Hey Blockchain Protocols, Stop Abandoning Your Market Strategies

How to think about go-to-market strategy in blockchain

Go-to-market strategy in crypto and blockchain would be laughable if it wasn’t so concerning. Project after project began with lofty ideas and then became victim to chasing the hype cycle. Why is this? One problem I see is the lack of conviction in an idea. It’s hard to follow a long-term, unsexy strategy when other projects are in the limelight and getting rich. It’s pure fear of missing out. 

Before the beginning of the last bull market, many blockchain projects were talking about entering Africa to bank the unbanked or provide legitimacy to institutions, among other creative use cases. While this innovation has not stopped in most cases, it is fair to say it’s no longer the focus. 

The rise of NFTs and the entry of large players who seek opportunities by selling digital goods has shifted many protocols to a new market of flashy partnerships that are purely revenue driven. Blockchain was supposed to be a way to increase participation of the average person in the financial system and instead that wealth is being transferred back to the big players through the sales of these collectibles.

What’s stranger is that protocols with seemingly zero interest in non-fungible tokens or even smart contracts quickly shifted gears. They went from working with governments to being the platform for artists to sell pictures of goats in hats. Why? Because it was taking too long? Because it was hard? The unfortunate result is that any differentiation between blockchains, besides a few metrics pertaining to speed and volume, has vanished. 

In my opinion, this is the result of the lack of good go-to-market strategy. But how can projects correct course and how can newer projects gain the advantage?

Enter Product Marketing for Blockchain 

It’s not about marketing your product, it’s about your product’s market. Product Marketing is a poorly named functional area that is very misunderstood, even by those who assume the role. It is a highly strategic role that sits between marketing, business development, and product / engineering, but is unique. 

For engineering-led start-ups, it’s best to have a product marketer as one of your first non-technical hires. But it’s pivotal that they deeply understand and can translate technical jargon. This is because they can work with you to analyze your market, work with you to strengthen your mission and vision statements and figure out the right market entry plan. 

Even products (or in our case blockchains) that can be used for general use, it is best to build for a specific audience and specific use cases. This helps strengthen your position in a particular niche, making it harder for competitors to enter and easier for your project to expand later on. 

Product Marketers ensure that everyone internally is on the same page when it comes to the go-to-market strategy. Is there consistent messaging? Is marketing / sales / product truthful and speaking the same language? Does everyone have a clear understanding of the advantages and shortcomings of our technology? They represent the user / customer internally to ensure that the marketing isn’t cringy, that sales isn’t overselling, and that product / engineering plans are going to first and foremost benefit the market of choice.

It’s a difficult role to fill because you need someone technical enough with a clear understanding of the audience, but intuitive enough to make decisions based on partial and ambiguous information. As there generally aren’t a hard set of deliverables that can be measured, it can be difficult for technical founders to grasp their impact as they are rightfully data-driven and highly analytical. Yet, while data is an important factor in creating a go-to-market strategy much of it will be argument-driven. 

Selecting A Market Strategy 

There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, as they (whoever they are) would say. But before you can start marketing your technology effectively, selecting an audience is imperative. However, before you can select a strategy, you need to choose a methodology of selection. I think about this in three ways: You can look at vertical, role, or region. And I really wouldn’t mix and match, although you can combine two or all three for greater specificity. 

Vertical. Choose an industry that you would specialize in. For instance, maybe you build out use cases that can be beneficial in gaming and ensure there are integrations with all the top game development platforms. Or you go after health care and ensure you follow all the data compliance measures and have the necessary tools to integrate with medical systems. 

Role. Instead of industry, maybe you want to focus more generally. But then it is best to look at roles. Who is going to be using your product (or in this case blockchain). Developers? Well, that’s a pretty broad bucket. Do you want to build a use case where you are closer to the application layer working with front-end engineering or do you see your protocol being more of an infrastructure layer where you are targeting operations engineers, site reliability experts, or system administrators? This means your blockchain may be adopted to be the next solution for something like software licensing, which would be useful across multiple industries. 

Region. Maybe the focus is designing for a specific region. What challenges do they have? What solution or void are you filling? A country in Africa or Latin America may look very different from a country in the European Union, Asia, or the United States. Countries in Africa where it’s hard to verify a university degree or ownership of IP may be an area of focus, while LATAM may be more interested in international remittances. 

Too many blockchain protocols are taking the if we build it, they will come approach. This generalist approach leads to hobbyists coming to your platforms but doesn’t entice businesses, institutions, and governments who need to solve specific problems right now. Plus many people are building these structures and it is becoming increasingly difficult for the average person to tell them apart.

Is it slower to target operations engineers working on healthcare solutions in Cambodia than getting a bunch of recent college grads selling pictures of goats to pay rent? Absolutely, but which is more sustainable and impactful for the longer term? Will the students selling goat jpegs lead to increased adoption or will it scare off players within your target audience? What makes it difficult to be replaced? In business development, this would be referred to as land and expand.

Deciding on a market entry strategy does not prohibit other use cases. As protocols are public and open source, anyone can use the technology for anything they’d like. This should be welcomed, even the goats! And other businesses supporting the chain may pop up to support those use cases and build for them. That’s the nature of free markets and that’s fantastic! But your mission needs to be unapologetically focused. 

Defining Your Messaging

The lack of care that goes into consistent messaging is appalling. Or that people confuse marketing copy with messaging. 

I think of messaging and positioning as the single source of truth. It’s internal and used to enable external marketing and dialogue, but its purpose is just to be true. 

