In today’s Web3 marketing landscape, brand building and community management have become hot topics. For Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) of major organizations, whether serving startups or billion-dollar protocol projects, brand building presents unique challenges and opportunities.

Marketing in the Web3 space is as intricate as constructing a house of cards. Beyond the inherent complexities of marketing, practitioners must also navigate technical challenges, the pressures of token market volatility, and the pervasive issue of misinformation. In an industry dominated by programmers and traders, building brand awareness is no easy feat.

It is against this backdrop that Safary Club emerged. As an elite network of marketing talent, Safary Club brings together the best marketing experts in the Web3 space through an invitation-only system. These experts share experiences, collaborate, and explore how to translate complex technical concepts into products that the masses can understand and desire.

Research shows that modern society is experiencing a severe attention crisis. In a market saturated with memes and AI bots, product developers often struggle to capture the attention they deserve. Simply creating high-quality products is no longer enough; the attention economy has become a critical prerequisite for growth. The core of business success lies in the ability to consistently capture user attention and convert it into meaningful commercial relationships.

The entrepreneurial theory space has offered numerous insights: Keith Rabois emphasizes the importance of founder mindset, Paul Graham advocates for unscalable actions, and Eric Reis champions the lean startup methodology. However, how to build and maintain a community-driven brand in practice remains a topic worthy of deeper exploration.

Safary Club’s founder, Justin Vogel, has made innovative strides in this area. The platform operates similarly to Y Combinator, providing systematic training and networking opportunities for marketing talent. By interviewing five top CMOs in the industry, this article offers founders a practical guide to early-stage brand building.

The following marketing experts contributed valuable insights to this article:

• Bhaji Illuminati, CMO of Centrifuge

• Blue, CMO of LFJ Exchange (formerly Trader Joe)

• Dan Held, General Partner at Asymmetric

• Matthew Howells-Barby, VP of Growth at Kraken

• Andrew Saunders, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at Skale Network

These industry leaders’ experiences, ranging from Twitter operations to token product management, cover key aspects of Web3 brand building. The following sections will delve into their insights in detail.

The Power of Human Curation
In this era of digital content explosion, we are bombarded with unprecedented amounts of information daily. Statistics show that YouTube uploads the equivalent of 82 human years of content every day, 2.4 million emails are sent every second, and the average person is exposed to nearly 10,000 ads daily. In this age of information abundance but attention scarcity, the increase in choices has not led to a corresponding rise in trust.

Faced with overwhelming information, people naturally seek expert opinions to guide their decisions. Modern content platforms primarily filter content in two ways:

1. Algorithmic filtering, as seen on platforms like Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook, where data analysis determines content reach.

2. Human curation, which aligns more closely with the natural evolution of human culture. In digital marketing, this often manifests as following niche opinion leaders.

For startups, gaining support from well-known influencers early on is challenging, making small, closed communities an ideal entry point. Many founders choose to share their product ideas in carefully curated small chat groups. These closed, curated communities play a crucial role in the 0-to-1 phase, providing valuable feedback from a targeted user base.

Balancing Community Engagement
In community interactions, founders must strike a delicate balance. Over-marketing can lead to user resistance, while a lack of product visibility can cause the project to fade into obscurity. Experience shows that the most effective approach is to build trust by providing tangible value to the community. People are more willing to discuss problems than passively accept educational solutions, so highlighting the severity of an issue often creates an opportunity to promote a solution.

When founders consistently provide value to the community, even if it’s not directly related to their product, they accumulate significant credibility. This approach cultivates a group of early supporters who often become strong advocates when the product is finally unveiled. This underscores a simple truth: people trust people before they trust a brand.

However, curated communities often have specific rules and entry barriers. The formation of high-quality communities requires effective management, which can sometimes conflict with business needs. For example, on Reddit, any non-personalized marketing attempt can lead to account bans. Thus, after gaining initial users, the key challenge becomes scaling growth.

Y Combinator addressed this issue by creating curated platforms like Hackernews. Successful projects like Dropbox and Coinbase were initially discussed on Hackernews. Similarly, ProductHunt has become a vital platform for helping startups expand their user base.

