web3 Go-to-Market Frameworks & Dealmaking

Transcript

[Music] hello hi everyone good afternoon my name is Maggie Shu and I'm head of go to market at a6z crypto prior to this I was at Amazon leading go to market for Amazon managed blockchain which was their blockchain service and then before that I was the BD lead at an early decentralized exchange called air Swap and I'm Pierce Carol I sit on the go to market team with Maggie have been here for almost 3 years uh prior to this I ran the web 3 practice at DraftKings which is a large online gambling platform um and prior to that had a fairly boring uh trafi career in equity derivatives I'll turn it over to Maggie and you'll see me in a little bit thanks

Pierce um so today we'll be speaking a bit about some web 3 go to market Frameworks and metrics as well as how we provide go to market support to you and then Pierce will talk about all things deal making and we'll end with a working session around deal making so I encourage you to start thinking about um an active deal that you might be working on so I wanted to review five common go to market motions with you and many of you have built and scaled companies before so these will likely not be new Concepts but I thought it would be a good framing regardless the first one is product Le the product itself is really driving the go to market so a potential customer user is going they're signing up they're creating account they're downloading an app the second one is sales Le you have a sales team

handholding the customer and in this case case it might be because the sales process is a bit more tricky or there's some questions around integration something like that the third one pretty self-explanatory it's developer Le and in this case developers are the main folks that you're targeting to onboard the next one community- based this could apply to nft communities it could apply to social apps consumer apps it could apply to games but it also applies to things like layer one and Layer Two blockchains and in this case you're looking to create that two-way engagement both online and offline with the community and then finally Integrations and in this case you're looking to partner with partners that likely have large distribution and you're likely looking to leverage their distribution and we see a lot of this in web 3 so most companies use some

combination of motions or they might start with one and move to another and this is a mapping of some of our portfolio companies against their relative go to market motions I will Deep dive into one portfolio company Loop which provides infrastructure for onchain auto payments and they actually use all five go to market pretty effectively I wanted to use this example because Loop is a seed Stage Company so they have similar resourcing to what you might have so the first one here is product Le they have a self-served onboarding portal where customers can get started themselves the next one sales Le they also have this meeting booking link that's directly on their website where interested customers can sign up to speak with the team developer Le obviously they have their sdks here they're posting on X they're putting out

newsletters and then finally they've nailed some really key Integrations in this case with stripe so I'm I'm actually curious to hear from a few of you what your primary go to market motion is if I could get one or two volunteers to just talk about the motion and what you might do around that that would be wonderful and I know there's some mic Runners so we'll wait a second for that but yeah would love to hear from a few of you what your go to market motions are my old product before the pivot started out developer Le moved to product Le um and then we settled on a combination of sales and integration and channel partners and then we pivoted it's great you've done kind of gone through the G it was so fun no thank you for sharing anyone else hi Magie uh Amir with Skyfire we're doing

something very similar with the exception of the product Le Square I mean box that you have there but I think we we're doing everything else that's great to hear thank you both for sharing um I I think it's really important and and both of you have highlighted that you might start with one and move to another so I wanted to focus the rest of this section on the last three go to market motions and I wanted to do that because these are ones you can start on now regardless if you have a product or even if you're pre-product so starting with Integrations again web three go to market is disproportionately about Integrations but hopefully it's more than just this cursory logo lock up that we see a lot in the space these are some real statements that we've heard from companies looking to go to market we're

looking to integrate with the top wallets the top dexes large institutions we're selling into dowo treasuries we want to partner with the Best Brands and artists these are all quite Broad and really need to be broken broken down into measurable outcomes so as an early stage founder it's all about your prioritization of timing and every time you're in a business development call that's an opportunity cost loss you can't be focused on product or hiring and it feels like maybe you're the one that's getting dragged into all these conversations and you want to be doing other things so I'd say that you really think about getting to what I call a minimum viable customer category or mvcc and in this case you need to be on the initial set of calls but you're really looking to figure out things like who is

the ideal customer profile or the ICP who are the other stakeholders who are involved in the decision- making what is the typical sales cycle Cadence so what are kind of some of the typical things that happen along the sales cycle as well as the typical length and questions or concerns so maybe there are questions that you get over and over and over again that you could address in some sort of documentation or pre- address so once this is clear you can then segment your targets you can set up an inbound pipeline it's really exciting you know you just put something out there and people will send pip line to you you can go through that and then most importantly you can take this work and send it to someone else maybe it's a junior BD or salesperson if you are a pre-product you don't have to wait to go

