Mastering Web3 Marketing: Strategies for Startups – with Cahill Camden | S3 E49

Cahill: 1:09

I feel like a lot of times startups, especially in the Web3 space. Their message is very broad. They're trying to do too many things at once and the message is not extremely clear. I think it's important to have a clear message. That way, you can attract the type of user you want to your community.

Joeri: 1:30

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host. Today I'm excited to have another fractional CMO on the podcast and his name is Cahill. Hi Cahill, how are you doing?

Cahill: 1:46

I'm doing great, Joeri. Thank you for having me on the podcast appreciate it.

Joeri: 1:51

I'm so excited and also you promised my way my name in the right way. Thank you so much. So, guys, Cahill Camden is a fractional CMO. As I said, he's helping Web3 and tech companies achieve accelerated growth. He grew Coinberry and Blockchain Foundry from zero to successful eight figure exits and continues to work with technology and Web3 companies. He's also a Forbes contributor and a bestselling author Also. You see my books over there, cahill on the background and he's focused on growth strategies, optimization, Web3 technology and AI. I see we have a lot in common we do, but I'm going to With Cahill. Yesterday, I was myself a guest on a podcast and the question I got from this person was explain a bit. But this is a fractional CMO because in the US people talk a lot about it, but it's not in so common in Europe. So can you define for a listener how you define your roles as a fractional CMO and maybe what is the difference between hiring an internal I would say CMO or maybe working with an agency?

Cahill: 3:00

So the way I like to explain fractional CMO is there's really two main components to it. There's strategy and management. So this is where are we going as a company for marketing? How are we going to acquire users? What are the channels we are going to explore to actually bring people to our company? So that's the strategy and management part. So that's a strategy part of it.

Cahill: 3:24

The management part of it is how do we manage all the different team members or stakeholders? So how do we manage the designers, the developers, the social media creators, the influencers, the sales team, the email newsletters? How do we manage all of these things? So that's the high level part of it. Then there's the conversion rate optimization part of it. This is more of the nitty gritty. What do these stats tell us? What do the analytics tell us? What are our conversion rates? How can we improve these things so that we can actually have more bang for our buck, more value, more people can actually sign up, purchase our products and services? So you've really got these two high level things that you do.

Cahill: 4:13

It's again the strategy and the management, and then more of the nitty gritty the conversion rate optimization.

Cahill: 4:19

So I do that for tech companies and web, three companies, and the difference between a fractional CMO and a full-time CMO is just simply the time that is spent in the company. So if you're hiring internally, one of the things that I always like to say is you are paying a lot more for that internal person. You've got various different taxes, you've got various different employee benefits, etc. That really increase the rate of the cost for your internal hire, whereas a fractional CML you don't have that. And then with an internal CML, you've got one person who's focused on your company, but they don't necessarily have experience or the insights from other projects that they're working on. So you get more time per se, but you don't necessarily get as much broad experience and insights into the market. Because for me, I'm working on different companies at one time. I'm seeing things work with one company versus another and I can quickly make adjustments and apply those strategies between all the clients that I'm working with so that everyone really has a lot of success. That's how I like to explain it.

Joeri: 5:38

Yeah, I love your explanation and indeed the fact that you can combine different experiences and see what is working, what doesn't. That's also something I love, and building the team there and maybe, if you work with an agency, being able to talk to the agency and then bet with the strategy of the business in mind. You mentioned the stack companies, the Web3 companies. I would like to know a bit more about your background, because Web3 is suddenly. It's not suddenly, but instead. What did you do before and how did you start your Web3 journey?

Cahill: 6:13

So I started in sales. So if you or any of the listeners have ever seen the Wolf of Wall Street movie, I used to do very intense sales like that phone sales. It was super dense. So I did that for a couple of years, ended up running an agency office out in Los Angeles. So I did that for a little while. It was for a bigger company and then, after I had exited that company, I thought I really want to learn marketing and so I wanted to go into marketing and tech.

