This article has nothing to do with cryptocurrency trading. It is an excellent article in the direction of Web3 marketing.
Original link: https://www.web3brand.io/p/eth-marketing
AI is greatly improving human productivity, while Web3 is building a healthier production relationship. The double helix of the two is leading us forward. Please remember this sentence, it is priceless, cognition, cognition is always the most expensive.
Amanda Cassatt is the founder and CEO of marketing company Serotonin. She served as CMO of Consensys (the company behind Metamask, Infura, etc.) from 2016 to 2019, responsible for supporting Ethereum and the projects built on it to grow into the most powerful blockchain ecosystem.
In her new book, Web3 Marketing, she shares Consensys’ path to becoming a popular force and summarizes suggestions for Web3 marketing practices. A16Z Crypto podcast host Sonal and CMO Kim interviewed her.
I have sorted out the information based on the interviews. I hope you can understand if there are any omissions in the information.
Contents of this article
1. Amanda’s career experience (Here you can see how important it is to be well prepared before an opportunity comes. Amanda was already a senior media person before joining the Ethereum team.)
2. Why publish the book "Web3 Marketing" (from this part you can know that this industry is still in its early stages. Although it has been developed for ten years, there is a shortage of talents and the maturity is still very low. There are still many opportunities. Don't let the speculation of cryptocurrencies destroy your mind)
3. From a geek project to entering the public eye: the path of Consensys (from this part, you can see that even a product as awesome as Ethereum needs a marketing part in the form of a company to promote it, and no one can succeed easily)
4. The boundaries of marketing (the core is still the product, so when you join any web3 company, you must first determine whether its product is feasible. If not, make a plan to leave)
5. The importance of building a personal brand in Crypto and web3 (people are more interested in people)
6. Differences between Web3 and Web2 marketing (decentralization is the soul)
7. Some suggestions for recruiting and building a marketing team
8. Write at the end
1. Amanda’s career experience
Before joining Consensys, Admanda initially worked at Huffington Media, an experience that allowed her to participate in the commercialization of social media and content at an early stage. After that, she participated in the establishment of the media company Slant, and learned about blockchain technology while trying to solve the problem of micro-payment of content creators.
She first heard about Ethereum in 2015 and was impressed by what it could achieve.
“I met several members of the early Ethereum team, including Joseph Lubin, Sam Cassatt, Andrew Keys, and Christian Lundquist. As someone with no technical background, it was difficult for me to understand the inner workings of the Ethereum virtual machine at the time. But it was clear that the early Ethereum team members were the smartest group of people I had ever met.” Amanda recalled that she fumbled through the unfamiliar terminology and understood that they were building something called the "Internet of Value" that would evolve the "Internet of Information" established by Web1. Web1 facilitated unprecedented global information flow and communication, and Web3 has the potential to do the same thing for value exchange.
After that, she joined Consensys as the first marketer. During her nearly four years in office, she built a team of 80 people, which was also the first real marketing department in the web3 business, including functional teams such as PR, content marketing, social media operations, community, growth, design and product promotion.
2. Why publish the book "Web3 Markting"
As a frontline builder who has witnessed the development of Ethereum and Consensys, Amanda believes that she has a responsibility to share her perspectives on the development story of web3 and the marketing methodology, hence the publication of this book "web3 marketing".
On the one hand, she hopes to convey to web3 technical people the understanding of marketing that marketing is more than just the ads they avoid seeing.
The environment of the early Ethereum core builders was very academic. Most of Amanda's colleagues were computer scientists, engineers, developers - many of them were self-taught programming geeks, with only a few business colleagues. Almost everyone hated the feeling of being marketed; many were willing to pay a subscription fee to avoid seeing ads, and typical Web2-style marketing was culturally inconsistent with this group of hackers and scholars.
On the other hand, she hopes to use this book to popularize this field to professionals who have not yet entered web3 and lower the threshold for participation of talents.
Hopefully this book is a really easy-to-understand journey through Web1, Web2, and Web3, covering the origins of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the Metaverse, and more.
