I've spent the last decade of my career obsessing over what makes people come together and what makes them stick in only the last 3 years of my career I've had the opportunity to work with over 150 of the top web3 brands to build the next generation of web3 communities part of the portfolio of clients we've worked with are Brands like Forbes web3 Brave browser karate combat abstract chain and many other I can keep going but one thing we are always doing at un fungible one thing we have our microscope on is how is the community
building landscape in web 3 changing so we can constantly adapt our strategies to that and over the last two years there's something very interesting that we started observing back in 2020 2021 and a little bit of 2022 a lot of what made a bron successful was first mover's Advantage coming into the marketplace and filling a void that did not exist before but starting last year moving into the future web 3 as an industry has become a lot more developed the space has matured and the blue ocean opportunities have most of them been closed down although
a brand can come in with a new technological advance or a special product or feature that has not existed previously in the marketplace the main blue ocean have already been filled the marketplaces have become marketplaces the AI tokens are AI tokens and now brands have to compete on both features and marketing so what this means for us as builders in the web 3 space that are trying to build products and services that are going to build the future of our industry is we need to adapt our marketing to this new reality we need to learn
to Market in a more competitive industry no longer is being first enough because now being first is most likely not the case anymore so now we need to evolve our products and marketing to speak differently to our target audience or to position us uniquely in the marketplace and what this means for us Builders Founders and marketers is that the fundamentals of marketing are finally setting in to this industry now more than ever marketing fundamentals on how we launch Our Brands in web 3 matter more than ever and in today's video what I'm going to be
introducing to you is what I believe to be the highest leverage play that Founders can be using as part of their marketing called the founder funnel now I've spoken about the founder funnel quite extensively especially on my ex account so if by any chance you do not already follow me on X make sure you do as this is really the place where I share what is on top of my mind my free flowing thoughts and when whenever I see something interesting happen on the market I have the ability to document that on X faster than
I have the ability to create a long form video format with the board and the preparation and everything so make sure you follow me on X Leon abot so let's talk about the founder funnel and why it matters so the founder funnel the founder funnel is a system that was inspired from my personal observations on how web 2 marketing has evolved over the last decade especially targeting a web a Generation Z target audience what I've observed happening in web 2 is the death of the traditional brand account the traditional brand account think about Pepsi or
Coca-Cola on social media the old style content that they did just product pictures and that's it the death of billboard marketing where all you're showing people is just your product and what we've seen is the emergence of founder Le Brands and here's the interesting thing in web 2 marketers have had to evolve for the new generation of Internet users who are gen Z and Millennials and here's where it gets fascinating guess who the target audience that is buying your nfts or trading your tokens these aren't your parents these aren't the Boomers or Gen X these
are the Gen Z and the Millennials these people have grown up with the internet and have developed a certain way of resonating with marketing content and today most web 3 Founders I see are still stuck in the 2005 way of doing marketing which is the Billboard marketing here's our product by now this ladies and gentlemen no longer works in web 3 and it is continue to no longer work even more moving forward founder-led marketing is the only way to Market to a new segment of the market and if you are in web 3 you are
stuck with that target audience so your options are simple either you adapt to this new market reality or you Fade Out of Oblivion and never have the chance to show the world the products and services you have been working so hard to build and if you are more of a data type of person I actually have stats for you that you might find interesting to back up my points a study by Sprout social which is a publicly traded social media management tool has found that consumers are 82% more likely to trust a brand whose founder
has a personal presence and is vocal about the Brand's vision and Mission a study by Adelman trust barometer found that companies with Founders who have visible and engaging person brands have a 75 High 75% higher employee retention rate employees want to stick around Visionary Founders that are moving forward and building in their industry a LinkedIn study found that companies with a high-profile founder grew 16% faster than companies without a high-profile public facing founder and finally another study found that brands with a strong personal brand of a Founder get four times more media exposure than Brands
who do not have a front-facing founder so what I'm going to do right here is I'm going to draw what the typical founder funnel looks like so this right here ladies and gentlemen is our beautiful founder funnel and what it looks like at the top of the marketing funnel we have the founder profile at the medium depth of the funnel we got the brand account community and finally the conversion event whether it's a purchase of your apparel your merch your nfts your ecosystem your token whatever that looks like and just to illustrate this point very
simply what that looks like you right here are watching Leon AB bu's videos this is my founder funnel strategy my founder funnel content when you asked to take a call to action or when you are ready to take a call to action and go to our website this is where you move down the funnel and you actually take action to landing on our website or landing on the social medias of the brand and then from there exploring deeper into the ecosystem and then moving into a community if you had let's say a free community or
