Web 3 protocols are well-funded and grow fast — but their marketing budgets are negligible
The last year 2021, was an active year in web 3 and crypto companies. The bull market generated record-breaking number of investments pouring into the space. Global VC investments totaled $10.5 billion just in one quarter, Q4 2021. That was more than entire 2020 combined.
However, marketing budgets of these well-capitalized web 3 protocols are usually negligible. Traditional web 2 startups are famous for using nearly 40% of VC funding on paid advertising, primarily on Facebook or Google.
How’s there such a discrepancy between web 2 and web 3 marketing?
First, let’s have a look at channel development over the last 20 years:
Credits to James Currier for the graph — https://www.nfx.com/post/viral-effects-vs-network-effects
The lifecycle of different user acquisition channels has shortened. Competition between platforms has become saturated.
Strategies to battle attention have dramatically changed with web 3 products
Marketing in web 3 requires a new set of methods and mental models. Successful marketing in web 3 creates an ‘organic pull’ of curiosity and utilizes word-of-mouth. Community building has much deeper dimensions than before. You might need an invite to be among the first users of a protocol. Joining as an early user might be financially beneficial, so invites are sought after. Protocols build on top of each other in a permissionless way, and also collaborate and spread the word of each other.
Web 3 resembles, in some ways, what the Internet was in the early 90s — a space for open innovation. In the 2000s, the growth of major web 2 platforms turned open innovation into separated walled gardens. Innovation happened only inside the walled gardens, and it was limited and later risky to innovate on top of them. Today we’re seeing strong signs that this cycle is starting to turn around.
My background
I’ve worked as CMO in early-stage web 3 protocol ramping up marketing efforts. I also have online marketing experience from my previous e-com business. I’m a regular user of many web 3 protocols.
I’ve dug up nearly all online resources about web 3 marketing, read books, and studied the methods of successful protocols to educate myself. Besides this, I’ve had numerous conversations with builders, investors and other marketers in the space.
After all this, I have learned a ton and felt compelled to write down and share my learnings.
In this lengthy blog post, I’ve compiled 8 key marketing principles to grow your protocol. With each principle, I provide an explanation, a case study and external resources you can tap in to learn more.
Are you a first-time web 3 protocol Founder/CMO?
You’ve come to the right place — this piece is written for you. I hope you find value.
If you have already worked in the space for a couple of years, you are most likely familiar with the majority of the principles. I hope there are some new insights you can learn from.
Starting a new protocol? Ask these questions:
Before we hop into the marketing principles, let’s touch briefly on the product-level decisions you have to make. As Matias Honorato described in his blog post, winners in the web 3 space will be the ones that can clearly define:
Where in the spectrum of centralization vs. decentralization will your product sit?
Is this a network-effect-driven business or not? (If yes, The Cold Start Problem is a must-read)
What does success look like? (User growth, TLV, developer activity, transaction volume, wallets connected, etc.)
Having a good understanding and answers to these questions helps you to create more effective marketing.
Exit-to-Community: New way to distribute value
Traditional companies have two options for liquidity events: corporate acquisition or IPO. It usually takes years or even over a decade to reach this point. When it happens, founders, investors, and early employees get financially rewarded. The actual users of the product usually hardly notice anything, let alone receive any financial benefit.
Exit-to-Community is coined by Media Enterprise Design Lab and Zebras Unite, have a look at their handbook.
In web 3, things are fundamentally different. Blockchain enables a new paradigm in value distribution.
In web 3, if your protocol/product becomes successful, not only the founders and investors get rewarded, but also the users, based on their activity and contribution. This is called a retroactive airdrop. Retroactive airdrop is relevant at a later stage after you’ve built a successful protocol that provides value to a large number of users. I cover this later in Principle #6.
At first, it’s important to build a useful product and community around it. That leads us to the first Principle #1: Community is everything in Web 3.
Table of Content
Introduction
Are you a first-time web 3 protocol Founder or CMO?
