PARSIQ + IQ Protocol Q&A #40 with Tom Tirman and Anastasia Nesterova
As usual, before getting to the questions, we have some community updates we want to remind you about. We still have some great opportunities for you to earn PRQ. From January 1st until March 31st our Q1 2022 $PRQ 2X Yield Boost + IQ Incentive Program will be running, so take a look, you won’t want to miss this one!
Keep up to date with all of PARSIQ’s news by following us on Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, and Discord. You can also follow Tom on Twitter here and Anastasia here.
Below is the Transcription of the Q&A from January 6, 2022.
Tom: Hi everyone and Happy New Year, welcome to this year’s first PARSIQ Youtube live AMA, we did a short one in Telegram last week to summarize the year, but today we have Anastasia who is the Head of Marketing at PARSIQ and she’s been with us for, i think 3 years, at least. And yeah, first she started part time back in 2018 and joined full time in 2020, so she’s been heading up most of our marketing efforts, so any questions to her please don’t hesitate to ask in the chat. So yeah, maybe we’ll start off with a small introduction, Anastasia you can say a few words about yourself and how you got to work at PARSIQ.
Ana: Yeah so, I spent a few years in crypto before joining PARSIQ so i helped a few projects to hold ICOs back in 2016 but yeah everything has changed drastically since then, after those projects i’ve been working on a freelance basis and that’s basically how I met the PARSIQ team. So it’s been crazy times when PARSIQ was just starting our journey and was really a super complicated project for user understanding and customer perspective, and I think we made a giant leap already with positioning and branding and even marketing.
Tom: Let’s jump into the questions, but before we jump into the questions from the comments section we have a few that have been forwarded by our Community Managers and most of them are for Ana.
Q: What marketing Strategies are we implementing to more quickly onboard members and customers?
Ana: Yeah, so if we are speaking about our B2B funnel and focus, we have a lot of different inbound tactics and workflows built, a lot of things are still in progress. We’re trying to create documentations, how-tos and lots of other educational stuff for our users and potential customers within PARSIQ so that we can really show the value of the project and solve the most common problems in PARSIQ that usually our followers and even users don’t really know about the problems they have. Not to mention that they cannot even be aware that PARSIQ can solve lots of problems with trading, compliance, analytics and so forth. The goal this year regarding B2B vertical is to rotate our marketing activities within our already existing customers and their success stories.
So, i hope that all of you guys already noticed that we just launched our new website which was created by our marketing team and Deanna Dong who is our Marketing Advisor, so we’ve got a new section for our customers success stories and this is i guess the most brilliant part of our new website. So everything regarding onboarding of new clients will go to show the real value and real case implementations on the platform. If we speak about onboarding and converting of our community members compared to our B2B clients, that’s maybe a more challenging task to us because the interests of our existing clients and our community members are different. I think I can mention that we have discussed and have plans for an incentive program for our community that will incentivize community members to build at least theoretical use cases and Smart Triggers that can be built in the future. So maybe this will build some kind of ground for our future Smart Templates Marketplace as well. So the task here will be to first of all create the demand for the project, for the platform and then to address the problems our community members may have which we can solve.
Ana: It’s interesting, it depends what he means by less traditional. I’d have to mention that we spent the last half a year being more focused on the B2B side of things in PARSIQ and we have restructured all of our positions, sales funnels, strategies and that’s why many community members noticed that we kind of lacked social media presence, like regular coin shilling stuff. But I think this is definitely what is being boosted soon. Because thanks to Rong Kai who joined us and started to build all the verticals from scratch, we spent a few weeks within the whole company to outline our KPIs for this year, for example inside the marketing department we set up three different groups of KPIs. So the first one goes to the B2B side of things, second one will be community growth and the third one will go to everything regarding the token.
I would say that all the resources and efforts will be spent there equally, so that’s why we’ve got to push all of our regular crypto presence starting soon. I think I can say that yesterday I had a nice call with a new marketing agency contractor whose only focus is influencer marketing. We had some kind of task package from them and they produced it really well, so we’re going to continue working with them on both PARSIQ and IQ Protocol. We already discussed that we need to have different types of influencer marketing campaigns for PARSIQ and IQ Protocol because IQ protocol needs more Community growth, follower growth, growth of awareness but within PARSIQ marketing activities, mentions on Twitter, Youtube, Reddit and so forth are going to be focused more on the token and explaining the real value behind the project and token itself.
