How Developer Marketing Works on the Blockchain

Mark:

Today we're talking about developer marketing with Adelyn Zhou of Chainlink. One of the great things about crypto is that everything is open and composable. And that means developers can develop their applications using any other blockchain and any other application and compose them in a game, could wrap in another DeFi protocol and a DeFi protocol could wrap in yet another DeFi protocol to create structured products. And when a project gets a lot of developers using it, it defines an ecosystem. And the blockchains and applications that create large ecosystems tend to have network effects and help the project where the chain persist and create a lot of value for everyone involved.

And so it's really important to understand these ecosystems and how projects attract other developers to use and compose that project. But it seems really mysterious and hard how to know if a project's doing that well and how they do it at all. And there's got to be a massive fight for developers. So I'm really interested to learn more about that. Adelyn is an expert on that. And perhaps no company has figured out how to do this better than Chainlink and more deliberately. So Adelyn, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge with us.

Adelyn Zhou:

Absolutely. As I mentioned, really excited to be part of this podcast and to share more about how to grow your ecosystem, bring developers and other parts of the Web3 stack right into your community.

Mark:

Awesome. So why don't we start out by asking you a question about yourself. What makes you such a credible expert and guide on this topic? Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and contextualize your role in Chainlink?

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah, so I've been in the blockchain space now for I guess, almost five years, which from a tenure standpoint maybe gives me a viewpoint since I've seen multiple bear cycles now and bull cycles. I've been through, not all of it, but at least in the near past. In my background specifically, I've always been interested and excited about emerging technologies and how to make them applicable to what we do. And so how do you bring technologies into full forefront? And so prior, to this I was working at companies like Amazon. I've also done work in machine learning and AI, and then got really excited about Web3 and got down the crypto rabbit hole and then have been at Chainlink the last few years.

And at Chainlink I started as one of the very first business people. Chainlink was fewer than 10 people at the time that I joined. And I helped work with our team to think through a lot of the early strategies, the building blocks, how do you get people to understand what is the oracle problem that we're solving and help them understand how Chainlink could be and is now a fundamental building block of many developer stacks and many projects.

And then I guess for the folks who might not be as familiar, Chainlink is a Oracle and what we do is we connect blockchains and dapps on blockchains to APIs, to data, to computation, to systems. Basically, connect what's on the blockchain to things that are outside. And what's outside could be systems like APIs or it could be another blockchain or it could be another dapp. And blockchains by itself are not able to communicate externally. And so you need a system like an oracle to provide that communication layer for the blockchain, be on chain and off chain. And as such, at Chainlink, we have over almost 2,000 projects using Chainlink on the base layer, including leading protocols such as Aave, Synthetix and countless different games and insurance. Basically, we power a large part of the Web3 ecosystem.

Mark:

Awesome. And we go back quite a ways as well. We know each other a bit from college and business school, at Harvard.

Adelyn Zhou:

Pre Web3.

Mark:

Pre crypto.

Adelyn Zhou:

Pre crypto. And I feel like my friends, you have the pre crypto friends and then the post crypto friends

Mark:

And then the few people who were there for both.

Adelyn Zhou:

That's true. The few people who had the conviction early on to jump into this crazy space.

Mark:

Yeah, yeah. Great. Okay, so 2,000 projects are building on Chainlink. That is a lot. Maybe we can start by understanding a little bit about the space. How many developers do we really think are out there in total there? There's a lot of, I mean DeFi is complex to use. I'm not even sure how many DeFi users there really are, and then you zero into DeFi developers. And I wonder if you have any view on what the actual size of the space really is.

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah. I think the size of developers, definitely can be much, much bigger. I think the latest reports from Electric Capital and other places pinpoint in the tens of thousands. I think during the last year a lot of developers kind of came in and started looking at it and playing with it. We'll see how many people still stay, given the state and the nature of where the industry is today. But I think at least the core people, the real believers who we really care about, will be here for the long run and our going to continue to build during this time. But I guess to your question overall, maybe tens of thousands, so not the millions that we all are working towards to bring in.

