Dean, welcome to Block by Block podcast. How are you? Good, thanks mate, how are you? Good, good. We're rolling and excited to talk with you about storytelling. Wanted to start out with your origin story. I know you've already shared this on Twitter or on X, but would love for the listening audience to hear your story. How'd you end up as a 20-year-old CEO of a growing internet company? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, wow. Okay. So been in crypto since 2020, kind of studied financial, financial econ backgrounds in, in perp trading and portfolio management and like derivative strategies. So very much an armchair economist at heart. Yeah, kind of messed around with DeFi and yield farming strategies for a while. whilst growing an anonymous CT account. So did that for a couple of years with a friend from uni, built that to a decent level, niching in DeFi and Gamlify. From there, did a head of content since a Gamlify protocol, also worked with a variety of influencers, helping them build their personal brands, doing ghost writing, community engagement, and then kind of in a very serendipitous manner. early last year came across John Wu. He's great lad, happy to give a TLDR on him as well, but came across him and was very bullish on his thesis of founder-led branding. And at the time he was building Forti-IQ in its very, very early days. So I met him in, it must be March or April, meant to join as a ghostwriter. I don't think I actually ever... wrote a tweet, like things, things just kind of went exponential from there. You know, started doing a bit of operational work, client management, day to day, managing the team, liaising with different ghost writers, hiring, and kind of doing some editorial work. And then like fast forward to today, somehow running the agency. It's very, very grateful to be in the position. And yeah, it's good fun. I wouldn't change it for the world. That's amazing. Let's talk about the name. So I love the website. It's very simple website. So first of all, the 40 IQ, I imagine that refers to IQ, the IQ scales, right? And so I looked it up and apparently 40 to 55 IQ is moderate mental disability. 55 to 69, is mild mental disability and then 70 to 84 is borderline mental disability. Now, how come you guys came up with 40 IQ? What's going on there? Yeah, so the kind of philosophy behind that, as I think a lot of people overcomplicate storytelling and as a result, marketing as a whole, like there's a lot of strategy and thinking and positioning work and I don't know, whatever sort of connotation that has. Bored to IQ is more like just, just stop thinking, your story, get straight to the point and just more doing. So I think we're seeing a lot now around like, just do stuff or just crack on. I think it's very much that in like less strategizing and less thinking, do the thing, collect the data and then iterate very much in that chronological order. So you do use data, you collect you just do and then you collect some data to see what resonates, kind of an EB test on messaging, right? And then you iterate from there. Is that what it sounds like? Okay. precisely. So specifically, for example, I mean, can just give an example with my Twitter account. I think I get a lot of questions from friends being like, Dean, what do I post about? I can give like some tips and tricks and get into like what the algorithm says, but ultimately, just consistency is all that matters. And that's the boring answer that no one wants to hear, but you just need to get volume out there. And then you can go into all the analytics tools like Twitter analytics, like Typefully, Kaito, Cookie3. Then you look in detail at all of your posts. Look at the stats, look at your smart following, look at impressions, profile conversion, engagement rates. See what worked and just double down on that. And is that the typical approach when you help founders? Or do you customize it for each one? Yeah, so with founders, it's a bit more detailed. So we create a custom content strategy based on kind of their protocol, their product marketing calendar, who they are as a person. So let's say hypothetically we're working with Vitalik. We'd be like, okay, Vitalik, we think you should spend 30 % of time talking about topic X, 25 % of time talking about topic Y. So we'll do a personal brand strategy deep dive. And frankly, what I think about brand strategy is I historically thought it's not very actionable. So we do it at the start of the process. And then as a result of that brand strategy, we take it and we give it to our writers. And then they're like, okay, cool. I've got this document, this nice shiny asset. And now I'm clear, this is what I need to write. And I advise the same for founders and friends. They could spend a little bit of time planning, like just jot down a piece of paper. Like what are you passionate about? What do you do in your free time? What's your company? Write down some subcategories and then from there go into typefully and start writing. I see. I think that approach makes a lot of sense and I bet a lot of founders appreciate that. What's the reception been so far from founders that have worked with 4DIQ? Yeah, I think it's a very highly demanded product. I think people understand the importance of founder led branding and founder led posting. I think it was very much a... highly potent strategy in the Web 2 world. For example, I bet most people listening obviously know Tesla and Elon Musk, but I bet they probably don't know much about Lucid or Rivian or many other