Quinten: 0:00

I see that more and more KOLs are using the fake engagement to get better deal, which I think is to be very fair, just disgusting because they take away marketing budget that could go to real engagement.

Joeri: 0:13

Hello e butveryone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Judi Bilast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm excited to be joined by Quinten Happy to be here.

Joeri: 0:26

Yeah, I'm happy to have you, Quinten, because you are the first Belgian on the Web3 CM Stories podcast. Isn't that amazing, guys? And he knows how to pronounce my name, so I love that. So if you're now wondering who is Quinten, I think lots of you will maybe already know him if you are in the Web3 space or if you're following Web3 blockchain crypto.

Joeri: 0:47

Quentin Francois is a cryptocurrency and blockchain content creator, investor, advisor and entrepreneur. He's an author too, the Bitcoin Revolution, which is Dutch, and he's also a co-founder and CBO at UriRate. He is what we call a KOL because he has a large YouTube channel. I'm not sure maybe the subscribers are already higher now, Quinten, but I read on your LinkedIn profile that there are 140,000 subscribers on YouTube, 150,000 members in your Facebook group and also over 100,000 followers on Twitter or X we call it these days and all your ?

Quinten: 1:45

The current state of the market. It's always a very interesting one, but I think we can describe it as some kind of reaccumulation period. I think, like a lot of people who studied the history or the different cycles that we already had in the past, they will recognize this stage of the cycle very well. But I think other people are currently. What's happening with crypto? Why is it not doing anything? But I think it's very clear, like after the halving, usually it's every cycle happening again. After the halving, we have a period of the price is not doing much.

Quinten: 2:20

I think the main difference between the last few cycles and this cycle is that Bitcoin stays the same. That's exactly the same thing. But altcoins have been bleeding much more than previous cycles and I think it has to do with the Bitcoin ETF, so the money that is still coming in is mainly going to Bitcoin. Right now we also have the Ethereum ETFs, of course, so money is flowing in there as well. Bitcoin right now we also have the ethereum etfs, of course, so money is flowing in there as well. But this could also be the reason that very soon, an altcoin or new altcoin run could be triggered. But I think, overall reaccumulation and there's nothing special compared to previous cycles. Everything is going according to plan.

Joeri: 2:59

I think, I think okay yeah, of course you think yeah, but sometimes it's also being patient and you know and and knowing what you're investing in. It's not in crypto. You've also been an investor in stocks previously, so we have an investment club, so you need to understand what you're doing. And, of course, with all these altcoins there are so many, yeah, are there maybe specific narratives in the altcoin world or specific altcoins that you think, without giving real financial advice, but that we should pay?

Quinten: 3:33

yeah, I think it's, it's pretty, it's more obvious than in previous cycles because actually, I must say, in previous cycles I missed a few important narratives or didn't position myself very well in narratives that I thought that could play out. Now I'm doing it differently and I'm just like playing it more on the narratives, and I think the main ones are obviously AI, that this is not even a doubt, that this is a main narrative right now. Within crypto and in terms of altcoins, I think real world assets are really interesting as well. We're already talking about that for many years, but I think now is the first time that really good applications are coming out for token real-world assets, so I think that's an important one as well.

Quinten: 4:15

Aside from that, deepin decentralized physical infrastructure network is also an interesting one, but I think it's a bit more risky, less obvious. Then we have gaming, which is already around for a long time as well, but I think more and more good gaming applications and platforms on which blockchain games can be built are coming out, so that's a good one as well. I think these ones are the most obvious ones and, of course, as every cycle, I think layer ones and layer twos are going to be still a very hot narrative again as well. So that's what I'm looking at and that's also how I position my altcoin portfolio. Wow.

