Hello, welcome to wenser's #web3 column.
In the world of web3, everyone has a heart to create projects. After all, project teams are considered to have a higher ecological niche in the web3 field. However, doing a project is like going to the West to obtain scriptures; one will inevitably experience "eighty-one difficulties," with countless obstacles and dangers along the way, all of which can become roadblocks to project development.
To obtain the "true scriptures," one naturally needs to overcome difficulties and challenges. Whether through sheer force or cleverness, there must be a way. This is a "little method" I have personally observed, thought about, and summarized; I welcome feedback.
I call this "little method" the "Nine-Tiered Tower Development Model"—first, because a concrete model is easier to understand; second, because in my view, doing a project is like climbing a high tower, with each step presenting new dangers and challenges; third, because in the end, doing a project can easily lead to "the higher you go, the colder it gets": there is no clear path ahead, only higher and broader realms waiting for some to explore and pursue.
Without further ado, let’s discuss my views—
First Tier: Vision#
1. What is Vision?#
Vision is mission, goal, and ultimate purpose.
At the beginning of a project, it is likely just the emergence of one or several ideas: NFT, DeFi, GameFi, SocialFi, DAO, etc. Without the initial spark of inspiration and grand aspirations, many projects would not come into existence.
The size, quantity, and nature of the vision depend on how the initial person conceived and planned it.
2. How to Set a Vision?#
In my opinion, vision setting should consider the following aspects:
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Does it have commercial viability (how long until it can make money, where does the money come from, can it sustain profitability)?
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Can it bring about new changes (for individuals, organizations, industries, fields, or even the entire system or world)?
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Can it occupy a certain ecological niche (i.e., possess irreplaceability, originality, innovation, and attract specific groups)?
3. Vision References?#
In this regard, I recommend referring to the visions of two DAO organizations: Bankless DAO and Nation3 DAO.
Second Tier: Team#
Investment is about people; the importance of the team in project development is self-evident.
In my view, the principles for team composition mainly include the following:
1. No Weak Links#
A mature team does not need every member to be exceptionally strong, but it must not be "missing arms and legs." Management, technical development, market operation, community governance, finance, and administration must be as complete as possible.
Of course, in recent years, we have also seen a phenomenon of the rise of super individuals, where one person can take on many tasks and achieve results in a short time. However, this is not necessarily a good thing for a project.
Relying solely on individuals to drive things will inevitably lead to the awkward situation of "human resources being limited." Do not rely on personal charisma to run a project; believe in the power of mechanisms and systems, supplemented by the efficient drive of key individuals, which is much safer.
Moreover, it can also counteract the evils and greed of human nature.
2. Complement Each Other#
No weak links are a basic requirement for the team. On this basis, team members need to complement each other as much as possible, not just in terms of abilities but also in coordinating, communicating, and mobilizing resources during project advancement.
Complementing each other is not about randomly filling gaps but striving to achieve "1+1>2"; otherwise, it is better to have clear divisions of labor and responsibilities.
3. Co-evolution#
For a team that genuinely wants to create a good project, if it cannot achieve co-evolution and progress together, it is certainly an unqualified team—a truly good team is one that grows continuously through collaboration and synergy, whether in abilities, vision, mindset, resources, or connections.
Otherwise, those who cannot co-evolve cannot share the fruits of victory together.
Third Tier: Technology#
Regarding technology, I am an outsider, so I will simply emphasize three points:
1. The strength of technology determines how far a project can go;#
2. The lower limit of technology is the image baseline of a project;#
3. Technology is the heart and brain of a project; without technology, there is no project.#
Fourth Tier: Marketing#
Many people believe that web3-related projects are marketing-driven because, in the crypto field, success in marketing leads to success in projects. This should be a consensus for a long time.
The reason is simple: web3 projects require "attention resources" more than web2 projects, products, or platforms. In fact, the term attention economy is no longer sufficient to describe the development model of web3 projects; I summarize it as "attraction economy": Simply put, your project not only needs to attract attention but also needs to be appealing to others.
How to do project marketing? My views are as follows:
1. Decision Path Marketing#
Scholars Petty and Cacioppo summarized two types of decision paths for humans: central decision path and peripheral decision path—the former is often used for bulk commodity consumption or significant decisions, where people need more time, comprehensive information, strong motivation, and powerful trust endorsements to make decisions, such as buying a house or a car; the latter is used for everyday consumption or trivial decisions, like buying a bottle of water, a pen, or a small appliance, where people make decisions based on positive or negative peripheral cues.