EVs and why. I think Lucid and Rivian are great cars. I'm a bit of a car geek and they're great, but do they have market share? Do they have higher top line revenue? No. Why? Arguably because of Musk. There's many more examples. You can get into Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Jobs, Richard Branson. It's just like a classic example of founders being the face of the brand. And that's because people bet on people. And then we just sort of took that thesis, did the same for crypto. And it's like, okay, well, what are the crypto examples? Vitalik for Ethereum, Jesse for base, Matt from Helios, great case study. And there's more and more of those. I think people as a result of those sort of archetypal figures have understood, okay, that's clearly the playbook. People don't want to hear about why I've got one more TPS than this other L1. They want to hear the differentiating factor of me, like the founder. What's my story? What's my philosophies? And the shared thesis of the community. You want to be able to resonate and empathize with your users. That's not going to come from slightly higher throughput or like 0.001 % lower fees that's going to come from your moat of your story. Yeah, I interviewed Nate Cha from Eclipse the other day. they have a, I don't know if you know about Eclipse, but they have a really fascinating story because they could have gone down the faster, cheaper, higher quality kind of road, which almost everyone does, or they could have taken a different approach of storytelling, which is what they did. and it's memorable. They have a mascot which is a, they call them turbo horns, which is a bull with horns and it has a name that sticks and is memorable, turbo horns. But with every other L1, I mean, they go down the faster, it's cheaper, it's better, whatever, know, the typical thing. But what Eclipse has done, and by no means am I, know, I don't know a ton about Eclipse other than speaking with with Nate, but their community is their rabid fans and their brand is memorable. And I think they've done something from a branding perspective that I think is becoming a moat for them. Now that's from the branding of the project. Now the branding of a personal brand, there, so to my question, You can brand a project like the way Eclipse has and it's memorable. What is I guess what's the relationship of the personal brand of the founder versus the brand of the project that he or she is leading? Like what does that look like? As in how the relationship, as in how to create content from it, or like the differentiating factors. you bring up Musk, for example. So Tesla has its own brand and everyone of course associates Musk with Tesla. Musk has created his own personal brand just because he is who he is and he does what he wants. But is there a point where the two, the personal brand of the founder and the brand of the entity, they're aligned, but they're could also be points in which they are not aligned. Like Musk, for example, is becoming very political now and he's part of the Trump administration, for example. And there could be some Tesla owners that are not okay with that, but they still love the car, but they hate the owner or they hate the founder. And so in that kind of situation, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Yeah, I think there's definitely case studies to show all sides of the spectrum. think my belief is that brands worth talking about are synonymous with their founders. So I think they share the same beliefs, share the same philosophies, tell the same story. I think personal brands being synonymous with the corporate brands, they build that strong relationship between the founder and the audience. So I think the values and core beliefs of the corporation should be very, very similar, if not congruent to the founder, because the founder is the one who should be connecting with the audience and telling that story and relating to their problems. It's a bit hard to tell a similar story through a corporate brand. Ultimately, it's kind of like talking to a brick wall. One example is I'd ask like the audience or you, when was the last time you DM'd or engaged with a brand account? I think most people spend a lot of their time engaging with founders. So it is just tougher for corporate accounts to even emphasize or express their values. but I think being as closely aligned with the founder makes, makes most sense. And then ultimately I'm a strong believer of all communications, all announcements coming from the founder first. Like if you have some crisis or PR issue, please do not announce it through the brand account. Like the founder should be the first person to say, hi, I messed up or, or I didn't, and I totally get it. X, Y, Like it needs to come from a person and not some. Not the brand account, not some external agency like own up, it's the person. Now as a general principle, I agree and I think definitely within the industry of the blockchain industry, if we can call it that, that makes a lot of sense. Would your recommendation work for let's say Web2 Fortune 500 companies too? think it is very case by case. Largely speaking, we've taken the playbook from Web2 and have seen it work. I actually think Elon's a great example, but I think it's emphasized and more emphatic and profound in Web3 because Web3, we have a lot of shared philosophies around decentralization, permissionless nature. I don't know, ultrasound money, whatever the kind of term is. We're all aligned with the same beliefs. So I think it's easier for us