One year after diving into web3 and NFTs
A list of adventures and learnings from someone relatively new to the metaverse and all things blockchain.
My first exposure to blockchain and crypto was back in Jan 2021. At crypto speed, that feels like a lifetime. Somehow, I found myself joining a company called Immutable. To be candid, I had applied thinking, “wtf are NFTs?” And here I am one year later, not fired yet. I’m hoping that means I’ve learned a thing or two, at least.
I’ve been lucky to work on interesting problems with amazingly smart people. Read on if you’re curious to learn from our experience!
This post will be part reflection and also sharing, because I truly believe web3 is too exciting a space for people to pass up. I’ll be going through some of the things I worked on as a generalist in the space (technically Strategy and Ops, but titles in startups = meh). High-level only or else I’d have to write a book:
Launching three tokens at the same time
Partnering with exchanges, market makers, launchpads for said tokens
Driving ops projects across finance, product, marketing for our tokens
Leading support in interim while hiring for support leaders
Transforming a new community of 5k (angry) users to 50k supporters
Building a team within an industry where no one’s ‘done it before’
Managing high-stress social channels (barely) - Twitter, Discord, Reddit
Leading comms during PR crisis and sensitive topics
Defining strategy on a critical web3 function—community building
Making that list and looking back, I can’t believe how much has happened in a year. It was often stressful, but SO MUCH FUN. I can’t think of any other industry where I can flex tech, strategy, ops, marketing, comms, philosophy, psychology, sociology, finance, economics, and engineering all at the same time.
BONUS: Web3 fashion is also avant-garde…
The following is a sneak peek on things I worked on. I hope at least one will inspire you to check out web3.
A trial by fire—launching three tokens at the same time.
First week in the job. Tokens team. The brief? We’re launching three tokens, and we need it done within the year. What a roller coaster. I learned a ton.
For the uninitiated, tokens refer to the Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and Dogecoin (DOGE) of the blockchain world. There are different ways to look at this type of digital item. You could think of it as loyalty reward points or like a company’s stock, depending on the intention and nuances.
No matter the use case, all (serious) token launches require a ton of work. Questions we had to answer spanned across disciplines:
Economics - How will the tokens work (sometimes referred as tokenomics)?
Marketing - How do we launch it to maximize impact?
Legal - What are legal and regulatory considerations?
Ops - How will it be distributed to users?
Product - What do we need to build first?
(And a LOT more, but I’ll spare you the details)
To give you a sense of how deep this topic can go, here’s an article solely dedicated to thinking about how to allocate tokens into categories for distribution. That’s 0.1% of the work with 99.9% to go.
I specifically looked into two key parts of the launch: researching and working with exchanges and market makers. Again, this post is just to share a sense of these things. Quick overview:
Exchanges are typically where tokens are launched. It could be through a centralized exchange (Coinbase, Huobi, etc) or a decentralized exchange (Balancer, Sushiswap). The challenges were figuring out the best choice for our tokens, and then working with different processes of each exchange leading to the launch.
Market makers are a constant in markets. I’ll leave the technical explanation to the experts. We had to figure out how market makers operated, partners who aligned with our values and vision, and actually get things executed.
Fast forward to actually having our tokens launched, the next challenge was to continue building the actual product. Through this phase, my task was to figure out and help build processes outside of the technical aspect of our tokens. For example:
When does the Finance team need to be involved and what needs to be done?
If we can’t automate things yet, how do we minimize manual processes?
How do we involve the community?
If something wrong happens, how are we flagged and then issue resolved?
More legal stuff…
A recurring theme is the multi-disciplinary requirements of working in blockchain. It’s an industry where being a generalist is not just good, but actually a requirement.
Developing deep empathy by leading customer support and community, while hiring expert leaders
Multiple hats, as you do in startup land. However, I hadn’t worn as many hats as I did last year. It was a particularly intense phase and I was asked to manage customer support as well as community management. 'We need you to help in managing the customer support function. By the way, please also look into community management (marketing). Oh also, can you help in finding and hiring the leaders for each function?‘
‘You’ll be fine,’ they said. lol
It was tough, but I credit this phase for building deep empathy for our users, customers, and community members. I’ve seen and heard their pain first hand and it’s hard not to go out of your way to find solutions for them in that position. Below are some examples.
