Do ‘Growth Hacks’ Kill Web3? | Claire Kart - Aztec, James Fry - Across, Jay Kurahashi - Eco

All righty. Okay, if I could bug people, take some seats. We're moving on to the panel portion of the day and we've got some heavyweights in the room with us. If you're on crypto Twitter, chances are you've heard from these people. Okay.

All right. The panel is about do growth hacks kill web 3 and we're being joined by Claire, Jay, James, and Debbie. All amazing marketing talent in web 3. I can't wait to hear from them. All right, I will pass it off to you folks.

I'll sit here.

Thank you so much. Hi everyone. How are we doing? So good. Wow, that was incredible.

[laughter] No, it's it's good. Um, you guys survived the long line outside. So, like that in and of itself is the accomplishment for you all today. Um, so we're here to talk about marketing and I'm going to play like pseudo moderator slash participant, which is just my excuse to talk more than everyone else. I'm just kidding.

Um, but the the real kind of push here and why we came together, web 3 marketing sometimes can really suck. Like, let's just be honest. We've all seen the timeline. We've all seen the airdrops. We've all seen how things go poorly.

But we're a group of folks who I think believe it can be done really well and it should be done really well. But there's a question that we're gonna contemplate together and it's around this idea of do growth hacks kill web 3 or did they? Maybe they are still I don't know. We'll debate that a little bit. Um but before we jump in there, we'll do some intros and I'm going to hand it off to Debbie first.

Hi, I'm Debbie. Uh I head up marketing for Privy. Uh before that I was a founder uh in the space and also an author. So yeah, I've been working and this is my fourth Eve Denver I think. So it's good to be here.

Hi everyone. I'm Claire Cart. I'm the CMO at Aztec. Um I come from a traditional kind of marketing background in fintech startups and then I've been in crypto now for seven or eight years. I kind of lose count.

I think it's eight now and I think it's my fifth ETH Denver. So yeah, really excited to be here and I'm very passionate about this topic. So if you love hot takes, get ready.

Hey everybody, my name is Jay Karashi Sofo. I'm the CMO at Eco. Long and short is we focus on making it easy for any application to use stable coins. So been part of the team for almost two years. Before that I led marketing at Avalanche.

You guys might know it as the layer 1. Um I've been a marketing leader in the space for over 10 years. So also have hot takes because I'm very passionate about this stuff. I think it does suck like James says almost all the time, but I think that's why I like it. So maybe a little bit of uh

max pain. [clears throat]

Yeah, maybe max pain is my my flavor of the day. But yeah, excited to talk about it.

That's incredible. Um, and I'm James. Uh, I'm head of marketing at Across Protocol. Um, I'm just happy to be here. It's going to be a good time.

So, um, before we jump deeply in, I'm wondering how do you how do you three define growth hacks? Because that's a really broad term. And I'm just curious like if we if we each maybe narrow that definition down for how we view it. Who wants to go first?

I can go first. Um, I think because I come from a traditional marketing background, right? Like at a fintech startup, we had products. For me, growth hacking is like this very tight loop between product marketing and edge. And so, you have to have a product in the market.

You need to be working with product and edge to create these like reinforcing cycles, right? Um, so that's the way I think about it and I think that is going to inform a lot of my future answers about why I think we've lost our way. Um, but we'll we'll get to that then. I think my my take is a little bit additive to that and focusing more on the loops. So I think the loops are very important when you actually can figure out especially using data to to go to market and create these complimentary effective like effectively like mini campaigns to boost the progress and success of your broader marketing strategy.

Um and then you can probably see why that can also be taken in the wrong direction and almost abused at times which happens in any industry but it also happens in crypto. So excited to like dive into that a little bit more too.

Yeah. I guess my hot take a little bit is that when I think of the word hack um as it is with hackathons it's something that you do in a really short amount of time. Um and so I think when it comes to growth hacks and I've thought about it in the kind of BTOC kind of way where a lot of it sometimes is like how do we hack the algorithm? How do we, you know, put in these things that are done in a really short amount of time, but to gain a lot of visibility, to gain a lot of engagement? Um, and I don't know if I necessarily agree that every single product or every single thing out there uh needs or relies on a form of growth hacking, if you will, which I I guess brings us to this topic of discussion.