Therefore, if your marketing goal is larger, heavier, and involves higher engagement, you need to find ways to make people clearly recognize the value, benefits, and problem-solving importance of your project or product through multiple channels and repeated touchpoints; conversely, you only need to provide peripheral cues or information, cultivate or change people's habits, or emphasize price advantages and differences to deepen marketing impressions.
2. Conceptual Marketing#
Simply put, this type of marketing emphasizes "concept guidance," continuously creating a sense of mystery, anticipation, and FOMO through new concepts, such as Frank, People DAO, MOON DAO, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE, Goblin Town, Shitbeast, etc.
Conceptual marketing is about "playing with flair"—it cannot be judged by common sense, nor can it operate like conventional projects; instead, it should showcase its "unique operations" and be different from others, such as "appreciating ugliness," "spreading rumors," "riding trends," "leveraging celebrities," "showing gameplay," "showing technology," "showing settings," etc.
What matters is not the content itself but ensuring that others feel "impressed yet confused," "unable to understand," or "unable to play," while simultaneously hiding some "clues." The more unattainable it is, the more desirable it becomes.
3. Product-Oriented Marketing#
Product-oriented marketing is more steady and practical. Of course, during a bull market, product-oriented marketing can often achieve good results, but in a bear market, this marketing approach faces increased pressure. After all, driving marketing through products and getting others to genuinely recognize the value of your product or project is quite challenging.
In simple terms, this marketing approach is: 1) What type of product? 2) What problem does it solve? 3) Who needs such a product?
Answering these questions clearly and then repeatedly promoting, widely publicizing, and finding corresponding key nodes can break through barriers and create opportunities.
Fifth Tier: Community#
Undoubtedly, during the project development process, more and more people are beginning to recognize the importance of community.
A cohesive, diverse, and highly aware community can be considered a vital force in the web3 world.
Still, it follows a three-step strategy—
1. Short-term Benefits#
In the world, everyone is here for profit; everyone is here for benefits.
To build a community in the short term, benefits must be an important part. Simply put—what can you offer others?
Community members join because they want something in return. A project can offer four types of things: people (social relationships); money (financial returns); goods (physical items); spirit (emotional value).
What are you offering community members in the short term?
2. Mid-term Goals#
As the community enters the mid-term, short-term benefits or immediate stimuli are no longer sufficient to sustain their investment of time, effort, and resources. At this point, a project needs to set different levels of goals to help community members find—belonging, growth, recognition, and gain.
Mid-term goal setting includes but is not limited to: financial incentives; social ranking comparisons; team game victories; external connections achieved; witnessing a nurturing system; achieving milestones; and the superiority of community recognition, etc.
3. Long-term Value#
After reaching a certain stage, community members and the community's focus will gradually return to one word—value.
Therefore, if this community has not created intrinsic and extrinsic value during its continuous growth, development, and gradual expansion into larger areas, then this community may still have a long way to go.
Intrinsic value refers to the value generated internally within the community that can circulate, flow, and proliferate, such as transactions, exchanges, content output and input, information exchange, product creation, project incubation, etc.;
Extrinsic value refers to the value generated through exchanges with external communities, such as external community collaborations, product usage and feedback, capital flow, attention flow, business model upgrades, ecological energy exchanges, etc.
Without value, there is no community.
Sixth Tier: Brand#
Brand, originally meant a mark, has gradually evolved into an intangible asset that can bring premium and appreciation to its owner through the development of language and writing, highlighted and presented through elements or combinations of elements such as text, marks, symbols, patterns, and colors.
If a project can reach the branding stage, it can be said to have already traveled two-thirds of the journey; in terms of the Journey to the West, it has probably reached the vicinity of the Little Thunder Monastery.
The focus of a brand lies in three aspects:
1. Brand Identity#
The most basic brand has only an identity—Laura Ries, daughter of marketing pioneer Al Ries, once proposed the marketing concept of "visual hammer," which is also the starting point for a project, organization, or individual to build a brand.
Simply put, how do you make others:
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Recognize you by seeing this identity?
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Remember you (from the first glance)?
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Have a good impression and deeper recognition of you?
2. Brand Equity#
Evaluating and judging brand equity is a more systematic and complex matter. Many projects indeed do not survive to create brand equity, and the measurement standards for brand equity tend to lean towards subjective recognition and other intangible assets.
The attributes of brand equity include differentiation, recognition, and overall perception.
Whether it is brand elements or marketing activities, building value chains and specific asset measurement assessments are not achieved overnight.
From a marketing perspective, there are two methods for managing brand equity: one is brand reinforcement, which strengthens brand equity through consistent communication of brand meaning; the other is brand activation, which is more suitable for brands that urgently need change, either returning to their roots or undergoing complete transformation.
