By Dan Reecer
Compiled by: TechFlow
10 Practical Tips for New Cryptocurrency Founders on Marketing Thinking:
Clarify your grand vision
Provide entertainment and education to your community
Start with 10 people and build one-on-one relationships with the community
Communicate often, show leadership, and stay authentic
Prioritize a great experience for your key customers
Invest in marketing and business development
Scaling through true partnerships and community engagement
Expand your marketing team in a planned and gradual manner
Design your token incentive mechanism carefully
Avoid common mistakes
1 - Define your grand vision
Elon pushed Tesla to a $1 trillion market cap, and then planned to take the company to $10 trillion by introducing robotics.
SpaceX's mission is to send humans to Mars.
What is your projectâs grand vision for the world?
2 - Entertain and educate with content
Great content marketing is about simply delighting people
Educating in simple and understandable language is one of the best marketing methods for ordinary users
Write content for the right audience (e.g. developers vs. users)
3 - Cultivate one-to-one community relationships
Build your core 10: Focus on the people who are initially interested in you. You need to start small and invest in your early community members.
Launch of Ambassador Program - Thousands of people looking to get into crypto this way
Donât attract the community through incentives
4 - Communicate frequently, demonstrate leadership, and stay authentic
Be active on X/Twitter - it's actually part of your job - be human, remember you are an expert, share your thoughts occasionally
Build in the open â and get people involved
Become a founder-led project
Location matters â consider moving to a crypto hub (New York, Singapore, London, Dubai, etc.)
Avoid being that founder who is âtoo busyâ to communicate and promote externally
5. Prioritize a great experience for your key customers
User-facing applications: Raise the bar to compete with Web2 UX/UI, beautifully designed and delightful to use. Learn from @infinex_app, @coinbase, @JupiterExchange.
Developer-oriented agreement: Prioritize providing excellent documentation. Developer relations and integration support are one of your most important marketing tools. Pay attention to code quality and ease of integration.
6 - Invest in marketing and business development
Great crypto founders understand that product/engineering and marketing/business development need to go hand in hand. Invest in high-quality talent, brand, content, and product.
Creative Design: Donât skimp on your budget, and donât be afraid to outsource.
Invest in top business development talent: Prioritize experienced and ethical people in the crypto space. These people will become the face and representative of your project in the industry.
7 - Scale through real partnerships, integrations, and community crossovers
Scaling through partnerships and relationship building, rather than relying on paid, non-organic growth (e.g. X followers)
Your early partnerships determine your reputation, perception, and âtierâ
Learn from losses in business development to improve your product or process
Expand your community through partner communities
Promote your partners - their communities will naturally spread the word for you
8 - Slowly and deliberately expand your marketing team (but not too slowly)
Hiring Marketing Staff - Hire First: Prioritize people with strong hands-on skills (executors), such as social media/growth managers. Next: Hire a marketing leader to achieve expansion
Choose two similar time zones for major recruiting (not just marketing): Americas + Europe or Europe + Asia
Donât be afraid to outsource some of your marketing (but not all)
Donât over-rely on PR early on: You donât need a PR firm in the early stages of your project. Ask yourself âWould CoinDesk be interested in writing about this?â Donât hire a PR firm until you have a steady stream of about 2-3 pieces of content like this per month.
9 - Carefully Design Your Token Incentives
Design a token economic strategy to reward your most loyal community members or users
Think carefully about your token allocation, as it will have irreversible and lasting consequences
Prioritize a gradual unlocking mechanism for any potential airdrops
10 - Avoid Common Mistakes
Donât spend money to inflate the number of followers on X â this is a clear warning sign
Donât be a technical founder who thinks you can be solely responsible for all branding, messaging, and marketing in the long term
Donât use âunder constructionâ as an excuse to avoid meeting with people and publicly promoting your project and vision
Donât let incentives drive community building
Donât keep copying/pasting ideas and strategies from other projects â create your own plan
Hope you learned something new, let me know if you have any questions. Would love to hear from crypto marketers on important tips I might have missed.