Crypto companies were crashing right, left, and center. Every time we thought it couldn’t get worse, we had a sequel waiting to take us by surprise (or by the balls). 

And this time around, it wasn’t even half-baked, completely shady ICO projects funded by unsuspecting investors, like in 2018. Rather, we saw the big guns of crypto, backed by the smartest investors tumble down and fail to find any support.

The first domino fell when the purported algorithmic stablecoin UST lost stability, causing an avalanche within the Luna network. That further dragged down the LUNA token from $80 dollars to a few cents. 

Source: TradingView

Years from now, on a sunny summer day, when you’re paying for your grandkids’ ice creams using a cryptocurrency, you can tell them, “that’s how $60 billion dollars were wiped off of the crypto market in a matter of days.”

This, however, was just the start. There was no way a $60 billion wipe-off didn’t cause any ripple effect. So, a crypto investment fund called 3AC, which had $10 billion in assets, went bankrupt, further leaving many companies that lent assets to them gasping for air (or funds).

Soon, we saw other major companies like Voyager Digital and Celsius Network bend the knee, or break it.

But in 2022, it didn’t seem like the crypto industry wanted to settle down with the drama. So we had more — the most dramatic (traumatic??) one so far.

A CoinDesk report on Nov. 2 revealed that the financials of the second largest crypto exchange FTX didn’t add up. Over the next week, the world realized that things not only didn’t add up, but in fact, there was nothing to add up to. Thanks to a financial hole bigger than $8 billion in FTX’s books.

That, as you may guess, led to a few other major and minor bankruptcies.

This Day — The Resultant of Those Days

All of what we discussed above combined with multiple other global macroeconomic factors have left the crypto industry in a tight spot.

Crypto market capitalization nose-dived from $3 trillion in November 2021 to below $800 billion at the time of writing (Jan 11, 2022). Very few projects were strong enough to not fall more than 70 to 80%. The worst hit got wiped off almost entirely.

Both retail and institutional investors have once again grown skeptical of the industry. While we’re glad that the SHIBA, DOGE, and the whole sh*tcoin crowd doen’t make a lot of noise anymore, it hurts to see institutional investments reach new lows. 

In November 2021, VCs trusted Web3 projects with over $7 billion. In 2022 November, just $1 billion. Here’s a chart showcasing the decline in VC investments:

Source: DeFi Llama

Talk about trust issues!

The interesting thing is, “trustlessness” in crypto meant we didn’t have to trust any central entity because we could verify every bit of information. It wasn’t a flaw but a feature. 

Not anymore. 

The meaning of the word has changed. People are desperate to find something or someone they can trust. But trust is hard to find here. Good projects… even harder to look for.

The bottomline is, throughout 2022, we’ve been in a pickle more times than we’d be comfortable admitting down the line. What we have to admit, though, is that the industry as a whole learned many lessons.

What Doesn’t Bankrupt You, Makes You Wiser

But first… let’s look at something that’s wrong.

For many, the concluding argument after seeing the crashes and the bankruptcies has been very simple: 

Centralized = bad

Decentralized = good

As a result, you’ll see crypto and Web3 proponents often bring up the events of 2022 to tell you that decentralization and self-custody are the only way forward. That there is no room for centralization in Web3. That everything centralized is evil.

The truth? It’s far from it.

In their current state, decentralized solutions are doing great, but not great enough to serve the masses. Yes, the adoption is rising, as it should, but we’re far away from the point where the UI and UX of these platforms are smooth and easy enough for the layman to use daily.

Self-custody is a great solution. But currently, it is more of a responsibility than an average Joe would want to bear. That’s the reason most users still prefer centralized exchanges.

So, when we talk about lessons from 2022 that we want to take into 2023, we’ll try and steer clear of any maximalist reasoning. 

1. Transparency Trumps All

If we really look close enough, we’ll find, the one major reason we need decentralization is that it promises transparency. Or, to be more precise, no central entity controls what information we can or can’t see. Everything happens in public.

In a lot of cases (NOT ALL), if we can enforce PROVABLE transparency into centralized operations, we won’t particularly need ultimate decentralization of every fabric within that system.

