Your product sucks (and nobody cares)
Note: This is a response to Bram’s (very well written) article on marketing. Go read if you haven’t yet.
To all the founders that love building product and hate marketing, this is for you.
First, let’s check out the top 10 coins by market cap:
At least 6 (arguably 9) succeeded on distribution – not technical innovation. They weren't the first. They weren't the best. But they had good marketing.
The sad truth is that good product alone will only get you so far. Plenty of mid products have succeeded purely on distribution – and crypto is no exception.
Why is this the case?
Let’s pretend I’m an absolute braindead crypto user. I want to do something onchain – pick anything: borrow money, buy a memecoin, dump ETH that the Ethereum Foundation paid me with, etc.
Which wallet am I using? What sites do I go to? What apps do I use?
In crypto, we have a literal endless amount of options to pick from: 50+ wallets, 100+ trading interfaces, 20+ lending protocols, across 350+ chains.
If I were a sophisticated, utility-maximising individual, I would pick the apps that give me the best UX, the best APY, the best price execution, etc.
So for my wallet, I’d maybe use Phantom. And maybe I’d use an aggregator like 1inch for trading.
But sadly, I lack any semblance of high cognitive ability. So instead, I’ll pick MetaMask.
Why? Not because it has the best UX (because it doesn’t), not because it supports the most chains, but because it was the first option when I searched “crypto wallet” on Google.
The truth is: I don’t have time to do all the required research to “maximise my individual utility function”. I’m dumb. I have limited brain power. So I’m satisficing and going on with the easiest option in front of me.
That’s why, despite the recent popularity of Phantom, Metamask is still the number one wallet by a large margin. That’s also why people go directly to uniswap.org rather than using 1inch (and why Uniswap has 10x the daily volume of 1inch).
It’s not “build it and they will come”. Never has been.
If you want to have a shot at building a successful company, your number one priority needs to be getting your product in front of as many people as possible.
You need to focus on marketing.
No one cared about my “better product”
Why am I being so aggressive about this?
Because I was literally you.
Two years ago, I was the biggest marketing hater. Two years ago, I would’ve read Bram’s post and patted myself on the back.
“Yeah I’m doing that,” I’d whisper to myself. I’m doing high-brow, intellectual shit like mechanism design. I’m in the trenches with my developers building the perfect protocol.
For marketing, I thought that the “product would market itself”. I’d post weekly features updates and write explainers on our whitepaper.
Honestly, I was so worried about shipping – about turning our novel AMM mechanism into reality – that I barely paid attention to marketing.
It was only after we launched Catalyst mainnet that I realised the truth that every first time founder eventually learns:
NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT.
They don’t care that it's cheaper. They don’t care that it’s faster. They don’t care that it has a revolutionary liquidity efficiency mechanism that scales to thousands of chains.
Why?
THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW IT EXISTS.
Case in point:
When Blast announced their airdrop for Blast Gold, everyone was migrating en masse out of the rollup.
We anticipated this and had deployed on Blast week earlier, thinking that we were perfectly positioned to take advantage of its chaos.
Catalyst was the best bridge to get from Blast to other rollups. It had the best price execution and the best speed by a large margin.
So what did you think happened?
Nothing. Literally nothing.
We had the same amount of volume as the week before – because no one knew about Catalyst.
Most people ended up using Orbiter – or they even used the native bridge and waited the 14 day withdrawal period!
Why? Because they didn’t know that Catalyst was even an option available to them!
That moment broke me.
It broke my mental model for what it meant to build products.
We had the best product… but no one used it. Because we weren’t even in the list of potential solutions in the minds of users.
Soon after, I learned about the stages of buyer awareness, and that was the beginning of my journey down the marketing rabbit hole.
I dedicated the next 3 months of my life to level the fuck up on marketing, so something that Blast never happened again.
Marketing is how we learn what to build
In the early stages of a startup, you need users to validate your product. But how do you even get users in the first place to validate the product?
Bram had this great line in his post, “At this stage [called Phase 2: Market Validation], you’ve validated that there is demand for what you’re building… this is the time to start thinking more strategically about your brand positioning.”
It’s a small line that – on first read – seems pretty intuitive (I mean – it makes sense to start marketing after you know that people want your product).
But for a first time founder, it glosses over a painful, months-long journey.
How do you “validate that there is demand for what you’re building?” How do you know that people want your product?
Business books make market validation seem easy.
“Just ship something, and if people use it, they like it.”
Does that mean if no one uses it, then no one likes it? Should I just scrap the whole thing and call it a day?