Joeri: 4:54

But it is amazing. Now I hear you talk. You're really talking about all the subjects that have all the guests that I've had on my podcast, so the narratives, like all of them, and like Web3 Gaming, I get a lot of people in that area that are there wanting to come on the show the bin, of course, and all the other things you mentioned. Yeah, that's also actually a good sign to see who is wanting to come on the show, but obviously you are what we call a KOL. By the way, I'm also in this different kind of position being a moderator or a podcaster, but also now KOL at the European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona. I don't know if you will be there. I'll be there too. About KOL marketing, actually, because you're on the web to see most. How do you see the role as a KOL or KOL marketing evolving in the crypto industry today? Maybe some trends that you are seeing?

Quinten: 5:50

The importance of KOLs is changing over the years. To give some background, I have been full-time KOL since actually seven years ago, middle of 2017. And back then it was like I don't know, everyone was still like shaping the crypto industry and the blockchain industry, and now it's more clear. I think the importance of KOLs is just going up and up and I think the first cycle that was pretty low level. The marketing that was being done via kols. There was not really like agencies, there were no projects having always like kol rounds or marketing allocations, whatever. And the last cycle I think it became more clear and that then it really evolved. So the more partnerships were there, etc.

Quinten: 6:40

And I think this cycle is by far the most obvious one that the importance keeps on going up. And it makes sense because the amount of followers that KOLs have is also going up. So the impact that like an army of KOLs can have on your project is insane. I think. Even I'm pretty convinced about the fact that a group of KOLs can make or break your project.

Quinten: 7:03

At this point I don't know if that's the most healthy situation, to be very fair with you, because, yeah, like some guys of course, go for money and they have no ethics and then they just take whatever pays most and I think it's very bad for for maybe better projects. I think, yeah, I don't want to work with these shillers and then stay under the radar a little bit because of that. So I think it's not the best thing that the importance is going up, but that's a trend that I definitely see and I think especially, of course, marketing is everything in crypto, because it's all like startups beginning projects, it's about community building, getting your name out there, et cetera. So I think marketing is most important part and KOLs are playing a bigger and bigger role in that over the years.

Joeri: 7:47

Absolutely, not only in crypto, but in every market. I would say storytelling is important. Can you talk maybe a bit about the importance of narrative-driven marketing in the crypto space and how it influences project success and content?

Quinten: 8:03

I think having a certain narrative, or like the ones that I already named, marketing in the crypto space and how it influences project success and I think having a certain narrative or like the ones that I already named, such as ai, gaming deep in real world assets layer one a little bit, but I think, especially these four there is no project. I think right now that is going to get a much of attention, except if it's middleware. Of course, that's something else infrastructure but if you have a project and you're not integrating any of these narratives and not using them when reaching out to, for example, vcs and so on to get funding, I think it's very hard to get noticed. So the marketing of the project already starts obviously at the very beginning when you do your first reach out to even searching for a team if you're like making a team for your project, then to the vcs, etc. So I think the narratives are very important.

Quinten: 8:55

How you phrase it and how you, yeah, use these narratives to get attention, because I think it's very important to realize is that crypto is, first of all, it's it's a tension economy, but also the tension span is very low. So that's another thing. Or, like, the memory of the market is very low. If you reach out to a VC, this VC is getting probably 30 to 50 projects every day. If you don't stand out, are not using some narratives, are not selling yourself enough, then you have. You don't have their attention, they're not going to go get back to you yeah, and actually it's a bit the same as with my podcast.

Joeri: 9:34

I'm approached by so many people with a standard they don't even. I think it's just like mass messaging that they are doing to come on a show or just a standard copy paste message, like we all get on the social media too. Obviously, you will get a lot with how big is your community or the number of your followers on Twitter, and also what we see is, I see also engagement. Okay, engagement is important, but it should be real engagement, not like this fake engagement. And then I'm wondering do you have any advice for brands who want to work, collaborate with KOLs in the crypto space? But yeah, but they want more authentic engagement.

