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

For social, culture, and art DAOs, go-to-market means building a community with a specific purpose — sometimes even starting as a text chat between friends — and growing it organically by finding other people who believe in that same purpose.

Web3 changes the whole approach to bootstrapping new networks, since tokens offer an alternative to the traditional approach to the cold-start problem. Rather than spending funds on traditional marketing to entice and acquire potential customers, core developer teams can use tokens to bring in early users, who can then be rewarded for their early c... 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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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

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

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)

Developer grants are grants made from a protocol’s treasury to individuals or teams who are contributing in some way to improving the protocol. This can serve as an effective GTM mechanism for DAOs, since developer activity is such an integral part of a protocol’s success. 

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.

What allows for long-term success in web3 is clear purpose, having an engaged and high-quality community, and matching the right organizational governance to that purpose and community.

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