Web3 marketing and brand building way: decrypt the product passwords of head projects such as Axie, NANSEN

Original: DECENTRALISED.IO

Compilation: yuliya, panews

In the field of Web3 marketing today, brand building and community operations have become a high -attention topic. For the chief marketing officer (CMO) of major institutions, brand building is facing unique challenges and opportunities whether it serves start -up or billions of agreement projects.

The marketing industry in the Web3 field is comparable to the construction process of card houses. In addition to the complexity of marketing itself, practitioners also need to respond to technical challenges, the pressure brought by the volatility of the tokens, and the problem of false information. In this industry dominated by programmers and traders, establishing brand awareness is not easy.

Based on this industry background, Safary Club came into being. As an elite marketing talent network, Safary Club brings together the best marketing experts in the Web3 field by inviting systems. These experts share experiences and cooperate on the platform, and jointly explore products how to transform complex technical concepts into products that the public can understand and yearn for.

Studies have shown that modern society is experiencing a serious crisis. Product developers are often difficult to obtain due attention in the market environment full of emoticons and AI robots. It is not enough to develop high -quality products, and the attention economy has become a key prerequisite for growth. The core of business success is to continue to obtain user attention and transform it into effective business relationships.

The entrepreneurial theoretical community has many insights: Keith Rabois emphasizes the importance of founders' thinking, Paul Graham proposes the theory of informal action, and Eric Reis admires lean entrepreneurial methods. However, how to build and maintain brands with community attributes in practice is still a topic worthy of in -depth discussion.

Justin Vogel, the founder of Safary Club, made an innovative attempt in this regard. The platform adopts an operating model similar to Y Combinator to provide systematic training and exchange opportunities for marketing talents. Through the dialogue of the top five in the industry, this article will provide the founders with a practical guide for early brand building.

The following marketing experts provide valuable insights for this article:

• CENTRIFUGE Chief Marketing Officer Bhaji Illuminati
• LFJ Exchange (former Trader Joe) chief marketing officer Blue
• Asymmetric's ordinary partner Dan Held
• Matthew Howells-BARBY, Vice President of Kraken
• Skale Network's chief marketing and growth officer Andrew Saunders

The experience of these industry leaders operate from Twitter to token product management, covering various key links of the web3 brand construction. The next content will be expanded in detail.

Power of manual curation

In the era of this digital content explosion, we are experiencing unprecedented information bombs every day. Statistics show that Youtube's new content is equivalent to the length of 82 people every day, and 2.4 million emails are passed on the network every second, while ordinary people have to contact nearly 10,000 advertising information every day. In such an era of rich numbers but scarce attention, the increase in choices did not bring corresponding improvement of trust.

Faced with massive information, people naturally seek professional opinions as a reference for decision -making. Modern content platforms mainly screen content in two ways:

• One is algorithm screening, such as Twitter, Tiktok, and Facebook platforms to determine the dissemination range of the content through data analysis;
• The other is artificial curation, which is more in line with the natural laws of human culture evolution. In the field of digital marketing, this artificial curatorial is often manifested as follow -up of opinion leaders in segmentation.

For start -ups, because it is difficult to get the support of the leaders of well -known opinions in the early days, the small closed community has become an ideal entry point. Many founders choose to share their product philosophy in the carefully planned small chat group. These closed and planned communities play an important role in the stage of 0 to 1, and they can provide valuable feedback from the precise user base.

In social interaction, the founder needs to grasp a delicate balance. Excessive marketing will cause users to have rejection, and the lack of product display will gradually forget the project. Experience shows that the most effective way is to establish trust by providing substantial value for the community. People are often willing to discuss the education of problems rather than passively accepting solutions. Therefore, highlighting the seriousness of problems can often create opportunities for the promotion of solutions.

When the founder continues to provide value in the community, even if these values ​​are not directly related to their products, they can accumulate important credit capital for them. This method can cultivate a group of early supporters. When the founders finally show their products, these supporters often become powerful spokespersons for products. This confirms a simple truth: people often believe in people before brand building trust.

