Let’s Talk Web3 Marketing (Katie Butler Interview)

Ty Smith0:07

What's up, everyone? Welcome to another episode. Today we have the co-founder of Distractive, Katie Butler, here. She is a Web3 and tech marketer who has had her hands in a number of things. So we're going to go through a couple of things of what she's been up to, as well as the ecosystem that she's working in. So, Katie, thanks for being here, first of all.

Katie Butler0:23

Yeah, so glad to be here.

Ty Smith0:24

All right, so let's dive right into it. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of what I want to discuss regarding the pros and cons of Web3 marketing and KPIs, things like that, I'd love to just hear a little bit about your background and kind of what you've been up to the past 5-10 years.

Katie Butler0:37

Yeah, for sure. So I got my start in startup marketing in various capacities. I used to refer to myself as a marketing chameleon, just for my tendency to bounce around between industries. I've worked in visual effects software, I've worked in IT, I've marketed security software to security professionals, to developers, all sorts of stuff. But the steady drumbeat really was around this tech marketing piece. And I found early on I love marketing to developers. It sounds strange for someone who's not got a technical background, because I don't. But I always found that they're some of the most loyal people, and so I sort of gravitated to that and, lo and behold, fell into this Web3 ecosystem and I have not turned back. So for the last four years, I've been working on helping build and market the Moonbeam Network.

Ty Smith1:24

Cool. What originally attracted you to Moonbeam?

Katie Butler1:29

Well, it didn't exist before I started. So I actually started at PureStake focused on API tools. And even in the early early days, I think what attracted me to PureStake was this idea that we don't know what the opportunity is going to be, we just know that there is one and we're actively looking to find it. And so in those early days, we were evaluating the market trying to figure out where there's an opportunity both from a tech perspective and a business opportunity. And so we sort of settled on Polkadot. We settled on this gap with how hard it is to build an application in the Polkadot ecosystem. And we were one of the first, if not the first, network to focus on, well, can we bring this EVM style to a new format, to basically a different kind of underlying framework, which in this case is called Substrate? And so that's what we did. We were kind of the first ones to do that. And at the time, it was pragmatic. It was, there seems to be a gap here. But it eventually became something that I think a lot of people have emulated as a new approach to having some consistency in the way that we build applications.

Ty Smith2:32

Yeah, I realize we should probably take it a step back because there's probably, I think most people are familiar with Moonbeam or at least have heard of it, but there's probably a decent amount of listeners that aren't overly familiar with it. So can you explain what Moonbeam is, I guess, in simpler terms?

Katie Butler2:44

Sure. Moonbeam is a platform where you build applications. And so when we talk about things like this EVM piece that I mentioned, really all that means is we've taken the most popular way to build applications, which today is in an Ethereum-style environment, and made that possible in a new environment, which in this case is Polkadot. But when it comes down to it, really all Moonbeam is is like a developer-friendly platform that lets you easily build applications that interact with many blockchains all at once.

Ty Smith3:12

What is the main, I guess, draw? I mean, you on the marketing side, I'm sure you've bounced around a ton of different ways of positioning this to different people. What is kind of the message, I guess, that you're putting out as far as what Moonbeam is and why someone should use it?

Katie Butler3:26

Well, it's something we're working on actively now. I think we'll you'll see it stretch and grow this year in particular. But I think there's really two things to focus on. The first is for users. Like why is anyone who wants to use an application going to care about where it's built? And from our perspective, really what we help enable is bringing the user experience back up to where people want it to be, right? You've gotten used to the clunkiness of Web3 and having to bounce between Ethereum and Avalanche and Moonbeam and all these other networks to complete a transaction. What if you didn't need to do that?

Katie Butler4:06

And so that's really what we're working on solving is making that user experience meet the bare minimum for what it could be. And from a developer perspective, really all we want to do is give them all the tools they need and get out of the way. And so our messaging really centers around the idea that we've sort of created this environment with access to the most tools and the most, certainly cross-chain resources on any chain, and that's kind of become our hallmark feature when it comes to builders coming to Moonbeam.

Ty Smith4:27

Got it. Yeah, I'm noticing now the Moonbeam neon sign in your background. That's pretty cool.