you had a newsletter or you had a a Discord that was open for people and then moving into the conversion funnel and then under that there's of course the customer Ascension process and then there's a super fans all of this but that's for another video and this in a nutshell illustrates the founder funnel simply and the reason why this follows this structure right here is the following let's look at this from the web 3 perspective for a second in web 3 there are two forces that are squeezing teams from both sides the first stressor so
let's call those stressors number one is that we have limited channels of Acquisitions number two is we have skeptical skeptical buyers so limited channels what does that mean in web 3 if you're if you've been in this space for some time you've probably realized that the number of channels we have at our disposal are pretty limited I remember back in web 2 I've was pretty much dabbling with Organic content and paid paid content and trust me paid media when you can unlock ads for your product that's where we were scaling e-commerce stores so like six
figures a month it was crazy but in web 3 unfortunately we do not have the ability to do this so we're pretty much limited to organic and influencer marketing the second one right here is we have skeptical buyers as you know in web 3 people have been burnt a lot of times so getting people to trust your brand getting people to get their Buy in has become a lot harder and in the Buy product a lot costlier it takes people seeing you more times with different angles of your brand for them to build trust and
going back to the founder funnel with the founder profile there's no better way of unlocking these two elements or overcoming these two stressors than through the founder profile with the founder profile you have the ability to create engaging organic content that spreads people engage with people and the more people engage with you the more or IC reach you're going to get needless to say that but people do not engage with Brands no one does people engage with people and number two people are a lot more likely to trust a Founder that they know who they
are they know who their vision is they know what they stand for and they know what they sound and look like and this is how we have the ability just from a fundamentals perspective to use the founder profile to overcome the two stressors that we Face here in web 3 what's also really really interesting about the founder funnel is you have the ability through the founder funnel to disrupt industries that are not currently using these types of marketing strategies and these types of marketing initiatives that are not that haven't caught up to the new age
of marketing I can only think back of this company called midday square based in Montreal and what they were able to do is they were able to get the product that was in a the most competitive industry ever and be able to bring break in to that so midday Square what they do is they have a functional chocolate brand and notoriously for the last century the chocolate company has been owned by four big companies and they came in as The Underdogs they positioned themselves as such they created marketing content that appealed to that type of
new buyer Persona the Gen Z marketing and all of a sudden I saw them personally I know the founders I had them on a podcast back in 2018 or 19 I believe great team they went from one store in a local Health shop in Montreal to now having their products in every Costco and Walmart and Target in Canada and the US they're growing and they're scaling and they got some offers to get acquired by one of these big four but didn't take them because they're a mission-driven company so what they were able to do is
to get into an industry that was very commoditized by the same big players and uncom moditi themselves through good marketing good marketing doesn't only improve the life of your prospects it allows you to build in an industry that is competitive and red and a lot of competition circulating around it allows you to break out of the masses and this is the great example of midday square if you are to look at their account on Instagram if you are to very quickly scroll you're going to think this is a reality TV show this is not a
chocolate company nowhere is there a picture of just the product itself with a nice nice white background no it is about the founder story it is about what they are going through as a team it is a Chocolate Factory the big machine that moles the chocolate just breaking and leaking on the floor and then documenting this and holy how do we do this this is the story that they bring you in and as a viewer you're captivated and it leaves a lasting impression in people's mind and then you go by the chocolate because of how
it makes you feel because of the brand that comes with it not just because it's a good chocolate bar which they have a great product as well so now that we have the understanding of the importance of the founder funnel what the next question becomes how do we actually execute on this Leon like what's next so let's talk about this so what I have for us right here is four steps of implementation for the founder funnel the first one of these is Define contrarian narrative so what is a contrarian narrative a contrarian narrative is a
narrative that is not often times agreed on that you have strong conviction in you could tie the narrative to your mission as a company for example the contrary narrative that we have on this channel is that NFS are the greatest tool at building Community since the invention of the internet there is no tool that has come since the internet's creation that has the ability to bring people together and create and Foster a sense of meaning and belonging between people nfds are the solution to the loneliness pandemic and I've been creating content around this and my
content you can say that it's niche and it's contrarian because I've been doing this for two years and a half and only a handful of you guys have been watching this content over the last two years and a half and I thank you for this and I can't wait for my contrarian narrative to eventually become the narrative but until then I'm going to be the one advocating for that and and pushing that and making the world realize of that narrative that's an example of a contran narrative and everyone else who believes the same that I
