Evolution of Web3 Marketing Practices - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSp0gxuoXNM&t=65s: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Evolution of Web3 Marketing Practices - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSp0gxuoXNM&t=65s

Stuart Hall46min

Amanda Cassatt

00:00

So it's about meeting your users where they are and making sure that you have content on platforms that aren't usually the web three platforms like Facebook or like Instagram that really fits the the needs of your non web three native users and that your content on Discord and on Twitter is really attuned to the the needs and desires of web three because web three really hangs out on Twitter and really hangs out on Discord. Twitter is how you get information top of the funnel and discord is when you want to actually enter a community start hanging out with other people start participating in something Discord is where are you? Where are you go deep. Today, I

Michael Stelzner

00:41

am very excited to be joined by Amanda Cassatt. If you don't know who she is, she's the former chief marketing officer for consensus and helped bring Aetherium to the market. She's also the co founder and CEO of serotonin, a web three marketing agency that helps web two companies bridge in to Eb three. She's also the co founder of Mojito, a leading NFT marketplace infrastructure platform. Amanda, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you. Thanks so much for having me, here. So today, Amanda and I are going to explore the evolution of web three marketing and how marketers that are really familiar with web two need to understand this kind of new world. But before we go there, I would love to hear a little bit of your backstory. How did you get into crypto? How did you get into all this web three space start wherever you want to start?

Amanda Cassatt

01:31

Sure, absolutely. Um, so I'll start when I had a media focused tech startup called slant. And our big idea was that we would incentivize creators to create online and take home value for their work by paying them out 70% of the revenue that their content brought into the platform from advertising, and that we realised that was a micropayment based business model, because oftentimes, we were splitting the dollar and splitting the cent when we had to pay out to our creators. And so I got fascinated by payments. Because although that business model makes logical sense, it doesn't make perfect practical sense, because of the spread that you pay out for third party payment processors, when you're transacting these kinds of super mini micro payments. And so I was on a quest to learn more about payments and figure out whether there was a way to make it more efficient. I stumbled into the early Aetherium team that was hanging out in New York in Bushwick at the time. And my mind was blown when they taught me what Aetherium was, because I realised it didn't just solve my little startups problem. It sounds so many other problems, made so many other business models Practical, not just logical. And I saw how to expand the capabilities of the internet. It was clear to me that I needed to drop everything and join the circus, which I did. I started working on Ethereum and working with this group of people around 2015, and started as Chief Marketing Officer of consensus in 2016. And then, between 2016 and 2019, I built the first web three marketing team at consensus, was able to build along with those teammates, a lot of the best practices in the space for bringing web three products to market. We worked on bringing products to market like Metamask, like a lot of the very first token launches, and a lot of the key kind of tooling and infrastructure that would unlock building in the web three space. Then after about four years of that I thought, Ethereum is safe, more or less, it's good, it has staying power, it's going to stick around, how do I make sure I'm bringing this set of best practices that we've developed to the next generation of projects that are building on web three. And that's when we started serotonin, which has now grown to become the leading web three marketing firm. And we do everything. So we start with brand positioning, visual verbal branding, do PR, do content, do product marketing, community marketing, social media growth, live events, the works in order to deploy those best practices to help not only the next generation of web three companies, so layer ones, layer two, and we can go into it all these mean NFT projects Dows, web three utilities, infrastructure, and also traditional and web two companies that are looking to get into web three, we help them with all the above.

Michael Stelzner

04:31

So what year did you start your agency?

Amanda Cassatt

04:35

So I started doing the work that would become serotonin in 2019, which was the same year that I stepped down from consensus. And what

Michael Stelzner

04:43

was it like in the beginning, were you finding that it was a challenge or was the need really big and there were very few people offering marketing services into the web three community.

Amanda Cassatt

04:54

So at the time, and I think, possibly still, I think I might be one of the best known or the is known kind of web three marketers, I can safely say that I was the first web three marketer. And so when I was CMO at consensus, I had so many web three startups reaching out to me saying, Well, you can leave and be our CMO. And I realised that there was a business there. Because if I could figure out how to say yes to a bunch of them, and tell them that I'm going to be taking on other other clients as well, there's a business there. And that was when eath was at $100. That was at the bottom of the last bear market. And I figured that if there's demand for this kind of service, if there's demand for this kind of business, in these market conditions, then goodness only knows what it's going to be like when when the market comes back. And that turned out to be true. And so we never actually took in any investment capital into serotonin. It wasn't bootstrapped. It was actually just a real business run from the ground up. And we started hiring into our own revenue, and hiring more people and taking on more clients. And before we knew it, we were able to start investing our excess profits and building our own in house product and engineering studio. We started learning from our clients, what kinds of software they would use, if only it existed in the market, actually building that software in house and then spinning it out to form its own software companies and raising venture capital into those.