Katie Butler4:31

I know, I should have lit it up. I didn't think about that. I wasn't on top of it today.

Ty Smith4:35

Next time.

Ty Smith4:36

So right now, as far as Moonbeam's growth goals, is it primarily focused on building out the developer and builder community?

Katie Butler4:43

I would say what I'm advocating for is focus rather than really going after numbers, right? Because I think probably most marketers are seeing what I'm seeing, which is that things have quieted down in the bear market. And so it's a really good time to focus on sort of the essentials. And what I'm hoping we can do is instead of trying to do lots of things a little bit, we can instead try to focus that on a couple core things that we think will really help improve. So what we're working on right now is identifying where are the use cases that we can really double down to make the most impact. And yes, that ends up essentially being a way to increase the number of builders in the space, but we're trying to kind of not cherry-pick, but have a little bit of strategy and focus with how we approach those builders.

Ty Smith5:29

Yeah, and that's actually a whole different topic. So Web3 marketing for a while was very niche. It was very few people building in the Web3 space and there was those tokens and there was exchanges and there wasn't a whole lot more to it. We didn't have NFTs and DeFi and all these different things. And in the process of me running an agency and I imagine you and your marketing history, marketing to developers is a totally different ballgame. It's the way you go after someone who's going to use a DeFi system or buy an NFT or use an exchange is totally different than someone who's going to actually build on your blockchain. So I'm curious what have you found successful, what have you found not successful? Walk me through that a little bit if you can.

Katie Butler6:07

Yeah, I mean, the learnings that I took from the Web2 space and brought into the Web3 space for developers are really just two things. One, they will be the first to tell you that they hate marketing, but they don't really, they just hate bad marketing. And don't we all? But they're just a little more vocal about it. And the second is if you can win a developer's trust, if you can win sort of their loyalty, they will forever be allegiant to your brand. Like it's one of those things where you'll hear someone say they hate marketing at the same time holding a laptop with the Octocat across the back. Like it's one of those things where there's sort of a duality here that you have to wrestle with.

Katie Butler6:48

But I've sort of taken those things and blended them into what we do. And so our focus has always been valuable content both from a technical perspective, but also a non-technical perspective. It's not just about your doc site. It's not just about diving into the what's what from a technical perspective, but helping people understand why things are important and understanding it quickly so they can move on with their life. And the second piece is trust, doing what you say you're going to do again and again and again. And I cannot emphasize enough how much that has really helped Moonbeam, at least for our particular community and ecosystem, build trust that we're at least going to do the things that we say that we're going to do in a hopefully fairly buttoned-up way so that you can rely on not just the technology that we create, but of course this world that we're building.

Ty Smith7:29

Got it. Yeah, I find that when people, obviously everyone says, 'I hate marketing,' and it really is more of, 'I hate being forced to watch something,' or 'being forced to think something,' and developers are especially, I think, testy with those kind of things. We've always found that like Reddit ads, for example, it's a great way to get in front of developers because Redditers and developers, there's a lot of overlap, but Reddit tends to be one of the most difficult platforms to actually get a positive ROI because people are so anti-ad. You really have to do it tactfully.

Katie Butler7:59

I would say, too, there's lots of things that are available in the Web2 world that haven't yet come over to the Web3 world. So one of my favorite advertising platforms is Cooper Press, which, shout out to Cooper Press if anyone can ever manage to get an ad secured there. So that's a series of newsletters, extremely content-focused, and they cater to this niche of developer who likes to always be on the cutting edge, likes to know a little bit more than everyone else, they're actively seeking new information. And so what they do is let you place an ad with your content that hopefully is good and relevant and provides value back within this essentially set of links, which isn't that different from Pointer and some of the other newsletters. But we don't really have that in Web3, right? We don't have a Web3 developer newsletter that we can roll an ad to, and we certainly don't have ad placements that have any real value in newsletters that I've seen. It's usually like your display ad at top and bottom, but not anything that gets a real click-through rate.

Katie Butler8:56

But just to give you a sense, these ads that I've run in the past in Cooper Press, I had 2,600 clicks from a 70,000-person newsletter list. And of those clicks, a 7% conversion rate to try my product, which with one ad is a pretty powerful return on investment. So you look at that kind of dynamic and the tools that are available to Web2 developers that just aren't available in Web3 yet.

