Web3 marketing versus Web2: tactics for building community

Transcript

Welcome to Web 3 Academy. Uh very excited today. We've got our first ever panel. We're trying a new format today. Uh panel focused on uh marketing in web 3. And we've got some absolute rock stars uh here with us today to talk all things marketing uh and to break it down and share their experience. Uh so I'll I'll begin by uh introducing our panel today. Uh there's uh there's four of us. Uh so it's going to be uh four panelists and myself moderating. So it's going to be a jam-packed uh information-packed uh podcast. Really, really excited. First

up, we have Mark Robinson. Mark, welcome. Mark runs the digital marketing agency Brandtic. He's also the host of Marketing in the Metaverse podcast. Uh he's an NFT collector uh currently at NFT LA and he's also hosting NFT Seattle, a major NFT event which will be in Seattle uh at the end of July. Welcome Mark. Thanks for having me. Honored to be here with everybody. Stoked to have you my man. Uh next up we have Anna CCAT. uh from breaking launch records for a new AI based IT solution at IBM to opening a new hotel for Marriott International and flipping

private jets. Anna has a knack at turning restrictions, challenges, and short runways into competitive advantages. Currently, CCAT is leading a team of marketing and PR pros who are transferring their skills to build an amazing web 3 community. Welcome, Anna. Thanks, Jay. Happy to be here. Next up, we have Alif. Uh, Alif is a marketer and educator who spent years in B2B tech. She's now putting her marketing brain into NFTTS and web 3.

She is the head of marketing at Ninja Squad NFT. She also makes amazing weekly videos on YouTube where she helps marketers land their dream job and succeed in their careers. Welcome a thank you so much. It's also my first time being in a panel by the way. So this is also very exciting for me too. But uh thank you so much for having me. Awesome. We'll navigate together uh through this then. That's great. And finally uh we have Kyle Reedhead. Uh Kyle is the co-founder of Impact Digital Marketing, a web 2 marketing agency transforming into web 3 marketing. Uh and he's also the founder of Web3

Academy uh which uh focuses on helping entrepreneurs, marketers, and business leaders uh use Web 3 to grow their community and transform their business. Welcome Kyle. Thank you, Jay. I'm excited to be here. You know, I'm obviously the other host of this of this podcast and uh we interview someone every week on on Tuesdays and it's exciting to be able to do it with uh with five of us here in one conversation. So, I think it's going to be a lot of information and I'm excited to learn. Buckle up everybody. It's going to be a good one.

Okay. So, uh let's let's launch in uh and let's start with um I'm going to start with Anna. Uh I'm going to go to you for the first question. Uh and then I'll open it up to anybody else that wants to jump in. Um and let's just start sort of broad. uh what do you see as the main differences uh between web two and web three in terms of marketing? Yeah, it's a really good question and one that I hear every single day. It's it's a common thread that we see in Twitter where people are debating over this, but it's it's pretty simple. The strategies marketing good marketing strategy is based on proven theory that we've been developing over the past 50

years. That's not going to change. I I I've been in emerging tech most of my career and it doesn't matter you know cyber security IoT quantum computing you know tech can change markets can change regions can change but um the strategy really is based on consumer behavior theory and psychology and so those good proven strategies are completely um transferable to web 3. What I do believe will change and I already see it changing. Um there's areas that I'm actually really concerned about. I I already see disruption is the tactics that we're using. Some of the tactics that we're using and that we've been relying on as marketers for the past 8

to 10 years. Those are ironically the tactics that are going to probably suffer the most. and that if we can get in front of the ball on those, we can we can um really open up brand new opportunities that we've never even experienced before. Amazing. Yeah, very very true to uh to zoom out and the strategy stays the same but the tactics are changing. Uh any anybody uh else want to jump in uh and talk about uh the differences that they see between web 2 and web 3 in terms of marketing? A leaf?

Yeah, I can hop in. I actually um talked about this very recently with a friend, so things are kind of fresh in my mind. I do agree with what uh Anna said already. Maybe I'm going to go into a little more about the um the tactical differences that I see and also the like the the language and culture. So, initially when I started to study the web 3 and what what it like how it is different than what I've been doing in the past, um which was fall of 2021 when I kind of really went in. Um number one thing is I think the culture and the language is very different initially when you're just stepping in. Those are the main differences. So I think you do

need to get accustomed with that as a marketer when you're entering this new world. Um and then a couple of other things that I found to be quite different which may change in the near future but these are I think still relevant are um one thing I find is that it's you can't really plan for very long term as of yet uh in web 3. So, I found it to be very much real time, spontaneous, like that's how we do marketing in an NFT collection right now. I can't um I can plan for a campaign, but I can't really put in goals for the next year because I don't know where the brand is going to evolve.

I can imagine but I don't necessarily know how it's going to be laid out as if um you know which is something I would have been able to do in a in a regular technology company in a in the web 2 world. A couple of other things I would uh mention are one thing I couldn't find when I entered this space and still doesn't exist is there's really no playbook in how to do marketing. Yes, some strategies, yes, some tactics still are relevant. And if you're a marketer that knows how to use certain platforms, you can apply that knowledge here, but there is really not like a best practice way of doing things as of yet. again and this is

going to evolve and we're going to you know talk about this in a different way maybe in a couple of months but as of yet I don't think we're really seeing a lot of uh systematic approaches like templates that we would use in web 2 and then also tools as well uh there were so many tools to solve so many problems and make systems um like more efficient and processes and automations I don't yet see that in in web 3 there are so many new brands popping up to solve those like efficiency issues I think but um so far maybe because of the spontaneous feature we're not seeing that many yet.

Uh and finally I know this is taking a little bit long but the community first approach is very different than web 2. Um almost all brands that I've seen so far in web 3, they're community first and then everything else comes. So that that's I think a major difference that we're seeing. That's great. Kyle, you wanted to jump in on top of that. Yeah, I was actually going to touch on the community side of things and so it's nice that you finished off with that. I feel like in in web two, marketing is a lot of like building an audience, right?

So it's like you as the brand or the person or the influencer trying to collect an audience, but your audience isn't necessarily included so much in your business. Whereas web 3, it almost like combines marketing with your business or with your business model and they become one and the same. So like web two world, we had like your marketing department and you had your like business operations department. They're kind of now like the same thing in web 3, I feel like. Um, and that also includes your community. Um, so I feel like that's going to be the big change in marketing is that it's going to really include your entire audience, your entire community, and they're going to help you with all the decisions that you make with your business. not all but certain parts of your business. Um, and then I think there's also the fact that

it doesn't really play out right now, but I think the way that web 3 is going where everything is sort of interoperable with each other. Um, and it seems like basically all communities are going to be tokenized, whether it's through an NFT or a social token or whatever. It's very easy and frictionless for someone to like leave one platform or leave one community and just go to the other because you can just everything's liquid, right? you can just oh I have an owner in I don't know bankless DAO or in whatever DAO or in this community and I can just sell it and go to the next one within seconds and it's super easy. Um so I feel like community is just going to matter so much more because they can just leave and go to another community like that.

Um and so the focus is going to be so much around building that community somehow engaging them keeping them active and I think including them in whatever it is that you're building. Mark. Yeah, just to to chime in on that a little bit. Totally agree with everything you guys said. I think Anna, one thing you said was like human psychology that's not going to change, right? And that's the foundation of a lot of it. Marketing drives human behavior and influences how what drives people to take action. Um, and then the community piece that you guys touched on. I think a concern that a lot of people have with web 3 and the metaverse and all this stuff is like the more digital that we go, the less people will be connected. And something that I think is really cool with web 3 is community

is not really an option. It's more of a focal point now and human relationships are more important than ever. And so I think like meaningful valuable connections with other humans is what drives a lot of it. Like Kyle, you said inviting the community in to make business decisions and whatnot. And how do you keep the community around when there's so many other communities that are trying to v for their attention and their loyalty as well, right? And so I think a lot of it does come to like having meaningful connections and relationships that can withstand time. And so that's something that's maybe not expected to a lot of people. I didn't necessarily expect that as everything shifts to become like web three and and more digital. But it's cool that the focus is more than ever on human

relationships. So I' I'd love to pull on sort of two threads here. Uh and uh I'll let you guys uh maybe raise your hand and decide which way you want to go. Uh I think one is you all brought up community and it's such a central point of web 3. Uh but we also leaf you mentioned that there's no playbook, there's no templates, there's no best practices. So I would love to hear you guys talk a little bit about okay what are you seeing as the techniques and the tactics that are working for building community in web 3.

