Startup Spotlight: UFOstart
Sebastian Schuhl is the marketing lead at blockchain marketing company UFOstart. Those building blockchain technology are, in many cases, incredibly talented developers. Not all of them will be naturally gifted marketers though, and UFOstart was founded to help those pushing the technology forward to get the word out about their work.
UFOstart regularly uses Primalbase as a space to congregate, with the team primarily working remotely. We sat down with Sebastian to discuss the inspiration behind UFOstart, the entrance of marketers and businesspeople into the otherwise development-focused blockchain industry and the effect blockchain can have on copyright and intellectual property.
Tell us a bit about UFOstart — is it marketing for blockchain companies and token sales?
We gave a presentation the other day about what UFOstart is at Primalbase, actually. It was my first time at Primalbase Berlin — it was really cool to see. Prime location, I have to say, right at Potsdamer Platz. Cool!
So, at UFOstart, we are a group of independent freelance marketing advisors, developers, and product managers. What we have in common is our passion for digital marketing, blockchain, and web3 technologies. At UFOstart, we believe that all businesses and projects will be decentralised at some point in the future and that a new way of marketing is necessary to cater to this changing environment. We are convinced that community building, creating a fan-base of loyal supporters of a company or project, and community-driven marketing will be more relevant than ever. That’s the core reason why we do what we do.
At the moment, we are still working as marketing advisors — we go to projects and educate their teams on marketing best practises, we give workshops, provide feedback and help to strategise the right marketing approach for blockchain projects and companies doing token generation events (ICOs, STOs, IEOs, etc.). At the same time, we’re facing the challenge to scale and digitise our advisory so it can serve a much larger, global audience. Thus, we are working on a product at the moment — or rather an ecosystem — to train and advise blockchain startups to apply proven, sustainable, and community-driven marketing methods.
We envision this ecosystem to be based on four main pillars — Education, Advise, Execution, and Technology. The educational element is meant to help startup teams to identify the right marketing activities and strategies for their specific use case and lifecycle stage. Following an organic and sustainable inbound marketing method, projects can learn how to create their ideal marketing strategy.
The Advice and Execution elements are based on the concept of a global, decentralised community of skilled marketing experts. What we have learned is that most blockchain projects face the same challenges. First of all, they have similar challenges to traditional startups, too, but then there are a bunch of challenges that are unique to decentralised, blockchain-based startups. As all of them have more or less the same issues when it comes to marketing, they can benefit greatly from sharing lessons learned amongst each other. So we are trying to create an ecosystem where different projects can come together, share their status quo, share current challenges, and talk about where they’re at on their marketing journey. Then, have various experts from different fields give feedback, offer industry best practices, and pitch in to say ‘we think this is what you should be doing next’, while other projects can say ‘hey, we had a similar case two months ago and this is how we solved it.’
In addition to having experts help projects out on a strategic level, we’ve realised that many young companies need additional support with their marketing execution as well. That’s why we aim to gather a community of freelance, project-based, decentralised marketeers to help with the implementation of the strategy; performing the actual marketing tasks and to dos.
The fourth pillar is the underlying technology and the token economy aspect of the ecosystem. This is a working product, so we are not there yet, unfortunately, but we envision something where this whole ‘working for equity’ thing can empower companies and individuals alike to jointly work on a common goal. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a team of — I don’t want to call them employees — supporters, a community that helps you achieve your vision and gets rewarded based on the success of your company? That’s the beauty of the token economy and the whole idea of ICOs in general, right?
Is it quite a fluid, constantly evolving methodology that you’re employing? Obviously, the space is so new and everything is still getting worked out, so are you constantly looking for different channels, different platforms? How is the community mutating?
At UFOstart we are strong believers in the inbound marketing approach. So, compared to the traditional way of marketing and sales, where you have lots of interrupting ads and sales reps making cold calls, inbound marketing is more about putting relevant content out there and educating your target audience, to then have them come to you on their own terms. You have to reach them on their preferred channels.
There’s nothing more powerful than organic, sustainable marketing based on a strong community. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do paid advertising here and there, it’s just that we’ve seen during the hype cycle in the crypto space that it was all about money in the end. It was all about who gets listed on ICObench in the top position, who has the deepest pockets to spend ridiculous amounts on crypto PR or flashy ICO Advisors. Furthermore, there are still too many self-declared “crypto marketing experts” out there who try to take advantage of young projects without adding any value.
We’ve also seen countless projects not putting sufficient thought into their target audiences. Lured in by the idea of millions in ICO funding, many blockchain projects use all of their marketing efforts to reach crypto investors. They completely neglect their actual (future) customers and users — their real community!
This community is made of the people sticking around in the long-term — they want to see you thrive because they believe in your vision. Other people, like these crypto speculators, are just in the game for a quick buck. Blockchain marketing is so interesting because it’s such a new field. There are many methods that can be applied from the more traditional startup scene, but there are also new channels evolving and we have to find out how to piece them together.
Another interesting thing about blockchain is that its global from day one. If you’re a decentralised blockchain project, you don’t start rolling out in Germany or the UK — you’re global from day one. That comes with a lot of new challenges.
How do you deal with the global nature of it? One thing that works in Germany might not work in the US or Asia. The blockchain scene is completely different in Asia as well.