“There are very few people working on Web3 right now relative to the number of professionals who are really good at marketing. We need to attract more talented people to join us, gain more opportunities, and make our industry more open, so that we can achieve rapid growth.
3. From a geek project to entering the public eye: The journey of Consensys
Amanda talked about her work at Consensys and some key cases that helped Ethereum break through the circle in the podcast and recent interviews. I have excerpted a few interesting ones here, and I recommend reading her book for more content.
What are your goals at Consensys?
Amanda's goal is to commercialize Ethereum and bring Web3 to the retail audience. In her first conversation with Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder and CEO of ConsenSys, she reached a consensus with Joe that she hoped Ethereum would become a household name like Starbucks and some major baseball league clubs.
The Ethereum experience: Sharing best practices
How to build a prosperous DAPP ecosystem on Ethereum?
Initially, her job as a marketer was to help these on-chain startups get as many development opportunities as possible, while showing each startup team how they might use Ethereum. Even if a project fails, the case summary can inspire other teams. Because the reasons for project failure are complex, sometimes it’s not because of a problem with the idea. For example, Ujo, a music NFT project on Ethereum in 2016-2017, eventually inspired Audius (a decentralized music streaming platform).
By stimulating the development of projects in the ecosystem, her team promoted Ethereum to more developers and project parties.
2017: The launch and expansion of EEA (Enterprise Ethereum Alliance)
The spread of EEA (Enterprise Ethereum Alliance) in 2017 was a turning point for Ethereum to break out of its circle.
Because before this, if you searched for Ethereum, you would get content related to a 19-year-old Russian-Canadian prodigy named Vitalik Buterin. If you searched further, the related information included Silk Road and The DAO hack in the summer of 2016 - Ethereum's brand image could not resonate with large institutions or investors.
Summer 2016, Shanghai
Amanda and Andrew Keys (early Ethereum evangelist and BD master) attended the second DevCon, the annual gathering of developers and enthusiasts hosted by the Ethereum Foundation, and excitedly preached to others about their ongoing project: launching the EEA.
The EEA is an alliance of enterprises, technology providers and research institutions, dedicated to providing enterprises, governments and other organizations with a secure, reliable and scalable blockchain platform to support various business applications. The members of the alliance include Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Intel, IBM and many other well-known companies.
In the following months, Amanda and Andrew visited reporters and communicated with multiple departments of various companies to coordinate press releases and interviews. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters and thousands of other smaller media outlets all published the story in late February 2017.
Since then, anyone searching for “Ethereum” has seen not only Vitalik Buterin, but also a host of large institutions and companies backing it. ConsenSys, the company behind the consortium, has also been featured in many reports, giving the relatively new business a lot of fame.
EEA has played an important role in the development of Ethereum. It has promoted the development and application of Ethereum technology by promoting cooperation among various industries and institutions, making Ethereum one of the most popular platforms in the blockchain field.
Although the initial enterprise standard for Ethereum did not even use ETH, the company required the use of a private chain and did not need a token. However, the exposure gained by Ethereum's association with top companies after the EEA's announcement increased investor confidence, causing the price of ETH to quickly soar to over $20. By the time the first Ethereal Summit was held in May 2017, the price of ETH would exceed $100, setting one of the fastest price increases on record.
Of course, the measure of success in the market is not the price of ETH; it is the number of developers building on languages like Solidity. Almost no developer who started working in the Web3 field in 2017 would attribute their career decision to the launch of the EEA. But the EEA release story began to start a flywheel effect, indirectly influencing and radiating more professionals and developers outside the industry to understand and participate in Ethereum. As more developers build applications, they have more opportunities to create "killer" applications, thereby driving mass adoption.
4. The boundaries of marketing
Understanding of Marketing: Matching
Amanda believes that marketing is a matching exercise to match a project or product with the people who are likely to use it.
“Except for building and trading, everything else is marketing” - from the company logo, to media releases, and even to developer documents and job descriptions.
The boundaries of marketing
However, the breadth of work does not mean that marketing is omnipotent. In many cases, when the project or product itself has no actual demand and cannot provide PMF (product market fit), or when the early audience of technical products is developers, the team should focus on product development, and the role of marketing is limited.