Uh, so that's one thread that we can pull on. Uh, and the other thread I'd love to pull on is this long-term goal setting versus short-term thinking. Uh, is something that I keep hearing again and again. I mean, quite frankly, not just in web 3, in all businesses now of, uh, how do you plan in this everchanging spontaneous world? Uh and so we'd love to uh hear you guys talk maybe a bit about how you plan within your businesses um and manage that. You know, okay, well, we still need to have goals and we still need to have direction, but we also need to be adaptable and agile.

Uh and so see see where you guys thinking on that. Uh anybody feeling called to either of those want to jump in on either? I I will jump on the first one on the community point because what Kyle and Mark said um that works beautifully together. Um Kyle mentioned um that you know we you we used to build audiences and I remember that so well right like last year CEO comes to you and says the business objective is 1 million users. So as a marketer you say okay if one million is my goal then I need to reach an audience of five million or 10 million and then you build to you know gather the entire marketing strategy and all the tactics they're going to you're going to reach all those people and then

convert a certain percentage like oldfashioned way of looking at it whereas um Kyle was saying no longer it's that you include the audience but then Mark's point about um it's not only inclusion but it's connection I was on another um discussion where someone said, you know, what should marketers do differently? And the person said, when every community member comes on board, the brand has to like reach out like one-on-one. I was like, that's nonsense. That's not scalable. Like a leaf mentioned, you know, automation like that that's impossible. It it's not that the brand is the important. The brand isn't the center of the universe anymore. It's the connections that are going to keep people. It's like we can produce as much content as we want, but

I I always tell our team that I work with now is like we don't build the community. We cultivate a space for community to grow organically. And your first question was like what tools can marketers use to kind of understand and get into this mentality. And I'm like going to do a quick plug. This is not my book. This is Andrew Chen's book, The Cold Start Problem. He wrote this right before like the hype of web 3 happened last fall. But if you read this book like he discusses a lot of these topics, he talks about it from a network product perspective. How one person brings on another person and if the denser your ball is like if we look at community as a ball with a bunch of points in it, points of light, we used to want our

ball to be very very big. Now we want our ball to be very very small and very very dense because if someone attempts to leave the community or join the community there's so many people around them engaging them and the brand just creates the space for that to happen in a healthy way. I can chime in on that a little bit too and I think you made a you made a great point of how is that scalable? There's no way we can scale that. And sometimes to scale in what we're doing right now with connections and building those relationships, you scale by do things that are unscalable like those one-on-one messages and that kind of stuff. And actually, I had a conversation with ALF's brother BCC

about Ninja Squad NFT about how he and and them together like built their community. He talked about how many one-on-one conversations he had and still has. And I think a lot of it is those one-on-one conversations, getting to know somebody and not just putting out content that's going to resonate. That's valuable, too. But driving driving those connections by just having those one-on-one conversations and then inviting, you know, if you welcome a member to a community and then say, "Hey, that's actually a great question. Would love for you to post that so that I can answer that and let everybody else in the community benefit from your answer and your question, too." That's like finding ways like that where you can incorporate individuals into the community and help them begin to engage.

And that's something that I think when people are contributing, they feel valued, right? And so when people feel valued and they feel needed, then they're less likely to leave. They're more a little bit more invested and it's just another step they can take to actually becoming more valuable and a a more like concrete part of that community. And then something else that I think is combining Kyle, you mentioned combining business and marketing. It's all the same now. But this is I don't know if a tactic, but something that I've been thinking about is I think under promise overd deliver is really easy to say, but I think as a business practice, it's a way that you can operate your business in a way that creates word of mouth and sharable content for people to talk about your

community, especially in web 3 where there's so much hype and so much promise and not a lot of delivery or the delivery is maybe questionable, right? So, I think finding ways where you can actually underpromise and overd deliver sets you up for a lot of marketing that's just automatically going to happen through your community. I wanted to just say one like short thing there. There's so many things to say about this conversation and I could really pull it everywhere. But um one thing I wanted to add on top of that doing the unscalable things sometimes matters the most is when I think about when I initially like started to dig

into the community first mindset and try to get myself thinking that way. It really brought the the thousand true fans um approach to mind. I think that's that's a very similar approach that you know if if you read about it if you if you study that I think it uh can easily res like you can easily resonate with what is going on and how to build uh the culture and the community in in a web 3 um ecosystem and to to what Mark said we still to this day after four months after launching the project we still uh want to meet everyone it like personally to talk to have conversations, to get to know what their day-to-day looks like,

you know, what their day jobs are, when they spend time with us, uh why they want to spend time with us, how they feel when they come into Discord to talk with us, um and yes, maybe we can't do it with like 4,000 members, but we still attempt to do that. and and the more we involve them in those conversations and one thing that I didn't mention with the difference between web two and web 3 is the instant feedback loop which is something I love about web 3 marketing uh because I can do something or I can think of something as a marketing tactic that I want to implement and I share that within the community and just kind of get the pulse of what they think about that and how they feel and if they

are also uh willing to support me for example because um that is also very powerful when when doing marketing or amplifying something that we want to talk about. Um just getting their involvement and also um and like their willingness about uh kind of approval uh uh so to say about about what we're thinking just to touch on. So the question the first I think of your questions Jay was like what what works in web 3 for marketing. I think one thing for people to understand because I get asked this every day is someone's like, "Oh, I started this NFT or this DeFi project, whatever. How do I grow it? How do I market it?" I think one thing people need to understand is like Web 3

actually isn't really set up for scale in marketing right now. Not yet, right? It's still super clunky. There's only like I don't know a little over a million people that have ever bought an NFT ever. There's like a few million that have ever been in DeFi ever. Like most people in crypto in web 3 are like just on centralized exchanges that have bought some tokens and don't even know what it is. So like when you're trying to think of your marketing strategy to like grow either your existing business or an NFT business or whatever at DAO, like you probably don't even really want to be thinking web three, you want to be thinking how do I do it with web two tactics. Like let's not forget that just because we're moving into web three, web two and web one still exist, right? Like in web two world, we still use email and

website which were tools that were used in web one. And I'm sure in web three as this goes, we're still going to use web two things like I don't know ads or social content or whatever. That is still the main way that I think about growing web three projects. Um, but I think what we've all talked about here is like when you use web two or web one tools to bring people in at scale, then it's like using web three to sort of incentivize them and organize them and get feedback from them and involve them. That's really what Web 3 adds right now. We'll see where that goes in the future.

Um, but yeah, just something to remember. It's like Web3 is still very quantum. Yeah, Kyle, you you're leading perfectly into uh my next question here. So, thank you. Thank you very much for doing that. Uh let's talk so we we we talked about community uh and some ideas and tactics and great ideas thrown out by everybody there. Um let's talk about what what web two tactics or techniques have you been using on web 3 projects that you've seen effective.

Kyle, maybe you want to take the lead. Yeah, I mean one of the things um is is what we've really done with with Impact Digital Marketing anyway, we work with a lot of um big crypto and web3 newsletters. So people that were building sort of a web two styled business. Um and what's interesting though is a newsletter or um you know a course let's say or memberships. These are these are basically communities. The difference is in web two they don't get anything from it. Well I mean they get their knowledge or whatever they're joining that community for but that's kind of it. And so, you know, the way that we grow those is typically through ads, right? Creating social content and then running ads and scaling, whether that's Google search ads or that's YouTube ads or Facebook ads, which

honestly still work really well in today's world. They really do. And I know a lot of people in this space hate it because it's, you know, they just hate Facebook and everything going on with what we're doing with user data. But the fact is it's pretty cheap to get people to give you their email or to sign up to buy something or to get involved. And so I like to use web two tactics to grow and scale and get a bunch of people into a discord or into a newsletter or to get their emails and then you can go and launch an NFT or a token and start a DAO around that community or whatever and sort of like web threeize your web two community that you used to have. Um, that's sort of the way that we've been doing it with a lot of our clients. Uh, and it's worked

quite well. Um, just because you can get that scale first and sort of start to form the community before you launch the token or the NFT and you can actually use them to be like, "Hey, we want to launch this like how should we do it?" And they sort of help you come up with that. Um, that's kind of the the big area that I've I've been working on. Anyway, love to hear what others say though. Maybe I uh so a couple notes that I mean I agree with most of what Kyle said. Um maybe to add on top of that. Um I think most of web two tactics and platforms still work for web 3 although obviously we are

seeing some of them become more popular like Twitter is just for brand awareness like the primary platform and then discord for community management. Um, but lately over the past two months, I'm seeing a little more transition to LinkedIn. Uh, I'm seeing YouTube is working really, really well, by the way. And I think I mean, I built my own community through YouTube, uh, a long time before even, you know, diving into web 3 at all. So, I think that is a very very effective way still to to use today and not many are using it, by the way.

