Does Bitcoin Need Marketing and marketers? Does it need influencers? What kinds of strategies are appropriate across different channels? Dan Held, Director of Business Development at Kraken joins me to discuss. 

Dan Held links:

• Twitter: @danheld
• Article: Bitcoin’s Marketing Team
• Website: danheld.com

Relevant prior episodes:

• SLP34 Dan Held – Bitcoin Heroes, Villains, Survival, and Capitulation
• SLP81 Dan Held – Why Bitcoin’s Security is Fine

Sponsor links:

• Swan Bitcoin
• Unchained Capital
• New Brighton Capital

Stephan Livera links: 

• Show notes and website 
• Follow me on twitter @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast 
• Patreon @stephanlivera

Podcast Transcript:

Stephan Livera:

Alright. So now let me bring in my guest, Dan held is the director of business development at Kraken and he’s a past guest on the show. Welcome back Dan.

Dan Held:

Thanks for having me. It’s been a, it’s been a little while. When was the last time we talked?

Stephan Livera:

Oh, I think on the show maybe around June or so last year. It’s been a while. We haven’t been keeping up our pace. So but I’m happy to chat with you again and today. Obviously there’s a lot, there’s been a lot of discussion about this whole concept of marketing and Bitcoin. So we, I think there are different views here, right? So some people might say, well, look, no, actually Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol. It doesn’t need anybody to speak on its behalf and, you know, number go up you know, the price and the censorship resistant aspects of Bitcoin are really what’s necessary. But what’s your view, Dan?

Dan Held:

Yeah. So Bitcoin like any product or service requires human beings, which are animals to understand and comprehend the value prop. Now animals like ourselves, don’t interpret zeroes and ones very easily. We need visualizations and texts and we need those arranged in ways that are intuitive for us. So ways that are easy for us to understand. That’s called marketing. Marketing is about crafting narratives to tell a story about why a product service or a protocol is valuable and why humans should use it. So it isn’t necessarily this formal structure, you know, with Bitcoin, it’s very unique because we have a decentralized marketing team yourself, Pomp, myself, Peter, every Bitcoiner. Every Bitcoiner at the dinner table, talking to their parents, talking to their girlfriend, boyfriend about Bitcoin. They’re all marketers too. We’re all talking about Bitcoin. And we’re all very excited about why it’s valuable and how it solves people’s problems.

Dan Held:

So Bitcoin has a decentralized marketing team and what’s really unique about that is it’s probably the most capitalist, free market way possible to do marketing. There is no centralized marketing org, each one of us crafts our own narrative and in turn tries to propagate it. If our narrative is one that people like, it resonates and when it resonates, people share it. And when they share it, our audience grows larger and that’s how Bitcoin’s marketing machine works. Is we each A/B test different marketing materials in order to convert and bring in new Bitcoiners. And so I, think it’s a pretty phenomenal, beautiful process as I’ve seen Bitcoin’s narrative since I got in, in 2012, technically I got in in 2011, but it didn’t really get it until 2012. As I’ve seen Bitcoin’s professionalization over the years get better and better. I think it’s a good thing.

Dan Held:

And I think today we’re going to dig into a little bit of what people’s sentiment is around marketing, but I largely perceive this as a good thing. This is a professional thing. We should formally think about how to reach the most pre corners possible and convert them into our objective here isn’t to squabble over which way is the best way to market, inherently Bitcoin marketing only works if it works. If people respond to the marketing and sharing and engage with it is good marketing. There is no if ands or buts, we cannot say this marketing is bad, this marketing is good. Bitcoin’s customer is humans. Humans require a message. And if the message is being delivered and humans like it, then it is inherently good marketing.

Stephan Livera:

Right. And I think you’re speaking there as well, too, perhaps the difference that a skilled communicator can make. Right. And so I think there is some role to that. So can you outline a little bit about the difference that a skilled communicator makes?

Dan Held:

Yeah. So when you craft a narrative, you need to think about how will that narrative propagate with the user or the person I’m trying to convert into Bitcoin. There are different narratives for different people. If you’re talking to a Venezuelan versus a baby boomer who lives in New York City, they’re going to respond to different things. They’re going to respond to different narratives at different times and across different channels. So for example, maybe Baby boomers, don’t like to hang out on Twitter, they’re on Facebook or younger. People like to hang out on YouTube and TikTok. These are all places where we acquire new Bitcoiners and neither one is better or worse. I think, you know, especially myself, I skew more Twitter just because it’s intuitive to me. I like it. It’s a lot of fun. I love to riff on different ideas. I’d love to hear what other Bitcoiners are thinking. But there are so many different places we can reach people. And so when we think about marketing, we have to think about not only the message, but the timing, the type, the narrative and the location, you know where are we talking to these potential new Bitcoiners.

Stephan Livera:

Great. And so let’s chat a little bit about some of the different channels, right? So obviously you and I, we kind of, we spent a lot of time on Bitcoin Twitter obviously, but.

