Justin, how are you? Doing well. Thanks for having me. Yeah, welcome to Block by Block. I've been excited to do this for a while. I've been following the work that you've been doing with Safari and with the community. Let's begin with kind of going back to the very, very beginning. Like, where'd you grow up? I grew up in the Bay Area. Really, where, where? in Berkeley, California. Berkeley, cool. I was born in the Philippines, but grew up in Walnut Creek. just in the East Bay from you. So that's neat. So the holidays are coming up and undoubtedly your family and your parents are praying to ask you like, what have you been up to, Justin? Like, how do you explain Safari to your mom? The way that I explained Safari to my mom and those that are not in the crypto space is that I tell them that I run a data analytics company that helps crypto teams and that I run a community of the best marketers in the crypto space. So I try to abstract all the crypto away and keep it to its core, which is a community of marketers and a data analytics platform. Cool. Do they ask you follow up questions like, what do mean by any of that? Yeah, usually people ask me what I mean by the data analytics platform part of it, because that can be so broad, right? I want to keep it like 101 at the very beginning. So when I explain more deeply into that, I say, well, you know, we're trying to help these crypto teams understand who their customers are and whether their marketing campaigns are successful or not. I love that. think keeping it simple for both not just like out of crypto, but people within crypto, just keeping the narrative and the story simple. As I was reading your background, was really surprised at how similar our backgrounds are. I too worked at a two-sided marketplace. I actually founded one. It was a tutoring marketplace that I eventually sold to a Fortune 500 company. And then I also... as you know. Yeah, yeah, it's quite an exciting business. It's super fragmented and opportunities are just really immense in these types of marketplaces. I also work for an interviewing video AI interviewing company. And I know you did something similar at... That's right. That's right. And also at the marketplace for... No, sorry. It was for warehouse workers. What was it called? Monolo? Is that right? Monolo. So I think our backgrounds are quite similar in the Web2 world and then now we're both in the Web3 space. I know you've explained in other podcasts how you got into Web3. I'd love to hear maybe something that you haven't shared, how you got into Web3 and what really got you interested in it. Yeah, I think that, you know, that's an interesting question to think about what I haven't shared. for us, we, me and my co-founder dove in to the web before we got into web three, we, we're trying to found another one of these data marketplaces, basically for web two. and so was really leaning on my background that you just discussed of, trying to solve, labor marketplace challenges. and. Then we realized that we weren't going to be the ones to solve hiring is a really tricky thing. And we thought we had a unique take on it, but it wasn't going to reach us to product market fit. soon realized. So, you know, when we were looking at web three, was kind of the hot issue, like the hot topic at the time, like AI is now. So naturally our, as we were waiting around looking for ideas, we, found ourselves looking at web three more deeply. And then that's when a lot of sort of the flavors of my backgrounds, the stars started to align, but it was, it was by no means an easy transition. And at the time I really had like sort of a identity crisis around like, am I a crypto person? You know, like, what does that, what does that mean? And what does it mean for me to found a company in this space versus founding a company in a space that I had spent many, many years before that in the labor marketplace space building in. So. It was quite the transition and I think it is for many people, although most don't talk about that. Yeah, it definitely was for me. How'd you get over the identity crisis? I think you just realized, you know, like so much of one's identity is wrapped up in work and what they do. and so that was such a big piece of, of my life, but just the longer I stayed in the space, the more it started to become part of my identity. But in the early, early, maybe some people know this, some people who know, know me from the beginning know this, but many listeners might not is that. I actually started my journey in crypto as a pseudonymous anonymous content creator under the pseudonym Jackie. And so that sort of enabled me to start putting my ideas out there in a way that wasn't like Justin Vogel. And that sort of like used the transition of my identity into the space. And then once I really liked it more and more than I was like, okay, now it's time to. to dox myself and just be one person and not two. What was that reveal like when you went from J.K. to Justin Vogel? Was there a big announcement or you just eased into it? Yeah, not really. I mean, I still have a PFP as my profile, but I have my full name on Twitter now. So it wasn't a big reveal. Those that knew me because, I mean, I think a lot of it was that the transition was natural. Like it was hard to be an anonymous community leader. So a lot of the people within my circle already knew like who I was. And so it's just about being more public about that on Twitter. Yeah. Now the transition from Web2 growth marketing to Web3, I mean, that's a big transition for a lot of us that are in growth roles, whether it be marketing, business development or community. What are some big differences that you see between Web2 growth versus Web3 growth? I I mean, one of the biggest ones is just the style of growth that's done. Web2, Web2 growth became very, very mature and sophisticated over the course of like the 2010s and early 2020s. And as a result, the style of growth that we see there is like highly scalable paid acquisition using big marketing technology systems to analyze, understand, segment. message and do all the different communications that one can do with users. And by contrast, Web3 is very immature. Marketing attribution didn't exist when I first got into crypto. Metrics are still very fuzzy and trying to figure out what teams should be tracking. And also the communication channels, the distribution channels are much less sophisticated as well. In crypto, we basically just have Twitter. and there some ad networks and other types of channels that are rising and falling over time. But in, the web two land, there are infinite numbers of acquisition channels for you to target, different types of users, specific