Yeah. Yeah. This is really good. I I I'll I'll answer this too because I think growth hacks there there's the positive side of growth hacks and I think Debbie you're kind of outlining that too there it's this mindset and we're all doing it right every one of you are thinking about agents maybe you've built out an openclaw agent maybe you're playing with it we're all looking for ways to get better faster like do the work that we do more efficiently um but I also think that growth hacks sometimes lead to the lazy shortcuts and we've seen time and time again projects who look for the quick way to gain mass amount of followers to build a community and I use air quotes really intentionally there because it's not community it's just airdrop farmers but they use these tactics and it ends up not just biting them in the ass but actually undercutting the entire industry um so there's a a a big scale of a range of what I think growth hacks are um I'm curious for you guys let's let's go to the one that I think probably all of us have experienced and seen done really poorly. What about Koss?

Koss as a shortcut to growth. Um, have you used them? Have you seen success in them? Maybe. Have you seen not so great outcomes?

I I can say that from Privy standpoint, we've never used Kos. I think of anything like I don't know. I don't know why I think of Privy as like the anti kind of growth hacking way. Um, but like you know how there are accounts out there that goes like who wants a follow from like this account, right? It could be any brand account and everyone comments privy follows a grand total of zero people.

Uh, so we only have followers and we follow zero like not even the people that are working on privy. So

I've used Koss in the past I think as part of my marketing mix. Um, but for me, I think like there there are so many different types of Koss, right? There's Koss who are definitely doing more like, you know, they're very Binance aligned and they want you to go farm whatever upcoming campaign is listing on Binance. And so that that's one route you could take, right? Maybe that is your goal and that needs to be part of your mix.

There's also Kols who are like deeply technical and write research reports but you know present it in like more of a K format. So, I think I don't like to write anything off. I just kind of like to try to analyze it from first principles of who is this person, how are they perceived, who is their audience, and sometimes distributing your message through a third party is a really effective way to go, right? Um, and sometimes it's not. So, I definitely use Kos as part of my mix, but I'd say I'm ultra ultra critical and skeptical.

Um, and that kind of drives drives the marketing strategy in general. I'm also very critical, but I would say I'm critical for most things in the marketing mix. And I think we all are. That's probably why we're here together. Um, and what I mean by that is there's nothing wrong inherently with Kos, but I think what KS has turned into is the solution for how do I actually pay a lot of money to get results fast.

And if you're actually looking in that way, that makes almost no sense. Especially if you're early stage because you're f you should be focusing on organic and actually focusing on validating your go to market strategy, your narratives, all these things that kind of like how you when you're building a house, you want to keep it clean. It's like your your bed isn't made yet. And so why would you go to the next room to try and expand it for a new extension of the living room for for example? Um and and so I've also used K's in the past.

I kind of look at it as just like a paid marketing function like any other industry I would say kind of looks at it that way. And so if you're able to strategically separate budget and understand what you're actually going for. Is it brand level awareness? Is it actual conversion? Is it something in between and actually clearly define it?

You'll have much less surprises when it comes to the outcome. And I think where we're at in crypto, I feel, especially in this kind of market condition, is people were very surprised that their multi-million dollar K budget led to nothing in the long term or very little in the long term.

How many of you have ever joined a project, used a product, bought a token because of a K?

A few people. Yeah, a few. I think what's what's hard is the idea the definition of KO key opinion leader. So if you look at this person as a leader that means you trust them. There's there's a a trust score that maybe you don't have a number to but you have that in your head.

But every time that Ko posts about another project, another thing, another token, that trust score is slowly degrading over time. And so I think what what we're experiencing today in a lot of web 3 marketing is that these Koss have been at it for years. Some of these folks I've been following since 2020, 2021 and they're over and over again they're just shilling the next project and at some point you just stop trusting them because you can't really trust someone who's constantly being paid to talk about what they have belief in. Right. It doesn't work that way.

