AI-generated JPEGs of apes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A meme-based crypto-currency delivering 45,273,873% returns in a year (not a typo), even though that particular meme-based cryptocurrency was itself based on another meme-based cryptocurrency, which was itself based on a meme of a funny-looking dog.

If you have been keeping an eye on the news, you would be forgiven for thinking that the arrival of Web 3.0 is a nightmare of late-stage capitalism that must be stopped at any cost.

The truth, as always, is far more nuanced.

Whether we like it or not, ‘Web3’ is here to stay. More than that, Web3 is going to become a fundamental part of what it means to live and work. It will be as much a part of your ‘normal life’ as is the website you are reading this article on.

The new ‘decentralised’ Web3 ecosystem, which arguably began with the birth of Bitcoin in 2009 and took off in the mid 2010s, is here to stay. More than that, it has led to an explosion of innovation and wealth-creation on a scale the world has never seen.

At present, entrepreneurial endeavours within the ‘DeFi’ (decentralised finance) space have been the big winners, but this is only the start.

It is no longer reasonable or sensible to dismiss these trends as a flash in the pan, embraced only by computer nerds, internet libertarians and so-called ‘crypto-anarchists’. The future is coming for all of us, and those that adapt fastest will come out on top.

With that point in mind, it should be said that the inevitable mainstream adoption of decentralised applications (‘dapps’) has left those of us without computer science backgrounds looking on with trepidation.

This article, as you will have gathered from the title, is aimed at those of us in sales and marketing. As the Commercial Director of venture-funded SaaS business, the question I have been asking is where, in this brave new world, will we fit in? More importantly, what is going to change about sales and marketing, and why?

Given Google is, at the time of writing, unable to provide any answers, I think I am justified in putting my own opinions to paper.

Before we dive in, though, let’s start with what’s not changing.

Cryptocurrencies, NFTs and the Metaverse.

When you look at most Web3 creations – notably cryptocurrencies, NFTs and most other ‘blockchain-based’ applications - the principles of selling and marketing them are, mostly, the same as they are with any modern business.

If you are looking to create B2C offering, you find out where your audience lives (Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok) and push your offering there.

If you are a B2B offering, you will find yourself pitching to your target market – whether that be logistics, asset management or the legal profession -- to persuade them of the benefits of your technology versus the status quo.

In short, and at the risk of being pilloried by Web3 futurists, it’s clear that the channels to market for these ‘new’ offerings are, at present, identical to what is standard practice at any existing company. Direct outreach. Content marketing. Ads. Same old.

So, you ask, what’s new about sales and marketing in Web3?

1. Community Building

The first theme that has emerged as a core tenet of ‘going to market’ in Web3 is the concept of community building.

There was (and is) already a sub-culture of ‘building in public’ in Web 2.0, and many successful businesses attribute a strong, engaged community to their growth.

This concept has been taken to the next level in Web3, driven partly by the enthusiasm of early adopters and partly by 'WAGMI' culture – the philosophy of democratised success.

Projects in Web3 are driven by the support of their communities, via Twitter threads, Telegram groups and Discord servers. Managing these communities has seen the rise of ‘Community Managers’ – responsible for sharing updates, encouraging participation, educating new community members and discouraging ‘FUD’.

Community building in Web 2.0 is often seen as an afterthought – a secondary, not primary channel for growth. In Web3, we will see the emergent winners building communities much earlier in the business lifecycle.

2. Tokenised Ownership

Closely linked to community building is the concept of tokenised ownership. Again, there are echoes here of a Web 2.0 concept in the form of ‘crowd-funding’, but with some critical differences.

The advent of digital scarcity in Web3 has, for the first time, allowed for the issuance of tokens that allow members of a community to have ‘skin in the game’. Depending on how the creators of a project have chosen to incentivise their audience to purchase their token, token holders could see various benefits, from early access, merchandise, decision-making power, a percentage of the profits or membership of an exclusive community.

Critically, these digitally scarce tokens can be traded on secondary markets. If a project turns out to be a huge success, or a holder loses interest in a project, they can sell their token on.

The best way to imagine this is as a securitized membership to an exclusive health club, to which there are only 100 membership spots. As the club becomes increasingly popular, the value of the membership spots rises too. Some members having moved away from the area or seeing the opportunity to turn a profit, will choose to sell their membership on to a willing buyer. Equally, if the health club chooses to be a flop, members may sell their membership on at a loss, or be unable to sell it at all.