Mark:

What strikes me about that is if we're talking tens of thousands and maybe the ones that are really serious or measured in the thousands, you could conceivably have a team that has conversations with all of those. So you think about developer ecosystems in traditional Web2 or software and there's just no way that Google could talk with all the developers that integrate with their services. But in Web3 you actually could. And so it really, in some ways, I guess I'm wondering whether it's really these days more of a marketing motion or a sales motion as you engage partners, developers. Yeah,

Adelyn Zhou:

I think it's both. It's always been a combination. Historically, the difference marketing sales is marketing goes out and helps lay and get the brand awareness and let people understand what it is. And then sales can be much more efficient, and then when you go conversation. If you don't have good marketing, then the sales people will be starting at the very basics and knocking down on doors that are completely closed. But if you have a good marketing or in a lot of cases this time, strong developer relations, developers already know who you are. They raise their hand and be like, "Hey, I'm interested in you." And then the conversation that you have with them, these projects are going to be much, much, much more fruitful. You're not going to start out the basics of what is an oracle or what do you guys do. You can dive much faster into why chainlink and why is Chainlink more secure, more decentralized and better for your project.

And then to your point about marketing to developers and being a smaller pool right now, I think that's why you see a lot of projects in this space too. We're not just focused on the developers here today, if there's tens of thousands, but trying to help bring in the developers from the Web2 space into this space as well. So there's a lot of education that we've also helped do to help those developers understand one, what is Web3, and two, how do you get started building on it if you are interested. And that pool is massive. Just think about all your friends who've probably asked you, "Mark, what should I look at? How do I get into Web3? What is all that?" It's same thing happening on the developer side, developers asking their friends, "How do I start programming. How do I start making a smart contract? What should I do?" So we want to be there for those conversations.

Mark:

So I guess there's two elements to that. One is penetrating the existing community and population, and the other is expanding the size of that community and population. And I guess it makes sense that early stage, you just kind of go after the people who already understand the space. And as you saturate that, then you start trying to expand the universe of potential developers.

Adelyn Zhou:

And I see that especially with projects in this stage that they are in. Really early young, new projects, you don't have much bandwidth to grow the pie, but larger ecosystems and maybe layer ones and blockchains, you have more resources. And so you're looking to expand the pie rather than just make your slice bigger.

Mark:

I mean that seems like a big turning point and I struggle a lot with this idea of ecosystem. I wonder how you define ecosystem. At what point does finding a few developers and having a few B2B relationships turn into an ecosystem? And at what point do you decide, hey, we got to grow the number of people who we even are aware of the space. What are these stages of growth in communities and ecosystems?

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah. Ecosystem can be a very big term. What I usually think about is ecosystem is everybody that could possibly touch a project, and that includes both the core, maybe community, your fans, your crypto enthusiasts. It could include your users and these might be other projects that use your system. If you are more of a B2D, business to developer, project, it could be your node operators, your validators, it could be even your auditors, third party legal firms. It can be honestly anybody that's stuck to your ecosystem or your project and helping make it more successful.

If you think about some of the layer ones, for example, really important to them might be the investors, like the VCs that are part of their ecosystem because they fund those projects that are on NEAR or on Filecoin or so on, and they help make those successful. So the VCs, you could say are part of the ecosystem as well. And so I would say ecosystems is more broadly defined as anybody that can be supportive and help make your project grow.

Mark:

But it does strike me that there are projects where they're selling a service and let's say it's AWS or an RPC endpoint and there's some other companies who are using that service and let's say paying them.

Adelyn Zhou:

Yep.

Mark:

And then there's services, they're ecosystems where... And I think that would count as an ecosystem. And then there's ecosystem where there seems to be this network effect where people are organically finding new ways to use things. It seems like there's some momentum in and of itself. And when I think of ecosystem, I guess I kind of start thinking about that. And so I wonder if you have any reflections on this. Is there any kind of turning point at which something takes on a life of its own?