But this Go ahead, Debbie. No, I was also going to say I think like you know in kind of the traditional like Instagram or Tik Tok um you know K side of things I feel like influencers or however you want to call them they are kind of legally like um like I don't know if they're obligated or they have to but they have to say that this is an ad. And I think that's something that we don't see in crypto is that you see these KS post about something. Sometimes they even write really thoughtful articles and and research about it. Um but it's not always disclosed that you're being paid to do it as well.

Very true. Yeah. Um I'll add one more thing. So we we did our token sale in Q4 and we ran it on our own platform, right? So like we owned the site that it was conducted on.

So just have a ton of data and I can tell you for a fact that there were markets where we were running tests of we're going to put a K in market a well selected K. We're going to see what happens to site traffic and conversion into the sale. And I can tell you Ko campaigns work and they're effective and you can, you know, get it down to like the ROI, right? You can be like, we spent this much and this is what we saw. So I have a ton of data because again we owned our sale platform which like has drawbacks and was hard in other ways but very very interesting in terms of just seeing um what traffic are we bringing in the door and what are those folks doing um with regards to like the action that we want them to complete and it varies market by market right like some of the markets I'm referring to were in Asia the role of kos is really different there um and if you can find a few people who do have trust and they've kept that with their audience it can be super effective, but I think you really have to know what you're looking for.

Vet people very closely. So I my message to all of you is like kos are part of a marketing mix. They can be part of a paid strategy and it's just a matter of like doing it well I guess and not seeing it as a shortcut because Jay's right. If you take it as a shortcut, you're going to get crappy results like any shortcut.

I I love that. It's actually a great segue because if if you think about Koss, you also think about this kind of term of mind share. Like every K is fighting for mind share. Everyone was farming their YAPs. We're all trying to figure that out on Kaido.

I I wonder if you guys could maybe speak on a little bit of this um the pseudo KO movement that came out of uh infoi and engagement farming. And maybe I I have a lot of opinions about Kaido. I'll save them maybe a little bit here, but I'm curious like what do you think of the effect of what Infoi in its stage that we saw it had on kind of web 3 marketing? So, I'll be pretty direct. It was basically like a spam machine and it was just a spam factory.

So, I'm sure there was some metrics that helped or were benefited from that, but not in the sense of how much time you spent in it, how many how many resources, and you also probably had to fund it a significant amount because I'm not too privy to specifically how all the mechanics work. There was like stake there was just all this stuff that made it very confusing. But at the end of the day, it's a mechanical Turks platform and you're paying people to fake your results. So, if you want to do that, that's perfectly fine. But at the end of the day, if you launch the product and you if you're an ecosystem and you don't have anyone building on it or you don't have users or you don't have whatever you're trying to accomplish because of that strategy, well, you shouldn't be surprised at that effect.

Um, and I'm glad that I think Nikita is probably one of the biggest voices from the X team, but I'm glad they figured out from the API perspective how to cut that out

because it wasn't self-p policing at all. Even though some people would say that and I just think uh you do need like those platform level controls sometimes in order to help the entire ecosystem of social media out a little bit.

Yeah. And I I think I think coming tying it back to what the platform I guess what the platform safeguards are. I think infoy as a concept, it definitely sounds interesting and it sounds like it makes a lot of sense, but when you have a platform like X or actually a lot of platforms these days and the rise of all of these bots, right? So then now you have all these bots that are farming essentially what these points are and you look at the engagement on say a tweet that you put out and there all these mentions these floods of comments but they're not really saying anything meaningful and then you click into the account and all they've done is just commenting on the same thing on different things I guess just to max out the number of points that they have. So I guess realistically it just wasn't very genuine at the end of the day.

I think when Vitalik first talked about the idea of infoi, I don't think he had Kaido in mind and the the permeation of what we saw on the timeline. In fact, I think he would argue that that was literally the opposite of what his goal was with talking about infoi in its in its infancy. Infoi very broken down is just quite simple. You get information and good information has some sort of financial yield. But when you bastardize that and just incentivize everything that happens to mention just a few keywords, it doesn't actually turn into infoy.

