The NTM Growth Marketing Podcast “Bringing Communication to Web3 with Shane Mac”

Hey Shane, welcome to the NTM Growth Marketing Podcast. It's an honor to be speaking with you today.

Hey, what's up, Andrew? Thanks for having me.

I'm excited for our dialogue. I'm very impressed with what you're doing. It's an interesting, fascinating space of Web3. And, you know, I want to start off the show and just hear a little bit more from you. Tell us a little bit about your company, your role at the organization, how it all began.

Yeah, thanks. You know, XMTP really came out of seeing a problem with these new wallets and crypto communications happening. And we're looking around a few years ago thinking, well, people can send all this money between all these wallet addresses, but they can't send an email, they can't send a message. And actually, Mike Shinoda, who was the, one of the people from Linkin Park. He was doing a Clubhouse one night and we were all in a room together. We're all chatting. And he said they had the largest Facebook page in the world at one point on Facebook. And then Facebook changed the algorithm. They couldn't reach their audience. They had all these people and they had a list of all their fans and they couldn't even message them. And then they had to pay to message them. And he was like, if I had a relationship or a contract or a smart contract with all of these fans and I had their wallet addresses and they were all on chain and that was public, no one could ever take that audience list from me in the future. No one could ever take my fans. I could always know this is my list of fans, but How do I message them? How can I reach them? Is there a way to do that? And that was really the kind of the genesis of a lot of things coming together, whether, whether it was DeFi protocols not being able to communicate to their token holders, artists like Mike Shinoda not being able to own their communication and own their audience. And then just general people every day being able to see what's happening on chain or who owns an ENS name or who owns an NFT, and they can't send a message to that person and say, hey, I really liked the things that I saw you were interested in and I just wanted to connect. And so it just kind of opened up this question of, is there a new identity being created? And if so, how do you communicate between it?

And that's what started the idea, at least, of XMTP.

Yeah.

And so you're the founder of the organization and also serving as CEO.

Yep.

What is a day-to-day in the life of a CEO of a Web3 company look like?

I think it probably looks like the day in the life of a CEO of any company. I don't see things as that different. I mean, we're trying to work as a team to build something and communicate clearly with our ecosystem of partners and developers, coordinate a bunch of people to work on hard problems. So I spend a lot of my time recruiting, a lot of my time internally trying to make sure that we're communicating clearly, setting good goals, working every quarter on what matters most, listening to our customers and our partners, trying to understand where we need to get better. It probably looks very similar to being the CEO of any organization. And I think what's different is I'm the CEO of XMTP Labs. I'm not the CEO of XMTP. XMTP is a decentralized protocol. And we will be a participant in that protocol once it's fully decentralized. But I do not run or am the CEO of that protocol. That is a global protocol that everyone will be able to use and we will contribute to it as the company. But our duty as a company is to improve and further the development of XMTP. And so I think being the CEO of XMTP Labs, looks like being the CEO of any company. What our work is going towards and the impact we're trying to have and the relationship to the thing we're working on probably looks a little different than a normal company where you make a product and get people to pay for that product and subscribe to that product when we're trying to make sure that there's a secure and trusted messaging protocol that everyone in the world can build on and use.

Can you elaborate a little bit more on why that looks different?

Yeah, well, I think you end up with the protocol XNTP and everyone who's building on it and the whole community will be able to own and govern and make decisions about this 'cause it's a fully open source project and we do everything in the public. There'll be many node operators running nodes. Which are the servers to deliver store and encrypt messages. And that ecosystem isn't controlled or dictated like a centralized company saying, here's what we're going to do. Here's, I'm going to go cut somebody off. I mean, the problem today is centralized company-run messaging apps that they don't want Andrew the identity on the messaging app. They can just kick you off. In this world, you can't do that. Because a single centralized entity shouldn't have control over everyone's secure and private communication. And that's what's fundamentally different.

From a marketing standpoint, I want to dive a little bit deeper into how you're utilizing marketing or not at XNTP Labs. And let's just start off with the first question, which is, what does marketing mean to you?

The ability to tell your story in a simple way.

Do you want to share a little bit more on what that story is you want to share at XNTP Labs?

We want everyone in the world to be able to own and control their communication, right? I think the idea that we've for 15 years been moving all of our data online, but therefore giving it all away is a pretty fundamentally flawed thing about the internet. And I think that's moving back to individuals getting control, control over the data, control over their inboxes, control over their identity, and ultimately control over their assets, which is where kind of crypto and blockchain all started. But I think it's going to move into all these non-financial use cases and everyone's going to start to realize how much power the individual can have and should have in the future. And so for us, it's a very big driving force is the ability for everyone in the world to own and control their communication.