Dan Held:

probably a little too much!

Stephan Livera:

I would agree with you and let’s chat a little about potentially some other channels that maybe, so what are some of the other channels and how should we be crafting our message on some of these other channels?

Dan Held:

Yeah. So I, you know, this was a really interesting experiment for myself. I polled my Twitter followers and ask them, Hey, where else do you hear about Bitcoin? And I believe like 65% said YouTube. And that kind of blew me away because there’s not a lot. There’s some good YouTubers out there. And I know quite a few of them, but there’s not a lot of Bitcoin only focused YouTube channels that are, that are popular. And so that really surprised me. And that made me think, am I crafting my content and propagating that content through the right channel or am I missing out on this big place where we could talk about Bitcoin. And so when we look at like where Bitcoin’s message resonates, the best Twitter is obviously a great one. Twitter is, I’d say the number one spot YouTube seems to be really popular. Instagram, I’m just not sure if that format works. You know, Instagram is a lot about how you look rather than how you think Twitter is much more about how you think. And YouTube is a nice blend in between where it’s, how you look. But also there’s a ton of educational content on YouTube. You know, when we look at Instagram, which is not a great fit there, LinkedIn is nice. I also cross post a lot of my tweets on the LinkedIn. I’m not sure how many of my Twitter followers know that, but I try to go propagate content over on the LinkedIn sphere. And it’s really cool to see, you know, a really big Bitcoin narrative, like proof of work is efficient or the launch of Bitcoin was fair or Bitcoin is sound money. Like these very simple narratives that we understand and are totally intuitive on crypto Twitter, or sorry, BitcoinTwitter.

Dan Held:

Back on the LinkedIn side, you know, I’m seeing a hundred people from Goldman Sachs saw that and I’m like, wow, that’s really cool. Like, a hundred people from Goldman Sachs saw this message. I don’t really care about Goldman Sachs, but it’s nice to know that I’m permeating. Like they read this message, it got ingested into the brain. And now that permanently altered their future thinking and each Bitcoiner can do this. This is an army of all of us, each one of us craft this message and propagate it. And you know, so I think LinkedIn, YouTube,Twitter are the primary channels. Facebook obviously is a big one. You’ve got different chat platforms like telegram, Facebook messenger on Facebook. You have Facebook groups. So I cross-post in there sometimes as well. You also have Reddit, right?

Dan Held:

That’s a very popular channel. There’s over 1.5 million subscribers to the Bitcoin subreddit. And so we really need to think holistically about how do we reach, how do we reaffirm people’s understanding of Bitcoin who are already into it. And then how do we acquire newcoiners and bringing them through it’s it’s never a complete process. I’m still learning after eight years of being in it. There’s people on a gradient scale of less knowledgeable and more knowledgeable and our objective and we each play a different role. You know, this is more like a relay race. We’re not, no one has to run the whole marathon themselves. We can relay, we can pass on the Baton where, you know, you’re, I think you’re better at like digging into like the core ethos of Bitcoin. Whereas maybe someone like Pomp is a little bit lighter that he doesn’t really touch on a lot of the things we’d like him to, but he plays an important role.

Dan Held:

He’s taking someone who’s never heard about Bitcoin and he’s defending Bitcoin on CNBC, which some of us may feel like, Oh, he didn’t defend it perfectly, but I think he’s done a phenomenal job. He’s done a great job at defending Bitcoin. He’s done a great job at positioning in that mainstream consciousness, because I think a lot of us forget that the outside world looks at us like we’re kind of freaks. I think we’re pretty normal, but the rest of the world thinks, you know, we’re a bunch of kind of weirdos. And we need to make sure that, you know, we can put on different faces. So maybe someone has tattoos and I’m a little bit more clean cut. It doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that we each try to propagate Bitcoin’s narrative and we try to tell the story of why it’s valuable and that’s, you know, that’s really my mission. And that’s what I think all of our missions are.

Stephan Livera:

Yep. I think you made, you made a lot of great points there, Dan, thank you for that. And I find, we perhaps have to get a little better at targeting our message for the right audience. So sometimes we might be having some really niche kind of discussion on, you know, Bitcoin Twitter, or even in chat groups and so on. But then when we’re speaking out to the rest of the world, when we’re talking to our more normie friends on Facebook or LinkedIn, we need to tailor our message. So what are some ways that we can tailor our message for that audience?

Dan Held:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I like to think about it. Like you’ve got a deck of cards and you play a different card for different hand that you get. So let’s say you run into a baby boomer. Well, they’re going to respond to different, different sort of discussions and different ways that you pitch Bitcoin than a millennial or Zoomer know millennial or zoomer or you’re like, look, Bitcoin was the first money made for the internet. It’s not controlled by anyone. These, you know, sort of like freedom narratives. This is an opt in money it’s consensual money. You know, that would be a unique way to position it. That’s kind of fun with the baby boomers. They’re old, they like gold call it gold 2.0, and I’m not prescribing this. I’m just saying, see what fits, see what resonates, if it doesn’t resonate, then it doesn’t, it doesn’t work.

