100% Organic Audiences with TPan

Host: Nick Price (Co-Founder at DOT)

Jun 17, 2024

DOT Ads is the crypto ad network with a Google Ads-like experience. Discover a self-serve ad platform and get your ads on 300+ crypto sites.

Thomas Pan (TPan) is a Growth and Marketing consultant for Web3 companies and projects. Thomas shares Web3 growth and marketing case studies, analysis, and breakdowns in his Substack publication Web3 with TPan.

Key Takeaways

‘I’ve been writing for 2 years, yesterday was my 283rd piece’

A few weeks ago Nick Price interviewed crypto thought leader Thomas Pan, aka TPan, and he shared the inside scoop on the ONE thing that has given him what every crypto leader wants…

💸 100% Organic & Converting Audiences
💼 Job Offers & Advisory Opportunities
🧠 Knowledge (& Power)

And you should believe him, TPan is also a secret boffin at Pollen Labs, an offshoot of the Ethereum Foundation - the ‘mecca of blockchain’ - and rubs shoulder to shoulder with some of our industry’s brightest.

The C Word - ‘Content’ - might already sound cliche in crypto marketing circles yet in this conversation they talked about how ink on a page can attract the things every marketer and founder wants for both themselves and their businesses.

📖 Read the Interview

Thomas Pan: I've been writing for two years. Yesterday was my 283rd piece.

I have been able to grow an audience, one that is more or less 100% organic.

Nick Price: I knew the Thomas behind the digital persona and you have TPan as your online profile and you're obviously Thomas in real life. For me, it was a bit of a weird, strange switch because I think at the beginning of our call, I was calling you TPan and then obviously now I'm calling you Thomas.

I'm interested, I'm really curious actually. There's one thing I've been thinking about: going with TPan versus Thomas for your blogging activities, what was the reasoning behind that?

Thomas Pan: I mean, to be frank, my online pseudonym is TPan, which is literally the first initial and last name. So, probably a terrible pseudonym if I would call it one, or if anyone were to regard it that. But, I think part of using that pseudonym, and even in more public settings, particularly in the online Web3 cryptosphere, it's a little bit more of a signal that you're assimilating into that community.

For me, it just helped me to better understand and just connect with other people that do the same thing, right? If I really wanted to better understand the online Web3 and crypto culture, I wanted to really consume and drink by that fire hose. And that also meant having some version of a pseudonym, albeit very uncreative, still a version of my name, but still part of that practice and culture.

So imagine you're on LinkedIn and you don't have your real first and last name, or just a name that doesn't sort of follow that similar format, right? Like, if my name on LinkedIn was literally TPan, that's just not how it is, right?

Nick Price: That's interesting. I thought you were going to roll with the privacy aspect over everything else. It sounds like that wasn't your biggest motivation. It sounds like you really just wanted to ingrain yourself in the culture. And I think it's fair to say that Crypto and Web3 is as much of a culture as it is a technology.

Obviously now you've built through your Substack page, TPan, quite a large following. Do you consider yourself an influencer in the space, certainly when it comes to commentary on Web3 and Web3 growth?

Thomas Pan: I personally have never regarded myself as an influencer, I've jokingly called myself a thought boy. I would say I'm just someone that tries to inspire a little bit or pull on threads, right? I probably actually have a lot of dumb ideas. I've called myself out in the past.

I'm trying to introduce ideas. I'm trying to share strategies or tactics that might not be relevant for you or other readers today, but maybe in three months. Maybe I write about something that someone else actually already talked about in a separate conversation and now you're like, "Oh, I understand it in a more multi dimensional way. And this is helpful because maybe Thomas posted a stupid meme about that topic".

Not an influencer, but maybe someone that provokes more thought, more ideas, hopefully provide some frameworks, ideas, tools, tactics that maybe for another day, or maybe will be in the back pocket to be pulled out tomorrow.

I'm never going to write about SPF in terms of, "Okay, he, he got sentenced for 25 years", that's just not my focus nor angle.

The other lens is again, focusing on that growth and marketing side and now a little bit more of the cultural side and those all really do tie together. There is a lack of good content for people like myself. For people who have my type of background. For people who have my background and are trying to understand what the hell is going on in Web3 crypto, like why is there all this crazy stuff? What does price have to do with the strategy tactics? What the heck are tokens and how do they play into this?

I've been writing for two years. Yesterday was my 283rd piece.

Since where I I have been able to grow an audience, one that is more or less 100% organic.