But once the product has a certain form, if you want to bring it to the mass market, you need to refine the core information, positioning, and selling points before launching it. It is also very important for web3 to spend time building the community and attract more people's attention as soon as possible in the fierce competition.
The relationship between marketing and products
She has a vivid metaphor: products are bones, and marketing is muscles. Obviously, both are indispensable for a person to walk.
If there are only products but no marketing, you will not be able to move forward and will be stuck somewhere; if there are only marketing but no products, it will become loose and powerless, without anything solid to maintain its form, and is destined to be unsustainable.
Amanda said her company once received a meme coin project. The other party said, our project is very popular now, and we hope this project has some kind of utility. Can you write a content about the utility of our coin with us?
This involves the need to build skeletons through marketing, which is an impossible task.
5. The Importance of Building a Personal Brand in Crypto and Web3
"A lot of people relate to ideas, but more people relate to people than ideas. People follow other people and feel close to them because of them."
If we look closely at Crypto Twitter, many company leaders’ accounts may have higher engagement than the company accounts themselves. Even if some leaders do not show up or participate in offline activities, it is still useful to have an online personal account. For example, Punk 6529, even if he only has a digital avatar, does not prevent him from participating in the Consensus conference and building a strong personal brand.
Amanda believes that it is important for every project to have a front-stage face. Especially in the early stages of a project, the founder has a strong personal brand in the foreground, which can help users better understand the project's goals, progress, and advantages. When the project gradually becomes successful, it is ok for the founder to move behind the scenes, and the project must not rely on one or two people to incur major risks (key man risks).
There are two stages in marketing a web3 platform:
1. Create incentives and include people in the incentive system to solve the problem of building an early community from zero to one
Second, decentralization, moving away from excessive concentration of power in the original leadership and moving towards shared autonomy by the community
In the first stage, human factors and brand building are particularly important.
6. Differences in web3 and web2 marketing
The biggest difference between web3 marketing and web2 is that it is a community composed of incentive-aligned people.
This group often includes project teams, investors holding tokens or equity, and users of dapps or protocols. In web2, the boundaries between users, investors, and project builders are clear;
In web3, everything is merging:
Users in the community might contribute to the project’s open source codebase and receive financial rewards for doing so; full-time team members might treat the contributor as a regular teammate; people in the community who hold tokens or equity might start using the product, and users might decide to invest.
Communities often share values and interests that extend beyond the project's mission. A vibrant community looks like a digital social club where members work and play together.
In the field of web2 or traditional consumer brands, there are also very good cases that attach importance to community operations. In web3, the characteristics of the community are embedded in the mechanism of all projects and are an integral part that can never be ignored. This also determines that web3 marketing must be the result of two-way communication.
According to my review of the interviews, there are several characteristics that web3 community operations need to pay attention to:
1. "Growth from the bottom up" rather than "transmission from the top down"
2. Early community building should focus more on qualitative rather than quantitative indicators
3. Web3 projects can eventually become autonomous and self-promoting
"Growth from the bottom up" rather than "transmission from the top down"
In an open community, it is difficult to centrally control how people talk about and describe a project.
Web3 marketers should not assume that all good ideas come from the team’s top-down transmission; they should provide oxygen for spontaneous movements in the community to help good ideas develop.
Amanda gave an example that the main work of Ethereum community operations in the early years was to discover active contributors to the community. For example, there are organizers of offline meetups all over the world, and the Ethereum team pays attention to organizers in various places. Whenever a new organizer appears, they add them to a group and provide them with a PPT deck. The official template makes the event organization look more formal and professional. And communication with other organizers allows these contributors to participate and learn more efficiently.
Early community building should focus more on qualitative rather than quantitative indicators
So how do we set key indicators for community operations?
Sonal of A16Z joked, “You can’t go back and tell your CEO and CMO that the community vibes are great.”
Amanda believes that many projects over-emphasize quantitative goals in their early stages, such as the total number of people following the Discord, the number of people following Twitter, etc. However, members are very important in the early stages of a community, not only because the founding team will need to deal with early members for a long time (are they people who will actively contribute and help the project grow?), but also because people who want to join the community later will carefully observe how early members interact, the essential reasons for their activeness, etc. to decide whether they like the community atmosphere and then decide whether they want to be a part of it.
