Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 12 - November 26, 2023
A few of the best mechanisms to retain users are having a sticky product, offering incentives, and building a reputation for keeping promises to the community and delivering against a road map.
It's logical to expect that the highest‐quality products will emerge from projects taking an open source Web3 approach to development. Building in the open has its risks, such as copycats, but these risks are worth it to those who want to build the best products. For Web3 projects, the best moat for defensibility isn't building proprietary software, it's building community and reputation over time.
The dream I shared with Joe Lubin during my original ConsenSys interview in 2016—of making Ethereum a household name—has in this sense come true.
Jeff Bezos once said he started Amazon, the first online bookstore, when he saw that web use was increasing 2,300% per year; in 2021, NFT trade volume grew a whopping 21,000%.1 Brands and celebrities hoped to seize the hype to sell NFTs to newly rich crypto kids.
Tiffany & Co., next on the list, programmed utility into their offering with a special twist: for a limited time, they let CryptoPunks NFT holders customize Tiffany jewelry with the NFT they owned.
Investors and users became skeptical about any new web project. In 1998, the economist Paul Krugman infamously predicted that “by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”3 A December 2000 headline in The Daily Mail read “Internet ‘may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it.’”4 During a crypto bear market, public opinion is just as harsh about Web3, and then, during a bull market when prices once again soar, hackers and scammers come out from hibernation.
Others like Reddit launched Web3 products, but without using terminology such as NFTs. Eventually, just like companies today face no reputational hazards when they launch a “web” product, I suspect there will be no backlash when any company announces a product in “Web3,” which will become so ubiquitous that it will be unnecessary to use the term.
Checking Decentraland on our phones in the back row of a live auction in New York, the CEO of Sotheby's and I realized there were far more attendees watching the auction from there than in the physical auction house.
Often, it's a better approach—a show of good faith—to offer something first before asking new users to buy anything.
“there's either building or trading, everything in between is marketing.”1
Marketing isn't a limited set of predetermined practices; it's a repeatable process that starts with imagining what it's like to be someone else. In this way, Web3 marketing is no different from any other kind of marketing. What does make Web3 marketing different is that much of the marketer's job is intended to be temporary and eventually transfer to the community.
Web3 projects have the opportunity to design self‐marketing systems.