Um, and then also I'd probably add for brand awareness. I think like the short form videos are really helpful to reach larger audiences. It's not for community building, but to reach larger audiences. I think those types of uh content are really useful. Um, one thing I'm kind of, you know, this is just a conversation I have with myself, but uh, Discord is the primary platform for community management at this point. uh but there are better community management platforms out there that we were using in web 2 like circle for example I think it is called circle um if I'm not mistaken so those types of platforms are actually built for

community management so I don't know if discord is going to be the ideal platform or if it's going to be the the only one dominating the space I would like that to change uh personally so that's one thing I wanted to to talk about and then another tactic that um I haven't seen in in you know where I live right now but last month I was in Miami and one thing that I noticed which I love by the way is Gerala marketing um and I would love to see this being uh used by more and more brands. Uh I want to do this for Ninja Squad too but I think I've seen this for uh Cryptounks board ape uh another crypto pets or something or holy pets or

something like like that. Um, there was a flyer that was on an airplane uh that was very visible in South Beach, which was like very interesting to me because it it said like uh Holy Pets is now revealed on OpenC and I was like, "Wow, this is a first." And I saw a couple of different ones like just walking down the street. um which isn't very common yet but I would love to see that just you know become more popular and using the creative ways to uh to bring more attention.

Yeah, just on the the topic of guerilla marketing. So we there's an NFT project that I've helped do some marketing for called Satoshi's Index and down in South by Southwest. I wasn't there but one of the team members was there and put up different flyers and stuff at near the entrances to the event and around different NFT centric uh events that were happening there. And then also in my Airbnb here in LA where I'm staying, which is right down the road from NFT LA, there's different posters like with a QR code that says scan here to enter to win an NFT. different things like that. So, it's interesting to see how some of those very gorilla web 2 tactics will play out. We got a decent amount of traction from the posters that we put

up, which was kind of fun. We didn't have a lot of expectations around it. More of a, hey, low low impact, why not try it and let's just see what happens as more of an experiment, which I think is a great way to look at marketing in web 3 is just a lot of experimentation and trying different things and being creative to see what see what sticks. Um, other things I think that when you I think the question was what tactics in web 2 are still being effective and identifying a target audience. That's where a lot of marketing starts. Figuring out who you're talking to. I think it can be easy to think, hey, there's only a million people or it's really small niche audience that's interested in crypto and NFTTS. That's my target audience. But that is way too broad of a target audience. That's if

you're trying to reach that many people, you're not really effectively reaching anybody, right? So being targeted in your approach and then having a cohesive brand voice, putting out consistent cohesive content. I think that's something that's really important to develop trust and garner that community of like-minded people too. Fantastic. Such such great ideas from everybody. And I I just have to mention for those listening on the podcast versus watching uh when brought up is Discord going to be the future of community management? many uh every panelist was making a face. So, uh I'm not going to open up that can of worms because that's a whole other debate on itself. Uh but uh yeah, there's there's

definitely some uh strong opinions and feelings about Discord and the potential of another tool to take over uh the uh the community management space. Okay, so let's let's shift now. Um let's talk about what web three tools or tactics have you seen be effective. Uh, and I'll just sort of give a launch point here um of something that we've talked a lot about uh on Web3 Academy is the use of PO apps and I've seen and I don't know um I know Mark you said you haven't been to NFTLA yet even though you're just down the street from it uh but I've heard uh of many um of these events using uh POA apps as a way and I think out of ETH Denver I remember speaking to

one of our uh podcast guests about uh how they literally just went around collecting PO apps and there was many uh exchanges happening every time you met somebody. Uh so whether it's POA apps or another web 3 tactic uh would love to hear you guys talk about what are the web three tactics you're seeing that are really effective in marketing. I I can start um and more of a like a broad view of this. It's important that we talk about web 3 tactics because as effective as web two tactics are, they're going to become more and more ineffective. As more and more people use, for instance, wallets to connect to DAPs instead of emails. Um, and email has been doing well for us for such a

long time, which means it probably has the biggest target on its back. Um, and so I I think about this as like purist imposers. We get called out. I'm sure you guys have been the the the the target of this is like if we as brands or the brands that we represent our clients if we aren't trying to contribute to web 3 and using web 3 tools um to grow community to cultivate community then then we can be accused of posers um as web 3 posers and I have a discussion I I have had this discussion with our CTO several several times um because I want to be a bridge for those who aren't in our

community yet without looking like we're just um not contributing, right? Like so I'll give you a perfect example. I know that I could get better um organic um optimization on blog posts by posting on Medium or WordPress. I know it like I know that mirror.xyz XYZ has a lot um of growing to do in terms of optimization, but I I drew a line in the sand for my team, for our tech contributors on my core team and for our community contributors that were like we're using mirror. I know I know all of

the stuff, the reasons why it's not there yet, but I do that as a way to contribute to web 3. like I have to eventually let go of those web two tools. Now, I'm not saying I'm gonna stop using WordPress because it is a good bridge. Like, it's a really good way to to host it. Medium is really, really good because it's indexed very well. But eventually, I think it's really good for us who are early adopters and leaders in this space to at some point move over and say, "Listen, we're using DAPs. We're we are decentralizing. We're not there yet, but like at least put it on our road map. Like 24 months from now, we're going to really truly be

living the decentralized life. I I love that. So, I think what's really interesting is a lot of the tools are not ready yet for masses to come into in web 3, but there's some that are like they're close. And so, it's like, you know what, let's start using it now and just get them in. And I think mirror is one of those right where it's like okay we can do that. I think po apps which is what you mentioned Jay um is is amazing because one of the things that I want if you have a community already or an audience like you really want to start educating them and get them to get wallets and start interacting with web 3 because that's going to be super beneficial for you if you launch a Dow or if you launch a social token or if

you launch an NFT. If you try to launch an NFT and no one in your community is all like I don't know 50 plus and they've never even heard of web 3. Well, that NFT is not going to go very well. So, starting like things on mirror, they're all of a sudden going to start seeing that, right? Your audience is going to go, "What is that?" And they're maybe they're going to download a wallet and interact with it. So, it's like you're educating your community or your brand's community. Same with PO apps. I love PO apps and I feel like everyone, every business should be launching PO apps for whatever it is you want to do, like someone attending events, someone doing something inside of your community. The PO app is so easy because it's free for everyone. and it's gasless and it's just teaches them to download a

wallet and to interact with an NFT for the first time and that is like starting to onboard your community and your users into web 3 so that as more tools start to appear you can use them and most of your community will already have access to it right um if you don't start to educate them early on then if you just try to go all in web three one day it's just it's not going to work I think so Kyle like so I heard just saw that some people were arguing that we like as marketers we should build into our budgets like way to just give people things because they don't have ETH and they don't have wallets. And I'm like, "No, we need to help them." Yeah. Like not just give it away and like let them use their like I want to use my credit card

to buy an NFT, too. But like it's I guess I'll have to get a what is it? The um the honey badge. Leaf and Mark. I'm curious, you both worked on several NFT projects. Have you found that you need to spend time educating your users in on web 3 tools in general as a first step in order to then sell them the NFTs? Yeah, I can I can chime in here, but yes, I would say for sure educating people on what is MetaMask, what is, you know, I walked my dad through setting up

his MetaMask account and getting an account at Coinbase and buying his crypto for the first time and transferring it and all those different things. And if you're not if you're looking to onboard new users that are not existing savvy holding crypto and have purchased NFTs, then education is a big part of it. So even like for me personally something I've been doing is you know I started a podcast and a lot of that is having conversations about marketing in this space just so that I can learn as I can share what I'm learning as I learn it right because if I'm building a community and kind of building in public in a way where it's hey I'm not pretending to be some expert I'm asking people that are smarter than me so we can all learn this together. um inviting people into that journey