As Web3 enters the mainstream, token sales will become an important funding route for start-ups and established companies alike.

3. Direct Social Selling

At present, B2B social selling takes place pretty much entirely on one platform – LinkedIn. At least in the early days of Web3, this looks set to change.

For various reasons, the conversations around Web3 take place on four core platforms: Discord, Twitter, Reddit and Telegram. Each have their own nuances, their cultural do’s and don’ts, and so the approach with each needs to be different.

As I have found in my own experience of running The Web3 Podcast, communicating across these different channels is an exhausting experience. You message someone on Twitter, they give you their Telegram, and you schedule a call via Calendly on their email.

With so many communication channels, it is inevitable that the ball gets dropped, and measuring effectiveness becomes increasingly complex.

As a result, my prediction is that we will see Social CRMs (which allow you to communicate via multiple channels from a single platform) become the norm for Web3 businesses.

4. Enter the DAO

The most radical innovation relates to DAOs, short for Decentralised Autonomous Organisations, perhaps the most striking element of the entire Web3 ecosystem.

For the uninitiated, DAOs are internet-based organisations collectively owned and managed by their members. DAOs can be formed for all sorts of purposes, from functioning as crypto-index funds, collecting digital art, or to fighting global warming. The common theme is that these organisations bring together likeminded individuals from all over the world, who share a passion for a cause. A DAO was even formed recently to buy a 3rd division English football club.

Crucially, DAOs are run without a hierarchical management structure. They have inbuilt treasuries, only accessible with the approval of their members. Decisions are made from the bottom-up, and members own and run the organisation. Those that contribute are rewarded. Those that don’t are free to hang around, participate in other DAOs, or to walk away.

Like any other company, these organisations need talent to survive and thrive. Governance issues might require the expertise of a lawyer, a pitch deck to attract new members requires collaboration between a marketeer and a graphic designer, integrating new software might require a developer. To galvanise their membership to action, DAOs offer financial rewards.

There is a small but growing number of individuals who are making a living – in some cases, a very profitable one -- freelancing for one or more of these DAOs.

Before you dismiss this new trend as a hacker-collective, consider the growth of the DAO ecosystem over the past year. In 2020, there was a single DAO with a balance sheet worth more than $1m. In 2021, there were more than fifty. In fact, you might have seen the story about the DAO that raised more than $20m to bid for a copy of the US constitution.

DAO-to-DAO Sales

The professionalisation and proliferation of these Web3 organisations has been hampered by the same characteristics that make them so appealing.

Without employment contracts, members are free to contribute as and when they feel like it. It is common for members to drift in and out of multiple DAOs, depending on what interests them that month.

Without interviews, and often without even a formalised onboarding process, DAOs are reliant on their members to volunteer their own skills and talents. Smaller DAOs may find their existing membership doesn’t possess the skillsets needed to carry a particular project forward, forcing them to change course or pursue a recruitment drive.

More than this, a bias towards anonymity sees members go by pseudonyms in lieu of their real names, making it impossible for admins to use traditional channels like LinkedIn to background-check their members.

In short, the biggest question facing DAOs is how they can harness the energy, talent, and connections of their members, whilst still adhering to the principles of decentralisation and free association that make them unique.

To bridge this skills gap in the short term, we have seen the birth of a category of DAOs specifically geared to providing services to other DAOs. Raid Guild provides full stack developers to create decentralised applications from scratch. CRE8RDAO calls itself the content marketing agency for the DAO ecosystem. Metafactory provides graphic design services to Web3 projects.

Members of DAOs in need of these services will either create a ‘request for proposal’ and invite these service DAOs to bid or will alternatively approach them directly. Usually, services are provided in exchange for the DAOs native token – which can (in turn) be converted into legal tender (i.e., fiat currencies like the dollar or the pound) via an exchange.

Business-to-DAO (B2D) Sales

Given the proliferation of DAOs and the growing size of their treasuries, businesses have sprung up to serve the ecosystem. These range from Web3 native ‘DAO tooling’ start-ups, which provide software to support the management and governance of these DAOs, to law firms, consultancies, and insurers.

For a Web 2.0 salesperson making the transition from, say, a traditional SaaS business into a business selling to DAOs, the contrast would be stark. In Web 2.0, salespeople are used to identifying likely prospects on LinkedIn and contacting them via email or phone.

In the pseudonymous world of Web3, neither of these options are likely to be viable. Instead, salespeople will have to embed themselves within DAOs, contributing to conversations and familiarising themselves with the governance structure, key players, and culture of each DAO.