to market until you've launched there are a number of things you can do now to really set yourself in the poll position for when you do launch so one that's really valuable is having these targeted informational conversations with potential design Partners to get feedback you can also look at Price Discovery what we just did in the last slide was mapping and prioritizing your partnership targets and then a critical one is competitive positioning you're going to be asked this all the time as soon as you launch so you might as well get started on it now I wanted to show an example of how you'd break down one of those statements so let's say you have a new yield bearing stable coin and you're looking to sell into Dow treasuries this is a statement we're selling into all Dow treasuries well how can we break this down a little bit more

I would say well we're looking to sell into Dow treasuries that are looking for some potential diversification well hopefully that's all Dow treasuries as well um so from there when you start talking to the treasuries you might come across do they have Pro like do they have goals do they have a man treasury management committee do they have a treasury management plan even if they have that plan do they even have the right governance to be able to go through this and diversify have they done this before do they hold other stable coins or are they only holding their native token and finally are they working with any external providers because in this case maybe you have to go through those providers to run that process and so instead of just saying we're going to Target the top five Dow treasuries by AUM or the top 10 or

whatever that list is you go through this and it's really you're looking at number four 7 8 Etc another example is what Integrations to think about as a new L1 or L2 and this is a Playbook that's pretty well documented at this point so there's now I'd say a standard set of applications and infer that pretty much every new blockchain needs here and for each one you can either get a partner to deploy on your chain or you can build it yourself moving on to B Toc business to customer business to community again these are actual statements that we've heard from companies we are making this so simple that your grandmother could use it we're onboarding the next billion people to web 3 I mean how many times have you heard those first two statements and in this category the key measurable outcomes are about finding and engaging

potential customers so in this case you have access to all the web two growth levers and all the web 3 growth levers and on the web two side this includes things like both organic and PID channels and on the web 3 side it would be things like tokens or if you're using points on the points arguably you need to be thinking about all of these because what you're looking to do is to combine both offchain attribution with onchain attribution and you're never going to get this perfectly right but I'll provide a few ways you can think about tracking your growth so this is a web three marketing process you are taking your data you are then analyzing it you're performing some marketing action against it and hopefully you're testing this through different subgroups you're then analyzing the results and

you're adjusting and at each part of this stack there are number of tools and services that you can use to help you with this for example this is a market map from Safari it's a really great resource and it shows the tools and services you can use along each part of that growth stack this is an ey chart I know but I wanted to provide some common web 2 growth metrics and adapt them to web 3 so starting with the web 2 metrics we've all heard of CAC and LTV so customer acquisition cost is basically everything that goes into acquiring One customer LTV is the lifetime value of a customer so if you have a SAS business and a customer is generally with you for about two years you take their monthly fee multiply that by two then you have conversion retention andur so conversion

out of all the people you've targeted how many people actually made a purchase retention how many people are retained after a set number of days and then vice versa churn how many customers have churned out for web 3 you actually might use the exact same calculations as the web two side so some of your businesses will have very web2 like Dynamics and you can use pretty much these same calculations that are standard others of you might need to adapt them and I've spoken with a number of marketing and growth leaders across our portfolio there are no standards so everyone's kind of figuring this out and adapting it for themselves so a few examples here and again these are just potential examples they're not ex uh they're not kind of exhaustive but one on the ca side would be adding token incentives so

if you're launching quests you obviously have to take that into account in your acquisition cost the next one is um in terms of LTV Maybe this is their contribution to transaction fees but it could also be something like their contribution to tvl and then on the conversion retention insur similar idea conversion might be out of everyone you've targeted how many percent own your nft retention you can do with the wallet analysis so what percent have done an onchain action after X number of days again vice versa what percent of wallets are inactive and then I would add two here engagement and share of wallet again these are two that are tracked in a web two way but I think think they're hypercritical when you're thinking about web 3 marketing growth so engagement this is both online and