These human-curated platforms help founders bypass algorithmic distribution limitations but also require building genuine relationships and meaningful interactions. More importantly, they must earn the community’s trust. Founders who try to outsource marketing in the early stages often face a harsh reality: sales are fundamentally about building relationships.

Dan Held’s success story exemplifies this. As an industry thought leader with 744,000 followers, his success stems from years of consistently producing high-quality content.

His strategy is built on educating the masses. Dan focuses on technical and controversial topics, such as Bitcoin’s energy consumption or fork mechanisms, and translates these complex concepts into digestible content for the average person. He employs a unique method: sacrificing 5% of the details to reach 95% of a broader audience. This simplification strategy works particularly well on platforms like Twitter, where capturing user attention is paramount.

Between 2018 and 2024, as Bitcoin gained increasing recognition, Dan’s role as a core educator grew. In this fast-evolving field, research analysts who can convey complex ideas in simple language remain scarce. This scarcity, combined with his consistent output of high-quality content, has led the entire community to endorse and share his work, especially in combating misinformation.

Building a “legitimate” status is a long process. As Dan puts it, his only secret is doing the same thing year after year. He didn’t rush to promote his Substack subscription on Twitter but instead selflessly contributed value to the community. This reinforces a marketing truth: the best sales often come from sharing without any sales intent.

In the early stages of building his personal brand, Dan did something many overlook: he carefully thought about and listed the keywords that best described him. These words guided him in finding relevant content topics and shaping a unique voice. He understood that the content we consume influences how we create, so he paid special attention to tone and expression.

Dan always focused on meeting audience needs. Many creators get lost in their own world, neglecting whether their audience truly cares about the content. In contrast, Dan’s approach is more pragmatic: timely, practical, and deeply researched on Twitter’s trending topics. This audience-centric method has gradually established him as an authority in emerging asset fields.

This methodology’s success is evident not only in personal brand building but also in his involvement in creating several recognized cryptocurrency projects, such as Taproots Wizard and Mezo. Whether building a personal brand, a Bitcoin NFT series, or a Bitcoin L2 project, Dan adheres to the same principle: consistently and authentically providing value. This unwavering commitment is the key to his sustained success in digital marketing.

From Followers to Owners
Before social networks became primary sources of information, Wikipedia showcased the immense power of volunteers. One legendary figure made over 2.5 million edits on Wikipedia from 2004 to 2018 without gaining any ownership. While this spirit of unpaid contribution is admirable, it raises a question: how can contributions translate into meaningful ownership?

In the blockchain space, whether for Bitcoin miners or Ethereum stakers, the core of incentive design lies in rewarding stakeholders for meaningful participation. This concept also applies to marketing. In 2021, Axie Infinity’s success was largely due to its “play-to-earn” narrative, which convinced participants that their contributions could translate into long-term ownership. This reveals an important truth: no one will promote something harder than those who believe they are owners.

Airdrop design is a powerful mechanism for creating a sense of ownership. For example, Hyperliquid integrated a points system before its token launch, hinting at the potential for future token rewards, thereby creating a cycle of continuous user engagement. This points mechanism, pioneered by Blur in 2022, provides users with a metric to gauge the value of their contributions without directly distributing tokens.

Unlike the “play-to-earn” model, which requires balancing token or NFT supply and demand, the points system offers a middle ground. It allows products to accumulate a critical user base and provides valuable feedback loops for development teams. Of course, not all users can make meaningful enough contributions to become partial owners.

Trader Joe’s Blue has a unique perspective on community members. Traditionally, only users who convert assets on decentralized exchanges are considered “valuable.” But in Blue’s view, anyone interacting with the product or its related media assets (such as Twitter, Discord, or Telegram) is a community member. These users may not convert immediately or even use the product temporarily, but their presence as social signals can influence other potential users to convert eventually.