I think Jay who kicked it off, it's more like spamfy. Like it's just a generated spam factory and and then the the evolution of AI content didn't help, right? It just it made it actually a lot easier for these folks to farm. Um it's Yeah, we can go on about it. I don't I don't know to I I know a few folks who worked really hard on Kaido.

They had good intentions. I think I think they did. They genuinely did. Um but you know,

farmers ruin it.

I'll quickly say too, like I think there's a larger problem in our industry, which is that many teams are they're very founder. Those founders tend to not have marketing backgrounds, right? They tend to be technical founders, which I think is right. And then there's they're either not bringing a marketer in or not giving them the ability to be a decision maker. And I see why InfoI and Kaido was very attractive to founders.

I think founders for many years have been pressured to produce vanity metrics and that's like this larger problem, right? So many of us are existing within this industry that has a lot of like larger problems that are larger than their than ourselves and like trying to go up against your founder and be like we are absolutely not doing that because we're not going to get quality users because XYZ like that is not a battle I wish any of you to fight but we all kind of have to fight it daily against different things and there's just not enough strong marketing voices being like this doesn't work this is BS and so I I think it's like this larger issue where there's alignment misincentive. The founders are very in charge. They're not listening to marketers and then we are like led down this path of just like incredibly bad decisions.

I've had a lot of marketers ask me, "What do I do? My founder, the board, the the leadership is pushing me,

a

lot of pressure

and and maybe I What advice would you all give to younger marketers who they're they're in that power dynamic, right? Like you can't say no to your boss. You don't want to lose your job." Yes, you can. They let's let's hear it actually.

Claire, what what advice would you give?

Here's the thing. Like, why did you why are you paying my salary? If you think you can do it, do it

and fire me and save the money and hire an engineer. Why did you hire me? I mean, this is not a question you want to have. This isn't a conversation you want to have on the all hands, right? You want to be respectful, but you want to go up to that person and be like, "Look, here's a pattern I've noticed and you have a limited runway, and I truly want to understand why you're paying me."

And if they don't have an answer, go look for a new job and negotiate a good severance and find a lawyer. Because you should not spend your time working at a place that doesn't give a about what you think or have to say. You are wasting your career. like this. This panel is not about this, but it is about this.

I think every GTM panel here is about this in some regard. And I won't go too on I won't like go off too much.

Please do.

But literally, you are good at what you do. And you're only going to get better if you are able to make decisions, be accountable for them and learn. And so if you're not able to make decisions, it cuts that all off. So if wherever you're working, if you don't have a seat at the table, you're not going to have a seat at the table at every decision. Like there are things where I'm like, "Okay, I don't 100% want to do this, but I get it.

this is like the founders's vision. So, it's got to be a give and take. But by and large, if you're just like not treated a decision maker, you need to leave.

Yeah. And I think I'll add to is also the timing of marketing. Like I I I also sit on in a camp where I don't think that you need marketing to start. Like you can't market a product that doesn't have product market fit. And no matter how good your marketing is, it's not going to help you find product market fit.

Uh and you know we all work in an industry where we're all trying to do something new for the very first time. We're literally creating the category and defining the category and having it evolve through time that like if you are not finding something that resonates or that people are willing to pay you money for there's no amount of marketing that is going to turn your product into this magic potion and start like printing cash all of a sudden.

I we should just stop the panel right here. Like this is the point. And if you if you leave walking away with anything from this, like one, if you're a marketer and you're running into that issue where you have that pressure, you need those vanity metrics, stand up for yourself. Stand up for what you believe in. And if you're a founder, putting that pressure on your marketing team, shame on you.

Like you you know better. You really do. You know better.

Anyone else? Any last This is our time to vent and we can just keep going.

It's a group therapy session. I

I'll retweet what you guys said. Yeah. [laughter and gasps] Um, okay. Let's let's keep going down the path here. I it's a little bit of a a gear shift, but AI and marketing have not always been just a clear straight path forward.

