Help!
Another trend is seeping into the Web3 ecosystem—favoring mindshare over market share.
Last week, I was irked to see various accounts farming impressions for a project on X. Some large accounts had been paid, while smaller ones were chasing airdrops.
It was an eyesore. Forgive me, but I absolutely detest airdrops—mainly because they offer no long-term value and slow down the expected mass adoption of crypto. It gives outsiders the impression that crypto’s use case is just farming free money. Data also shows that more than 90% of airdrop farmers never return to use the product : Short term attention, zero retention.
Just yesterday, a founder building a mobile app for real-world assets took to Twitter to rant about how fake users flooded in after they announced a reward for completing KYC. His frustration was valid but his intentions were blurry.
Why incentivize users to use a platform? If you need to pay people to show up, there’s clearly no PMF. So don’t complain about the kind of crowd you attracted.
Here’s my take on this:
- If you’re serious about building a crypto mobile app with longevity, study Phantom and how they scaled by first embedding deeply within the Solana ecosystem. Start with a strong ecosystem fit before trying to go broad.
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Airdrops and rewards won’t make users stick around. They might download your app, but they won’t stay unless you’re offering something genuinely new that solves a real problem with ease.
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And if you decide to incentivize later, it should be based on actual user behavior and history within your app, not just for completing KYC.
Back to mindshare…
Attention deficit is at an all time high. It is believed in some corners of crypto twitter that the loudest will always win. So if you can’t scream loud enough, you’re a spectator. There are more downsides than upsides to this.
Downsides of celebrating Mindshare over Market Share
- Vanity metrics over users
With projects optimizing for followers (real or fake) over actual users, new roles like “Growth Intern” are popping up. The job? Shitposting. And the expectation? That trending on Twitter through memes somehow equals real growth.
As a social media manager you will be tasked to draw out a “GTM strategy” that focuses on how the project trends on Twitter even when the product is crap and has no market fit or differentiation from competitors. You see, you’re also doomed!
- Dismissal of the marketing team
Builders gaining real traction can feel discouraged from creating something meaningful just because they’re not loud enough. As a result, VCs or even leadership like the CEO or COO dismiss the marketing team entirely.
It’s even more laughable when the data shows that a project capturing over 70% of Crypto Twitter’s mindshare was sitting at just a $12M market cap barely four hours after launch. You’d expect it to be way higher.
We’ve subconsciously built a path where hype is all that matters—not the product, not the marketing framework, just hype. I’m sorry if you feel pressured to outperform this norm; it only proves you’re among the few who refuse to settle for mediocrity. It may cost you, but it’s worth it.
If you’re an outsider or new to the system and curious about why many crypto projects don’t last, check
Until empathy becomes a guiding principle, building products that drive mass adoption will remain a myth. So for now, keep dancing around the mini hut called Crypto Twitter, beating your chest like you’re some marketing genius for getting attention.
I’m just an observer 🫡