Cahill: 6:43

So I started that journey and it just progressed until a friend of mine was working on a blockchain project back in I want to say, 2015. And he asked me for a bit of help and I was like now what are you going to come work on an app? And apps were hot iPhone apps iPhone was like really hot and he said, no, you don't understand. Blockchain is the thing. I didn't listen to him until another friend of mine asked for some help in, I want to say, late, mid 2017. So mid 2017 is when I started getting into it, helped him with his project it's a marketing Then started getting more clients and started going down the path read the Ethereum white paper, bitcoin white paper, and it all clicked, as people say. And so then I just started working in Web3 and pivoted my whole agency and most of my business to just Web three and a bit of tech.

Joeri: 7:39

Yeah, because, yeah, no, the world is changing all the time. I also mentioned it. Now there is also AI these days. Are you this Web3 kind more on of projects, or is it because you had the NFTs, you had the metaverse cycle, now it's all about the eyes? I'm curious. Yeah, what are the things that you are working on at the moment?

Cahill: 8:03

Yeah, so I've been in Web three, blockchain, whatever you want, whatever new industry term you want to call it. Like I said, I've been in it since 2017. And I really believe in it. I think that the market is changing, obviously, and I think that is important to take into consideration when doing marketing, when building your projects, etc. But I didn't jump on the bandwagon for just NFTs or for just IC areas or whatever it might be. I've been doing it for a while and I will continue to be in the space.

Cahill: 8:33

So I do work on Web3 projects with AI. I actually have my, I've invested in my own startup and that is focused on AI, so I've been doing quite a lot of work there. This is over the last two years, so before open AI really became a popular thing, when it was released to the public, we started integrating it. But I do work with AI as well, and that's again it's more of a technology. I think that will enable a lot more advancement. It's not necessarily a hype thing that I'm jumping on. It's more hey, we can use this to really accelerate what we're doing, you know.

Joeri: 9:09

Yeah, yeah, indeed, it's not AI on such. That isn't interesting. It's when you combine it to get the value out of something else. Yeah, when we were, when we were preparing the episode and I read the things that you have been, you have accomplished in your projects a lot of growth in community building and so on. Yeah, I liked an orbit more. How did you, what were the challenges and how did you achieve such growth in your communities?

Cahill: 9:37

Yeah, so it really is going to depend on the market cycle, all right. So I've, as you mentioned when we started recording, I've helped a number of companies grow from basically zero to eight figure exits, and that has happened over down cycles and also during boom cycles, and so some of the challenges that I think you experienced are going to depend on the market cycle, all right. So what we've seen, for example, what I've seen shift and you've probably seen the same thing is, if you were in the space in 2016, 2017, community was important, but because there weren't restrictions on advertisements and it was still quite fresh, you could actually get away with a lot in terms of advertising your, your product and just getting users. Okay, ico boom happened, the crash happened, a lot of rug pulls. Then things changed, okay. So then we get into much more content driven type of marketing and the content driven marketing with things like medium, things like beehive, things like sub stack, et cetera, that becomes very popular.

Cahill: 10:52

Apple is still very popular and then there's a boom everyone's on it and then community starts to emerge from content, because people want to see much more close connection with founders and the founding team, I think. And so now we're in this phase where community is super important and so that's something that will work you out community and social. Not to say that it's not always been important it has been, but it's just, it's fluctuated and now it's become more important. I think, as we move forward, I think what we're seeing, what we're seeing from community emerge, is a lot of the live events in community, like spaces, amas. These types of things are becoming a lot more popular and a lot more valuable in some ways to really connect deeply with the community that you've built. So I think these are some of the challenges that I've seen going through the different kind of phases.

Joeri: 11:46

Yeah, obviously these challenges are there. So once you have this community and doing these spaces and so on, it's really interesting to get this engagement. But you need to start from somewhere, of course, and then to grow how you did. How did you do it and how there are certain phases, maybe to start at the community to get people engaged and then grow from there.

Cahill: 12:07

Yeah, that's a great question. I'm actually about to release a course on this, so this is interesting that you mentioned that there are ways to start a community, so something that's got to start grassroots. I think some of the very clear things that you have to have is just a clear understanding of what your product or service is about and making sure that that brand message is clear. I feel like a lot of times startups, especially in the Web3 space, their message is very broad. They're trying to do too many things at once and the message is not extremely clear. I think it's important to have a clear message so you can attract the type of user you want to your community.