Starting a new protocol? Ask these questions
Exit-to-Community: New way to distribute value
Principle #1: Community is everything in Web 3
Principle #2: Curate your first Atomic Network & Create artificial scarcity
Principle #3: Welcome experience & Invite-only strategy
Principle #4: Utilize Bounty platforms to reward users when they complete specific actions
Principle #5: Collaborate & Integrate with value-aligned protocols
Principle #6: Use retroactive airdrop to distribute value to your community
Principle #7: How to acquire users outside of crypto twitter and web 3 natives?
Principle #8: Certain web 2 marketing methods are still useful, too
References
Principle #1: Community is everything in Web 3
Traditional web 2 companies develop a product. The product is purchased by consumers. If the company becomes successful, investors in the company will benefit.
In web 3 these categories of company, user and investor collapse. They collapse into a single economically aligned entity called a community.
Before web 3, the “community” word got slapped on top of many businesses relatively lightly. You got some conversation going on, but different stakeholders didn’t have a similar alignment. Also, access to protocol/product data was not that transparent for a typical user.
In web 3, a successful community looks really different. You can have the most passionate, engaged people you’ve ever seen. In web 3, communities feel different — users can participate and contribute to the success of the network in a way that wasn’t possible before.
[Thanks Amanda Cassatt for the mental model of collapsing interests of stakeholders.]
What does this mean for community building?
It means a whole lot.
One needs to wrap one’s head around how to communicate differently, be transparent, and create an organic ‘pull’ effect for your community. Early users expect that their early contribution will be rewarded with retroactive airdrop later. This means you can encourage your early users to contribute (and some of them are very much willing to do so).
Twitter is for discovery, Discord is the way to interact and go deep
For the top of the funnel and discovery, Twitter is the place to be. People learn about the latest protocols, news and development there. For a protocol founder, Twitter is a place to consistently tweet, create tweet threads explainers and interact with industry professionals.
As a protocol user, to go deep into a specific protocol and interact with community members, Discord is the place. As a protocol founder, that’s a good place to organize all detailed information, onboarding processes and announcements in different channels.
One unique interaction format in web 3 is AMAs (Ask-me-Anything)
They can be less-official audio-only hangouts organized on Discord or Twitter spaces. Or more official video-AMAs on YouTube.
You can click here to find an example of this type of video AMA. I was ramping up t2.world’s marketing in the early phase and co-hosting t2.world’s first video AMA.
Tool recommendations to start building community:
Discord & Twitter metrics: Orbit.love (Tip: Measure the Active Users, not only user amount)
Private Discord channels & token-gating: Collab Land and Guild.xyz
Create Twitter threads: Typefully — Scheduled tweets: Buffer
Video livestream for AMAs: Streamyard (this is simply a superb tool)
Protocol documentation: Gitbook (most people are used to Gitbook format)
Principle #2: Curate your first Atomic Network & Create artificial scarcity
If you are creating a product that depends on network effects, this is an important principle.
Let’s first explore the Atomic Network idea:
Invite-only strategies and Allow Lists are often described as leveraging FOMO, fear of missing out. While that is true, it is not the key driver. If your product depends on network effects, it’s not enough for the product be great.
It’s equally important to curate the first batch of users — the ‘Atomic Network’, as coined by Andrew Chen. Who’s on the network, why they are there and how they interact with each other. This first set of users will set the tone, culture, magnetism and ultimate trajectory of the community.
Suppose the product contains two-sided markets (e.g. buyers/sellers or readers/authors). In that case, the Atomic Network should be curated to be in a healthy balance, with the emphasis on manually recruiting the ‘hard side’ of the network first.
Artificial scarcity is important, too:
There is a certain magic in exclusive experiences. People holding Allow List spot to your protocol will engage more, post feedback, critique and tell about it to their friends. People without a spot on the Allow List will ask for it, and prompt conversation, and sometimes controversy, driven by scarcity and exclusivity dynamics. This again spurs up more engagement and attention. It just works.