Dan Held:

If it resonates, then people like it and it makes sense to them. So we’re each AB testing and experimenting across these different segments of potential new Bitcoiners. But yeah, you’ve got, you’ve got a wide variety of different ways to pitch it. You know, I’ve, I’ve been to so many dinners by now. I’ve been on stage, I’ve been on podcasts, I’ve tweeted, I’m posting on LinkedIn. I’ve interacted with so many different types of people that there’s not a one size fits all narrative. There’s kind of a like a core narrative that has little branches and those little branches are ones that you can use to melt it and make sure that it resonates perfectly with the target audience.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. Right. And I think as you said it’s really about sort of tailoring it for who you’re speaking with. I mean, even in the chat, we’ve got a few people talking about TikTok and so on. And again, it’s a different style. It’s a different style presentation.

Dan Held:

You don’t want to see me try to do a Tiktok, but I admire the people that do. I mean you don’t want to see me dance? It’s bad. Yeah,

Stephan Livera:

Of course. Of course. So look at another question amongst maybe these are the concerns that are coming from the more let’s call it, the hardcore Bitcoin Twitter group. They might have a concern they might say, does Bitcoin need influencers? They might say, you know, they might be more about keeping the message more peer to peer and anti-influencer. And they might resent this notion that anybody speaks for Bitcoin, if you get me. So what would you say to those people?

Dan Held:

Well, I’d say that their marketing pitches that they’re the anti-marketing team, you know, that’s how they position themselves if they don’t like marketing, but then talking about it publicly, it makes it marketing. So then even prescribing themselves as anti-marketing as a marketing pitch it’s sort of like, have you ever seen the tee-shirts that say the anti-social social club? It’s the same sort of thing it’s everyone wants to hear and understand something. And if you’re like, well, I don’t believe in marketing well, that’s, that’s inherently marketing. When it comes to who’s propagating Bitcoin and sort of their ethical standards, I understand where Bitcoins or Bitcoiners are coming from. I’ve been around for eight years in this space. I’ve seen a lot of scammers come through. So I know a lot of people append to their name to bitcoin. They ride on it and then they jump off when it’s convenient.

Dan Held:

So I get that, I understand the PTSD that comes along with going through civil wars, going through constant attacks by other people about Bitcoin. So I get it. I understand. I’m there alongside with you. Similarly, you know, we should, we should look at these new people that come in critically. If they come in and talk about Bitcoin, it’s like, okay, cool. Let’s see how your narrative progresses over time, but we shouldn’t be, I think some of it stems from jealousy. It’s this jealousy of going, Oh, this person’s not as Bitcoin as I am, but they’re getting more attention. And instead of doing something about it, we complain about it. And that’s where I feel. I felt the need to write out my tweet storm on Bitcoin’s marketing, because I think I felt like there was a lot of miscommunication about what marketing is about what roles we each play.

Dan Held:

Cause we each are a marketer. And three, if you can’t beat them, join them. Like if you don’t like how Bitcoin’s being marketed, then figure out how to, you know, build your YouTube brand from 10,000 to 200,000 and take them on craft better content making don’t share a flow chart that’s like made for engineers, go hire a designer and craft something really nice and eloquent and like simple. You want great YouTube videos. Well hire a graphic artist. Like the complaining that other people are explaining Bitcoin better than you are. And that eventually they turned to shitcoinery or something is I think just frankly, basically jealousy it’s jealousy. It’s a lack of understanding of what marketing is. And I felt compelled to talk about it because I want the Bitcoiners who understand Bitcoin the best. I would prefer that they are full funnel. That the first time someone hears someone they hear about Saifedean or something.

Dan Held:

Right. But then he’s really great at crafting really in the weeds content. And I think Saifedean was one of those few that is somewhat full funnel, where he has great narratives for someone just getting into Bitcoin. And that’s why so many of us recommend his book. This book is a great A to Z sort of point. Right? And so I, it’s more of me wanting to compel Bitcoiners to be the best they can be. And don’t just look at marketing tactics and call those sleazy or scammy. For example, I think we’re all familiar with LinkedIn. LinkedIn beat every other professional platform out there, partially due to a growth hack, LinkedIn spammed, all of your contact lists with emails to join LinkedIn. Is that ethical? Maybe. Does it matter? Did they win? Yes. The United States government and Fiat money. Is Fiat money bullshit?

Dan Held:

Yes. But they’ve propagated that narrative through universities, the mainstream financial system, and literally literally every corner of the earth. And that’s what we’re fighting against. And it’s basically all marketing fluff is marketing and fluff to instill confidence in, in dollars, even though there’s nothing backing them. There’s no, and we don’t have any trust in our central banks and their monetary policy. All that’s backing that is faith. That faith is backed by marketing. So, I mean, you want to talk about marketing, working for a long time. Like people go, Oh, well, you know, eventually unethical marketing doesn’t work well, but LinkedIn is still around and they occupy an entire building in San Francisco. And last time I checked the US government is what is it? You know, fiat in the US depends on when you choose 6102 or another era, but it’s been running for a hell of a long time.