That is to say, yes, most failed projects in 2022 were centralized. But the complete problem didn’t stem from centralization. It was actually the lack of transparency caused because those in control chose to operate in a shady manner. 

If only there was better transparency…. 

After the fall of FTX, most major centralized crypto companies have already started working on being more transparent by publishing proof-of-reserve to tell their users that their assets are secure.

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s definitely a better short to mid-term solution instead of pro-crypto users asking everyone to go full self-custody. 

Centralized crypto entities managing people’s money are definitely going to have a hard time making sure they operate transparently. But that only makes things safer for end users. So, why not?

2. Yield Doesn’t Yield Itself

A cliche is a cliche because it has been tested through time. 

So, we’ll start with one: if something feels too good to be true, it probably is.

For context, consider the 20% yield of Terra-Luna. Or Celsius which offered an 18% yield. Or the numerous other projects that offered insanely high yields and later pulled the plug.

Like we said, the yield doesn’t yield itself.

There has to be some finite source for it. What is it? That’s your question to ask every time you look at such investments and think, let’s go in.

Be more cautious in 2023. There were no free meals. There aren’t going to be this year or the next either.

3. Regulations Aren’t That Bad After All

2022 bankruptcies made many people realize that benign pro-decentralization doesn’t mean we don’t need regulations. 

Good for us.

Hundreds of billions of dollars were lost in crypto in 2022. Livelihoods… shattered. At the end of every bridge that burned down in the last 12 months, there were people. 

And these people now seek justice. Or have already lost hope to get it.

The reason? We didn’t have strong, binding regulations that overlooked the operations of the entities that crashed or defrauded investors. As a result, there is little any legal entity can do to help the investors. 

What we assume is, regulations, if done right, can uplift the industry instead of stifling innovation.

4. Simplicity Before Self-Custody

We’ve already made an argument why instantly asking everyone to self-custody their assets isn’t the smartest move. However, we’re not against self-custody.

In fact, people who can manage to keep their funds in self-custody wallets definitely should. It is, by all means, a better alternative than to have all your funds stashed in a centralized platform. But not everyone is ready for that.

So, in 2023, the aim should be to simplify decentralized products and create easy-to-use self-custody solutions.

Again, the work for that is always in progress. If we look at the last 4 years, Web3 products have come a long way in terms of user experience and design.

However, there’s a lot more work to be done in terms of simplifying things to the extent that if our parents want to use Web3, they can use it without much help from us.

One upcoming solution to look up to is smart contract wallets made possible using account abstraction.

5. Decentralized Solutions will Flourish

Once again, while we’re not decentralization maximalists, we do believe that decentralization has so much to prove in the coming years. The bankruptcies and crashes of 2022 only made it clearer to the world why we need decentralization in the first place

So, even though centralized and decentralized solutions will likely co-exist in the future, people will always have easy access to decentralized alternatives of almost every kind of service.

Building Ships for Severe Winters

Now that the Titanic has struck the iceberg, the ship is already down 1/3rd, and we’re hanging on to floating doors like Rose and Jack, we need to evaluate the options we have.

One is to wait for the other ships (projects) in the ocean to onboard us and take us through the storm. For that, we can look up to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the like.

The other, more long-term option, is to build better ships ready for severe crypto winters. 

And it shouldn’t be that difficult for builders to see why they need to build Web3 projects that promise better potential.

Throughout the last bull cycle, we saw terrible projects raise millions of dollars simply because they used words like “decentralized,” “permissionless,” and “peer-to-peer.”

Times have changed. Investments have slowed down. Investors have learned their lessons. 

It’s going to be far more difficult to raise funds for NFTs that look stupid and do nothing. Or DeFi projects that look different but do the same thing all over again.

What’s good for serious builders is that there’s less noise to deal with. And a lot of good information to focus on, study, research, and find gaps to fill.

If we compare this with the patterns from the last bear cycle, we can say that this bear cycle too will bring about many interesting, innovative projects that go beyond the fluff that we usually see during bull markets.

There are definitely still going to be baseless promises, shallow projects, and people looking to make money off of retail investors. 

But, would we still trust every random project with a big promise as much as we did in the last bull cycle?

You tell me.

It all started when I asked my boyfriend if he could bring me flowers on the next date. 

