Attention into Action: The Why + How of Distribution in Crypto Marketing
What is the point of marketing?
To generate attention that leads the people who can find value in what you’ve built to take actions that exchange value with you.
Attention is worthless without action. And the action set you aim to generate through marketing should have at least a thesis and some level of measure to guide you in your efforts to maximize this value-exchange cycle.
Even if the thesis is raw and the metric is dirty, having an aim that can be tested and disproven is important for getting to the point where monetary value meets goods and services value.
Nike knows fairly precisely how much benefit they derive from a “cool” superbowl ad even if most of us would just be estimating that “30 second cool video = more shoes sell” when deciding whether or not to run an ad campaign with no clear call to action.
But you need at least a “cool = sells more shoes” thesis to justify running the marketing experiment.
So how do we generate these theses and metrics, then start and grow these value exchange loops?
Generating attention that leads to action
Generating the kind of attention that leads to action requires three things: distribution, trust, and intrigue.
Distribution of your message to the attention of people that can find value in what you’re offering, and trust that if they take some action you're asking or suggesting they take, the results will be worth their while.
As I repeatedly remind myself - there are no kind, datable women to be found scrolling crypto Twitter in your apartment when you’re single.
If you want to encounter people who find what you have to offer valuable, and vice versa, you’ll need to go to places where your ideal counterparties already are until you can generate enough retained attention to have them near you.
And get more coming to you through word of mouth and algorithmic amplification.
Trust comes from authority, and/or likeability and/or credibility.
Authority e.g. doctors in lab coats. most know nothing about nutrition science but patients will defer to them when discussing disease. The fact that many diseases in modern societies are related to diet and lifestyle while the average physician knows less about these than many fitness bros on reddit doesn’t matter.
If your position and the relationship you have with others suggests “you know what you’re talking about” people will use that as a shorthand to trust you - see Kahneman’s System 1 thinking.
Likeability e.g. you do things that I find fun or fascinating. This builds an ethos around you through the pathos of positive emotion - which will inspire me to defer to you for things in which you haven’t demonstrated expertise.
Again, just because you tell great stories and are charismatic doesn’t mean you know anything about why Ethereum might be a better investment than Florida swamp land. But the holy grail of trust - credibility - is hard to discern so we use this as a shorthand as well.
Credibility e.g. a handyman who you’ve worked with for years. If you prove you know something valuable like how to fix my leaky faucet, that you won’t defect in our dealings together through deceit, and that these hold true consistently over time and a series of individual interactions - I’ll defer to you on questions related to your proven expertise.
Credibility is the best source of trust but the hardest to build since it takes time and more effort than the other two as those can be done with smoke and mirrors - Vitalik has demonstrated deep, interesting, and accurate analysis of cryptoeconomic problems over years so smart people genuinely respect his thoughts and opinions on the space.
An opposite example might be actors shilling nutrition products to people in an entertaining advertisement.
Almost always there’s an expertise angle associated too e.g. athletes shill nutrition products OR fast food - because athletes know what’s cool so even if eating Big Macs is terrible for your health it must be cool if football player xyz does it in that funny ad.
However, the fact that the ad was funny doesn’t speak to the quality of the food from an experiential or nutritional perspective.
That an athlete is fit while almost certainly getting to their fitness level with, at best, marginal use of the products they’re promoting leverages the authority of “I’m a person many people know and look up to and among my traits is physical fitness so trust me bro buy this supplement.”
Intrigue, the third element in our actionable attention alchemy, comes from the fun and fascinating - which can be sustained through a cadence of novel moments but can also happen as a “flash in the pan” phenomena.
e.g. this Feeder Rotation post that went very viral - but didn’t grow his account much beyond the few hundred followers he had before he posted (was like 900, weeks later it’s 1100).
If you consistently deliver enough proof of credibility, value to offer, and feelings of fun and fascination, then I’ll give you more of my attention over time.
Authenticity
As covered in this very long thought piece by Toby Shorin, in the 2010s “Authenticity” also became a major factor in building trust and generating attention as another proxy or catalytic element of credibility.
The tl;dr for that very long post is that people became skeptical of big brand and traditional media marketing and turned instead to Individuals - who then monetized just as traditional media had done, using the same advertising tactics big brands had always done.