Ana: Yeah I think that, the channels are pretty obvious for community members and it’s all about good quality influencers, channels, websites and building a regular presence here. I think I can also add about our kind of problem with influencer marketing last year, because we lacked some resources, mainly stuff in the marketing department, because looking and searching for good influencers and bloggers who can really dive into the project who really explain it’s real value without pronouncing PARSIQ wrong. It’s pretty time consuming work and luckily as our team grew last month we’re going to have a lot more resources and time to manage this.
Tom: So let me, maybe give my thoughts on this. I don’t usually like to comment on topics regarding price but, yeah unfortunately crypto is a lot about hype and marketing at some points but it’s much more than that, we have market trends, market sentiment, down markets, up markets. So, the PRQ had a pretty parabolic run before some others, why? Because the crypto industry is big enough that now it’s like a game of musical chairs and there are different trends at different times. So, if you remember last winter PRQ performed extremely well, like parabolically well. When a lot of other assets were stagnant or even lost value, that also coincided with the trend of blockchain infrastructure and blockchain data, which happened. So we had oracles, we had data providers, everyone performing well. Then this year, after the summer May crash, it mostly was new L1s like Avalanche, Tera, Solana and also Gamefi, Metaverse, NFT projects trending.
Meanwhile infrastructure projects were stagnating, that includes most oracles, most data infrastructure providers, so there’s a different trend, different time and different types of conditions. Could we have done more marketing? Yes we could and we will, but that still doesn’t mean that a lot of buyers will flock. Because like I said market sentiment, market trends. Every segment has had its parabolic run at different times. But there’s a rotation so that means attention at some point will fall again to data infrastructure providers and our job is to continue building, continue onboarding, getting adoption and this is how eventually the attention will come to PARSIQ. If you think about different publications, different types of attention that PARSIQ has gotten over the last year, year and a half. From Bloggers, YouTubers, Research institutes like Stansberry or Simetri, most of them are actually organic, so we never reached out to them, we never paid them.
This is something that they noticed and saw potential in. And I feel this type of organic marketing works best. So our goal would be to do well on the product, the adoption side, the user side, create actual value and that will create attention from a lot of these, let’s say marketing platforms. We have tried doing some paid YouTube influencers a few times, and usually it doesn’t work very well because unless you develop a relationship with that influencer and he really understands and actually believes in the project, the influencer doesn’t really convey the value well. So he has to believe in it, he or she has to believe in it to properly message it for the audience. That’s why, we will do paid marketing for sure, paid publications, but we will also strive to get organic attention, which works best. So it will be a mix of those things and actual adoption, actual progress and traction. Which will eventually get to a point where a lot more people will be interested in terms of retail interest, number of token holders, number of community members.
Ana: Yeah totally agree here, i can only add that even though the most relatable type of promotion comes organically we still do much work here for example in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) writing different types of content, because you know you need to first get into the sight of those influencers or media websites, so there is a lot of works in progress that are not really visible but still we have really a lot of tasks here and things are improving and improving because it’s a long-term play to build this kind of organic position and vision of your project and brand.
Tom: Yeah exactly, and most important is to show adoption, to show traction, to show progress and everything else, yeah we’ll help with the active marketing whether it’s organic or paid, to amplify but it has to come from there. This is historically what works best and the trend will come once again, middleware, infrastructure will be heavily in the picture and this will be PARSIQ’s time to shine.
Q: Any more plans for attending Crypto Conferences?
Ana: Totally, yeah. I would say more of that this year, we plan to conduct at least 1 of our own kind of events, like a hackathon that’s focused on developers. But i guess the most loved conference for our project is ETH Denver, we just got confirmation that our team is going to attend this conference again. So we’ll see what other conferences we’re going to attend, because it’s super time consuming as well. We’ll be more developer focused here, conducting workshops and explaining PARSIQ and so on so forth. Our recent Hackathon with Gitcoin, brought great results for us and built a lot of ground for future marketing campaigns. We just took one application, built around monitoring of CryptoPunks and we’re in the process of building a single marketing campaign around this.
Tom: Yeah, we’ll be doing ETH Denver, we’ll try to get in on all the big developer conferences like DefCon, ETH Barcelona, ETH Amsterdam and so on, so forth. So we won’t do exclusively developer oriented conferences, we’ll do others as well. We have quite a few mapped out for 2022. But the main focus is indeed developers.
Tom: Yeah we’ve talked about decentralizing PARSIQ completely and having nodes that people can run and node operators can earn rewards. Those nodes would activate Smart Triggers in a decentralized, trustless manner. But right now this just doesn’t make sense to sacrifice speed and scalability for decentralization, because most of our clients don’t require decentralization and if anyone is concerned that the data is not trustworthy because it comes from a centralized source, so Anatoly actually has a solution for using ZK Roll ups that is to make the data provable.
So I don’t see a necessity to do it at this point really, especially since we will be targeting the traditional institutions coming in from Web2 and integrating with the Blockchains, they certainly feel more comfortable with a centralized software service provider. That being said theoretically both versions can co-exist in the future, so we are not ruling this out. It’s still an idea, but yeah when you think about most other blockchain data services that are on the market, i won’t name any names but i’ve checked out most of them and although a lot of them have a tag like “Decentralized network for blockchain data’’ almost all of them are centralized actually, the data comes from a centralized cloud service, it’s more a marketing thing, calling things decentralized and appealing to maximalists of decentralization.
Q: What is planned for 2022 that will highlight PARSIQ as a go-to middleware?
Tom: Well a lot of things are planned, including marketing and everything we’ve discussed today and will discuss. But for me most importantly it’s the adoption, 2022 will be the adoption year for PARSIQ i hope, this is what we’re aiming for and i do think in general the blockchain adoption curve will look really really well in 2022. So our product has had gaps, certain gaps that haven’t allowed us to onboard some of the bigger players we’ve been talking to, so it’s not that they didn’t like the product, they love it. But they need some additional functionality to really cover their needs and we are actively working on this and finishing up some things so hopefully we can finally onboard some of these big, big projects, some big projects in gaming, big projects in DeFi and centralized financial service providers and others.
Tom: Yes, because as you know IQ Protocol has a lot of games in the pipeline, big and small. To integrate with the protocol and as it turns out, some of them really need monitoring, so definitely PARSIQ will be working with these gaming projects and so we will do some co-marketing.
Q: Ana, How do you measure success of marketing campaigns?
Ana: I guess it depends on the initial goals we set before the marketing campaign, so if it’s about lead-gen marketing campaigns or just regular awareness campaigns, the final outcome differs. So if we talk about our B2B focus it’s about the number of new marketing qualified leads that our Business Development team takes and proceeds with. And if we are talking about awareness campaigns and community growth there are also some kind of metrics we can track. So it’s mostly about the general community growth regarding number of followers, number of website visits and so on. But we have a kind of internal metric that scores the engagement of our community, and this is actually the most important metric that we strive to trace and to track within the awareness marketing campaigns. That’s why we try to regularly try to build engagement campaigns like we had with the Riddle campaign and the 12 days of PARSIQ campaign, and I personally really love them and I love to see when our community gets so active and communicative and just warm, nice.
Q: What happened to PRQ it’s got little pulse, barely alive, basically abandoned for IQ and IQT?
Tom: Well this is absolutely wrong, in fact PARSIQ has a much bigger team than IQ and most of the efforts are there. They’re different projects, PARSIQ is an established project with an established community, a name, product, users. So the goals are different, for IQ it’s more about getting awareness, building up the community from scratch. For PARSIQ it’s about expanding community, getting adoption, more and more adoption and traction so if you mean the price, i think we’ve covered it. I mean look at the market, you could say that for a majority of the market except some outliers which have been trending because like i said the market is so big that it has now trends, and money rotates between these trends in different times and different years.
Q: What will be the initial circulating supply and when will we get more info about the IQT drop?
Tom: You’ll get more info closer to the token launch, which is planned to launch in the next 6 months of the year, maybe end of Q1 but we’re not in a rush. So we will launch when everything is ready. So you’ll get all the information closer to then.
Ana: I think there is no term like awareness phase of marketing because we always do some kind of awareness campaign together with our community. So i’d say there’s two different types of marketing that can be conducted at the same time, there is basically a marketing funnel that we have, where we have awareness campaigns and awareness marketing activities to chase new people and new audiences, then we have some sort of inbound marketing activities, let’s say to retarget people within our marketing campaigns and to educate them without inbound processes and so on and so forth.
Tom: Yeah, I would also add that PARSIQ actually has decent awareness, at least maybe not in terms of retail community but when i speak to investors, founders, builders of other projects everyday and a surprising amount actually know and follow PARSIQ and a lot of them actually hold PRQ, so in that sense it’s pretty known. If you mean retail awareness, actually our follow count on Twitter has gone up quite a bit in the last 6 months or so but we’re always working on this. Like I said it’s a mix of things, marketing trends and our marketing activities.