Quinten: 10:16

And I think fake engagement is getting more and more of a problem lately. The good thing is that both actually all platforms so YouTube, instagram and Twitter are really like fighting fake engagement and deleting bots and so on. The good thing is that both actually all platforms so youtube, instagram and twitter are really like fighting fake fake engagement and and deleting bots and so on. So that's the good thing. But a tip there I think to especially I'm going to focus on the part that you said you were about a fake engagement, because I think that's very important to to point out. You can definitely see on instagram it's the easiest thing. If someone posts something, then in the first hour they maybe get like 30, maybe 100 likes on their video and then a few comments and then suddenly in the blink of an eye they have 3 000 likes like 10 minutes after and like a lot of comments and all the same comments. It's not very difficult to to spot that, especially if you look at the comment section. It's very easy to see that now on twitter, because mainly I'm focusing on twitter right now, not doing youtube much anymore.

Quinten: 11:17

But speaking about twitter, I see that more and more kols are using the fake engagement to get better deal, which I think it's to be very fair, just disgusting, because they take away marketing budget that could go to real engagement just to put in their own pockets.

Quinten: 11:33

But anyway, how you recognize that is more or less the same thing. So if you look at someone posting regularly and you see this person posting in something and he or she gets, let say, 500 impressions in the first 10 minutes and then suddenly it jumps to 3K or like 10K, then it's very easy to recognize that this person is using fake engagement, like fake impressions and so on. So it's something that I really don't like to see that happening, but it happens more and more and it's just a matter of like work with I would say work with agencies for beginning projects who want to do marketing like KOL. Agencies are good, but on the other hand, they also just work with people who have fake engagements. So always just do your own research there and check, like the KOLs that they offer you, and just check like pay attention. Put your notification bell on for a little while and just look at the posts when they just posted and then 30 minutes later and you will see who has fake engagement and who has not.

Joeri: 12:38

Yeah, it's important to do your homework, to spend some time. Fake engagement, real engagement Something else a problem is like fake reviews and honest reviews, and it brings us to company where you're working at the way that you founded V-Rate. For people that have never heard about V-Rate, Can you explain a bit? It was a really good transmission.

Quinten: 13:04

Anyways, yes, we founded Rerate, which was called differently in the beginning. We rebranded it some months ago, like one and a half years ago more or less, which was still bare market territory. So there were some challenges there, but what we want to do, or what the problem that we saw, was okay. You have the review economy, which is very big 150 billion dollars is it worth. So you have chip advisory, help and so on, and problem there is that you have a lot of fake reviews, first of all, which the black for sale themselves. They get fined for it constantly but it's to boost their numbers, and so on.

Quinten: 13:42

You have extreme reviews, so people only review when they are extremely happy or extremely sad about an experience. You have a review bombing the competition that is literally telling an army of people like, hey, can you give this restaurant or this some bad reviews? So that is also some problem there. And, of course, the bots and so on that are there as well. So it has a lot of problems and I think, or we thought, it could easily be solved by using matching technology, like by storing, making sure that everything is very transparent, by incentivizing doing reviews for every place that you go so you get more balanced reviews.

Quinten: 14:22

But also we made a proof of location system that eliminates the risk of the balls, first of all, and also the review bombing, because we cannot do a review anymore if we're not at this place, or at least the system needed to detect beforehand. Okay, you have been in this place in the past, let's say 48 hours, so you can still do a review afterwards, of course, but if it didn't detect that you were there, then you cannot do a review and that eliminates all the problems that we have. We make that in a very socialify and gamefy setting with nfts, with following people, with even check-ins so you can see where your friends are, like if you can even follow your favorite influencer, etc. So we're making it like a social platform with reviews in the middle, check-ins in the middle, but also like social by NFTs and so on.

Joeri: 15:13

You mentioned those words like NFTs, but people using the platform they don't need to understand what is an NFT or this blockchain. It's just a technology behind and it's really a good use case if you would say, like in in one or two sentences, what we rate does but just say the trip advisor of web3. Yeah I love that it's, it's easy. But then for me, if I don't know this web3, then you would maybe say for the future or at a TripAdvisor where you don't have the problems.