We can learn these dynamics from web 2 success stories. Let’s hop back on memory lane:
Gmail first launched as an invite-only product in 2004, with a gigabyte of storage, when others were offering megabytes of storage. The original reason wasn’t marketing — their infrastructure consisting of old Pentium IIIs just couldn’t handle that many users. Later they learned that the invite-only feature turned out to be a key driver behind Gmail’s growth.
Facebook initially required a harvard.edu email address to sign up (fostering Atomic Network where everyone trusted each other). Later they expanded to other college campuses, again requiring specific university.edu email addresses to be eligible.
Tinder launched at the University of Southern California campus. Founders helped a couple of hyper-connected students to throw their birthday party. 500 students showed up, and a bouncer made sure everybody had Tinder installed before they could get in. If you didn’t have a chance to talk to someone during the party, you had a second chance the next day on Tinder. 95% of people that night become active users. Tinder replicated this model in other college campuses for their growth strategy, again fostering Atomic Network where people would trust each other.
[At this point, I’d like to pass credits where they are due: Andrew Chen, who’s the author of The Cold Start Problem. Simply a fantastic book. Part of the paragraphs above are directly from the book.]
Next, let’s examine a more recent case study from web 3 space.
Lens Protocol - NFT Profile minting experience
Lens Protocol is a composable and decentralized social graph that makes building a social media platform easy.
I wanted to pick up their launch process as a short case study, because it was successful (over 70,000 Lens profiles minted) and also a great example of utilizing artificial scarcity. On top of that, some other protocols have utilized a similar playbook later.
Chronological order of activities that happened during LENS launch in 2022 spring:
1) Lens received lots of mentions in web 3 media and twitter: AAVE team was building something new in the social space (“Twitter killer”). AAVE CEO Stani even got banned on Twitter for his marketing stunts.
2) Lens “Open Letter” was launched on 8th Feb 2022. Essentially, before any product was launched, you could read about their mission and values. And then connect your blockchain wallet, twitter account, “sign it”, and retweet your signature.
3) At launch on 18th May 2022, if you had signed the Open Letter and tweeted your signature before 5th of May, you were qualified to claim your Lens handle.
4) Besides that, builders were given priority access: “Lens community buildoooors will also be able to claim a handle! Addresses belonging to all project members that have built on Lens as part of the recent LFGrow, DAOHacks, and ETHAmsterdam hackathons will be eligible at launch, as well as Top 250 Gitcoin grantees from rounds 9 through 12. Thank you for building on Lens!”
5) LENS had over 30 projects live during the launch, so you had a lot of things to go and play around
My analysis of Lens launch:
First of all, many months before the launch, in all quietness, the Lens team had already attracted a significant amount of developers in different hackathons to build the first set of applications on Lens. That is, they had done serious heavy lifting solving the ‘hard side’ of Atomic Network building, having over 30 dapps published the users could interact with.
The Open Letter signing was designed to everyone else, normal web 3 curious users. It was the easier side of Atomic Network. A bit of artificial scarcity was applied, and only the web 3 natives who follow the space closely were early enough to sign the Open Letter, to be eligible to mint Lens handle. Not letting everyone in created a mythical exclusive feeling, and sparked some conversations. Heck, even I wrote tweet thread about Lens. I guess I felt a tiny bit privileged having been there early enough to sign the Open Letter and minting Lens handle among the first ones.
The Open Letter was a smart way to engage people to buy in their mission, warm up for the next stage, and encourage them to spread the word over Twitter to their friends. I was there signing the Open Letter as well. The values resonated and it was a no-brainer.
I’ve seen the Lens launch playbook being replicated, e.g. check out Tally Ho’s “Community Pledge” page
Allow List: Another method to curate Atomic Network
Another way of building the Atomic Network, and filtering suitable users, is to ask people to apply to use your product. This can be a simple Google Form, or Typeform, which is a bit more user-friendly. You can ask their name/handle, email, twitter, and certain questions related to your product or the problem you are solving.
