How an interest in NFTs led to building the thirdweb community
Tell us about yourself and what you do at thirdweb.
I’m the Marketing Developer Relations Engineer, my main focus is on creating video content and educational content to teach developers how to use thirdweb tools.
This includes things like developing our YouTube strategy to share across social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter. I work closely with our growth manager Juan on guides and blog posts—it’s all about creating educational pieces of content to showcase our tools.
Before thirdweb I worked a retail job! I wasn’t in tech at the time, but at the end of 2020 I started learning about web3 through NBA Topshot (digital collectibles). I was interested in the technology side of technical collectibles and I was really interested in NFTs particularly as it relates to gaming. I played play to earn games like Axie Infiniti and was always curious about how blockchain technology worked and I wanted to go into a field in tech that developed that more.
I taught myself the basics of coding and took a lot of time to study how to develop NFTs and web3 applications, which is how I found thirdweb. I found it so easy to use and grasp and I ended up creating content about how to use thirdweb and elaborate on the things I built and learnt. Then I got contracted with our Developer Advocate program and now I’m here full time and continue to help our developers out!
What are the values/team principles of the marketing team?
Collaboration and communication is key on the marketing team. It plays a big part in how we operate remotely which requires us to get the details right for pieces of content and videos we produce. The communication between our teammates and cross-functional teams like Engineering or Product requires us to be really clear about how we communicate.
We share pieces of work for feedback in our communication channels which is so important to us too. We have a great leader in Catty our Head of Marketing who also emphasizes the importance of having a strong workflow to enable us to prioritize new ideas aligned with our goals to push out content at the rate we push them out.
How does thirdweb view marketing and content?
Marketing in web3 is something different. Being able to communicate and know our audience plays a big part in what we do when try to create content for the team. It’s not your typical marketing team where you’re trying to create a clearly articulated and entertaining piece of content that people will watch on different social platforms.
Right now, we have a very specific type of audience and the community aspect of building is huge. Engineering and Product have a super high knowledge of how we do this because they’re at the forefront of the space that we’re in. Our Principal Engineer is also always marketing our company and we work closely with him to take strategic approach to how we approach our developers and customers.
Having said that everyone knows that we have to market our product and get it out there — hearing their perspective is super helpful. We also like to work cross-functionally by prioritizing our sales and BD teams who observe channels that can support our sales and BD goals which in turn supports the entire company.
Ultimately everyone here has a marketing mindset that we need to create amazing content.
How is marketing in web3 different?
Organic growth is super supportive to us. In web3 the community and the eyes of the people looking at web3 content and web3 products is smaller than typical web2 products.
Having these organic educational pieces of content really appeals people in the web3 space or who are looking to get into the space as well.
Organic growth and community building is so integral and makes our product strong. The ability to help and support people through our Discord and support channels and partnerships have really shaped this difference.
The team has varied backgrounds and levels of experience, how does this impact the work that we do on the marketing team?
We have so many different perspectives on the team and when we’re creating content on the marketing team we have a scale of technical to non technical skill levels. Different perspectives helps us answer questions about how we can serve someone who might not have the technical understanding or context that we have about a web3 product feature we’re rolling out.
We ask questions like does this grab their attention to really see the scope of possibility that this tool can do? It’s a super great balance of skill levels and backgrounds of where we are culturally in support of how we put out high quality video content in an efficient way. I really believe that this is the secret sauce to the way we’re able to put out so much amazing content.
We really look out for each other to support how to make things better and make sure we create digestible content pieces that hit our milestones.
What are some of the main obstacles our team faces and how do they overcome them?
Our main obstacle is marketing in web3 and how it’s still very new. One of the ways that our Head of Marketing encourages us to challenge this is through testing and trying a lot of different ideas.
When we have ideas and conviction in them, we try them out and see how they affect our reach and look at the data and analytics. From there we iterate, test and perfect. If something doesn’t work at all, we don’t dwell on it. We look at why something didn’t work and move on quickly to create something that we feel will work better.
There’s no blueprint of marketing in web3 and we’re trying to create the template that we can follow and constantly try new things.
Thirdweb is a young company, what are you actively working on that you know is making a positive impact on our company vision?
The most exciting thing that I’m working on right now is perfecting our educational content. For thirdweb and blockchain developers the educational component of how to start developing and building things on blockchains and web3 applications or games, key. I’m working on perfecting this and I believe that educating people about this technology really supports people’s transition from web2 to web3.
If someone is also brand new and doesn’t know anything about the world of web3 we bring them from knowing nothing, to understanding, to being able to build. We’re working on a super long length video that’s a course where we’re taking people from 0 to 1 in their knowledge when it comes to building web3 applications on thirdweb.
I really pride myself on this initiative and can’t wait to see it come to life!