segments of users. however, down deep down, you want to target it's available in web two in a way that it isn't quite yet that mature in web three. So I think that overall I see it as a maturity. difference of we're just in a really immature market versus Web2 is very mature marketing environment. Yeah, I agree with all of that. One of the frustrating things for me is I'm always asking the question, like, which of these channels is working? And how do I know that? And where can I put more gas on the fire? And being able to answer those questions in Web3 is really, really hard. Related to that is it's also difficult to kind of arrive and have the entire project or company kind of agree on what are some of the key outcome metrics or outcome indicators that we really care about. And for a lot of projects in Web3, there's not, that it's not super clear. And so in situations where you're a Web3 project that I guess in some situations, if you're a layer one, for example, one of the key metrics is developers and apps that are building on your chain. That's really important. And I've been in work with several layer ones where that's been the key metric in other projects where DeFi, example, DeFi is, know, TVL, though it's, think a vanity metric is still an important one. But in other projects where there's not like a clear product, the token becomes the product. And so, I guess in, in situations like that, like what does growth marketing look like where the project doesn't quite have a product. It has a community, but it has a token, but they're still kind of building the product. Yeah, I think that this is a really interesting and unique factor that we thought a lot about at Safari. When we originally conceived of creating a marketing technology platform, we thought, just like in Web2, like, it could be used by any crypto team out there. But you soon realize exactly what you've come to, which is there are a lot of companies that have a community, a social presence, but they don't actually have a product. until they have that, that token and that live platform. Like for example, you know, we take for granted that in web two, if you exist, you have a product, right? Like you have a product, you have a funnel, like you need to like drive revenue. That's the game. Right. But I think that, and I believe we'll probably get to this later on is the game is not fully just that in crypto because we're an immature, industry. There are other signals of mind share and other things that that matter too. And there are companies that can be very, very successful at having mindshare that have no product at all. and that has its own sort of experience within, how we think about those companies. for example, Monad and Bear chain, right? They are large scale teams that have significant mindshare, but they still don't have a product yet. they are going to at some point in time, but in web two, there weren't really examples of. these types of things of companies with large scale influence that didn't have also people using their products. So I think that the game is different in crypto. is mind share in the beginning and then conversion later as the project matures. But yeah, there's this whole initial phase that didn't really exist in Web2. Yeah, we'll definitely get into that. You're alluding to the article that you guys, that you published last week, I believe, from measurable to memorable, the evolution of crypto marketing, which I found really fascinating. And I wanted to get into that a bit later. You mentioned funnels. How do you think of funnels in Web3? I imagine as the creator of the Safari platform, customer data platform, how, when you're working with clients or potential clients and they ask you like, we don't really, we haven't really defined our funnel. How do you help them do that? Yeah, it's a very common challenge. It's funny, like in, web two lands companies, because the funnels are clear, they have a good sense of what they want to track. And then, you know, you go in and set that up technically, but for a lot of our clients using our platforms, exactly as you said, is we have to do a lot of hand halting and consultation to say like, okay, like let's look at your website together. Like what should the funnel look like? And then once we agree on like what the funnel should look like for you, we go in and. and help them track it. We see a lot of different types of funnels and I think it depends on the maturity of the company at that time. For many sort of that have a live product, it looks very familiar in the Web2 sense, right? It's like, how do you go from social channels or different acquisition channels to your website to doing the engagement action or activation metric that they ultimately care about? But where it gets a lot trickier is for those companies that don't yet have a product or their product is still sort of like in early beta or test net. And so a lot of that time we see companies go from social to community to maybe a product or maybe to like a landing page, like a wait list campaign. And I think that that is much more common. And then the question becomes. What is the conversion metric if you don't have a product yet? And is it, how do you influence the rise and fall of token prices when you don't have a place, central place where they might go buy your token that enables you to collect first party data on the token buyers beyond just on chain. So there are a lot of different nuances for what these things could look like and do look like. But oftentimes that is the most fundamental challenge that a lot of growth theaters have is in the absence of a traditional product funnel experience, what does success look like for us? Yeah, I know for me it's been super frustrating. I come from the world where we had really sophisticated branching and progressive profiling. I love progressive profiling. You learn so much about your customer through additional questions that they can answer over time with landing pages that are bespoke to them with a video, like a welcome video just for them. The sophistication of web two is so amazing. but you don't really see any of that or a lot of that is hard to do in web three. One of the reasons is because of the ethos of privacy and web three, right? Like we value privacy, self sovereignty. And in some of these things that we, we typically do in web two are kind of viewed as bad taste or, or not, not very favorable on web three. how do you balance the, the the challenge of privacy versus attribution. How do you deal with that? How do you work with clients that have the same concerns? How do you help them? Yeah, this is something that we thought about from the very early days. We actually