Cahill: 12:49

So once you have that clear message, what I'm seeing working right now is moving in the way of things like free types of mints, free types of drops, free types of rewards. That can drive user growth to your community initially and that can really increase your Twitter user base. It can increase your Discord user base. It can increase your newsletter signup. So, for example, one of the things I mentioned to you, as a client I'm working with right now, I've taken them from basically zero to 75,000 people on their newsletter. Let's call it. I think we just crossed 29,000 people on Discord, 17,000 on Twitter in the last three and a half months, four months. A lot of this growth has come from the partnerships that I've built, the free mints that we've done.

Cahill: 13:39

So free badge mints, which are called social badge mints, can really help. So it's more of. For those who are not necessarily familiar with that, it's how do you tie some utility from your project to a badge that people can then display on your platform or on your game and they can have that kind of social proof that, hey, I was an early contributor to this, I was an early member to this. I was someone who helped with those early missions or helped with those early growth activities to grow your community, and so I want to show people that, yeah, it was one of the first time I believe in the project. So this is what I mean by social badgerment.

Joeri: 14:20

Yeah, you already mentioned creating contact on social and so on, because there needs also to be way that people maybe they know the brand or maybe they don't know the brand, but they find the community and they step into the community and then they become active in the community. So you need to grab their attention, need to find them and get them in the community and then grow from there. This seems also a really challenging part. Do you do that through the content or maybe through the spaces or something else?

Cahill: 14:53

Yeah, you're exactly right. So there's multiple phases to this. Obviously, right One is, like you said, capturing attention. So you're a brand new company. No one knows who you are. Okay, you got to have a clear message. Let's start there.

Cahill: 15:05

If you don't have a clear message and you're announcing or sharing content that is not clear, then people don't know what to attach to, they don't know what to believe in, they don't know if they fit your community. So I think having that clear message is first. Once you have that clear message, yes, you need to create content and push content on social platforms. In the Web3 space and technology space, we're typically looking at Twitter. Youtube is great. We are looking at things like sub-stack medium, but also your own blog, because you're going to want to have that later. So you got to push content on some of those platforms or all of those platforms. But how do you get people to read that content?

Cahill: 15:50

Now is when you have to start thinking about community partnerships, very small influencer or what we're calling now key opinion leaders, kols for connecting your brand to that content that you've created.

Cahill: 16:05

So that is the AMAs, the Twitter Spaces, those types of merges of community that drives people to your content.

Cahill: 16:15

To get those people, you've got to start small, typically, unless you've got budgets, and then you can go bigger, but a lot of people do charge for these types of things, and so once you get that, then you can also start going to creating your own type of free badge mints or your own type of utility badge that someone can mint for doing other marketing activities.

Cahill: 16:40

So you're basically getting your early community members to help you with your marketing by rewarding them with a free NFT free badgement that they can then say hey, I'll go and do a tweet, retweet something for you, advertise your AMA. I'll do something for you invite people to your newsletter, but you're going to give me a social proof, social badgement in return that gives me some utility to your game, your platform, your community, and so then you do that to drive more people to your community. So this is the kind of like the three main phases that we've been working on, and there's always you can pay for advertisements, you can do publication, you can get on podcasts, you can do all these things, but again, there's a lot of different traction channels. This is where a fractional similar like yourself or myself, this is where we come in and we say, okay, based on what you have right now. Here's what we should be looking at doing so that we can have the maximum chance of success.

Joeri: 17:42

Yeah, exactly, and maybe people that are listening. You mentioned a few times already utility. What kind of utility could it be when they have, when they mean something like that because, okay, they had, they can prove they were like one of the first. But what are some examples?

Cahill: 17:58

Yeah, so their utility can vary depending on what your platform is. So, for example, we're I'm helping out what through gaming company. So some of the utility might be you get, you get a bonus, or you get early access to an airdrop. When it happens, you get more rewards points when you're on the platform, you get the ability to have a certain badge on your profile. On the platform, you get the chance to win some type of giveaway. Now, in that giveaway could be tokens, it could be an NFT, it could be early access to the founding team, it could be a private AMA, it could be USDT, like you can do so many things. Could be a ledger, it could be a the treasure, like it's up to you. But that's what I mean by utility. So you get some utility with the platform or game or your project, and then there's some type of reward. Reward can be intrinsic rewards hey, I'm one of the early founders, I've only got one of 500 badges or it can be external awards. Hey, I get early access to the team, I can ask my own private questions, or I can literally win 50, 100, 200, 500 USDT or something like that. So that's what I mean.

