Credit to @amartin for leading all of this!
We started with nothing but an idea; to create a reverse job fair to bring more marketing talent to the briliant products built on NEAR Protocol. With new ideas, comes uncharted paths and challenges. Here’s a look at a few of the challenges the Gen C team overcame along the way to turn nothing into requests from participants to throw it again.
- In less than 3 weeks, we created an event platform from scratch
- Out of the gate, Splashthat was recommended to use due its intercompatibility with the rest of the NEAR ecosystem. Though nice from a UI perspective, the software didn’t have the features needed to run an event. Therefore, we had to make a change.
- Given the feature outlook of what the event would need, we figured using a hackathon software would work great. Yet, after several meetings with DevPost, they decided that they did not want a marketing event to be held through their software. They barred us from using their site.
- Following Devpost, we tried Gitcoin. CEO was out of town for 2 weeks. That would be too long to wait with an event right around the corner.
- Get a license from a DevPost approved agency was the creative hack we tried next. Technically, we had the green light. But it would’ve costed $35k-50k. Onto the next.
- After striking out 4 times to find a host for an event, and the clock ticking down, the most viable option was to build our own platform. Everything had to pause for several days to scopeout the feature set and what was needed on the tech stack. In 1.5 weeks we built a cms event platform from scratch.
- Speakers and sponsors from outside the NEAR Ecosystem participated in a NEAR sponsored event
- With little to offer, we were able to gather 20+ speakers with a cumulative following of 350,000+ people to talk about web3 growth strategies, marketing tips, and user aquisition tools.
- To do this with little to no social media or branding, we leveraged our personal web3 networks, hired contractors within web3 circles, and offered payment to those that qualified to get it done.
- As everyone in Web3 knows, time is the moat. Convincing sponsors to spend the time to participate in this conference was challenging but we pulled out the stops to get this done.
- We flew out to several in person events to do 1 thing: talk about our event.
- We outreached to over 200+ companies about participating as a sponsor. We even got several telegram accounts banned in the process.
- We again called in favors from our personal networks.
- The difficulties of crypto advertising on traditional Web2 rails was mapped and conquered
- Web 2 advertising is hard and frustrating. We knew this going in to the Gen C event but boy did it prove to give us a run for our money this team. Even while advertising and event (and not crypto or a coin!), here is everywhere we got banned:
- Youtube
- Facebook Groups
- Craigslist
- UpWork
- So while the first couple weeks of advertising on the main channels looked scary, we adapted and conquered. We were able to drive 164,000 visits to the website and 208,695 views across the 30 days of streams. Through our social channels, we were able to reach 8.3MM tweet impressions, and 107k profile visits. What channels did we end up conquering?
- EventBrite
- Meetup
- UpWork
- Web 2 advertising is hard and frustrating. We knew this going in to the Gen C event but boy did it prove to give us a run for our money this team. Even while advertising and event (and not crypto or a coin!), here is everywhere we got banned:
