I always thought I’d end up working with Ethereum or Solana when I first made my way into the web3 space. Nothing prepared for developer infrastructure like Aurora, Centralised Exchanges like FTX or platforms like Polkadot. I’ve done a lot of user-focused work so having to take all that experience into Avalanche felt like I was saying ‘bring it on!’
Oh Avalanche brought it on alright, it was such a crazy experience walking right into the hot mess of a product for a startup that was just going through its 3rd pivot in 2 years. The team were pretty clear with me; “this is a lot” but that didn’t deter me, made me want to do even more work—which is weird because what the hell do I know about building brands and products in the Avalanche ecosystem?
Well it turns out, it’s not that different from most of my previous experiences only that the stakes were higher and turn-around times are always getting shorter and shorter. I pretty much exist as a brand, product, growth and community manager. Trust me it’s not as fun as i’d like but I’ll tell you how I do my thing.
BRAND STRATEGY
Many players in web3 have little to no idea what a brand is, neither do they think they need to have. Does your project really need branding?
Yes and no.
Yes; when you’re starting out in such a ‘decentralised’ space, nobody really cares much about your branding.
No; it starts to become a need when your community is growing substantially and nobody can say exactly this is who you are, what you sound like or what you’re known for asides your product.
My job was to bring said cohesion to visual and verbal identities, as well as establishing a proper communications guideline across board and simplifying all the technical docs—I particularly don’t like this part but, there’s nothing vodka, a hiphop album and words of encouragement from your mother can’t fix.
PRODUCT STRATEGY
I often get in heated brawls with ‘product people’ when they say product strategy is akin to just Product Managers or Designers. Excuse me, the marketing people are they mannequins? What do you think they do? Granted that product strategy is niched and marketing professionals who understand it often do a good job at being Product Marketing Managers, it’s still not fully understood so I will simplify it:
Product strategy is the thought-process defines what you build, why you build it, who you build it for and how you can make money, get traction, generate noise or grow user count from it.
That’s pretty much what I am doing currently in combination with my work as a brand strategist here.
WHY AVALANCHE?
To be honest? Money. The job is challenging, it pays well and I’ve met a number of great guys like Matt, Jake and Daniel from Ava labs.
HOW DID YOU MAKE IT WORK?
I didn’t lol. Everyday is a new opportunity to fix what’s broken. It just turns out if you’re pretty good at fixing stuff and putting out fires, you’ll somehow make things work. I like that. I like it a lot.
Since I joined, we’ve seen 48% weekly engagement on the Discord server of over 2,000 people, re-onboarded 13% we had lost due to product -and not community- focused building, launched an NFT Marketplace, built a custom wallet integration, and finalised the tokenomics of the native token built to work seamlessly with Avax, the native Avalanche network coin.
So you can say I’m good at fixing stuff lol. Though i’d like to say building in Avalanche is incredibly difficult. I’ve had sleepless nights, marathon calls, community check-ins and lots of product iterations even right before deployment. Web3 takes a lot from you but it often somehow makes it worth it.
That being said, will I do it again? Heck yes!