Michael Stelzner

06:16

Yeah, is that Mojito? Or is that something else?

Amanda Cassatt

06:19

So Mojito was the very first example of that, we spun out a company called Mojito last year, we were working with Sotheby's on their web three transformation, really incredible story that I'm sure we'll get into here, as well as a bunch of other really cool brands working with CAA. And we learned from them, that they wish to sell NF t's on their own own website, as opposed to selling them in third party marketplaces. And this makes perfect sense because every brand that does ecommerce wants to own the experience wants to own the customers, the data, the CRM, as opposed to handing those over to a third party, right? There's a reason why Nike sells shoes on nike.com, but also sells shoes on Amazon. And we figured there's really no back end infrastructure provider that's helping the proverbial Nike here sell shoes on nike.com, although open seas doing great as the proverbial you know, eBay or Amazon. And so we figured there's a vertical side of the market, which is setting up marketplaces like open sea like super rare, like looks rare. And there's also a horizontal part of the market, which is enabling all of these different ecommerce store friends to sell web three artefacts.

Michael Stelzner

07:31

It's fascinating because I think of when I'm listening to this, I'm thinking a little bit about like WooCommerce. And I'm thinking about Shopify, and I'm thinking about all these tools that are out there for people to sell products, direct to consumer, instead of having to go through a marketplace and then have to take a cut, I've got a feeling that you're onto something. And eventually, you know, the bigger brands are probably going to be some of the early adopters of this. But I could imagine something like this being very instrumental for people that already have an existing customer base that want to get into NFT projects, right?

Amanda Cassatt

08:03

That's exactly right. I think in the future, every single e commerce website will include as part of the products that they sell NF T's and web three enabled artefacts, I think every single e commerce Store is going to turn into an NF T store. And that's not just big marketplaces, it's also owned brand websites. And so for a brand or a major sports figure or a celebrity, you benefit if you can bring traffic and customers to your own owned website, as opposed to paying out both in both in profits. And also in data and control of the customer experience. If you can send traffic to your own website, you might as well be selling NF t's on your own website. And so I think that's really a future I think these marketplaces will grow. But I think also this back end will grow. And, you know, I don't think it's just part of what we're proud of at Mojito is it's not just a thin layer that lets people sell NF Ts, we're also taking care of custody, we're also taking care of payments. We're also taking care of tax assessment. And as we build the platform, we see a whole suite of products that connect to the core marketplace product, most notably CRM. Like if you think about what the blockchain is, it's the best ever CRM that's existed, something like the the Facebook or the Instagram or Twitter business suite. What it lets you do is extrapolate people's potential buying behaviour based on their identity. What the blockchain lets you do is the opposite. You know, their buying behaviour because it's all recorded and it's all publicly available on chain. You may not know their identity, but you know, what actually matters, which is the buying behaviour. And so let's say you sell a certain group of people and FTS, and they keep them in their wallets. You can reward them by making your next collection of NF T's only available to those while That's, it's the best customer retargeting system ever to exist.

Michael Stelzner

10:04

Very cool. There's plenty of people listening right now that are not yet into web three. I mean, as you know, and we know that there's a massive opportunity out there to onboard businesses of all sizes into web three. And there's a lot of people that are crypto curious, for lack of a better word, or maybe are even sceptical. Why should businesses from your perspective, consider adopting web three concepts and principles?

Amanda Cassatt

10:30

Yeah, so there are a bunch of different layers to that answer first. So we've seen since 2009 2011, the start of companies like Coinbase, a movement of financial assets, from Fiat into crypto. So moving from web two into web three. But I think what we started to see in especially 2021, as the NFT, space started really booming is a movement of a new type of asset class from web two into web three. And that asset class is REITs and IP, as opposed to currency. And so what you can do by starting to sell NF T's in web three is create a new non cannibalistic product line. It doesn't cannibalise any of your existing product lines, that helps you unlock the value and liquidity from the rights and IP assets that you already own, by translating them into NF T's and selling them in web three. And so it's a product that's instantly global, it has no supply chain, it has no kind of upfront costs, the way that a physical product does. And the creativity of what it can be is unlimited, because it isn't subject to the laws of gravity.