are first engineer that we hired. Our lead data engineer, Ricardo, has a PhD in differential privacy. So privacy is something that we thought about deeply and hired for from the very beginning of the company. There are a few, I've mentioned this before on other podcasts, but we... really see privacy, not as like a binary of like you're either like infringing on privacy or you're not, but it's really a spectrum. And so the question is like, where do each individual company fall on that spectrum in the bull market? It was interesting to see the last bull market. A lot of companies were promoting privacy on the surface, but heavily infringing on private user privacy in the background. They were not necessarily using tracking tools like Google Analytics, but they were doing intense data mining and buying third party lists and enriching that data and doxing users behind the scenes in massive Google spreadsheets. And that was kind of like an interesting, inconvenient truth for what was going on. And this was also not necessarily going on by marketers. This was often going on by devs creating these lists and doing different things. In crypto, often see people being more privacy centric in like a true way today than they were in the past when people actually thought that things were more privacy centric, if that makes sense. But there are a few different things within our platform that we try and do from a privacy centric standpoint. The first is that we don't use any cookies in our tracking script. We have an alternative tracking methodology that's more privacy centric. and then the other big thing that we do within our tracking script is, a lot of tracking scripts that are out there collect, the IP address and location of the user every single time they log into a website or connect to a website. we think that that is bad. and so, we, but we also recognize that marketers need to understand location data for, a wide variety of purposes. It can be quite important. So basically we take a middle ground approach where we say, we look at the IP the first time a user connects to a website. We say, you are from that place. and then we never look at your IP again. and so this can be, obviously there are potentials for inaccuracy there. You Pete could be visiting your family in the Philippines when you first connect to Uniswap.com and we say, he is from the Philippines always versus you're actually often in Walnut Creek or somewhere else. And so that is one sort of like trade off that we make to say like, generally speaking, where is this person from? But we are not going to log their location IP every single time they connect to this website. So that's just sort of like a tangible example for how you can be. gathering the type of information you need for marketing while also not like heavily infringing on user privacy, in my opinion. And the IP question is really tricky, especially in Web3, since most of us probably use VPN just to protect our own privacy. I know in the past, one very important kind of task that I've done is like, I want to know where my community members are live so that when we are in events or we need ambassadors, then we can actually where we have the most concentration of community members. And so it's important to know where people live by city so that we can have events there. We can have ambassadors that can organize events. Like that's really important from a community building standpoint. And the way I've tackled that is rather than looking at where people are coming from, because by the way, most web three people don't even visit the project's website, right? So it's like also really frustrating. I in, in either telegram or discord, wherever the community sits, I typically do a, like just a, just a survey, anonymous survey, just like, where do you live? and then, and part of that survey is then asking like, you know, if we were to hold an event or would you be like, would you mind volunteering to be an event organizer, et cetera? And that's often, you know, using, asking them for permission and it's anonymous survey. That's been very helpful in. kind of creating communities in where they live versus looking at IP data, which is often not very helpful anyway. is that something that, like, what do you think of that approach? Is that something that you've seen done elsewhere? Yeah, I mean, I think that it kind of goes back to what you're saying with progressive profiling. I think that that's one of the most like ethical ways to collect information is just to ask your users. Obviously there could be inaccuracies there. People naturally lie or whatever, what have you, but I think that that is an ethical way to collect data. We actually, so back when like Farcaster frames was all the rage, we built our own Farcaster native attribution to collect data and enrich it. through there and so many of our clients were creating Farcaster frames to ask their users questions. And when a user interacted with the frame, that would naturally tie their answers to their wallet and their Farcaster ID. So it became a very clear attributable way to do data collection. And to ask their users questions and get them to do different things. So I think that, you know, we saw that a lot was, you know, farcaster frames, whether it was great for conversions or not, dependent on the clients, but a lot of them found like really rich ways to understand and enrich the data sets that they had through launching different like fun, farcaster frame games and campaigns and questions. And so I think that. Probably we'll continue to see more of these types of things as a bridge similar to how you did it to say, how can we respect privacy by asking users and if they want to answer, they can answer. And if not, they don't, but helps us gather more first party data on our clients. That's right. I've actually never used Farcaster. I've heard some good things about it. I just, I'm actually surprised it hasn't taken off like, I think initially we all thought it would. That's definitely something I need to look into because I think it might be good to have some presence on there. It sounds like it has a lot of features. It has some features that you don't see on X that could be very interesting for marketers. Speaking of, know, farcasters and also other kind of tech stack or channel questions, what are some, I guess, for Web3 tech stack for growth marketers, and feel free to talk about Safari in this, you know, what are some tech stacks that you've seen that have worked well and is effective for marketers? Yeah. this is definitely where Safari's platform comes in. so we call Safari's platform a customer data platform. but it has a lot of different elements