it is a truth universally acknowledged that a successful blockchain with millions in funding and thousands of galxe users must be in want of a terminally online social marketer.

i argue that to be an effective, witty, and cool marketer, you need to live a life outside of crypto twitter.

“but crypto is 25/8! CT never sleeps! the decentralized market is always churning!” you cry, indignantly.

there will always be news that’s super relevant for your project (assuming you have any semblance of globally-agnostic DAUs); memes you have to jump on; another stablecoin depegging scandal or celebrity rugpull. there’s always a trade to be made. a tweet to be written.

the question is never whether you were the first to hop on. it’s whether you were memorable.

what is memorability?

i admit: attention spans are dying. it’s hard to hold attention when you’re scrolling faster than a 3AM rugpull. there’s an old marketing adage that says you need at least 7 touchpoints with a user to finally convert them. in crypto, i’d double it.

we’re an industry built on the philosophy of scale and volume. how many transactions per second? what’s the average amount of $ bridged per wallet? how many positive tweets do i need to generate to get on a project’s pre-TGE Kaito leaderboard?

what cuts through the noise? something that makes a user stop in their tracks because they’re fascinated by the incentive, the design, or the feeling. a memorable experience lingers. it makes you want to come back again and again, or tell your TG group, or take a screenshot so you'll always remember being first.

i know better than to advise market makers on incentives. i also know better than to advise pixel-pushers on design. but feeling? i know a thing or two about feeling.

how do you make “degens” feel something real?

i want to preface this by saying: i don’t entirely agree with the “degen” user profile. it reduces people to juvenile activity— an assumption of less-than-average critical thinking and more-than-average liquidations. more importantly, though, it ignores the reality that each of these “degens” has touchpoints with the real world that transcend the blockchain. they have lives outside their phantom wallet.

in a world outside CT, they have things they care about. things they’ve experienced, or watched, or learned. fallen in love, had their heart broken, songs they’ve memorized, dreams they’ve lost. interests beyond farming 0.5% APY yield on your low-liquidity stablecoin. most relevantly– they have emotions you can tug at. ways to make them feel more than just anguish or euphoria when price goes down or up.

to know what inspires feeling— the real kind, not the ones you get when that stop loss is triggered— you need to feel. for that— you need a life.

a life outside crypto twitter.

a life that doesn’t revolve around which KOLs are clogging your timeline, or which ticker is monopolizing jesse pollak’s replies, or which new L1 just imploded with a rugpull. forgive the expression, but you need to touch fucking grass.

touching grass 101

i don’t say this to be preachy. everyone knows you can’t sit on twitter all day. but to be a truly great marketer, you need to be inspired.

inspiration comes from a lot of things. other forms of media are the easiest ways to be inspired— as demonstrated by brands who hop on the latest white lotus meme at just the right time to seem early. but are they truly early? or do they follow other forms of media that are faster than them?

but inspiration also lies in the classics. in knowing not just what’s trendy, but also what’s universal.** experiences that people can relate to regardless of their day job. images that have ingrained themselves into retinas. memories you don’t remember making but somehow share with the most random people you meet.

inspiration hides in collective consciousness. in mimetic desire. in references that take you back to a memory so vivid, you feel alive.

for an industry that waxes poetic about community, we’re incredibly fragmented by our individual experiences with the blockchain. what’s universal, though, is the experiences we lived through shaped by age, time, history, and what we grew up on.

it’s why a Y2K-era ZK testnet hit harder than any airdrop—because it was just fucking cool. it’s why chatting with someone anonymously to guess whether they’re human or AI is fun. it’s why the consumer brand tapping into the girlhood of it all is blowing you all out of the water.

it’s why your best performing tweets are likely the ones you didn’t even think twice about— just typed out straight from your brain into the new post box.

the moment you start actively living outside crypto twitter, your horizons expand exponentially. suddenly, you’re having ideas for campaigns that come straight from a little voice in your brain instead of just duplicating someone else’s campaign. i know it’s a hard sell sometimes— most people just want to do what they know works.

but you know what’s more memorable than a really good imitation?

the original.