Dan Held:

So doesn’t matter if they use ethical marketing internet or not? Not really, same with Airbnb posted their postings on Craigslist, which is against Craigslist terms of service. Is that unethical? I don’t know. Does Craigslist suck? Craigslist fucking sucks. It’s the worst piece of shit like website I’ve ever been to now when it comes to Airbnb is a nice, elegant, simple, easy to use. Yeah It’s phenomenal. Does Craigslist deserve to have this wall garden? I don’t think so. And inevitably, whenever each new up and coming company or protocol tries to take over the old, the old world is going to fight back and they’re going to use every trick in the book to win. So, you know, is a tactic by Bitcoiners you know, let’s say we talk about fractional reserve banking. Most people don’t understand that they even have a problem with their banking system.

Dan Held:

So is it wrong to be like, Hey, your money’s not in your bank account, that’s truthful 94% or 95% of their money’s not in their bank account. And technically now that the federal reserve ratio is zero it’s technically zero. Right. But like, is that the state of the baking system today? Like they actually gonna fail today? Probably not today. At some point in the future, we think that it will, or it will just lead to hyperinflation. Maybe banks don’t fail. You know, the US government is essentially backstopping everyone, but you have to be as gritty as possible to win. There is no such thing as ethical marketing. There’s such thing as marketing that wins and Silicon Valley companies are testament to that. Governments are testament to that. They’re, you know, you get read the history books. They’re not written by the losers who were ethical.

Dan Held:

They were written by the people who won. I’m not saying do something that’s extremely egregious, but you know, simple things like do you have to have a double opt in to your email versus just sending them an email if they sign up? I don’t know if you follow, unfollow. Some people complain that, Oh, people grew their Twitter presence by following, unfollowing. And I’m like, well, did it work? They’re like, yeah. And so what’s there to complain about, so you’re telling me that you have a problem with someone tapping on someone else’s shoulder and being like, Hey, I’m following you and they follow them back. And then how do you determine that between inorganic and organic? What if someone truly follows 50 people a day and unfollows 50 people a day? How would you know?

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. Right. So I guess I’ve, maybe one thing with that though, is it might be seen it inauthentic or kind of cringe where like, if you’re using a bot, for example, now we’re not going to name names, but there are people who have been out there who have used this kind of, well, seemingly use this kind of practice where they were basically following thousands of accounts on Twitter, and then later unfollowing them to try and quickly build a following. And this is technically against Twitter terms of service, as, but as you mentioned that there were other companies, big tech companies who basically got big from kind of breaking the rules a little bit. But I think it comes down to there’s this feeling of, Oh, that’s slimy, that’s cringy, that’s a bit dodgy. I don’t want to do that. I want to do this in, like, I want to promote, and I want to talk about Bitcoin in an ethical way. What would you say to that?

Dan Held:

Well, so by the way, most people think of Bitcoin, even in an ethical, a self prescribed ethical way to present Bitcoin is still perceived, pretty slimy. Most people perceive Bitcoin as money used by money launderers and drug dealers. So I don’t know what you’re going to do to be able to polish that up using ethical methods. Right. So Bitcoin already has a pretty poor reputation. I’m not sure how you could make it much worse. Obviously I don’t believe that I believe that Bitcoin is one of our best tools for freedom of humankind. I think this is an amazing thing Satoshi gave us and that we all built. And I think it’s honestly, I think it’s one of our best chances at us enabling freedom. So I think we should position that in the best way possible. Absolutely do I, you know, and that’s where, when people say, Oh, that’s a slimy technique or not, that doesn’t matter.

Dan Held:

All that matters is that it worked and slimy doesn’t mean I manipulated someone into doing something and then didn’t deliver. It means I used a hack to grab their attention, show them something, and then they liked it. You know, for example, if you run a follow, unfollow bot and they all unfollow you after, well, then your content isn’t engaging. You can do follow unfollow all day long, but if you don’t produce any content that’s engaging or tells people things, then they’re not going to care. If you have a YouTube channel and you figure out how to hack YouTube SEO, is that a bad thing or a good thing? Otherwise, you’re just beholden to this dummy algorithm that surfaces your content when someone performs a query, I used to work on app store optimization at Uber. How did we rank highly for search results?

Dan Held:

Do you think Apple’s algorithm is perfect? No, they actually use the title string. So the title is the name of the app. It’s the proximity of the keywords at the beginning of your title string. That’s why bitcoin.com is the number spot for the word Bitcoin in the app store. If you look at number two, it’s Coinbase and Coinbase has like 10X, the number of installs. So what’s ethical, what’s not ethical. Is it ethical to have bitcoin.com wallet at the top of the app store? I don’t know. Would it be, you know, so did they hack it? Not really. They just followed the terms of service and they followed exactly how to structure it, but like, is that the most relevant search result for the word Bitcoin? I don’t know. Right. So yeah.