Toby argues that “authenticity” is waning in the 2020s as we move into “profitable belief systems that produce ‘types of guy’.” Something Dovey Wan has recently written about as well.
e.g. Defi Degens, NFT DAOs, and one day “social tokens” of various categories.
Part of the human value of tokenization is more distributed access to capital markets - with all the challenges and opportunities that it provides to capital allocators and business builders.
And part is in the way tokens, which have dollar values related to their capital formation component, can also signal participation in belief systems - we can see just how profitable belief in Iggy as a cultural force is in the charts now.
This is why community building and “DAOs” as a broad concept for organizing around useless governance tokens is powerful and important not just because everyone in crypto does it but because they’re at the forefront of the evolution towards new meaning in being a part of something bigger than yourself. Away from the idea that maximal individuality and being “true to yourself” is important since we’ve seen how that leads infinite to yet-another-subscription-toothbrush posts and products.
This might be part of why KOLs have been a prime target for derision on crypto Twitter lately, but I think that’s more an effect of prices being down. When they go back up again if Ansem is still around he’ll be a hero to the masses once more and people will gladly ape whatever the token shillers flash from under their trench coats.
That being said, most of us look to leadership for most things in our lives. The pope lets doctors tell him what to do to manage the health of his body. Andrew Huberman wouldn’t deign to tell you how to launch a multi-billion dollar tech company. Elon couldn’t tell you how the path into heaven has evolved over the millennia.
So while the functional utility of Key Opinion Leaders may be waning, it probably won’t ever go away and certainly there’s still value to be gained from working with them into the foreseeable future if you’re a crypto company or protocol that’s yet to reach exit velocity re: your ability to generate your own attention.
But how do you do this in a net-positive way for yourselves, and ideally the broader crypto community as a whole?
It starts with a thesis
Re: Marketing, what is it we’re doing and how does that translate into some net-positive action?
It starts with a thesis - what are we aiming at and why will this strategy/tactic get us there - and at least one metric.
The metric can be broad and dirty but it should at least exist since at the end of the day we’re talking about business/economics, the management of time and capital, and if we don’t even attempt to measure we’re committing to being outcompeted by competitors.
A thesis and a broad/dirty metric doesn’t mean we won’t get outcompeted anyway but a complete lack of these is a sure shot at failure.
So if the point of marketing is to generate awareness of the value you offer to the people who most appreciate and receive that value, then taking action to move toward exchanging with you to receive that value, what is the value of a project and what is the value of KOLs inside of that?
For L1/L2, Depin, Infra, and Defi projects, aka those that ostensibly aim towards providing utility and not just “fun” or “cool”...
Broadly the value can be a cool/fun community. The value can be reveling in the dream of what you’re building, the better world you’re on the path toward. The value can be in the APYs, the returns from number going up. The value can be in the fun experience of doing something like building on your platform, participating in some game or event.
How do you generate awareness that you even exist, let alone that these things are on offer, to the people who would find your offering valuable?
Leveraging other people’s audience
One of the key strategies in the last few decades has been to leverage the audience other people have gathered.
Other people already have the trust and attention of the people that you’re trying to target. They can solve for distribution so you can build trust and generate the kind of intrigue that leads people to follow you on Twitter, join and participate in your community, deposit into your protocol.
So how do you get some of that trust and attention for yourself? You need to be anointed by these others, publicly. Presented to their audience and given the seal of approval.
Then, if you leverage the authority granted by this anointing and add more reasons to be considered credible + generate intrigue, you just might generate valuable action from members of that audience.
What kinds of “other people” are there?
In crypto, the main distribution channels (the mechanical systems through which attention is captured) are:
Podcasts (e.g. good game)
Newsletters (e.g. Linn’s Leverage)
Publications or Media Outlets (e.g. Blockworks)
Crypto Native Discord/Telegram Groups (e.g. The Daily Gwei or LobsterDAO)
Discovery tooling (e.g. Defi llama’s Yield charts or Aevo’s Token Premarkets)
IRL events are worth footnoting as a potential channel but feel different enough to not delve into them here, today.
There’s also a meaningful distinction between Individuals and Organizations as the way you connect and interact with Taiki will be different than Blockworks.