Adelyn Zhou:

I think that when the [inaudible 00:11:44] takes a life of its own is when other people can build and it's not just a customer or vendor relationship, but it's one plus one is more than the whole. I think that's what you're saying. And this comes into play a lot of times when you have maybe channel partners and alliances and other BD relationships, where a project might not just use you but be built on you. And then others, like you're saying, composability, build on top of that. And so I think in the traditional Web2 space, is much more sometimes of a vendor client or vendor customer relationship. But in Web3, because of the composability, because of the interlock nature of the industry, a lot of times you see different people building on top of each other and then when they're all together on one ecosystem and then that just expands, right? And I think that's the difference.

Mark:

Makes sense. Interesting. Okay. And how do you judge the quality of an ecosystem? Because there's a bunch of different ecosystems out there. You have an ecosystem, Ethereum has an ecosystem, Uniswap has an ecosystem. Some of these overlap, some of them don't. But they're all ecosystems. So how do you judge their health when you look at them?

Adelyn Zhou:

I think there's a couple metrics. One, how many pillars are there in those ecosystems? What is the actual size? And then of course, there's the quality. How deep are those relationships? How embedded are those ecosystem projects part of that, or core layer one or core function. So I think it's a combination of quality and quantity together to judge that. And then the quality would be how deep are those relationships, how active are they and how beneficial is the relationship between the two?

Mark:

There's this concept in academia I guess, where you're trying to judge how important is a concept, how seminal is a work. And one way you can do that is just by counting citations.

Adelyn Zhou:

Yes.

Mark:

If something's been cited a million times, then it is probably more seminal than other stuff. And it turns out what's the most cited publication ever, it's the Bible. And actually, well not science, that's pretty seminal in culture and society. There's definitely an ecosystem around the Bible, that's for sure.

Adelyn Zhou:

Definitely. In a way, the citation is also kind of a page rank of which website. And so it's like how interconnected you are.

Mark:

Yeah. I wondered, in developer ecosystems, do you think it's as simple as number of independent companies or developers using a core product that defines the importance and size of that ecosystem, or do you think there's some other more complex or nuanced metric?

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah, I think it's probably more than just, the base is number, right? That's easy. You can be number of GitHub repos, number of projects or something like that. But then that goes back to the base of number of customers. It's kind of like that. But if you're really trying to judge the health, there's also ways to be how many other people are making a successful business by building on top of you. So they might not be actually using your product, but they kind of layer on top of it. Or take the example of the VCs, how many other VCs are now very successful funds because they've invested in your projects or how many other third party developer dev shops are there building on your agency to build? And how many of those are helping enterprise customers maybe help bring that, if that's important to your ecosystem. So I think it's more than just a pure number.

Mark:

What do you think are some ecosystems, developer ecosystems, in crypto that you think are especially impressive? I would ask ones that you think are unimpressive, but I don't want to make you speak negatively of anyone. So let's focus on who you think are impressive.

Adelyn Zhou:

Well, you mentioned Ethereum earlier. I think throughout it all, they have an incredible developer ecosystem. Devcon, the conference they have is always an incredibly well run with really great research coming out of it. And I think that we all look to as a very good organic system. I think Cosmos has been very interesting in the recent few months. They really have shown that they can band together and there's all these now app chains that are coming out of the Cosmos ecosystem. I feel like that's really a community bottoms up type of ecosystem that has come into fruition. And it's been exciting to watch that.

Polygon, I think they've done a really interesting job of seeding varied ecosystems across just for verticals. I think Polygon Studios and then focus on games and their way of working with enterprise and traditional Web2 companies I think has been really fascinating to watch as well.

And then even Filecoin. I think they have a really interesting grants program and VC model where I think they work with almost like 400 different projects every single year to help seed the Filecoin ecosystem. So you'll see everyone has a different flavor, but they are all for the same purpose of how do you grow that core ecosystem.

Mark:

Yeah, interesting. One thing that strikes me about all of that is that in crypto, a lot of what helps these ecosystems grow is just a massive amount of capital available to help start them. Like in Web2, you don't have a company starting its own VC firm to invest in companies that use its service. Whereas, in crypto, a lot of these places have raised an enormous amount of money or have tokens with an enormous value and so they can really invest in and support people building in that ecosystem. How important do you think is capital to creating a developer ecosystem in crypto and how important do you think actual execution of marketing and developer relations is?