Stephan Livera:

What about the question of authenticity? Right. So let’s say this again, not talking about any one person, right. It’s just in general, right? When we’re talking about, say things like tweet scheduling, for example, like scheduling of posts, right? So there’s, this kind of idea comes up as well, because it may feel kind of low effort posts. People put up a certain thing that appeals to like a different denominator, if you will. And that just doesn’t feel as authentic as an engagement strategy. What’s your view there?

Dan Held:

Yeah. That’s a great question. I think the only thing that matters is people engaging with your content. It is inherently good content if people engage with it, there’s no such thing as low or high value. I can write a 30 page paper on something and no one reads it and that’s high value content. Does it matter if no one reads it? It’s like if I read an article and no one ever reads it, like, is that ever, is that considered high quality? I would say no, because it didn’t have it’s intended purpose of being propagated. Now, if I condense that paper into three bullet points and tweeted it, is that the most in depth content I could do what I consider that an adequate explanation of how a process works. No, but people ain’t got time for that. You know, they’re opening up Twitter on the bus stop.

Dan Held:

They don’t really care to go read 30 pages. They just care to get the TLDR. Now there’s different types of people who love to read. Who love to read the whole long form. I do this all the time with my articles. I’ll take my articles, pull out a quote from it, tweet it and link back to the article. And if you look at like, I think Nic Carter did a really interesting analysis of his read rate. So the dropoff point, and I think he found after like seven minutes for all of his articles, that was basically true. Engagement drops off after that. So, you know, what is good content in terms of like how long it should be and how it’s propagated. And when you look at scheduling, this is a tool to increase your max engagement. All of this, you know, all of these growth tactics, go back to how do these algorithms work?

Dan Held:

How do these algorithms surface engaging content? And there’s all sorts of ways to pick it apart. And that’s a lot of what I’ve done in my roles in growth is thinking through how to propagate content and how to be surfaced highly for search results and scheduling as a part of that. I live on the, I live in the Pacific, so I’m in Pacific time. If I tweeted when I wake up, let’s say that’s 8:00 AM. New York is already at 11:00 AM. And Europe is six hours after that. So 5:00 PM that doesn’t give my tweet a lot of time to build engagement and pick up engagement throughout the day. So I use a scheduler to tweet at 6:00 AM, cause I don’t want to wake up at 6:00 AM every day. The tweet from 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM. And that way I’ve got it all laid out all scheduled and it can reach the max propagation rate.

Dan Held:

So as people engage with the tweet, Twitter then surfaces that tweet to more and more people. You can actually find these engagement metrics in Twitter’s platform. It’s under the media center. So I encourage people to go look at that. So I analyze when people engage with my tweets, made sure to schedule them early, and that has shown to be effective. I find a very high success rate with scheduling my tweets early on. So it’s not necessarily low engagement. I’m not crafting content for my audience. My audience is asking me what content they want and I’m delivering that. And that’s what every great person who understands content marketing does is you don’t deliver what you want, you deliver what they want.

Stephan Livera:

Yep. Yeah. So there’s a lot of interesting points there. I think it’s kind of I guess your view is kind of like an all’s fair in love and engagement kind of idea. What would you say? Yeah, go on.

Dan Held:

Yeah. I mean, there is no other truth. The only truth is that they engage with it. Like we can, we can subjectively say my long form article was wonderful, but if no one hears about it or 10 people read it versus 20,000, you know, on a short quippy tweet and each one gets the point across, like maybe the tweet gets 80% of the point across like which one is better, you know, it’s yeah. It’s all fair in love and war. And we’re fighting a battle of narratives. We’ve seen people attack Bitcoin with very intellectually dishonest narratives, proof of work in inefficient Bitcoin was a stealth mine, which it wasn’t, all these things are used. Bitcoin maximalists are conservative, inaudible. These are all used to undermine Bitcoin. I mean, that’s why I started to write was to defend Bitcoin against these narratives. And so it’s key that we propagate these narratives for people to understand them the quality inherently to be high quality, inherently has to propagate in order to be high quality.

Stephan Livera:

Yep. Yep. And so what about this idea? That bitcoins messages might get bastardized. If a certain message gets kind of hijacked, if you will, by a corporate or some other entity, who’s trying to kind of ride the coattails of Bitcoin, what’s your view there?

Dan Held:

Stop bitching about it and make up your own content that’s better. What do you, what are you gonna do to stop it, it’s decentralized. Right?