So, if we continue actually delivering results, amplified by marketing and at the same point market trends shift and attention comes again to infrastructure projects like PARSIQ I think we’re going to be pretty well-off in terms of awareness. It’s also mostly a B2B product so in that sense it’s always difficult, more difficult to get retail awareness compared to for example DeFi or NFTs or Metaverse. But you know PARSIQ is set to last, to be here as the industry standard for years, while a lot of projects will actually die. There are hundreds of projects launched every day, over 90%, maybe 99% of them will die. A lot of them have already been abandoned, just from being here and building, showing progress, getting more and more big institutions, projects, developers use and get value from the product, will also help with this. At some point simply attention, even retail attention will turn.
Tom: Just wait and see.
Q: What do you think is the thing about PARSIQ that creates more interest from retail investors?
Tom: Well look, when you think about L1 Blockchains, they have a different type of value proposition, middleware infrastructure works in the background you know, it’s the glue so it’s not as obviously attractive to retail investors. But with that being said again I come back to the adoption and value that the product can provide, which will eventually get the retail interest. And we will be heavily focusing on developers, especially developers who can build applications, applications that can be retail facing. And so if all these applications will all be powered by PARSIQ this is also a big focus for 2022.
Q: PRQ Liquidity is very bad for a long time, why is the team not seeing this as a top priority?
Tom: Well we do have a healthy number of centralized exchanges that provide quite decent liquidity, right now if you mean Uniswap, it’s not terrible. It’s down from where it was of course in the market peak around April, mostly due to the fees. We have been able to provide the ability to trade on Pancakeswap without high fees with decent liquidity, on centralized exchanges and there will be more listings both centralized and decentralized exchanges to increase that liquidity.
Tom: That’s actually the best time to develop because then we can really focus on the important stuff which is building and getting clients, getting users, getting traction. Instead of trying to appease the community when everyone is saying., “Hey, Solana is going up, why isn’t PRQ?” So, that’s a perfect time when all the assets are in a bear trend, this is a time to build and the results will be seen during the next uptrend. This is pretty much what happened where we built all the way through 2019 in the depths of the bear market and in 2020 the result was there.
Ana: Yeah nice questions, I mentioned already that the last half a year we’ve spent on restructuring our focus on PARSIQ together with Deanna Dong and she actually conducted a lot of surveys of our existing users on the platform and based on this, we decided to rotate our focus to be more B2B oriented. Due to our complicated structure of building Smart Triggers, we need to have enough educational content which is going to arrive sometime in the future.
Q: Do you think PARSIQ will be vital for the Web3 industry?
Tom: I can’t personally wrap my head around why the term Web3 has become a new thing or a new trend because PARSIQ has been positioned from Day one as the bridge between Web2 and Web3. So yeah we are definitely well positioned, the idea is to be the essential middleware for anyone either building on Web3 or wanting to integrate on Web3.
Tom: I know a lot of our community members are fans of Coinbureau, someone from our team tried reaching out to Coinbureau but with no response so far.
Q: When will the allocation of PRQ from the 1mil PRQ rewards be shared?
Tom: They’ll be shared with a small vesting schedule of I think 4 months, so 25 percent of the 1 million pool will be claimable, Feb 1st and then March 1st, April and so on.
Q: Is the private round closed for IQT, who are the private investors?
Tom: Yes the round was closed for IQT, heavy interest, very heavy interest in the round. Massively oversubscribed. There does seem to be an abundance of capital on the market, it seems like a lot of people are now VCs. But yeah word has certainly gotten out in the investor circles and you will see the announcement of the fundraising round and some of the biggest names quite soon.
Q: How much is being spent on marketing?
Tom: Well off the top of my head I don’t even know that number, because it varies from month to month, we have campaigns, sometimes we don’t have campaigns. Sometimes we have certain milestones when we want to get information out so we spend more, other times there’s no point in spending more, so it can vary widely from 5 figures up to 6 figures and up per month.
Tom: Not really, I mean the value of Chainalysis is that they store huge databases of labelled addresses, like bad actors, addresses involved in malware, gambling, p2p exchanges so we’re not competing with that. We’re providing the infrastructure, so in a way someone building a new Chainalysis would be able to use PARSIQs infrastructure.
