You’ve Built Some Really Cool Tech, So How’s the Distribution?
Web3 is undeniably on the rise, with an ever-expanding community of talented individuals, often from developer and product management backgrounds, building groundbreaking technologies. However, despite the growing ecosystem and the undeniable potential, many projects have their heads down building, without focusing on how to successfully bring the product or service to market.
Every go-to-market (GTM) strategy needs to fit the individual goals, resources, and Web3 sector targeting required by each project, but there are still some universals that ring true regardless. As founder and software engineer, Camila Ramos, so eloquently puts it: “you gotta make like a record label or a drug lord & think about DISTRIBUTION”.
Ramos's playful analogy highlights a stark reality. Crypto funding has continued to decline for a fifth consecutive quarter (TechCrunch), US regulatory pressure keeps mounting, and global economic growth is slowing. Yet despite all of this Web3 developer activity has continued to climb in Q2 (Alchemy Q2 2023 web3 development report). In other words, more and more developers are seeing through the media fixation on token prices and market movements, and recognizing the long-term potential of a growing ecosystem.
This is exciting. Cool people with cool ideas and even cooler technologies are filling the Web3 space – but founders and developers are so often consumed by the complexities of building on blockchain technology or other decentralized systems that they do not have the time, or resource, to develop an equally essential GTM strategy to properly promote their product or service.
So how can lean projects take the step from great tech to great distribution?
Let Customers Lead the Way
A well-crafted GTM strategy should not aim to convert everyone in sight. Instead, it should focus on building meaningful relationships with the most relevant customers. This entails understanding the people behind the transactions, diving deep into their motivations, thought processes, and beliefs – essentially, letting customers lead the way. It’s a deeply people-centric approach, which is why there is value in letting people drive the marketing in the first place. After all, marketing is a highly critical piece in the GTM puzzle.
Understanding Your Audience
One of the most compelling aspects of people-driven marketing is its capacity to comprehend your audience on a profound level. By engaging with your customers directly and encouraging them to share their experiences, challenges, and insights, you gain unparalleled access to their perspectives.
In Web3, where innovation often outpaces comprehension for the majority of non-crypto natives, this understanding is invaluable. It allows you to bridge the gap between complex technology and its real-world applications, finding the right style, tone of voice and language to communicate your product offerings to meet the needs and desires of your audience.
Building Trust and Social Proof
Every disruptive technology will be met with a healthy dose of skepticism (just look at AI), and generally speaking the same can be said of Web3, a space where the emerging technologies are neither fully tried-and-tested nor mainstream. This makes user-generated content, in the form of anything from reviews, testimonials, success stories, to simple user-experience walk throughs, so invaluable for providing the social proof that makes them feel more trustworthy and accessible.
When potential customers see their peers endorsing your product or service, it fosters confidence. It tells them that real people, just like them, have benefited from what you offer. This social proof can be a decisive factor in converting prospects into loyal advocates.
The Viral Potential of User-Generated Content
User-generated content has a unique ability to spread. When customers share their positive experiences or creative interpretations of your product, they can inadvertently amplify your reach far beyond your initial audience — 35% of users in the US have re-shared UGC on social media (Statista).
Harnessing the Power of the Crowd
Web3 is defined by decentralization, and its foundations are being laid through the creation of interconnected communities. It’s a people-centric space which makes it fertile ground for people-centric marketing; it doesn’t get much more people-centric than letting your community become your marketing voice through user-generated content. While there are no shortcuts to creating a solid GTM strategy, incorporating user-generated marketing can help you get to know your brand perception and how to communicate it on a much deeper level than simply broadcasting brand messaging in the hope that it sticks. It can also build trust and social proof, educating and entertaining users, and even supporting user acquisition — all of which can help you make the move from great tech to great distribution.