Michael Stelzner

11:38

Yeah, I like that a lot. I think you're onto something there. When you say, look, business acts, you've already got existing products and services that in generally speaking, like when Apple released the iPhone, we know it ended up killing the iPod, you know what I mean? And so on and so forth. And the idea of creating some sort of a new product, digital collectible, for lack of better words, as an NFT could open up a brand new line of revenue for your business. Right?

Amanda Cassatt

12:06

Exactly. So it's almost as if no one had invented stickers, and stickers were invented for the first time. And you have IP of let's say, Disney princesses. And now you can start putting your Disney Princesses on stickers. And so you have a new product line that doesn't cannibalise any of your existing Disney Princess merch lines. But now you can start selling stickers.

Michael Stelzner

12:27

What do you want to say to those people that are gonna say, Yeah, but 95% of my audience doesn't understand NF T's yet.

Amanda Cassatt

12:35

Totally. In the beginning of Ethereum, getting out there to the public, everyone said to me, no one's ever going to understand how this works. And that's the same thing people said about the internet. And still, nobody understands how it works. We're all using the internet. But most people don't understand how TCP IP works, we can turn on a light switch, but most of us couldn't actually recreate a light bulb, or an electrical socket, the same way people are going to end up using web three artefacts and the blockchain without ever understanding how the blockchain works. It's all about creating an experience for a user that enables them to get really seamlessly on boarded. So what we've actually done with that at Mojito is a gradually custodial Wallet. So the moment that you buy your NFT, with a credit card with crypto, whatever the actual merchant has chosen modularly to enable, it goes into a wallet, even if you don't already have a wallet, you can come in with your web three wallet with your meta mask wallet if you want. Or you can just get served with a wallet right there. And you don't have to handle the private key. You don't have to store anything sensitive. But whenever you get educated about web three, as a user, and start wanting to have a self sovereign wallet, wallet, and you want to start costing your own value, you can take control of that wallet and take it away from us so that we're no longer the custodians, and you're the custodian. And I think these kinds of UX choices for products to create progressive decentralisation and to meet users at every step of their journey is what's really necessary here.

Michael Stelzner

14:11

I love what you're saying here because, you know, to get somebody set up today to buy something. Well, open seat now does accept credit cards or cash or whatever. But for the most part, you got to teach people what the heck is a Metamask wallet, you got to teach them how to go set up a Coinbase account, then you got to teach them how to transfer all this stuff that I mean, it's so complicated, but the days are coming. Because what I'm hearing you say the days are coming where it's all going to be pretty much transparent as long as the consumer knows that they can hold something that is limited supply that is resellable and potentially going up in value. They're probably not going to care what the behind the scenes technology is. Eventually they probably will and they'll want to transfer it into a safer space like a ledger but but this the rapid onboarding of consumers. You see that coming relatively fast,

Amanda Cassatt

15:01

definitely. And I see I see users coming into the space with a lot of different mentalities, right. You're describing a mentality of a user who's coming in, and really thinking of NF T's in a financialized way, and thinking, I'm buying something, but I'm not consuming the funds that I'm using to buy this, I'm actually just parking them here temporarily, because I believe at any moment that I could exit out of this NFT and maybe make a profit on it, but but at least be able to resell it, because there's enough liquidity on demanding this NFT that I could easily do that. And that's certainly a mentality of some consumers in the NFT space. But I would say that as major brands, major sports figures, celebrities, start selling NF T's as products as membership tokens as access cards, to their fan bases, you're also seeing examples of these things serving utility to their audiences, as opposed to being viewed as let's say, a piece of art, or let's say being viewed as a way to park your finances in something that you could exit out of.

Michael Stelzner

16:02

I love that. I love that. I love that perspective. So let's talk about marketing. You have been doing marketing in the web three space longer than anyone that I know. What do the people listening, whether they're marketers or working for businesses, or even creators? What do they need to understand about marketing in the world of web three? How is it different maybe than the world of web two?