What promises do you make to your users / community / partners / customers? What does your blockchain provide? How do you do that? What markets are you targeting? What are the core capabilities for those markets that differentiate you? What are the benefits of using your technology and your value proposition? What are you not very good at? Where are you and where are you going?

Knowing who the message is for is pivotal. Have you built out personas to get a deep understanding of your user? Do you know them from a behavioral standpoint? A psychological standpoint? A demographic standpoint? 

Given the current cultural climate, I believe that persona building can be a top asset to secure market share. Why? Because it seems that this is a task that is often absorbed by marketing teams who are afraid to make generalizations about their audiences. For example, if you are selling a devtool, your audience is going to be primarily white and Asian males of working age. Understanding how to speak to that audience without trying to be too woke will help you break through.  As your messaging needs a broad reach, you need to speak to the widest audience within your target. Otherwise, you are shooting yourself in the foot and alienating those that would otherwise adopt your technology. As demographics change, your messaging must change with it. But reality cannot be ignored in exchange for desire before the shift occurs. (as a side note, I have found that those who do not fit into those demographics often share the same psychographics as their colleagues. And those similarities are what drew them to their careers to begin with) 

This is important as it will determine your company’s voice, what content you produce and how you engage. There is a reason Victoria’s Secret has body positivity and empowerment messages for women and Alex Jones is telling people the frogs are turning gay and selling vitality supplements. Getting the voice right for your audience is the difference between long-term sustained growth and fizzling out between market cycles. 

Understanding the difference between a release and a launch

New products or upgrades are the best opportunity to re-engage with your selected market. But you need a clear strategy or you can easily ruin this opportunity. 

A release is when code is deployed, a launch is when you tell the world about it. This is not necessarily at the same time, especially if you have frequent releases or the timing is off.  Whether you have a continuous integration model or are dealing with the complexities of achieving consensus before upgrades take effect. 

Those who focus on go-to-market strategy will help define the go/no-go for the launch. Meaning that certain features will need to be ready. If part of a feature is delayed, the release may happen, but you may wait on the launch. You can have many releases, but only one launch if you want to capture the attention of your audience and not become noise. 

You will also want to ensure that you treat each launch with the right amount of effort. This can be defined by how much of an impact it is expected to have in your chosen market or current user base. Not every launch deserves a press release and the amount of effort it took internally to build is not a factor. Sometimes a small bug fix that greatly impacts users will need more of an effort because it is critical to share, while something that took months to build may only be a blip for most users. 

A product marketer or go-to-market strategist will assess this with the product team and ensure everyone is on the same page regarding what each release means and ensure everyone is enabled for when a launch will occur. 

It’s helpful to get everyone using the same language about launch sizes and what is included. Even if releases are labeled something as silly as large, medium, and small, where large includes press releases, documentation updates, blog posts, paid campaigns, videos, training materials, broad social media strategy, etc and a small starts and ends with a single tweet or discord post. 

Launch strategy can be very complex depending on the number of teams releasing products, the competitive landscape, and world events that can steal your thunder. 

Blockchains are not the exception 

I hear from many teams that blockchain is different. This methodology of go-to-market strategy and release / launch planning just doesn’t work. Well, I heard that from every B2B SaaS start-up making software for ITOps I worked with too. Everyone thinks they are unique. And while it’s true you cannot copy and paste a strategy, the reality is most market factors are the same even if you aren’t selling anything and don’t have customers in the traditional sense. 

But release cycles are different because once we release there is a consensus period. And? It is up to each team when they want to do the market launch. The purpose of the launch is to expand beyond your existing user and community base. I advise waiting until the code is fully available after the block the changes take effect. As new players aren’t hammering for your changes. However, this is an individual decision and you can time your launch to what works for your team. Though that might result in greater risk if there is a chance of the release not being approved or delayed. 

But it’s open source and everyone can already see everything on GitHub! Our community is already tweeting, we can’t not say anything! Why not? Assuming you are actively engaged with your community, they already know what's coming anyway. Let them tweet and talk amongst themselves. Maybe even pull them into your launch planning so they can help amplify it. The launch isn’t for your existing users, it's a vehicle for growth and to expand your market share. Although, yes it will impact them too, an engaged community will already know everything and this should be managed through your developer relations team, not hamper your go-to-market strategy. 

But should we even be controlling messaging? We are decentralized and there are other players building? You only control what your organization is doing. You can’t control what others do. It’s your purpose, your vision, and your mission you need to act on. You can try to bring others along, but given the nature of open-source projects, there is a level of chaos that we need to accept. What is important is that you keep that chaos external and that your team follows your plan. 

But our market strategy isn’t working! We actually do need to abandon our strategy. Fair enough. Sometimes this happens and you need to pivot. Having regular check-ins and metrics that help you decide when to stay the course or move on will be helpful. Set this up beforehand and don’t let your emotions fog your judgment. If and when that time comes, I guarantee the failure wasn’t because you followed a go-to-market strategy, but because you picked one you weren’t suited for at the moment. Choose a new market to enter, but be careful to not select based on hype cycles, FOMO, or what everyone else is doing. 

At the end of the day, blockchains are software. Functionally, a blockchain is software infrastructure or a platform that others build on top of. Those who benefit the most from building on a platform are those with particular problems they need to solve, they will be within businesses, institutions, governments, and rarely individuals. Because of this, blockchain companies should be looking at the expertise that was gathered from B2B SaaS companies, especially those focused on DevOps and ITOps tooling. Thinking you need to entirely reinvent the wheel will only make it harder for you and your team to achieve the growth you desire.

—

Follow me on Twitter (@tonacracy) for similar advice and rants.