'The Personal Element in Marketing and Sales in Web3' with CEO at Tweed

Host: Ioana Lungu (Growth Marketing Manager at DOT)

May 28, 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.

Tweed provides self-custodial key management, a fully functional white-label wallet, and onramp + offramp connectivity to platforms looking to introduce web3 elements within their own environment and appeal to non-crypto native users.

A Customer-Centric Approach

We were joined by Michelle Latzer, Co-Founder & CEO at Tweed.

Key Takeaways

Taking it Slow: in tough times, listen to the market instead of rushing
Staying Close to Customers: keep in touch with them to understand their needs. Involve the whole team, including engineers, in helping your clients.
The Personal Element: Events and conferences are super important for networking, but also for marketing in web3.
Marketing to Developers: share useful content like blogs and tutorials.

📖 Read the Interview

Michelle Latzer: Always stop and listen rather than the startup mentality of speed and just run forward and kind of sprint the idea in a bear market.

But the thing that really works in Web3, which is amazing to me, because it never was in other industries that I was in, is the personal element, like the events, the conferences, and how crucial overall that plays in marketing and sales.

We try to be very close to almost all of our customers to understand their use case to understand what we're doing well, what we're not doing well, how we can improve, what are features they would want to be seeing. So always maintain this community. I call it to all customers and be very close to them. So we can be up to beat on what they need and how the space is evolving.

Ioana Lungu: You just went straight into creating your own business.

So how has been the journey so far from the very beginning compared to now one year and a half later?

Michelle Latzer: I picked probably the hardest of times to start this journey and with three, it's like, was the bottom of the barrel. Not quite the bottom. It was pre-FTX, but it was getting there already. It was definitely not the market we're seeing even today. So I think it has a lot of advantages at the moment.

You start by being very aware of your resources and your needs as a company of what you can expand, what you can't. We were fortunate enough to meet our investors very early on in our journey. So we were funded and we're able to start a team and to start this process of ideation and experimentation with different technologies, very kind of early in our journey.

And I think even so, we were still very much like the thing that we did very well is really keeping on listening to the market. And especially in a bear market, it's super important to kind of always stop and listen rather than the startup mentality of speed and just run forward and kind of sprint the idea in a bear market.

I think it's more important to keep on listening and to kind of more like jog. I like the running metaphors. I'm a runner. So you'll keep hearing those, right? So I think it's more important to run a bit slower, always keeping one ear open for what the customers are saying, what the market is saying.

And if you're really able to crack this use case and the needs during a bear market and to build this product because you're funded and you have the ability to get the team. Then once that bear, it's cyclical thing, right? So bear markets are bound to eventually be over. And if you're able to survive and to really kind of with this amazing product that you really listened to the market and solve the problem that's there, then you'll be the leading kind of provider within your niche.

But I think a lot of the things that are important are really understanding the problem. Solving something based on the actual what they're saying, not what you think and not what you want and keeping on iterating, like not being very fixated on one idea or one messaging. We have a big marketing topic here, but marketing is a huge thing in our society.

Space is like, how do you want to message like kind of product market? What you're building, what's the right messaging, what institutions are you selling to? All of those things are things that we really immersed ourselves in all of those questions during this year. And I think it allowed us to get to this point way stronger.

Ioana Lungu: How you approach marketing, especially in B2B, and how do you get new clients on board?

Michelle Latzer: Our main kind of audience that we are trying to sell to is the developers themselves.

Which is something that we're experimenting now with doing more paid marketing towards, but we've been doing in the last years a lot of blogging, a lot of tutorials and putting ourselves in events of developers to really teach them about the abilities of our solution.

Just because I feel like this world so many companies are fully remote. The conference time is the time for all of them to really meet in person. So a lot actually are attending.

So whenever you go to conferences, it's not like a big event. In other industries, cloud or finance that you go to one a year or you go to this, here like people go to almost all of them all the time, at least the big ones, no matter if it's in Asia, if it's in Europe or if it's in the US and it's incredible because you're able to really build a community, know everyone, which I think it's also people like, when I say to people, yeah, you know, I had a drink with my competitor, they're like, wow, like, how did you meet them?

Like, you know, we see each other all the time. It's great. We can become friends. We can know new companies that are starting, you know of them pretty, pretty soon. You can create a lot of partnerships and collaborations and a lot of coincidental meetings that lead to great things.

To be honest, I think that the in person element so far, again, experimenting with mostly non paid has been amazing. It's been the most fruitful, highest ROI and we'll always be sending someone from our team to events, especially the big, larger events. Even if not, hosting some happy hour or something like that, but it doesn't even require you to have your own booth or anything.

It's just the presence attending really booking meetings ahead of time with people you know are going. That is what's proven. I think most successful for us.

Ioana Lungu: I can imagine that may be a bit difficult considering that developers are sort of, your target, customers, if you may. I'm really curious to know if you have any strategies that would, let's say, bring them together or just foster this community feeling.

Michelle Latzer: Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's something ongoing that we're trying to tackle, especially now on the marketing side as we, we finally hired someone on the marketing. So it's something that we're going to be really focusing on this year. In general, again, I treat it as two different, two types of community that we try to foster.

One is obviously we always want to have one ear on the side. And the ecosystem and the market and be part of those discussions. And that, we do through really being present at events and hackathons at forums and communities that are either of our peers and colleagues, or where a lot of customers are around, if it's around loyalty, around some defy around gaming, it's stuff that we always try to be part of those forms conversations.

And I'll say that another thing that I treat as community is really our customer base, because I feel like in general, you sell something, especially being a developer tool, usually people come to your website, they try it out, they pay and you kind of know their name, you adore, you don't, and they go, we try to be very close to almost all of our customers to understand their use case to understand what we're doing well, what we're not doing well, how we can improve, what are features they would want to be seeing.

So always maintain this community. I call it to all customers and be very close to them. So we can be up to beat on what they need and how the space is evolving.

And I'll say that again. If we're able to move customers from one of our competitors to us, have to always listen and understand if you're really answering their problems and if we solve them, because then they can always leave us and go to someone else again.

So from my perspective, especially in those early days, you really want to be the closest you can and customer-focused, kind of customer-oriented, customer-focused, and we try to, we do it like a company-wide, right? It's not just me or Julie or Bren or who does our sales. Like it's also all the engineers. I really care that the engineers themselves today do a lot of the support and integration help for the customers. They know where the customers are getting stuck.

It's important. Where customers finding bugs, like this is important that our developers are being very, kind of, in tune with what's happening on the business side. So this kind of notion of full everyone understanding everything, every element of the business is very important.