Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics - a16z crypto

In web2, the primary GTM stakeholder is the customer, typically acquired via sales and marketing efforts. In web3, an organization’s GTM stakeholders include not just their customers/users, but also their developers, investors, and partners. Many web3 companies therefore find community roles to be more critical than sales and marketing roles.

An airdrop is when a project distributes tokens to users to reward certain behavior that the project wants to incentivize, including testing the network or protocol. These can be distributed to all existing addresses on a given blockchain network, or targeted (such as to specific key influencers); often, they are used to solve the cold start proble... See more

Traditional web2 GTM frameworks are a useful reference, and offer some helpful playbooks — but they are just a few of the many frameworks available for web3 organizations. The key difference to remember is that the goals, growth, and success metrics of web2 and web3 are often not the same. Builders should start with a clear purpose, grow a communit... See more

 How do you “go to market” and convince potential customers to spend their money, time, and attention on your product or service? The response by most organizations in web2 — the Internet era defined by large centralized products/services like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, in which the vast majority of value accrues to

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In web2 companies, founders not only set a top-down vision but are responsible for growing a team and planning and executing against that vision. In web3, founders take on more the role of a gardener, helping cultivate and nurture potentially successful products but also setting up the space for it all to happen.

For web3 organizations, GTM strategies depend on where an organization fits in the below matrix, according to its organizational structure (centralized vs. decentralized) and economic incentives (no token vs. token)

This new model, known as web3, changes the entire idea of GTM for these new kinds of companies. While some traditional customer acquisition frameworks are still relevant, the introduction of tokens and novel organizational structures such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) requires a variety of go-to-market approaches.

One of the key measures of health of a DAO is quality engagement of the community, which can be measured through the primary communications and governance platforms it uses. For example, a DAO can track channel activity on Discord; member activation and retention; attendance on community calls, governance participation (who is voting on what, and h... See more

With new go-to-market strategies for web3 come new ways of measuring success. For DeFi apps, the canonical success metric is the aforementioned total value locked (TVL). It represents all the assets using a protocol or network for things like trading, staking, and lending.