In my last article, we discussed the challenges a Product Manager has to deal with when they lead a web3 product. One of the main challenges we discussed was the elements of a Go to Market strategy (GTM) for Web3 and how the frameworks we used to know became obsolete.
Could we adapt those go to market strategy elements to be our baseline for building fantastic products that the community needs? Well, spoiler alert, we can.
What is the Go-To-Market Strategy?
A GTM strategy is a tactical plan detailing how we are planning to execute a successful product launch, a new market expansion, or a new customer target.
It’s designed to mitigate the risk that includes the launch of a new product.
Or, what we product people usually think, anything and everything which ensures that you build the right product so when you implement the Go-To-Market strategy, it will impact the end user positively and the business, resulting in you keeping your job 😂
Now that we have a clear understanding of what is, let’s see the most common components of a go to market strategy and how we can adapt those to our web3 products:
Main elements of a good GTM
Product Market Fit
Having a clear reason, a purpose, and a problem to solve is really important. At the moment that you are formulating the GTM, asking why are we building something is the main thing to ensure that we are not just in love with our product.
Sometimes, we know we believe that we can create needs for our ideal customer, but that it’s not entirely true.
There has to be a deeper reason for people to consume our products, even if it’s not straightforward. Web3 is not an exception.
To understand the product market fit, we need to be embedded in the web3 community, understand what motivates them, what challenges they have and how we can help solve them.
However, if we want to bring web3 to the masses, we need to understand which problems the people outside of Web3 have that our technology can help solve.
But first, we need to define the problem. Don’t try to create a need to be solved with blockchain.
Audience and buyers
In web3 we are familiar with what we call our early adopters, our community. They are the ones that are going to engage with the product or service even before we release it. Building a community is an essential step in our Web3 Go-to-Market marketing strategy.
A community is going to allow us to perform early validations, confirm our assumptions, test the product, and even participate in the decision-making process.
Competitive Landscape
Who else is doing what you are trying to do?
We used to ask some questions to identify competence such as:
- What is the actors’ market share?
- Who is leading?
- What am I offering that is different from theirs?
- What are their weaknesses?
- How loyal are the users to the competitors?
There are several frameworks and tools that can help you to understand your landscape.
The most famous are the SWOT analysis, the Porter five forces, and a BCG (from Boston Consulting Group) matrix.
Are those valid for web3? Well, they have existed for a long time, and they are still valid tools, but in this particular industry, we should ask ourselves some additional questions:
- Do we have a community that already supports us? If we don’t, it’s time to create it.
- Is our product solving a problem that can’t be solved with web2?
- What do we offer that a “traditional” product does not?
- How easy is it for our buyer persona to switch to our tech? Is this for the masses? Or is it only for tech-savvy people?
Distribution
This is the key to how your potential users are going to access our product. For a regular one, we have tho techniques: marketing-intensive and sales-intensive. But in web3, I will say that we can have a new one: Community-centered.
And what does that mean?
As I mentioned in the previous sections, we need to create a strong community if we want to succeed in this world.
Go to community strategy is focused on building and engaging with a community of early users, that could help us to increase interest in our product as well as have early feedback.
But how to start building a community
The same as we have MVPs (Minimum Valuable Products), we could have MVCs (Minimum valuable communities). And here we have a couple of steps to start thinking about building a community from the very beginning:
First: Build
- Define and share your core proposition & how co-creation works
- Bootstrapping a community: use tools and applications that are already popular with these users: Discord, Twitter, Telegram, and even some web3 tooling like Crew
- Depending on your product, a common practice is sharing tokens & retroactive airdrops with early contributors
Second: Engage
- Gradually opening and broadening up
- Depending on your organization/company structure, you can progressively decentralize governance and ownership over to the community
- Prepare an onboarding journey for new members, especially for those that are newbies in the web3 ecosystem.
Third: Sustain
- Getting members to actively participate, engage and contribute
- Creating the right dynamics between regular members, active contributors, and the core team
Go to community timeline
And how is that going to help us with the Distribution?
Communities are leading the web3 revolution. Having early adopters with influence in the community could help us to bring real engagement to our product.
But to reach the masses, we still need to apply some of the traditional GTM strategies for distribution.
It’s because of that, that Web3 Go-to-Market and Go-to-Community need to be complementary, and we cannot have one without the other if we want to reach a broader audience.
| Web3 Go-to-Market | Web3 Go-to-Community |
| Optimizing lead flow | Hosting meetups and creating educational content |
| KPIs: Conversion Rate, Repeat Rate, CAC | KPIs: growth and retention |
| Strategies like: “Pre-sale”, “Earlybird” | Engaged MVC |
| Feedback: NPS, CSAT, surveys | Feedback: Community |
| How many leads did the forum generate last week? | How many people did we help last week? |
| Value capture | Value creation |
Then, Is Go-To-Community the new Web3 Go-to-Market?
As we saw in the article, one strategy does not replace the other. And both need to coexist if we want to reach a broader audience.
What we need? Conquer a different niche from the tech-savvies and web3 early adopters.
We have to mix traditional go to market strategy components with the new ones, to let them engage with our product but then educate them about this new paradigm.
We are always looking for Web3 talent !
Mighty Block is one of the partners of Forte, a platform to enable game publishers to easily integrate blockchain technologies into their games. We believe blockchain will enable new economic and creative opportunities for gamers around the world and have assembled a team of proven veterans from across the industry (Kabam, Unity, GarageGames, ngmoco, Twitch, Disney), as well as a $100M developer fund & $725M funding, to help make it happen. That’s where you come into play.
Feel free to browse all our current open job opportunities in the following link 👇