you AKA you the viewers all of a sudden are a lot more likely to resonate with my message another example of a contrary narrative is in web 3 games you could it can be that web two gaming Publishers are stifling growth within their game because there's no in-game economy and they're only taking value away from The Gamers not giving it back to them that's an example and this is the narrative that axi Infiniti used to become the number one crypto game back in the previous bull market uh every security and privacy app and web 3
have somewhat of the same narrative which is that all these big web two conglomerates are just siing data of the out of the users and if you are a believer that you deserve to control your data and monetize it yourself then use our Alternatives that's an example Brave browser one of our portfolio clients that's exactly their narrative so you're contrary narrative defining that defining what you believe in and this is often times done through internal work realizing what is that you're passionate about what is it you uh consume on a natural basis the second element
that we are going to have as part of the founder founder funnel is Define Your solution and delivery mechanism so I'm going to I'm going to tell you why this is important so Define Your solution and delivery mechanism the reason why it is important as soon as you start the founder funnel to have a product or a delivery mechanism as I said it right here how are you solving the problem that is part of your contrarian narrative the reason why this is important is that your delivery mechanism will become your North Star that will prevent
you from swaying off to wherever the attention takes you if you have no North Star you're going to end up op optimizing your content for what gets most views and often times what gets most views is not what builds your business the best I'm speaking from personal experience by the way I've spent a good four five years of my career building Instagram pages and I was only chasing awareness and Views and followers and I got just that built a following on my pages of over millions of followers but that never translated into any business growth
and for me for example the contrary narrative is nfts as the greatest tool for community building the problem is not enough good marketing wisdom and knowledge in web 3 it is very scarse often held by the few people who control the N the industry and finally my delivery mechanism is UN fungible un fungible if you are someone trying that believes in nfts as the great community and have an nft that you're trying to build in the marketplace or web through technology as a way to bring people together then this is where it works so that's
a great example and that's why we were I was able to stay on course even when the bull market was shifting away from nfts and going to meme coins and going to this and going to that I don't want any of that it's not part of my vision it's not part of my mission it's not part of why I get up in the morning and I don't want to sway there so that's why it's incredibly important to have Define your delivery mechanism number three that we have right here is Define initial initial platform what's it's
going to happen as you start deploying the founder funel this is going to be awkward as hell it is going to be an awkward Journey because finding your voice is going to take time whether you are trying to find your voice through written content through video content through through podcast content it's going to take you time to find your voice and that's why the earlier you can start implementing testing iterating the faster you're going to get to becoming your ideal self there's a version of you who has an audience base of millions of people that
is willing to pull out their credit card to buy whatever it is that you're building and whatever it is that you are selling that version of you is not you right now because we have yet to acquire the skills to get there and that's fine because we are all on the process to getting there and it all starts with identifying our initial platform my recommendation to you is create where you consume I myself for example was consuming YouTube more than I was consuming on X when I started in web 3 so that made it more
natural for me to create on YouTube than it was on X for me I like watching videos and I've always enjoyed the process of trying to get better and improving my abilities of delivering a message clearly and concisely so that was something I enjoyed therefore YouTube made more sense for me if you are to look back at my previous videos on this channel and if you are to look at some of my older channels on YouTube look up jumpo Mentor you're going to see when I I used to make Fitness content back in 2018 17
I was a completely different person my delivery was different I've worked on it I've improved I've studied I've gotten mentorship so at first Define your initial marketing platform get a hold of it systematize it and then automize it at first I was editing all the YouTube videos on on my uh Premiere Pro and then I now I have a team that helps me do this once we've done that this is where we start scaling and this is where it starts becoming fun this is where we actually start getting the results and this is where the
rest of the funnel starts getting filed the first one is the the next thing is stack channels oo so this is this is the scaling part and that's how it's going to look like so right here let's say the this right here is our marketing efforts over time for Leon how it started is at first I had YouTube as a marketing channel and you could see it started and then it's slowly growing then what I did as a Creator is I started stacking around 9 months after the YouTube channel I started stacking X written content
so x copy then it took me took me a good six months to get a hold of x copy and a year after is where it really started picking up and that was after by the way Alpha for you here that's when I started Mastering the Art of Storytelling I had read a couple books I had taken a course on it and it was by embedding storytelling as part of my marketing that I was able to all of a sudden deliver a message that started resonating better with my target audience then I stacked Twitter spaces