However, the curatorial community often has its specific rules and entry thresholds. The formation of high -quality communities is inseparable from effective management, and this management sometimes conflicts with business demand. For example, on Reddit, any non -personal marketing attempts may cause accounts to be banned. Therefore, after obtaining the initial users, how to achieve large -scale growth has become a key issue.

Y Combinator provides answers to this question by creating a curatorial platform like HackerNews. Successful projects like Dropbox and Coinbase were first discussed on Hackernews. Similarly, ProductHunt has also become an important platform for helping entrepreneurial projects to expand the user base.

These manual curatorial platforms help the founders to bypass the restrictions of algorithm distribution, but also require the establishment of real interpersonal relationships and meaningful interaction. More importantly, you must win the trust of the community. Those founders who want to simply outsourcing marketing in the early stages often encounter brutal reality: the essence of sales lies in establishing a relationship.

Dan Held's successful cases explained this well. As an industry opinion leader with 744,000 fans, his success stems from high -quality content outputs that have lasted for many years.

His successful strategy is based on the education of education. Dan focuses on those technical and controversial topics, such as the energy consumption problem or a bifurcation mechanism of Bitcoin, and transform these complex concepts into content that ordinary people can understand. He used a unique method: sacrificing 5% of details in exchange for 95% of the larger audience. This simplified strategy work on a platform like Twitter, because it can better grasp the user's attention.

From 2018 to 2024, as Bitcoin has been recognized more and more, DAN's status as a core educator has also improved. In this rapid development, research analysts that can convey complex concepts with simple language are still scarce. It is this scarcity, and the high -quality content he continued to output makes the entire community be willing to endorse and spread for his content, especially in terms of confrontation with false information.

Establishing a "legitimacy" status is a long process. As Dan said, his only secret is to insist on doing the same year after year. He did not rush to sell his Substack subscription on Twitter, but chose to contribute value to the community selflessly. This confirms a marketing truth: the best sales are often sharing without any sales intent.

In the early days of establishing a personal brand, Dan did something that many people ignored: he carefully thought and listed the keywords that best described himself. These vocabulary guides him to find the right content theme to create a unique expression style. He knows that the content of our consumption will affect the way we create, so we pay special attention to the polishing of tone and expression.

Dan always focuses on meeting the needs of the audience. Many creators are easy to fall into the creation of their own world, and ignore whether the audience really cares about these contents. In contrast, DAN's method is more pragmatic: strong in time, high practicality, and in -depth research on hot topics on Twitter . It is this method centered on the audience that has gradually made him a authoritative figure in the field of emerging assets.

The success of this methodology is not only reflected in the establishment of personal brands, but also helped him successfully participate in creating a number of recognized cryptocurrency projects, such as Taproots Wizard and Mezo. Whether it is creating a personal brand, a Bitcoin NFT series or a Bitcoin L2 project, DAN always adheres to the same principles: continuous and authenticity provides value. This consistent attitude is the key to his continuous success in the field of digital marketing.

From followers to owner

Before social networks became the main source of information, Wikipedia had demonstrated the huge power of volunteers. A legendary person has conducted more than 2.5 million editors on Wikipedia since 2004 to 2018, but did not obtain any ownership. The spirit of this free contribution is amazing, but it also triggers a thinking: how to transform the contribution into meaningful ownership?

In the blockchain field, whether it is the miner of Bitcoin or Ethereum pledker, the core of the design of the incentive mechanism is to allow the stakeholders to get a return on meaningful participation. This concept is also applicable to the field of marketing. In 2021, the success of Axie Infinity was largely attributed to the "play and earning" narrative, so that participants believed that they could transform their contributions into long -term ownership. This reveals an important truth: no one will work harder than those who think they are owners.

Airdrop design is a powerful mechanism for creating a sense of ownership. Taking Hyperliquid as an example, the integration system was integrated before the tokens were launched, suggesting that the probability of tokens may be obtained in the future, thereby creating a cycle of users' continuous participation and interaction. This integration mechanism created by BLUR in 2022 provides users with an index that measures its contribution value without issuing tokens directly.

Different from the " Play Earning " model, it is different from the two ends of the supply and demand of tokens or NFT . The integral system provides a middle area. It allows products to accumulate key user bases and provide a valuable feedback cycle for the development team. Of course, not all users can make enough contributions to the Internet and become some owners.

