our industry collectively uses way too many buzz words and struggles to distill complicated concepts and communicate them clearly to less technically savvy people
so i'm gonna fix that by making this shit easier to understand and share lessons about marketing while i do so
people talk about product market fit all the time, but founder product fit is just as important, maybe even a prerequisite to PMF
the problem with constantly chasing narratives is that founders aren’t chameleons with domain expertise in every hot flavor of the month
Airdrops as we know them are over.
Giving tokens away to build a holder base has mostly created sellers. Across the largest airdrops, between 78% and 94% of recipient wallets had sold off most of their allocation by day 90.
People cite Hyperliquid and Jito as proof airdrops can work, but neither succeeded because of the airdrop. Hyperliquid had over $1B in revenue funding buybacks that soaked up the selling from recipients. Jito’s eligible cohort was small enough to avoid industrial farming.
Token economics are starting to require real protocol performance. MegaETH locked 53% of its supply behind performance targets. Pendle routes roughly 80% of revenue into buybacks for stakers.
Token distribution is moving from handouts to performance.
I got to sit down with one of the greatest marketers you’ll ever have the privilege of meeting or listening to
👑@akachacolate from @monad
Check it out 👀👇
5:16 The trenches
13:36 Lessons from DeFi summer
16:44 What’s crypto marketing’s disconnect with builders?
22:43 Twitter’s interesting because I’ve always hated Twitter
24:14 Incentive programs and why we might not see a HyperLiquid type airdrop again
36:08 The three verticals that matter crypto in the next 2 years
42:55 How to outcompete in an emerging industry
49:49 We’re marketers not doctors, no one is going to die
high key annoyed about AI because my competitive advantage was being able to read/write/research/do things generally faster than the average person
Everyone else suddenly leveled up overnight because of Claude and ChatGPT