I hope all 8210 of you are having a great week so far 🔥
If you're enjoying my writing, please share Terminally Onchain with your friends in Crypto and join the /toc channel on Farcaster 🤝
ZachXBT got 2.8k collects on an investigation mint.
Doodles has been posting weekly animation mints the last 6 weeks that have gotten 400k mints.
Azuki ran a Mizuki art contest where voters decided winners by minting.
Kraken & Optimism co-collaborated on a mint for Ink's launch.
Coinbase has been publishing their quarterly earnings reports as mints.
Dune announced mint moments and has actively been minting new charts & analytics.
Now, for anyone that's active in crypto, this isn't a crazy new concept. It's starting to become common for large brand accounts to drop major announcements not only as X & Farcaster posts but also as mints.
Notice how I said large brand accounts?
All of the company names above have the largest distribution channels in the crypto ecosystem. For them, it's a matter of just spinning up a profile on Zora and tweeting a mint link out. When you have >300k followers on X, there's enough attention accrued to quickly garner excitement around collecting the announcement.
But here's the thing. 99% of the founders reading this post simply don't have that scale of distribution. Most companies in the crypto ecosystem are small teams working hard to build a following and are sticking to traditional marketing campaigns.
And that's probably why many of them are discouraged to try a similar strategy.
"We'll barely get any mints, why bother?"
"This isn't sustainable revenue for a small team like us"
"I tried this once but no one cared"
If these are the responses that come to mind, you're thinking about onchain marketing incorrectly.
Let me be clear. As of right now, it's not about the number of mints you get. And it's definitely not about how much money you're making from these mints.
The value proposition is to simply build an onchain repository and CRM for your brand.
In my post The parallel burden of onchain creators from September, I mentioned my own strategy to build TOC's onchain distribution.
"That's why I'm locking in on my own Zora activity. If I'm already cranking out 5000 word deep dives every week, why am I not making the most of minting bits and pieces for onchain distribution?
It would be pretty stupid for a Youtube creator to only post 1 hour videos and not at least get 2-3 shorts out of it right? I'll spare you the random metric about how attention spans are decreasing."
And I've been doing exactly that for the last 6 weeks. Check out the progress on Terminally Onchain's Zora page.
So far, I've done ~25 mints.
Some of them get zero collects. Some I'll airdrop to the TOC pro subscribers using Hypersub. And for one, I even tried using Boost to target new wallets and ended up getting ~1000 collects.
But here's the thing...I don't care about the mint numbers!
Even if these get zero mints for the next 6 months, I will continue adding to my Zora collection.
Why?
Because the goal is to grow my onchain distribution channels before the rest of the ecosystem realizes the importance and follows suit.
In the last 6 weeks, my Zora follow count has gone from less than a 100 to 1600.
And this is partly because there's a ton of new users onboarding to Zora's mobile app, but mostly because I've been consistently posting new mints.
To better understand the implications of starting your onchain marketing campaigns asap, let's go back to 1996 for a second.
Get your free Hotmail
Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith had just launched Hotmail, one of the first free e-mail services on the internet.
They used an iconic marketing campaign to skyrocket their growth. In just 1.5 years they had 12 million daily active users!
In the following years, as the internet started to take off past the early tech adopters, personal e-mail quickly became a no brainer for anyone.
Look at the chart below, there was a 50x just from 1997-2000.
And guess which corporate marketing strategy started taking off by the early 2000s...
The few companies and creators that started experimenting with e-mail marketing in the late 90s were ahead of the curve:
Amazon was one of the pioneers of personalized e-mail marketing.
Dell promoted their custom built computers through e-mail.
CDNow, one of the first online music retailers, used email to send personalized album recommendations to customers.
Britney Spears implemented early email lists allowing fans to sign up for updates, concert notifications, and exclusive content.
BMW created short films featuring their cars and used email to distribute these to a targeted audience.
Those who had the insight to bet on e-mail marketing early had a headstart on building direct distribution channels with their audience and potential customers.
Everyone else was playing the catch-up game to capture that attention.
This is no different than early social media brand strategies. The marketers at companies who understood the importance of having a FB, Twitter, or LinkedIn presence for their product had the time to grow their following before the masses caught on.