The latter has a sales team that is generally reachable and will be happy to get work done for you if you pay them and aren’t an absolute rug or scam.
The former may or may not respond to your Twitter DM and no matter how cool your tech is or how much money you offer - he just might not want to work with you because that’s not his game. Or he just doesn’t think you’re cool.
Under the Organization category, I think there are also 3 meaningful distinctions that, again, DeFine how you’ll approach, engage, and work with them:
Media companies
If you do a good job of PR and/or have something interesting for them to share that generates attention elsewhere, they may create content that extends your reach for free/organically.
You can also almost always just pay them to advertise which may cost a lot but is generally guaranteed to happen
Vendors
Market makers, service providers, tooling platforms - the essence of your relationship with these organizations is some sort of product/company value creation or problem-solving, not getting attention.
Generally they’re doing something for you more than you’re doing something for them, though you may or may not pay them directly.
e.g. Caldera taking a percentage of sequencer fees or Market Makers earning on trading fees + options that expire ITM.
Especially in crypto, many of these “vendors” have attention captured in one of the above channels and so, depending on your ask and relationship, they might be willing and able to help with the distribution of your messaging beyond word of mouth.
Collaborators
These could be ecosystem teams, partner protocols, angel or VC investors, etc.
With these, there’s generally a co-creation of value involved versus a direct or indirect exchange of dollars for value provided between you and the other party.
e.g. leveraging Open Zepplin’s contracts or working with the EF to understand and integrate an update in an upcoming hard fork into your protocol.
The dollar flow is obviously involved at some point with investors but the best won’t factor that into at least a good portion of their thinking like a Vendor would.
Stop paying a vendor and they stop working, good VCs will take some ownership of the value generation - e.g. the EV is becoming minus but if I, the actually useful VC, contribute more resources, together with the portco team we might be able to turn that back into plus.
Perhaps, VCs should be in the Vendor category.
The point here is that there’s a sense of “co-creating value” that colors the potential form of an ask like “can you retweet our announcement” that’s different from vendors.
With this in mind, how do we recruit these “audience owners” to generate our “we’ll do x to get attention and prestige with your help” value exchange?
You need to have an offer that’s valuable to these audience owners, then bring it to their attention.
What do audience owners find valuable?
The primary things these various audience owners will find valuable are attention, prestige, profit, fascination, fun, and friendship
Attention = people become aware I or something I did exists; no coverage is bad coverage. e.g. that Feeder Rotation post.
Profit = either I make more money directly or we do something that generates value for me. e.g. an NFT drop that builds loyalty in my community or creating an integration that makes my protocol or ecosystem more valuable.
Prestige = people trust and/or like me more because of this thing we’ve done. e.g. telling people to buy WIF at 10 cents when it was on its way to $2+
Fascination = devs and researchers like thinking about and chewing on new problems that they find interesting.
Fun = people like to drink and dance (and read shitposts - sometimes all at once at crypto conference “afterparties”).
Friendship = people spend a lot of time at work, it’s nice if at least one or two of the people you work with you like on a personal as well.
How do you leverage these forms of value to get access to the same benefits from them?
Particularly, let’s say, our goal is to generate attention and prestige from our interaction since proper attention = more potential audience for us to capture, and prestige = building authority and trust that helps us retain attention and generate action.
So those two are important for building your own ability to generate attention and action.
When you’re starting, you don’t have much attention to offer others though in the age of social media algorithms, you have more than 0.
e.g. if you’re a new x that fits the current hot narrative/topic, someone talking about how you fit into that can go viral in the Twitter algorithm and get a lot of attention for themselves too.
But we can’t count much on “going viral” so let’s presume when it comes to convincing audience owners to help us generate attention and action we have profit, prestige, fascination and fun.
Profit
Profit is the easy and obvious go-to - offer tokens (straight up or with an investment) or USDC. Most people will find these valuable with relatively little convincing.
Tokens/investment can certainly take a lot of convincing but at the end of the day money exists because even “1 today might be 10 tomorrow” is much more legible than “trust me bro this will be fun.”
The other edge of this sword, however, is that because of the mathematics involved Profit can also lead to shallowness - if you stop paying me, if I think the work I’ve put in is worth what I expect to get out, I’ll lose interest in helping you.
