In this episode, host Grant speaks with Andrew Saunders, CMO of Arbitrum Ecosystem, about Offchain labs, Arbitrum Nova and marketing tactics, both good and bad.
Read our notes below to learn more.
Andrew’s background
Started in the marketing industry that helps bring hip-hop to suburbs.
Worked for Universal Records throughout college doing marketing jobs.
Moved to LA and worked as a minimum wage earner until 27 years old.
Built charities and philanthropic partnerships for major celebrity clients.
Represented major companies like Coca-Cola, General Motors and Delta Airlines, served as a bridge for them into Hollywood.
One of his early clients is Cisco Systems.
Worked with Twitter and Snapchat on the product and platform side doing beta testings or experimenting things that weren’t public yet.
Worked with Instagram on building ad products.
Built new ad products that were leveraging Amazon destination sites for auto brands.
Built his own in-house practice and quickly scaled across 7 countries and 12 different product lines working with autonomous vehicles, helped to send Alexa into space with NASA and more.
Have been an independent venture investor for years that invested in a lot of underserved female founders.
A board member of California Department of Education.
Pitching for a marketing budget
You have to build trust.
Track record is important.
Having very legitimate people vouch for you.
Pitch decks are great, flashy and fun.
Creating a lightweight version of a business plan.
Draw a comparison of case studies.
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Favorite things about crypto and Arbitrum
Blown away everyday by how smart and how curious a lot of people are in this industry.
Have been receiving a lot of partnership calls every single day.
Seeing a huge wave of talents shifting from big tech, academia and multi-time/multi-exit founders.
The anonymous component of crypto brings a lot more inclusivity.
Research and development is your best friend.
Researching and inventing new technologies are among the most exciting things in crypto.
Building a targeted organic community.
Inventing new ways to market products in crypto.
Data and infrastructure are good bets.
Why choose Arbitrum?
One of the founders of Arbitrum, Ed Felten, is pretty legitimate and experienced considering he was the Deputy CTO of the White House under Obama and the author of the book “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction”, which is recommended by a lot of people for new folks entering the crypto industry.
Arbitrum is building a platform that has longevity and isn’t going to run into issues or hiccups down the road from a technical or government perspective.
The founders are kind and humble compared to a lot of other companies that Andrew interviewed.
One of the biggest partners is Chain Link (decentralized oracle networks).
Has a legitimate and well-known list of investors and VCs.
What you see on the outside is similar to what you see on the inside.
Working with Arbitrum is a complete opposite of what corporate America is like.
The community is very solid and inclusive.
Mainnet was launched before anything was up and running, giving a first mover advantage.
The community evolved organically.
There weren’t any kind of token manipulation tactics.
Fully EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible.
Lower gas fees and faster speeds.
The technology is great, developers are responsive and the founders listen to community feedback.
Everyone is focused on scaling ETH and bringing Web3 to the masses.
The success of all companies that sit on top of Arbitrum correlates into its own success.
The community members are some of the best marketing people.
The community is like one very, big, fun non-traditional family.
Marketing tactics to be aware of
There’s a lack of fact-checking in the industry.
The average person doesn’t know what questions to ask, what things to question or what to dive deep on.
The biggest issue is the notion of fake narratives.
Reporters and interviews need to be more intelligent in order to ask the right questions to produce the right answers.
There’s a lot of fiction and twisted truths.
The way people present information isn’t 100% accurate and ethical.
One of the things that’s strange and different in whitepapers is the goal, maybe too ambitious.
A lot of investors in the industry throw money into crypto companies just because they don’t want to miss out on the opportunity.
A lot of things being marketed by paid or sponsored influencers are not theoretical or tangible.
Making sure to look at projects’ teams if they are being truthful about their narrative and hitting benchmarks against their roadmap.
A lot of companies in crypto are doing BD deals with large scale tech and entertainment companies in Web2 where significant money is shifting hands in one direction.
Being wary of one-sided partnership announcements or press releases.
Unethical excitements are going to drive pumps.
Gaming on Arbitrum
There’s a lot of interesting things in GameFi.
Arbitrum Nova lends itself to better things that require faster speeds and more transaction volume.
Arbitrum Nova is a home for gaming and social.
Social platforms coming to Arbitrum will be a great developer experience and user experience because the apps will move quickly and transaction fees will be very low.
There are a lot of partners building games, on the back of other IPs, choosing to build on Nova.
The problem today is the games haven’t been fun.
Gaming space shows new tokenomics, new models and new gameplays.
Web3 gaming is very early.
Check out these important links
TODAY’S EDITION IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY LEDGER HARDWARE WALLET
This Black Friday, take the opportunity to invest in security. We have partnered with the Ledger, who is the industry leader and most trusted vendor in the hardware wallet space.
Enjoy 10% off all purchases sitewide using code: BLACKFRIDAY10
Act now, click the link below and secure your crypto.