Stephan Livera:

Right. Yeah. So look, everyone’s got to, everyone’s gotta find their own way of crafting a message. I guess for the Bitcoin view, it might be something like, people might say, well, okay, fine. You might make that out there, but I’m not going to support that. I guess that’s how some of them might frame it. They might say, look, you’re welcome to do that, but I don’t support that kind of style. Maybe I supported this other kind of style of engagement and I guess that’s all people can test it out and figure it out and hammer it out in terms of the market of ideas, the marketplace for speech.

Dan Held:

Exactly. Right. It’s a marketplace of ideas. Whichever idea is best crafted, best narrative compressed and propagated the best way will be the one that wins. Of course these things are rooted in reality, like you can’t say Bitcoin is useful for ice cream delivery, right? Like this doesn’t make any sense. It’s also likely that your narrative wouldn’t propagate at all and that no one would really find it interesting or relevant. A lot of content. You know, when you think about content, a lot of it has to do with relevancy. When I perform a query on Google or the app store, they’re trying to give me a list of search results that are relevant search results. I searched for taxi. I want to find Uber or a taxi app. I searched for Bitcoin. I want to find a Bitcoin wallet or Bitcoin price tracker, you know, more specific queries, like how to buy Bitcoin, et cetera, or have different intent or more like maybe learning, like what is Bitcoin?

Dan Held:

And so, you know, we can’t go through and complain when companies structure their content to be highly visible across the search channels. And similarly on social, because social is just one component of this, right? And you also have a whole paid advertising side to this as well, where people can insert their message about the Bitcoin in the Cash App. You know, I’ve seen them, I’ve seen their ads pop up on Reddit, Twitter, and they’re doing, you know, an interesting, so it’s always interesting to see how these companies position themselves, right? Like, are they like buy Bitcoin or the, do they go, Hey, we’ll, we’ll bid on ads that are, what is Bitcoin and try to work an angle through content wise. Inevitably you’ve got individuals like yourself and others and myself and we each craft our narrative for Bitcoin, but we also are competing with companies and we’re all competing to share the same message.

Dan Held:

And so, you know, we can, we can hope that a company doesn’t come by and tell the message of Bitcoin. Well, that’s an evil company, but it’s sort of mutually exclusive, right? Like you can’t be a company that tells Bitcoin well, because Bitcoin, you don’t have to trust anyone else. You can buy Bitcoin and withdraw it and hold it in your hand. You’re own private key management. So I don’t really understand how a company could be evil in that regard, if it’s convincing people to buy Bitcoin and those people move their Bitcoin off of the exchange or brokerage or something. So inherently, if they’re good at marketing Bitcoin that increases Bitcoins adoption. And not all of the people who are into that, company’s marketing will necessarily convert and become a customer of that company. They could become a customer of another company. And there are network effects that built here as the price rises, people become more aware of it and this increases adoption across the board.

Stephan Livera:

Yup. And so let’s talk a little bit about that funnel idea, right? So I think a few people got triggered a little bit by this idea that a funnel even exists. Right. And I think perhaps there is something there around, we may not necessarily agree with everything that someone popular has said about Bitcoin, but nevertheless, they have put that idea or incepted that idea into the minds of many more people. And then they can sort of progress down the layers and find other more technically precise content.

Dan Held:

Yeah. The proverbial rabbit hole, the funnel is the rabbit hole.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. So I guess effectively, it’s just a recognition that some people have a bigger audience than others, or some are more effective than others at communicating about Bitcoin. I think one important point, and we were chatting about this on Twitter earlier was essentially that it’s difficult to be at the top of that funnel unless you already have a big audience. Otherwise it’s kind of difficult if you’re, if you don’t have a big audience and you’re trying to make material and content for beginner Bitcoiners, it’s just not very sustainable. What’s your view there?

Dan Held:

In terms of like profitability or what were you asking exactly?

Stephan Livera:

Like viable, how viable is it for you to make that work? I think in my mind it just comes down to, well, probably related to the point you were making before you can make the best, you can write the best book or you know, do the best podcast episode or YouTube video. But if people don’t watch it. What are you going to do about it?

Dan Held:

Yeah. I mean, at the top of the funnel, you have to keep your message really tight and concise. People forget like, okay, we all know Bitcoin Bitcoin as John Oliver puts it, feels like everything you don’t understand about money with everything you don’t understand about computers. That’s how people feel about Bitcoin. That’s the Normie on the street. What they like, what their brain goes through. When you say the word Bitcoin, they think like numbers and like a network and like confusing that that’s like their immediate response. It isn’t like, Oh, Holy grail sound money. The clouds part part open. Like they don’t think that. We do. And so we need to get them to that moment, that aha moment of going, okay, I understand why Bitcoin is valuable. And when it comes to pitching Bitcoin, you can’t start with Bitcoin.