baked under the hood in that. what I think that to like scroll out instead of just, she likes Safari's platform. think that what companies fundamentally need is they need marketing attribution of some kind. So for those that are listening, marketing attribution basically means how do I know that this channel led to this outcome of some conversion. So the basic question that attribution is answering is, what I'm doing working and why? They also need to be able to have a place that they can understand and build deeper profiles of their users, to see what they're doing, what they're trying, are they activating, are they falling off? What does that mean? And they need a way to understand whether their top of funnel channels, whether that's Twitter or something else, are working for them, either just on the awareness front, but we're also on the conversions front. And I think that, the very basic tech stacks that we tend to see are people are using Twitter native analytics, which I think, you know, work well if that's, part of your stack, they use some sort of, multi account, and Twitter scheduling cross-posting tool. I personally use Typefully for that to both cross-post across Twitter and LinkedIn is a successful channel for us as a B2B company. And with Typefully, are you able to track that inside of Safari? so we, TypeFly is basically just, a tool to schedule and put out posts. so then we track the posts from the Twitter side, into like what happens in the website and so on and so forth, if that makes sense. Yeah, I guess what I was asking is where do you put the Safari tags? that in when you post inside of Typefully? is it from X when you connect, I'm guessing you probably connect X to Safari, that way every post is already tagged. Yeah, so actually, we don't need to put something within Twitter. We put the tags on the company's website, all over all the things that they want to track. And then naturally our tag, when somebody comes from Twitter to that website, it naturally picks that up. So it's on their website side rather than on the Twitter side. On Twitter though, we also have our own Mindshare product. so they don't need to connect their Twitter or anything or authenticate anything. We can just get that information directly from Twitter. So they say like, we want to track the block by block Twitter page. And so then they just like write that in and then Safari starts pulling that data naturally. I see. Now in a situation where, let's say, let's pick a specific use case. Let's say my funnel looks like this. I have users that follow us on Axe and from Axe I want them to join our Telegram channel. And from within Telegram, I want them to buy your token. How does the Safari customer data platform help inform and help me better understand how I'm doing with that specific funnel use case. For sure. we, we're not yet on Telegram. so this is a tricky funnel for us, but I can describe another funnel. Imagine Telegram was your website instead. users follow you on X. they go to your website, they connect their wallet, they buy a token or they do make a swap. in that funnel, We would have your Safari script all over the website. And then we would also match up. We have a, in in the, in the behind the scenes of Safari's product, we have a matching between Twitter users and wallet addresses. And so we'd be able to say these people who have connected their wallets to your website also follow you on Twitter or also follow you on Farcaster. And then you can do a matching between this is a user that came to our website, follows us on Twitter, and actually made the swap or bought this token that we care about and connect all those things together. So the full sort of mapping of both the user journey from Web2 to Web3, but also the matching and connecting of Web2 to Web3 identities of a Twitter to a wallet. Got it. Okay, that makes sense. And what you're sharing also highlights kind of the difficulty in Web3. As I mentioned, in many projects, our website visitors was very low and most terminated after Telegram or Discord, and then we kind of didn't know what happened to them after that. And so getting them to the website would be very, very helpful. What, I guess what... tactics have you seen that gets people from, you know, these top of funnel channels like Telegram and Discord to the projects website? Yeah, I think it all depends on what type of project is, but like, let's just assume for this example that it's like a DEX. So like consumer facing, retail facing platform. We see the different styles and this is actually what made me very bullish on Farcaster is that you could do the full attribution journey all within Farcaster without having a website. that like sort of The example of flow that you described with Telegram could be done with Farcaster instead of Telegram. Somebody follows your page on Farcaster, they go in and they click to swap within the Farcaster feed and they buy that, but it's all fully attributable within the Farcaster ecosystem and on chain. So that I think is like kind of the magic of crypto and attribution and marketing coming together within Farcaster, but obviously It is not as clean within the larger funnel and user journey that we see in crypto. Sorry, I now lost my train of thought for what we're what the example question you were actually asking that was. the, I guess the user journey, like what tactics have you seen to encourage users to go from a top of funnel channel like discord and telegram to the website. Yeah. You know, a lot of it comes down from incentives, incentive, like promotional posts of different offers or exciting things. A lot of people direct users to the blog instead if they have like interesting announcements or like thought leadership. And then from there, people make their way to the actual website. But I think that, you know, and this kind of goes back to my piece, think that we're still in a mind share moment. And so a lot of companies are not actually trying to get users to go to a website and convert. They're just trying to influence them to think about them more and talk about them more. then through that conversions inevitably follow. But that is the type of growth activities that happen in a small market. a small user market where influencing individuals matters a lot and not a scale market, which hopefully we will be in soon where conversions matter much more. Yeah, you, you bring up a really interesting point, driving people to the blog. I've been in many internal discussions with, with multiple projects where kind of dogma takes over and they don't want to have a blog on the website URL. Instead, they, push them to medium or to mirror. And for, as a marketer, that's