He nodded, smiled, and said “of course,” followed by an apology for not having done so before.

“No problem, we can always openly share our needs and expectations with each other,” I comforted him.

Seemingly confused and unsure, he responded, “Umm, okay.” 

“Don’t you like the idea?” I asked.

“Oh, no. You can always express what you want. But I’m not sure if I’d be comfortable doing the same.”

And I knew exactly where this was going…

So, my boyfriend, you see, is a software engineer — super geeky and introverted. He can understand the world’s needs and design products for them, but he’d hardly ever been able to communicate his feelings or desires. 

For one, I knew he always needed more intimacy in our relationship, but he never freely communicated the same.

So, this time, I wasn’t giving up.

“Oh, why?” I enquired gently.

“Well, I think it’s a terrible strategy. In a relationship, you should guess what the other person wants through trial and error… And then see how it goes,” he stared into my eyes as if it was not obvious.

At that moment, I completely zoomed out. Not because of what he said — it’s very likely that a huge proportion of the relationships today operate that way. And few ever seem to complain about it. 

As irrelevant as it may be to our relationship-focused conversation, I zoomed out because my first thought after he said that was, “Sh*t. That’s how most Web3 founders operate with their products too.”

The Relationship

It struck me how a romantic relationship is similar to the relationship between a product and a customer.

Most web3 founders, like my boyfriend, think that they need not tell the users about the product. The assumption they back that thought with is, “if a product is really good enough, the customer WILL use it and share feedback.”

No wonder this often doesn’t work well for them.

Why?

In the case of a relationship, you need to understand that the person you’re with sees the world differently than you do.

It’s stupid to put your partner to the test by seeing if they bring you flowers or buy you a gaming console, and then decide if they win.

For the majority, this wouldn’t make sense, and they would still simply expect the other person to try and meet their needs without asking.

The logic: if my partner “loves” me, they should offer what I want without me having to ask for it.

Most first-time founders feel the same way about their products.

Founders put months or even years of effort into building a product. Then they launch it and put it to test by sharing it with their audience and seeing if they “like it.”

And to me, it makes total sense.

That’s the way you know if you made a good product, right?

Unfortunately, NO. It doesn’t work like that. Neither in relationships nor with products (sigh).

So, Where Do We Start?

When I asked my boyfriend for flowers, there was a fundamental assumption that he loves me and means well.

Because if it was not, my first thought could have been, “He never bought me flowers. Maybe he doesn’t love me or doesn’t consider what would make me happy.”

Unknowingly, in a lot of relationships, this is exactly what the troubled person tells themselves. As a result, they resent their partner, or in extreme cases, decide to part ways.

In my case of conflict, I started with the fundamental question, “does this person love me, and is this the person I want to be with?”

If the answer is no, I’d have had a bigger problem to solve.

But for me, it was a sure yes.

I know that my boyfriend is loving and caring in his own beautiful ways, but probably he never considered that bringing flowers would make me happy.

Or maybe he wanted to, but he never prioritized it or forgot about it. Either way, I wouldn’t know what he “wanted to do for me.”

And the only way to get what I wanted (flowers) was to simply express.

Now, to be honest, it stung to have to tell him that I wanted him to get me flowers. It would be better if he just “knew it.” 

But clearly, he did not.

So, even though asking for what I want is a lot of “work” (mostly because we are not trained to think of it like that), it’s important that we do. 

Put another way, you start by defining the goal.

The goal of a relationship is to make you feel happier, more complete, and good about yourself when you are with your partner compared to when you are not.

In this case, it wouldn’t make sense for you to test the other person without clearly communicating what you need. 

It would be wrong to judge them based on whether they bring you flowers or make efforts for more intimacy if you haven’t clearly stated your needs/desires.

You need to think of this as a tennis doubles game. Both of you are not on different teams. You’re playing on the same side—playing to win. And you want the other person to make the right moves so that both of you can win together.

For your relationship to work out in the long term, you both first have to understand that the other person sees the world differently than you do. Same applies to your partner. And that’s why, both of you may need/want different things to make you feel you’re in a happy relationship.

You have to openly and clearly ask for the things you want without judging them or making them feel bad for asking it. And you want to make sure you make your partner comfortable to ask for what they’d want.

