basement hackers a lot of you know desire to disintermediate the big Banks to move away from web 2 to move away from some of the corporate control that we've had and yet the news Cycles around the eea launch ended up having the second order effect of bringing in a lot

more engineers and developers and hackers into the space and if you ask those people why they got into ethereum they would never say because of the eea but that ended up starting a flywheel that ended up attracting a lot of people that maybe wouldn't have even enjoyed that particular announcement my take away from that is the value of Partnerships which is a big theme and go to market especially in web 3 but another takeaway to me is going back to this question of what's similar and what's different and what to throw out with the baby in the bath water and what not to which is this is a classic business thing actually it's not web 3 native it's web two two it's also classic marketing and that's an important message I think that the

audience should also hear totally so last question what advice would you guys give to people who came to crypto but this is their first kind of winter or the period where they've come across like crises and they haven't experienced that before but there's a lot going on whether it's a crisis like FDX or banking crisis which actually is not about crypto or a policy crisis I would say that certainly those events have an impact but I think it's important to just look at the historical data and know that every new wave has brought in new innovation new projects new Builders new investment and then those stay and build throughout the bear Market such that the market comes back even stronger

next time and the strongest indicator of that to me isn't the consistency of the Cycles it's actually one of the most important assets migrating increasingly into web3 which is Talent every one of these waves brings new Talent onto the shore and then they stay and so if you go to Devcon if you go to East Denver you see the Brilliance and the growth and the power of this movement I think what you just said there that it's in movement and that's very true and I think that's what makes it so unique you know you're not just joining a company or joining a movement and look it's not for the faint of heart it's not for everybody I get that but I think if you really love a good meaty challenge that

has like every element this is a great place to do it like we've got some really interesting policy challenges happening right now and that you have a chance to impact these companies are really building fundamentally new you know the next internet the next sort of major Technologies and infrastructures and having a chance to figure out how to translate that and bring that to a bigger audience the idea that we are working these decentralized models like trying to figure out how do you really build a community in a project and a product within this new world I just think there's no more fun meaty challenge out there for a marketer or comms person right now you know your choices are you can go into web 2 which

I think we all kind of know what that looks like and this is a new frontier I think that's incredibly exciting for folks to have maybe like a slightly higher risk appetite yeah if you were alive during the Italian Renaissance you would wish you were living in Florence and being in web 3 is the Florence of our time okay so to kind of sum up it's interesting neither one of you precluded that the person does or doesn't have to have a background in marketing or has to be only from web3 what I'm hearing you about say is it actually doesn't really matter it's more about the mindsets it's more about their willingness to pull up and dig in there to be able to be very Mission focused and willing and to be excited about the space this is part of my motive for writing the book and

making sure the book is a really accessible Journey Through the history of web 1 to web 2 to web 3 to the origins of Bitcoin and ethereum the metaverse ETC because what got us here won't get us there the actual number of professionals that are currently working in web 3 is so small compared to the total number of professionals that are really great at marketing so what are the chances that the people that have already arrived here in web 3 are the very best at what they do yeah so the way that we're going to grow is making our space accessible to more people getting more at bats getting more qualified talent into our space so that we can continue growing

even faster by having the best people hence this book and hence this podcast episode that is a great note to end on you guys thank you so much for doing this episode of web3 with A6 and Z thank you so much for joining Kim and Amanda thanks for having me thanks so much thank you for listening to web3 with A6 and Z you can find show notes with links to resources books or papers discussed transcripts and more at asicsncrypto.com this episode was produced and edited by sonal choxie that's me the episode was technically edited by our audio editor Justin golden with seven Morris credit also to moonshot design for the art and

all thanks to support from Asics and Z crypto to follow more of our work and get updates resources from us and from others be sure to subscribe to our web 3 Weekly Newsletter you can find it on our website at asicsnzcrypto.com thank you for listening and for subscribing let's go [Music] thank you [Music]