Dan Held:

You have to start with a more primitive version of that, which is you have a problem with your money. People don’t know that they have a problem with their money. So we’re going around and selling Bitcoin. And we’re like, Hey, Hey guys, you should get Bitcoin. And you’re like, it’s sound money. And they’re like, I don’t know what sound money is, and Bitcoin sounds confusing. You know? So we need to start at the most primitive version of the idea, which is you don’t trust your government and you should buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin solves that problem. Not having to trust anyone. You know, these are the, the analogies that you have to make at the top of the funnel. And that’s actually pretty difficult to do. Like you are making them challenge their core assumptions over what is money? What is the government, central banks, banking system.

Dan Held:

I mean, you’re asking them to basically turn their life over and like completely rebuild their mental model of how the world works. So that’s pretty difficult to do. And you know, I think the people at the top have a tough job. The people at the bottom don’t have an easy job either though is you’re, you’re talking about really technical topics. How do you talk about proof of work? How do you talk about security models? How do you talk about UTXOs and coinjoins these all important topics? I don’t think anything is less or more important. I don’t think top or bottom of the funnel is less or more important. I just saw something in the Bitcoin space that annoyed me, which was at the bottom of the funnel, kept making fun of the top of the funnel. Like it was some sort of slimy thing to do.

Dan Held:

And I’m like, we’re all part of the same team here. Those guys are going to hand off the baton, which are the users coming through the top and they’re going to hand them off to us at the bottom. And I just didn’t feel like it made any sense to you know, basically people are being pretty harsh to individuals for being good marketers. And I felt like this has gone past the point of being silly. It’s been damaging to Bitcoin. No one person speaks for Bitcoin. That’s why we each have an individual voice. If someone has a really strong voice, that’s fine. I mean, Andreas Antonopoulous has a strong voice. Pomp has a strong voice. You have a strong voice. I don’t really see this as an issue. I think some people worry, which is a good, good worry. You know that, Oh, what if this voice takes over Bitcoin?

Dan Held:

I just don’t see that happening. And I don’t see one person speaking for Bitcoin. I don’t see one person speaking for an entire industry. You know, I think there’s always a multitude of voices for any industry, whether that be flying cars, Uber and Lyft. You know, there is tons of ride sharing companies. And especially when you look globally. Food delivery companies, like no one speaks for the entire food delivery industry, but there’s a lot of strong voices in it in simply because there’ll never be one person to speak for the entire industry. Because when I go into YouTube and I look at educational channels, there’s ones that I like Dan Held likes, but you might like a different style of learning. We’re never going to find every human on earth that’s going to agree with one marketing pitch. So inevitably there’ll be fragmented. There’s not going to be just one marketer that controls the whole marketing pitch. It’s going to be the it’s going to be fragmented. And that’s, what’s so cool about social media is that each one of us can craft narratives about different topics, lifting weights, eating food, being in Bitcoin, personal finance, et cetera. And you don’t see any one of those dominate too much because each person has a different style of teaching these persons with different content style. And that resonates with specific audiences.

Stephan Livera:

Yep. One other view now I don’t necessarily agree with this whole, this view, but there might be some in there in the community who would say something like, look, you’re spending way too much time talking about audience and narratives. Why aren’t we spending more time building tools and products and like actual Bitcoin wallets and services and things like that. Why aren’t we building more tools instead of talking about narratives?

Dan Held:

Yeah. Another good question. I think I’ve been, you know, I’ve been in for eight years and I don’t mean to keep harping on this. I’ve just seen a lot of shit. There are an over-indexing of developers building shiny things versus those shiny things, solving problems. And these are also manifested in DeFi products and tokens, shiny things, looking to solve a problem. They’re a solution looking for a problem. In other words, and a lot of Bitcoin tools that I’ve seen built, typically you don’t have an empathetic UX focused person where they go, okay, what is the user experience and how is this solving something? It’s a developer who made a lot of money in Bitcoin and they say, I want to make a wallet. It’s like, okay, cool. Well, how is this differentiated from every other wallet? And there’ll be, they’ll say that word BIP, but I’m like, I don’t think anyone cares about BIPS.

Dan Held:

Like I do, but a normie doesn’t an normie doesn’t care about BIPS. And like, you shouldn’t tell them what BIP it is. You should tell them what it does. Well with this one, you can have individual UTXO selection, cool. More granular wallet control, maybe, you know, so firstly, do we, you know, Bitcoin function is extremely basic when you buy Bitcoin as digital Gold and HODL it, there’s not a lot you do with it. You HODL it and there’s better interfaces for hardware, wallets, backups, exchanges, et cetera. But there’s not like this infinite surface area of like, Oh, this is a new app store. There’s going to be 10 million apps. So I think there’s a bit of an over-indexing in the space on developers. And we see that systemic across Bitcoin and other parts of the blockchain crypto space when it comes to UX design and marketing, I think we see a huge, we can see a huge gap there except over on the ICO side.