whether it's you know around marketing or it's around an NFT or a company but I think making those those changes like you were talking about you know the changes you're implementing in your business hey I'm drawing a line in my sand here's here's some things that we're going to start doing and I think creating spaces for people to begin to just without commitments like understand some of these concepts and begin to wrap their head around it I think is really important so that they can just get educated at their own pace. So creating videos around how to set up a wallet and how to set up, you know, how to buy crypto, how to buy an NFT, all those different baby step things that to us, if you've been in the space where time just flies, seems so elementary, but you know, 99% of people have no idea how to

do that. And it's it still is confusing. Even when you've been in this space for a while, some of it is still there's just so much to learn, right? So the easier you can make it for people to follow along and onboard into the space, I think that's a huge part of it. Um, and you're obviously limiting yourself to a very niche amount of people if you're not catering to people that are normies, as they say. So, yeah. And I'll and I'll just add a few things on the education part. I mean, for us at Ninja Squad, education is um is a huge part of our content strategy in general, but it is also a part of the project utility as well. it is so important to um consistently keep educating on the new things that we're

we're using as a team that we want to introduce to them but also what are what is happening in the space because uh that's kind of the mission for our project but you know going back to the content strategy because I think that's where the the question originated um in terms of you know providing that educational content we've been using a lot of the web two platforms and they have been really effective for us honestly we are doing a uh so our I think major advantage is that um the two co-founders and myself come from a content creation background we all already had a big audience and we really had a kind of a like a big stance on educating um from for a very long time.

So we now prioritize that educational content on YouTube on um on Twitter. We do that a lot but also we leverage uh our medium blog and that has been really helpful not only to educate but also to uh empower the community members to share it with their own network because when they have readym made resources it's just so easy for them to just share it and they kind of feel proud of you know being involved in that community having that resource available to them and to be able to share it with their network. So all those tactics have worked really well. One tactic we haven't used um and we probably won't be using but I personally think it is going to be used and it is effective is

emails. Um I've seen uh two projects that use email newsletters very brilliantly. And I was like, okay, maybe this is a tactic that is going to be relevant because originally I thought, you know, email is just dead and it's not going to be used in web 3 because a lot of people don't want to click on links in emails or click on documents uh when it's shared in Discords. Like that's like a big red flag in in most NFD communities. If you know, you know. Um so when I was, you know, thinking about email, people were saying, you know, maybe that's not the right thing.

But I personally think after a while we're going to see more uh collections or projects or businesses use email marketing. I just want to add one thing to that. One thing I've noticed and been thinking about a lot over the last like month, especially as we've built out Web3 Academy, is Discord, which is where all Web3 communities are almost is like that's your community center. And there's like, you know, people come in there to ask questions and get support and get feedback and, you know, you can make good conversations and things in there, but I don't know how, and I haven't looked into these stats yet, but I feel like the the reach is probably not very good there. Like if you have I don't know 10,000 people in your Discord, I don't think many of them are actually seeing what you're posting in there. So to me, I see all the other

things like you've mentioned newsletters using emails or content on Twitter or I don't know, LinkedIn or YouTube or whatever or a podcast. Like these are your ways to broadcast to your entire community and then it's like when people are ready to attend an event or ask a question or get involved, that's where the Discord is like your community center. Um, so that's the way that I kind of see it and hopefully that helps others kind of just come up with their strategy of how they want to do content um for their business. That's great. Okay, so let's let's shift gears now from the tactics that uh are working. Uh what I'd love to hear uh is you guys share maybe the things that you're seeing that aren't working or the things that you think people should be

uh a little bit more hesitant to use. I mean, Anna, you mentioned a little bit of uh making sure you're not a poser and, you know, you need to be using these web 3 tools. Uh, but would love to open that up to a larger conversation. Is there anything or anybody you spoke to that recently you said, "Hey, stop doing that or maybe don't go down that road." Uh, in terms of in terms of marketing and growth, not necessarily stop using it. Um, but I feel really passionate about a topic because I I studied it. It was like it was the concentration in my masters. Um, and it was search engine marketing. I've lived and breathed this stuff since it came out. Um, it was one of the reasons I went back to school and got my masters was because I came from I kind of cut my

teeth in the marketing agency world. I worked for six years and then search came on board. I actually remember the day that I told like walked into our CEO's office as an intern and was like, "Hey, have you seen Google?" You know, like I had that instinct. I knew it was going to be something. And so I saw it grow and and you know really dug in and I I love it as a tactic. I love it and it's going to be hard to watch it evolve but it will evolve. So perfect example. We've all been talking about how Discord is where community is is happening where community management I love how Alise said that's where community management happens. That's a really good way of looking at like Discord. Um but this is this is a gated application. Twitter for the most

that are not indexed, are not indexed well or gated. So this is what is forcing marketers to use web 2 applications in order to be that bridge to onboard people. But there is going to be a day when we need to address this issue. Like how are all those DAPs going to be searched? like how how we're right now all this content is locked. Google cannot index it. Like maybe we don't need Google anymore in web 3. But then what do we need? Because findability we've learned as a society is what drives is a driver of innovation. Like sharing content that was what web 2 is all about, right? Like we could all create content and find it. That was

huge. It was a game changer. But I see search engine marketing as we know it not working well in web three because we have all this content. You know, web s Google can't even index the content right now that we're producing right now. And that problem is only going to be amplified when when the content is decentralized. So, this is something like I I I want I want to get a bunch of SEOs on one side of the table and a bunch of like web 3 technologists on the other side of the table and and and come up with a solution because right now I think it's just this open-ended like we don't know what's going to happen and it affects marketing that our industry is

affected by this more than any other industry in my opinion. Kyle, I want to hear what you think. I want to be at the table and you have that conversation and hear the back back and forth. I think that'd be fascinating. I'll call out a couple obvious a couple obvious things, then I'll kick it to Kyle. But I think some of the things that we all think are annoying are like all the spammy mass DMs and all the comments and there's there's a lot of things that are really annoying that marketers are using that are also not effective. And then I think people influencer marketing is definitely still valuable but in a kind of a different way where if somebody's a thought leader and they've got a boughtin community

because they've put in their time and resource research and have a lot of value to add in a certain area then they're their influence is really great and because this space is super confusing and people are looking for someone to simplify it and just tell them hey what should I buy or what should I do? I think the influencers voice is really loud because of that because they have their the respect of the community. But just people that just doing a influencer campaign with somebody who's maybe not super relevant and is not doesn't have a botin community in web 3, if you just say, "Oh, they've got two million followers on Instagram. Let's do a campaign through this influencer." That is not something that's going to be relevant

because they might have an audience that has no idea. None of them have wallets. That kind of stuff. And even if people really like them because of, oh, they look amazing and I love her makeup and this that and the other, they're probably not going to just buy an NFT. They'll have some small percentage that will, but um I think influencer marketing is going to be a lot more targeted and is only going to be valuable if it's a relevant person who actually has more of a community versus just a generic audience of a bunch of followers. That doesn't really mean a whole lot these days. Yeah, I have uh am I on here? Yeah, I am. Okay. I have one thing that So, first of all, on SEO, I haven't put enough thought into the SEO. So, I don't think I have enough like uh enough

information in my head yet to comment on that because I don't know where that's going to go, but I agree it's going to disrupt SEO. Absolutely. And it's going to disrupt marketers a lot. I put more thought into like the data side on like how it's going to work for ads. So, maybe we'll touch on that later. Um, the one thing though that I think needs to stop in this space is whitel lists. Um, like you know, trying to get all these people on your NFT white list before you're going to launch and making them like, I don't know, join like 10 Discords and tag 18 people and do all these things to get on this list to me is just absolutely super frustrating to see. And I think it just it needs to stop. Like we need to just turn it off and never do it again and just forget

about it. Um, I get what they're doing and yes, it's it's fine. The problem is is like I think the people that focus so much on these white list it's you're getting a bunch of people that are going to join this thing and they're going to flip it and sell your NFT anyway and like that's not good for your business long term. And I think a lot of what's happening in NFTT spaces right now is it's people who aren't really building businesses. They're just creating some images or some art and they want to sell it. Um and they're like the only way to sell it is by getting a bunch of hype and doing these whitelists and then they're kind of not really doing anything with it afterwards. And so for those that are going to build NFTTS around an actual true business or an