offline online could be nfts acquired it could be their engagement in your Discord server um whether they're liking your posts on X and offline could be events attended you might be tracking which events around the world they've been to maybe they have poops and it's easier to do that and then finally share of wallet analysis you can do a literal share of wallet analysis that's one of the benefits of web 3 a few examples so daylight is a company in our portfolio building a decentralized energy Network they have both traditional Partnerships and they also did this great onchain summer partnership with over a 100,000 mints one example from your cohort is block sense so the left side shows their Discord also shows a blog post and then the right side is from a quest campaign that they ran a word of warning about

your platform selection because I'd say at least half of our portfolio companies and probably more I think the numbers a little bit low have had an issue with what we call a legacy web 2 platform over the past year and they've escalated this to us and I know some of this is unavoidable you can't kind of get off all the web2 platforms but you really want to think about diversifying a way when you can for example with regards to Communications and engagement most people are still using the top four because that's where the largest distribution is but I would really encourage you to start thinking about decentralized solutions for example what is your foraster strategy what is your xmt strategy and I think those can be really effective versus you know we have companies that have gotten blocked because there's some sort of odd twio

filtering and their messages aren't getting sent out to their fans finally on the B to D side I hear this all the time we are targeting all developers and again let's break this down so if you have an L1 it might be more specific it might be something like this we are targeting net new native Builders building net new applications to grow Network value and then from there you have these measurable outcomes contract employers number of calls and these are things that we track on our state of crypto report base recently launched this pretty cool analysis it's an onchain score to rate each base name on a variety of categories including swaps bridging and contract interactions and Compass Labs which was a prior CSX company they have fairly robust developer documentation but one

thing that ended up being really successful from a goom Market perspective was this example GitHub repo that they launched and Compass offers a def5 simulation engine and it was a really cool way for potential users to try these specific strategies this has been one of their most effective ways of onboarding potential new customers I think it's a really great example of showing not telling and finally in-person Gatherings can't discount that in web 3 these are critical to building a developer community and they can be of all sizes from meetups to hackathons to full-blown Summits these are a few recent examples so you have forecasters Dev day coin bases base camp son a breakpoint I don't know if any of you were at any of these um I was at a few and what was cool was each of these was really authentic to their developer

Community but what I think is most important is that they were all executed with a variety of budgets and production support so everything from a single room all the way through to renting out a full-blown Convention Center final thoughts on go to market defining success I think it's really important to be clear and opinionated on your kpis in terms of modering your progress I would set these as three-month Sprints anything less and it's hard to see the effect of what you're doing but also recognize that some of these deals might take over a year to close so I wouldn't necessarily tie yourself to progress that has to be made in a set amount of time and then finally this is not something that you're going to set once and forget about it this is this really active process where you're constantly testing

and adjusting your marketing mix okay so moving on to go toar market support how can we help you we can help in a variety of ways everything from talking through your product launch um helping with Partnerships introductions deal negotiation pricing strategy issues with vendors and I know some of you have office hours set up this week really excited to chat about that what's really cool though is we're not alone uh you have support across many many other teams as well and we can really help orchestrate across all of these so please use us as a first point of contact so the other week you heard from Scott and the research team on things like business models you had the amazing talk from Eddie on token models uh and the engineering team can help with things like that and finally marketing

that'll come up next week and you'll hear from the marketing team on all things coms and marketing so again feel free to use this as kind of that first point of contact but you have a lot of go to market resources across a16z crypto and with that I'll pass it to pierce to talk about dealmaking thank you for having us uh as Maggie mentioned uh Integrations and Partnerships um take up an inordinate amount of Mind share for Founders in web 3 and so what we wanted to do is spend a little time focusing on this specifically uh it's a relatively flexible malleable space No Deal is the same so no negotiation is the same so what we're going to try to do is distill a lot of learnings from our Collective mind share down into something that is digestible hopefully applicable for a broad range of Founders

I know we have some Founders who have um already built and scaled companies some Founders who are doing it for the first time um definitely meant to be interactive I'm the youngest of four kids so like I fight for every word I get which means you should also fight back if you have a question or something we have Mike Runners just let us know but we'll also have Q&A at the end so I don't stand up here as like the be all end all resource for negotiating a deal um there are numer ous points of literature uh that are out there to digest uh in fact a16z crypto itself um is home to Scholars and authorities on this discipline I could have put up the academic works by Tim Ruff garden and uh Scott commoner up here I could have put

