Founders become confounded when they spend months or years “architecting” perfect code, but users don’t fulfill their part of the social contract.

Fill in the blank:

“If you build it, they will _____” (except they have to find it first)

Marketing enables people to find your product. If you market your creation, you enable users to fulfill their part of the social contract. They will come. They will advocate for you, as long as they know why it matters.

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Why So Many Web3 Founders HATE Marketing

Selling is natively uncomfortable, especially for builders. We feel like we should be able to bring our creation into the world and then let people spread the gospel that is our solution. 

That’s not how it works in the modern world. You must earn attention with your product as well as your marketing. Yes, good products do market themselves to a degree. But they can’t do all of the marketing by themselves. You’ve built the solution to their problem. Now it’s time for you to talk about the problem, the solution, and the lessons you’ve learned along the way. 

Building a narrative doesn’t mean you’re going to be branded as scammers and vaporware sellers. Even if you don’t feel like there’s enough product to hype it up yet, it’s still vital to begin pursuing distribution. You can improve the product much faster through feedback from people who actively use your solution. 

Harsh reality: Without marketing, even the best tech dies unseen. 

Speak your truth instead of selling. Share your vision with the world. Translate the complexity into simplicity so that a high school kid could readily understand the points you are making. Deliver nuance without relying on jargon. We don’t have to know all of the technical details to understand why the product is exemplary.

“We let you spend your stablecoins IRL, without compromising your privacy” 

(Key Value Proposition, Payy)

Terms they don’t use in describing this value proposition: 

• Zero-knowledge/zk

• Shielded

• Self-custodial

• Off-ramp

• Private payments
  

Good founders ship. Great founders clarify. That’s what we help you do.
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Marketing, But For Builders

You’re not convincing people to buy anything. You’re attracting attention from people and educating them about a problem and your proposed solution to that problem. Your job as a founder is to amplify the draw of your product. People want solutions to their problems. They must be able to find and understand a solution in order to rely on it. 

Web3 users are allergic to bullshit. They’re skeptical and there’s a higher proportion of technical users in web3 than there are in most spaces. They are equally inclined to read the product documentation as they are a Twitter thread.

Marketing lets users see and understand your truth. 

• What’s the problem you see?

• Who does it affect?

• Why is your solution able to fix it? 

• Then, how can user get involved? (e.g. sign up for a newsletter, join discord, etc.)

You want to align with users, to help them understand what their life can look like with your product in it. You aren’t trying to manipulate them, you’re aligning their worldview with yours, helping make theirs better. Anyone who’s lived or worked across borders knows that the modern financial system wasn’t designed for movement. It punishes mobility.

How Builders Can Do Marketing (Without Selling Out)

Clarity comes first. Get clear on who you are talking to. Build a user persona for 2-3 ideal customers.

Build your personas in a way that speaks to an inciting event. The moment that users feel a NEED for something different. Let them feel understood, seen when you make the content for them. 

Research this via Reddit, Twitter/X replies, and other public communication channels.

Let’s say your ideal customer is Asian and they live paycheck to paycheck. (According to an ADP study, that’s about 50% of workers in Asia, as of 2025)

They went to Primark, Five Below, Daiso, Miniso, Action, or somewhere cash still rules and decided to offramp their latest airdrop for some quick dopamine, but it’s Saturday, their bank doesn’t operate on weekends and “instant” transfers don’t hit their bank until Monday. They have to leave empty-handed.

Be Able To Explain Your Project Simply In One Sentence

It doesn’t have to convey EVERY thing or bit of nuance to your project. Just nail the biggest pain point + your project’s identity. Do it without jargon (e.g. interoperability, zk, etc.) If you can’t explain your solution in a sentence, try doing something that takes part of your focus (cooking, working out, cleaning, etc.) and, in your head, try rehearsing a conversation with a non-technical person who wouldn’t be familiar with your product. 

• What does your product do? (How can you make them understand what your product does?)

• Who does it help?

• Why does it help them?

To make it extra effective, consider if you were explaining it to an older loved one, and making it useful to them. E.g. “Have you ever been frustrated by a slow bank transfer?”