This may sound a bit academic, but the main idea is—can your project's brand occupy a place in people's minds? Does it have a clear and intuitive brand image? Can it be solidified into a long-lasting, realizable asset?
3. Brand Strategy#
When a brand's equity grows to a certain scale or level, it is time to think about brand strategy, simply put, how many brands does an organization need? (To put it directly, it needs to consider the relationships between brands.)
A web3 project will gradually grow and expand over time, and after reaching a certain point, it will inevitably face the issue of managing relationships between multiple brands.
Taking Binance as an example, it is not just an exchange; it also has its own public chain, stablecoin, application ecosystem, NFT trading market, and its investment institutions, external liaison departments, and business entities, etc. These "brands" need to have a hierarchy—some are used to attract new users, some continuously generate cash flow, some build external brand images, and some respond to external competition, etc.
However, not every individual, project, or organization can grow into a brand, and becoming a brand also varies by different levels, different situations, and different time cycles; the road ahead is long.
Seventh Tier: Culture#
After crossing the barrier of branding, a project enters the next domain and stage: culture.
To be honest, in my personal view, very few projects reach this stage. The reason is simple: there are few projects that can connect with culture, especially in the web3 field, where many people think, "Everyone is here to make money; don’t talk to me about culture—can culture feed you?"—this is the true thought of many.
After the NFT sector became popular, this phenomenon has somewhat changed, but not significantly; people have merely progressed from being indifferent to the cultural background and connotations of projects to starting to pay attention to these matters.
For a project to truly break through the cultural barrier, it needs to pay attention to at least the following aspects:
1. Meme#
To create culture, one must first have a meme.
The concept of "meme," which originated from Richard Dawkins' "selfish gene" in his book, can be simply understood as a cultural factor or the smallest unit of culture.
Wikipedia explains it as:
"Meme—also translated as 'meme,' 'meme,' 'meme,' etc. The most widely accepted definition is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person through imitation, usually to convey a specific phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme."
This term was created in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," comparing the process of cultural transmission to the rules of biological evolution and reproduction."
Therefore, if a project wants to grow from a brand into a culture, the first step is to become a meme—this is also why the so-called "meme coins" like $doge and $shiba have thrived, and one of the reasons why the NFT field is currently experiencing a blind, baseless, and inexplicable frenzy.
Because of the meme, there is popularity; because of popularity, there is attention; because of attention, there is flow; because of flow, there is value.
2. Circles and Groups#
When a meme is created, used, and spread, over time, based on this or these memes, different circles and various groups will emerge or be fostered: they may share similar interests or have different cultural, educational, and social backgrounds, but they must have common emotions, matters, and pursuits that connect them, allowing them to link through relatively convenient, real-time global networks or technologies.
As humanity enters a postmodern society, or what we might call the future online society, virtual world, or metaverse, the concept of nation-states will gradually be replaced by concepts such as circles, groups, and ethnicities, which is one of the processes through which different cultures emerge.
3. Era Imprint#
When the culture of a circle or group becomes strong enough to influence an era, an era imprint emerges.
Just as Coca-Cola became a memory for a generation, the "lost generation" became a reflection of a generation, and the "angry generation" became the golden age of idealism that countless people yearn for, the past history of BTC and ETH will also gradually condense into imprints, engraved on the monument of time.
On this heavy stone tablet, whose dimensions are hard to estimate, countless people are currently and will continue to exert their utmost efforts to leave their marks, even if it is just a faint white spot, it is already an indescribable, timeless shadow that transcends cycles and traverses time.
As the saying goes, a person truly dies when everyone forgets them; a project’s true death or immortality is also determined by whether it has melted into the vast tide of the era.
The criteria for judgment are simple—1 year later, 3 years later, 5 years later, 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later, 50 years later, 100 years later—will anyone still remember it, remember the slightest change or constancy it brought?
Eighth Tier: Economy#
In the Nine-Tiered Tower, we have reached the eighth tier, which is the economy.
Many people might think this tier should come before culture or even community, after all, all web3-related projects inherently carry financial attributes, and at the economic level, there are naturally layers of barriers to break through, especially in terms of tokenomics, which must be planned early in a project.
So why do I mention it in the second-to-last tier?
5, 4, 3, 2, 1… Alright, five seconds have passed; here’s the answer—
1. Economic Division: Micro + Macro#
In my view, a project cannot influence or affect culture until it grows to a certain extent, regardless of whether viewed from a micro or macro perspective. After all, crypto and web3 are still in their early stages—Luna, which was among the top 10 by market cap, can plummet over 99% in just a few days, and ETH can drop over 50% in a month. The total market cap of cryptocurrencies is around $1.2-1.5 trillion; no project can be arrogant enough to think it is stronger and more resilient than Ethereum, right?