actual true community, you shouldn't need a white list, right? You should already have that community or you should already have a a need for your product or whatever it is that you're building this NFT or this token around. And so like the white list shouldn't really be necessary. So that to me is always a red flag and I hope that that's something that that stops 100%. Um I have a couple of things that I would love to for for to stop uh very soon. Uh whitel list I was going to mention that uh for sure like especially when when projects say they want to be inclusive and then they have like I don't know tens of hurdles that you need to jump before before getting into that project. I hate that and I think um that

is very uh disturbing to people who are now trying to enter this space. It it makes it even more difficult for them to to come in. A couple of other things that I don't like uh engagement farming type of tweets and influencers that use that like which floor should I sweep? Uh I got this much money who do you know who do I send this to? That type of like a terrible terrible communication. I hate that and I hope that stops and you know um is lost from the planet earth. And then also um kind of similar to the whitelist approach that that Kyle mentioned, I really dislike the super fast uh launches or the stealth launches

that some uh collections projects are doing just because it emphasis that should be on the community and uh community first uh approach to you know I just want to make a quick buck. uh by selling art that I I was able to make with someone that I found on Fiverr kind of thing. So, I think that really gives that impression. So, I am absolutely not a fan of those super fast launches and I get like I I wrote this in my notes because I get so many messages every single day uh when people, you know, just because they're really intrigued, they want to launch an

NFT project because they know they can make a lot of money if they if they succeed. uh that's not the way to look at the the space at all and yeah, I would like for that mindset to to go away. Yeah, for sure. I think uh I I I those some great points there and I hope uh as you said we can erase some of those from the planet Earth completely. Uh you heard it here first everybody. One one thing to add though I think these like annoying things that we're talking about where it's it's kind of scammers mainly right people that aren't really thinking a long time. This happens with every like iteration of the internet. Like I remember when Instagram first started. Um, and it wasn't even like you could just DM anyone on

Instagram and it would go into their main inbox. Now I think they've like made a feature so that doesn't happen. But so like I remember I started doing that first. I was like oh I can just reach out to anyone and they always get it. Like this is sweet. And then it just was like everyone was doing it just DMs after DMs like okay this is getting so spammy and email same thing right? like email was great and then all of a sudden people started spamming emails and they had to create the the spam promotional folders etc. So like I'm sure web 3 will figure out ways around it or maybe it'll just kind of I don't know people will just stop doing it. We'll see. But it's it's normal with new technology. Marketers find a way to ruin a lot of things.

Exactly. And make the rest of us look bad. Okay. Let's uh let's jump forward to the future now. uh would love to sort of project out predictions uh five to 10 years from now. Uh where do you think we are? Whether it be the metaverse uh what do you think marketing looks like um when we have a billion people in web 3? Where do you think the future is?

I'll share a couple of ideas or thoughts that I have. I think it like marketing is going to exist everywhere and everything can be an experience as we get more into the metaverse which I don't think at one point all of a sudden we're going to exist in the metaverse. It's a gradual thing and it's just as technology takes a greater portion of our lives then we're more and more heading that direction. But you can be if you have one of those AR headsets, then the sidewalk can all of a sudden turn into some billboard or whatever it might be, right? Like advertising and marketing can exist everywhere and experiences.

And I think they'll be unique based on what your wallet looks like and what tokens you have and communities you're a part of. And so we're all going to have different as we're just walking around. if you're at the mall or walking down the side of the street or whatever, like different I think it's going to be really interesting to see um how people can create immersive and kind of blended experiences that people will interact with in our daily lives. And then I think there's going to be a lot of ways to leverage digital avatars with different different ways to create like marketing on somebody's t-shirt in the metaverse and you know finding different placements of way to get your message and interact with people. So I think the

possibilities are endless. It's hard to know exactly what all that stuff is going to look like. I don't I think we're a long ways off from people just throwing on a headset and not interacting with people. I don't think that's in the near future, but I could see a reality where that's a portion of it or there's some kind of a blend where I think it's going to it's going to create a space for people to be able to interact more seamlessly, whether you're in person or digital in kind of an augmented situation. So, that'll be exciting and create more ways to seamlessly collaborate with people all over the world. And then I think globalization is going to happen faster and faster as you can communicate with somebody in real time in any language from anywhere in the world in a space that's less disconnected like Zoom how

we're doing right now. But it'll almost appear as if you're in a 3D conference room. You're pointing to a whiteboard and whether somebody's in person or on you know the next variation of Zoom whatever that looks like. So a lot of collaboration and that kind of stuff. So, um, yeah, those are a few thoughts of maybe 10 years down the road. We'll see. It'll be exciting to see how that plays out. Yeah, I can I can go next here. Uh, I think five to 10 years from now, I don't know, it's so hard to to even think about to be honest. Um, I I do think that we will we will be very the experiences online will be very immersive, right? So it'll be like

whether it's VR or or AR or you know you have like I don't know you're wearing gloves where when you touch things you can like actually feel it in the metaverse because it like starts to like put pressure on your hands or warm your hands. Like Mark Zuckerberg talks about this stuff a lot and how his vision is of the metaverse. Um and so I think experiences digitally will be a lot more similar to like really good experiences in the real world, you know, where you can actually hug someone and like shake hands with someone and like be eye to eye with someone. like I think that's going to move digitally which is very exciting and then I think where sort of web 3 comes from that um or comes into that is like the interoperability to be able to just like connect into an app or

into a world and as Mark said it can look at your wallet and go okay you're a board apach holder and you have I don't know this much money or you are in these communities and it creates experiences or shows you things based off of like what you hold in your wallet. That's something I can definitely see playing out. Um, other than that, it's it's honestly so hard to say where this all goes. Um, the one thing I would say though is for those who are just trying to like stay ahead of it and try to figure out what to do marketing wise and plan for the future, there's one thing that is just always true and it's your messaging matters more than anything else. And it's like regardless of the tools that come up, whether it was email back in the day or even going doortodoor, you

know, many many years ago or it's Facebook or it's meta or it's whatever metaverse we're in, like marketing is all about simplifying your message and trying to get it to the right people and in front of the right people. And so what tools will do that, who knows? But that's still going to be what you have to do as a marketer and as a entrepreneur or whatever. So like whatever wherevers people's attentions are, you want to be there, of course. And then you want to just make sure you have good messaging, right? You need to figure out your copy. To me, that's always the most important thing. I can uh piggy back on what Kyle said.

Um, I'll start with a tactic since I I alluded to that early on that I predict I could be wrong, but I I believe that wallets will be where we distribute those messages and how we bring our digital selves and that's going to matter to marketers. Um, and as much as it will disrupt those tactics that we use right now, there's huge opportunities in that as well. I don't know how that's going to play out. Um, I know there's lots of smart people working on inner wallet messaging. Um, and they're using it for very techy reasons, but we as marketers should watch that really closely because I'll see the evolution. We'll see the

spamming, right? But then eventually there will be ways that that those messages are super um helpful and ways I know eventually they'll layer on machine learning and all that to kind of crowd out the or to to remove the clutter. Um the other one I'm thinking about is like more of a phil philosophical uh prediction, but I think marketing and builders, marketing and tech is going to come closer and closer together. So, perfect example is one of my really good friends is in charge of building um the women of web 3's headquarters in Dententraland.

She's not a marketer, she is a builder, she's an engineer by trade and she's head of product and um engineering for a really well-known web 3 company. And I think that we have also as marketers we have to approach this with excitement but also eyes wide open because when marketing goes too far into technology we lose the human side and we will lose if we lose the human side. Like as much as we focused on data we got out data instead in getting out human insights.

