How to Build Your OWN Brand on the Blockchain | Avalanche’s Head of Strategy 🔺

I think marketing's getting much harder. The easy mode of, you know, turning on Facebook and Google Ads, that's kind of going away. So I want to talk about awareness, right? Because you guys have done some pretty interesting things. And, you know, people here like nerding out on marketing too. And I think marketing's getting much harder. The easy mode of, you know, turning on Facebook and Google Ads, that's kind of going away and marketing's getting more difficult. And I think that's going to, you know, cause for more creativity, which is great. So like, what have you guys done from like an awareness standpoint? There's a handful of things that we talked about pre-show, but I just want to kind of hear it from your mouth too, because I'm sure you have more than what I mentioned.

Yeah. So that's a, that's a really interesting point. That's a very pretty point. I think as a layer 1, marketing is, is probably slightly different from, you know, any other type of company or project. But actually what's interesting is like, this is back in school. I remember there was a case study that we read on Starbucks. And the interesting thing about Starbucks is that you've never seen a Starbucks ad, right? Yeah, you're right. That's true. And they focus a lot on building the Starbucks experience. Right. And I think a lot of what we do is very similar to that type of a strategy where we first and foremost have to build a good product. And so as you sort of asked about, you know, the interoperability with Ethereum, right. That was a huge source of growth for Avalanche. Now, you know, on the network have about $11 billion, I think, in total value locked. It just, assets are being used in DeFi, right? And a lot of those assets are either native to Avalanche or came from the Ethereum network through the bridge. And a lot of things that we did, it was a lot of attention to detail where we made the bridge, the way the bridge is architected, it's the cheapest, fastest version of a bridge you could ever have. And there's some very sort of new technologies that we're using there, like Intel SGX, so on and so forth. But what it enables is, you know, you know, the transactions cost just as much as just sending a normal transaction, right? And that's in contrast to the other bridges that use some sort of a multisig, and it's kind of a more expensive operation. We also did a lot of things like, so when users bridged over assets, it would get a small airdrop. And, you know, a lot of times, you know, if you just bridge over, then you realize, oh, I don't have the AVAX token, right, to make any sort of transfers or anything, I'm stuck there, right? And so I think this really helped with the user experience. And then once you got over to the Avalanche network, we took you to an ecosystem page where, you know, AAVE, Curve, all the major ecosystem projects were on there and users could kind of learn about them and figure out, you know, what to do with their assets once on Avalanche. And so I think what came out of this was a lot of, you know, even like very funnily, a bunch of memes, right, on the internet around like Bridge War. that the something or meme actually came from the Avalanche network and how good of a user experience the bridge was. And so tying back to that Starbucks example, you know, the whole Starbucks strategy is that they want to have— they want to create a good experience such that, you know, if you have a bad experience, you'll tell like 7 people. If you have an average experience, you might not tell anybody. If you have a good experience, you might tell a couple people, right? And so from that, I think we got a huge flywheel of marketing and kind of word-of-mouth marketing, right? And, you know, really helped build the community there. And another example is just, I think this is not really much of a secret, but the Avalanche Rush incentive program that was a $180 million incentive program that brought over the likes of Curve and Aave and all these DeFi blue chips, right? And, you know, I think that the parallel there is You know, if you look at companies like Uber and Lyft, right, in the early days, they kind of subsidized rides to capture market share. And, you know, in DeFi and crypto, it's actually not that different, right? You need to give people an incentive to come over. And once they're over onto the Avalanche network, then there's a whole host of other things, you know, native to Avalanche that they can explore. That was awesome. I think really sort of good examples of, you know, things that actually were, uh, yeah, very, very effective for us that, um, slightly different from conventional marketing, but, but also had a really big effect on the Avalanche network and its growth.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's like a lot of great, uh, tech products out there. I mean, it's, it's, A, you create a great product, you create a great user experience, and the other thing is show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome, right? So, you know, airdropping, just so everyone knows, it's kind of like releasing little bonuses, right, for participating in, in this context. Um, and, and then like, you know, what you guys have done with the, the fund to bring into blue chips, like super smart too, right?