You can open applications already months before the actual product is launched. The benefit is that you can hand-pick the most suitable users for your first batch, the Atomic Network. You don’t need to treat people on a first-come-first-serve basis (and it’s a good idea to be open about this). Over time, you can onboard new larger batches of users at the pace you can handle while giving a great user experience. And ultimately onboard everyone. Btw, when you are pre-product, increasing the number of sign-ups is a good metric to focus on, and also something you can communicate to your investors.
We used this method at t2.world — have a look at t2’s Allow List application here for inspiration:
We used Typeform to create t2.world’s Allow List page.
Principle #3: Welcome experience & Invite-only strategy
This stage comes when you have successfully built your first Atomic Network, the first batch of users. You have already found a way to provide value & users are excited and happy. Now it’s time to ask them to invite their friends.
The Welcome Experience is important:
You can think of this through an analogy. Imagine arriving at a large dinner party. A close friend welcomes you at the door, and while you step in and leave your jacket on the rack, you see familiar faces: close friends, acquaintances, and a number of new people who’ve been carefully curated. The dinner turns out to feel exciting and intimate. If this is an ideal experience for a dinner guest, you can think of a similar welcome experience for a user of a new product. Invite-only products can curate this because every new user is at least connected to one person, their inviter.
Utilizing highly connected people is useful. It’s a good idea to invite the most connected people early on because they tend to bring other highly connected people with them. The result is a dinner of social butterflies, which greatly helps in launching a new product.
[Again, thanks Andrew Chen for these analogies]
The invite-only strategy also gives you time to improve the product
Just like Gmail, in the beginning, couldn’t support more than a certain amount of users, you might face a similar challenge. You’ve built a sizeable community, but you are unsure how they will like your product. It is a safe bet to first invite only a small batch of users, and treat them like kings. You can learn from them, engage with them on a personal level, and utilize the feedback to improve the fundamental features of your product almost on the go. You don’t want to give a bad experience to a large number of users.
When you are ready to take the next batch of users, you can incentivise the first batch to invite their friends. This can be capped, too, for artificial scarcity. For example, you can give maximum 5 Activation Codes to each user. Let’s explore how STEPN utilized exactly this:
Case example: STEPN (Move-to-Earn game)
STEPN is a Move-to-Earn running tracker/game. It’s perhaps one of the best examples of utilizing Activation Codes from the previous bull market.
You had to buy a pair of NFT Sneakers, and you could start earning money simply by walking outside (GPS measured your movement). At the market peak, you could earn $100-200 USD for 15 min walk (although you had to invest thousands of USD to buy the NFT sneakers).
(The first 10,000 sneakers NFTs were distributed for free to the early community in Dec 2021, through a simple quiz question in their Discord)
STEPN was a massive short-time success story, picking up over 3 Bn USD market cap (and over 700,000 MAU) in just a few months and going down equally quickly. Its token economics leaned heavily on new users, and it was partly labelled as a ‘Ponzi’ project. Today in 10/2022 its market cap sits around 0.3 Bn USD with 70,000 MAU.
Despite the controversy, STEPN witnessed massive growth, and it’s worth studying how they achieved that.
One key aspect of their marketing was Activation Codes. You had to have an Activation Code to be able to register. I remember there were a couple of weeks when STEPN truly grabbed the narrative. Everybody in web 3 circles was talking about them and hunting for Activation Code.
STEPN had designed several ways to acquire the Activate Code. Here’s the full list:
1. Get an Activation Code From a Friend (max 5)
2. Get an Activation Code From STEPN Discord (released every 1h)
Every 15 min, STEPN shares 10 activation codes in the #activation-code channel.
3. Get an Activation Code From STEPN Telegram
1000 codes were shared every day at 13:00
4. Get a STEPN Activation Code From Social Media & Discussion Groups.
5. Get up to 100 STEPN Activation Codes. (For Influencers)
6. Complete The STEPN Quiz For an Activation Code
Let’s analyze the methods above:
By distributing the codes inside their Discord and Telegram, people had to join these channels. That was a clever small trick to increase the following of their communities.
The different methods to get the Activation Code provided a great talking point for crypto influencers and bloggers. If you search “how to get STEPN activation code” on Google, you can find countless guides. Many of them were written organically, some were paid by collaborators.