Amanda Cassatt

16:29

Yeah, so here's the fundamental kind of paradigm shift of what I think is changing. In Web two and traditional business models, there's a company and the company is making a product, and the product is being sold to consumers and their investors who've invested in the company that benefit from that product being successful. What web three does, or what is the substrate that promises to do or can be used for is collapsing the category of company, consumer and investor into a single economically aligned category called community. And so that word gets splashed around a lot. And it's often used with no meaning. But in the web three space, that's just the description for this amalgamated group that has all of these parts in a single economically aligned unit. And the benefit of this for brands is that you can get the most passionate, engaged community that you've ever had, and the most fandom and the most excitement and the most drive to build your product and to build your community and grow it because everyone can be economically incentive aligned to do that. Look at how the early folks that got into board a yacht club, by virtue of having that economic incentive, and that community incentive, right, it's not all extrinsic motivation and a lot of intrinsic motivation. Look at how they were incentivized to evangelise that collection, and that technology, and that group to the world, and it was so successful. And bitcoin is the same way, right? In theory, and is the same way as as these NFT collections. And that is creating economic alignments, you think about how something like the Bitcoin Blockchain works. Mining is the perfect metaphor. When you're mining on the Bitcoin Blockchain, you're using your computational power to help secure the network. And you're being rewarded with bitcoins. And so you're being rewarded as an individual for doing something that helps the community. And that's the ultimate incentive alignment mechanism and a way to surmount tragedy of the commons problems, and NFT collections designed correctly, if they're, if those mechanisms are designed correctly, can have that same, you know, powerful incentive alignment.

Michael Stelzner

18:50

I want to dig in a little bit on this concept of the investors and the company. And the customers. If I got this right all becomes essentially this amalgamation of this thing called community. It might be hard for some people to wrap their head around that because in you know, traditional business, like I run a traditional business, I've got all my employees, I've got all my 10s of 1000s of customers. I don't have any investors, because I own the business. So I guess I'm the investor.

Amanda Cassatt

19:20

You already collapse categories. Yeah, there you go.

Michael Stelzner

19:23

But how does that how does that like explain how that all kind of comes together? Just so people maybe can wrap their head around that because it sounds cool conceptually, but I don't think it's easy to really understand. Maybe we dig a little deeper on that.

Amanda Cassatt

19:38

Sure. Absolutely. So company, consumer or user and investor. So those all go together in this kind of context, because the company typically does all the work building the product, but in a lot of these ecosystems, the community actually is contributing to the development of the product. And you see that in open source ecosystems, and you see it in, you see it in web two contexts in kind of referral marketing programmes, right. And when you're doing a referral marketing programme, you're using your customers to essentially work for you in some way, and you're paying them in some way to work for you. And it's an acceleration of both of those things. A lot of the projects in this space are open source or partially open source. And so the people that would be the consumers are often actually building some of the technology themselves, and getting rewarded for building that. And so there's a graduated scale between what makes someone a full time employee on the team, versus someone that's actually helping build the product, but isn't a full time employee on that team. And there are some really big platforms for doing this, like Bitcoin, that developers are constantly using to participate in growing these projects

Michael Stelzner

20:54

was that coin like gi T, COI N?

Amanda Cassatt

20:57

Yeah, get coin, it actually spun out of consensus, and is fabulous.

Michael Stelzner

21:04

Hub concept almost a little

Amanda Cassatt

21:06

bit. It's a way for developers to participate and get rewarded for growing open source projects in the ecosystem. And so and so there's that right. And that's a great example. Because the line between someone that's full time on a project and something that's contributing to a project there exists everything across that entire spectrum. And the same exists on a non technical front, right? Like most of the communities on Discord for NFT projects are actually moderated by members of the community. And so if you think about your web, two companies, social media accounts, it's someone who probably works for your company that's running that social media account, or that's moderating some kind of internal channel that you have. Well, a lot of that work is being done in these kinds of discord communities, by individual community members that have spun themselves up and that the, the, the team has decided to align with and reward for doing that moderation work. And then same with what would be called referral, right? A lot of these communities economically align incentives with their users in a way that it makes sense for the user to go out to the market and say, I love this NFT collection. It's awesome. I'm playing this game. And it's amazing. And they're not doing it in like a paid influencer, who often sounds fake or inauthentic. Because they're talking about something that they don't genuinely care about. They authentically genuinely care about the thing we're talking about. They're actually part of the community. And so there's a question of, is that even marketing? Is it? Or is it just getting people excited about something? And I think the, the story with web three marketing is it's not about x marketing activity or y marketing activity. It's about designing self marketing systems. And at that systems design level, if you create something good, you can succeed much more powerfully than if you're doing all the work yourself.