Trader Joe's Blue has a unique opinion on community members. In traditional concepts, users who transform asset conversion on the decentralized exchange are regarded as "valuable". But in Blue's view, users who interact with products or related media assets (such as Twitter , Discord or Telegram ) are members of the community. These users may not be transformed immediately, and may not even use products for the time being, but as the existence of social signals, they can affect the final conversion of other potential users.

In Blue's view, the acquisition of such users has reached saturation points. In 2021, due to the huge interest in the DEFI field, an agreement can build a community only in this category. Attention and capital will happily switch between products and protocols to pursue benefits. But in the fourth quarter of 2024, the situation was very different. Users have formed their own preferences, and the freshness of trying new Defi primitives has greatly weakened. In the face of the core audience no longer paying attention to the content you built, pioneering new areas has become an inevitable choice. This is exactly that Blue hinted that he was about to take.

He believes that the Internet is transitioning to the short video content stage. For Trader Joe, this means exploring how to integrate YouTube short videos and Instagram Reels into its content strategy. This dialogue in September sounded strange at the time, and it seemed that it was unlikely that traditional social networks like TIKTOK were used as the growth engine of crypto native assets. However, in the next few months, multiple MEME assets such as Chill Guy and PNUT did find a foothold in Tiktok virus video.

In the era of social networks, although tokens like Chill Guy, PNUT, and WIF seem to be a short -lived, they show the powerful power of capital coordination in the era of social networks. These MEME assets without traditional VCs can reach billions of dollars of market value, which contains profound inspiration. Meme assets have the characteristics of "fairness" characteristics like other "contributions to earn" assets. They provide sufficient room for uprightness to make them the core supporters of the product. Although the founders cannot expect to put their lives into their fascinated assets, the operation of these assets does provide valuable experience:

If you can get rich enough people in a short enough time, you may not have to worry too much about distribution.

However, not all early operators have the ability to make community members get rich quickly. Perhaps the project is still far away, or worse, there is no say in the operation of the integration system. In this case, what lever can managers use?

The essence of ownership is not just whether they can trade or have assets, but more importantly, the overall experience of cultural identity and user interaction with the product.

Taking NANSEN's early development as an example, when analysts discuss products on Twitter, they can often receive support from the official account. This method provides an influential leverage: analysts actively create NANSEN related content because they know that they can get the opportunity to distribute content. As more and more analysts show their work through NANSEN, the product has gradually become the preferred tool for investment funds to build a market view.

Similarly, Dune 's creators' rankings have gradually developed into an important platform for excavation of emerging analysts. Well -known analysts like Tom Wan and Hildobby have obtained the initial development opportunities through their contributions. In these cases, the sense of "ownership" does not come from the direct rights of the product itself, but the common growth of personal reputation and the common growth of products. Although these analysts have not directly benefited from the growth of DUNE, their reputation has grown with the development of products.

Let users build reputation through products are another way to affect product cognition. Because in the final analysis, reputation is the most precious asset that people really have. This cognition is of great significance for understanding the user incentive mechanism in the digital age, and it also provides new ideas for the community construction of early projects.

Category creation

To create a new category in emerging markets, it is necessary to have the ability to change product strategy. Most marketers do not have the ability to "make users get rich" or inspire users to use products through tokens. They often strive to strive for the greatest attention under limited resources, which is particularly difficult in the emerging market that has not been recognized.

A typical example is: In 2019, if anyone proposed that BlackRock or German Bank will develop its own L2 solution, it will definitely be ridiculed. However, by 2024, with the increasing maturity of RWA (real world assets), this has become a reality.

Category creation, like content creation, is essentially a relationship -based game. The experience of CENTRIFUGE chief marketing officer Bhaji Illuminati explained this well. As a continuous entrepreneur, she has led the organization to achieve billions of dollars in her career in her career. She found that in corporate sales, decision -making often depends on a single person, usually the chief -level executive (CXO). These executives receive a large number of proposals every day, but it is difficult to distinguish their advantages and disadvantages.