really frustrating because I want visitors to go from my post on X. click the link, come to the website and read the blog. Then I know that, okay, this Twitter post worked because now they're reading on the blog and now I've tagged them. Now I can hopefully retarget them at some point, but at least they've now been on the website. And that's always been frustrating to have those internal discussions where one side is very kind of dogmatic on the privacy side. Whereas I want to be very pragmatic and actually do right by my customers, or by my, by the users. But to do that, I need to know what's working, what's not, where are they going? And how can I best serve them? And, but I need some information. How do you deal with situations like that? It kind of goes back to the privacy question again. Yeah, for me, I think that this is, this is sort of the challenging world that we, find ourselves in now, is that one of my hot take learnings from building our marketing attribution platform, which is now morphed into a customer data platform. One of the reasons for that big shift is link, what I call like link based attribution. like you go on Twitter, you click a link that takes you to the website. that flow is largely dying. In my opinion, it's dying in crypto because users are really scared to click links that don't look exactly like the project's domain. But it's also dying in web too, because social platforms don't want people to click a link that takes them out of the platform. And so we're increasingly seeing and hearing about companies like Twitter and other social networks that are deprioritizing posts that have links that take people off the platform in them. And so what does a marketer to do in that environment? Well, these platforms are smart. They provide alternatives, AKA Twitter doesn't want you to go to an external blog. They want you to post an article within Twitter instead. And so I think that that is also why kind of Some of the scalable web two tactics that worked in the past and marketing systems that worked in the past aren't really working anymore. If you can't take people off of Twitter, to, to like get them to the next stage of the funnel, then how do you adjust and, and, adjust within that environment? And I think it for a lot of teams right now, it means exploring, you know, having your blog live on Twitter. you have a blog that's separate, that that's like searchable, that's on your website. but you also just like copy paste the same exact content within Twitter as well so that you don't either have your post go nowhere because it has a link or like people naturally like drop off. So I think that's the big challenge that a lot of marketers find themselves in, not just within crypto, but beyond crypto is that these top of funnel channels are becoming closed ecosystems. And it's very hard to get people back to your website. Yeah. And you highlight one of the big problems that I see in attribution. I think this comment is in general, not just in web three, but just in general. And also the dynamic between mobile and... Most people are on, I think, and I haven't seen the data, but I'm guessing most people are on X or Telegram or Discord mobile. And so being able to... to follow them from mobile to, I can just imagine that attribution becomes very, very difficult in two different environments as well as in a whole different industry like web three. Speaking of, I imagine you've seen, you've been part of, led and have seen lots of campaigns and this is both web two and web three. What's one campaign that you're especially, proud of and or learned a lot from. It could be there be a campaign that you led yourself or one you've seen a client execute on. Would love to hear some details on that. Yeah, I think that the, one that comes to mind most for me is, our basically like when we started in, in crypto, we realized that we knew we wanted to build a marketing platform of some kinds. And obviously that evolved over time. but we realized we couldn't just like launch it out into the market because the market didn't exist. Like there was not a web three growth industry. There were web three growth people. but none of them knew each other. There wasn't any content that was written about Web3 growth. A lot of that has changed in the last three years, but on the community side, our mission really became how do we create an industry around Web3 growth and what are the components of the industry and how do we get other people to recognize that? The thing that was really the turning point campaign for that, that I think really manifested in the creation of this Web3 growth industry that now we all take for granted was Safari putting out our Loom Escape-esque market map where we basically categorized all of the different Web3 growth tooling companies and agencies into their own categories and said, hey, look everyone, you might not have been noticing, but there are hundreds of companies that are doing all sorts of different things. They're creating this Web3 marketing space and there are hundreds of marketers as well. and like, sort of like putting, putting a map together, put us as Safari, but also put, the category, of, of Web3 growth and marketing on the map. And I think that there are a few interesting things that I learned from this content piece that now we've run back a few different times, that are deeply psychological, but I didn't necessarily understand at the time, which is this content type of content has always hit for us. So I tried to figure out why, right? The obvious why is like one, when we first launched, it was like, this is the unique insight, right? I think unique insights always perform well, which is no one had mapped this, this market before in the way that we did, but even deeper than that on the, on a psychological level, every logo that was on the map was as soon as we put that out there, they're incentivized to share it right there. Like We're featured, look at us, vanity, we love it, you know, we're a legit company. So they all share, right? Then there are all the companies that we didn't put on the map for whatever reason. We didn't know about them. We couldn't find them. We didn't think they were legit. All these people are now commenting being like, I can't believe you forgot us. Why are we not on the map? Right? So you have like the in people, the out people, those people are both like driving insane amounts of traffic, right? To this content piece. and then you have. you know, all the people who are just curious and want to learn, who don't know these unique insights. And so I feel like there's this trifecta that we see of like basic user psychology, that made this campaign particularly