By Dan Reecer

Compiled by: TechFlow

10 Practical Tips for New Cryptocurrency Founders on Marketing Thinking:

  1. Clarify your grand vision

  2. Provide entertainment and education to your community

  3. Start with 10 people and build one-on-one relationships with the community

  4. Communicate often, show leadership, and stay authentic

  5. Prioritize a great experience for your key customers

  6. Invest in marketing and business development

  7. Scaling through true partnerships and community engagement

  8. Expand your marketing team in a planned and gradual manner

  9. Design your token incentive mechanism carefully

  10. 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 project’s 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

  • Don’t 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 — and get people involved

  • Become a founder-led project

  • Location matters — consider moving to a crypto hub (New York, Singapore, London, Dubai, etc.)

  • Avoid being that founder who is “too busy” 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: Don’t skimp on your budget, and don’t 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 “tier”

  • 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

  • Don’t be afraid to outsource some of your marketing (but not all)

  • Don’t over-rely on PR early on: You don’t need a PR firm in the early stages of your project. Ask yourself “Would CoinDesk be interested in writing about this?” Don’t 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

  • Don’t spend money to inflate the number of followers on X — this is a clear warning sign

  • Don’t be a technical founder who thinks you can be solely responsible for all branding, messaging, and marketing in the long term

  • Don’t use “under construction” as an excuse to avoid meeting with people and publicly promoting your project and vision

  • Don’t let incentives drive community building

  • Don’t keep copying/pasting ideas and strategies from other projects – 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.