Thus, projects that have not grown to a certain scale actually have relatively weak relationships and correlations with the economy.
2. Economic Orientation: Singular or Diverse#
When a project grows to a certain extent, an important criterion for judging its development stage and maturity gradually shifts to whether its relationship with the entire economic system is singularly maintained or supported by multiple dimensions.
Taking StepN as an example, after adopting the dual-token economic model from Axie Infinity, the GMT+GST dual-token model provided this project with more diverse gameplay, more stable support points, and more varied consumption scenarios with a longer preset lifecycle. Therefore, its early development was very strong, especially after Binance's strong involvement, StepN's performance on the BSC chain was astonishing, with its token price soaring to over 20 times that of SOL chain tokens (if I remember correctly).
However, from another perspective, the "dual-chain support" of the BSC and SOL chains still falls far short of a level where a project can rest easy with "outward orientation > inward orientation" and far exceed the baseline.
Therefore, during a series of event shocks and severe market fluctuations, the StepN token model was severely impacted, and the price trend somewhat reflected the market's confidence in it.
Of course, from my personal perspective, I am very optimistic about the StepN product and its business model. My personal judgment is that in the short term, we are unlikely to see another "StepN" or a similar phenomenon-level product. In other words, the market cannot accommodate a second StepN.
Ninth Tier: Society#
Finally, we have reached the ninth tier of the Nine-Tiered Tower model, which is also the last tier of this model—society.
I personally believe that the highest goal of a project, or the highest ceiling, ultimately is to become a part of the overall social system, or to subtly blend into the entire contractual society, becoming that part which is perceptible yet unknowable.
In this regard, the only example I can think of that comes to mind is the NFT project mfers. Although its creator sartoshi recently announced that he has "disappeared," and even before leaving, he pulled off the "End of Sartoshi" NFT series' paid release, on the level of "integrating into society," nothing could be more down-to-earth and genuine than the phrase "motherfucker."
Of course, not every project needs to reach this level or become a part of society, but if it cannot achieve this step, then it naturally has no connection to the word "greatness."
Or even if mfers, a very real, very crypto-native, and very decentralized project, has only reached a small part of the ninth tier of the Nine-Tiered Tower—after all, in a time when MetaMask's monthly active users in the tens of millions is already considered the pinnacle of "killer applications," we are still so early.
Finally, I would like to add a few conditions that I believe a project needs to meet to reach the societal level of the Nine-Tiered Tower:
1. Become Social Infrastructure#
2. Influence Social Development#
3. Promote Social Progress#
Perhaps these requirements are utopian, but projects must have some dreams, right? Otherwise, what’s the difference from being a salted fish?
Fighting!#
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To summarize, the project team's Nine-Tiered Tower model: 1. Vision; 2. Team; 3. Technology; 4. Marketing; 5. Community; 6. Brand; 7. Culture; 8. Economy; 9. Society.
Due to time and ability constraints, it is inevitable that I may have missed some points, and I welcome feedback and discussion, looking forward to deeper insights. Thank you.
——wenser
Personal ENS Domain: wenser2010.eth#
Overview of Past Content:#
- Domestic NFT Project—Little Ghost
https://mirror.xyz/0x70511BFE07d9E9599A93d5a7B9F6e1C30fbeC695/Ub-jeM1OqY_79ZzJQfyDzZq7aJQqrAUbF6lpeS5JoMQ - World-Class CC0 Series NFT Project—mfers
https://mirror.xyz/0x70511BFE07d9E9599A93d5a7B9F6e1C30fbeC695/Hj1TvQZNsLuZhtMPZHFr7Z7fQLfVhpleUvssG0rsYKk
"Did mfers Win?" English Version - Twitter Post (mfers creator @sartoshi liked and retweeted)
https://twitter.com/wenser2010/status/1500427804176896001?s=19 - "The Dual Transfer of Paradigms and Models: Why Ordinary People Should Make Money in Web3? (Also known as: Discussing the Inevitability of Web3 Replacing Web2)"
https://mirror.xyz/wenser2010.eth/Nz48sXewTbXcY3u_giZHmAiUtJ-Z_PE52ChMjPmnJts - "Web3 Survival Guide: Anti-Fraud and Security Manual V1.0 (2022)"
Feishu Version: https://e7qjl676i8.feishu.cn/docs/doccn2rvEMHefBYKvyTVRGwe7Pf?from=from_copylink
Google Drive Version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14XeGdkLRC4wEyH2hdojcVqtxRFxVcY4L/view?usp=sharing