Why crypto marketing feels a decade behind web2

When we built our first product, we didn't bring in a marketer.

We weren’t cheap, it just never occurred to us that we needed one. We were builders with a thing we thought was cool, and we assumed cool was enough.

“Build it and they will come” was the default crypto mindset and a big part of why the marketing lags here. 

And we were a textbook case for it.

Web2 spent fifteen-plus years turning marketing into an actual discipline: funnels, cohorts, retention curves, attribution, and everything else that came with finding out what's working and then doing more of it. 

Having enough of a line from spend to signup to purchase to makes marketing measurable, and therefore repeatable. But none of that was possible with wiring crypto had. 

You can see the contrast in AI right now. Agustín (do Rego) from WYCF who contributed to a module in our W3A marketing course, called it when we spoke and he’s 100% spot on. 

AI marketing looks clean and polished and is weirdly mature for only being mainstream since 2022. Mainly because it's the same web2 teams carrying their playbook over as they integrate AI into their products or build new ones around it. 

Crypto never really got that hand-off at scale. A lot of the people running growth here came from within crypto, so the skill transfer never happened at the level it should have. And a lot of them thought we needed to rebuild everything from scratch because the tech is new.

This problem is really visible in what projects actually ask for. 

When we ran Outposts as a B2B tool, our whole bet was that projects wanted to talk to their existing users. But they didn't. Pretty much everyone wanted the same thing: more users.

And they're right to want it. Growth is the job and it's what everyone gets measured on.

In web2, "more users" has become disciplined; teams interrogate their own growth instead of just reporting it.

Crypto too often stops at “more users,” while making that number harder to trust in the first place.

Wallets are not user accounts. Poor incentives attract behavior that looks like growth. To make matters worse, social activity happens off-chain while product usage happens on-chain where one person can look like five wallets. All very complex and difficult to measure.

So crypto got very good at producing visible activity without always knowing whether that activity represented actual growth. If crypto had borrowed more from web2 instead of treating itself as a completely separate world, we would have asked the difficult questions much earlier.

If you're running marketing for a web3 product, you should be asking questions like: Where did our users come from? What did they do next? Were they retained? Were they incremental? What were they worth? Could we get more of them at this cost?

That is the machinery web2 has built. Not perfectly, but seriously enough that “we got users” eventually becomes “we know which growth is actually working.”

A marketing campaign can hand you a clean-looking result: you spent this and got that. But whether those users were real, whether they stayed, whether they came back, and whether your spend actually caused it takes more work. It takes measurement machinery most teams never built.

None of this means crypto marketers are worse at the job. They were handed a worse toolkit.

The teams that win from here on won’t be the ones with the cleverest meme. They’ll be the ones that finally bring real growth discipline to crypto: tying marketing back to on-chain behavior, putting budget behind the channels that work and optimizing for quality, not quantity.

Boring, unglamorous, and still rare.