Influencers could apply for exclusive STEPn Activation Codes they could give to their audience. This was a sweet value for the influencer to provide for his/her audience.
That’s for the praising part. Then the other side of the coin: STEPN’s Activation Code mechanism code was pure FOMO building and artificial scarcity. You didn’t need to contribute any actual value to the STEPN community to get a code (besides your movement data). Their Activation Code mechanism worked well for them, probably because STEPN was such a simple game/tracker which anyone could use — walking isn’t a stretch to most of us.
Principle #4: Utilize Bounty platforms to reward users when they complete specific actions
One of the most popular methods to scale user acquisition is to run an incentivized bounty campaign. These come in many shapes and forms. The most basic one is to ask the user to do specific actions in your protocol (e.g. “trade on our DEX!” or “Stake our native token!”) + retweet the bounty promotion tweet. These activities are asked to be done in exchange for some reward, for example, a community NFT.
Early users are generally willing to do this, as they expect it can lead to more rewards later (beyond the NFT). When designing these campaigns, it’s good to be aware of these user expectations and match the reward later on based on the actual efforts contributed by the early users. These rewards can take place during token launch or allocated from the protocol’s community treasury.
Some platforms also provide an option to use a credential/identity system (using government IDs), namely Galxe. Also, you have the option to require email confirmation or connecting a Twitter account. Utilizing one of these methods enables you to attract real humans and prevent bot farms from raiding your campaigns.
Case studies: Here are two links with plenty of examples of how campaigns can be structured: Campaign examples 1 and Campaign examples 2. These pages are a great way to source ideas. Generally speaking, you want to encourage users to do the main required action in your protocol/product, whatever that is: doing a trade, posting content, staking, etc - to activate a new user.
Here’s some Task Description examples (copy+paste from links above):
Perpetual Finance: Trade at least 100 USDC on Perp v2 (7501 NFTs minted)
Yearn Finance: Subscribe to the Yearn weekly newsletter (7,746 NFTs minted)
Serum: Buy at least $25 of SRM using USDC during the event (4427 NFTs minted)
Tools:
There are many different platforms to create an incentivized campaign. Some of the most popular platforms currently are Galxe, Layer3xyz and Crew3xyz.
Word of caution: While incentivized campaign executed the right way at the right time can bring significant growth, there is also a risk it brings spammy vibes to your brand. Especially the first set of community members is better to find through your personal and professional networks — people who know and trust you. Incentivized campaigns work at a bit later stage. Use them with caution.
Principle #5: Collaborate & Integrate with value-aligned protocols
This pic was just too cute not to be used here, and has nothing to do with web 3 protocols :-)
On the tech level, one fundamental innovation in web 3 protocols is composability (utilizing existing innovations of other protocols as ‘API calls’ in your own protocol). Just like composability works at the tech level, a collaboration between protocols and DAOs works at the community and marketing level.
You can reach out to other protocols and DAOs who have similar values as you. Perhaps some of them can see you as a potential competitor, but for the most part, there is potential for collaboration and cross-promotion.
These collaboration reach outs can be framed e.g. in the following way: “Hey Community Manager X, your community Y is value-aligned with what we’re working on at Z. We’re about to launch our product soon, and would like to provide free value to your community members. We could allocate 1000 free Allow List spots (or NFT mints) on a first-served basis. Perhaps we could even ideate a campaign together! Or just keep it simple. Let me know your thoughts.”
Technically speaking, you could just scrape the blockchain addresses from any protocol permissionlessly, create an Allow List around it and announce it at their Discord. That said, coordinating this with the Community Manager or the Founder, in most cases, is still wise and polite. If they like it, you might get some extra marketing firepower.
Usually, token communities are delighted to receive free value if you’ve built something useful. It’s a win for their community, it’s a win for your project’s growth.
Integrations on a product level
“In web 2, the bigger network wins. In web 3, people who build the biggest network together win.”