Also, almost all of the le.g.al work and risk comes into play when money or money-like objects are exchanging ownership, and allocation/cash are expensive and usually limited in yet-to-make-it companies and protocols.
Prestige
When you’ve built Credibility and a large audience (which can signal authority) prestige can be as simple as “I’ll tell people about you.”
But this is what we’re looking for from our audience owners, and while there is a space for some cross-pollination (e.g. a famous athlete saying he liked a famous psychologist's book = the psychologist becomes “cooler” and the athlete becomes “maybe not that dumb.”), let’s discount the prestige value of your ethos to 0 for now.
While you’re on your proverbial come up, ways you can generate prestige for audience owners:
Give them access to uniquely valuable information/insight e.g. do bespoke data analysis and co-publish the report or bring deep expertise in game theory to their audience as a podcast guest.
Do something cool/fun together like an NFT mint with a respected artist and a novel mechanism or a high quality IRL event like a penthouse CEO brunch.
Solve a difficult challenge together leveraging both of your capabilities e.g. develop, propose, and get an EIP implemented or close a complex deal between the two of you and an ecosystem fund.
Though the nature of prestige can develop a stronger relationship than one just based on profit, as you can see with the examples above it can be a lot more complicated to deliver on this.
And, as with Fascination and Fun, it takes a lot more work to understand the what, why, and how of this for your audience owners than profit.
To some you’d generate prestige for generating an analysis of the effectiveness of the Uniswap airdrop; most people in the world and many inside of crypto dgaf though.
Fascination
Fascination is a sense of awe, enthrallment, perhaps euphoria that - in the way I’m using it - comes from something that’s thought provoking or at least has a sense of “could be productive.”
That’s what differentiates it from fun/cool.
In crypto, the common sources of fascination as I’m describing it are:
A novel mechanism you’ve designed or are building
Novel research or analysis you’ve done
A novel narrative you’re telling
Whether Intersubjective work tokens work as Eigen has described is yet to be seen, but a lot of people spent a lot of time digging into that white paper - and then talking about it publicly even without any direct relationship with the team.
People did something similar with this Uniswap Airdrop analysis.
And countless bull/bear threads have gone viral related to macroeconomics, crypto as an industry, various meta narratives, and specific dives into specific protocols on CT - all of which were created because their writers found something fascinating and decided to share it.
Fascination has the same issue as Prestige in that what generates fascination is not as uniform as the value of profit - with the additional challenge that it doesn’t have leverage.
Meaning if you help raise someone’s prestige, they’ll get other secondary and tertiary benefits like being invited to exclusive events where they’re more likely to meet and close a lead VC for their next round.
Fascination starts and ends almost entirely in the moment of awe/euphoria that one gets from the thing that is fascinating to them.
BUT there is some implication for human capital that Fun doesn’t provide. e.g. if a dev gets absolutely enthralled by your white paper that might lead them to build a better product or solve a problem they will encounter in the future thanks to a new way of thinking/new information.
Fun
I grew up amid corn fields which, among other things, instills the idea that real = what can you see and touch and smell and taste. If the corn isn’t knee high by July there’s no shiny story to tell and maybe it’ll be alright - we have a problem and we need to fix it.
So when it comes to work I’m a very practical person - which is the personal bias that leads me to put “fun” at the bottom of the list.
I think it may objectively be the weakest or hardest to generate value when it comes to recruiting people like Media organizations or Key Opinion Leaders to work with you.
It might also be one of the strongest if you have charisma and high energy as almost everyone likes to have fun and it can be as simple to deliver as “man that founder was fun to talk to and his idea didn’t sound half bad I’ll have to dig into the docs.”
This can emerge simply as an effect of the character of people on your team (e.g. the above phone call example) which makes it easy and cheap to deploy.
e.g. it seems like Hugo would be fun to work with so maybe I’ll help Polymarkets out when they ask just because of that.
It can also be a result of strategy and tactics - again, NFT mints are maybe more “cool” than fun but then again owning a Milady in Christ isn’t going to impress a future boss, co-creator, or wife.
That it’s the most drug-like, meaning ephemeral and for its own sake, is also the weakness of fun as a lever for generating relationships with audience owners.
If we do a bunch of fun things together, late nights at the club, we might associate with each other for a long time.