to crowd around that. Whereas Web2, there's a lot more adjectives you can throw at it, slightly more paradoxical. Here, I think it is a bit easier because we're kind of all on the same path. We're all trying to onboard everyone into our shared belief and get everyone into our community. So I think it is easier. And there's more of a defined playbook. Candling Web 2, I imagine it's harder. Yeah, and as an agency, 40 IQ, the audience that you're specifically focused on are our founder led projects within Web3. Yes. So we are a crypto storytelling agency, a crypto native storytelling agency. So we help founders build up their personal brands and to be specifically niche in Twitter. And kind of we've expanded our product portfolio, but with every product we have, we strongly strongly believe the founder should be the face and lead all all coms. Yeah, I agree with that. Let's, we jumped into Forti-IQ pretty quickly. Maybe we can back up a little bit and let's, can we define what storytelling, personal brand, maybe let's talk about that. What is, I guess, what is a personal brand? Mmm. A personal brand. I, I'll give kind of both answers that, um, one thing in yes, by the way, had the name in the 40 IQ. think a lot of people throughout these marketing times, like personal brands, corporate brand, brand positioning, brand strategy. like, there's a lot of jargon and it's a very esoteric industry as it is. Um, and I think a lot of people spend too much time. on that and like you can study all the textbooks and I don't know actually I've just got like a bunch of marketing books right in front of me and like yeah you should read them and great but like just don't overcomplicate it kind of just crack on but like storytelling specifically I do think there's a lot there. A lot of kind of the technical founders in this space kind of disregard it and I'm a data guy I love maths so let's just go buy the maths. Storytelling releases oxytocin, which is a chemical in your brain known as like the love drug. So you tell a story What is a story something that has a beginning middle and end it's like it Should be like decently long you need to convey an emotion. You need to compel someone And there's like a whole psychological process with like neural Coupling and like dopamine release that sells someone stories help sell, they feel empathy, they help engage with other people. So storytelling as a whole is like profoundly impactful and there are loads of metrics around boosting conversion or increasing value of products or I think there's a status all the other day, stories are up to 22 more times memorable than facts alone. So if you've got a fact and a story, just combine them. I can pause there, but I've got some thoughts around a personal brand as well. No, I love you bringing up the point of emotion, how stories bring out emotion. And I've worked with many founders in the blockchain space and many are, especially highly technical ones, are very focused on facts. And one example that I've brought up many times, I come from the Web2 space like most of us have, and I brought this up in the I get it from the Web2 space, but I brought it up with number of founders in the Web3 space. I said to one, know, sharing your TPS is kind of like saying, I lost 10 pounds. But what if you said something like this instead? I lost 10 pounds and now my wife thinks I'm attractive again. It changes the context of the entire conversation because now it's you share a fact. but there's an emotional angle to it too. And I love that example. And I've shared that a number of times with many folks and I've, and I've realized two things for those that are founders that are really technical and focus on facts. The example I shared goes in one ear and out the other. They just do not get it. But for some they're like, it's almost like a light turns on. They're like, my gosh, it's It's not just about TPS, but it's TPS and it allows, you know, it enables XYZ and they start thinking about the emotional aspect to it. What do you think of that? I emotions everything. you can, if you can, I don't want say play on someone's emotions. But people buy on emotions and like they stay on facts. So I think if you're thinking of getting people in the door and like as a top of funnel resource for anything, like if you want people to use your decks, if you want people to use your chain, it's emotions. pretty confident, or I can just speak about myself as a person. Like I don't go around using a different L1 or L2 because they're like two seconds faster or slightly higher throughput. I'm assuming most devs are the same as well. They're going to choose your protocol or your product based on like the emotion that you bring out of them. And that's where it kind of brings back to the founder, the stories they tell about oxytocin release. and what emotion comes from that story. Literally the simple additives like, do you feel happy? Are you bubbly? Do you feel, I don't know, acrimonious? Like, whatever additive you want to throw at it. Those stories and how you feel, that will resonate and you'll remember that. You'll remember how you feel for a long, long time and that's a kind perennial feeling. You will not remember those facts. Like I bet for example, The facts that I just gave, storytelling being 22 times more valuable with a fact, I bet that was forgotten when I said that. But the emotions and the adjectives I said, that's more important. It's like all about the psychological aspect and how you feel. I agree. What makes it difficult in the