on crypto marketing
there's no marketing 🫶
increasingly convinced that self-confidence and authenticity are the most important elements when marketing in crypto. there is no dependable guidance for marketing success, but users/retail (we hope) shift towards projects and teams who are honest about what they will deliver.
crypto follows a general version of the attention -> community -> hype -> token marketing playbook, which is pretty lazy and clearly doesn’t work across the board anymore. + improper execution of capturing attention can damage brand trust and credibility.
reasons this playbook doesn’t work:
marketing to everyone is marketing to no one: trying to engage everyone is lazy because you don't have to think about your user, you market broadly. any semblance of attention is mistakenly seen as sign of a devoted community or future converted users.
not authentic to the product/service: there are few good examples of long-lasting projects outside of common suspects such as eth, solana, btc, uni, aave — many of these benefitted from first-mover advantages in their respective novel spaces. each of them built a marketing strategy rooted in self-confidence and authenticity — i.e. not everyone agrees that eth has ‘good marketing’, yet it remains the second-largest token by market cap. from day one, eth firmly established research as a core pillar and built proper credibility around it.
lack of self-confidence: projects don’t believe that they can succeed without the single marketing formula that only worked for some in crypto and afraid that they won’t come up with anything better. retail is becoming wary of these antics and it is extremely low roi to focus so much resources on a flailing community. this is bad news for some because it means that each project has to think deeply about their user/think through testing product/be honest about progress.
it is merely a façade of building in public: building up a discord server isn’t what building in public means. it means true, honest updates on how the project is developing, it means sharing lessons on building and user acquisition — this is what gives confidence that your project will be in production at some point in the future.
it is worse to have the wrong people care about your project than nobody: the end outcome will be the same: after the token dumps, it turns into an abandoned, left for dead project that relaunches as an l2. in the infra case, projects that build on you will leave once they outgrow your community. focus on those who will find sticky value in your product/service.
this is largely from from the infra perspective; pure consumer is a whole different beast that even web2 struggles to market to. crypto needs to become much less performative and understand that to really turn around public perception, it’ll need to bring the receipts moving forward.