Ty Smith9:25

Yeah. There's also an interesting component to marketing to developers and just building out ecosystems, especially in the Web3 space, is I find there's a lot of there's a very thin line between BizDev and marketing in that space because there's a lot, someone might call hosting a hackathon BizDev, someone might call it marketing. I guess in your role, how much do you feel is like pure acquisition of new people versus fostering this kind of community through things like building partnerships or what most people would probably call BizDev?

Katie Butler9:54

So we have even more nuance. We have BizDev, marketing, and also developer relations, which doesn't sit under any of those three buck or any of the other two buckets. And so developer relations in some senses has they own things like hackathons and we of course help promote them. So there's some nuance there, allows for the division of responsibility. But in terms of how my team spends time, I would say we spend an inordinate amount of time marketing to our ecosystem and helping our community both interact with each other and engage on a better level. So we don't spend enough time, I don't think, trying to grow the platform, trying to grow Moonbeam, and that's sort of where we're hoping, I'm hoping to shift our efforts this year to be able to sort of find ways for us to focus on the most important parts of community engagement and then open up some of our time to go bigger and to start talking to new people who don't know very much about Moonbeam yet.

Ty Smith10:49

Yeah, I personally think you're doing it the right way because the builders will create the ecosystem, which is what is then needed to attract the user. So going after users without a fully built-out ecosystem is probably backwards. At the same time, though, I could imagine that as a marketer, I see firsthand how, when you have to report to someone that is really just focused on the bottom line or focused on something that doesn't directly see the immediate results of marketing, it can be kind of frustrating to them and then to them, communicate it to them. Focusing on builders is a slow grind oftentimes, I've found. And it's the kind of thing where once you get the builders on, you then have to wait for them to build the thing, which can take a long time as well, before you really see the benefit to the ecosystem. I'm curious if you've experienced anything like that.

Katie Butler11:30

Yeah, oh, for sure. We spent the last, so Moonbeam launched in full January 2022. And then about mid-year last year, we got sort of the first batch of just infrastructure deployed, right? We had Chainlink deploy, I think in June. And so at that point, you had really some meaningful number of tools, if not all the tools you needed to deploy. And that's when we were able to initiate the builders. But you're right, depending on what you're building, it can take a really long time, especially if you're doing it the right way, if you're getting all of the security audits that you should be getting. If you're working on a game, there's usually a lot of work trying to just figure out what exactly it's going to look like, nonetheless deploy graphics and get all of that stuff built. So it can take a long time. I think we're all a little spoiled in this space by the idea of copying and pasting from the Ethereum ecosystem, which I hope we've proven isn't really a strategy.

Katie Butler12:31

It's just sort of a way to have the same thing in many places. But our view of the world, and this is the concept that we call a connected contract, but our view of the world is that it doesn't really make sense to have these clones of things in lots of different places. Most people expect one cohesive application that you can use regardless of what the stuff is that's happening behind the scenes. So I'm hoping we move into that direction and then that, when you talk about deployments and new teams launching, that will instead look like almost like a compatibility expansion rather than an actual net new deployment, because you won't have to build a whole new project, you can instead just roll each of these networks into the applications that you have today to allow other people to tap into those ecosystems.

Ty Smith13:10

As you're trying to, I guess, pitch, not the best word, but as you're trying to onboard these new builders, what is, I guess, the pitch that you're using? What is the main value prop, I guess, that you're putting in front of developers to get them to come to Moonbeam?

Katie Butler13:21

Well, so I think our uniqueness really centers around this connected contract concept. So that's the idea that you can build on Moonbeam and you can grow anywhere, right? It's sort of lack of restrictions. You can do anything that you want. So with a connected contract deployment, what that essentially means is if you build something on Moonbeam and six other chains, whatever they are, you can use Moonbeam smart contracts to control logic for all of those. So what that looks like is let's say you want to lock your ETH on Ethereum and borrow against that liquidity on Moonbeam. You don't have to move it over, so you don't have to bridge, you don't have to go find wallets, you don't have to do the swapping, you don't have to do any of that. You can just say like, 'You know I have ETH and it's on Ethereum,' and just send a message between your own smart contracts to confirm that that's available. And so when we talk about simplifying the user experience, this is really what we're talking about is this idea of improving what it looks like to have an application and an application experience that's user-facing so that it's not quite as complex.