as a marketing channel when I started doing Twitter spaces my follower grew very quickly and it grew with a very Str strong strong follower base and that is why one of the main products that we offer at un fungible is we help teams unlock Twitter spaces as a marketing channel since we've built the largest network of spaces in the industry with some of the top projects some of whom I've I've named here and then right here this is where you can start stacking more opportunities that could be LinkedIn that could be podcast that could be
Instagram so you see all of a sudden how right here we started with YouTube then added YouTube uh X written copy then Twitter live streams then we can add here x shorts then Tik Tok shorts then Instagram shorts and that is how you are able to build a marketing machine and with time build a team around you that has the ability to start funneling eyeballs into the founder account into the founder account and then through that you have the ability to Arbitrage that attention into to your brand through occasional brand shout outs perhaps call to
action but in an Ideal World the brand itself you as a Founder are nothing but a representation of the brand UNF fungible is Leon Leon is UN fungible there is no un fungible brand account on X does not exist as of November 2024 there is n and there is no strategy in place for that because Leon is UN fungible and un fungible is Leon then we can start as we as we start scaling those we can start adding by the way just for your information something that's going to come what what about influencer marketing can't
I skip founder profile to get influencer marketing you can that's a lazy way and it's expensive but this is where we can add K marketing so k key key opinion leader which is short for influencer that's can be added as a as a marketing stock because K in and of itself is a marketing channel that takes time to build and that needs refining and improving over time so that's how with the founder funnel we start pushing attention into the Branded account and then push down I'm not going to cover these elements in today's video that's
content for other videos but we all of a sudden get the idea that when people buy into you they're indirectly buying into your product by selling them and what you do your you're selling them on who the brand is and this ladies and gentlemen is the new age of brand marketing the last thing that I'm going to say on this topic is the following which is the concept of Action Reaction so for every Force you exert there's an equal and opposite force that comes on the other side if you let's reverse engineer this if the
reaction we want is increase eyeballs well there's two ways to do this with the action what are the actions that as Founders have control over as we saw content is the most organic one and the best one to do in web 3 so the next question becomes what type of content can I create and this where we can break down content into two main pillars the first one is educational the second one is entertainment and something about entertainment entertainment doesn't necessarily need to be funny or comedic it doesn't mean you have to be a a
comedian all of a sudden and entertainment can only be as simple as going to the street and asking people what the price of Bitcoin is and seeing someone say $1 or someone saying $200,000 that's a form of entertaining content educational content is exactly what you consume and depending on your delivery mechanism you're going to reverse engineer what type of content your audience resonates with for example for a web 3 game I can see how the founder leaning more toward entertaining content would make more sense than and educational content because as a Founder do do web
three gamers really care about how to build a web three game not really so that's where it becomes interesting to to to Define what they do midday Square for example again going back to the example of these guys for them like I said you go and it feels like it it feels like it's a reality TV show they lead they leaned into entertainment with a little bit of educational how they do it with educational is they tell their people like hey guys for example we're currently experimenting with this new recipe so the price of Cacao
is increasing has increased by 20% in the last four quarters and what we're thinking of doing is changing our recipe from being 15% caca to being 10% caca and then we're going to add this new little ingredient that replaces that therefore allowing us to cut the cost and preventing us from increasing prices on you guys and then they ask what do you think of this and then in the comment section I swear like by the time you watch this video it's probably going to be one of the last videos that they posted on Instagram you're
going to see the fans the reactions people like no I don't do this this might be harmful for people this might have this specific ingredient might have bad reaction on some people's stomach allergies just increase the cost I'm willing to pay more like the reactions are incredible and that's a perfect example of what a strong Community looks like so ask yourself what type of content are you more of a Founder what is your founder content fit for example for me my friends don't know me as the most entertaining guy in the room I'm more of
a serious person and so for me it would make a lot more sense to go with educational content than it would be with entertaining content and that's why the angle that I chose works for me and why I enjoy doing it because it fits my character but the moment you want to start becoming someone you're not just for the camera is the moment you're going to start hating and despising it because trust me ladies and gentlemen you're one message away from changing your customer's life your customer is one Community away from having their life changed
for me that was joining the gym Community almost a decade ago that changed my life and that was one message from one person that got me to join the gym you have a responsibility and a duty to put your message out in a way that resonates with people and for you to put something out that resonates with people it first has to resonate with you it has to come from the heart and the way you make it come from the heart is for you to resonate with what is it you're creating in the first place
so ladies and gentlemen this is the founder funnel these are the steps that you can follow to start implementing it and start getting it out there my name is Lan bu it was a great pleasure spending this time together I shall see you very soon cheers