Adelyn Zhou:

I think they're all part of... They're all ingredients into this, I guess super pie or whatever you want to create because you can't not have one. I've seen some projects are really, really successful because they have lots of external VC capital. But the challenge is if you don't have really core builders, once that capital leaves will these core builders actually stay. And so I think we're seeing some of that play out even in today in the industry. And so I think the capital needs to be there to help accelerate. But then you also want a strong community at the basics because people who actually care about your chain or your layer one or two or whatever, because just having capital then doesn't... Otherwise, these developers or whoever will just follow the money and they'll never stay with you. So you have to have a balance of both.

Mark:

Yeah, it makes sense. You need missionaries and mercenaries and if you just use capital, you get mercenaries but not missionaries.

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah. And then if you have just missionaries, it might take them a very, very long time and they need acceleration. So then having both.

Mark:

Yeah, so you got to convert them mercenaries to missionaries.

Adelyn Zhou:

Or maybe help the missionaries be a little more mercenary.

Mark:

Yeah. Okay. So you've done a great job of this. What are the range of things that Chainlink does and what works best?

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah, I would say mean what we've done over the years has also changed. At Chainlink, I am was the chief marketing officer for many, many years. And where we started off is very different even today based on the size. So if you're a founder of a small dapp, what we're doing now is maybe what you'll do a few years down the road as you get to that stage. But for us, I mean core, we have developer relations team, and then part of that we have really strong documentation. That's always been one of the core focuses for us, from day one. We want to enable developers, whether they speak to us or not, to be able to just jump in our docs and play around, play in a sandbox and try it out. That allows your users, the developers, to have an aha moment. And that's probably the most valuable thing.

From there, we have events, virtual hackathons to in person hackathons to meetups to conferences. So you can think of all this as developer marketing events. And then on top of that, we work with a lot of third party developer tools that developers will use in their coding experience or coding journey for creating a dapp. So helping connect with the Moralis and the Alchemys and various different systems to be part of that, I guess that learning experience for a developer and that building experience so that we are in there and makes it easy. Basically, you just want to help developers have a seamless experience, whether it's jumping the docs or building with us or asking questions in an easy way where there's someone that responds. So I would say we do all of that.

Mark:

Makes sense. Okay. Got it. And are there things that, over your journey, because you've been a pretty integral part of this for a long time, and Chainlink really does have some of the best developer marketing engagement programs I've seen in crypto. Have there been things that you thought would work or that you put a lot of effort into and turned out not to?

Adelyn Zhou:

I think some of this is still proving out. I think for us, do you do paid advertising for getting developers onto your platform? Do you test out Twitter ads and Google ads or something like that, to get drive awareness of let's say your hackathons? But then the developers that do come from those paid ads, are they actually the quality ones that you want? Are they from the geographies that you're looking for or are they more mercenary that just want to try to earn a bounty? So I think some of that's still to be played out.

Other things, we've tested so many things and then also things that have worked two years ago and then we pioneered it and then a lot of other people then have, like we said, have watched us and I would say replicated and copied a lot of our playbooks. So imitation I guess is the biggest force of flattery. And then that forces us to continue to move forward faster. So what's worked for us in the past no longer works even today because everyone else kind of piles in and does the same thing now. So we have to always be probably not just one, but two or three steps faster with everyone else and continue trying out various things. So things at work probably don't many of them today, and we're always pioneering the next thing.

Mark:

Are there big mistakes you see other new ecosystems doing in their marketing that you would advise them to lean away from or you think are misguided?

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah. I think one, they should probably think about what is the flywheel that they are creating, what is the strategy that they have. Are they doing a VC funding play? As we said with some projects where they have VC funds and then it goes in circles. But then if you're doing that playbook, how do you make sure these projects stay with you so that when the next VC comes around that they don't all go leaving and following that? Or, are you trying to do a grassroots bottoms up approach? And in that case, how do you support them and how do you accelerate their growth? I wouldn't say there's anything I've seen extremely wrong or anything. I would just advise if you figure out what is unique to your project. There are so many different layer ones and now layer twos and action and subnets and super nets and things like that.