Dan Held:

So you cannot simultaneously claim that marketing doesn’t work and look at Ethereum and ICOs and be like, it works. XRP? I mean, these are very good marketing teams that I’ve have propagated and crafted. Great, great marketing. I mean the dApp platform was brilliant and you’ve got to remember back. In back when this was starting to formulate for Ethereum apps were the hot thing. Like Airbnb is an app. Uber was an app. You know, all these top companies are apps. And all of these top companies were apps. And I think that when we saw Ethereum’s narrative back then they pitched a perfectly, it’s a decentralized app. Oh, I mean, that sounds so cool. Right? Like who, wasn’t excited about that idea? If you didn’t know how blockchains work, you’re like, Oh, that sounds phenomenal. And so you cannot simultaneously say marketing doesn’t work, Bitcoin doesn’t need it. And also look at ICOs and other protocols and see how their marketing has worked and claim it doesn’t. It’s mutually exclusive. You cannot hold both of those thoughts simultaneously that it doesn’t work, but then look at the space and see that it does and somehow not reconcile that.

Stephan Livera:

I see. Yeah. I guess the only other counter I could think of potentially they might say they might distinguish that someone might say, well, those ICOs we’re able to just kind of keep promising and promising and kind of marketing kind of a false vision, if you will, whereas Bitcoin, they might, they might say it’s something that over the long run it’s going to prove itself out and therefore does not need marketing. What would you say to those people?

Dan Held:

Ripple’s been around for seven years and your fiat monetary system has been around for decades. So actually sorry, generations.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah.Yeah. That’s I think that’s a fair point. I think I think it’s one of those things where look there certainly are some downsides and, you know, I guess there are some more kind of cringy tactics and maybe that’s a subjective perception, but again, everyone has to kind of hammer that out in the marketplace for ideas. And we can, I guess be a little more effective in how we communicate about Bitcoin. And I think that’s something we can all strive for. I’m always striving for that too. So look, Dan I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you. Do you have any closing thoughts to leave for the listeners in terms of why should they care about trying to craft their own little marketing message?

Dan Held:

Yeah, so I think we’re the best chance at Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the best chance we have at freedom. Do people care about their privacy? No, they don’t. They don’t run a VPN app on their phone. Do you have one running right now? Probably not. I don’t either. I forgot too. I’ve got it on my phone, but do I do it every time? Not really. We’ve seen people’s privacy you know, the NSA and the FBI increasingly creep in on privacy rights across the world. We don’t see people standing up for other rights, but the one last thing you’re going to stand up for. The one thing that all humans will care about, and I know that they will is their money. They will care about their money. And so I think that we can instill the idea of libertarian ideology of freedom by starting with money and that’s Bitcoin.

Dan Held:

Bitcoin if they start to believe in it, they start to question the nature of the reality. They start to question why things are the way they are and that from that inception of Bitcoin, then believing in that, that bleeds over into everything else. Then they start to challenge, well, why don’t I have more privacy, et cetera, making sure Bitcoin succeeds is my life’s mission. I’ve been in this space for eight years. I have seen these ebb and flow of narratives and I’ve seen Bitcoin almost died multiple times, but it hasn’t. And that’s incredible. And I want to ensure that as it starts to challenge bigger and bigger challengers, that Bitcoin’s size of the market and resiliency of the network is large enough and the faith of the handlers in Bitcoin is strong enough. You know, the peaks of these markets are set by speculators, but the floors are set by HODLers.

Dan Held:

If they didn’t understand Bitcoin, then the price would go to zero because they wouldn’t have the faith and trust and belief in it. And so I want to create a hyper resilient Bitcoiner HODLer base that really understands Bitcoin. And I want to make sure that base is as big as possible. And then when you make Bitcoin succeed, as soon as possible, I don’t want to wait till I’m 50 years old to see Bitcoin succeed. I’d rather it happen sooner than later. I think it’s very much succeeded, so far but we have big challenges coming up ahead of us and we need as many people on our side as possible. And marketing is the way that it’s going to get there.

Stephan Livera:

Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Dan, how can listeners find you online?

Dan Held:

Well, as we mentioned before, I’m across a couple of different social media channels danheld.com/blog for long form content. You’ve got @danheld on Twitter on LinkedIn. It’s also Dheld and just starting my YouTube channel, but that’s also Dan Held as well. So it’s basically where you Google Dan Held trying to propagate Bitcoin’s narrative. I actually even have a podcast on Spotify and iTunes. I don’t post to it very often, but I have started to read my articles and post that because some people like to listen, they don’t like to read. So each one of these is an attempt to propagate the narrative of Bitcoin. And if anyone wants any tips, like I’ll respond publicly on Twitter in terms of some of my tactics. I don’t mind sharing what I’m doing. If a lot of Bitcoiners DM me and we’ve gone back and forth and I’ve learned things from them and them from me, so anyways, that’s where you can find me. Thanks for listening and thanks for having me.

Stephan Livera:

Excellent. Well, thanks for joining me, Dan and listeners, you can find my stuff online at stephanlivera.com. If you enjoyed the show, make sure you retweet and share it out. I think that’s basically it for this one. So thanks everyone. We’ll see you guys in the citadels.