Cahill: 19:13

And you also did mention something verification. There are ways to verify this, too, right? So, on Discord, there are ways to do verification. Techniques to connect badges. There are ways that you can do this on the blockchain. Obviously, if someone has your badge in their wallet, when they connect to your platform with their wallet, you can verify that they've got the actual badge. So there's a lot of things that you can do. It is more technical, it does take a bit of time and maybe cost some money, but there are ways you can verify this so you can say, hey, for the first 5,000 people to do X, we'll verify that and we'll give you this in our platform, and so you can give us types of this.

Joeri: 19:56

Yeah, yeah, the possibility is that, if you mentioned a few for people that are already in Web 3, I'm also thinking of that are in Web 2 or maybe get access to an event or something like that if they get access to personal tool, course and so on. You mentioned you're working on the course. Will there also be a traditional way to buy your course or will it go via NFTs or via crypto?

Cahill: 20:24

Yeah, it'll be traditional first, and you mentioned for Web 2 or just the regular tech world. You're absolutely right, these types of tactics can be done there as well. Maybe you need to do a bit more manual work to verify, because you're not using the blockchain, but you can do these types of exact same things to grow your tech company, and this is something that I'll be sharing in the course, which is the course can be purchased in a regular way, Web 2 style, but it will cover all of these things and the exact templates you can use. This is exactly what we've used to grow our core, to grow our communities for different clients to tens of thousands of users. I think we'll probably in the next two or three weeks, cross 100,000 newsletter subscribers for this one client. It's really there's a lot of potential here, and I think it's worthwhile for anyone in Web 2 or Web 3 to really consider, like how can I really grow my community and get the ball moving, get the ball rolling Exactly.

Joeri: 21:30

What's also interesting to me is you haven't mentioned yet LinkedIn, all these other platforms. Maybe are yourself active on LinkedIn we connected on Discord but I get a lot of people reaching out to me through LinkedIn, through the podcast and so on. So I'm also curious about you. Are you just referred by clients that refer to you to other clients? Are you also creating content? Or are you visiting this, being as a guest on podcast like this? What do you do to find your clients and then that they find you so?

Cahill: 22:03

yeah, they find me referrals. I have not really had. I've just been so busy with my AI startup and with client work that I have not had the time to put a lot of content out there. I used to have a newsletter, though I did that for a little while. I also used to have a podcast with tens of thousands of downloads back in 2018. So, like, that was a while back, but I've done the content and I'll probably pick it up again this year.

Cahill: 22:30

But it's really just a matter of how do I build great products right now? And then I am in a lot of Discord communities, like you mentioned. I do actually contribute a lot in communities. That's my thing. I'm on Facebook groups, I'm in communities. I do a lot of that. And then I also have a very good understanding of paid media acquisition Facebook, google ads and so that's what I do as well. Just because I can afford to have that, I can afford to have the time then to focus on other things, and then I'll have some people on my team create content in a few months when we're ready to really go.

Joeri: 23:07

Any tips for people not to be overwhelmed in Discord because, you know, on so many servers I have myself, I started to delete some of them where I was not so active on and to focus on a few. But yeah, any tips for that? How to structure, how to organize yourself?

Cahill: 23:24

Yeah. So that tip that you just said focus on a few that you're really, you really are going to be a part of. I think that's one thing. I mute all my servers, so then it's up to me to go in and check what's going on with the community. I really personally don't like all the little notifications and the popups. Obviously, my client, the servers that I'm on I don't mute them as much because I have to know what's happening, but I do recommend muting things on Discord, on Telegram as well. It's just an overwhelming amount of notifications.

Cahill: 23:58

And here's the thing right, we talk about it as marketers. Hey, how do you grab people's attention? But as a founder, as a leader in your tech company or your Web3 company, you've got to be very mindful of your attention going places, because otherwise you can't market, you can't sell, you can't build great product and you need to have deep work time to be able to do that. But you've got to be very mindful of your attention. But you've got to remember Not everyone is building a company like you, so they can have notifications popping up on Twitter and Discord and Telegram and that's fine for them, but for you you've got to be very mindful. So I turn off notifications on it.