Ana: You know, sometimes I barely have time to follow any projects other than PARSIQ and IQ so I’m mostly inspired by the things our community talks about and what is brought by our Community Department. Other than that i’m really not sure that i can name something, i was mostly educated within traditional marketing strategies, when i first came into crypto markets i was so upset by the fact that nothing is really working, here you cannot simply create, let’s say for example google ad campaign because of the bans on mentioning crypto, and you can’t even mention Bitcoin on some of the biggest advertising networks like Facebook and so on. Everything is so different from the traditional market, but i guess the biggest advantage here is that you’re always learning and you always try to be more creative than any other project in crypto basically.
Tom: Yeah we have a number of internal promotions, not many exits. I think we’ve had one, maybe two exits over the course of three years. Really the team understands the space we are in, i mean it’s crypto so really the team just believes in the project, they love building, it doesn’t really affect their performance.
Tom: We all know the cyclical nature of this industry, and it’s good, these downtrends wash out the projects who actually do not deliver value, they probably wash out some participants who were just here for a quick flip. The builders remain, the believers remain, those who actually want to change the industry.
Tom: Yeah so I mean we are almost 50 people now, in house plus also some outsourced help, it’s a lot. And a lot of the teams are completely separated, for example the engineering teams for IQ and PARSIQ, completely separate. There are still some joint resources that are being shared in terms of Marketing and Community, but those two will be willingly separated, so IQ and PARSIQ will both have dedicated teams, dedicated only to those projects. Actually these claims that PARSIQ has been abandoned in favour of IQ Protocol are completely false and absurd because we have many more people working for the PARSIQ side than IQ.
We have many more people actually doing Marketing for PARSIQ than IQ. These are different projects at different stages, they’re not comparable. Saying launching the IQ token will somehow take away value from PRQ is nonsense, they’re not competing with each other, if anything they’re building an ecosystem and complementing each other. It’s like saying Ankr takes something away from Luna, or launching Keeper takes something away from Yearn Finance. It doesn’t work this way. If anything they actually compound the positive effect, not vice versa.
Q: If an Auto Company partners with IQ could we see a car rental on IQ?
Tom: Yes! But it would actually work much better if our actual, you know whenever governments actually put our assets on the blockchain, like real-estate, like cars as unique NFTs, in that case IQ would be perfect to facilitate decentralized, permissionless renting of such assets.
Q: Could it happen with a subscription model like Netflix, Spotify or similar?
Tom: Yeah well obviously I don’t think us approaching Netflix is a good step yet, we’ll start with Crypto-natives, we already have a couple of non Crypto-native companies who want to use IQ as a subscription model. They have nothing to do with blockchain but they’re tech start-ups, one for example is a file storage company. If you understand the logic they would issue a token, the token would allow them to more easily raise funds, fund global liquidity and renting 100 tokens = 100mb of storage for example, or something similar. So lots of use cases like this, access rights for non-crypto native applications. We’ll definitely be venturing down that route. Starting with crypto-natives then getting to non crypto-native startups and then going on to some bigger players.
Tom: It’s impossible to tell, the market is unpredictable, I mean some of the projects in the space, they’re overvalued, some are undervalued. It’s really for the people, the community and the participants, the network participants to decide what the value should be. It’s so important what the value is in this moment, but it’s important what it will be over time. I cannot predict this. I mean PARSIQ went from less than a million market cap to over 300 million market cap in 6 months, so everything is possible in crypto who knows.
Q: Any updates or talks with Sandbox?
Tom: Wait and see.
Q: Any news about the supply squeeze of PRQ?
Tom: Yeah well who knows, again it depends on some of our initiatives, the overall market, it can happen.
Tom: Actually I do have a contact with Samsung, I haven’t pitched them this idea but I will definitely do that.
Tom: So Ana do you have any closing thoughts? A lot of questions today about retail hype, about marketing that would increase the price, the number of token holders and market cap, the FOMO effect and so on. Which is understandable, but in my opinion it just doesn’t quite work this way. So we do have to put a lot of effort into marketing, both organic and paid while at the same time showing value with the product and for users, and it will catch attention. But you know with retail everything is a passing trend, a lot of things are trending at one point then not trending, then trending again in a year. So I’m pretty sure PARSIQ is here to stay, and with amplified efforts from the team both product, BD, marketing, community teams. And with the help of you guys, the community. I think we’ll be able to achieve this huge network effect at some point in the future.