If you’re like me (and countless other founders in crypto), you will have launched your product and realised that absolutely no one is using it.
The issue is that you don’t know why no one is using it.
It’s one of two options: no one is using it because they don’t like it, or no one is using it because they didn’t hear about it.
The first option is honestly great. If people don’t like it, then you can ask them why and adjust with new features or an entire pivot if needed.
The second option is limbo. Maybe they will like it – if they just heard about it. Or maybe they won’t? You literally don’t know.
This is the number one issue that founders in crypto are facing right now. Their product’s adoption is underwhelming, and they’re in that limbo stage where they don't know what to do next nor how to fix it.
My takeaway from being in this limbo: you need minimum traction in order to even know if what you’re building is the right direction.
And for that, you need marketing.
Marketing is not just mindshare
Marketing doesn’t have to be a grift.
I think the word “marketing” gets a bad rep because it’s conflated with the notion of “mindshare” – that marketing is just hopping on narratives and building enough hype on the timeline.
I think the bad rep is exacerbated by the fact that most marketers are ass, and even the good marketers are completely removed from the technical ins-and-outs of the product (I once had a marketer tell me that “it was bullish” that he had no clue how his product worked).
I too used to think that marketing was just mindshare.
It was only after I launched Catalyst did I realise the truth: everyone on the timeline loves and supports your “better product” when it’s an idea. They’ll debate its merits on the timeline and retweet your launch post.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll use it.
*gasp*
Shocker!
PEOPLE THAT GAS YOU UP ON THE TIMELINE WILL NOT USE YOUR PRODUCT.
How many projects have I retweeted to be a good friend but never used? Probably 99 out of 100 RTs.
No – marketing is so, so much more than just yapping on CT and opportunistically jumping on the new meta.
Marketing is positioning, the strategic value that a product is giving to its users in comparison to other options. Marketing is branding, the emotional evocation that a product gives to its customers. Marketing is messaging, using human psychology to package words to ensure they stick in the minds of readers.
Ultimately, good marketing will make your product seen to more people and build up enough desire for them to actually want to use it.
Good marketing gives your “better product” a fighting chance in the market.
Good marketing still needs good product
Don’t misunderstand what I’m trying to convey: this is NOT an endorsement to go all-in on marketing and build vapourware.
This is NOT a greenlight to do more airdrop campaigns.
(I don’t want to see anyone in my DMs in 6 months yelling at me that my advice didn’t work because they launched six Galxe campaigns that netted no long-term users.)
I’m saying that, as a founder, you need to prioritise marketing in order to even build the best product.
Good marketing means that there are users flowing into your product. More users flowing in your product means that you have more data on what works and what doesn’t. More data better informs your product roadmap.
Said succinctly, marketing allows you to maximise learnings and get to product-market fit quicker.
Of course, marketing alone is not enough.
You need to KEEP people after they’re made aware of your product and go use it for the first time. You need them coming back again and again because it actually provided them value.
If you build a shitty product, your users will churn like crazy, all your marketing spend will have been wasted, and you will eventually die.
How to do “product-led” marketing right
1. Build something that you’re proud of, but don’t overengineer.
Find the one thing (not two or three) that you want to be special at. And make everything else bare minimum.
For CrossCats, we wanted to support the weirdest chains possible. That means we didn’t care if it was the fastest or cheapest – because it was the only option. We didn’t add bells and whistles to the UI, there’s no analytics page or price chart for the selected assets. Just the bare minimum – to see if people gave a shit about bridging to weird chains.
2. Stand for something.
I’m a firm believer that you need strong positioning and branding – a way to be radically different from anything else in the market. I gave a talk on it here.
Standing for something, having strong world beliefs, and being OK with being different are the foundations of not only a good brand but a good product.
3. Set up a sustainable marketing muscle so you can “flow water through the pipes” and see if people actually like your product.
This could be social, content, videos, even ads honestly (I know it’s a crypto faux pas, but it depends on your user).
For us, we do $200,000+ volume daily. Unincentivised. It’s not topping any bridge ranking charts, but it’s enough to know that people want it and we can run experiments on what other features they want to have.
4. Master mental and physical availability.
You want your product to be in the minds of your potential users, and make it as easy as possible for them to think about you, find you, and use you.
Know how your users find information and select products. If it’s search, make content and ensure your SEO rank is high (boring shit I know I’m sorry). If it’s from the timeline, yap your heart out. If it’s from other apps, develop that business, brother. If it’s word of mouth, make a referral program.
Need help on any of these things? My DMs are open to talk about this whenever.