successful. So our original map got well over 250,000 organic impressions on, on Twitter alone. and our other maps have continued to see, like immense traction, on social. So. I think that whenever anyone thinks about a campaign, there are a lot of different channels that people leap to and from in crypto, whether that's referrals or quests or ad networks or other things. But I think fundamentally they need to think about like, why would somebody engage with this content or not? And I think that I can't say that I'm a marketing genius. I realized a lot of this after the fact of you know, why did this thing hit versus other things didn't hit? So that was one successful campaign for, you know, basically creating the industry that we all know of the Web3 growth. I love the market maps that you guys have built. For me, they've been super helpful because a lot of these logos and brand names I hadn't heard of before. Thinking of the market map campaign in the Web2 world, I would have probably put out just the map and then, but then accompany it with a downloadable PDF that I would gate behind some kind of form. and then that PDF would be super detailed. how do you think that campaign, a campaign like that would have worked in web three? You think it would be very beneficial or successful? Yeah, it's so hard to know, right? Like we, we didn't get it. It's available on our website. obviously with those types of campaigns, you collect email addresses. I think that it certainly could be successful, especially if the content was good enough. but I feel like a lot of those web two style reports are getting kind of generic. Like it doesn't feel like unique insights anymore. and for us, at least at that time, you know, we were. pre-product at that time. Our goal, it was interesting actually, maybe this is a unique insight people don't know about this map is the original intention for this map was we were two founders that had bootstrapped Safari with our own life savings as the community to start, but we needed to raise funds. And we always wanted to build a product, but we couldn't build a product with our personal life savings. So the idea, the original idea for the market map was We don't know all the investors that are interested in the web three growth space, but maybe we could create a market map of companies, investors and people. and we've put out this post basically being like, if you're an investor interested in the web three growth space and you want to be on this market map, like enter your name here. Right. It was like crickets. It was like nothing, nobody. And that made me realize actually there aren't investors interested in the web three growth space because nobody knows the space exists. Right. Right? And then when we did the post about the companies, then we started getting all sorts of like companies that we also had never heard of before. They were like, wow, like there are a lot of, a lot of us in the space. And then we put it out and then all of a investors started coming to us and being like, wow, this is super interesting. This really hot space. Like we're like, yeah, we know. But like for a lot of people, it just came out of thin air that we had started documenting this for, for a long time beforehand. So that was very beneficial for us. creating our own narrative and our own industry and space that helped us fundraise in a very difficult post-FTX world. But yeah, I think that was a big piece of it. That's cool. your that campaign also led to introductions to investors from which you eventually raised capital. that what you're saying? direct inbound from investors wanting to first learn more about this space that they hadn't heard of before, but to, yeah, our lead investor came to us inbound, for example, like they sent us an email and then it was, yeah, it was good. That's really, really cool. I'm intrigued by this campaign, because you see campaigns a lot like that in the Web2 space. What if all of those logos that you put on the market map, you held interviews with each of them, and then you PDF-ized those interviews, and then put that behind a form? for, like, who would the... who would be attracted to that kind of PDF? think other marketers, of course. But I think potentially investors too, that might be looking for places to invest in. What do you think of that approach? No, think that that's, that's definitely a great one. We kind of do a light version of that. When we put out our, our market maps now, the most recent two had like a 10 page report with them that goes into like each of the different categories. What's changed, what's interesting, what's exciting. and the way that we do that is we basically go to the founders that we think are the most interesting in that category and say like, what competitors are we missing of yours? What is. interesting that you're working on what is not working in the space. And so we kind of synthesize all of those things together to create these like really rich, concise nuggets on what each of the categories are doing. But I agree. think it could be more interesting maybe for, those that want to go really deep to, yeah, create interviews of these, people's thoughts, on each space that they want to go deep on because, know, a lot of Web3 growth today, as we've talked about already, is really a change in behavior, a change in style of growth for many marketers. So it's not just like, I want to try this new channel. It's like, I want to understand why this new channel is going to work for us. Or I want to understand like, is it cutting edge and what is the philosophy behind this channel? And can I use it in a way that my competitors haven't even thought about yet? Right. So I think that there's, because we're in a nascent immature space. People do want to know more from these growth tooling founders about the philosophy of their channels and what's coming next. And I think there's so much opportunity. mean, for someone just coming into the Web3 space and who's in charge of growth and marketing and business development, it could be incredibly frustrating, especially with the kinds of sophisticated campaigns that one is used to in the Web2 space and Web3 space. It's just totally different. And I think that market map campaign that you have is really, really helpful. Not only is it unique insight, but it's a really good kind of like, here's how you get started and here are all the players that you could be looking at and here's the tech stacks you could have. Like that's super helpful for really anybody, but especially for people that are just getting into marketing at a Web3 company. I wanna go to the article that you guys published last week or two weeks ago, why mind