Quinten: 15:45

You made me think about something like. The people, indeed, don't need to know what all this is. People don't even need to know how to integrate a wallet or what NFTs are or whatever blockchain is used on the backend. Because we focus also, we want to do mass adoption for our applications. So we focus on Web2 and Web3 users and we want to make it very easy to use the platform, and I think that's also the way to go for any application right now. If you want to become a killer app in Web3, this is the way to go. You need to make it simple, you need to make it easy to understand and you need to onboard web to users as well.

Joeri: 16:26

Now, that's exactly what we try to do as well absolutely, and something that's also really important in web3, it's the building of community and to have user trust. How do you see building this community?

Quinten: 16:40

we're definitely going to start with focusing on the web3 community. So of course I have a lot of connections in a big network, everything marketing wise. I'm not the cmo in the company but I'm like an all-around brand advisor because of the connections and so on, but especially focused on marketing, of course. But so we're going to focus there on the web3 users, first via marketing channels that I know, and afterwards we're going to focus more and more on onboarding web2 users, because of course, for us the low-hanging fruit there is just to try to get the web3 users in first place and then go to the Web2 users and hopefully become like this big application where by that time it will be easy enough for everyone to use.

Joeri: 17:30

That is a bit of the short explanation of how we will approach it yeah, it's, you're still building, but maybe there is already a lesson learned that you can share. For people wanting to do something, there's a lot of lessons shared.

Quinten: 18:41

First lesson is it's very hard to build during a bear market. That's, yeah, that was actually all right. It was really hard. And first, it's still up to today, most of the people in our company haven't got paid because we literally grinded for one and a half years without much funding. We got some funding. We raised a few hundred K, which made us be able to develop the application, but there are, of course, so many lessons that I don't even know where to start.

Quinten: 19:13

But yeah, I think a team, having a good team, is one of the most important things. Having a motivated team is super important. Also, just know, if you start with a project, that the challenges and the difficult times will come. Just be prepared for that and just not give up. Everyone has it. Everyone has very difficult periods. Everyone has a lot of challenges in a startup. It's just a matter of seeing it as part of the of the process and it's just like the ones will the ones who like keep on going and not get stopped because of that. They will eventually win. And it's like a race of whoever can keep on going the longest. This project will just win in the end. Of course, there's like a race of whoever can keep on going the longest, this project will just win in the end. Of course, there's like other factors as well, but this is like a really good one. A lot of people just get up too early, and I think that is the main thing. Challenges will come, hard times will come. Keep going.

Joeri: 20:08

Exactly you need to build and you know why you are doing this. Maybe you don't see the book anymore, but it's the why it's really important, why you're doing stuff. So that's if you do that, and then you continue and you believe in it, and then, yeah, sometimes you need to pivot, of course, and you don't know what will happen in the market and you don't know if there will be what will happen. Believe in that. Having a good team helps, but, of course, we cannot say in the crypto market, web3 market, blockchain everything is evolving so quickly. You also mentioned AI and I'm wondering what there is. Ai, of course, is everywhere, but do you see now, as maybe the next big trend in crypto or blockchain, if there is already something coming up that we should be aware of as a marketer?

Quinten: 20:55

I think more or less the same thing as I replied a few questions ago like the same narratives. If I would have known another one I would have said it, but I don't know it. But I'm just going to focus myself on the existing trends. Maybe, like DeFi is coming back, maybe NFTs are coming back. It's possible, but I think it's for me personally. I'm just playing my out, my my output portfolio on the narratives that are very clear right now and if scenarios. I would like it so much, but I do believe I think that is very interesting.