Michael Stelzner

23:02

It's kind of magical, to so many marketers, including myself, right? Because, you know, we've experienced this a little bit in the social marketing world, right, where you might have superfans before web three, who ultimately are super loyal, and always active in your Facebook groups are active on certain social platforms, and they kind of rise up and then maybe, eventually, they become part timers or contractors, and then maybe eventually they become employees. I think at that conceptual level, what's fascinating about this is because everybody who's in the community is invested in the community, generally speaking, right, like they own the token, or they own the NFT to get into the community. So in some regards, their their owners, that makes them an investor. They're passionate about it. Not everyone is but some of them are very passionate about it. And maybe economically incentivized to be passionate about it, because they have a decent sized position for themselves in that community. They want others to know about it. So they naturally begin evangelising, right? Which sometimes happens in the web to world when you have a super customer who just loves the product and creates content and just tells everybody they love it. But it's kind of something you have to cultivate in the web two world really, really strong. And it's very difficult to do. But in the web three world that sounds like it's actually much easier to do because everybody is kind of an owner. And my close totally,

Amanda Cassatt

24:24

you're absolutely right. And let me even describe kind of a mechanism that comes from web three, that we're starting to help web two and companies that we call web 2.5 that are coming into web three execute against it's this idea. That's called a retroactive distribution. So ens famously did this. So if you know what DNS is domain name server ens. Every time you see someone with a dot eath domain, that's because they bought an ens I have Amanda dot eath for example. So what what that

Michael Stelzner

24:59

is, by the way, Oh, yeah, so

Amanda Cassatt

25:01

what what that entity did and what a bunch of other entities have done in the web three space is reward all of their users with a token that those users can go to a website and claim. And they can claim that token in accordance with how much they've previously used that product. And so what you're not doing with a retroactive distribution is selling something to people, what you're doing is rewarding the people that believed in you from the beginning and have been using your product from the beginning. And people in web three, if they use a new product, if they discover a new product, and evangelise it, they expect to eventually down the road be rewarded in that way. And it's the perfect thing to do, it's the perfect way to build community. When you think about building community and web three, what you want to think of it as is, you're descending from a rocket ship, and you're putting down your ladder somewhere on Earth, and you're going to bring a few people with you on to the rocket ship, and then you're going to fly away again. And those are going to be the people you have. So you have to be really thoughtful about who you want on your rocket ship. Because those people are your token holders, and their dynamics and their passion for your platform and your project is going to is going to determine the entire dynamics of the project and whether people buy or sell or hold those kinds of pieces. And so you want to make sure that the people that hold your token, whether it's an NFT non fungible token, or whether it's a fungible token like a coin, you want to make sure that they're really passionate. And using retroactive distribution as a way to make sure that the people that hold it are really passionate. And so just a couple examples of how we've been bringing that to the traditional and the web two world.

Amanda Cassatt

26:38

There's this incredible, very Gen Z focused music brand huge YouTube audience called lyrical lemonade. And what we did is proof of attendance with free claim doubles at an IRL event. On Mojito, those NF T's become multi year passes to the festival, being a holder unlocks token gated merch that just engage the community that already loves this, and allowed them to claim a reward based on based on something that they already love. We did the same thing with the Milwaukee Bucks, right, their fan membership programme, we release NF T's that signal, your membership, which gets you VIP viewing area games, merch discounts. And so that's a whole, you don't have to imagine that with your web through strategy, you have to be selling stuff to your fans, you can be creating value for yourself and your fans by rewarding them for their engagement to date.

Michael Stelzner

27:33

I love this and I'm a moon birds holder and Kevin Rose has kind of a soft,

Amanda Cassatt

27:39

we work with them. We work with proof collective from serotonin.

Michael Stelzner

27:43

Yeah, so they've got kind of a soft sticking metric, right, which is like they basically you take human birds, and you kind of nest them, which is like staking it, you can't resell it, but every X period of time, and I've got six of these Moon birds, you know, they go into different levels. Right and, and he's rewarding people that have held these for certain periods of time with airdrops and other benefits. And I think it was them that did it first, but now I'm starting to see other projects do this right, which is the idea that, hey, you stay with us, you will earn rewards, you know, and 96.7% of moonbird holders have nested their birds. I think this is kind of similar to this retroactive distribution, except it's based on kind of the future. You know, it's kind of exciting.

