Why Your Crypto Project Needs a Narrative to Grow & Scale

This is Part Two in an 13-part Alpha Growth series breaking down the problems every blockchain project has and needs to solve to grow and scale. New to the series? Start here.

We’ve established the first problem every crypto project faces: the problem itself.

Above all else, whether you’re an ecosystem fund, a DEX or a dApp, you have to know what problem you’re trying to solve before you can do anything else.

Once you know the problem (and it’s likely you’ll think you know the best problem to solve, try to move forward, change your mind, decide you were wrong, find another problem, try solving that and so on and so on until you land on the right problem for right now) you’re ready for the next must in blockchain biz dev.

The second problem: you need a narrative on solving the problem.

What dis? It’s not enough to identify a problem and set out to solve it. You need people, teams, builders, creators, a community to get involved and be a part of the solution.

So how are you going to get them interested?

You’re going to tell them a story.

It’s going to be a story so good that they want to tell it to other people. These storytellers will be proud to tell it. It’s a story so good that the people telling it can feel their social cred going up just from knowing about it.

It’s not only a good story. It’s a simple story. One that won’t get mangled in the game of telephone that happens when more and more people repeat the story across their networks.

It’s a story so good and so simple that it stays intact as it travels from person to person. It makes clear what problem you’re solving and how you’re going to solve it.

Looking to a Web2 example, take Cloudera, founded back in 2008 with a team of Google, Oracle, Yahoo! and Facebook alums. One of the guys, Jeff Hammerbacher, had built the internal cloud at Facebook. He learned how to solve that problem there, then left to start his own company. There was a super simple narrative that ended up drawing tons of attention to what Cloudera was up to:

“Jeff solved cloud at Facebook. Now he’s solving cloud at Cloudera because a lot of other people need help with the same problem, and they know how to do it. He did it for Facebook, he can do it for all these other people who need help. Pay attention. Get involved. Join their team.”

And people hearing this narrative thought, oh, cool. Now I will pay attention.

You have to simplify the message and turn it into a story. That’s what a narrative is. It’s “explain it like I’m five.”

Another way to say this: it has to pass the telephone test.

If I tell you the story and you tell the story to the next person, and they can tell the same story to the next person, then it’s inherently viral. Along with being five-year-old simple, the narrative has to make the storytellers look good. The person who tells the story needs to be able to feel like they’re getting some sort of status or cred by telling it. Each person who tells the story needs to feel that. If you can get somebody else excited to tell the story and spread the narrative, and they get influence and affinity and status from telling that story, you’re going to have a viral, word of mouth narrative about the solution to the problem you’re trying solve.

You want people to think:

It’s pretty cool I know about this story.

I sound like I really know what’s going on in this industry when I tell this story.

This story is going to be really valuable to the people who hear it.

Other people are going to want to tell this story once I tell them about it.

There’s an art to setting up the narrative. It’s like game theory. There’s a sweet spot in gaming that you have to hit to keep the people playing. If the challenge is too easy, it gets boring and the person leaves. If too much mental energy, too much cognitive load is required, people eject out and leave.

Just like in gaming, your blockchain project narrative has to be right on point, simple enough for people to instantly get it, but exciting enough to hold their attention. What you want is this: I can tell you, and you can tell the next person, and that person can tell the next person. When that happens:

You’re getting funding.

You’re building a team.

You’re creating a community.

You may need a consultant or external team to help you surface the narrative by asking questions like:

• How do you want the problem solved?
• Who do you want to solve the problem?
• What is the strategy for telling people about the problems so they can come in and solve them?

After you do this, there’s another piece that’s crucial to getting your narrative to the right people. Once you have your simple story ready, you’ve got to do something with it.

Spread the narrative. Let it go viral.

But how?

Aurora literally put up a forum post. So did Proximity Labs. This happens all the time. Ecosystem funds and projects share their narrative around the problems they want solved with their existing, immediate communities.

And that’s a good first step. But unless you’re in the weeds, already in the community getting your hands dirty, you won’t even know these problems exist because you won’t hear the narrative.

This leads to a limited talent pool. Limited ideas. Location bias — where the people who are working to solve problems are the same people who have been in the ecosystem.

Now sure, some location bias is okay because you want qualified candidates. But you need to take steps outside of your normal circles to get the message out there more broadly. The qualification mechanism in this is the difficult part.

For an example of this done well, look at YCombinator. They publish a huge list every year essentially saying, we’re looking to invest in these types of things. They’ll end up having a huge team of people scoring thousands of proposals. The best ones move onto the next steps. Their process allows them to put their narrative in front of a broader audience, but still get inbound from highly qualified people and teams.

Along with the YC approach, how can you market these problems so that even more people can know they exist? You need distribution. You need mechanisms for making distribution happen.

Here are a few ways we advise the projects and teams we work with at Alpha Growth to create the distributions they need for their narratives:

• Host AMAs that put the problems out there and mention there’s funding to solve them
• Award grants
• Connect projects to investors
• Launch an incubator
• Hire internally to solve the problems using talent that comes to you via the new distribution channels
• Host events
• Build up your socials by talking about the problems
• Put on hackathons
• Hold open office hours

At all times, you’re communicating: hey, we’re open to ideas, but these are the things we’re solving. These are the things that need to be built. These are the kinds of companies and teams we want to help build these solutions.

I can’t underscore this enough:

Your ecosystem and the projects in it are not going to get your problems solved by the best teams with the best abilities if you aren’t creating a narrative around solving the problem.

Once your narrative is set and going out across your distribution channels, you’re beginning to build the solution. And for that, you need investors. In Part Three of this series coming out next week, I’ll tell you what you need to get investment.

If you’re interested in learning about more growth strategies for your project, we encourage you to connect on Twitter @bryancolligan. Join our Telegram for members-only alpha on projects we’re watching and DYOR resources for creating growth, credibility and engagement for your project.