Serotonin clients are often early‐stage Web3 projects, where the only employees are the founders along with a few engineers and product specialists. When we first engage with them, one of their first questions is usually about how to build the ideal marketing function. For an early‐stage project that hasn't yet achieved product‐market fit, it makes sense to stand up a light and agile marketing department to conduct the tests and experiments to probe for market fit. Teams shouldn't plan to invest heavily in marketing until there's a value‐capture moment on the horizon, such as a major partnership, product, or token launch, where excellent marketing would catalyze step‐function growth for the project. Even before this return‐on‐investment (ROI) moment is on the horizon, however, projects should set themselves up for success with the right marketing foundation. That means identifying a target audience, distilling the product offering into a value proposition, and messaging that value proposition clearly to the target audience on the channels where they live.

When building a marketing team, a project should think about the channels most relevant for its current stage based on the size and type of audience it seeks to reach. Most likely, an early‐stage, pre‐product‐market‐fit Web3 startup should focus on owned and earned channels at the beginning and branch out into paid channels as it grows and gathers data on ROI. The owned marketing channels for early‐stage Web3 projects are typically a website, blog, Discord server, and Twitter account. The blog may live in a CMS on the domain or link out to Mirror.xyz or Medium. Some websites will include a sign‐up box for an email newsletter. Events such as inexpensive hackathons and meetups are a live extension of organic social and community channels.

The earned channels for an early‐stage Web3 project are media coverage and event speaking gigs. Media comes in many forms, from podcasts to niche media channels to the major national and international media. Virtual and IRL events are common, and founders with interesting projects or well‐connected backers can usually swing speaking gigs without paying for sponsorship. Paid channels—such as major event sponsorships, hosting conferences, paid influencer campaigns, media sponsorships, physical advertisements, and paid social media campaigns—should be introduced only once a project can measure their ROI. This is usually impossible without any product or token in market. Over time, projects can measure their customer acquisition cost precisely and optimize paid campaigns so that cost is as low as possible compared to customer lifetime value, the total earned over time per customer.

If a project has a recurring need for a certain type of marketing, let's say creating weekly blog posts, organizing regular hackathons, or engaging every day on community and social channels, then it needs personnel on board to staff those channels. That personnel can be a blend of an internal team with an external agency or agencies. The benefits of growing a team internally include fostering a deeper knowledge of the product. The risk is incurring excessive overhead cost and overstaffing. Early‐stage marketing is experimental, and it's hard to know what marketing specialties will be most important. It can also be difficult to find and train excellent Web3 marketers, while select agencies can spin up teams nearly instantly.

From what we've observed at Serotonin, the ideal early‐stage marketing department is a mix of at least one internal employee who is a generalist, Swiss‐Army‐knife marketer, partnered with an external agency. The internal employee serves as a counterparty for the agency, giving feedback on work, providing information about the product, and securing approvals for materials to be released. This marketing‐focused employee can also represent the project at IRL and digital events. As the Web3 project grows and progresses toward product‐market fit, it learns which channels work the best and which more‐specialized marketing skill sets it will consistently need. At this point it makes sense to increase internal marketing hires, while continuing to use an agency for intermittently necessary specialties, such as media relations and event organizing, as well as extra support scaling the channels that are working the best. Growing projects continue to retain agencies focused on channels such as content, PR, and paid growth to complement and flexibly expand the skill sets of the existing in‐house team.

A high‐quality agency partner shouldn't feel “external.” All contributors should be passionate, incentivized members of the team. Web3 is ushering in a fluid future of work in which it's natural for individuals to contribute to multiple projects that interest them. Some Web3 startups have full‐time employees, many of whom also work nights and weekends on their own Web3 projects. Other Web3 projects are structured as DAOs, with no employees at all, and everyone a contributor. The structure of an individual's employment doesn't necessarily correlate with their degree of motivation or the value of their contributions. In Web3, the spirit of trudging home at the end of the workday, or working a 9‐to‐5 job just for a paycheck, feels like a depressing anachronism. Some of the most exciting talent have left jobs in TradFi and Web2 for Web3 because they believe in the values of the movement and wish to help propel it forward. That spirit infuses the best Web3 projects.

This isn't to say that Web3 startups are without their own problems. Markets that are open around the clock, never closing for nights, weekends, or holidays; pressure from investors; endemic volatility in the crypto market—all this can lead teams into hyperdrive and burnout. DAO structures can be unruly and slow to make decisions. As the founder of a Web3 agency, I'm obviously biased, but I believe agencies like Serotonin can help solve problems like these: relieving pressure on internal teams by adding capacity, and cutting through the noise of a decentralized organization to turn decision paralysis into action. When I was CMO of ConsenSys, I searched tirelessly for the right partner to create the ideal balance of in‐house team and agency that one finds in most mature marketing departments. That I could never find an agency that natively understood Web3 was one major reason for starting Serotonin.

When projects choose to hire marketers in‐house, they frequently ask us whether they should look to hire marketers who already work in Web3 or train new talent from Web2. The answer isn't simple. When I hired the original ConsenSys marketing team, I didn't have the luxury of choosing between Web2 marketers and those who already had proficiency with Web3, because there weren't any of the latter. Today there are thousands of marketers who work at Web3 projects and companies. In a crypto bull market, the price of Web3 native talent can soar, with venture capital funding flooding the space and projects hiring at breakneck pace. When crypto prices eventually fall, high‐quality talent can become available at more affordable rates for startups. In the meantime, projects considering hiring Web2 versus Web3 marketing talent should ask themselves whether they have the capabilities to train someone on Web3. Many firms simply don't have time to teach a new person about Web3.

At Serotonin, we now hire marketers from Web2 because we've developed an internal training and credentialing program to help Web2 marketers adapt their skill sets into Web3. This book includes many of those techniques. That said, the average Web2 marketer won't thrive at Serotonin or in any Web3 marketing role. We only hire marketers from Web2 who are passionate about Web3: who have joined DAOs, Discord communities, and other groups; who spend their personal time, nights and weekends, researching DeFi or NFTs; and who are willing to put in the time and effort to get up to speed. Identifying those individuals is a judgment call, and it's one of the most important ones we make, not just in order to access larger pools of affordable talent, but also because the marketing minds that got us here won't get us there.

The best Web3 marketing practices are probably yet to be invented, because most marketers are still working in Web2. One important way we help grow Web3 is to open up superhighways for talent to migrate from Web2 to Web3. The same way investors began migrating their financial assets from fiat currency into bitcoin over superhighways such as Coinbase starting in 2012, another type of asset transfer is taking place today. Individuals starting their careers or positioning themselves within companies are learning about Web3 and raising their hands to become “the blockchain person” or “the NFT czar” within their organizations and communities. Though crypto prices rise and fall and investors move in and out of bets, when talented people put in the work to learn about the ecosystem and seek titles branding themselves as Web3, they're often here to stay. It's like the story of the Ethereum meetup organizers; Web3 becomes part of one's identity, which is its own personal type of staking mechanism. One key way we grow our movement is by introducing the next generation of professionals to the substrate that is Web3 and the opportunities it offers. Any Web3 project can join this mission by hiring and training talented professionals from Web2.