You ofc cannot force the other person into this. The best you can do is help them understand that communicating what they want is the only way you’ll know of it. There’s just no other way out.

A very similar logic applies to Web3 products and services.

It would be amazing if people just saw the world through a Web3 founder’s lens and knew/understood how great their product is.

But in the majority of situations that doesn’t happen.

In such a case, as a Web3 founder, your response could be that your product is not good enough because people clearly can’t see how good or useful it is. 

And you can give up (which unfortunately most do).

Or you can recognize that your customers “don’t know” how good or useful your product is. Then, you start with the question: do I believe in this product? 

If the answer is yes, ask again: what are we trying to accomplish?

The goal?

To get more people to use this product. 

Clearly, right now, people don’t understand the usefulness of the product. So, what is it that I can do to communicate it to them (through marketing)? 

As your customers don’t see the world the way you do, you have to spend time communicating why your product exists and how it can help people.

Now, this is not a fix for a bad product. And ironically, the only way you can know if this is a product problem is to get people to use it and share feedback. 

Not having adoption, in a lot of cases, doesn’t mean that your product is bad. (And even if it does, you can get feedback and reiterate).

It could very well be that you do not know how to communicate what the product can do in a way that can be heard and understood by users. 

Like in a relationship, this is not a one-way street. Your customers have to be willing to give you feedback and work with you on the product you’re building. 

So, you want to start with people who experience the pain that your product solves most and are open to trying new products.

The Process

What if I’d been wanting to get flowers from my boyfriend for a long time, and when I finally asked him, he forgets to bring them on the next date (for whatever reason).

And let’s assume that it was for a valid reason. 

What would be a healthy response? (especially, if I know that the person means well and loves me) 

Maybe, I would try to tell him that it would’ve meant the world to me had he brought some flowers. I would also try to define why that’s so important.

Again, flowers are just a random example. It could be anything — boundaries, rules of engagement, love language, and so on.

To be able to come to a place where you “need” the other person is to ‘guide’ them for what you want. And both parties need to do it. If we do it in the spirit of we are both on the same side and we win together, we lose together, then communication is key.

The punchline of all relationship advice is (and it’s been said thousands of times by different people in different ways) communication. But no one ever takes out the time to articulate what they mean.

You’ve to say in a way that can be heard (your intentions can be heard by the other person) about the things you need and want; and you’ve to say it far more frequently and pointedly than you think you would ever have to say.

If your frame of reference is that this is ‘manipulation’ or the other person is ‘dumb and stupid,’ it would be gut-wrenching to ‘guide’ them. 

But if your frame of reference is that this is the person that I love the most and I am ‘guiding’ them to a treasure, and they too will communicate what they want and guide me to a treasure, then it will turn out to be amazing for both of you.

Likewise, if you launch your web3 company thinking your product or service is amazing and people would love it, and it does not work, and you try to communicate what it does and people still don’t get it, what do you do?

First of all, it would help for you to understand that communicating about the product or marketing/distributing is going to be as big of a task as building it, or even more important. 

(Exceptions always exist, but for the vast majority of products this holds true)

It’s unfortunate that a lot of bad or average products learn how to communicate/market better and, more often than not, win over the better product. 

Once you know this, you have to acknowledge that getting people hyped up about the product and the technology is a “process.”

A process where, like in a relationship, you have to be able to communicate (in a way that your intentions can be heard) about what the product can do for them; and you have to say it far more frequently and pointedly than you think you would ever have to say.

If your frame of reference is that this is ‘dumb’ or that customers should ‘get our product’ then it would be gut-wrenching to find out how to say what the product can do (in a way that can be understood) and then ‘saying it over and over again.’ 

But if your frame of reference is this is a product that I believe in and I am helping my customer see how this can change their lives for the better, then it becomes a beautiful journey where you’re discovering how the customer wants to consume the product (and if we need to make changes to that) and how best to communicate and help them see what it can do for them. 

Wrapping Up

When you know that just ‘knowing or loving’ someone is not enough and there’s a lot of work that goes into making a successful relationship, you can reset your expectations.

You would know that feeling attracted to someone is only 50% of it and the rest 50% of the work is going to have to do with communication. 