Joeri: 24:38

Yeah, it's a basic tip, but it's a great tip. I do the same on Telegram and so on, because you get so many notifications and then try to focus on what really matters, of course.

Cahill: 24:51

So then, also with that. We've been talking about content. We've been talking about getting clients and how do you manage things? Again, going back to it, my focus is really on communities and so, now that I'm thinking about it, I do create a lot of content for communities, but not in the traditional sense of medium articles and podcast newsletters, that type of thing. But I do post a lot on communities not on a lot of communities, but a lot on some very small communities. So you and I are part of a community. I've posted a number of articles in there, I've shared thoughts, I respond to questions. I'm quite active in the community and it will go through waves and phases. Sometimes I'm very active for a few months and then I'm building and then I'll come back and I'm very active for a few months. But I think that's also a good tip for any founder or leader who's in tech or Web.

Cahill: 25:48

3 is, like you said, choose the communities that you want to focus on, remove notifications so that you go in and you check when you have time. And then what I would also add to that is contribute to those communities, Like I've gotten many clients from just contributing to communities, including some clients that I've never actually talked to, like never on the phone or on video, just email. They just want to work with me. They've read all my content, like literally every post that I've done. They're like, hey, I like what you have to say. How can we work together and work together for months. So those are my three recommendations.

Joeri: 26:29

Yeah, I think I love those recommendations. Just engage with people where you are If it's an meaningful engagement, not like just like these spammy comments and people see the difference. Of course. The only thing for me is only thing you directly see their background. On Discord, it's always who is this person that I'm talking to? I'm still more active, only thing at this moment. But, yeah, I definitely see if you are in the right communities and people, you show that you are genuine and then, rather than you reach out to you. Any last message to our listeners Is there anything you're excited about, things that are happening in this space or projects that you are working on?

Cahill: 27:07

Yeah, so I'm currently working on an interesting project called Stadia X. It's a gaming platform, so I'm excited about that, obviously, and that's growing. It's going well. We've got some interesting games coming out, so I've been working on that. And then I'm also very excited about two other things the AI startup that I've been working on, for that we're just starting to market that right now. So it's all around PR and getting more PR for your business, but we've created a really cool Chrome extension that allows you to take AI with you to pitch on different platforms, so that's called Press Jockey and I'm interested about. I'm excited about that, obviously.

Cahill: 27:48

And then, lastly, the course that I'm working on. So the course is all about how to grow your Discord community, how to grow your community, whether you're Web 2 or Web 3, whether you're just a tech company who's trying to build software or whether you're a Web 3 gaming startup. This course, I think, is going to be sharing. It's going to be sharing all the things that I do for clients, and you'll be able to just buy it instead of spending $10,000 to work with me. It's a great thing.

Cahill: 28:17

And what I'm excited about really, yuri, is I feel like Web 3 has had a lot of challenges. We're starting to see big players come in the market now and I'm excited to see cool, interesting, helpful projects really grow. I think we need that. We don't need the FTXs and the big black rocks coming in and buying everything. Sure, it might help a bit with the large companies coming in, but really I want to see cool startups thrive in this ecosystem and in order to do that, you need community. So this is why I'm excited about that course, because once you have that, once you unlock how to build community, you'll be able to grow your business and share your idea with the world.

Joeri: 28:58

Great, you can send me the link after us. We will put them in the show notes. There is always an article for every podcast episode show notes. Other people, my listeners, know that, but if people want to follow you, cahill, or they want to reach out to you, what do you suggest them to do?

Cahill: 29:16

Yeah, so the best way to get in contact with me is on Twitter. It's at Cahill. We'll show that link in the show notes and then you can email me as well. So my agency, my fractional CMO work, is done from digitalvision. io. So digitalvision. io is where you can reach out to me and you've got email addresses there and stuff like that, and we'll go from there.

Joeri: 29:43

Amazing. Thank you so much, Cahill. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for having me on, yuri. I appreciate it. Guys, again an amazing episode with a lot of value. I found that, and I think you found that too. And if people around you could also be interested in everything around, like fractional CMO, community building and so on, maybe, in Cahill's course, be sure to share this episode with them. And if you're not yet subscribed to the podcast, this is a really good moment to do this. And, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.