How building meme pages turned into spearheading content creation for web3
“Web3 is a new technology — an emerging technology. That basically means that most people don’t understand it and at thirdweb we’re educating the world on why this technology is important and how it can be valuable for their business.” —Cathal Berragan, Head of Marketing at thirdweb
Tell us about yourself and what you do at thirdweb.
I’m Catty, the Head of Marketing at thirdweb! My background is in content creation and I’ve been making content online since I was very young. I started out building meme pages in my late teens and that’s what introduced me to the world of digital marketing. That’s how I met Steven Bartlett, and worked with him on a company called Social Chain where we created social media strategies for large tech companies.
I spent the last few years digging into how big tech companies like Uber, Twitch, and AfterPay use social media to grow their brand and their audience. After the agency world I wanted to apply my learnings to something that really excited me and a larger problem to solve.
Just as I was leaving Social Chain web3 started to grow and was clear to me that this was the next version of the internet was going to go. I wanted to be part of it to bring more awareness to blockchain and web3.
Thirdweb has been the perfect vehicle for that. I joined the team early on while we were building other projects and spent the last 18 months to bring growth tactics to market to grow the company.
What are the biggest obstacles/challenges in being someone who’s head of marketing in web3?
Web3 is a new technology — an emerging technology. That basically means that most people don’t understand it and at thirdweb we’re educating the world on why this technology is important and how it can be valuable for their business.
With any new technology you have to understand complex concepts and make it easy for the average user to understand. It’s a question of breaking down concepts, understanding each one and communicating them effectively.
We are definitely building as we go and there’s a lot more to discover!
How has this shaped perspective of building the marketing team at thirdweb?
There’s no playbook for web3 marketing.
We really are the first ones doing it which means there’s a lot of things that we don’t know yet like channels to drive traffic or our potential audience. The team we’re building requires us to be very flexible. Also, being a generalist is hugely valued in blockchain. We’re a lot more experimental and double down on tactics that are effective after seeing what works.
Eventually we’ll know more and be able to go into each vertical. It’s a much more experimental process than working in web2.
What are your anticipations of verticals based on what you’ve seen so far?
The web3 audience is technical and crypto native and so they naturally don’t respond to certain types of marketing. It has to feel organic and it has to feel like you’re not actually marketing towards them. People are more skeptical about non organic forms of marketing.
Creating educational content, and content they’d be searching for is how we support thirdweb because that’s how people are consuming and that’s how they become a customer.
What are the lived values/team principles of the marketing team?
We obsess over marginal gains. We identified a few tactics that work for us and our goal is to be the best in the world over those tactics. So we have to obsess over 1% gains that involves a lot of A/B testing youtube thumbnails to find out what drives the highest click through rate.
That might mean getting to a 5% increase in engagement or traffic, but those numbers compound over time. We don’t let things slide because we know that the fine nuances and tweaks make a huge difference over time.
A core part of our culture is celebrating experimentation — it’s important that every person on the team has a responsibility to come up with new ideas and test them. We share learnings and then learn together as a team. We also over-communicate our findings so that we can all learn more consistently as a team.
How does thirdweb view marketing and content?
We’ve done a great job of making every single team keep growth front of mind — everyone knows we need to grow as a company and a big part of that comes from marketing. We all have an eye on marketing and understand the value of this.
That’s come through relentlessly communicating as a team how we we’re evolving.
Knowing this means everyone can contribute to our efforts. Our engineering team writes blogs, everyone supports and shares content on social about our growth, and all of this helps us reach more people.
Across the team we share tactics we’re employing so that everyone understands the value and can get excited to contribute towards it.
The team has varied backgrounds and levels of experience, how does this impact the work that we do on the marketing team?
Creativity is a combination of inputs. So when you have people from different backgrounds and experiences you get a very colourful mix of inputs that give us new ideas. I see that when we’re coming up with new content formats and new channels that we’re adding to our content portfolio.
People on the team have insight or knowledge that we may not know about or have come across. Together we combine them and apply them to what can work for us as a team.
It’s important to have people who are actively trying things in different forums outside of thirdweb too, this way they can bring them back to the team and see how we can implement it ourselves.
What are some of the main obstacles our team faces and how do they overcome them?
The current biggest obstacle in web3 marketing is the lack of data that’s available about our audience. It’s hard to segment users and understand the journey of the customer. A lot of the time you’re shooting in the dark. With this in mind, we’re working on a lot of changes to our user flow and tools to allow us to understand our users at the same level as you can in a web2 company.
That will take time and privacy is central to web3 which means there is less data by default. The way to do this is to work with engineering to figure out how we change the way the product is built so that we can get more data and also build a better experience for our users.
Thirdweb is a young company, what are you actively working on that you know is making a positive impact on our company vision?
We’ve entered our solutions phase as a team. A lot of the work we’re doing right now is to educate and communicate what the use cases of block chain technology are and how they can bring real value to businesses.
We’re creating an incredible amount of content across audio, video, and written which will further how the world understands how they can use thirdweb for their businesses. Across the board we feel that we need a collective understanding of how users can get this technology in their hands and use it effectively.
That’s why we’ve been very focused on technical content and exploring how we’re progressing the technology from a technical level and now going a layer above that by telling the world what you can build and why it’s a better infrastructure for the internet.
This is the most important thing that will lead to mainstream mass adoption.
Trends we’ve seen lately are very much about web3 infrastructure. It’s much more efficient and faster for developers when you’re building open and shared protocols for developers — it’s quicker to implement.
We’re also seeing the rise of social graph: i.e. Threads built on a decentralized protocol which means whoever builds their audience owns their audience and Instagram can’t take it away from them.
That’s making it abundantly clear to us that, that that’s where the internet is going.
When you think about how Elon Musk took the X handle away from its original user, it serves as a reminder that when you think you own assets on these platforms you don’t own these assets at all. At any point the platform can decide to take it away from you which means people’s livelihoods can disappear overnight in a world where so much industry is used by people growing their social platforms. Web3 gives you the opportunity to export and translate your audience elsewhere and that’s hugely important.
When it comes to building web3 for startups, 0>1 marketing and anyone building in web3 — It’s just as much about what you don’t do as much as it is about what you do know.
We adopt the mindset of being particular about where our team applies our focus and energy. It’s tempting to spend a lot of money sponsor events and host hackathons but tactics like these are cost intensive and time consuming. I think a lot of the time you’re playing the wrong game by focusing on some of these more web2 oriented marketing efforts. By creating content you’re reaching 10x the amount of people for less investment of time and money and much higher ROI.
What it comes down to, is being really analytical about how the things you do return growth about where you put your time and energy.
When we apply that to everything we do from our work to our team, we become a very intentional team that accelerates us even faster.
Authors: Erika Khanna and Cathal Berragan
Contributors: Joher Khan