In Blue’s view, acquiring such users has reached a saturation point. In 2021, due to the immense interest in DeFi, a protocol could build a community simply by creating a product in that category. Attention and capital would happily shift between products and protocols in pursuit of yield. But by Q4 2024, the landscape had changed significantly. Users had formed their preferences, and the novelty of trying new DeFi primitives had waned. When the core audience no longer pays attention to what you’re building, exploring new territories becomes inevitable. This is what Blue hinted at as his next move.

He believes the internet is transitioning to a short-video content phase. For Trader Joe, this means exploring how to integrate YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels into its content strategy. This September conversation initially sounded odd, as using traditional social networks like TikTok as growth engines for crypto-native assets seemed unlikely. However, in the following months, meme assets like Chill Guy and PNUT found a foothold in TikTok’s viral videos.

The Power of Meme Assets in the Social Network Era
In the social network era, tokens like Chill Guy, Pnut, and WIF, though seemingly fleeting, demonstrate the powerful force of capital coordination. These meme assets, without traditional VC backing, have reached multi-billion dollar market caps, offering profound insights. Like other “contribute-to-earn” assets, meme assets possess a “fairness” characteristic. They provide individuals with enough upside to become core supporters of the product. While founders can’t expect to dedicate their life’s work to meme assets, their operational mechanics offer valuable lessons:

If you can make enough people rich in a short enough time, distribution may not be a concern.

However, not all early operators have the ability to make community members rich quickly. Perhaps the project’s launch is far off, or worse, they have no say in how the points system operates. In such cases, what levers can managers still use?

The essence of ownership isn’t just about the ability to trade or own assets; it’s more about cultural identity and the overall experience users have when interacting with the product.

Take Nansen’s early development as an example. When analysts discussed the product on Twitter, they often received retweets from the official account. This provided an influence lever: analysts actively created Nansen-related content because they knew they could gain distribution opportunities. As more analysts showcased their work through Nansen, the product gradually became the go-to tool for investment funds to build market perspectives.

Similarly, Dune’s creator leaderboard evolved into a platform for discovering emerging analysts. Notable analysts like Tom Wan and Hildobby gained their initial opportunities by contributing to the product. In these cases, the sense of “ownership” didn’t come from direct equity in the product but from the co-growth of personal reputation and the product. Although these analysts didn’t directly benefit from Dune’s growth, their reputations expanded alongside the product.

Enabling users to build reputations through products is another way ownership influences product perception. Ultimately, reputation is the most valuable asset people truly own. This understanding is crucial for grasping user incentive mechanisms in the digital age and offers new insights for early-stage project community building.

Category Creation
Creating new categories in emerging markets requires the ability to shift product strategy focus. Most marketers don’t have the ability to “make users rich” or incentivize product usage through tokens. They often struggle to maximize attention with limited resources, which is especially challenging in unrecognized emerging markets.

A classic example: in 2019, suggesting that BlackRock or Deutsche Bank would develop their own L2 solutions would have been met with ridicule. But by 2024, with the maturation of the RWA (Real World Assets) space, this has become a reality.

Category creation, like content creation, is fundamentally a relationship-based game. Centrifuge CMO Bhaji Illuminati’s experience illustrates this well. As a serial entrepreneur, she has led organizations to billions in value multiple times in her career. She found that in enterprise sales, decisions often hinge on a single individual, typically a C-level executive (CXO). These executives receive countless proposals daily but struggle to distinguish their quality.

One often-overlooked solution is creating niche content tailored to specific decision-makers. Take RiseWorks, for example, a platform allowing team members to choose crypto or fiat for salary payments. While payroll solutions aren’t inherently exciting, the topic of managing global teams is engaging.

For first-time entrepreneurs, maintaining team engagement across cultures and time zones is an important but underexplored topic. According to Bhaji, sales teams for HR tech are best served by creating niche content, particularly in podcast form, to build credibility.

Although thousands of podcasts compete for attention, adding another doesn’t solve all distribution problems. But it provides a platform for industry experts to share perspectives without spending excessive time organizing thoughts. For CXOs, being invited to a podcast is a great opportunity to build personal brands.

However, not everyone is suited for podcasts. For sensitive topics, an alternative is creating small, curated working groups. Kraken’s growth lead, Matthew Howells-Barby, exemplifies this. He joined Hubspot in 2014 and later created a community for professionals in startup growth roles during a career sabbatical.