blockchain space is we financialize everything and we use those types of motivations to compel behavior. And so what's the role of emotion in stories when one DEX provides 50 % APR versus another one that is 20 % APR? how do you compete in that kind of financialized world or hyperfinancialized world? that is definitely a tough one. And there's definitely a lot around, I'm seeing a lot around hiring in the space right now and different protocols, offering different types of compensation. And a friend kind of told me that the average tenure at a crypto protocol is nine months. By the way, it's funny because that's like the kind of sort of average vesting periods usually in the time to liquidity. that's kind of a lot in that. Yeah, I mean, using the Dex fees example, or let's say you're a company and you're trying to hire a marketing lead for 100k to someone else offering 200k because they've raised some nuts series B 500 mil valuation. Those are examples we see all the time. It's not binary. It's not that the person with the higher comp will always win, or it's not that the person with the higher fees will always win. A lot of the time, frankly, that's true. Like you still need to have a sick product. You still need to offer competitive rates. Like I'm not saying that's true. Numbers do mean a lot, but like, okay, why is the average tenure only nine months? Even though they're getting comped in a sick manner, why is that protocol? that has 20 % APR still around. There's something there and I can't define what that moat would be. But what I have seen, and I can speak for protocols that offer significantly lower total compensation packages, because they can't be competitive in that regard, but because of their culture, because of the vision and the ability of the founder to sell to their team have retained. And that's so compelling in itself. think most people can comfortably say, and this is a big reason why people on web three and not web two, like most founders in web three, I'm pretty sure could go work a more cushy job at like a fang or like a fortune 500 company, be an executive, probably on like a couple mil with equity, like maybe a lot more, but they're here in web three grinding. And that goes for the thing that goes for like CMOs, that goes to marketing leads. People are coming from web two to web three, like why? And I don't think it's for the comp. It's for the culture. It's for the vision of web three. It's for how, how we're going to change the world, whether it's to do with like finance or tech or healthcare or economics or decentralization or kind of the whole crisis with debanking. There's like a deeper core belief there that goes beyond, beyond finance. answers. Now getting to that deeper core belief, and I agree with you. I think what you did is you reframed the conversation from what I started out with that things are hyperfinancialized and people based on APR. You reframed it by saying that there's actually a deeper core belief that people, that compels people's behavior. What getting to that, if I'm a founder of a web three project, How do you identify the deeper core belief that gets your specific audience to use your product versus another? Yeah, great question. The answer is in asking why. So I think you always have to ask the right questions. So to convey your beliefs, you have to drill down very, very, very deep. Let's say I just gave some examples of financialization and compensation schemes to find out why someone got into crypto. That'll give you a certain story. Like for example, for me, it was around inflation rates and the economy and constant easing and the whole kind high-economic policy. I think the American debt to GDP ratio is around 134%. There's like $32 trillion of debt and that's unsustainable, massive fiscal deficits. I got into it because of the... economic aspect and the only way to find out is by getting to know the person and asking why by going over and over and over again, why you encrypt, like what's the core belief and double clicking each time. So for the founders. You have to, and I stress this, have to share the basics. Like what problem are you solving? Like let's step back a bunch. Like why am I as a person going to benefit from using your product? Don't just, just like one sentence, one sentence, everyone's going to struggle with this. If you can't define what problem you're solving in one sentence, go back to the drawing board, come back to me later. and then explain again, what problem are you solving in one sentence and why now? Those are almost the only two things that matter before you get into like any special protocol, also like product announcement or feature release or like all these other metrics. And they're great. You need metrics, like those two questions, what problem are you solving and why now? And that's going to be the most compelling. Now, it sounds like you're really pushing for simplicity and clarity, which is so hard for Web3 people to actually follow since we love jargon. A professor once called it like, what is it called? Jargon monoxide. Like we love jargon, abbreviations, and just all sorts of things that normal people don't like jive with. Mm. Tell me about the one sentence constraint. What does that force the founder to do? If it forces you to be concise and articulate well, think Einstein might have said this, if you can't explain it in a simple manner, you don't understand it well enough. Kind of as simple as that. So if anyone's giving you some technical explanation, yes, the other party can