share matters in the bear market. It's actually, it's titled From Measurable to Memorable, The Evolution of Crypto Marketing. And then the section that I want to talk about is why mindshare matters in the bear market. I want to read this section and then get your reaction to it. And then maybe you can have a discussion. Is that okay? Okay. In a bear market, the crypto industry operates at a smaller scale. The audience is primarily composed of insiders. developers, builders, and investors who are deeply entrenched in the space. For many projects, particularly L1 and L2 blockchains, there are no traditional conversion points like buy now buttons or direct customer funnels. Their success depends on being the platform of choice for these key players. This is where mindshare becomes critical. Projects that dominate the narrative in their niche are more likely to attract attention, build trust, and secure relevance. Metrics like ShareVoice, narrative dominance and sentiment analysis have been essential for marketing for measuring success in this environment. I think you hit it spot on. I want to talk about, first of all, what's your reaction and maybe anything else you'd like to add. And then I want to talk about metrics like share a voice and narrative dominance and how one can measure that because for as a marketer, I've had a really hard time figuring that out. I think there's some tools inside of Telegram. There are hardly any tools inside of Discord that can be helpful, but Telegram can be very helpful in measuring kind of words and frequencies, but it's very crude. It just doesn't work out really. But metrics like Share Voice would be very interesting in how one can go about measuring that. But anyway, let's go to maybe what else could you add to what I just read? Yeah, I think that this really came from a deep understanding of where the companies are today. We kind of alluded to this earlier in the podcast, but we take for granted that companies and crypto have a product. And if they don't have a product, then mindshare becomes the thing that you can measure and can track. And ultimately what becomes important, like why, if you're a game, do you choose to go with Avalanche versus Ronin versus, you know, a different blockchain. You first have to know that those blockchains exist and do those things and that's marketing. But you're probably not going to like go onto their website and like go through like a, like a traditional funnel to like sign up and like, cause that's like your whole company's future can depend on which blockchain you decide to run on. And so yeah, I'd say that. one of my observations and I think that we're, still kind of like locked. think that the challenge that we've seen, especially in the bear market is that people really just zeroed in on the core people that were around during that time and forgot about everybody else. And I think that that is a pretty grave marketing mistake, but shows why things are the way that they are, right? That we're trying to gain influence with say like 20,000 people, right? across the entire space as you know, who matters in that and why. But as we go to the next version of this market in the bull market, we will once again come back to scale. So I think that's important. On the actual like measuring of the share of voice question that you had. We're building a product around this right now, which is like in private alpha with our customers today. But The way that we think about it and the way that other tools are approached it is, web two social listening tools, there are actually many of them. I wasn't really aware of this because this wasn't a big part of web two growth. But I think for many of the things that we've talked about of like link based attribution is dying, a lot of these traditional funnels that the way things are done in web two is also becoming more challenging. That's led to, in my opinion, the rise of some of these social media. listening platforms in web two specifically outside of us. the way that those do it is based off of like raw impressions and engagement metrics and basically like pulling that into a central platform and, matching it with the company's first party data. but that those tools don't really work for crypto companies for reasons that you might already have on your mind, which is that some impressions are complete BS, right? Cause they're like totally bought it. And other impressions are. good because they come from like organic real people and so in that context a Web to specific tool that misses the crypto context isn't that useful then there have been some web three companies that have come along and Created there a new standard that basically says there are people in crypto that matter These insiders and there are people that don't matter right who are maybe in crypto, but they're outsiders and if you get engagement from the people who matter, then your post goes up in the share of voice. And if you get people from that don't, then it just like doesn't count. Right. So like a new engagement layer on top. I think that that is like a great first step, but what we find in that is the people that matter, to you versus matter and crypto, are very different on the project level, right? Like, You might be a Cardano project, but the influencers of our moment, like, and Sam and all those people, they don't care about Cardano. So you might, it might show that you have like 0 % share of voice, but maybe all the gods within like the Cardano ecosystem think that your project is great. Should that be the metric? No, like you matter within the Cardano ecosystem and the Cardano ecosystem is where you have your users. So you should be able to measure that you have. you know, 75 % share of voice within the Cardano ecosystem, if that's who your users are. So our approach is really on the market level, whatever we define your market to be, we measure it within that rather because we think it's a little too simplistic to say they're just X number of crypto users that matter. And if you are in with those insiders, you have massive share of voice. And if you're not, you're not. yeah, recognizing the the tribes that exist and mapping accordingly is how we think about it. But, you know, I think that this whole industry of mind sharing, share a voice is relatively new in web two. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, very, very new, like matter of like six months in crypto. So these definitions and these methodologies are for sure subject to change. You just said something that made me think of, you know, when I think of, you know, KOLs or influencers, I typically think of them as kind of this generic blob of influencers. But you said something that made me think maybe I need to be thinking about it from a, you mentioned tribes, right? Like, Stalana has its own influencers. Like, who are those? You know, same with Cardano, same with Ripple. Like, there's key people within those chains, those communities that are that he listens to. And so maybe I need to be thinking about that. Because at some point, you you may be in a project or I may be in a project where I'm going to want to, you know, it would be great if some Cardano community members could kind of migrate over like we need some of that, or XRP. And so I need to be, you know, build a relationship with those KOLs or influencers, and maybe maybe work that route. And so you said, I think an interesting insight that made me think, of rethink how I think about KOLs. And I've not been a big fan of KOLs, though I think they're super important. Yeah, especially in Web3, since a lot of them are just kind of incentivized or paid for, it's not organic. maybe there is an organic aspect to this that I haven't considered. You just, I think, made me consider that. So thank you. Yeah. And that's exactly what we find as well. think that, how measurement happens also shapes perception too, right? Like right now we're saying only people like Ansem matter, right? As KOLs. but if you said like Cardano is like top five influencers matter within the card, if you're a project within the Cardano, then like those people matter, right? All of a sudden and things, the metrics and how we see the truth. changes. so I think that there's a lot of potential power for good that a platform like Safari's Mindshare platform can have on recognizing the people within ecosystems that matter, even if they're not recognized as being important by the larger whole of these insider KOLs. Now could Safari help me identify who are the top 10 influencers in the Ripple ecosystem? Yep. So that's exactly what this platform naturally does is both within the ecosystem, who are the people that matter that have the greatest share of voice, but also the companies that matter. And where does your company stack within that ecosystem? However you want to define it. got it. And I'm curious, like what's behind the I guess, behind under the hood? How does Safari identify who those influencers are? And is it by channel or is it cross channel? Or is it specifically just X, since that's where a lot of crypto people are on? Yeah, we start with X because we think it's the most, yeah, it's where most of the traffic in, in mind sure happens, but we'll certainly move to other channels in the future. I would love to see, more from Farcaster if Farcaster becomes big again. And, know, we see that very, or I saw that very distinctly within Farcaster too, right? The people who are, have 200k followers on Farcaster have like 2k followers on Twitter. Like, It is a totally different world, it's right, that they have their own KOLs, people with massive followings that exist on one channel, but not on all channels. Yeah. one last question about channels. I, you mentioned in a different podcast, you think that LinkedIn is, an underserved channel where potentially there could be, you know, one could become an influencer, especially in the web three space and be able to, build an audience that way. So I've done a lot of, kind of growth hacks with LinkedIn and as well as with Facebook groups. And I don't know if you've seen some of these Facebook groups have tremendous number of members and I've built scripts to scrape these Facebook members and their profiles and then I then match it with their email address and then their Twitter profile. I should just create a product out of that because that's tremendous, right? But as I mentioned, As we talked about earlier, like that those kinds of tactics are kind of viewed as kind of either taboo or kind of bad taste in web three. But I still am very drawn to that kind of approach just because I want to be able to reach people where they are. But I haven't heard a lot of marketers talk about Facebook groups and I'm not personally ever on Facebook. I really don't like. But I also recognize that, you know, most of the world is and. And there are a lot of Facebook groups that are that focus solely on crypto and retail and trading. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that this is kind of goes back to the measurable versus memorable approach is that when, excuse me, when everyone's mindset is focused on being memorable with 5,000 people that matter. That means that you don't even think about these other channels that actually have massive scale. And so I think that as we get into a more bull market-esque worlds where retail matters more and more, people start thinking about this much more naturally. But I think it's a huge missed opportunity. For example, like I think the right framework, and this was said, so I had a marketing mentor in Web2 who is the VP of marketing at Thumbtack, which was a similar company to Buenolo. Fast forward, you know, like six months, she was the VP of marketing at OpenSea and I was an early stage founder. The way that she described what her growth mission was at OpenSea was I'm trying to find and convert all the people who own crypto to owning an NFT. Like that was her mission versus like, I think a lot of people in crypto are like, I'm trying to, I'm actually trying to like move like 5,000 whales, right? Or a hundred whales that exist in the space. But when you start going and thinking about it that way, like, How do we convert all the people who own crypto to being in DeFi, right? Within our specific protocol and onboarding it that way, then your worlds in terms of the channels really opens up. And I think that there are truly at this point in time, a massive number of people that own crypto in their Coinbase account or however, that are not in DeFi. I know many of these people personally who are personal friends of mine, they don't know, they don't understand crypto. No one's trying to convert them, but they have. 50K, 25K, like these are, would be by crypto marketing standards, like sizable users to target that nobody's targeting. So I think it'll become massively important for the marketers that adopt this mentality now of like, how do I convert people who own crypto into using my protocol? Versus going after the same group of users everyone else is going after. I think that makes a lot of sense. Justin Vogel from Safari. Thank you so much. Is there any last words you'd like to share before we end? No, this was great. Thanks for having me. I feel like we covered a lot of ground. So hopefully the listeners enjoyed this segment. amazing. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you.