Um, I think there have been a lot of marketers who have been quick to adapt AI and to work that into their kind of marketing stack. And especially lately now with agents and OpenClaw and there's all these plugins to have OpenClaw run your Google Ads account and run your SEO and all of these things. I'm just curious for you all, how have you implemented AI in your own workflows? How do you encourage it in your own teams? Um, and do you think that it makes sense for us to embrace it as a marketing kind of ecosystem in crypto?

Um, I would say like with probably a lot of the leading teams, our team is very much like AI forward and trying to be as in front of it as possible. That doesn't necessarily mean we have to use AI for everything though, right? So it's having a critical mindset, standing up for yourself when you need to. Um really understanding what AI is doing for you in this flow. So I'll give like uh I'll give one example just for time.

So one example is over the weekend uh a lot of like like a lot of bots and a lot of the conversations coming up with uh cloudbot and things like that, right? There's a bunch of scripts that you can run for marketing. So you can actually plug in like your Google search analytics, your Google Analytics and all that to basically have a search analyst to be your co-pilot. That for a team like ours where my marketing team is very small, we it's myself and a junior uh junior kind of support person is extremely extremely helpful because not only do I not have to hire an agency anymore, but now this product knows who we are to a tea and has all the all the data. And so it took a little bit to install and whatever.

And there's also risks to it. Of course, they have your data and there's all these things. So, you have to be mindful of that. But to use that now, it's like we it while I'm here effectively, I have my laptop running all these different scripts. It's giving me all these recommendations.

I'm not quite comfortable with just having it automatically merge into production, of course, but it I can come back to my hotel room and I can read the recommendations. It's like, hey, by the way, this is going to take one or two days. This is going to take two or three days. Here's how you pace it. Here's how you organize it.

And so I don't mean to be doom and gloom, but the most crazy thing happened the other day where I got pinged by a friend and they said, "Hey, do you want this person as an intern?" For the first time, I said or like always, I said, "Hey, this person is interesting, strong background." Yeah, definitely. Let me just figure out where this person fits. Unfortunately, after I thought about it and I was mapping it all out, the AI like cla or whatever you use is actually able to do everything that intern used to do.

Now, I think there's a role for the intern, but I think it's different from what we probably like grew up with in in our career where you kind of just measure and you uh kind of follow the lead of of your boss effectively and do it over and over and over. I think that's a little bit different now and I'm curious where that's going to go. But that was like a crazy moment for me to actually experience on myself which is wow I actually said no to this and I actually can't even think about what I would use this person for and so I don't want to waste their time but let's just network and that'll be at least the least I can do for now.

Yeah,

Debbie, what about you?

Well, I use it um a lot in my writing uh workflow. Uh and I think as I think the whole thing is that AI doesn't replace critical thinking. I think if anything it like challenges you to to level up your critical thinking. So even though AI says that this is a certain way to do it like I have to be like that doesn't sound right at all. And so I think it's about challenging yourself to disagree with the AI sometimes or sometimes agree with it.

And so having that level of discernment to reject it completely is obviously not the way forward. You're going to be left behind. Um but to really think about how you can collaborate with it but still having your own strong strong point of view. Claire.

Yeah. Huge plus one to what everybody said. I think I I use it quite a bit like as a sparring partner or, you know, like I'm thinking about an idea. I want some assistance on it. Maybe I want to see a first draft to maybe even see how I wouldn't approach it, you know, where it's like, no, no, that was wrong.

So now I've closed down that pathway. So I think about it a lot like I think in the past teams were more bloated and you know in some ways like it was nice to have this big group of colleagues and now teams are leaner and so I feel like I use AI a lot kind of as like an a colleague right where I'm not going to do exactly what they say I'm going to brainstorm and spar with them. Um and so I I use AI a lot in that in that way.

I love it. We're getting the uh time signal. They shaved a few minutes off I think. But um can we just give it up for our panelists and uh just as a last point here like genuinely if you're a marketer and you're trying to figure this out um reach out to any of us like I personally I would love to keep this conversation going after the panel if you need help if you need advice if you just need to know like what do you say to your boss cuz he's being a dick and trying to make you pump your followers like we're here to help. We would love to help you.

So, thank you all and uh have a great Youth Denver.

Thank you for having a great conference everyone. Thank you.