Ty Smith14:29

Got it. What would you say have been the most popular or most leaned-into marketing strategies that your team has been focusing on lately?

Katie Butler14:30

I mean, lately it's been very much community engagement. So I think we've all sort of become enamored with these quest platforms, right? You've seen like Zealy and Link3 and all of these guys pop up. Galaxy, of course, was one of the first ones. So we tend to use those, but I think what we're really trying to focus in on are things around like how can we make sure we're being a little bit more strategic about the things that we're doing and how can we focus those efforts on the things that are important. So now instead of, I'm trying to kind of champion this shift internally, now instead of focusing on, 'Ah, Zealy's a channel, we'll use that channel. Twitter's a channel, we'll use that channel,' I'm trying to remind people what audiences look like and how we can focus on the community as one audience, where these are people who maybe have tokens or they provide infrastructure to the network, whatever it is that is like a layer of engagement that they already take, and talk to those people a little bit separately from our existing kind of casual Twitter followers or people that we want to market to in some way, people who are still in that funnel. So I think we're starting to move to a path where we're customizing these experiences, and honestly, just good marketing hygiene that we should have been doing, but we were a little bit busy with the bull run of 2021. And so now it's just a good time to kind of go back and apply like marketing 101 type approaches to the stuff that we've been doing this whole time.

Ty Smith15:51

Have you been, I don't know how you do it internally, but resource-wise, how much would you say the split is between focusing on community building and growth within the developer community versus just people that are fans or spectators of the Moonbeam ecosystem?

Katie Butler16:07

I would say marketing efforts are probably more focused on community at this point. Like we support a lot of developer-focused activities, but when it comes to measurement, that does kind of sit more with the developer relations team, where they're actually kind of like that bottom of funnel bringing people in and trying to get them to deploy. So we do run a lot of programs and we help promote programs for the DevRel team, so hackathons, I know we talked about, but even like we recently were running an accelerator program, which is obviously pretty high touch in terms of involvement, as well as we have like newsletter campaigns and other developer-focused workshops and things that we help run. So we serve more as like a promotional element to the campaigns that kind of sit within DevRel now, especially as we've sort of started this decentralization process and the DevRel team is quite literally a different company.

Ty Smith16:55

One thing that I always find a lot of marketers and just business owners in general deal with as a challenge is knowing how to focus and how to separate different things. Meaning, and I ask this with wanting to understand, let's say, your Discord, for example, or Telegram, however you have it set up. Do you separate it based on developers versus the broader community? Do you have just a channel within the same server? How do you separate that? Because it's very easy, and a lot of people fall into the trap of either wanting to separate everything and then falling into the trap of not having enough resources to focus on each thing, or combining it all together and then people are getting messaging that is really not relevant to them.

Katie Butler17:33

That's what we're pretty actively focusing on now. So we have sort of our general announcements and engagement channels on both Telegram and Discord. I would say Discord has moved way too far in the direction you're describing, where it's very, very granular and it's kind of tedious. So what I'm hoping we can do is pare it back a little bit. And one of the initiatives that we have going is we will soon be launching a community-focused Telegram handle. And the intention there is like if you look at our communities pretty particularly in our Discord, we have like governance-related items that only the community cares about, we have these infrastructure providers, which are called collators on Moonbeam, we have delegation campaigns that are about to run, which again, really only matter to people who have Glimmer or Moonriver tokens. So we're moving toward a world where we can talk to the community as more of a collective and talk with the community as more of a collective, but we haven't launched all of those things. I think there will still be a time and a place to like break out some of these technical conversations, like with builders on top of Moonbeam. But I think the short answer is we've sort of over-segmented in Discord and we're now starting to pare that back a little bit.

Ty Smith18:39

Got it. Are you migrating from Discord to Telegram?

Katie Butler18:41

No, we have both.

Ty Smith18:42

Yeah, that's always a common question that we always get is which one to focus on, which one to prioritize. The answer really is usually it's both. They both serve different purposes.