Also, if you do it while exercising, you get an added boost. Walking improves blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, making it easier to get a simplified first draft out, while lifting weights is a good way to break out of any over-editing or perfectionism spirals. 

Remember, You’re Not Advertising, You’re Educating People

Treat content as your open-source reputation. Share what you are learning as you build. Share documentation, frameworks, perhaps even decision logs/journal entries. The goal is to get people to integrate themselves into your narrative and adopt part of your narrative into theirs. If they are an early adopter, let them know they’re early to your project (without going full “we’re so early” mode on them.)

Build In Public (But Do It Strategically)

Leave promises off of the table. You must focus on shipping updates. Making promises can lead to disappointment and soured public sentiment. Transparency builds trust with both investors and community members/users. Mistakes build trust with both of these audiences when you handle crises well.

Lean On Your Champions, The People Who Like Your Work

Find 10-20 people who see some element of your project the way you do. Let them help expand your reach. Reward them along the way. Common champions include aligned builders, investors, and early (alpha/beta) users. Let these people help share your story and maybe even help write it.

Light-Touch Marketing For Technical Founders

As a technical founder, you still need to do some marketing, but you can take a slightly different path. The “Build in Public” approach has become glamorized in recent years as a way of allowing technical founders to share their process and progress to draw attention to their product. 

Some easy ways to implement building in public (take notes as you build, or as something breaks):

• Asynchronous content: One deep update becomes many pieces of content 

  • Medium form content often ships as DevLogs or Change Logs 

  • Each medium form piece can be pared out into multiple short-form snippets, including: 

  • Lessons learned, What broke, how was it fixed, Twitter Threads, etc.

• Automate things that are easily repeatable (e.g. write 3-4 drafts of a tweet then schedule them over a one-month period to maximize the reach of your message.)

• Personalize the things that most build trust (e.g. investor relations updates, community-facing notifications/updates, monthly changelogs, etc.)
  

Some examples of content and cadence that work (when they come out consistently):

Monthly summary (what we are building, how’s it going, etc.) 5-tweet thread

• June 2023 Monthly Update from ENS

• September 2025 Monthly Update from Curve Finance

• April 2021 Monthly Update from Swarm (yes, they still publish these every month)

  
  

Monthly milestone (e.g. hit 100 daily active users, achieved beta, etc.) newsletter & mirror post

• Conduit Rollups Announcement (2 new rollups launched)
  

Quarterly release (e.g. shipped V2, closed a new LOI/major customer/partnership, etc.) X Spaces discussion & Case Study

• 2023 UniswapX Product Release 

• 2025 Panther Mainnet Beta Announcement 

Common Building-in-Public Traps (And How To Avoid Them)

There are many common traps with building in public. Some of the traps that are most harmful to builders, however, include overexplaining the tech (while underexplaining the problem), delegating marketing to someone that doesn’t understand the product, launching too early before there’s a cohesive narrative for the team and product, and mistaking community engagement for traction. 

Avoid these traps by focusing on simplicity. Make sure your message aligns with the problem you’re solving. When you delegate marketing, do it with a shortlist of requirements for the content (e.g. tie blogs back to at least one product feature or ensure that changelogs align with the GitHub PR history before publication.)

Work with your team early to establish “who we are” and keep that consistent in your content. Community engagement is vital to a thriving project, but it’s NOT the same thing as traction. You need paying users, signed deals, and partnerships. 

Founder’s Takeaways

Marketing is an extension of your founder discipline. 

You don’t have to love it, but you need to respect its function. 

Apply the same rigor to marketing that you apply to other parts of the business and product: pressure test your project’s narrative, make sure you’re putting out content regularly, and, if it’s suitable for your project, hold discussions in public forums (e.g. podcasts, on Twitter/X, etc.) 

It may require some debugging to get it right, but if you stick with it, you will reap the rewards in visibility and impact.

Don’t wait for investors to “get it.” Let’s make your story fundable (and your marketing effective). Book a call with Core9 Labs and get a free Fundraising Readiness Lite Assessment. Just mention this post.