But if you move to a new city and get married, are you really going to bother with keeping up with that guy you did a bunch of coke with during those all-nighters at E11EVEN when you were 22?
That’s a bit extreme, people keep fond memories of fun moments and fun can be much more wholesome than doing coke at a strip club.
But when we’re framing things in the general context of “business partnership” I think fun is generally a good/great to have but icing on something else that’s the cake kind of thing.
Friendship
Chris Dixon doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would describe someone as a “work friend” but all of us need companionship and the people we work with are some of the people we spend the most time with.
Especially as we’ve seen the disappearance of third places, more and more work becomes a place where we find platonic companionship.
That being said, we have a limited capacity for friendship especially compared to the above levers, as it’s so personal it’s not something we can have or provide to anywhere near as many people as even fun.
It can be one of the most powerful tools in this entire toolkit - someone who is your friend will work harder to get you the open job at their company than someone you’ve “just worked with.”
It’s also not something you can lead with in a lot of circumstances. Some of the most powerful connections are with some of the busiest people and a “hey man” plus a handshake while they're sitting on the hotel couch at the conference might sell them on a follow up but it’s incredibly hard to pull off.
So I don’t know that we consider Friendship as something to lead with, but being an interesting, fun, “real” person is good to have pervade your communications so that maybe you can make some friends along the way for fun and profit.
Which other people with an audience?
How do we decide which of these channels and kinds of audience owners to work with?
The basic ROI equation here is how much attention and/or prestige can we generate for the investment of our time and capital.
For attention, we need to consider WHO from an audience standpoint would find what we offer valuable.
What do you offer an audience?
Incorporating an in-depth discussion of value proposition design in crypto is its own, much longer post than we’re into already.
I like DeFi so here’s a very short list of very broad value props; infrastructure, ecosystem, NFT/metaverse/gaming, other kinds of companies and projects in the space will have a different list.
The state of your “product” will also modify value propositions available - e.g. a yet-to-be-live on mainnet new L1 has a different value proposition than that same chain once mainnet is live.
For a live Defi project three general sources of value you can offer:
A fun, fascinating, and/or insightful community
Higher ROI (APY, points, potential for your token to go up)
Different/better risk-adjusted returns (e.g. Ethena’s dollar-denominated tokenized C&C vs Tether deposited in Aave)
If you’re leaning into that last point, you’ll need to reach fairly sophisticated investors which means recruiting a TikTok based memecoin shiller is a complete waste of time and money, while a more 301, in-depth, and consumed by sophisticated actors podcast like Decentralised might help you reach a liquid fund looking to put a couple of their millions to work.
If you’re selling “more number go up” making sure you’re on Defi Llama and clearly outranking the competition on the Yield charts is one of your most +EV moves.
If you’re primarily selling your community, doing AMAs in the community Discord servers of partner protocols can help you target people who 1. hang out in Discord and 2. will likely already be aware of your project such that listening to you in the AMA could be the exact thing that convinces them to explore your community too.
Quality and Quantity
With a sense of who we’re trying to target, we need to also think about the quality and quantity of the various audiences we might be able to reach so we can then develop a thesis around ROI.
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
Quality
For our purposes in the DeFi example, quality is an assessment of how likely it is that someone in xyz audience would find value in what we’re offering - if only they knew about it and we communicated that effectively.
It’s never 1:1 and even if it was, it’s never “heard about you once on that podcast then immediately aped in $10k.” So a thesis and dirty metrics are important to have so you can assess and iterate on messaging and targeting.
Demographics was the way this was done in the mad men era of the ‘60s and is still used with a lot of companies today. They are marginally useful as targeting criteria for our purposes.
However, most people in crypto audiences are men and no one knows most net worths or job descriptions of crypto Twitter reply guys.
But that doesn’t matter so much when you’re looking for your first 10 mio in TVL so these are of marginal value.
You can get more sophisticated with the stats and segmentation but the general question to have an answer for, which you then overlay on channels and specific people’s audiences is “what value are we offering, who would find that valuable, what’s the likelihood that those people are part of this audience and also are inclined to view us favorably and/or take an action we want if they become aware of us through this medium?”