Who are the early community members, their backgrounds, how they participate, and whether they actively contribute ideas or keep asking when the token will be issued. Why are they interested in this project, and is the interest more spontaneous or driven by external factors? Are they actively introducing more people to the community?
The early members of the community determine the core. Especially in web3, where the code is open and vulnerable to vampire attacks, a strong and active community is undoubtedly an important moat.
Web3 projects can finally become autonomous and self-promoting
The community is an ideal carrier for continuous user interaction. If community members can be properly motivated and allowed to participate in helping the project develop instead of having to spend money to buy all the growth, it is actually a more efficient way of promotion.
With a strong enough community, Web3 projects can move forward along the path of decentralization.
7. Some suggestions for recruiting and building a marketing team
When Consensys first built the marketing team, Amanda's goal was for the department to consist of full-time internal employees + external agencies. Unfortunately, at that time, there were not many external agencies that understood the business. In the end, she recruited many practitioners with rich web2 marketing experience and let them quickly understand web3 during their work - this also became the reason why she later founded Serotonin.
Tips for team building:
For web3 projects that are starting to build a marketing team, she believes that the most practical approach is that the first full-time marketer should be "a Swiss jundao-style generalist."
Early stage employees are candidates who believe in this industry, are very passionate about this field, are highly willing (self-selecting), and want to produce results.
Generalists need strong comprehensive abilities and can understand products and functions. If it is a technical product, it can be a talent with a technical background who wants to transform into a business. They can act as the spokesperson for the project, manage multiple external service companies and partners, convey business demands to partners and get the desired results. At the same time, they can understand the required operating media channels and the content to be conveyed. He/she does not need to execute every detail in person, but needs to fully understand and personally communicate these work goals and how to do well and achieve them.
As the business grows, it is necessary to plan which positions are long-term and stable professional fields and which are project-based and cyclical needs, so as to decide whether to set up full-time positions or hire partners.
8. Write at the end
Every bear market is a good time for construction. The alternating bull and bear cycles of crypto are like waves, and each wave will sweep more talents ashore. The bull market in the past two years has allowed more talents to come into contact with web3, participate in it, and stay to build.
Web3 is exciting for those who want to build the next generation of the Internet. This is an industry that is suitable for people who love challenges, have a slightly higher risk appetite, and like to work at a high pace:
“If you were alive during the Italian Renaissance, you would have wished you were in Florence. Being in Web3 is as exciting as the Florence of our time.”
Water and fire are in harmony, written at the end:
In the web3 world, the most terrifying marketing is the one who can create products. I was lucky enough to work with such a person once in the two years after I entered the industry, but I didn’t really understand this point until I reviewed it later. Amanda knows the marketing logic, but the essence is that Ethereum products are good, which is a prerequisite; good marketing is to find good products to sell and have a certain judgment ability, but top marketing is to be able to create products and sell them.
The core is still the mechanism of Ethereum itself. It was enough in that era, but it is completely insufficient now, because it is difficult for products like Bitcoin and Ethereum to appear again. Current products may have a bright spot in the short term, but if you want to run for a long time, the core still depends on the designer, not the operator or the market. The previous order was to rely on PR to drive operations, but the current order is that PR is only an auxiliary operation, and product-driven operations are the core, and economic models are designed around products. There are few operators with strong execution and experience, but they are not impossible to find or have no substitutes, but those with strong products are all at the founder level, and there is no way to make do with them. When a good product encounters different levels of operations, it is nothing more than a different development speed, but if the product is not good, top marketing can only extend its life for a short time unless the marketing adjusts the product.
The best people are those who can not only design products in a positive way and market them downward, but also adjust products through reverse marketing. Generally, such people are the ones who do projects themselves. However, many founders who are already doing projects do not necessarily have this quality. The aggregation of products, marketing and strategy is the operator. When the values of these three things are aggregated and not separated, the project will not be too bad.