Unlike open podcasts, closed Slack groups bring together small clusters of individuals with specific expertise. This model works because people often have career questions unsuitable for public discussion but need targeted, high-quality advice.

Matthew identified this gap during the 2020 pandemic lockdown and sold the business to SEMRush in 2021. Similarly, Safary built a network of over 300 marketing professionals, offering CMOs advice on vendor evaluations and event planning.

While podcasts and private groups help identify target decision-makers, creating new categories requires more effort. Just as no one in 2019 believed loans or real estate would fully move on-chain, skepticism remains about the future of autonomous agents like Virtuals or Ai16z.

In emerging categories, it’s best for businesses to unite and create working groups. Centrifuge’s Bhaji faced the challenge of connecting blockchain and traditional finance while building credibility for her protocol. She collaborated with major institutions like Coinbase and Circle to form the Tokenized Asset Coalition, which grew from seven founding members to over 700 companies applying to join.

Such coalitions succeed because they communicate in ways that resonate with specific fields rather than using industry jargon. For example, instead of discussing “fast entry” into DeFi pools, they analyze the transactional efficiencies of on-chain lending. Coalitions like Bhaji’s achieve this, earning unique market positions.

Building Communities Through Offline Engagement
After establishing curated communities, the next logical step is creating environments conducive to active discussion, collaboration, and business partnerships. Traditional Slack DMs or Zoom meetings often fall short. Although most crypto transactions occur digitally, organizations like Safary and the Tokenized Asset Coalition are expanding into offline events to strengthen relationships.

Offline events turn usernames into real faces. For example:

• Bhaji organized the Real World Assets Summit

• Safary’s Justin hosted offline meetups for his community

Both marketers emphasize that building communities in niche markets requires fostering genuine human interactions.

Whether it’s Dan Held building an audience for Bitcoin-native content or Matthew Howells-Barby crafting a curated audience for growth-related matters, relationships are the foundation of effective sales. Building communities requires:

• Consistency

• Authenticity

• Integrity

• Moderate selflessness

These requirements may conflict with the rapid growth pace startups desire. For early-stage companies, investing time in asset coalitions may be hard to justify internally.

Observing the successes of Justin, Bhaji, and Dan reveals a common thread: they all focused long-term on selflessly providing value, building credibility and reputation. This approach ultimately created a trust flywheel, accelerating their careers.

This trust-centric strategy, though time-consuming and patient, leads to more enduring success. By consistently providing value, they not only built strong community foundations but also created sustainable business ecosystems. While the initial investment is significant, the long-term payoff includes a more stable market position and a more valuable business network.

Attention is Everything
A common mistake marketers make is conflating loyalty to tokens with loyalty to products. Kraken’s Matthew explains this with a vivid analogy:

When consumers buy Coca-Cola, they care about the dopamine hit from the drink, not Coca-Cola’s stock price—that’s for institutional investors like Warren Buffett. But in crypto, users are deeply tied to assets:

• Most users focus on the asset first

• They often care less about the underlying product

This may explain why Web3’s user base is concentrated on exchanges rather than decentralized applications (dApps).

In a period where mass attention is focused on assets, how can users be attracted? Skale’s Andrew Saunders offers several key insights:

• Marketers’ primary goal is to form sticky communities: not users who leave after airdrops or come only for testnet incentives

• Two main tools: leveraging key opinion leaders (KOLs) and building persistent communities

Using celebrities to build user bases has been a core strategy across tech cycles:

• In 1995, “Friends” stars Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston taught Windows usage

• In 2002, Will Ferrell starred in an iPod ad

• Jay-Z also created ads for Rhapsody

These cases show that celebrities can make emerging tech “hot” in early stages. But due to budget constraints, most marketers turn to crypto-native alternatives—creators with significant influence in Web3. However, KOL marketing has two main issues: lack of necessary audience disclosure and difficulty verifying content quality for educating target audiences. Recently, Kaito addressed these by offering creator vet