This blends in the concept of “relevance” but for the sake of time I’m mixing relevance with a couple of other elements of quality which are:
Are the audience numbers/engagement stats fake (e.g. botted, from 2 cycles ago so they don’t pay attention to this channel anymore)
Would someone be more likely to take an action we want after becoming aware of us here (e.g. people like reading CT shitposters but probably won’t be buying your token just because they saw said posters shill it)
There’s also the prestige element that comes into play - people will assign different levels and kinds of prestige value to an ad run on their favorite podcast vs an in-depth thread from their favorite DeFi alpha threadoor.
The audience relationship also matters from a “will this attention generate action” standpoint.
People will relate and react to a media publication article differently than a Twitter thread from a builder differently from a podcast produced by an ecosystem foundation differently than a link shared in Discord by an anon account they feel some level of internet friendship with.
Quantity
This one is easier to understand - how many of the people you’re trying to reach are in this audience.
Benchmarking and comparative analysis matter here.
If your target is “people who use DeFi,” the total market size is a few hundred thousand. A decent percentage of Bankless’ audience likely use DeFi. Perhaps almost all of an airdrop threader’s audience do.
I don’t know Bankless’ actual numbers (I do but I’m not telling) but let’s say they theoretically get 100k downloads for a podcast episode (not the real number), maybe 40% of those people use Defi (I don’t actually know this number).
Very dirty but let’s call that 40k “relevant impressions” if you’re a guest on that episode.
Also theoretically, a well-known and liked DeFi threadoor makes a thread about you and gets 100k impressions, but 90% of that audience uses DeFi.
Same “impressions”, higher quantity. But a download of a podcast does not equal a listen and an impression on Twitter does not equal more than a tweet being loaded on someone’s screen.
There are a ton of other nuances that come with the medium re: quality - e.g. more people click the links from a thread and immediately go deposit into a protocol than do so from a podcast episode where they would have to go into the notes and click the link but also they’re at the gym right now not on their “de.g.en stuff” computer.
But the above is the 101 analysis to get you beyond raw and simple “higher count = more reach.”
ROI
ROI in this case is about attention and prestige generated per hour and dollar of effort.
In a perfect world, you get on all the podcasts, in newsletters, have threadoors, retweets from partners, etc that you can.
In the real world, there are time and dollar costs that lead to a need to prioritize execution.
This is where the Individual/Organization distinction, the channels and audience target distinctions, as well as the “what value do you provide” come into play.
The last factor is why this section is below the “things you can do to convince people to promote you” section - it matters when it comes to distribution into attention channels in the crypto space.
On the “Return” Side we’re thinking about:
Quality/Quantity of attention
Quality/Quantity of prestige
On the “Investment” side we’re thinking about:
Dollar cost
Time cost
Who’s time cost
Effort to contact
Effort to engage/complete
Dollar cost is obvious.
Time cost is fairly obvious but here’s some sense of where this gets nuanced.
Your founder and CEO going on a one hour podcast is a very different cost than having one of your 3 in house data analysts spend 10 hours working with a partner’s analyst to create a report you both share on your main project Twitter feeds.
Effort to contact also matters - you might be able to find someone who knows someone who knows Cobie. Maybe all it takes is asking your VC who knows him and makes a TG group that day.
Or maybe it takes a few hours to figure out that degree of connection then time spent over the course of months to build up the relationship and execute on a strategy to eventually make the intro seem worthwhile to the person who knows the person you know.
In the effort to contact sense, there’s also a discovery/do we even know these people exist element.
Pretty much nothing in crypto is just a Google search away and Twitter is useless for something like “what are the most active Defi OG telegram groups.”
You almost accidentally have to find out LobsterDAO exists or have enough of a network to ask around and find out.
Effort to engage also matters. Again, the sales team at a media organization is pretty easy to contact and fairly easy to get execution out of if you’re ready to pay them what they’re asking without any hard negotiation.
If you want to build out a set of 5 integrations and then organize co-promotion with all of those protocols plus the ecosystem foundation… we’ll see you in 6 months.
Recruiting support
Once we have a sense of value to offer our audience owners, a broad sense of the thesis behind channels and types, and a specific list (the building of which has not been walked through in this post you can do that on your own/DM me for help if you need it)...
How do we get these audience owners attention to make our offer to them and ultimately get access to their people?