Lego Building
It’s good to research if there are useful building blocks already available in the niche you’re building.
It doesn’t make sense to build everything from scratch. If you utilize existing web 3 protocols, you not only save developer hours but most likely will also get marketing support from them and can tap into their community.
E.g. Lens Protocol definitely wants to promote all apps utilizing their social graph and identity layer. The benefit for your protocol is not only the identity component but also the user base of Lends handle holders.
Another example: ENS domain names. An increasing amount of protocols integrate with ENS. Many people create their online identity around their ENS domain. Some protocols have been clever in using the ENS domain name directly as the username/display name in their protocol. You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to do just that.
Principle #6: Use retroactive airdrop to distribute value to your community
Needless to say, getting here is not an easy feat. Retroactive airdrop usually only makes sense when you’ve already created a protocol that provides value to a large number of users. Otherwise, it can easily fall flat. Airdrop is usually conducted together with the token launch.
In web 3 you don’t need to sell the entire company/protocol to create a liquidity event. Your own token enables the distribution of the value. Part of the tokens is allocated to founders, team and early investors. A significant part is also allocated also to the users of the protocol. This can be anything between 5-25% of the entire market cap, or even more.
Here are airdrop examples of the largest protocols:
Uniswap (UNI token) - Decentralized exchange
Eligibility criteria for the airdrop: interacted with Uniswap protocol
Airdrop: 15% of the entire treasury to ~12,000 addresses
Doing a trade on Uniswap would earn around 3 k USD right after the announcement
Ethereum Name Service (ENS token) - Domain names for blockchain addresses
Eligibility criteria for the airdrop: registered a domain, e.g. yourname.eth
Airdrop: 25% of the entire treasury to 137,689 addresses
1 domain registered would land you 7 - 12 k USD worth of tokens after announcement
dYdX (DYX token) - Margin trading protocol
Eligibility criteria for the airdrop: traded using dYdX - the more trades, the more tokens
Airdrop 7.5% of the entire treasury, ~65,000 addresses
Depending on the number of trades using dYdX, the airdrop amount totalled from a couple of thousand USD to 6-figures.
Yes, the rewards were significant considering the effort from the user. After these major airdrops, many protocols started to have stricter eligibility criteria, e.g. requiring several interactions with the protocol, not just one. This weeds out the airdrop farmers and focuses on the actual core users.
Defiant has written a comprehensive summary of airdrops conducted by major protocols. This article by Hashed also goes deep.
Airdrops are a great way to decentralize the protocol, and the distribution should emphasize core users (not just lurkers or airdrop farmers). Nihilistically speaking, airdrops can also be seen as an expensive customer acquisition tool. Nevertheless, it’s a good idea to look long-term and consider distributing airdrops in several events over a couple of years instead of all at once. Ethereum’s Layer 2 scaling solution Optimism had successfully implemented this strategy. The way how airdrops are conducted seems to be in constant evolution, and the best practices are forming along the way.
Detailed guidance on how to design a retroactive airdrop is a deep topic of its own and outside of the scope of this blog post. If you’ve made it here, congrats. You most likely have experienced advisors to work out the details with you.
Principle #7: How to acquire users outside of crypto twitter and web 3 natives?
This principle is a joker card — it’s more of a product design idea.
The amount of web 3 protocol users is still minuscule on a global scale. There are only 30 million monthly active users of Metamask. We’re still really early. Many protocols compete for the same web 3 native users hanging on crypto twitter.
However, if you want to break out to the broader general audience, how to do that? That’s the billion-dollar question.
For an average internet user, interacting with web 3 protocols is still cumbersome. You need to download Metamask, you need to store your private key safely, you need a crypto exchange account to get some tokens, you might lose your tokens because of user error & there is no customer support… It takes quite a bit of hobbyism to be even able to interact with a web 3 dapp.
This is a challenge widely discussed in the industry. Many teams are working on more user-friendly blockchain wallets and onboarding methods. That said, I don’t think there will be any killer app available anytime soon. It’s also an educational thing, it will just take a while for the majority to wrap their head around digital tokens.
