How an interest in start-up culture evolved to a career in web3 marketing
Tell us about yourself and what you do at thirdweb.
Hi! My name is Juan, and I’m on the Marketing team at thirdweb. I joined nearly a year ago to lead our SEO efforts, but my role has quickly developed into many other areas of marketing as well — spanning growth, content, & product marketing.
Before thirdweb, I studied at Northeastern University in Boston, where we had a co-op program that enabled us to spend 2–3 semesters working full-time instead of doing classes. My first co-op was at Reebok, where I was part of a small-but-mighty Product Management team of 3, and got my first corporate experience in a larger, more established company (10k+ people).
After Reebok, I realized that I loved being part of a smaller team where I could have more responsibility, but wanted to work in an environment where my work would have more impact. And so I began diving into the college entrepreneurial ecosystem — taking on multiple leadership roles at entrepreneurship orgs, joining a few VC fellowships, and working with startups throughout the rest of my time in college.
It was through these experiences that I then broke into tech & joined Mixpanel’s Marketing as an intern for my last semester of school. During my time there, the company grew from ~250 to ~400 people — and in a time of such exciting change, I was able to work across functions in the Growth org including SEO, global content expansion for our EMEA websites, events, community, & more.
I loved my time at Mixpanel, and having worked across various Marketing functions, I realized I wanted to join an even earlier-stage startup where I could take on more & put my generalist skills into action.
During this time, I also began learning lots about web3 — and then once I graduated, I got the amazing opportunity to join the team at thirdweb!
What are the values or team principles of the marketing team?
I started my career at a 10,000+ person company where there was a lot of process & things tended to move slower. I then joined a mid-size company where things moved a lot faster, and I got to experience high growth — even as an intern.
But I don’t think I experienced true ownership until I joined thirdweb. It’s an environment optimized for hungry & ambitious people that want to take on more — and the team is very focused on unlocking everyone’s potential & enabling us to do our best work. From day one, I’ve felt a high level of trust from my teammates at thirdweb — which has given me the opportunity to take initiative, iterate up, & own various projects.
We reduce as many unnecessary blockers as possible so that we can stay focused on our main goals, support each other in working towards them, and continue shipping at a high cadence.
How does thirdweb view marketing and content?
At the core of every great marketing effort is a great product. A marketing team can be good without it, but having a best-in-class product makes it so much easier for us — and with a suite of 10+ products at an engineering-driven company like thirdweb, there’s tons of surface area for us to market.
Our Marketing team is thirdweb’s megaphone to our product. We do everything that we can to show what the product’s capabilities are and show its value — but rather than being promotional or transactional, we focus on giving people valuable content that helps them build in web3.
Because we have so many different products, a lot of what we teach people are things that are possible with thirdweb. We focus on the value first and we focus on helping users and discovering how to support them to earn their trust.
The team has varied backgrounds and levels of experience, how does this impact the work that we do on the marketing team?
As an emerging industry, web3 has brought lots of people with varied backgrounds & experiences into the space — as opposed to more established industries where people’s career paths are much more similar.
As a result, we get some awesome synergies at thirdweb that haven’t been as prevalent in my other roles.
A great example of this is our Marketing team! We all come from various different backgrounds, which brings fresh new perspectives & gets us to think on a more first-principles way — rather than “the way things should be, because that’s what other companies are doing.”
I especially want to highlight our video team here: never have I ever seen such an incredible video team in tech — much less at a developer tools company! Every time we have a product launch or big announcement, our video team really enables us to shine through with their insanely high production quality.
What are some of the main obstacles your team faces and how do they overcome them?
Like any start up, resources and time are always the biggest limiting factors. There are tons things we all want to be doing at all times, but we have to be laser-focused on what we know works — dividing our time between 1) building organic growth flywheels and 2) executing moonshot growth experiments that could 10x our growth.
When something doesn’t work we’re not afraid to stop or pivot and take those learnings to apply them to newer projects.
A great advantage that we have as a Marketing team is our shared growth mindset & generalist skillsets. We’re not afraid to step in & get our hands dirty with things outside of our core responsibilities — even if it’s something we’ve never done before. There’s a lot of things that I’m doing at thirdweb that I’ve never done before, and this constant challenge & career growth is part of why I love it!
thirdweb is a young company, what are you actively working on that you know is making a positive impact on our company vision?
Being part of a fairly lean Marketing team, I’m proud of the working style we’ve established as it enables us to keep shipping continuously. Everyone is extremely clear on their areas of ownership, what they need to do to 10x their output, and how we can all work together to meet deadlines & achieve aggressive targets consistently.
On a personal level, I’m also proud of the progress I’ve made in the past year, going from owning SEO to being spread across pretty much every Marketing function. I’m excited to continue establishing thirdweb as a thought leader in the industry, and the #1 platform for web3 development.
Beyond thirdweb, web3 is still an emerging industry — so as a company at the forefront, it’s extremely motivating to get the opportunity to educate others on the space as we build an open, global, digital economy!