Was this something you were passionate about before you were in that Clubhouse thread? You know, in your career, were you concerned about these issues or was that a big lightbulb moment for you?

Oh no, I think my whole career. Is been in messaging. So I've been working on messaging as a thing that I truly just like. I think it's what drives the internet. I think human connection is a fundamental thing that it kind of unifies us all. And since the day the internet became really sticky for me was the day I could start texting back in the day in the '90s and texting led to messaging. It always came from messaging for me. And so for me, it was always driven through a lens of that. And then as I grew in my career, when I was early on, I didn't know that building on top of SMS or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, that they were gonna change the APIs and working with them would get harder and they'd pull the API keys and the business model would change and we would get cut off or we'd have to start, like, I didn't understand all those dynamics. Now I do. And after having building a couple companies on top of all the Web2 platforms, to me what I care about is creating a better relationship with all the developers in a more open and transparent way so that we can go build the future together and they don't have to worry about getting rugged by some centralized platform in the middle that's going to cut them off, change the rules, or add in a business model that they didn't tell them about and start charging them all a ton of money. So only like a few major partners can afford it and then no one else can actually build on it, or they just cut you off altogether because they're in control and they can do that. I think my personal drive is driven by changing the relationship and the mechanism by which all of us can build together so that you don't have to sit here and get rugged by all these past platforms. You can actually, because you don't even have to have permission, it is permissionless. You don't have to sit here and worry that we're going to pull, you know, the API because it's not an API, right? It's a permissionless SDK. And I think that's a very important shift. Happening in the world that I'm super excited about. And I think our ability to now coordinate everyone, communicate effectively, and governance across the whole community of developers, not just a single person making decisions, is a fundamental shift in how the internet will work going forward.

Out of curiosity, as an individual, are you still using any social media platforms? Facebook, Instagram, YouTube? I know Twitter is huge in the Web3 space.

Yeah, all of them.

Do you have any current thoughts on what's going on with the platforms? And I'll make that a little bit more concrete. I want to bring it back to changing business models, suddenly creating new revenue streams out of thin air. The whole having a blue checkmark or not now on social media.

I think they're always going to evolve. They're always going to be changing. They're always going to do what incentivizes a company to win the the best. And that's how the companies are built. They're center— centralized organizations that have to pay themselves and their employees. And the best model was advertising or subscriptions. And so they're going to do what incentivizes keeping the company alive. I think that's where the model has to fundamentally shift to do something different. I don't actually see it as like, oh, why are they changing things? What are they doing things wrong? I don't, I don't really see it like that. I think that's always going to be true. The question for me is, What is the mechanism by which the next ecosystem, the next protocols, the next platforms can be built where users actually know that this can't happen, or developers know this can't happen, or because of the way it works, say identity is owned by the individual, not by the platform, that it can't get taken away from you. I think these are the things that shift how this all works. I mean, even in XMTP, one of the main core things about it is it's a portable inbox. It's interoperable, but it's also portable. If I'm logged into an app with my private key and all my messages are there and I don't like that app, I don't trust that app, the person who's running it, we can't trust anymore. I can delete that app, go to a new app, I log in with my private key, all my messages show up. And I think that portability, that ability to own your messaging, own your identity, own your data, and take it with you is how the internet should work. And I think that fundamental shift is the thing that changes everything. And so it's not about, are these apps gonna keep changing the rules and a blue checkmark or not? No, they're gonna do whatever is in their best interest for them. The question is, can you have a model that gives the control and the ownership back to the individual where it doesn't matter if they do that because you don't have to be locked into it. Your messages aren't locked into the DMs. They're not locked into iCloud. They're not locked into WhatsApp. Your messages are actually yours. And if you and your network— and if you don't like the application, delete it, move on. Your entire network comes with you. That's the future.

I love it. Thanks for sharing. Why do you think storytelling is so critical for marketers?

It's just the human way. I mean, everything starts with the story. If you tell me any data set or you tell me any decision, Or you tell me I should do X. If I don't have a story to root the, the data to, or get me excited about, or that attracts me to it, it doesn't matter. And I think everything just goes back to our ability to storytell and to do it very simply and more self-aware and more empathetic. I think storytelling is, is a true like art form, but doing it in a way that brings curiosity, that brings self-awareness, that allows us to be more of our authentic selves, to make it safer for others to tell our story and tell their own. And then the great brands, actually, people make the story their own. Right? They actually, they end up becoming part of the story. And I think doing that and creating that and leading with that amount of kind of curiosity and self-awareness and empathy with your storytelling so people feel like they can actually be a part of it is super challenging but super powerful.

