Web3 Organizational Development — The 5 Challenges of a Web3 Startup for Traction & Growth

If you're an experienced Startup CEO, Founder or Marketing Lead, you'll know that growth happens in cycles — not in a straight line

Constant firefighting is just as bad as the naive attitude to ‘do it once and do it right’.

Reliable and sustainable growth happens through continuous and controlled iteration.

Is Opportunity Cost Curtailing Your Growth?

Imagine:

You have one of the best marketers in the industry — with a background of half a dozen prior jobs, from freshie to senior marketeer. Specific industries, mixed bag of team experiences, and so on. Smart, capable, organized.

And yet — I've never met an early-stage Founder or Marketer that doesn't feel they are spinning toooo many plates. It's the nature of the beast — and everything is moving faster and faster.

So is it within the vicinity of being reasonable to expect that adding additional senior resource for a period of time could help enrich what your team can deliver?

Big business does it all year long. Training programs, consulting projects, 3rd party audits, offsite workshops, advisory boards, and so on.

Marketing isn't a micro-engineering challenge like plumbing. It's not as straight forward as changing tires on a car. It's an endless web of creative and analytical opportunities across a vast array of possibilities…

Click Through The Tabs To Browse The Endless Opportunities

…then see below for the five surest paths to high impact modern (web3) marketing.

The Five Highest Leverage Strategies For Modern (Web3) Marketing

To set the scene…

The Big Promise of web3 is that each dapp gains the network effects for traffic and success by association within a blockchain ecosystem…

Yet to date… we know that commercially successful customer facing ‘ecosystems’ have struggled to develop.

A Web3 Ecosystem Map by Coinbase, back in 2022

What's more…

The complexity of target audiences is multiplied a thousandfold in a web3 situation

In web2, there was ‘customer’, and maybe ‘partner’.

In web3 there are easily 6 audience categories to account for:

• Technologists — integration partners, community developers
• Token Buyers / Traders — pros, degens, chartists, fundamental analysts, VCs
• Platform End-Users — what we used to call ‘actual customers’
• Validators — incentivized for providing compute, storage or liquidity
• Evangelists / Ambassadors — community members who are inspired to spread the word about your project
• Governance Community — folks who want to participate in decision-making to influence and contribute to the direction of the project

What to do in 2024?

Given the above situation there are five strategic levers to focus on for web3 growth.

Lever 1: Audience Journey's

What?

Data-driven emotional and logically sequenced experiences (first touch to final transaction) that draw each unique type of key audience into deeper engagement with your brand, adding usage volume, transaction value, and publicity.

Why?

• In the attention economy, if it's not immediately relevant, folks abandon ship and don't return.
• Small compounded improvements lead to geometric gains in business metrics fast.
• Too much guesswork about target audience profiles, brand narrative and key messaging, under-developed segmentation, which calls-to-action to use (opt-in, learn more, register, try, buy, etc).
• Lack of visibility on exactly where the friction points are, the churn rates come from, or the missed revenue opportunities exist throughout the funnel.

How: Secret Sauce shared in my free email mini-course over 5 days — get it.

Lever 2: Co-Marketing Alliances

What?

Controlled synergy among complimentary groups (tech partners, industry associations, thought leader influencers, and so on) by co-producing experiences (content, events, etc) with coordinated publicity campaigns that significantly amplify exposure to build brand preference for all participants (mostly you!)

Why?

• Rising tide lifts all boats — publicity for one becomes publicity for the other.
• Actual ecosystem development — the network effects of inter-connected resources (tech integrations, audience exposure, targeted events, team skills, thought leadership).

How: Secret Sauce shared in my free email mini-course over 5 days — get it.

Lever 3: Traffic Multipliers

What?

A stair-step approach to traffic management that builds distinctive and cumulative layers of brand experience — rather than typical cookie-cutter campaigns that are easily interchangeable from one brand to another.

Why?

• Confidence in committing to a traffic plan based on a logical sequence of timely additions.
• Resolving the dilemmas between various forms of organic (‘free’) traffic (which is never really free given resource costs and opportunity cost) and the instant-on appeal of paid traffic.
• Content that pushes all the right buttons for your target audience depending on what stage of brand interest they're at, so every piece of content published builds deeper engagement, and is never done just for the sake of churning out yet another aimless item.

How: Secret Sauce shared in my free email mini-course over 5 days — get it.

Lever 4: Community Segmentation

What?

Instead of expecting all types of target audience segment to somehow find home in a single community Discord or a one-for-all branded Twitter profile, instead, clearly segment audiences to create massively higher retention.

Why?

• Most web3 projects mix audience types into very few community experiences with no clarity on who an event or publication is really intended for — this causes many busy savvy potential community participants to simply tune out
• Too few conversations become spread across too many topic channels in a seemingly random pick-n-mix assortment that kills traction.
• Community culture suits the immediate audience rather than the requirements of its most strategic target audience — which leads many web3 projects astray from commercial purpose and turns communities into low-grade groupies.

How: Secret Sauce shared in my free email mini-course over 5 days — get it.

Lever 5: Team Dependencies

What?

Get more out of your team by the criss-crossing inter-dependencies that exist when KPI's are woven together with crystal clarity at all levels of decision-making, process and performance.

Why?

• The greatest cause of failure revealed by failed startup CEO's is “team related issues” — and exit survey's for operating companies reveal that most leavers decision is due to frustrations with their direct manager. Ouch.
• Team Management of any size is fraught with difficulty, and always in fluid motion due to team changes (hires, fires, leavers), market changes (competitors, tech trends, economic conditions), product changes (features, versions), and more — which detracts attentionn away from actual brand and campaign research, planning and performance.
• The highest point of leverage is not for a ‘better’ Marketing Lead, or ‘better’ Copywriter, or ‘better’ Marketing Designer… it is for a more cohesive team dynamic.