So, one option might be just to abstract away the blockchain wallet experience.
Your product could utilize blockchain and tokens at the backend, but the digital assets would be first stored in a centralized custodial wallet. The product could be fully functional just through a regular email signup. For users, signing up would feel like any web 2 product. Later, the user could be provided with the option to connect to a non-custodial blockchain wallet such as Metamask. The user could move his/her digital assets there, but it wouldn’t be mandatory.
Naturally, this type of approach is against the decentralization/DAO values. For the most fundamental DeFi protocols, this would never work or make sense. For less-critical consumer-facing applications, such as web 3 games, this is worth considering. And can potentially unlock millions of normie users who would have never had the patience to set up a blockchain wallet.
As we discussed in the beginning, it’s important to assess where in the spectrum of centralization/decentralization your product sits.
Principle #8: Certain web 2 marketing methods are still useful, too
It’s good to note that certain ‘traditional’ online marketing methods are still useful.
Content and blog posts — Churning out content regularly is equally essential as always. In web 3, there is an expectation of a higher level of transparency, considering we’re building open protocols with public transactions. Many users also analyze your protocol from an investor perspective.
SEO — Search Engine Optimization. Organic traffic from Google is still significant. If you’re developing a consumer-facing content product, SEO is as important as it always has been. If you’re developing niche DeFi protocol, you probably don’t need to worry about SEO that much.
PR — Fundraise news, product launches, and partnership with famous parties. Definitely worth having an experienced PR freelancer or agency pitching stories to web 3 and tech media. This not only gives you immediate traffic peak and credibility boost, but the backlinks from high domain authority websites contribute to long-term sustainable organic traffic as well.
Web 3 growth tech is evolving rapidly
Web 3 Marketing/Growth Tech landscape in Q3/2022, compiled by Safary community.
The good news is that you don’t have to build all support tools from scratch. Safary community has put together a great list of resources above.
That said, we’re early. In 2011, with web 2, there were only 150 Marketing Tech companies. Today there are over 10,000. The web 3 Marketing Tech space has just gotten started, and the tooling will evolve fast.
Credits to the top thinkers in the space
This blog post was built on top of insights from many thinkers/builders/marketers in the space.
Thank you, Andrew Chen, for writing The Cold Start Problem. It’s a fantastic read, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how the early days of some of the largest web 2 products looked like. Thank you, James Currier, a long-time author of everything related to network effects. Thank you, Matias Honorato, marketing visionary in the web 3 space. Thank you Blake Kim from Myosin, for insightful ideas on how to approach web 3 marketing. Thank you, Amanda Cassatt, for the most valuable YouTube video I found on web 3 marketing. Thank you to the entire team at Media Enterprise Design Lab for the Exit-to-Community handbook, it clearly articulates why value creation and distribution are going through a fundamental change. Thank you, Safary community, for bringing the web 3 growth professionals & resources together. Thank you, Galxe for the great tool, campaigns and documentation. Thank you, Defiant and Hashed, for deep-dive research on airdrops.
The full list of links can be found at the bottom.
Finally, thank you, reader
Thank you for reading. Hopefully, this sparked some ideas for your protocol marketing. If you found this valuable, you can consider joining my email list at the bottom of the page.
Also, you can consider giving a like to my tweet thread summary of this blog post.
Need support for your protocol marketing?
If you need help with your protocol marketing, feel free to reach out to me, and we can explore if I could be of help in supporting the growth of your protocol.
About the author
Mikko Ikola is passionate web 3, blockchain and disruptive protocols in the decentralized world. You can follow @MikkoIkola on Twitter and contact Mikko via email at ikola [a] iki.fi.
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References:
Matias Honorato — Creting a lasting growth strategy for Web 3
Safary Club — Web 3 growth leader community
Media Enterprise Design Lab and Zebras Unite: Exit-to-Community handbook
Galxe campaign examples 1 and campaign examples 2
Defiant Data Dive: Airdrops are Mostly Fool’s Gold…But They Have Their Uses