do some research and understand what like, I don't know. ZK is or FHE is, sure, but like if you can't explain it in one sentence, that's like your fault and you're losing out on a sale because of that. It's not my job to understand what you're doing. It's your job to sell me on it. So that stress is articulating in a concise manner. And I say this to our team and my friends a lot of time and John says this, like there's a famous quote. think it's, sorry, I didn't have time to... to write a short sentence, so I wrote an essay or something like that. Basically, it's a lot easier to write long winded paragraphs that are not structured rather than one short sentence. I get straight to the point. So that's the point when you see all these marketing teams creating these fancy 90 slides decks with like all this terminology, just like, mate, give it to me in one sentence. You could do all the same. And you can end up with like a much higher gross margin because it should be quicker. Just give me one sentence. Don't need 90 slides. Same for people. Also, no one who's going to do that. We're living in like a brain rot era, high, high dopamine. You think they're going to read some white paper with a hundred pages or they're just going to go on TikTok? Like one sentence. I agree. think if I could be mistaken, but I believe Mark Twain is the one who said that quote, which makes, which I completely agree with. mean, you know, thinking back to my uni days, it's, you want to fill in those word counts. And what you end up is the output makes zero sense, but is, you satisfy your, you know, three to five pages worth of garbage when the same thing could have been said with lots of substance and is maybe a couple of paragraphs. That's what I love about, I don't know if you've read much of Ernest Hemingway. I love the classics. Ernest Hemingway is, he does exactly that. He says more in one sentence than I could in two, three pages. It's so full of substance and it's beautiful, it's elegant. And I love that about Ernest Hemingway. Going back to web three, there's a relationship between the story of the founder. Well, let me back up. Do you think there's a relationship between the story of the founder, the brand, and also token price? Without a Yeah. Yeah, sorry, go on. No, and if so, what examples can you think of that might satisfy that? Yeah, the one that springs to mind is Luna and I'm just that's probably what trauma from getting burnt there as probably most people do. But like, I think it was pretty obviously unsustainable. UST and 20 % yield in hindsight, is that really possible? And like people remember anchor protocol and I'm sure a lot of you remember UST. Yeah, they gave some BS maths reasons, I don't know. I never checked out the maths, maybe I should have. But firstly, if you don't know where the yield's coming from, you are the yield. I love that saying. And like, I was the yield. I'm putting my hands up, I was the yield. I think that's a prime example. He was shit posting on Twitter 24 seven. He was being obnoxious, arrogant, confident, don't know, whatever, like, sangatimonious, whatever word you want to use it. He was just on Twitter. consistently all day every day posting his beliefs and like a lot of people agreed with that. Rightly or wrongly at the time people were bought in and that was his main focus. He was building his personal brand. He was sharing his core philosophies and like everyone knows what happened to Luna kind of yes it crashed but it pumped like 100x before. Another example I think what Vitalik's doing with Ethereum is very very impressive. Yes, you know, I think if Vitalik went away, think Ethereum would be totally fine. Like what's another example with public tokens? I think the ones that come to mind are Luna, but brand founders that are synonymous with their brands, think Smokey's doing a great job and I know that their pre-products, but by the way, that shows how profound this is. Just, I want to kind of double click on this. Barrow Chain do not have a product. They don't have a product. Like MegaEath do not have a product. But look at the community they've created. Look at the narrative they have. Look at the mind share. Now, by the way, all of this is trackable. Like now and now you can track it on Kaito. This is like, you can see they are in the zeitgeist. And so the people who say product is everything. Yes, don't get me wrong. You need a safe product, but like, no, it's not everything. Clearly you don't even need a product. You just need to say like Q5 on Twitter and that's it. So Smokey is definitely rewriting a playbook. Can't any other like live tokens, I don't want to name too many names, but I think the good example of something in the past is Luna and Doqan and like what he did to pump that token. No, double clicking into into bear chain. Smokey is quite active. I'm not familiar with with mega ETH other than just a little bit. Are the founders very active and is that is that what is kind of the the magnetic kind of attraction from the community is because of the founder? Yes. And by the way, there was a great event. seems like I'm shilling kiter here. I'm not paid. But there was good event at DevCon called GrowthCon and like Smokey was on stage, the Megateeth founders were on stage and they admitted, it's nothing to admit, it's like a fact. They were like, yeah, guys, we're both pre-product. We're at a marketing event. You want to know what's worked? It's this. They literally gave everyone the playbook, just being active on social media. speaking