Ty Smith18:50

What would you say are some of the bigger challenges, I guess, that you deal with marketing-wise?

Katie Butler18:55

Well, there's always the challenge of, I think, how different marketing is in the Web3 space. So, you and I had talked a little bit about this before in the sense of, people who are in the space marketing tokens or even, I've been speaking to someone recently who is part of one of the teams that put in a Bitcoin ETF, like their challenges look so different than mine. So, you really kind of have to hyper-focus on the challenges you have in front of you. And a lot of times, if you're looking for recommendations or resources or even benchmarks, you have to look outside of Web3, at least for what I do, since it does kind of more resemble that B2B use case. So, that's certainly a challenge is a lot of the stuff you're doing just hasn't been done before. But, you're also trying to educate people on marketing constantly and what marketing is or is not. What's the difference between marketing and community and BD and DevRel and all of these roles that can sometimes become sort of blurred?

Katie Butler19:49

And, again, for the last couple of years, we've been operating so quickly and moving so fast that it was sort of like, fine, whoever wants to take it, whoever can get it done, we'll handle it. But now we're starting to apply a little bit more discipline for organizing those things. So, as much as it's not very glamorous to say, I think some of these organizational questions are the big ones. I think that's really what we're working on right now, which will hopefully result in more efficient and smarter marketing efforts.

Ty Smith20:16

Yeah, it's very, like we were saying before, it's the segmentation within Web3 itself as far as what different product classes look like and how those get marketed is so, I think, unique to the Web3 space. Like when you, let's say, market a tech product or a SaaS product, a CRM will market not totally different from a project management tool or something like that. But a DeFi project will market so different from an NFT product. It's a totally different ballgame and you need a specialist that kind of focuses on just that, which is it's just interesting because all this stuff didn't exist like 2-3 years ago.

Ty Smith20:56

I guess right now, marketers love KPIs. What are the KPIs that you're setting with your team?

Katie Butler21:02

So, we have, I think, a number of them. I basically have like three higher-level goals, right? So, awareness is going to be the first one. Getting some sorts of leads in the door is going to be the second one. We haven't focused on leads in that way, really, in the past. So, that's sort of like a new layer. And then the third piece is turnout from a governance perspective, which is related to the community. So, those are at the top level what we're focusing on.

Katie Butler21:27

Sort of related to some of the decentralization efforts we have going on, when we've started to focus on things like conversion rate to get to some sort of lead metric that we can track, it's wild how tough it is in this space because you have so many different players all organizing different pieces. So, I was even working with a community project earlier today to help organize what they thought was like a really excellent conversion rate. And so, I did the math for them and kind of gave them, 'Your impressions from Twitter versus how many people showed up to your website and followed all the way through.' I was like, 'This is actually a very bad conversion rate, and we need to help fix this.' The easiest way to fix it is reduce the number of steps, right? And then you lose people at fewer places along the way. So, there's some stuff like that that I think, we're trying to adopt internally, make sure we're following good marketing best practices, but also help educate people in the community who probably aren't used to doing these sorts of things. And if they're running community campaigns or ecosystem projects, it's helpful for them to have some sort of idea for what does good look like.

Ty Smith22:24

Yeah. You mentioned leads. What are you defining leads as? What does that look like to Moonbeam?

Katie Butler22:28

For me, it's mostly just form completions on the website. So, it's not a terribly, of developers. So, we only have a couple of places that we even ask for developers to contact us, but that's really the only metric we can track. I'm sure most folks who listen to this probably have the same mess of Telegram channels, contacts, leads, that I do. That's just impossible to measure. We haven't solved that problem yet.

Ty Smith22:52

Yeah. Yeah, that is a difficult one because I can't wait for the CRM that comes out that is built for Web3 marketers that understands that half the people aren't contacting you through a form submission, they're finding your Telegram and sending you a DM.

Ty Smith23:04

I don't have a whole lot left for you. It's been super enjoyable to chat with you. Where can we find you?

Katie Butler23:10

So, you can find more about Moonbeam at moonbeam.network. And then, the agency I run is called Distractive, which you can find at distractive.xyz.

Ty Smith23:21

Cool. Thanks for joining us.

Katie Butler23:23

Cool. Thanks for having me.