Amanda Cassatt

28:32

Yeah, I mean, I would consider that almost like, not really like a staking mechanism. Because when you're staking something, you're taking it out of your control temporarily emitting it, you're committing to putting it somewhere. But I think I think it's using the substrate of web three, to do new things that you couldn't before do with your customer base, right? Like you can reward them for keeping something in your wallet, the same way that the board if Yacht Club, distributed eight coins to everyone that held board it at a certain moment in time. And so it made sense to keep that in your wallet, if you felt like they were going to do that kind of distribution. And so a well architected collection or system is going to think about that. What kind of behaviour Do you want to motivate? What do you want people to do? And then make sure they're rewarded for doing those things.

Michael Stelzner

29:25

So, um, when we were preparing for this interview, and I want to talk about how we can actually do some of these things functionally, but we've already kind of got got a little bit of a start. But we were talking about designing a self marketing system. So I would love you to kind of like explain what does that mean? How do we do that? What are some maybe tips or techniques that you might want to recommend when it comes to designing a self marketing system?

Amanda Cassatt

29:49

Sure. So I think it's more of an evolution of in web to marketing or in traditional marketing. We can call this an ambassador programme or a referral programme, but that Almost that concept just gets so much larger in this context, because someone isn't an arm's length ambassador or referrer they really become part of your team and part of your community. And so what we did when we were first on bringing Aetherium to market and popularising it wasn't saying we are Ethereum centralised marketing department and we're going to be pushing out all the information you need to know about a theory I'm Thank you very much. What we did was arm a host of different meetup organisers in different cities around the world with what they needed in order to run coherent meetup groups that would be singing from the same hymnal that would be using some of the same logos and imagery that would have some of the same projects rotating through them talking to different meetup groups around the world about what new was coming on the Ethereum blockchain. And by organising the organisers into a network, we were able to get much more leverage out of our marketing activity out of out of designing a deck or out of funding, you know, one of these groups having beer and pizza or out of having a certain project come through, we were able to get so much more bang for our buck, not because we invested more money in it upfront, but because we fed a grassroots movement, and we put people in charge, we delegated trust, right? We didn't say were the only custodians of our brand name. We're the only ones who can use it. We're saying you are the San Francisco meetup organiser, you're not that because we decided you are you are that because you know, you, you decided that you want it to be that. And now that you are that we're going to arm you with everything you need in order to be more successful. And so I think that bottoms up mentality ends up making your money or your effort work a lot harder than a top down Command and Control mentality or you're trying to maniacally control the expression of an entire brand, which by the way, wouldn't even work for a decentralised system like that. And so with Moon birds, it's really fun because the community has been organising all kinds of meetups themselves. And the and the core team at proof has been enabling that because they really see their role as enabling and facilitating the formation and the growth of these kinds of groups, rather than trying to tamp them down rather than try to say we own the only official group. For example, there's a women's meetup called ladybirds that came about really organically, that they've definitely encouraged and provided support for a tonne. And it's about looking at your community, consumers, but now community, looking at your community, seeing what they're naturally doing, what they're naturally gravitating towards, and accelerating and supporting those tendencies.

Michael Stelzner

32:39

Yeah, this is fascinating, because so many of the different like, like there's, I know, I mean, I'm going to be going to them in birds meet up at NFT. NYC. And I know they got the lady birds. And I know they've got some other ones too, like they've got, you know, certain traits, like the magic hat thing is going to be doing something with David Blaine. The other Yeah, I don't have the magic hat one though, unfortunately. So, but some of the some of the other groups that I'm part of, you know, I'm seeing these traits, forming, like I'm part of the bulls and apes Committee, which is relatively new and and they've got these Captain hats and all these different poker skin ones. And there's poker groups. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to develop little sub communities inside their community of holders, and trying to encourage them to have, you know, live streams, for example, on Twitter, or to have like, smaller gatherings and community kind of stuff. So is the idea of this. What we've been talking about here, the self marketing system, it sounds like at its core, it seems to be watching for the emergence of communities inside the bigger community sub communities. Or, to me a little bit about that. I love

Amanda Cassatt

33:53

that you said the word emergence, because the word emergence comes from nature, right? It's the best thesis people have about the start of their being cellular life, or, you know, a meet an amoeba turning into a bigger amoeba that turns into a little lizard, or tadpole, or whatever, you look for the emergent properties of your group, you look where cell walls are starting to form where amoebas are growing, and you try to see how you can feed those things and how you can give them energy and shape them. And don't feel like you have to control how everything works or how everything shapes out. You have to put the community at the wheel and allow them to do different things, different things from each other to create different things. And you support that and you play with it from the team side, rather than determining everything that happens. And I think that that change in how control works can be a little bit jarring for people coming from web to and from the traditional world. But you just you just end up being subjected to these kinds of new forces that these economic alignments bring it back out, and you want to you want to just encourage them.