One of the often ignored methods to solve this problem is to create niche content for specific decision makers. Taking RISEWORKS as an example, the platform allows team members to choose cryptocurrencies or legal currencies as salary payment methods. Although the salary solution itself is not exciting, how to manage the topic of global teams is very attractive.

For the first entrepreneur, how to maintain team participation in different cultures and time zones is an important but lack of relevant content. According to Bhaji, the team that sells human resources and technology is best to create credibility by creating niche content, especially the form of podcasts.

Although thousands of podcasts in the market have contended their attention, adding a podcast can not solve all the distribution problems. However, it provides a platform for industry experts to share views without spending a lot of time to organize ideas. For CXO, being invited to participate in podcasts is a good opportunity to build a personal brand.

However, not everyone is suitable for podcasts. For sensitive topics, an alternative is to create a small selection working group. The experience of Kraken's growth director Matthew Howells-Barby is a good example. He joined Hubspot in 2014 and later created a professional community focusing on the growth role of startups during his professional vacation.

Different from the podcasts that are open to everyone, the closed Slack group brings together small groups with specific professional knowledge. The reason why this model is effective is that people often have some career problems that are not suitable for discussing in public, and at the same time need targeted high -quality suggestions.

Matthew discovered the market blank during the 2020 epidemic blockade, and sold his business to Semrush in 2021. Similarly, Safary has established a network with more than 300 marketing professionals to provide chief marketing officials with suggestions for supplier evaluation and event planning.

Although podcasts and private groups help identify target decision makers, creating new categories requires more effort. Just as no one believes in 2019, the loan or real estate will completely turn to the chain, and now people are skeptical of the future of independent agents such as Virtuals or AI16Z.

In the emerging category, enterprises are best to unite to create a working group. When CENTRIFUGE's BHAJI is facing the challenges of connecting blockchain and traditional finance when they establish credibility for their agreements. She has cooperated with large institutions such as Coinbase and Circle to establish a token -based asset alliance, from seven founding members to more than 700 companies to apply for joining.

The success of this kind of alliance is because they can communicate in a way in line with the characteristics of specific fields, rather than using the industry's common term. For example, instead of discussing "quickly entering the" DEFI pool, it is better to analyze the transaction efficiency brought by the loan on the chain in detail. Like the alliance created by BHAJI, they can do this, so they have gained a unique market position.

After establishing a selected community, creating an environment that is conducive to active discussion, collaboration and business partnerships is an inevitable next step. Traditional Slack private messages or Zoom meetings often cannot fully achieve this goal. Although most of the transactions in the cryptocurrency field are performed through digital methods, organizations like Safary and tokens alliance have begun to expand offline activities to strengthen relations.

Offline activities can turn the username in the Internet world into a real face. For example:

• BHAJI organized a real world asset summit
• Safary's Justin organized an offline party for its community

Both marketing experts emphasize that establishing a community in the niche market needs to promote real interpersonal interaction.

Whether Dan Held is committed to establishing the native content of Bitcoin, or Matthew Howells Barby to create a selected audience for growth related affairs, the relationship is the foundation of effective sales. Establishing a community requires the following characteristics:

• Continuous consistency
• Authenticity
• Integrity
• Moderate selfless dedication

These requirements may be contrary to the rapid development rhythm expected by startups. For early startups, it may be difficult for the investment time to participate in the asset alliance.

Observing the successful experience of Justin, BHAJI, and DAN, we can find a common feature: they have been focusing on selflessly to provide value, thereby establishing credibility and reputation. This method eventually formed a trusted flywheel effect and accelerated their career development.

Although this strategy with trust as the core requires time and patience, it can bring more lasting success. By continuously providing value, they not only established a strong social foundation, but also created a sustainable business ecosystem. Although this investment is large in the early stage, in the long run, it can bring more stable market position and more valuable commercial network.

Attention is everything

A mistake often made by marketers is to confuse the loyalty to the tokens and the loyalty to the product. Kraken's Matthew explains this situation through a vivid analog:

When consumers buy Coca -Cola, they only care about the dopamine pleasure brought by beverages, and they will not care about the stock price of Coca -Cola -that is a question that Investors such as Vollen Buffett need to pay attention. However, in the field of cryptocurrencies, users are closely linked to assets:

• Most users pay attention to assets first
• Often less concerned about the underlying product itself

This may explain why the user base of the web3 is mainly concentrated on the exchange, not in the decentralized application (DAPPS).