So that's um just a couple of you know predictions in terms of like tactic and philosophy and I'll add one prediction just one quick one uh on top of I think it combines all those thoughts um what I would expect to see uh in the next 5 10 years is for companies brands to collaborate so much more than they do at the moment because they would want to provide those seamless experiences to individuals. Right now it's like you engage with one brand and then you're done with that and then it's another and

you as an individual kind of um create those experiences with those brands or engagements with those brands. But if it is going to be a seamless experience where I enter into my own metaverse and I have all those uh you know different brands that I'm personally invested in then I want to see them all together working together. So I think that's just a prediction. I don't know if it's going to happen. I think it is partially happening though like there's a lot of networking going on between web 3 builders. So um yeah I'd expect to see that more. I think it's also easier for that to happen now in web 3 because in because in in web three if you want to partner with another company it's very easy to just exchange tokens right and

it's almost like exchanging governance or exchanging equity in web two you have to go get a bunch of lawyers and you have to appraise it and do all this stuff whereas in web 3 it's it's just like valuation's already there you just kind of switch over it could be equal whatever you want you see Immutable X doing this a lot with like gaming um companies that they're um that they're working with so I think it actually makes it a lot easier to do that. So, I I I completely agree. Um, one other area I just want to talk in here that I'm surprised no one touched on too much, which was sort of like how's the data situation going to work in web 3 because this is like a big a big topic of of crypto and web 3 and and what does this mean for like ads, right? I know Anna

talked about SEO, but ads relies completely on data. And this is something I've thought a lot about and I again I have no idea how this is going to play out. Um, but one thing I the way that I think that this is is going to go is I don't think data goes anywhere. I think that we are going to get even like vast amount of more data as a result of web 3. Um, both from like the web two sides of data, pixels and things, but now we also have wallet data which is just going to give us so much more data about about people. But I think what happens is because of wallets and because of the way that looks like web3 is getting built out is we will have control of our data. So we get to decide who can use our data. Instead of like

Facebook saying can I use your data, we get to put limits on our data and say this is the only data I ever want to show to any app. Um or um or maybe we put a cost to our data, right? Which is like if you want to use my data meta, you have to pay me x amount, right? Um and maybe we can put limits where it's like only certain you know maybe only in certain types of industries or certain categories or we have limits of like price like only if you want to use my data you got to give me like big money because I think that data is so important for companies for governments um you know for marketers obviously that there's there's a need for it and so we're going to pay for it. Marketers are going to pay for it. Companies will pay

for it. Governments will pay for it. have to um and honestly users as much as they complain about data sometimes sharing your data just makes your life so much easier, right? So like it makes the experience better. So there's going to be some sort of balance there where we'll be like, "Okay, if I can make 10 bucks a week, I'll let you have this data so you can run your ads or whatever you're going to do. I don't know." So I I think it becomes like this universal basic data. So instead of universal basic income where governments are going to pay people, I think everyone just starts to make money from their data, which is really interesting. The other the other uh idea here in regards to ads is as metaverse builds out like Decentraland or whatever else is built, it's kind of like a whole new world. And

so the opportunities for marketing, whether that's Mark, you mentioned billboards or it's like I don't know a digital avatar that's a robot that just like appears because of something in your wallet. Like there's just a million more endless amounts of of placements for ads. Like right now ads are like a newsfeed for Facebook, you know, before you watch a video on YouTube and then like I don't know a newsfeed of I don't know LinkedIn or Twitter, right? And it's like kind of there are more obviously like Google display ads and things, but like those are the main ones. Now it can be anywhere. It can be on buildings. It can be on people. It can be or on avatars, not people. Um it could be like with AI, you could be just walking down the street and you have these glasses on that are AI and all of

a sudden you can have like a placement up in the sky, right? That's like a QR code or something. So, like I feel like we just have an endless amount of of ad placements that are going to come to our world. Now, hopefully there's not just ads everywhere. Like hopefully we find a way to do this in a in a like a pleasant experience for the users. Um, but I don't know. I think there's just going to be tons of opportunity that I don't know if you guys see the same thing, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah, the ad placement like the creativity that we can uh the create I I think the we can really go uh like break all the boundaries with creativity in terms of ad placements. I was actually going to comment on that when you first mentioned placement in the previous

question I believe. Um, but as you were explaining, I I could see that, for example, at Ninja Squad, we're we're building this animated education series, and I could even see us uh exposing our community to a couple of very relevant uh sponsors that could come in and have, I don't know, maybe tokens that um people could collect or um you know, in the background, maybe like in the in the background wall that they're seeing, maybe we could put that add placement there like it could be in so many different ways and I hadn't put much thought about that before but it is it is an area to be very creative and playful

right and I think ads are going to be um like you need to improve the user experience so it won't just be like disrupting the user experience like we have today where it's like popups and things like because people can just turn it off if they want and go you know what these ads there's so many I'm just going to turn off my data I don't see any like to build ads in the future I think it's going to be like you have to help people in whatever they're experiencing. You know, it has to be something that's very valuable and useful. Otherwise, I don't think it's going to make it into web 3 or into the medical. Totally agree with that. Oh, go ahead, Aliff.

I was just going to say what comes in very handy is that because you have a limited number of people in your community, you know them really well. So, that gives you a big advantage in terms of which placements you want to bring to their attention. I think absolutely. I think gamification is another concept that we haven't really talked about, but leveling up the experience of people in your community or the people that you're reaching out to and making it valuable, but also making it fun, interactive, engaging, gified. That's definitely going to be something to see. And there are communities that are already doing this and doing this extremely successfully. I think Clone X has done an awesome job of that with different airdrops. They they do all these different things to keep their

communities engaged and coming back and seeing what they're coming out with next. and it's you're finding ways to level up and so that can be annoying if you're grinding in a Discord to earn a whitelist spot by leveling up your Discord username or status or none of us like that. I hope that gets banished out of this world as well. But I think there are tasteful ways to do gamification where people are excited to participate and I think that is going to be really key. Any final thoughts before I shift to the next question?

Okay, great. Uh, so let's let's step back now. Uh, fantastic predictions by the way. So many great thoughts uh about where the future could go. Very exciting. Um, let's talk about how we get there, though. Uh, and also maybe a little bit about um why you guys are spending your careers and your time uh helping us build web 3, why you believe that it's important that we do this. Um, so what is what does the industry need to do in order for crypto and web 3 to reach the masses? What do you think is important? What do you think that everybody should be spending their time on, right? I guess I can start. Uh, there's

kind of two questions in there. I feel like there was like why web 3 and then there was like how do you how do you grow web 3? Uh, let's start with how do you grow uh how do you grow web 3? Um, I think the the the features of web 3 right now or the products of web 3 right now are not things that most people use. So there's like DeFi was kind of the first one, decentralized finance, and it's like most people in the world don't really care to like I mean people would love to get some percent interest on their holdings, but like most people don't even understand that or think in that way, right? Like most people in the world don't think of owning, they think of earning in my opinion. So it's like how can I earn money? It's not how can I

own things that then make me money. There's a small subset of people that do that. And most of what web 3 is right now is owning. There's like DeFi. There's obviously speculation like Bitcoin and things like that. Um, and then there's like art NFTts, music NFTs even right now, which a lot of people are saying is the next big thing. That's also owning. And I think again I don't think a lot of people think in those terms. I think it's about earning which could be like play to earn obviously was huge with Axi Infiniti. Um, and that just like blew up so fast, faster than any other industry we have in like months, right? Because it was just everyone was like, "Yeah, I want to earn. I can play a game and earn." Like that's so easy for people to wrap their head around. Dows, I think that's the

way to earn by working, which we all work. So, of course, if there's a better way to work or a better way to earn more money, then of course that's going to onboard a bunch of people. Um, I think if I don't know who's going to build this, but if social media ends up having some sort of like incentivized structure where you can earn by creating content, I guess mirror is sort of already doing that. We all post on like everyone posts. Even my mom posts on uh on Instagram, right? So like if she's like, "Oh, I can post and I can make like a little bit of money too." She'd probably do that more often and that could onboard her to web 3, but DeFi or like I don't know, owning music is probably not going to do that. So I think it's when

we start to build out these like more earning things instead of owning things is what brings the masses in. That's just my assumption. Why web was just going to say and why web 3 is because of opportunity. Gives everyone equal playing field. Everyone has an opportunity whether it's owning or earning or anything else. I think doesn't matter where you live, doesn't matter what you look like, who you are, what your age is. um you have the opportunity to be in any of these companies or to do any of the things that we're discussing and to me that's just it's absolutely incredible and a huge unlock for this world. So that's why it excites me.

Love it. Yeah, I'll start with why web 3. Thank you for reminding me that that was part of the question. I'm glad you summarized that. Uh I would say partially I saw a lot of people that are way smarter than me that dove into the space and saw it as the future and that initially piqued my interest and then seeing the the forward thinking like the improvements to technology and finance and all these different worlds. technology doesn't move backwards. And so as you begin to understand what blockchain technology and web 3 can provide, I think it's a rabbit hole that the deeper you go, the more you realize how many good things are coming out of it and the exponential possibilities.