to the community, getting everyone bought in, like even Monad. Keoni's great. Look at that. That discord is popping off every two seconds. And what Bill Monday's done and what interns done. Like, okay, the intern meta, I would not advise trying to create an intern account now. It's definitely saturated. But intern himself, like the guy, that's the playbook. Again, free product. So they've got to be doing something that's right beyond product if you don't have one. So like study Maggie, study Smokey and study Keone. Okay, I definitely will now. I think those are really good examples. Which brings me to my next question. Things are so noisy on crypto Twitter. And in Kaido is a tool that can help us kind of look at what is driving Mindshare, what currently has Mindshare right now, and who's kind of one of the big drivers of that specific Mindshare. What suggestions do you have for for founders to cut through all of the noise and how can they do that starting today? Yeah, so there's three things which are imperative to get right and in this order. Distribution, and I can go into more details. Distribution, reply guy, and content. Distribution is absolutely everything. And like that's a kind of loaded term, but like what that means is to have friends. Like you just need to have industry friends. And simply just be shameless. Like if you think it's cringe to ping someone when you've got like a huge announcement, then you're just not going to make it. If you've got a massive announcement and your friends are there to back you, ping them. Like, I don't know, I don't think there's any shame in messaging your industry mates, speaking to or chatting different group chats or I don't know if you have a PR agency utilizing them, but. Distribution really is everything. Go to, go to East Denver, get on a speaking, uh, get a speaking application, be on podcasts. Like this is a great example. People should be here and get, get Distro. Um, so that, that's how, how you kind of get distribution is like literally having friends, um, and then speaking. Uh, that's another tip. If you have a British accent, it makes it a bit easier. Uh, that's like slightly harder to take. It takes a, it takes a long time though. Um. And then the other is around Reply Guy and Content Reply Guy is simply, I think he's 13.5 times boost on Twitter. That's what Reply Guy will give you. And a good account to follow by the way is Alex Finn for algorithm updates. Twitter's open source code anyway, so pretty easy to know what's working and what's not. But you gotta be replying to active accounts. And then lastly, And I say lastly, because it's true, like this shows genuinely everything. Content and authentic content. What's the one thing that nobody else can copy? Not even AI, your story. I think people get confused about the word story. Literally means like, I want to articulate this in literally one sentence, how you've lived your life. or what you've done in your life. Like anything could be as simple as a great example that happened to me. I was skiing a few weeks ago and I broke down at 2 a.m. in some shitty Ford Fiesta and I to try to do some mechanic work and like that did pretty well. Nothing to do with crypto. It can be to do with crypto if you want. It can be to do with like how you got liquidated or how you got all, by the way, always notice how the people who get hacked, notice those do well. Why? It's a story, beginning, middle, and it's relatable. Everyone lives, we're normal people. We are normal people. Like I'm speaking to you, you're a normal person, you live your life, you eat breakfast, lunch, and then you sleep. I don't know, I think the online world has made us think we don't go about a normal day-to-day life. So just telling stories about what's happened in your day, I'm not saying becoming like a blogger or like live streaming your whole day that's a bit saturated but like yeah just telling simple stories And to your example of getting hacked, I mean, there's a lot of drama and that draws a lot of people in. There's the emotional piece. And we can all relate to that, right? Now, we've been speaking as if, you know, from a distribution perspective that the crypto Twitter is largely, it's clearly the main distribution channel. What if you're a project or a founder who In different geographies, WeChat, for example, for Asia and China is a much larger channel. What are your thoughts on WeChat and using other distribution channels to tell your story? Or does it matter? it's definitely a good point. I think in crypto, we definitely neglect Asia or even Africa as a region. The truth is you've got to be on Twitter. Like yeah, okay, WeChat, great, Fivecaster, amazing community. Actually, I was gonna say LinkedIn, Gray, don't even get me started on LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn, you can do your like little congratulations and don't know, fake comments, but the real stuff is on Twitter. If you want real distribution, and I think the data points are there. Like, so whoever is listening to this, you, How much time do you spend on Twitter, LinkedIn, Farcast, any social media platform? I'm very confident because the data shows everyone's on Twitter. So yeah, you can diversify social media and it's pretty low hanging fruit to use like typefully and just cross post. Fine. But you're playing the wrong game if you're not speaking on Twitter. It's just don't hate the player. Sorry, don't hate the game. Just play it. I think a lot of people say... don't like Twitter. I find it cringe. It's too