Three main options:
Cold outreach
If you don’t know your target audience owners at all and don’t know anyone who knows them, your one shot is to slide into DMs.
Twitter is the primary place to reach people in Crypto, you can also find some people on LinkedIn.
The general strategy here is to send a short and direct initial message - don’t waste time with “gm” and nothing else, don’t send a paragraph on who you are and what you’re doing and what you’re asking for.
The first will get rejected because people have 0 idea why you’re contacting them and they don’t want to do the work of trying to figure it out when they don’t know you.
The latter will get rejected because you’ve shown a lack of respect for time - if I’m potentially 50% interested in what you’re offering but you ask me to spend a couple of minutes trying to understand the full depth of what you’re getting at, I’ll probably just skip it.
Short, sweet, friendly, and direct, I generally use something like “gm, I’m working with X, we’re doing y, let me know if you’re interested and I’ll share more details.”
This assumes I’m sending the message from my Twitter profile - which includes a bio that has my title in it.
You could modify it with “gm I’m so and so with such and such.”
If you’re sending this from your project’s main account and you’re the founder, that you’re the founder is good to include since we live in a world of social media interns.
But no need to explain that you’re with the project or send links to anything at this point if that information is in your bio.
This is the most labor-intensive option as the conversion rates are going to be low when you’re trying to reach people who don’t know you. The benefit of it is that it’s always available as a backup once you’re growing and is there for you when you’re starting out as well.
Warm connections
This might be the most ideal source of connections to audience owners.
It can require more hands-on work than Organic generation (explained below) but you can do it with intention, only going after the conversations you already believe are valuable and taking the initiative to start them.
And it has better leverage and is more likely to work than cold outreach.
Essentially you know guys who know guys, some of those second kinds of guys might be audience owners you want to work with so asking your guys for a connection can get you into the right conversations very fast.
And the Credibility lent by your guy to the guy he knows means your offer is more likely to be considered.
Exactly how to make the ask depends a lot on your relationship with your guy, but leveraging the above valuable things and positioning them for both your friend who could make the connection and the connection you want is important - as is making everything as simple and easy as possible.
Example “hey Bob, we’re looking to connect with Alice to explore integrating her x into our y, think that’d be valuable to her? If so, up for making a connection?”
I like to do the “think this would be valuable” maneuver as it demonstrates the “I want to help you not just get things from you” mentality, and in this case if the answer is yes then the value to Bob becomes obvious - Bob can connect you to Alice and get credit as a guy who makes good connections for Alice.
Connections like this are a big part of why it’s useful to get good VCs, angels, and integration partners - amongst the other value they can bring to you, opening up conversations is a huge help.
And some conversations will never start without a warm introduction.
Organic generation
Organic is the holy grail for marketing in general and is definitely valuable in the audience owner biz dev game as well.
Essentially once you make enough connections with the Bobs of the world and gain enough of an audience and prestige, people will start to reach out to you looking to exchange things including their audience’ attention with you.
There’s filtering to be done here - you’ll get botted accounts with “Influencer” as their job title DMing you “gm” in the hopes that you know absolutely nothing and will pay them to pretend they’re helping you get reach.
But you’ll also make connections that can be incredibly valuable that you’d never have thought to make.
And when you make outbound cold requests, the prestige you’ve gained which has generated the inbound messages will also help increase the odds someone will reply to you in a cold DM.
Almost anyone in CT will respond to a DM from Sriram at this point. Not so true 18 months ago.
And you’ll also start to see requests to connect coming back to you through your network, not just in Twitter DMs.
To get to this point, working all of the above ideas to grow the amount of captured attention and prestige is the general path.
You can also choose some specific targets to generate organic connections for your co-marketing and distribution efforts by pivoting the target audience and offer.
e.g. there might not be many DeFi users looking to ape into your protocol listening to On The Brink, but plenty of capital providers do so having an interesting interview with Nick and the gang might help you forge new partnerships.
Converting attention into action
This would be a logical place to start getting what to do with access to audiences.
But this post is already chapter-in-your-doctoral-thesis long and I want to get it published today so I ain’t got time for that.
That being said, if I’ve captured your attention this long and you have a sense that I know interesting and valuable things, two ways you can take action in a way that’s valuable to both of us:
DM me if you have thoughts/questions related to any of this!
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