My guest today is Brandon Martinez (https://mobile.twitter.com/proudlywashed). He is a veteran entrepreneur having previously founded music startup INDMUSIC, most known for working behind the scenes of the 2013 viral meme, “Harlem Shake.” Martinez sold that business to Live Nation in 2016 and went on to run their YouTube business for the next three years. Martinez participated in Snapchat's Yellow accelerator, Transparent Collective, First Round Fast Track, On Deck Founder Fellowship, and is a member of Friends with Benefits.
He is currently building SNKRHUD (https://mobile.twitter.com/snkrhud), an NFT-based playground for sneakerheads and their kicks, and FlowScore (https://mobile.twitter.com/flowscorenft), a Ranking & Token-Based Rewards Platform for the best projects on the Flow Blockchain.
Show Notes & Topics:
- Scientific approach for building your personal brand or business
- Do your own research - you need to find the opportunity you want to spend your time on Create a hypothesis - find a person or company who has achieved the result you want then breakdown the path it took for someone to get there
- Experiment with the right audience - be simplistic and clear in your presentation; think of it as a series of 1 act plays because reactions will vary
- Iterate - be open-minded; no two paths are exactly the same so be flexible and dynamic in your narrative and thinking to account for context
- How do you bring your brand into Web3?
- Understand the community, and all of the different ways they interact with their common interest - for sneakerheads this was understanding the whales ability to buy a collection on Sotheby’s for millions all the way to the individual who only buys fractional interests in top end pairs of sneakers
- Look for shifts in the culture and identity of a community - collectors in NFT world reflect same behavior of new sneakerheads
- Grassroots, authentic WOM marketing based on your own identity - Brandon was everywhere, AMA, pods, sharing collection
- Education - bridging the gap between Web3 and the current landscape - starting with Telegram before Discord to avoid the scammers
- Embrace the early adopters to help you build the best product
- Leaning into your blockchain - Flow (and Snap in Web2) provided tools that helped them grow early
- Tourists vs. Purists - why is your community here?
- The tremendous opportunity for curating Web3 data
- Compile the known data, what is on-chain
- Create archetypes of the on-chain data
- Understand how IRL data impacts the community
- Where does the data live?
- Aggregate in a manner valuable to everyone, from individual collector to entire blockchains
Thanks for listening! Did you know you can also watch the show on YouTube? Just hit the link below and don't forget to subscribe!
Web3 w/ Me - YouTube