Michael Stelzner

35:04

Okay, I'm gonna throw out a couple of words here. And I just want you to like pick whichever one you want to respond to. But discord and Twitter, and media relations and influencers alike, are all things that we use sometimes in web two, but how we think about them, you know, from a web three perspective.

Amanda Cassatt

35:22

Yep. So when you're a brand, and you're starting to sell NF TS or web three artefacts of some sort, if people in web two or the traditional world already know your brand, or are fans of it, then and you're starting to go into web three, chances are that you're going to attract a mix of web two and traditional world natives and web three natives. And so knowing that, I'm sorry, can you repeat that first part of the question?

Michael Stelzner

35:51

Well, actually, just, you know, I just threw out all the different platforms that you're on. Yeah.

Amanda Cassatt

35:59

So knowing knowing that your web three native folks are going to be used to using discord as a chat channel to communicate with each other. And they're going to be used to primarily using Twitter. But your existing audiences are probably going to be used to Instagram depending on what it is or use to Facebook, maybe even Facebook, which still exists, or maybe other platforms. And so it's about meeting your users where they are and making sure that you have content on platforms that aren't usually the web three platforms like Facebook, or like Instagram that really fits the the needs of your non web three native users. And that your content on Discord and on Twitter is really attuned to the needs and desires of web three, because web three really hangs out on Twitter and really hangs out on Discord. Twitter is how you get information top of the funnel. And Discord is when you want to actually enter a community start hanging out with other people start participating in something Discord is where you where you go deep. And I know a lot of new people are being funnelled into discord learning about it for the first time. If you're taking people from your email list or from your Facebook or your Instagram, and you're putting them in discord, you'd better tell them what they can expect there and really prepare them there. And if you look at some of the I think some of the NFT communities that are designed for women first getting into the crypto space are really good at this, like Astro girls like crypto Coven, are really good at segmenting their discord. So it's really clear when you arrive what the rules are what you can do in each chat, why there are different chats. I think the actual setup of your Discord server plays a huge role in what new people to discord for the first time we're going to receive there. And then you can really use Twitter to get crypto and web web three native folks, I'd recommend partnering with web three native influencers and brands. I think Adi das and product did a great job partnering with G money who's a web three native influencer and board a yacht club, I think they're gonna be so many more collabs between web three native brands and influencers and web two and traditional companies. We've done a lot of that actually with Sotheby's who we've worked with from the very beginning. And so I think I think they're going to be some exciting sort of mash ups there.

Michael Stelzner

38:19

I want to talk about Sotheby's in a minute, but how do people find web three influencers? What's your tips on like, how to even know where to find them?

Amanda Cassatt

38:29

Yeah, so um, crypto Twitter is the best place to learn about web three, I believe and to find out who's influential there. And in the English speaking market. In Asian markets, I think in the Korean market, Japanese market, Mandarin speaking market, it's a little bit different. I think most genuine web three communities find it pretty inauthentic to have some kind of paid influencer shilling the the community or the platform. And so what's really important is to find spokespeople that actually just love the product, and that care about it, and that would care about it. And so I think if you're trying to find web three influencers, you should reach out to them, DM them on Twitter and say, Hey, would you be are you interested in this? Can we have a conversation? And really talk to them person to person and say, Is this a project that you're interested in? And if they want to contribute to it and genuinely want to be part of it, maybe they would also help talk about that project publicly. What kind of doesn't work and what rubs the real kind of core of the market wrong and feels inauthentic is if you pay an influencer to speak about your web three project that feels like someone that probably wouldn't care about web three.

Michael Stelzner

39:44

What's the best method just to basically immerse yourself into the community and kind of see who the active participants are and maybe show them off your product and see if they get excited and maybe they become somehow working with you in that kind of capacity?