up some of the deal terms that our investment team have negotiated I could have put up uh hiring contracts that our talent team has helped with but I wanted to double click on the on the practice versus the theory with respect to go to market um does anyone know what aam's razor is generally like the yeah shout it out go ahead simp explanation the simplest explanation is usually the likeliest or the best one so my distilled version of this for web 3 looks like this it's very very challenging to negotiate a deal in web 3 if anyone hasn't seen training day I highly recommend it this is from training day don't take any pictures of this please um the reason it's hard in the web 3

space is there's a lack of standardization today and there's evolving business models it's also challenging because there tokenomics and valuation might obscure price Discovery uh might prevent you from actually figuring out how to value a certain deal or its impact on your business uh decentral decentralization and governance also comes into play here how do you move through an open governance process to get a vote forward that has a deal attached to it uh trust and anonity how do you develop trust metrics or trust Mechanics for a pfp and a pseudonym like you have to actually talk to the other person on the other side of the table uh and Regulatory uncertainty of course uh the inconsistent um uh regulatory landscape is always kind of looming we can kind of

distill this down into a more academic representation and this is a um just borrowing like a basic concept from social behavior which is basically saying that you have to consider both the individual and the environment to understand their behavior and in this space you can kind of think of that as like one you're going to be negotiating against a found and two they are constrained by the web 3 technology that we're all operating within so what does that really mean when you're negotiating with another founder in web 3 you get all the Legacy baggage of Founders right ego aversion all these things and the one thing that I would just highlight here in particular for those of you who are you know potentially approaching a negotiation with a partner or thinking

about one um the Zero Sum fallacy is particularly troubling for Founders in web 3 because we have this like grow the pie ethos right like we talk a lot about you know it's early the technolog is going to get there we want to uh make the market bigger not our market share bigger and what that winds up doing for a lot of Founders is it kind of paralyzes them because they feel at odds with this idea of wait we should be growing the pie but I also have to carve out my slice so it kind of neutralizes their ability to negotiate a deal that focuses on their market share expansion rather than the overall Market expans so how do we think about coaching through this Dynamic uh we actually

don't coach for like best we coach for better it really boils down to one thing if you can better manage the people and problem solving of a specific negotiation you're going to be able to influence a deal or a partnership um and Founders are naturally really good at problem solving right you wouldn't be Founders if you weren't good at the problem solving part of this so we wind up spending a lot of time on the people aspect or in layman's terms how do you get people to like you because with like comes trust and with trust comes the ability to win and influence deals and so we'll go into some of these um it's more of like a again this is a very amorphous kind of talk about like wait how do you get somebody to like you well there's two people in that relationship

so it's really going to depend on the other person on the other side but what we don't do is we don't try to enforce like some rigid system uh that uh is similar to the if anyone's an Always Sunny fan you know that this outcome can end suboptimally so we're not going to try to teach you some like rigid framework that you have to adhere to but what we will do is talk very briefly about this general purpose framework again all these inputs are like really distilled some of the books I put up on that first slide a lot of what I've learned over the years is is distilled down into this basic framework and so you have the timeline of like okay you're thinking about a given category of Partnerships you've done all the work of identifying like who the potential targets are now how do you move from the

preparation phase to the closing and post- activation phase um and we're just going to talk quickly about these things the one piece I won't spend a ton of time on again is relationship building um the reason for that is everyone has their own style right and everyone's different so the two things I would say on relationship building and the two highest um highest indicators of success are the ability to listen actively like if you're not actively listening to the person across from you then you're not hearing what they're saying and you're totally neutralized from being able to address any problems and then two to be interesting you have to be interested and so I like I think we all spend a lot of time in our lives like figing interest in what other people are saying

and so you have to do that to start uh uh developing a rapport with somebody so those are two things I would just keep in mind whenever you find yourself locked in like a room where you're like I really don't want to be here right now you have to listen actively and you have to be interested to be interesting so moving on from the relationship building aspect diligence let's say that you need to integrate you need a native stable coin integration well how do you get into a room with a stable coin issuer and successfully negotiate if you don't have any information then where are you going from and so Maggie and I actually get pulled into these conversations like midstage usually and we learn that Founders have either incomplete or

insufficient information about the parties they're negotiating against so the one thing I would immediately encourage you to do if you're not already doing it use every single note in your network to find information and Cat catalog it in your brain and start building Market intelligence regardless of what you think your needs are today having information is having power so start doing that immediately as a first practice um but with respect to the stable coin example specifically there's really like four ways to break this down and this applies across Partnerships but knowing who the decision makers are very often it's actually like better to treat it like a vice everyone thinks like you just go to the top like you just go to the founder CEO and you get done well more often than not you actually