Quinten: 21:32

I do believe that out of one of these niches, with one of these narratives, there will be like a killer application, and we saw like really good attempts last cycle. I'm thinking, for example, about gaming. We saw Stefan. Stefan was obviously the one that was really close to becoming a killer application which made like a big breakthrough for crypto. But their tokenomics sorry to use this word, but fucked it up. So they became, they went into like that spiral and they didn't get out of that spiral anymore. So I think personally that the chances are there that it will be in.

Quinten: 22:10

You have a lot of blockchain applications that are getting better and better.

Quinten: 22:13

A few years ago they were horrible, they were constantly bugging, it didn't work, and so on.

Quinten: 22:18

But right now there's a few really good blockchain applications that could be a contender for this killer application this cycle. The one that I want to mention very quickly is Off the Grids. It's made by a gaming studio that had a game before that had 150 million users already and right now it's already beta, is being played by very big streamers and so on. This could be, in my opinion, an application with easily tens of millions of players, which would already make it the biggest touching application today, because even Steppen only had I think, if I'm not wrong like 6 million at the peak. So if this game gets, in my opinion it could go to 10, 20, 30, maybe like a legal prediction that I'm doing right now, but I'm super excited about that. But I think it could also come from other issues. But I believe it could also come from other issues, but I believe that it will come actually this cycle like an application with probably 100 million users that will run on blockchain while nobody even feels it works.

Joeri: 23:27

Yeah, that would be amazing. I think it's now two years ago that the metaverse was a hype. I don't know if this is something that you've been. I've been doing metaverse events myself at a certain moment. Now, when you use this word metaverse, it's a bit burnt, like NFTs burnt. I don't know Any thoughts about metaverse.

Quinten: 23:47

It's interesting that you're saying that, because what I also think about these things, like metaverse, but also ai is that these trends and niches that are right out there in crypto, they start outside of crypto. So the metaverse it was a big hype after after facebook, I think yeah, it was facebook right, rebranded rebranded to meta and wanted to like I don't know how much it was a crazy amount of money, like tens of billions of dollars, into the Metaverse project, and then it became very hot in crypto as well. Now what we saw with AI is the same thing. Chatgpt came out. This was a huge success the application with the quickest to 1 million users ever and it became immediately a big hype in crypto because before that, nobody cared about AI applications.

Quinten: 24:39

Fetch is there since 2018, I think, or 2019. Nobody cared for four years or three years, and then suddenly ChessGPT comes out and all these AI coins like go through the roof and now it's like a narrative that is there to stay. So I think there's a lesson there as well that we can point out here, I think, and that is just pay attention to what happens in the traditional technological space and you can maybe have a look into the future what the next big thing is in crypto as well, because it starts there and it goes to to crypto immediately afterwards yeah, I think that's a really good thought, that you have to see what is happening, and then how can it come to crypto Quinton.

Joeri: 25:20

I guess this is a really good point that people can think about is what you just said to end this podcast episode with. But if they want to follow you, if they want to find you, I think it's not difficult to find you. But where would you like me to send?

Quinten: 25:34

you x. I'm mainly focusing on x right now because I'm actually a little bit done with youtube because of several reasons, but it exists like a lot nicer to do and there I'm the most active. So I'm constantly posting, maybe too much, but but yeah, that's my main platform.

Joeri: 25:54

Yeah okay, amazing. So thank you, quinton, for sharing all your knowledge with us and be sure to connect. I will already connected, I think, on x, but you will maybe connect even more. I will follow you with more because so many things are happening on all these social media platforms, but now I know that is your main, so I will follow you there for sure. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to have you on your show. It was a pleasure to be here. Guys, this was the first episode with the belgian, a belgian crypto info here on the show on the web 3 cmo stories. So, if you liked it, be sure to share this episode with your friends, other other entrepreneurs, people in Web3 or maybe looking and they want to know what is happening in the Web3 space. Also, if you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this. If you haven't given me a review yet, please do that, because it helps me even reach a bigger audience and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.