In this new environment, relationship building is going to be more critical than ever before. Selling to multiple stakeholders at the same time has never been straightforward, and in the transparent, decentralised world of the DAO, this is likely to be more complex than ever before.

In B2D sales, the playbook remains unwritten. The future of the ecosystem belongs to the players that will write it.

@CallumWooders

He had heard I was launching a Web3 Podcast and wanted to know whether I would be interested in partnering up on what he believed to be a pioneering new concept – a decentralised dating app. ‘Imagine Tinder in Web3!’ was the excited pitch.

‘Cool!’ I messaged back. ‘What problem does a decentralised dating app solve?’

‘It solves the same problems as the centralised app, but with different features’

‘Okay, and why does it need to be decentralised?’ I asked.

I was immediately informed that I was ‘clearly not the right person to work with on realistic projects’ and promptly blocked.

I relay this anecdote as illustrative of the biggest fallacy in Web3: just because something can be decentralised, doesn’t mean it should be.

The cultish appeal of Web3 as the new frontier in tech has led to a stampede of talent, investment, and media attention. The evangelism of these early adopters, combined with the instinctive dislike of centralised authority prevalent amongst crypto natives, has led to a misplaced idealism throughout the ecosystem.

As a result, we have seen a slew of new start-ups promising to be ‘X for Web3’ or ‘Decentralised Y’, without considering why a decentralised model is better for the users of the product. When pressed, these founders will usually say something about user privacy and data ownership.

Whilst most users value their privacy and care about protecting their data, they value convenience more. Even in the Web3 community, which you would expect to be a bastion of decentralisation, you see Twitter, Medium and Discord predominate as preferred communication channels.

If it seems that decentralisation for the sake of decentralisation is the hallmark of many Web3 communities, that’s because it is. A narrative has taken hold that advocates ‘sticking it to BigTech’ or the government, as if Trump being banned from Twitter is indicative of an imagined slide into autocracy.

These zealots have attracted an array of criticism, and a number of sceptics have gleefully pointed out that decentralisation is largely a myth, blockchains have failed to solve any real problems, and that Web3 is basically one giant fraud. In many cases, these pundits have a point. In many others, they do not.

Horses for Courses

The vehemence with which some ‘haters’ have reacted against Web3 is downright odd.

Broadsides have been levied at the inefficiencies of the blockchain, always in reference to Ethereum and Bitcoin, whilst ignoring the fact that newer arrivals and upgrades have solved many of the problems that plagued these forerunners.

These same sceptics have denied any ‘real world’ applications for this technology, instead claiming that Web3 is essentially a Ponzi scheme. The promised benefits are always just around the corner. Early adopters get rich, and late comers are left ‘holding the bag’. Fair enough, this may be true in the murky world of crypto shitcoins and NFT rug-pulls, but to apply this argument to Web3 ecosystem in its entirety is a straw man.

It seems these critics have forgotten that blockchains are already in commercial use. HYPR and Xage provide cybersecurity for Internet of Things (IoT) companies, having sold hundreds of millions of licences between them. Anti-money laundering start-up Ocular employs a blockchain to ensure data cannot be manipulated as it changes hands between different parties. A recent article by Forkast highlighted that 81 of the top 100 public companies are using a blockchain in some capacity, up from just 2 (PayPal and Walt Disney) in 2014.

Digital Scarcity

The big innovation of Web3 has been to create scarcity in the digital world, which allows for provable and transferable digital ownership. Whilst it’s easy to dismiss NFTs as a ‘fad’, the eye-watering prices people are willing to pay for a Bored Ape or a Cryptopunk are proof that they are valued by the market.

It may be a marketing gimmick – but then so are many things that humans place a premium on. Ultimately, an asset is worth whatever the market decides it is. There is no reason why diamonds should be valued more than, say, Tanzanite, based on their scarcity alone.

It really is early days

Since the birth of Bitcoin in 2008, a group of technologies have evolved and coalesced into what we are now calling Web3.

Many of these new innovations have only gained prominence in the last twelve months and have still to break into the mainstream. It is up to us, as early movers in this space, to decide and discover what these innovations can (and should) be used for.

Yes, Web3 is rife with scams and bad actors, but there is a lot of good here too. As more smart minds are drawn to the space and the ecosystem begins to mature, we will look back on these heady days as the dawn of something amazing.

We just might have to experience a few rugpulls first.