Amanda Cassatt

39:59

I would say crypto Twitter is just the best education I think so there's some great podcasts you can listen to. I think the defiant by CAMI Russo is fabulous. I think NFT now with Matt med bed and Alejandro Nava is just fabulous, I think a bank lists with David Hoffman, overpriced JPEGs with Carly Riley, I think there's some great niche or specialised media outlets to learn about this more, I think you start following the people that are on those, and that are hosting those on what's called crypto Twitter. And you follow more of the people they follow, you let the algorithm do its thing I hate to say and it'll it'll serve you more of that kind of content, you'll meet more people in the space. And maybe you can start communicating with them. And and start participating in the space and meeting them that way. Also, join some actual NFT communities, join some discord servers, get to know the people there, get to know the moderators get to know how it works, learn by doing a lot of times we have people reach out to us saying we want to do this web three strategy, or we have this NFT idea. And and the question is, do you own any NF T's? The best way to get to know this substrate is to start to work with it in a really lightweight way.

Michael Stelzner

41:18

Give us a little bit about give us just a minute or so on what you've done for Sotheby's. It's just so yeah.

Amanda Cassatt

41:23

So it's so cool. Southern piece was founded in 1741. It was the first auction house. And so we're not talking about web two to web three transformation. We're talking about a company that has existed since the 18th century, selling art. And they were obviously really interested in getting into NF Ts. We started working with them at seratonin on the marketing side, helping them with their entry into web three. And they were working with one of these third party marketplaces, and they wished they could sell NF t's on their own own website. The same way they sell Sotheby's handbags or some of these wines. They wanted to sell digital goods on their own site. And so we actually originally built Mojito learning from their team, what they would want in terms of that product. And now they have the entire set of BS Metaverse platform. If you look if you Google Sotheby's Metaverse, they'll go to a site that is powered by Mojito that sells NF T's in a free standing marketplace. And they can and they can sell NF T's there as easily as a CMS with all of those built in capabilities, like tax assessment like customer retargeting, all of the different parts that enable an enterprise, a very regulated enterprise, to be able to, to be able to sell NF T's. And that was really the first of its kind. And because of that work, they were actually listed in the Forbes 50 Top enterprises using Blockchain. They were listed on the time 100 list of most influential companies, which is extraordinary for their Pioneer ship in the space. And within just a few months of being live. On Mojito, they've done over $100 million of sales on the platform. So the reception was extraordinary. And the kind of takeaway, the kind of takeaway for, for other brands and traditional companies looking to get into web three is, how do you take the poetry of what makes your brand and what you do so successful, which in the case of Sotheby's is curation at the very highest level? And how do you weave a poetry with that, and the new capabilities enabled by web three to bring to market an offering that's that that brings something new into web three, and that grows web web three. So we always say the Northstar of a great web three strategy is does this strengthen and augment the existing web three community and having the endorsement of Sotheby's having Sotheby's curate art and say, this is worthy of the Sotheby's brand. And it's being sold as an NFT and web three, that really added a lot of endorsement and substance with the credibility of that brand to the entire web three and NFT movement. And so it really moved the needle for everyone. And we took them even further actually into the metaverse. There's a web three enabled Metaverse that we actually work with it seratonin called decentraland, one of the absolute leaders in that space, and we build a look alike version of the Southern auction house in New York City in decentraland. And people can actually go there and people can watch auctions there, and they can bid on auctions from there. And we've seen so much actual activity happening there. There were more people watching in there for recent sales, then then in the actual physical, New York location. And so I would say to all brands that the southern V's example is a power More demonstration of how the metaverse is a new location for commerce. It we're moving from Madison Avenue into the metaverse

Michael Stelzner

45:09

Amanda Cassatt This is amazing. You are absolutely a rockstar. If people want to reach out to you on the socials or they want to connect with your company, do you have a place that you want to send them?

Amanda Cassatt

45:21

Absolutely. So Amanda dot E or at Amanda Cassatt CAS s a TT is my Twitter handle. seratonin is our marketing and professional services company. We do marketing for web three companies and also big brands that are looking to enter web three. Check that out serotonin Dotco feel free to shoot me a note at amanda@serotonin.co. Mojito, our NFT infrastructure spin out is at Mojito dot XYZ feel free to message me about that as well or get in touch on the website.

Michael Stelzner

45:55

Yeah, and Mojito is moj it oh, just for those that you

Amanda Cassatt

45:59

know, the reason we called it Mojito is because Mojito is our momenti. And for a while our tagline was the sweetest way to MIT. So you know, Mojito like the drink Moji T O dot XYZ.

Michael Stelzner

46:12

Amanda, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us. We're better because of it.

Amanda Cassatt

46:16

Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you for having me on and see you at NFT NYC

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