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Imagine you’re an engineering team made of shadowy super-coders. You’re into DeFi, dApps, AMMs, and liquidity pools. You get the value proposition: Slay the banksters and increase people’s sovereignty over their hard-earned money so that we can cooperatively out-run the central bank money printers and their war on our savings and salaries w/the inflation they’ve wrought.
All you want to do is BUIDL. Marketing sucks up time and energy. (TBH, you prob. don’t even like it.) Instead, you’d rather put that time and energy into perfecting your knowledge of Solidity or improving your burgeoning protocol.
Someone has to do some marketing because you need TVL to go up in order to make your protocol sustainable. TVL might be a vanity metric but it helps keep your team motivated. And it attracts the whales (as well as your fellow degens) because, well, “numba go up” – right? A big, increasing TVL is bullish AF.
Now compound that dislike for marketing with English not being your native language. You know you’re at a disadvantage because DeFi has a nomenclature all its own – and just about all the action (outside of Asia, that is) is being talked about primarily in English. So when you sit down to write any sort of marketing copy, you have to not only write like a degen but you have to do so in a language that isn’t native to you. It’s tough.
Instead what you do is put off the marketing – continually – and focus instead on more BUIDLing because, somewhere deep inside, you believe that “if you build it, they (the whales) will come” and magically discover your creation.
Maybe you’ll get lucky and your fellow degens will auto-magically discover your protocol and spread the word for you. Maybe you won’t.
How about a better way? One which gives you and your team vastly better odds at your protocol being a success?
My team and I can help your DeFi protocol with marketing and P.R. I’ll explain what I mean by that. But first, a bit about me so you know why we’re qualified to do this.
HODLing and DeFi
As an investor, I’ve been a HODLer since 2013. I’ve also gone through a lot of the growing pains on ETH and various L2s & side-chains. I’ve lost a fortune in bear markets. I’ve lost another fortune to malicious rug pulls. As a business owner, I’ve run engineering teams – and I empathize with the mentality of “Just let me BUIDL! Don’t ask me to market it afterwards!” which is common amongst top-tier development talent who don’t like explaining their work of genius to plebs and normies.
At the end of “DeFi Summer” last year, I got into DeFi via Yearn after listening to a podcast Andre Cronje was on.
Since then, I’ve put several hundred hours into DeFi. And I’ve become something of a “DeFi Maxi”, if you will.
Why? Because DeFi is as close to a digital meritocracy as we’ve got nowadays:
- Your gender is irrelevant.
- Your age is irrelevant.
- Your follower count is irrelevant.
- Your politics are irrelevant.
- The school you attended is irrelevant.
Build something useful and decentralized – and the community will (hopefully) help it grow.
Increasing TVL
How do you get that community to help it grow? Well, you need a few things in my experience:
Good Technical English: Yes, DeFi is populated by a bunch of super-high IQ peeps who love to talk like 4th graders, shill their bags, and share Pepe memes. But when it comes to money, they don’t mess around. If you sound dodgy AF – like you might rug pull them, for instance, and run their funds through Tornado Cash – they’re not going to ape into your protocol. It’s that simple, fren.
Clear, Ongoing Communication: What your protocol does and how it’s different from other, competing protocols is key. You have to explain that in clear terms which your fellow degens get. And you have to keep explaining it over and over in order to keep sending TVL in the right direction.
A Tribe of Believers: Every backer of your protocol wants to see it moon. You gotta communicate with them where they’re at, primarily via Discord, Twitter, Telegram, and Medium. And do it on the regular. You want to keep the gigabrains around and engaged.
My team can help with all this. We’re good at communicating your protocol’s message because we’re native English speakers and fellow DeFi fanatics. Plus, you can pay us in your protocol’s native token because we believe in getting our incentives (namely, the success of your protocol) into as tight of alignment with you and your team of shadowy super-coders as we can.
We only want to work with a few, quality protocols. Let’s see if yours is one of them.
LFG,
Brian from Libertas Bella