And for that reason, it's clear to me that the brand accounts that establish an onchain marketing strategy right now will be ahead of the curve. Not only from the perspective of building a robust Onchain CRM but also in the sense that they'll have more experience trying out different experiments for personalized wallet marketing.
If the number of active wallets starts growing exponentially in the next few years, then you could say we're currently in the 1997-2000 era of onchain marketing.
Okay, so you're sold on the idea. And now you're thinking, how should I go about it?
Let me explain how.
The first 3 steps
After talking to many founders in the space about this, I've realized the problem is that they're all overthinking their onchain marketing strategy.
To reiterate, we're not currently at a point where you can depend on putting out mints as a way to consistently acquire new customers.
That's why I'm suggesting baby steps.
Step 1
Make a Zora account for your company and post things you're already tweeting about:
Product updates
New hires or job postings
Metrics you want to flex
Investor updates
Blog posts
In fact, I would argue that the more raw your mints look, the more people will want to mint them. Raw meaning screenshots of the product, internal slack discussions, etc. You can even do PDFs of research your team published.
Why?
Because people love being part of a creator/founder's journey! Anyone who has built any kind of community through a product, service, or content knows that the more they build in public, the more trust and excitement they earn.
Let your customers, audience, and community be part of your company's journey in an onchain native way. That's why we're all building in this space anyways.
Step 2
Once you've established your Zora page and built an initial content base, then it's time to start experimenting with other tools.
For example, you may have noticed a set of collectors who are consistently minting your content. Reach out to them and offer a free grant on Hypersub to have them opt in for airdrops of all your mints. It's an easy way to gift them your content and a way to thank them for being an early adopter/fan of your product.
You can also try using onchain targeting tools such as Daylight and Boost to try blasting more important mints to a larger audience.
A few days ago I tried using Boost just to see how effective it was. They were able to finish the marketing campaign in under a day. I went through and picked a couple of random wallets to see how legit these mints were. To my surprise, most of them had a real "onchain credit history". With that being said, I'm sure a good chunk had to have been some sort of bot activity but that's not the point.
With the Boost, even if you find 10 new high quality wallets to add to your CR, then it was worth it.
And the spam filtering of collectors will only get better over time!
Step 3
Create a Dune Dashboard that gives insights into your product's audience.
Note: this is separate from a Dune board that covers product metrics (i.e. revenue, DAUs, etc.)
Rather, use this audience board as a chance for anyone to understand what kinds of people are excited about using your product! What does your company's audience look like onchain?
For example, here's the dune board I have setup for Terminally Onchain pro subscribers. It was my way of digging deeper into what kinds of things they're up to in the ecosystem. What DEX do they use? How many contracts have they launched? Which chains are they most active on? What does their Farcaster activity look like? And so on.
This will help your team generate ideas for new partnerships. For example, if your community members who are minting tend to use Aerodrome a lot more, maybe reach out to them? Or if there's a certain game or artist that they tend to be excited about, then figure out how to make the most of that information!
Create a perk or discount for them, do a collaborative mint, etc. Of course, don't offer any of these things up front - it's the element of surprise that matters the most.
And the best part about this Dune dashboard is that it becomes a marketing tool in itself. The more you advertise the metrics on that board, other crypto natives, companies, and ecosystems will take notice. Because you're flexing xyz numbers, I'm willing to bet others will reach out.
Over time, as wallets, onchain distribution, wallet targeting, airdrop spam filtering, etc. get better, it'll start to be a no brainer for any crypto native company to try marketing using onchain rails.
The key takeaway from this post is to just get started now - it doesn't matter how small your current distribution channels are. It's low effort, sets you apart from other startups in the space, and gives you time to experiment with this new marketing paradigm to see what works.
Be the Amazon, Brittney Spears, and CDNow of direct line onchain distribution.
I'm personally so excited about the playbook above that if enough companies start to post updates onchain, I would be happy to share them on this newsletter to help out with distribution!
~ early product hunt vibes ~
Heck, you could even imagine a Zora specific client fixated on product hunt type announcements/launches that people who are active in the ecosystem (i.e. founders, researchers, power users, VCs) can all use to stay up to date.
That's all I have for today's post!
If it encourages even one of you to get started on the playbook, then I'd consider today's deep dive a success 🤝
Hope you all have a great weekend :)
- YB