And it's like, okay, if that's the way everything is moving, even if you don't understand it all, makes sense to dive in and be part of creating it versus sitting around and waiting for everybody else to figure it out and then find a way to hop on. So for me, I'd rather be an early mover and find a way to participate and build and own like you said, Kyle. So that's why web 3. And then now I forgot the other question. What was the other part of it? H how do you think that we uh bring the masses on to web? Ah yes. Yeah. I think um making it almost easier for people to use it than not. So, if right now you could sign in with Facebook, Google, or your

Ethereum wallet, for most people, it's way easier to just click a link and now you're logged in via Facebook or Google. And there's not real incentive or a reason for everybody to do that. Or what's the benefit, right? When everybody switched to email from writing letters, it was more efficient, it was faster, it was a better experience, and so it just made sense for everybody to shift into the internet and web two. As of right now, there's not a compelling reason for people to create a wallet. And there's no real benefit for a lot of people if they're not in one of these niche communities or trying to buy an NFT, but that's not most people. So, I think as there are more incentives that the average person would actually see from creating a wallet and diving in,

then we'll see a lot more mass adoption because it's not that hard to do it if there's a reason to. But right now for the average person they don't see a compelling reason to create a wallet and the technology is not really built out with a lot of incentive around that. So I think that is a big piece and I think safety too. Right now there's a lot of scammers and hackers and there are people that are really smart at like smart developers that are doing their best to avoid hackers that still get hacked. And some of those things also are a little bit of a red flag for the average person that's already a little hesitant to change wanting to dive into the space.

I um I'll go to that just to um segue agree um that while marketers can do a lot, sometimes we're just bringing messages to the builders and and that's why it's important for us to monitor community, cultivate community um because we can't influence product strategy. It it is too hard. It's a journey right now. I'm still on the journey. I started in December 2021 and I'm still so frustrated because I can't get a bank to let me connect my debit card to my MetaMask wallet so I can buy some ETH. Like I'm in the space and I'm freaking upset. Like I I I'm like I feel like I'm in wallet jail. Um there's too many scammers. I posted this problem on Twitter over the weekend and was just barrageed with bots. Like that's not safe. That's not baby proof. We have to

have a baby proof before we bring masses on or every if you bring someone on to a new product or a new service or new world and it's just fraught with scamming, they'll never come back because they'll lose and they'll hate it. Um, it's too technical right now and the UX and UI is too bad. So, there's lots of ways that like we can bring community. I do this I did this just this week like I brought community feedback to our product team, our engineering team and said, "Hey, like this is what I'm hearing." So you guys might want to consider this when you're building out your road map. Um, and then in terms of why web 3, like it's the tenants that brought me. So we own our own data. We give credit to where credit is due. As marketers, how many times

have you gotten your content swiped and like another brand takes it? And I'm like, what? This is a legitimate brand taking my blog post. And even on Twitter, right? Like I mean, I love the fact that we're giving credit where credit's due. I love that we're lifting up art and artists. Um I don't know where that's going to go. I hope that we can continue to create just this robust economy around art. I I just that I'm attracted to that personally. Um I love the tenant um and Alif um kind of touched on this that no one wins by other people losing. That's very appealing to me and I and that's the internet I want to be a part of. Um and then leveling the playfield playing field. Kyle, you mentioned that. Um, I

I'm connected to people that I would have never thought I'd ever even have the opportunity to have a conversation with. And it's because web 3 at its stage right now is a leveling. It's it's leveled to everyone. We're at the bottom together in a trench. And that's fun. Okay. For me, all of the above, plus a couple of things. I love it because I find it playful and casual and that is different and refreshing to me.

Um, considering that I was, you know, working with larger technology companies and an education institution which have a very different approach and communication and culture. Uh, so I I love that about uh, web 3. The other thing is obviously the equal opportunities to anywhere around the world which matters a lot to me. Although I live in North America, things are more available to me than if I was living in my home country which is Turkey. But I love that this space is bringing equal opportunity to everyone if they have access to internet. Um and regardless of age, geography, language, anything. Um so I you know to to the

best of my capacity I'd love to build this uh further and further and to enable it you know to to make it more accessible to to people uh that have no you know information about it yet. And in terms of how to reach the masses, the second part of the question, uh I want to g give an example to this because my answer is that we need to be where people are if they don't yet understand Discord, if they're not using Twitter, if they're not using mirror XYZ, but we want to reach new people. We need to be where they are at. And um an example to this is so I don't know if you've heard about it but there is a

project that has not minted yet but it is going to mint soon. It's called uh my BFF and their sole mission was to onboard more women into web 3. Um I think I I got that correct but it is something along those lines. And what they did was instead of inviting everyone to Discord first, which is not um very popular among the average person, um they instead did the email tactic where you would be able to sign up through an Instagram post, I I believe, and they invited you to a YouTube live session where a lot of

celebrities and a lot of known people were on that u on that YouTube live session and it was just very appealing to the masses when it was organized in that way and they made it the information how the how the information was delivered was very beginner level which is also something very important because once we step into the space I think we can easily forget that we were also beginners just only two months ago and we now kind of very fastly adapt to the language and and the tools and we forget how it you know how many questions we had just uh a very short time um ago. So I think they they nailed

it in that sense the platform they used uh the the way they delivered the message the way that they used influencers that are not web 3 natives but are web 3 enthusiasts was also a good way uh to approach that. and they have succeeded so well and I cannot wait for their minting as well like the the actual collection minting. They did an airdrop which was free to anyone who joined that YouTube live session which I believe was around 10,000 people uh maybe a little less. Uh the airdrop that they sent out for free to all those people I think the floor price was 0.9 when I last looked. Um and that is

insane. And those people uh that opened up their wallets for the first time um with that information session, they now have that asset. And I don't know, that was just a very successful uh I guess pre-launch. It wasn't a launch. So um a very good example to reach the masses, I think. Yeah, that's that's a great great example. Appreciate the uh uh using that specific example. Such a great way to picture it. Thanks, Cle. Uh, okay. We're we're almost we're almost at time here.

Uh, but I hope everybody has a few more minutes because uh I've got one more question uh before we wrap up. Uh I wish we could talk for hours because you guys have such amazing thoughts and ideas and there's just so much great great content coming out of this. Um my one question before we wrap up is uh and this came from uh Twitter. We had uh we asked on Twitter if anybody had any questions and so thanks so much to the community for participating. Um the question is if you could provide a checklist for newbies in web 3 uh what would you what would you add? What would you put on that list? And I I'll we'll go around we'll give each one of you a chance to uh to answer.

Can I go first because I wish I would have known this three months ago. Please. Like I need a list of banks that are crypto friendly. I've Googled it. I've searched for it. Like the answer is no bank is crypto friendly. But but that's not a good enough answer, right? We need a better checklist. And that if you don't find a bank that's crypto friendly, it's going to be a roadblock for you on everything you go to do. Unless you guys have a secret that I haven't found, which is very possible because I I I I am still a noob. I I don't know how like I two years from now I should probably still call myself a noob because this this space like is changing by the day. Um but yeah, we we are in the DeFi like love DeFi, but unfortunately we all

still live in the traditional finance world and we we all still have to deal with our own um traditional banks. And so yeah, I think that that should be on the checklist is if you if your current bank doesn't like crypto, probably need a new one, an an additional one. I'd say probably a a list of resources in terms of banks, in terms of the tools that you need to use, in terms of people to follow, um maybe events to follow, podcasts and channels and just resources to to look out for. I think a very comprehensive list of that sort would be fantastic to have. There are a couple

that I've added to a couple of my Twitter lists that I created in the past, just other people's accounts and resources and those kinds of things. But I think when I was starting out, having that handy was very helpful to to look out for. I would just like look at the feed that was only from those accounts that I needed to follow and that I I knew were credible accounts to to look out for. Um, having that type of thing was very helpful in in the learning journey, I think. I don't know if you guys have heard of Web 3 Academy, but that'd be a good place to start. Shout out to Kyle and Jay. Um, but yeah, I think one one mindset piece of advice is you're going