Nick Price: Certainly the advertisers that we speak with aren't looking for volume. They're looking for the most niche categories of content. 5,000 of the right people seeing your brand is much more valuable than 100,000 of the wrong people.

I think focusing on audiences which are truly engaged with your content is always going to be more valuable than large audiences.

And I think that brings us nicely on to this second chunk of questions that I wanted to talk about.

You consult for businesses in the Web3 space from a growth and marketing standpoint. Tell me about what you do there and, maybe you could focus on why businesses reach out to you and what are some of the typical problems they face when growing.

Thomas Pan: I work with different startups or companies that are operating a Web3 and crypto. I think part of the how that came to be about just goes back to the content. The content has been a flywheel and I've been very grateful and it was initially an hype, a hypothesis I wanted to test out. Good content leads to good conversations, which leads to good opportunities.

How do you go to market with a new product, a new idea, announcing a new feature, all that stuff, and then that also touches upon content where I work with. I don't necessarily do the content. I do my own content, but in regards to strategy, voice, different approaches to remix the very standard, like "Hey, we have an announcement", right?

Actually, my most recent recent piece that I published yesterday was about Azuki and their announcement of anime chain and anime coin.

If you actually pick apart what they did, it was super smart, right? I think everyone should do this.

The playbook's being rewritten and you need to have people that obviously understand best practices from the traditional growth or marketing side.

Nick Price: It's no surprise that your angle from a growth perspective focuses on content and community. And these are the areas, as you said, where the playbook is being rewritten because ultimately with the advent of AI and generated content, the difference between good content and great content has never been more important.

With the final few minutes that we have with you, Thomas, I wanted to talk a little bit about your role at the Ethereum Foundation. Tell us what you can about what you do there. The mecca of blockchain. I'm sure it's an incredible place to be, an incredible place to rub shoulder to shoulder with some of the greatest minds in the space, but tell us a bit about your role there and what it's like to work at the Ethereum Foundation.

I'm saying, I mentioned it because I assume many of your audiences don't know you work there. I know you keep it a little bit low key, so we'll, we'll just graze upon it, but tell us what you can about that.

Thomas Pan: Totally. No, no. Happy to talk about it high level. In terms of backstory, I landed or I eventually found the opportunity at the Ethereum Foundation with the role that I'm in through my writing as well. It was actually a sort of a introduction, and introductory conversation and one thing led to another.

I work at a team or, we've been thinking about how to sort of describe it, but ultimately it's a product accelerator and the team is called Pollen Labs. We are a sub division under the privacy and scaling explorations team of the Ethereum Foundation and the privacy and scaling explorations team, or PSE for short, much shorter, is effectively the R&D arm of EF. So there actually is a fair, not full of course, but there is a degree of separation to let R&D do its thing, which is actually pretty cool and makes a lot of sense because there's a lot of different things that that division is working on.

Some key areas are more about on the sort of smart wallet side, identity and privacy, as well as ZK. And the PSE team actually has probably around a dozen, maybe 15 plus different protocols and projects and a lot of smaller ones. Different folks are sort of researching or building very early prototypes with based off these different types of protocols and concepts that are sort of really pushing the edge of Ethereum in general.

I'm sort of the growth and ops and a little community as well, in regards to the multidisciplinary team that we built. So front-end, back-end, design product, smart contracts, et cetera. Well rounded team. And I'm on that team. And we work with either internally within the EF. So, within the privacy and scaling explorations, and all those different protocols and teams that are building things.

Nick Price: It's fascinating. And when we spoke about this previously, you mentioned that one of the focuses for your team was to make this technology or bring this technology closer to the consumer. And you gave me the example of releasing the Solana phone as an example of a blockchain brand going from 0 to 100.

You guys focus on going from one to two. I assume you can't talk specifics as to what types of products or projects you're working on, but would you say the focus of Pollen Labs is pushing the blockchain into the hands of the consumer step by step?

Thomas Pan: Yeah, can't speak in too much detail on that front, and obviously some of this is my opinion, of course, but I would say it leans that way.

A lot of foundations are really great at focusing on the developer experience, there's a lot more exploration being done nowadays about what it looks like to support the builders who either have an Engineering Team or a Dev Team, or they are devs themselves, to think about what it looks like to go easy to, sort of, put this in quotes, but like direct to consumer in that way versus let's say, B2B, builder to builder, or like dev to dev, and then to the consumer.