whatever too much drama. Cool. Okay. Do you want to make money? Do want to grow like Twitter? That's the North side. If you want your protocol to do well, just just play the game, mate. And you can talk about anything. You can talk about why Twitter is so bad if you want like do that. I'm sure there are people that agree with that. You don't have to go to like blue sky or threads and then shitpost or like talk bad about Twitter. Do it on Twitter if you want. Elon's fine with that. He's a free speech maxi. so whatever you want, whatever things or topics you want to, you want to emphasize, do it where everyone else is. Otherwise you're just kind of shouting into a void. You know, what you said reminded me of something that I found hilarious on LinkedIn. Someone shared, he said, my wife left me for my best friend. Here are the 10 things I learned about B2B sales. And this thing had hundreds of comments and it was hilarious. And so he was doing two things, right? Obviously, was not really talking, nothing really happened between this guy and his wife. But he's making fun of that. It's almost like a meme how, you know, I taught my child to ride a bike. Here's what I learned about B2B sales. And so it's hilarious. And this thing had hundreds of comments. And anyway, what you just said reminded me of that. That was funny. No, exactly. think I'm sure LinkedIn's great for web too. And I think it's become a bit of a meme on crypto Twitter. It's just a bit of a place for unsolicited thought leadership or advice. That is cringy. That being said though, like, yeah, low hanging fruit. So just cross post, do it. It's just extra distribution. I'm not a huge LinkedIn fan, although I'll be hypocritical if I'd advise people not to post on there. still do it. But the target market is on crypto Twitter. Now there are some Web3 projects that have a token, but their product is largely focused on other, either developers and or enterprises. Now, how would you advise a founder who's the founder of a project like that? Like one example, there are a couple of privacy projects that are focused on the regulatory KYC AML space, which is very kind of a stuffy highly regulated industry and so they serve primarily companies. But they also have a token, they're decentralized and so a founder like that, how would you advise them on growing their personal brand given that they have really a crypto audience but also the actual users of their products or other companies? Yeah, that makes sense. And that's a common question I get. So I think a lot of people assume that these methods only work if you're B2C. So in my opinion, B2B, and even if you're targeting a niche market of devs, these methods still work. It's just a slightly niche market. By the way, just because it's a niche market doesn't mean they're like, I don't know, suddenly in... some random like Timbuktu using some other social media. Like they're still people, they're still gonna be on Twitter, they're still scrolling. It's just, it's gonna be a slightly smaller Tan. So the strategies that remain the same. And what I would say, yes, the obvious answer of brand building is to convert. Like, okay, it should be top of funnel, high, I post a tweet, you funnel to my company. you buy, we get sticky users, high retention, top line profit, line, sub one revenue, bottom line profit. Like that's kind of, it should act as a funnel, but like there's a plethora of benefits beyond users and hear me out here, cause that sounds a bit stupid at first, but personal brand or corporate brand building. Okay. What does it do? So it leads to hiring. Let's look at like. I'm good friends with Drift for example, David from Drift, a lot of their hugely successful hires have come from them building their brands on Twitter. Mark from Helios, he's always posting about hiring on Twitter. VCs like I know Archetypes hiring, I know Dragonfly's hiring, all the head of talents, they are on Twitter. A good friend Will from Scribe, he's head of talent there, he's hiring on Twitter so. The benefits for like techie companies or B2B companies is yes, okay, it's a bit tougher to get users, but you'll find talent on that. It will be easier to connect with the VCs. I'm friends with a lot of the VCs and the first thing they do when a deal comes across their desk is they check the founder's Twitter profile. I can vouch for a lot of people that do that. So you can, it's easier to raise funds, easier to hire. more brand awareness. Also, it's a social status. So people will just respect you more, whether that's right or wrong. It's true. lastly, if you have a token, I don't think you really care who buys it. That's just a candid truth. Like, okay, you might, your users might be devs. Your users might be B2B. Great. If you have a token, I'm pretty sure you want everyone to buy it and just go long 100X on some platform and just like put their whole life into it. That's kind of the aim of a token. You just want to pump it as much as possible. So that comes from the personal brand. Your users don't necessarily have to be the same people that buy a token. I can say like, I own a decent amount of crypto. Dismount tokens like my portfolio is Pretty spreads and I do not use a bunch of their products like they are not one-to-one correlated I think that's a really good point that the audience for your token, if we can think of the token as a product, is largely going to be, there is overlap, but it could also be very different from the actual users of the product. And I think a lot of founders kind of miss