Do you consider yourself a good storyteller?

I don't know. I don't, I probably not. But I, I do spend a lot of time trying to simplify things probably just to make them make sense to me. But I really, even in like this Web3 space, I think it's, it's all still way too complicated. It's too hard. It's too hard to convey the real meaning to people's lives, why it's gonna change their life, why it matters. What's the use case that's killer? And so I do try to spend a lot of my time talking to, you know, my friends in music in Nashville, my parents, you know, my partner, a lot of people who you really have to simplify it down and tell simple stories. And so I practice it a lot. Whether or not I'm good at it is, you know, debatable.

Well, tell us a little bit about that app you showed me before we hit record, Oasis, because I thought that was brilliant for marketers of how they could utilize this AI.

Yeah, it's cool. It's, uh, so this guy built it online. I was using it and it's an application here that you just hit the voice button in the middle, start talking. You can talk for as long as you want. And if you talk for 10 minutes of your idea, you can then hit select outputs and you can literally pick any type of output you want. You can say, write it in a Twitter thread. Explain this like to, to explain like I'm 5.

I see.

Summary, professional email, write it into a song, college essay, New York Times article, one simple paragraph, whatever. So I can talk for 10 minutes and it can write a Twitter thread, write an email to people, write me a summary like I'm 5, and then all of it is instantly just a summary of everything that I've just rambled about. And so as you're like thinking out loud and trying to formulate thought, whether or not it is the end output isn't the point. The point is something to reformulate and edit and bring back and craft and summarize and simplify and give you a new perspective on what you just said is such a powerful tool. That's one of the better, I think, AI tools I've seen that really is kind of taking your original thought and then just giving it back to you in all these different formats and styles and stuff. And that, that usually then triggers the actual thing, right? That's like the editing and the art of great writing is the working through the writing. Like it, you know, people think you like have great thoughts and then you go write. It's usually actually writing is the process of creating great thoughts.

As you were speaking, I was thinking of a use case where 30 years ago this would've been amazing. So my fiancée works at Dr. Bronner's soap. Have you heard of them?

Uh-huh.

There's this organic Southern California soap company that's been around for a long time, and they're notorious on the label, which is the former founder would ramble into a tape recording, and his ramblings turned into— it's like an infinite amount of text just around the bottle. And as you're like in the shower, it's notorious for people just trying to read like line by line as inspirational quotes. So something like that would've been amazing for him of he's just rambling in this tape recorder and they could have seamlessly just integrated into their product design.

Amazing. Totally. It's awesome. There's so many cool use cases for AI. I'm so, I'm so excited about everything that's happening and I don't, I have no, you know, I built chatbots in my last company since 2013. So I feel like I've seen the spectrum of like really shit to good or great where they're at now. And I've been a part of the story of, is it gonna replace jobs? Is it gonna kill creativity? Is it gonna X, Y, Z, right? And the answer is always, it's gonna change things for sure. But the ability to push the limits of what we're possible of or help us think differently or show us new ways to do things or open us up to new ideas. And expand the surface area of what we think is possible of creativity, of writing, of everything is always how these things kind of happen. And so for me, I'm super excited to say, what does songwriting look like with this AI assistant at your side? How do you expand the surface area of creation of writing with this AI assistant at your side? How do you simplify messages for people that really struggle to communicate effectively and very worried and a lot of anxiety around not sounding like they're clear and people have a hard time understanding it, so they quit talking more. Like the ability to help so many people more clearly get out what is in their head to reach someone else is so powerful on a level that I don't think we've ever seen versus this is going to replace everyone that's going to, you know, never this is gonna be bad. I agree, I agree. There's gonna be some really kind of dangerous consequences if they're not put on rails. But I just see so many opportunities for this to help so many people effectively communicate.

Are there any other AI tools you've been just going down the rabbit hole with?

Oh, the list is too long. I mean, I've been in, I've been in this space for so long that like, You know, I'm on the board of a company called Keys AI, which is a keyboard that replaces your iPhone keyboard to be more of an intent-based keyboard. So I just can take a screenshot of the conversation in iMessage and it'll suggest back 3 ways to respond. Right? So like, while I'm— or an email, while I'm having the conversation, give me a coach that helps me think about how to communicate more effectively and more empathetically and more curiously. Like, that's a really powerful thing. People are like, oh, that's crazy. I'm like, well, What do you mean? Everyone else just learns by watching other people or reading a book, tries to remember it, and then tries to then effectively put it to work. Or you actually try to take it back to your coach or your therapist or your counselor and remember what actually happened in that interaction a day later. If you can screenshot in real time and they can be a part of the conversation and you can have real-time coaching for any conversation, the amount of anxiety that you relieve for people that can help them communicate more effectively, to teach them what curiosity and empathetic communication looks like. Like, you'll just help people understand maybe what they never even got taught how to do.

