Marketing is happening all the time in Web3, but many of the most successful marketers in the space aren't formally trained and wouldn't identify themselves as marketers. They are simply the people working on Web3 projects who take responsibility for connecting their products with users. Without ever reading a book or taking a course on marketing, they intuit the need to understand one's audience first and foremost, figure out the channels where they live and the problems they care about solving, and craft messaging on those channels to motivate them to overcome their indifference. Over time, these instinctive marketers begin to observe a funnel of users that forms through discovery, leads to engagement, hopefully converts to use, and with enough care and commitment, results in long‐term retention. My friend Eva Beylin, who also works in Web3, tweeted something brilliant: “there's either building or trading, everything in between is marketing.”¹ In this book I have attempted to codify the “everything in between” in Web3: what works, what doesn't, and how to think about it.

Marketing isn't a limited set of predetermined practices; it's a repeatable process that starts with imagining what it's like to be someone else. In this way, Web3 marketing is no different from any other kind of marketing. What does make Web3 marketing different is that much of the marketer's job is intended to be temporary and eventually transfer to the community. Unlike Web2 companies that Meta and Google have contrived to make forever dependent on their platforms, forced to pay to drive revenue and even reach their own audiences, Web3 projects have the opportunity to design self‐marketing systems. They need to bootstrap demand and initial community from zero to one using practices such as those described in this book, but once the system is in place, they should make it part of their road map to decentralize the marketing function. Thanks to its potential to decentralize over a network of incentive‐aligned community members, Web3 marketing is far more efficient and sustainable than Web2; incentive design and building the right early community are the keys to success. And absolutely anyone working on a Web3 project who is able to imagine what it's like to be a potential user, develop messaging, build a funnel, and measure and optimize against results, is taking the proper approach for a Web3 marketer, regardless of their actual role or title.

Every technology that changes everything appears unlikely at first, but in hindsight, it couldn't have happened any other way. Back in 2016 when I joined ConsenSys, we suspected blockchain‐based projects could powerfully incentivize aligned behavior from groups, though at the time there were few examples. Between that moment and today, we've seen the logic of Web3 starting to play out in reality. With the growth of Ethereum and other blockchain networks, the runaway adoption of NFTs, and the traditional and Web2 businesses clamoring to enter the space, Web3 is probably past the point of no return. I expect to see the potential of Web3 and the metaverse fully ramify over the next decade. My conviction that this will happen comes from paying attention to the incentives at play. Companies and creators want to escape the linearly scaling materials economy and build in an abundant world where there is no frontier to close. Users want to invest in their favorite projects, investors want to help project teams build, and builders want to collaborate together with these groups to achieve success as efficiently as possible.

We have started to observe a trend both inside and outside Web3 of average people getting more interested in investing their money in the ways that have traditionally realized the greatest returns for a select few. This interest goes beyond day trading, which already exploded in the early days of the web when technology enabled consumers access to securities markets previously only enjoyed by professionals. Today, millions of retail investors are banging down the doors that have prevented them from accessing the most lucrative opportunities reserved for elite accredited investors (in the United States, those with a lawyer or CPA's letter that confirms they own $1 million, excluding the value of their home, or make over $200,000 per year for multiple subsequent years), such as investing in private equity.² Platforms like Republic and Robinhood have succeeded by making potentially high‐reward opportunities accessible to retail investors. The sudden rise to popularity of groups like the subreddit r/wallstreetbets, a motley collective of retail investors coordinating their moves on Reddit, are demonstrations of this trend, with the power to catapult a stock into the limelight, as it did with GameStop, foiling the strategies of major hedge funds.

Permissionless and accessible to everyone, Web3 is the ultimate example of this trend. Those with or without accreditation can access any crypto token on a DEX or join a DAO to invest collectively with others. People with everyday jobs are starting to identify as investors as well as workers. Over time, more are likely to catch on. I predict that as the future of work evolves, most people will diversify their economic activities to operate simultaneously as creators and investors. With each person taking on multiple blended roles, increasingly the categories of user, builder, and investor will disappear, to be replaced by a single category called community.

Web3 projects with incentive‐aligned communities are designed to outcompete Web2 companies that only make money in the margins between customer acquisition costs and lifetime value, and rely on intermediaries they don't control for the continuation of their businesses. However, Web3 projects are poised to succeed because they are capable of independent and sustainable growth. They don't depend on third‐party platforms for business. They can incentivize growth without paying a piper.

More people worldwide are making it part of their lives to invest in these assets and to join these DAOs and communities. That fact, combined with the inherent advantages of Web3 over Web2 business when it comes to growth, gives Web3 enthusiasts like me confidence that our new model for doing business will change everything. Today this logic is just starting to make sense to a small group of early adopters. Tomorrow when we look back, I suspect it will seem inevitable.