Go To Market Strategies for Web3 Era

 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, 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.

Traditional go-to-market (GTM) strategies rely on sales and marketing initiatives to lead customers through a marketing funnel or flywheel. The primary goal is to validate the product by identifying a pain point, finding a target audience, and building a cohesive strategy for pricing, product, distribution channels, and more.

While Web2 businesses’ GTM strategies start with the product (i.e. come for the tool), Web3 companies should have more of a bottom-up approach and design the tokenomics to reach and attract an engaged community. That’s what investors would want to see.

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.

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