have to start lower and get like actual buyin from the stakeholders who are going to be executing the decision that's made and so if you treat it like a vice and you kind of go from the top and the bottom you can squeeze on on who actually is going to make the decision so once you've gone through the diligence phase let's you're now in negotiations you're talking with with a partner you're trying to like again set the stage for how this negotiation is going to go anchoring is really just like psychological Bo of where you're going to set the market so this Dilbert cartoon is um not I don't love Dilbert I don't know if anyone does uh sorry but it's it communicates the point very accurately whether you're a dii protocol a reaking platform a shared sequency

Marketplace um you want to use a combination of costs both explicit like what does it cost my business and implicit like what is the opportunity cost of going down this path Plus Market comps so again this Market intelligence theme is going to come back over and over again um and this is where some of the aspects of web 3 technology can be really helpful there's a lot of information out there on the on governance forums so the op Bas deal the economics of that deal are literally plastered everywhere Bas has the opportunity to uh earn up to 2.75% of the op Network and then op is paying base the greater of um 2 and a half% of total net profit or 7 and half% of sequencing Fe you might have to like

fact check oh sorry greater of 2 and a half% of sequencer revenue or 15% of net profit anyway it's out there it's public information use that to your advantage like if you're walking into a negotiation you don't know where to set the anchors you can use what the publicly available information to try to get a better idea of where you should be anchoring that conversation the one thing I would point out is there's a risk of being anchored to unrealistic expectations so it's usually good to have a co-founder or somebody that you can you know bat the ball around with to see what makes sense in terms of opening up this conversation with a partner Framing and anchoring can be used together to influence the economics of an actual negotiation but framing just by itself we'll talk about for a second um this is all about how

you present information to influence the perception of the mutual goal and so this is monthly active wallet addresses of uh popular uh ZK l2s um and you'll notice obviously there are Market leaders and Market followers and your framing of a conversation should change based on whether you're talking to a market leader or a market follower right if you're talking to a leader maybe the framing is talking about how you can complement their strength you maybe you also talk about how you can scale to accommodate the fact that they are a market leader and you should maybe talk about that it's a low risk integration with high reward right because they don't want to jeopardize their Market leadership by entering into this partnership with you it's very valuable position where they are conversely if

you're talking to a market follower maybe the framing should be along the lines of like look this could be like a really strategic IC turnaround this could be an inflection point we can be flexible and bespoke to your needs uh it's risk-taking because you want to gain market share the framing of that conversation is going to influence the way that it goes and it's important to understand who's on the other side of the table and who you're talking to and to adapt accordingly the next piece is you know kind of As you move through this negotiating Pro process and you're building a relationship the entire time and you've anchored yourself and youve framed the conversation now how do you actually get closer to closing a deal well reciprocity or the concept of giving something of value to get something of value to make things

mutually beneficial is really important so this is a chart of monthly trades by nft Marketplace and let's say you're an nft project you're an individual Creator um you're a game that needs to get assets out into into the uh ecosystem they know what they can do for you they can offer you distribution and a monetization path but do you know what you can do for them and that's a really important piece of this like what are you what's the value you're actually driving we hear from a lot of projects of like well of course we should be on openc or of course we should be featured on you know XYZ nft Marketplace well I like you know like don't convince me convince them so like what are what is the value you're bringing to the table

so in this case um do you have unique and exclusive content that you can offer uh are your non-fungible tokens um technologically Innovative like do they bring a new feature that takes that Marketplace away from from feature parody with all the other marketplaces um or do they open up uh do you open them up to a brand new audience that they don't have today so that's some of the again this idea of like giving something to Value to get something to value or reciprocity and then this was just announced last week and this is a really good uh representation of collaboration um so Aptos is going to be acquiring hash pallet and the pallet Network pallet network is a Japanese blockchain Aptos is collaborating with them so that they can enter into to the