The UX/UI experience of blockchain is terrible. After looking through support tickets and personally handling a few highly sensitive customer issues, it becomes obvious that blockchain products are way too technical and the complete opposite of user-friendly at the moment. For example at its worst, buying an NFT requires either insane fees or a lot of clicks and popups. It’s a natural phase of new tech. Blockchain needs more time for better product experience and education.
User segments are more diverse than ever. Given the vast disciplines involved in blockchain products, the users are also varied. You have gamers, developers, investors, researchers, influencers, entrepreneurs… the list goes on. Being deliberate on the audience to focus on is crucial. However, you still need to cater for all of them since they’re all token holders of the project!
Speed and transparency is demanded in hours, not days. Gone is the corporate veil. Twenty-four-hour reply times won’t cut it. Corporate speak is not welcome. Instead, customer and community relations are best served through instant Twitter posts and live audio broadcasts by project founders within hours of a critical incident. Your community can lift you up, but they can break you just as quickly.
Nurture a Twitter expert and Discord maven. These are two separate roles and you can’t start early enough. The level of community engagement in web3 is next level. Sending a post or two daily isn’t enough to be relevant in a space where discussions spark and end within hours. On the flip side, if you’re a social media expert, it’s never been a better time to flaunt your skills and get top $.
I’m proud to have held the fort and navigated some tricky customer situations during my time. Nonetheless, I’m excited for our new senior leaders to take our customer experience to the next level.
Defining strategy and building a web3 community
If you told me last year that I’d be looking after ‘community building’ full time, I would have looked at you weirdly.
Coming from management consulting and web2 B2B SaaS, I have to admit I didn’t think much about community. Sure it’s a thing for consumer UGC among the likes of Pinterest, Etsy, and Youtube. Maybe the occasional Robinhood or WSB subreddit. But a seemingly financial and analytical space like blockchain or crypto? Surely not.
Yet here we are, and it’s been mind-blowing.
Community can literally make or break your project. How? Tokens. Generally speaking if your token drops in value, you’re in trouble. If token value is up, then you have a lot more resources and options.
Suddenly, community impact can be quantified and measured.
Before, you could sense when social media had negative sentiment. With web3, you can (at least indirectly) attribute the impact of sentiment to your token.
So how do you build a web3 community? Well that’s the big question and I don’t think anyone’s really figured it out yet. There’s been a few successes, but no real playbook. (If you know of one, take my money!!). Here is a couple of learnings to give you a sense.
The web3 difference is ownership. Web3 communities contribute significantly more compared to web2 counterparts because they are incentivized to do so. Through tokens and NFTs, they are practically part ‘owners’ of a thing.
A web3 community is not a fanclub. It’s an organization. Take a look at the ‘org map’ or how the IndexCOOP community is structured. It has ops, treasury, people, and sales functions! Don’t make the mistake of thinking community is just another support channel.
If there’s one piece of advice I can share to anyone interested in moving into web3, take community seriously:
Join a web3 community and get a vibe
Try contributing to a community to see how it works
‘Buy into’ a community you like (tokens, NFTs) to really feel the highs and lows
Spend time in Discord and Twitter of your community
Do this over a few months, across a handful of communities
So take a closer look at web3
You might be wondering why someone like me with almost no experience on crypto and blockchains were left to do such important work. Well the fact of the matter is there is a very limited group of people that actually know how to do it. This is exactly what excites me the most about crypto—the opportunity to pioneer things most haven’t done yet.
If you’re excited by that, come onboard.
(Apologies if this is the nth time someone pushed web3 to you. We tend to do that)
Reach out, I’m happy to help
Follow me in Twitter for more web3 learnings: https://twitter.com/nigelwtlee
Hit me up in LinkedIn
Or…