The Web3 Growth Playbook

Web2 companies use Facebook ads to reach new users, email to reactivate churned customers, and push notifications to tell users about new products. There are currently no widely used crypto-native growth tools which presents a major blocker to teams building effective growth loops.

Liquidity mining is a "a network participation strategy in which a user provides capital to a protocol in return for that protocol’s native token." Just as VC funds helped subsidize marketplaces until they reached scale, Web3 protocols can bootstrap their growth using their native token.

In an industry built on open-source interoperable software, we believe that partnerships and community are the only sustainable moat. We've spent years helping to drive growth initiatives at leading companies in the space including Aztec, Celo, CoinList, Index Coop, and Solana. Seeing the challenges of growing crypto projects firsthand is what insp... See more

Web3 products have much more tangible constraints in that they're gated by the install base of crypto wallets. If you're building a DeFi app on Ethereum, your immediately addressable market is defined by the ~25M people actively using Ethereum wallets (although this is growing quickly).

Crypto projects that have grown through token incentives have faced similar challenges to Web2 startups that burned through piles of venture funding. The data is quite clear that most subsidized liquidity is highly mercenary. Hence, we're starting to see more thought out liquidity mining products including OHM and Rift.

If Web2 companies have focused on driving loyalty amongst their uses in the form of engagement and retention, Web3 companies are focused on driving user ownership. One of the most exciting and unique features of Web3 is that "users...fund the products, information, and services that they consume." We're still very early in understanding all of the ... See more

However, business development can look very different in Web3 when these partnerships are negotiated transparently in governance forums rather than behind boardroom doors. Given that these integrations often do not require permission from one of the two parties, they are not always mutually beneficial. For example, a number of platforms have integr... See more

Dapper has built NBA Top Shot into one of the most widely used Web3 apps by abstracting away any notion of a blockchain. Everbloom is using a similar approach for a mobile first NFT experience and we believe that this sets them up well to reach true mainstream adoption.