Japanese Market uh it's a very like well one regulatory more Friendly Market and two very adoptive Friendly Market um and so what they'll and they also have the relationship with the World Expo which is a inperson event from April to October of 2025 that's expected to draw 28 million people to Osaka and hash pallet has the exclusive rights to the digital wallet that will be present at that event so this is again a really really collaborative interesting deal for AP to be doing it's one of the first of its kind I think it's going to be kind of a trend you're going to see some of this like maybe faltering uh infra start looking to um new and Innovative infr to kind of carry them along and Usher them into a new age of innovation

um and so all of these things I just talked for a really long time all of these things go into a single deal negotiation and ideally over the course of your startup life you're G to have multiple of these um so this is hopefully just a general framework for you to continue to think about As you move through the life cycle of your company and helps you feel like instead of playing checkers you are playing chess that's it we're going to do Q&A so we we help basically daps accept any token as payment sorry say it again we help daps accept any token as a form of payment yeah and so we work with Bridges and and aggregators right um that's been a great like BD effort for us so like partnering with a particular bridge and then when people come to them and say

like I want to integrate this to my daap they can forward them our way eventually we want to replace Bridges entirely right so in our long term right now we're sending flow to Bridges but eventually we would probably stop doing that and so there's a degree to which that is eventually going to be quite competitive um so so I guess like in a similar way like how do you sort of handle that how do you make sure you don't lie but also like not enter into agreements that are not going to be I have some thoughts and then Magie you can uh also give it your answer um so the like very tactically the way that I would think about this just like really quickly off the cuff is I would establish these as affiliate relationships contractually where your flow is rewarded where you're actually

getting rewarded for the flow that you're sending to the bridges and it establishes a relationship of like friendliness like okay this is and affiliate deals are very well documented very well structured um Legacy web 2 models um and then what I wouldn't do is lock yourselves into some sort of period of exclusivity or some sort of clause in that you know agreement that uh uh limits your ability to uh expand outside of the scope of that agreement and so over time just slowly moving away and sending less flow just kind of looks like you're not as as productive as a of of an affiliate as you once were and it reduces the friction to overall exiting of a relationship that's tactically how I would do it so it kind of sounds like you're like flipping it where like we're

actually benefiting quite a lot a lot from them sending customers to us but now we're almost like charging them for that correct interesting okay cool how does that work when uh the payments are made in like a a token for protocol that they would be giving out to users and then like how how would Affiliates work in that case do you just collect some of it I feel like this maybe is a thing we should offline about because like your question is very very specific but you also don't want to give details public so it's like maybe we'll just talk about it later but I'd say one point is like in web 3 often times collaborators do be become competitors and vice versa and so in a landscape of constantly shifting Market Maps uh I

would just make sure you're structuring your contracts in a way that doesn't lock you into anything unnecessarily there will be a time when they probably are like wait what's going on like those people are building like they're my partner but they're also building something that's potentially competitive we've seen this time and time again and in that case it's better for you to have structured everything just in a way that is cleaner and where you don't haven't given anything up you know when you think about go to market and you know what kind of actions you want to take marketing branding PR Etc or even going to conferences you know is there a framework you use in trying to determine whether the cost justifies or the benefit justifies the cost you know how do you think about that when the benefit is so you know abstract there's no way to

really you know quantify it X Ane how do you make a de a smart decision in choosing how to spend your budget yeah there's no shortage of different marketing activities you could do I would think um it's about experimentation so maybe there's a way you could test an activation at a conference versus doing a full sponsorship and then measuring the result what were you hoping to get out of that is it you know listed de developers is it certain apps or you know what what is your goal going into those um in kind of the web 2 world you will see some standard percentages for how much a company should spend on different types of marketing for example again in the web 3 space there really aren't any standards and so you'll see some companies that are just like all in

on one type of thing and other companies that might do something else so you have to just be constantly adjusting that uh if you are for example a founder and you have this really great personal brand presence maybe that's one of the most effective ways to go to market and another project might not have that because their founder just isn't as widely known on X or something hi uh Dean it's aai um I feel like everybody has a different answer to this question so I'm interested in hearing what you guys uh could contribute but um kind of focused around the community's motion when building out communities um how do you approach establishing like a two-sided or even multi multi-sided markets especially when both sides are reluctant to jump on without the other

um and I and as kind of a followup to that are there strategies for doing that without like getting Whiplash from like kind of turning your heads at different sides of the market so maybe contextualize it just a little bit more said market so we're we're building like a like a Content consumption uh thing right so there's like consumers there's creators right there's different people like you know since we're doing Ai and web 3 right there's people that might be more incentivized on the web 3 side of things right um there might be like web to content creators web to Consumers right um and you know um content consumer so hard in the sense that you know like getting people to jump onto a platform that is new right with the content you know like will creators create if there's nobody to watch the