So what makes you unique? How are you going to differentiate outside all of the noise that is out there? There's so much content now. There's so many, I guess influencers, there's so many players. So how are you going to differentiate yourself out of the noise so that developers come to you so that you have something different? So that's what I'd say. I'd say you can look in a, maybe replicate some of these successful things you've seen in other playbooks, but then really have a sense and point of view on what makes your project different and how you're going to succeed and think about what kind of flywheel you can create as part of that strategy.

Mark:

Makes sense. And it sounds like Chainlink is trying to build other adjacent ecosystems too. So you have oracle price feeds. That's been pretty successful and it seems like increasingly you're doing cross-chain, is that right?

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah. I guess we started with oracle, that was a whole concept, but the very first use case were price feeds and very popularized with DeFi a couple years ago. And then that still continues to be a super popular product. And then on top of that, we've added VRF, which is verified random numbers that has been really successful with NFTs and gaming products. We added automation. So a lot of projects are now starting to realize that many parts of their, I guess their projects are actually centralized and the automation part needs decentralization. So that's become very successful as well. And then actually, it's been the last couple weeks given everything's happened with FTX, one of the products we've had for a long time actually is called Proof of Reserves. And that's been now back in the limelight.

People are like, "Oh my God, this is what we all needed." And we're like, "Yes, that's why we've had this project for a very long time, helping people prove the amount of reserves that they have on exchange or in a system." And so I'd say that's become very popular right now. And then in addition to that, cross-chain is something that we've been working, on our Chainlink CCIP protocol. And as I mentioned, oracles, it doesn't have to be just blockchain to API, blockchain to data, it can be blockchain to blockchain as well. And what we've seen is one of the biggest challenges to Web3 through adoption is the siloed nature of all these different chains. And so we're just taking our expertise in connectivity and bridges, bridging systems and data to apply that to this now multi-chain world through cross-chain solutions.

Mark:

Makes sense, because a lot of what needs to happen in order to do anything between chains is just passing information from one to the other, and that is ultimately kind of an oracle problem.

Adelyn Zhou:

Yep.

Mark:

Why are random numbers so important?

Adelyn Zhou:

Oh, yeah. Random numbers is, actually, creating randomness is one of a old computer science problem. It's actually really complicated to truly create randomness. And then on the blockchain, it's even harder. Historically, blockchains have created randomness by using the block hash and different things like that, but that's actually not random because you have that seed and then you can use the algorithms to go backtrack and figure it out. So randomness can be really important. Let's say you're doing a NFT drop and you want to make sure that the NFT is actually fairly dropped to everybody in the community rather than to friends, especially back in the day when NFTs were millions of dollars each. And so with Chainlink VRF, you can guarantee the randomness of distribution of that NFT. Same thing goes for, let's say a loop box in a game, can you make sure that the characteristics in that loop box are randomly generated? And then even projects like raffles and things like that, how can you guarantee that you are picking winners randomly? And so using a product like VRF can enable that.

Mark:

Interesting. Cool. So very developer native tools that developers know they need and is actually very core to what they're building, but might not even be apparent to users of the eventual product. Makes sense. I want to just kind of ask you a couple open ended questions about marketing since in addition to just kind of developers and ecosystem growth, you've been leading marketing as a whole for Chainlink. But before I ask you that broad question, it sounds like you've done paid advertising in crypto, have you been able to do performance based advertising? Because my understanding was that Google, Facebook, et cetera, banned crypto oriented advertising and so made performance very difficult.

Adelyn Zhou:

We do very little of that, of paid. I know some projects probably do a lot more. We historically haven't, we do more of the organic channels. So it definitely is challenging for those. And thankfully, we're not in the business of buying lots of users or traffic. For those who do, there's guidances, having really good relationship with your Google and Twitter account rep is helpful. But for a long time, agreed, you couldn't even use the word DeFi in a ad. And so it's like, all right, or NFT. And so basically, it's very complicated to do that. But there are still ways, but you have to do it much, much more carefully.