We had it negotiate a deal for us, and we, because we were too triggered to give a rational response, so we had ChatGPT help us give an empathetic counteroffer.

Of course. I mean, what's the secret to negotiate? Sorry, go ahead.

No, I just say we prompted it to use an empathetic yet confident tone to counter the negotiation points. And it was brilliant what it came out with. And they agreed to it 100%.

Right. And negotiation is one of the perfect ones because it's about as long as you're focused on what the other party wants, What is the success for both of us look like? How do we make this bigger for both of us? And if you're guiding towards the right thing, then the goal of negotiation is listen more and remove emotion, right? Like, that's the goal. And so as long as you're aware of that and you can have that, have that awareness, you can do it. But most people, they can't because the emotion takes over, right? Most people hit respond. Oh, that's in, in negotiation. It's so visceral, right? It's always the response. Oh, fuck. Like, and you just like, there's always another thing, right?

We're trying to have that perfect one-liner as we watch Jimmo's session the night before.

Totally. Right, exactly. Exactly. Um, and I think there's just so much that can be taught in the moment, and then you learn by doing, not learn by listening. And trying to remember. And that is so much more powerful because then you instantly get the feedback of, oh, that worked. I changed that shit. This is better. This is a better situation now because I know how to communicate more effectively. So I just feel like there's infinite use cases for it.

So in some of my conversations with marketers, I've heard from two ends of the spectrum. I've had the marketers who are all about AI, you know, it's to the point where they're using it to negotiate deals, to people who are extremely resistant to the change that's happening, which is very common for humans to be resistant to technology shifts. What advice would you have to that marketer who's been resisting the rise of AI this year?

Every single person who's missed out in the past is doing the same thing you're doing now.

In terms of resisting it, I mean anything.

Yeah, like the person who adopts, who learns, who's a part of it, who's doing the work, understands the nuance, understands what it's great at, understands what it's bad at, understands where there's opportunities, sees all the opportunities. The person who resists it and doesn't even try it learns nothing and always misses out, and therefore leads a self-perpetuating cycle of resisting it more and then feeling like you're always left out. It's kind of like choose, you know, you choose your own destiny there. This one is so nuanced and so powerful that like, there's just no reason to. I don't even believe that it's gonna replace everything or change everything, or even that it's that good. I think the writing is like fine. It, I know when someone writes with ChatGPT, which is actually a more like inspiring opportunity for incredible writers to not sound like ChatGPT. Like, I actually feel like the voices of uniqueness around writing, around personality, around authenticity, around like creatives will be way better than like people writing, you know, the top 10 blog posts and bullshit content that it's always kind of been bullshit. That'll just be more bullshit. Like, that's going to be the same. Yeah. If you're building an SEO blog platform with 1,000 articles and you use ChatGPT, like Maybe that works for like the certain use case that search traffic links to, that links to a lead gen, but is it gonna work for brand? Probably not.

I hear this from Web3 marketers in which they're very vocal that Web2 marketing and Web3 marketing are very different. Can you share a little bit more on what are the differences of Web2 versus Web3 marketing?

I think it's very, very simple. In Web3, you can have ownership in the thing you're marketing and creating incentives for people to also be supporters of it changes the dynamic in general, right? The people who work for a company in Web2 and get paid by it and have stock in it market, talk about, share it a lot differently than the people who don't. Right. And in Web3, it's not just the people who are working on it, it's the whole community can have ownership in it and participate in it and feel like they have that ownership of the thing, which I think changes the dynamic and the incentives for word of mouth, for marketing, for talking about it, et cetera. And I think that at the core fundamental difference, I think is the difference.

Are there any Web3 companies who you really admire for what they're doing from a marketing standpoint?

I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot doing kind of really experimental stuff. There's a lot from like a protocol level. I mean, if I think about the just, and I don't even use the word companies, I think protocols or foundations in general, like the Ethereum Foundation to me and the Ethereum ecosystem from a marketing standpoint and a storytelling standpoint has done an incredible job of inspiring millions of developers to want to build with Ethereum. But, you know, it's not a company, it's a, it's more of a movement. Right.

And so the storytelling's been the key aspect.

Oh, for sure. I mean, what do you think Vitalik really does?