content right um I think these are like all sort of like established questions but you know when you're kind of in a new field with new content form in Ai and web 3 right it's like hard to look at some of the like solutions that have come before and like see a path forward yeah it's an interesting so it's a really interesting question because we actually it's becoming more and more of a like repeatable question that we get and I think what's fascinating about this space is um like we've maxed out the native web 3 content and so a lot of the conversation is like well how do we like what's the next adjacent audience to that or next adjacent cohort and it's like this idea of the digital creative and they're typically Web Two creatives who either don't know anything about

blockchain technology or have no interest in learning about it um and so you wind up with this Paradigm where you're as a as a platform or protocol you're trying desperately to attract these web to creatives who expect you to have the audience for their distribution and you're expecting them to bring the audience of their following to your platform and so it's this weird dichotomy of like nobody has anything in a sense um so so I would focus on carving out your market share today in the market that exists and building a network effect today rather than trying to onboard a user and then get them to produce and create it's just I think

when you're think about bootstrapping like bootstrapping a network effect it's just easier to do it today with Native creators what do you mean by like native creators in in in this context nobody that has to be educated as to why like put their art or their creative on chain is important like you'll be either like in my mind you're either going to be talking to digital creatives who can't make a living in in a web two world or you're going to be talking to Native web 3 creatives who actually understand the value of putting their work on chain and so I would focus Less on the digital creatives who are struggling to monetize their creative in a web two PL in a web 2 world because they maybe don't have a following even that's going to be valuable to your platform and focus on the creatives who actually have a

following today and get the value of being on chain how do you parse when to actually push the gas on the goto Market strategy especially in the context of sort of it being a bit confusing when your product truly has product Market fit in the context of all the cils and all the people who are sort of opportunistically using your product just for like future rewards um I'm not sure like how you think about that and like especially when you're like early in terms of your launch uh like when to actually hit the gas on that versus like you know taking time and you know like what typee of indicators you would use to to justify that what would you be taking your time for I think the main question is sort of like if the product

that you're launching truly is delivering sustainable value or if people are just you know they see you have uh reputable investors and that you probably will have a token at some point that they're just using the protocol to farm a future token launch which like you know there's like millions of wallets doing that so it's like how do you parse if you know that's what's going on and you should push the gas cuz you actually have a product Market fit or that you know you should not do that I would I would reframe it as the question is you have growth but you don't know what percent of the growth is like actual meaningful product Fit versus um speculation and in web 3 they will always be intertwined to some

degree but I think you can take some of those other things like engagement and ways of seeing whether they're um engage with your community whether it's going to events engaging on um conversations online and offline you could probably set some of monitoring up to to track that and and get some good degree of like this is actual these are actual people who are interested in the product and they going to be long-term users hi thanks I have two question one is for go to marketing I think when we uh talk to engage with customer usually we are both try to sell product but also try to like understand their penpoint almost like a validate ideas get new ideas my question is like how do you like mentally differentiating the two and uh

especially early stage when you engage with customer you might not have product but you really want to get them interest they tell you you so I feel like this two almost like going the same time or you like a separate them um my my second question is about deal making is like I think as the company girl you probably like be able to negotiate bigger Partners in other words I mean like some bigger Partners they like have left over us as but smaller partner we have leverage over them how would you like uh strategize those uh for different stage of a company like a you know what would be like a healthy mix in general sure yeah I can take the the first one so in the beginning you're looking for people

who I call Design Partners who are willing to just share their pains with you uh regardless of whether you have a product or not and as you develop the product you can then test and iterate and say hey we're working on on this feature is that going to help so I think the balance of the conversation shifts over time but the whole point of you engaging with them is you're looking to build something to help them so I think it's a very natural and authentic conversation uh as long as to Pierce's Point you're actively listening you're trying to understand what they're doing the one caveat is sometimes your early design partners are asking for stuff that actually doesn't make sense for you to build for everyone else so I would just be very careful about over indexing on their feedback because we've seen time and time again especially with CSX

teams they're kind of going down rabbit holes with those partners and then they end up with features that aren't that useful [Music]