that. I know that with the projects I've worked with, there's been some confusion there. And it's hard, right? Because the founder puts their life and soul into building this. whatever, this L1, and they want users and applications to build on it. But there's this other product, which is like the token that is related to this L1, but they're not doing much to grow that. so I get it. I can empathize definitely with founders that have that conundrum. Let's talk about frameworks. And I don't want to overthink this. I probably am kind of committing that crime. Yeah. framework I love, and this goes back to just all good stories have the hero's journey. Is that something that you guys refer to when you talk to founders about their own personal journey and how their online persona comes out? Do you refer to frameworks like that? Yeah, so there is a lot. Like I do kind of advocate for simplifying and just acting first, but there is a lot of frameworks. There's like personality tests, there's the hero journey, and we have an in-house brand strategist who spends a lot of time on this. I think it's great to do all the strategy and it is needed. but you just have to act on it. That's the key missing part, which is why I kind of, I'm trying to fix that pendulum imbalance by just only talking about, executing. But yes, I think, I think all of those exercises, all of those frameworks and frameworks for decision-making are key. think if you're making any decision without a framework, you're leaving it up to personal bias. So even if you're making like a life decision, a piece, a tip I give for people going to conferences, is if you see some high flying figure like if I don't know if you see Brian Armstrong and you're too scared to go up to him use Bezos's regret minimization framework like one day later am I going to regret not going up to this person? Yes, okay so go up to the person now if you're at a bar and you see a fit girl go up to that girl that's an important framework regret minimization same with investing Do the classic, like, I don't know, net present value, IRR, payback period. Like, yeah, frameworks are integral and the same goes for marketing. So yes, I'm huge on execution, but any decision you make, you should have a set framework and it should just be like a simple tick box. Just like make it really simple. Inversion theory from Charlie Munger. Any decision you have to make, do the flip. Like, okay, if I want to make a million dollars, do the flip of that. How do I not make a million dollars? go to the casino every day, put it all on black, spend it all on booze, I don't know, like do the inversion and then okay, think about, okay, now how can I do the exact opposite of that? So I use frameworks throughout my life, same applies to marketing, like it's no different. Frameworks are definitely integral. Dean, this has been so helpful and so fun to talk with you. I want to end with a couple of questions. Do you like to read? And if so, what books are you reading right now? Well, I've literally got a bunch here, so I'm about to read Amanda's Web3 Marketing. I've got... behind me actually, if you look right there. sick, is it good? Yeah, yeah, I use it mostly as a reference. So I have not read it like cover to cover. Nice. And one I'm excited for, I don't know why this came without, this is like, I think I bought it off some crappy websites, I have no clue why it doesn't have the cover, but it's Who, I think is the name. It's basically a hiring book, yeah, so Who, A Method for Hiring. So we're currently going on a big hiring sprint, so I'm just trying to figure out my way through that. But yeah, a big, kind of a big reader. That's cool. can, so 40 IQ, F-O-R-T-Y IQ.com. So the audience can go there to learn more about 40 IQ. They can follow you on Twitter and I'll make sure that people know where to go in the show notes. And your DMs are open. And is that the best way to get ahold of you? Okay, cool. terminally online, Telegram, Twitter, just message me and challenge me if I do not respond within one minute and punish me. I'm always online. Amazing. Well, Dean, thank you so much for taking the time to meet today and to have this amazing conversation. Any final words you'd like to share about yourself or 40 IQ or about brand, personal brand or storyteller? Yeah, I want to, I want to give some maybe unsolicited, but parting, parting advice. I think building your personal brand and distribution network is one of the highest valuable things you can do right now. And initially you may be talking to a void. as someone who's grown multiple Twitter accounts, anyone who says it's impossible to do it now, they're just lying. She's not true. even though I know I'm only at kind of one K, but firstly, smart following is what matters. So the reason why I have credibility, I'm top 200 Kaito, um, smart follower, I've got 20 % smart following and I have a decent amount of distribution. And that's all within the past few months. So it is very possible and probable if you stay at it consistently, build your personal brand that's portable throughout your life. Okay. Companies will come and go. And we say this to our employees. We know you're not going to work here forever. well aware of that, let me empower you to build your personal brand. Well, let me give you the skills you need. It's exactly like training employees up in any department. Help your employees or help your friends build their personal brands. I think that's a really great place to end. Thank you, Dean, from 40 IQ. Thanks mate, cheers.