I, I'm not sure.

They do—

talking about the guy who invented Earth, Ethereum.

Yeah.

Like Ethereum. Sorry, I brain fart there.

No, no, no. Vitalik, who invented, you know, who's co-founder of Ethereum. He's a storyteller. He is on every podcast. He is at every event. He is on every dev port, like, blog, and he is telling stories all day, every day for developers and people to adopt and build with. I think he's been doing that since day one.

I have a few last questions, and the first one is, You know, if I look back and look forward in marketing, I think there's been some major shifts that have happened in the last few years. You know, 2021, there was iOS 14 issue that happened within Facebook. 2023, I would call, you know, the AI year almost. Where do you see the future of marketing going down the line? And whether that's a technology innovation, a big rule that gets instituted on a platform, or just more trends you're seeing evolve of Web3 that makes this really the mainstay of what marketing looks like to us?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think one that it's kind of relevant to us, but also I think it's very interesting for the world is moving from a privacy world to a consent world. And what I mean by that is today your phone number, your email, it's all, you know, default private. And therefore there are laws around it that protect your inbox. I can't spam laws. There's SMS marketing laws. You can't send it to my number because there's a fine that the government will charge you if you send unsolicited SMS, et cetera. In a world where every address is public, and a lot of those now can be resold, and it's private data, but people are reselling your private data all day versus move to a world that every identity is on chain. Now you're actually in a consent world, which is what are the ways by which consumers can control their inbox so that the rules are clear? They actually can put criteria up and say this message can't hit my inbox unless we've had any interactions before, or we actually own things in the same community, or we've been to the same concert, or we're part of the same group. Or we've interacted with one degree away from me, someone else. And so I know that they're one degree of separation away. But doing that as an open ledger versus a Facebook private ledger, that is an algorithm that seeds their friend graph, is a very different model where consumers and individuals can be in control and then the rules can be defined by the consent mechanism that allows people to reach each other. And I think that'll change everything, that'll change the power dynamic, but also the, the ability for brands and marketers to be able to reach people in a way where when you can look at on-chain data and you can filter a list based on tons of criteria, not just random email addresses you're sending messages to, but how many NFTs they hold, what's the value of their wallet, how often do they interact, What are the brands they've ever associated with? Like, there's gonna be so much data in this open pixel. And then you have to just understand the rules by which those people want to interact with you. And I think moving to a consent world is something that will be a very powerful shift to consumers controlling their inbox, but also the brands who really have the trust and the great credibility to have a, a mechanism by which it's a better channel because because it's not going to be drowned out by tons of noise and tons of crap.

Uh, so my last question today is, what is the best purchase you've made for under $100, uh, personally or professionally in the last 6 months?

Uh, I saw that. It's a good, it's a good question. Um, Here, I'll show you. One sec.

Sure.

Handmade stationery.

Love it.

You got a little handmade paper, handmade stationery, envelopes, wax seals, custom pens. I think in a world where it's all digital and we're all trying to do marketing all day, my old co-founder Robert Stevens, who was the founder of Geek Squad, he really was always learning how to do all this kind of artisanal eccentric stuff. Making paper. He's leather binding his own notebooks. And he sent me a gift, uh, 3 or 4 years ago with a letterpress maker in my hometown. And this lady has been working with me ever since to make custom letterpress, make custom paper, custom stamps, custom wax seals, all this stuff. Um, and for me personally, just writing and actually writing letters is kind of a moment of gratitude. You, you don't really write letters to people you really don't like.

Right.

And I think also the ability to focus and take a step back and get off the computer and get off the device in a world where there's infinite messaging channels and infinite emails and infinite social networks and all this shit, it really has been a helpful space for me to kind of just be more present, be more thoughtful. And I love writing in general, but on the other end of it, every single person that I write letters to, we have a better relationship because of it. And I think in a world where everyone's trying to maximize scale or, you know, send more messages and send more emails, I write, I don't know, about 300 letters a year now or so. And it's been probably one of the most impactful things I've ever done. And the feedback I get from everybody is like, I truly appreciated this so much and it was so unique and different. Thank you for writing it. Mostly I'm doing it for myself, but I think it is also very powerful to do things in a different way to stand out in this world where everyone's kind of sending things through the same channel. Amazing.

Well, Shane, last, Lastly, if someone wants to learn more about you and your organization, can you give us any links, websites to check out?

Yeah, just go to xmtp.org, say hi, or I'm @ShaneMac on Twitter.

Perfect. Shane, thank you so much for your time today.

Hey, thank you. Have a good day, man.