to feel like you're really far behind and you're going to feel like you're missing out and you're going to feel like there's so much. Why am I not understanding it all? And there's just too much to understand for any one person. And so I think picking a niche of, okay, I'm going to try to understand this one thing and attacking it in bite-sized chunks can be helpful, whether it's I'm going to understand crypto or NFTTS or blockchain technology. But if you try to just understand anything and everything in the whole space, you don't really know where to start. Then just be okay with the fact that it's going to be a little chaotic. And even if you started a year and a half ago, two years ago, you still feel like you're behind a little bit just because everything is moving so

fast. And um and then I would encourage a newbie as well to find one or two people that you relate with, that you enjoy how they put out content. And like there's a couple of resources that I personally learned a lot from as I was beginning that were really helpful. And you know, you can there's a million people that maybe not a million, you know, there's only a million people that have bought NFTs, but there's a lot of different people that you can listen to, but find one or two that you trust that you value the way that they uh put out information that you can relate with and connect with and kind of subscribe to them to understand them. I think that's a good way to um just educate yourself in a step-by-step way. And then

connecting with other people in the space, ask a lot of questions. You maybe think it's a stupid question. It's not. and other people probably have it too because everybody's trying to figure it out. So, those are a few things that I would encourage somebody getting started to do. Yeah, these are all great. I think it's it's hard to give a checklist because things change so fast in web 3, right? Like it's like, hey, download these wallets or use these apps today and then two months from now you're like, well, now it's this wallet or this app that's the big thing. So, um I think there's a few things. There's like how can you figure out what to do now? Uh, and then there's like um a lot of what web 3 is is like what's the future going to look like? Like a lot of the things we want

in web 3 don't actually exist yet. So I think you got to come into the space going I hear all this promise of web 3 but understand like it's not actually there yet. It is as you said we don't even know what banks work yet. So like it is very clunky and difficult. So I would say there's a few things of how do you learn that kind of stuff. Like first thing I would say and this the first thing I did and honestly probably all of us here is buy some crypto buy something that's in web 3 because once you put your money into it all of a sudden it's a priority in your brain and now you're going to actually try to learn it. So go buy some ETH right and and all of a sudden now that you see that going up or

down it's going to force you to go Google what the heck is ETH or like what am I doing? You know what I mean? It's gonna it's going to force you to actually want to figure this stuff out. Um, and I I would bet every person in here that was the first thing they did is they bought some of it because a friend told them they bought it, they're like, "Wait a minute, what did I just buy?" Like this magic internet money. And then they started exploring and then you go deep down this rabbit hole. So I would start there. The other like quick wins I would say is web 3 mainly exists on Twitter, Discord, and then like I don't know the most popular wallet is MetaMask at the moment. So like download a MetaMask wallet and fill it with some ETH that you're going to buy. go on

Twitter and follow a bunch of people in web 3. Um, you can follow us five here to start and then see who we're retweeting because we retweet all the web three stuff. So, there's your sort of entrance into Twitter because Twitter is this, especially the crypto Twitter is this crazy weird corner of Twitter where like there are just some very interesting individuals on there and you're going to learn a lot. I'm not going to lie, I've learned so much on Twitter. So, I would explore Twitter. It's going to really make you think differently about this space. And then like I don't know, I would get on Discord. I know it's hard for a lot of people to use and kind of clunky, but getting into Discord, especially joining like a DAO of some sort. Um, it just it gets you right in the weeds and like you

start seeing what's going on, what people are thinking about, what people are talking about. uh you usually have to like depending on the Dow you might have to connect your wallet and prove that you have these tokens and like it starts to make you just understand where it's going in a clunky very not the easiest user friendly way but at least you're starting to get in the weeds and and explore. Um so those are the kind of the three things that I would start with. I guess the other thing is a lot of people in web 3 write um or have podcasts but like join a bunch of newsletters. A lot of people have really good newsletters that are free. Uh, yes, they have paid versions which are great too if you want like that extra alpha or whatever, but I don't know. I do a lot of learning just from reading

newsletters um and listening to podcast. So, just just immerse yourself really. Fantastic. Thanks. Thanks so much to uh each and every one of you. Wow, this has been just an incredible uh conversation. So much great insight, so much valuable content. Uh, one thing that I think is really important and you guys have all mentioned this around the philosophy of Rev 3 is collaboration and supporting each other. Uh, so as a final thank you to each of you, I just want to go around and give you guys a chance to tell our listeners where they can find you online. And if there's any projects that you're currently working on that you're really excited about, uh, by all means, uh, self-promotion is strongly

encouraged here in Web3 Academy because we're all doing such great work. Uh, so Ann, I'll start with you. Oh, thank you. Um, so you can follow me on Twitter, Anna CCAT. U, I'm not going to do any promotions at this time. Um, we're still pretty stealthy. Um, but we I'll just share our rallying cry and that is that, you know, we own our data. Um, bring your digital self. We don't we don't like any centralized server owning our data. And, um, we believe that for every single human being, not just developers. Um, and then I guess the only plug I would make is that um, when web two started, when web.2 do web 2.0 started, when web one started,

you know, women were really late to the party and um, and so were minorities and I believe in in diversity because it benefits all of us. um we will grow faster, do better, um change the world if we build diversity into its core. So I would say that um anything that we can do, the five of us to um really in every moment that we take in our hiring decisions, any any ch in people we follow and projects we support um to really dig in um and and to make sure that they also believe in those, you know, core tenants.

This was wonderful. So, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me. I really really enjoyed the session and I look forward to uh you know sometime meeting all of you in person. I love in real life meetups. So hopefully that happens one day. Um uh you can find me everywhere on every platform with my first name, last name, ilif. Uh some use on some platforms the username is longer but I think if you search for it you're going to be able to find it anyway. Uh I have a YouTube channel so if you want to stop by for a lot of educational content at the intersection of marketing web 3 and future work because that is something I'm really passionate about. uh you're

going to find a lot of stuff uh there and I'm always open to answering questions so reach out um on Twitter or YouTube comments and yeah thanks so much. Thank you Mark. First of all like Aliff said thank you so much for hosting us putting this together. It was awesome connecting with you guys further and hearing all the interesting answers and perspectives. So, I learned some things today and that was a very interesting conversation that I really enjoyed. So, thank you guys.

Um, you can find me on Twitter, Mark A. Robinson or on Instagram or my podcast, Marketing in the Metaverse. That's the username on Instagram or my my podcast Anywhere podcasts are. And then the other thing that I will promote is I'm hosting NFT Seattle. And so if you are looking for an excuse to come to the beautiful Pacific Northwest in the summer, July 29th is the main date. There's going to be some other events on the 28th, which is a Thursday. Uh July 29th is also my birthday, so you can come hang out. It's going to be a big birthday party and we're going to talk all about NFTTS and celebrate artists. And um Seattle in the summer is pretty much the most beautiful place. So, it's a good excuse to come

experience the Pacific Northwest and meet a bunch of people in real life. I like that. Me too. NFT Seattle.io is or NFT Seattle.io on Instagram. You can follow there and subscribe for updates. There's a lot of updates that have not come out yet because it's just I'm finalizing a lot of things right now. So, um, apply to speak or apply for updates. Yeah. See you there. And we'll make sure to have everyone uh everyone here their their links and stuff will be in the show notes so you can find them there. Uh Jay, you just asked me to to to show myself. I mean this is I co-host this podcast. So if you want to listen to me, just click

subscribe. If you're listening on Spotify or YouTube or whatever the opportunity you're just Yeah. Yeah. Just just click subscribe. You're already in the right place. So just click subscribe and or you can find me on Twitter at Kyad. Amazing. Well, thank you all so much. What a valuable session this has been. So much great stuff coming out of it. Uh wish you all the best and uh hope to meet you in person or in the metaverse sooner rather than later. Thanks J. Thank you for listening to Web 3 Academy. We hope this helps you along your web 3 journey. If it does, please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one. By the way, if you have yet to join the Discord

community, you are missing out. This is where all the magic happens. This is where we learn, where we ask questions, where we network. Uh you want to be in there. The link to join is in the description below. And finally, a quick disclaimer. Nothing in this podcast was financial advice. Crypto and web 3 can be risky. You can literally lose it all. In fact, if you invest on account of what we say, you probably will lose it all. So, don't do that. In all honesty, the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway. So, you should not take any of this as financial advice. Thank you, friends, and see you in the next one.