The top 5 things I learned in my first year working full time in Web3
A year ago I quit my job in Web2 to go full time in Web3, here's the top 5 things I've learned in that time.
Let's dive in.
1. Be a Missionary, not A Mercenary.
When I joined Web3 full time, less than 500k people owned an NFT. That figure has 5x'd despite trading volume on some of the most popular NFT sites declining by as much as 99%. This is because it didn't happen in Web3, it happened on Reddit, Inc.
Web3 is a lot of fun, but it's also very insular as a community and relatively small. As the saying goes, "we're still early". You'll constantly hear people touting "mass adoption" as the goal, despite most people still disliking NFTs. Did you know that only 18% of Americans under 30 think NFTs are a good investment and even less do as age goes up?
Reddit understood that you need to GO to where people are, not FORCE them to come to you. You need to be a missionary. NFTs are unfairly associated with a lot of bad things like scams and carbon emissions, so they got a rebrand.
They understood that decentralization is the dream, but we need to go incrementally to get people on board.
2. Decentralization wont happen overnight and that shouldn't be the goal.
Don't get me wrong, I believe in the original dream of Web3. Centralized power corrupts and if we made that power decentralized with governance permissionless and democratized, things would be better on the internet. This all sounds great, but if I've learned anything it's that...
"If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together".
As it stands, there's almost no true decentralization out there. Most companies are privately owned, most DAOs have figure heads and hierarchical systems, some tools have keys/back doors from the creator to alter the system at will or are powered/governed by a token held majority by the creator/private company. Is this because decentralization doesn't work? No, it's because...
Don't believe me? At the next family gathering, try and convince your Uncle Rick to buy an NFT using a non custodial wallet like MetaMask and don't help him while he tries to do it. Taking out "convincing" him as a step, did you know it's over 50 steps for Rick to buy his first NFT? Could you imagine if buying something on Amazon was even 5 steps, you wouldn't do it.
The vast majority of people behave like Rick and if we want to get them on board, we need to have less steps. If a fully decentralized internet is like swimming in the ocean, we can't expect people to jump right in, we need to let them dip their toes in first.
3. Brand the Solution not the Product.
Ever notice how most Web3 companies look like this:
Communify : A Layer 2 rollup solution for scaling DAOs in the Web3 economy"
Please note that i'm very sorry to Communify . I truly thought I made up a random start up name and am sure you all do great things inclusive of your branding. This isn't about you, but I hope you like the shout out regardless. Back to the point.
What in the sam hell is a Layer 2 rollup solution? How is does that scale my DAO? In this economy? The questions pile until you realize it sounds like a bunch of jargon that when paired with design that looks like the below, makes for the majority of how branding works in Web3.
The front page of Netflix says: "Unlimited movies, TV shows, and more.", but could you imagine if it said: "A cloud based streaming solution for the long form video content economy". You'd probably never use it despite the product being great.
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"...customers are not interested in our product’s benefits but how it would solve their problem."
- Lee Iacocca, former 福特 Chairman
In other words, my made up (apparently not) company, Communify's branding, should probably look like:
It's the same reason the iPod slogan was "1,000 Songs In Your Pocket" and not "A pocket sized device for your MP3s".
4. Don't work in Silos.
A huge reason that companies don't grow isn't because their slogan or product requires too much onboarding. It's because their departments don't work in unison. They work in silos, and often they are incentivized to work against each other. This seems like an obvious thing to not let happen, but you'd be surprised how often it does.
Here's an example:
Biz Dev brings in 5 new clients in order to stay on target to hit their KPI goals. Product is a bit behind on their roadmap, but that's their own KPI and has nothing to do with Biz Dev's, so the clients are onboarded. Marketing now has to split resources between customer management for the bad UX the bugs caused and can't devote enough attention to meet the growth KPIs of the client which sold them on the product in the first place by Biz Dev.
The result: the clients leave and everyone internally points the finger at each other.
So who's to blame? Is it Marketing for not meeting the expectations of the client. Is it product, who was behind on their development? Surely its Biz Dev who set this whole chain reaction in motion? It's none of them. Instead, it's leadership who set goals that were naturally combative instead of ensuring that everyone was unified.
So what's the solution? Make sure everyone is unified by a singular goal. If everything is a priority, than nothing is. In other words "Don't work in Silos".
5. Learn from Cargo Cults and ask "Why?".
What is a Cargo Cult?
"A cargo cult is an indigenist millenarian belief system, in which adherents perform rituals which they believe will cause a more technologically advanced society to deliver goods."
During World War II, Melanesian islanders had never seen planes, military outfits, or radios. So how did they perceive military units setting up base near them? As people dressing and marching in unison and as a result having massive objects drop all of their needs from the sky. So they mimicked this behavior expecting the same result. They marched in unison, built huge straw objects that looked like planes, made matching outfits, and assumed they would have food and goods delivered to them as a result. It of course never was.
"But I would never do this!" says the same community who thought if they put an adjective next to an animal, create 10,000 variations of that as a jpg, and put them up for sale, that their project would be the next Bored Ape Yacht Club . While a few people got rich mimicking that behavior, a whole lot more lost everything and a ton of trust was lost towards Web3 and NFTs as a whole. So how do we learn from Cargo Cults? We relentlessly ask "Why?".
While you can get some vanity metrics up in the short term by mimicking behaviors, the path to sustainable growth is in asking "Why?" and then making sure everyone on your team agrees on the answer.
Here's a bit more context on me. If you enjoyed this, let's connect and/or feel free to share.
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