How: Secret Sauce shared in my free email mini-course over 5 days — get it.

The Web3 Book Trilogy

Due Autumn 2024

Due Winter 2024

Due Spring 2025

After a 10-year career in web2 and now 7 years in the trenches of web3 growth and marketing — working with or evaluating for VC investment well over 100 web3 projects… the original Cyclic Growth Framework has matured into a trilogy of books for web3 professionals.

Startup Life Is A Full Life…

All The Hiring, Managing, Leading, Learning, Reporting, Researching, Planning, Attending, Organizing…

1001 urgent items on your desk — and the constant need for superhero speed.

Pirate Metrics is taught in Lean Analytics by O'Reilly Publishing. It uses an acronym like a pirate exclaiming “AARRR!” (acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral).

Pirate Metrics is how I led Wirex marketing from 300k to 1.5MM users within a year with product analytics to track all drop-off points throughout the full customer lifecycle.

Stepping back from Marketing Lead operations in 2022 (when I joined a web3 VC to build and lead their Incubator program), I began to draft a trilogy on Web3 Organizational Development still in progress.

Towards my book research I've worked with several web3 communities including a DAO launch platform (Hypha) and one of the leading crypto AI projects (SingularityNET).

the GROWTH Pirate

Full-Time Option

I'm getting closer to book completion and raring to get back in the saddle for full dedication to an ambitious team; thus available full-time for the right role in an area related to crypto, AI, longevity, governance, or DeFi.

Temporary Project Option

I'm also available for short-term projects to deliver any of the 5 strategies outlined above that can serve as best practice case studies for my book launch and thus at a big discount from typical full-time rates.

aka, gavriel shaw

Contact me on Telegram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or via the Support Chat on this page.

Mini Bio

• Scaled a crypto exchange in 2017 to 1.5MM users building a marketing team of 18.
• Ran a web3 VC incubator with 60 projects in 2022.
• Ran Cyclic Media as an Agency in 2021 with 14 staff and first year revenue approaching 1M
• 15 years across multiple sectors including as CMO, Head of Growth, Head of Marketing, eCommerce Director, Web Marketing Director, Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, SEO Manager, Senior Copywriter, Business Development, Agile Coach & Scrum Master

Incubation Feedback

In 2022 I led an Incubator program for a web3 VC startup. Here's some feedback snippets from participants.

The Benefit Of Being Investable

Even if you want to bootstrap all the way to Valhalla, venture capital investment criteria helps focus your most efficient path to growth.

The Cyclic Growth Framework is built with the due diligence checklist from 2 VC's that I worked with directly to evaluate dozens of projects and lead the incubator program.

• Customer validation — commercial viable customer targets
• Credible business model strategy
• Competitor Analysis that would mesmerize a VC because it pinpoints genuine market differentiation beyond any other brand
• Allocating use-of-funds to justify continuous feature development
• How to correctly size a market so that any VC would believe in the big picture
• Crafting a go-to-market strategy beyond a basic marketing plan — a believable and achievable way to build market traction fast
• Sufficient detail for a technology roadmap
• Team Structuring that compliments any shortcomings in Leadership experience — crafty
• Demonstrating risk mitigation so VC's feel their greed glands overpowering their investment concerns
• Financial Modeling that isn't pie-in-the-sky but practical for bootstrapping budget towards compounding market traction

“Gavriel is a marketing genius. He especially excels in the crypto and fintech space, where he not only understands how to market sophisticated technologies, but he also grasps the complexities of navigating the space and maintaining forward momentum in a fast changing environment. Gav is also a team player who leverages his skills to get things done. He also comes equipped with characteristic British humor that is needed in almost any fintech/crypo team. If you ever have a chance to work with Gavriel you won't be disappointed. He is a master of his art and works hard to meet goals and take care of his clients. He is one of my favorite people to work alongside.”

— Sterlin Lujan, Risk Specialist, CCAS, CISC

Actionable Intelligence From A Gold-Mine Of Data

The Cyclic Growth Framework ensures a constant rotation of ideas and results for never-ending improvement.

The Notion Template and the new Web3 Trilogy of books captures practical details gleaned from a knowledge base accumulated over the past 2 decades for actionable intelligence in cutting-edge growth strategy.

The background video shows nodes within the Cyclic Growth database.

Addressing 3 Growth Challenges for Modern Startup:

Near-Effortless Market Traction With The Cyclic Growth Framework

Spoiler Alert: It becomes near-effortless ONLY once you operationalize a reliable decision-making process for risk management and growth innovation…

Forged in the fires of Mordor… the Cyclic Growth Framework helps to:

• Validate commercial viability with less risk and less budget.
• Balance opportunity with spend and data-driven campaign performance.
• Optimize operational resource and processes across design, dev, product, marketing, growth, sales, and support.

The comprehensive Cyclic Growth Framework is available on a Miro Board with 4 columns for Direction, Insight, Pipeline, & Performance

Dozens of models, tables, diagrams, and matrices for comprehensive growth management

It's a lot to juggle, so I built…

A Comprehensive Notion Template for Growth — Available To Clients

Fill-in-the-blank templates with best practice documentation for all areas of growth to use with your team from prototyping through to scale.

Honed on the frontlines across dozens of startup scenarios over 15 years.

Knowledge — With Process — Is Power

What's inside:

The Cyclic Growth Framework template for Notion has a ready-made selection of best practice workflows for all areas of product-led growth.