Mark:

Interesting. So the broad question is, what are the other differences between marketing and crypto on blockchain versus in Web2, and what would you say to marketers who want to get into crypto to help them understand the difference?

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah. I would say it has gone a little bit closer than when I first joined the industry years ago. Back then, Web3, crypto was like, oh, crazier space. Now it's a little bit more buttoned down. There are now more tools. Back then there were even fewer tools. Like in Web2, you had all these marketing tools at your disposal. And then here in Web3, you're like nothing in grades with Telegram or Discord or whatnot. It's gotten a little bit better. Similar-

Mark:

You can't even trust your Google Analytics.

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah, exactly. The privacy concerned people who tend to use Web3 don't have cookie tracking on, you're using a Brave browser, so how do you track them? So yeah, you have to completely change your mindset on what your benchmarked on and what tools you have at your disposal. I would say other things on top of the tools and analytics stack that you use is the focus on community. That doesn't really happen in Web2 very much. You have a SaaS product and you don't have that often a very [inaudible 00:34:53] community that loves you and will tattoo you on their bodies and will fly cross country for your conferences. That doesn't really happen. In Web3, you have that, and that's really a core part of your ecosystem, your brand, and these people who truly are art and believers in what you do. And that's really, really important.

So I'd say the focus on community is really, really different. And then last, I would say maybe the order of operations on how you grow could be different. So in Web2, a lot of times, the first people you might hire is a product marketing manager, whereas in Web3, you might hire a comms person or a community person first and then build in some of these more traditional Web2 type of marketing functions. So yeah, so I'd say tools and systems are different. Can focus on community and then the order of operations on how you build out a community, how you build out your marketing function is different here.

Mark:

How would you describe community to someone from Web2?

Adelyn Zhou:

I think it's really just your believers and your followers who really live and breathe and love what you do. I don't think it's any different than the early adopters who loved Peloton or CrossFit or even like you were saying the Bible, like a religion. So I would say it's these people who really believe in the vision, the mission, and the values that your project espouses. And they incorporate that as part of their lives, and they feel like they are part of what you're building. And in Web3, it's different too because they can be more of a part of it. They can have ownership of the tokens that you have. Whereas in Web2, you can't really do that until maybe a company is public. And even then it feels very different. Whereas here, you can be part of it, you can get a token, especially if something's a DAO too, you really are part of the decision making process of that. You really have an ownership stake in the success of a project more than you do anywhere else.

Mark:

Yeah, that makes total sense. There's something around shared holdings and incentives that I think makes people much more willing to give all of themselves and identify with a project, where otherwise it just feels a little bit more arm's length.

Adelyn Zhou:

Exactly.

Mark:

Yeah. Awesome. Out of curiosity, are there any books that you'd recommend to people who are interested in the kind of things that you do or just books that you really love broadly that you want to recommend?

Adelyn Zhou:

I would say a book in general that I like, it's not actually Web3 at all, it's by, and Mark, you might have even take in this class, Clay Christensen. He wrote a book, he wrote some amazing books, like Innovator's Dilemma and things like that. But one book I really liked was, How Will You Measure Your Life? And it takes business concepts and helps you apply them to help you make decisions like, what do I want to do with my career, or how much time should I spend with my children? Or how do I choose A and B? And it gives a really cool framework for that. Not quite Web3, but I think it's a good reflective book and that helps you guide you if you're ever like, what do I want to do with my life?

Mark:

Makes sense. It is a good book. I'll second that.

Adelyn Zhou:

Yeah.

Mark:

Adelyn, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your knowledge with us. If people want to learn more and follow you or Chainlink, how should they do that?

Adelyn Zhou:

You can follow me on Twitter, AdelynZhou, and then Chainlink you can follow us at, @Chainlink. But I guess given where everything is going with Twitter these days, we don't know what's going to happen. So maybe you could find us on our website chain.link as well. Yeah.

Mark:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

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