Absolutely. I always feel that it is just something you have to find out yourself or learn how to do it from someone who’s been through it. That’s what we try to really embed into our product — it has to be a platform where people share what challenges they’ve been through; they’ve tried out things and found out if they worked or not; they can then share that knowledge with someone else who’s in the same situation.
Together, as a community of global blockchain marketers and projects, we will be able to figure out what the best practices are in, for example, social media marketing in South East Asia. There is no one-size-fits-all approach anymore, particularly not in a global environment with so many decentralised projects.
What originally brought you to blockchain and crypto?
I personally started quite late to really get into blockchain actually; roughly two years ago maybe. Two of UFOstart’s co-founders are die-hard early adopters of crypto and blockchain though — they even sponsored the first Bitcoin ATM in Berlin back in 2014. Yet, the scene is still very infant and that’s why I think it’s so exciting — there are so many things to come that we can’t even envision at the moment. Also, it’s very inspiring to see what’s happening behind the scenes, far away from mainstream awareness. There are lots of smart and dedicated people out there putting all of their time into building something new and trying to figure out how we can improve as a society.
Are you mostly dealing with developers and engineers? How do they deal with the marketing side of it when you come in? Are they largely tech people as opposed to business people?
Very much so, yes. There is a bit of a shift happening though, I think. Most blockchain projects are founded by tech guys and girls. They don’t really worry about marketing, which is fair, because they want to focus on building a visionary product. At some point, though, they realise that if you want to raise money via, for example, an ICO you should probably think about marketing at some point.
One of the things we saw is that, once that happens, many projects go to some sort of crypto PR agency. As with any industry this young, there are a lot of bad players out there who don’t really know what they’re doing though. They’re just in this game because they see an opportunity to exploit young companies. It’s that short-sighted, very expensive, and unsustainable crypto push that I’ve mentioned earlier.
We believe that authentic, genuine marketing has to come from within the project team, the founders themselves. It can’t be an agency doing the community building outreach for you, it has to be the team who is in charge.
That’s a big challenge these tech guys face as they don’t know how to do marketing and don’t want to spend time doing it either. They need someone on their team who can take the marketing lead. That’s why we envision our ecosystem as a combination of education and advise but also operational support.
What kind of startups have you worked with? Are there any particularly exciting ones that you’ve worked with?
We’ve worked with a bunch of projects. For example, we’re working with a company called authentic.network which is doing some very exciting stuff in the field of digital twins for physical products. We’ve also supported Ocean Protocol in their early days and are working with WOM Protocol, MADANA, BlockAxs, photochain, and many others at the moment.
It’s companies from all over the place, yet, all of them face very similar marketing challenges. That’s where it makes sense to apply the same methods and tools; tweaked to the project’s specific use cases.
When you’re trying to push these products to a wider audience, because it’s so new and so many people still associate it with Bitcoin and Silk Road, is there a case of having to overcome the initial stages of explaining the technology to them before you can explain the product?
I would say it really depends who the project’s target audience is, and it depends how technical the product is as well.
A good example of a project we’ve supported with this challenge is called photochain. Photochain is building a next generation stock photography platform based on blockchain technology. Their goal is to level the playing field of a very unfair stock photography industry where existing players like Shutterstock have huge market power and take incredibly large chunks of photographers’ revenues via these platforms. Photochain’s blockchain based technology can significantly decrease administration cost and, thus, enable photographers to keep a much larger percentage of their revenue. The technology will also help photographers fight copyright infringement and make licensing much more transparent; clear benefits for photographers compared to existing stock photography platforms.
The typical photographer is not very blockchain savvy at this moment in time, though. So when photochain started off explaining everything about the technical aspects of their product — think blockchain, smart contracts, and other very technical stuff — we told them to rethink and redefine who their target audience is and how to address their specific needs.
Photographers don’t care about the underlying technology. All they want to hear is that this new product will enable them to get more money for their work while enjoying better copyright protection than before. For this particular target audience, that was the eye-opening moment. We didn’t need to talk about technology; that came second.
People don’t care what the technology is, often. If someone comes to you and says ‘the bank is cutting interest rates on this account because of blockchain’, it doesn’t matter that it’s because of blockchain, you just care that you’re making some money out of it. No one cares that something is stored on the cloud, just because it’s the cloud, it’s just part of the product.
Well, it really depends who you’re talking to and what your community looks like. As I said, it could be, for example, the photographers who don’t care about the technology. But if you’re a company that wants to attract developers because they are your main target audience, your potential users, then, in that case, you’d want to push the technological side of your projects as much as possible. It’s always about what gets your community going. If they love the fact that you’re building this very specific tech gimmick on top of blockchain, that will be the trigger to make them contribute to your project and to become your loyal supporters.
How many are there at UFOstart now?
We’re probably around 15 people in our core team at the moment. Not all of us are marketers though — there’s a bunch of product managers, bloggers, developers, etc. All of us are freelancers and we’re mostly working remotely — we’re headquartered in Berlin, so we do meet in Berlin and at Primalbase sometimes but most of the stuff happens remotely, via videos calls and other tools.
Do you have people working permanently in Primalbase or do you just meet there?
We mostly just meet there. Sometimes we show up and grab a table, but mostly we just meet there for bigger workshops, group meetings, etc.
Make sure to check out UFOStart’s blog and follow them on Social Media to learn more about marketing in the blockchain era.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ufostart-ag/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/UFOstart
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UFOstart/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ufostart/