How to attract users during the period of popular attention in the period of asset itself? Skale's Andrew Saunders put forward several important views:

• The primary goal of marketers is to form a viscous community: not users who leave after airdrops, not only users who are motivated for the test network
• Two main tools: use the influential figures (KOL) and establish a continuous community

The use of celebrities to establish a user base has always been the core strategy of the scientific and technological cycle:

• In 1995, "Old Friends" actors Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston for Windows use teaching;
• In 2002, Will Ferrell took an advertisement for iPod;
• Jay-Z also made advertisements for Rhapsody.

These cases show that celebrities can make emerging technologies " hot " in the early stage. However, due to budget restrictions, most marketers have shifted to the alternatives of cryptocurrencies -creators with huge influence in Web3. However, there are two main problems in KOL marketing: lack of necessary disclosure to the audience, and difficult to verify whether the quality of the content is valid to educate the audience. Recently, Kaito solved these problems by providing creators' review capabilities. The platform verifies the influence range of the creator through algorithms, evaluates interactive quality and frequency, and generates the YAP score (a centralized creator content utilization index). This method helps agreements to motivate correct user groups and improve marketing effects. Through this systematic method, the project party can better evaluate and select partners to ensure the effective use of marketing resources and provide users with more valuable content.

Kaito also provides a protocol native YAP instrument board. For example, if it is a project like Monad or Eigenlayer, you want to know who is the top "yappers" (or contributor) on the social media platform, and the platform can draw such a map for them. Marketing staff can then use these scores to motivate creators through airdrops. Although these are still in the early stages, it is certain that Kaito has had a substantial impact on user education and creators ' discovery. This does not mean that with their instrument board, the work of marketers is much easier. Generally, the combination of the story and the guidance of users need emotional intelligence and original data. Andrew's experience provides a good example.

Andrew worked early in Amazon. One of their marketing policies is not to cooperate with personal cooperation with the recorded records. During some period, the company decided to cooperate with many hip -hop artists to expand market influence. Considering the high frequency of hip -hop artists, Andrew must strive to change the internal policy to promote this activity. At this time, he had reached the final stage of introducing the creator: change culture. Generally, the policy of the company (or agreement) hinders the addition of outstanding creators to join and help spread emerging technologies.

In the early protocol, there is enough influential marketers to be able to define their culture. ASYMMETRIC's Dan Held is famous for participating in Taproot Wizards. One of the requirements for casting a wizard NFT is to take a shower photo. Although most communities will relax the requirements for large influences or investors, Taproot insists on this commitment. Each member of the NFT community must go through the same embarrassing process to cast NFT. Most of Taproot's external communication maintains this weird energy that seems to be disconnected from traditional marketing, but this helps to cultivate a culture of loyalty to the community. This is also reflected in their declarations.

Few marketers have the ability and influence to bet on emerging creators. Work is often not in analyzing the click -through rate or watching the number of times, but in the impact that independent creators can have on the overall.

• In 2008, Barack Obama created history, becoming the first president who has attracted attention through social media. He is a young politician who bets in emerging technologies to help his campaign.
• In 2024, President Trump received a lot of support from the native cryptocurrency supporters of cryptocurrencies, all of which were single -subject voters.

In these two examples, emerging technologies have a significant impact on the fate of a country.

Between the dramatic events and the emotional declines of the decline in Twitter, we often ignore the fact that the success of cryptocurrencies depends on its ability to attract users.

This has a greater impact on marketers, because they are often first layoffs during the economic downturn, and it is difficult to quantify the direct impact of their work. However, the evolution of our industry from dark web currency to mainstream relying on marketing staff to transform code into a story that can leave a mark in people's hearts . If we want to attract the next billion users, we must give them power, cherish them, and applaud them at the same time.

***** Note: DECENTRALISED.CO is one of the biggest holders of Kaito NFT. These NFTs were obtained as part of the paid subscriber airdrop. They have been platform users since the first quarter of 2024.