Similarly, in a web3 startup, once you know that building is only 50% of the work, the rest has to do with distribution, customer feedback, and marketing. It’s easy to balance expectations.

You would know that a product not getting adoption isn’t necessarily a product problem, it could be a marketing problem. 

And that, most importantly, solving the marketing problem, like communicating and understanding the needs and wants of your partner, is a process. 

A process that has a lot of parts and nuances to it, and a process that’s never over. You keep working on it, understanding what works, doing more of it, and constantly experimenting more.

A lot of early web3 startups including Namecoin, EOS, DigixDAO, etc failed to see the light of day for this very reason. 

The founders of the project were tech people through and through who understood very little marketing. Their founders believed that the product they were building was great and that the community would just “see” and “understand” its value. 

As history has it, it didn’t go very well. We need to learn from their mistakes and ensure that we take the time to communicate the utility of our products so that they don’t become one of them. 

Ironically, most of the time, people use this phrase thoughtlessly. So much so that the real meaning of the phrase seems to have been buried under a pile of misrepresented versions.

I find it painfully disappointing that despite how crucial thought leadership can be to business growth, its misrepresentation leads to Web3 startups leveraging it the wrong way.

This post is an attempt to compile every important thing I learned from my failed and successful experiences building thought leadership for companies and from actual thought leaders and their content.

Let’s start by defining what is thought leadership. And then, we’ll dive into how web3 startups can build thought leadership from scratch. 

What is Thought Leadership?

To start to fully understand the meaning of thought leadership, we must break down the explanation into three parts: the plain English definition, the purpose of it, and lastly, the desirable goal.

1. The plain English definition

Thought leadership refers to expressing your ideas such that it illustrates your expertise in a specific domain.

2. The purpose of thought leadership

When you say you want your Web3 startup to be a thought leader, you are in fact trying to define the kind of relationship your company wants to have with

– your customers

– your competitors, and

– the industry

And that leads us to:

3. The desirable goal

To change how people perceive you and your Web3 company.

Instead of seeing you as just another company with another solution, you want your customers, competitors, and your industry to see you as

– the leading authority on a specific subject

– the go-to place for deeper insights into your niche, and

– the source for what’s happening in the industry.

You want your content to become a reference point for others creating similar content.

And an important element that helps you achieve that goal is that your content has a perspective or angle that’s uniquely you. All of it doesn’t have to be necessarily original but it has to have something originally from you.

Characteristics of Thought Leadership Content

Based on the explanation we shared above, you can think of thought leadership content for your Web3 startup along the lines of 

– personal experiences

– guides and resources

– novel ideas

– opinions

– case studies, etc.

None of these are exclusive though. Thought leadership can be one or multiple of these things. I have found that the most helpful way to think about it is that you must share something about the world that not a lot of people know.

Here are some examples:

Irrespective of what type of thought leadership content you pick, their characteristics (should ideally) remain the same.

And the first step to understanding the specific characteristics of good thought leadership is to first know what thought leadership IS NOT.

1. Playing the Cool Card

A big problem that we run into when creating content is that of sharing intentionally contradictory opinions to come off as an expert or sound cool.

Look no further than crypto Twitter. It is filled with people critiquing projects left, right, and center to generate interest and hubbub. You can almost tell that they are doing it to appear cool more than to bring a new perspective to the table.

While some might say that this is an effective marketing tactic to attract attention, I would argue, it’s stupid and insincere. 

A part of being a thought leader is to not be insincere. It is about what you believe in, what you have personal experience in, and have the willingness to stand for.

Creating clickbaity content may build some audience in the short run, but it’s just that — a short-term “strategy.” And you may lose credibility sooner than you realize, or worse, vacillate between opinions just because they are contrary to get your content attention. 

2. Me-Me Content

The point of any form of content marketing is to address things your target audience cares about.

And the fastest way to go off that track is to share ideas that are supposed to make you feel good more than they’re aimed at adding some value for your audience.

For instance, ask yourself, why would anyone just want to know everything that you’ve achieved? However, if you take those same achievements and break down the process of how you got there, people might actually want to read.

In my opinion, there’s a simple correlation between the impressiveness (for you) of a content piece and how useful it is to your audience: the more impressive you think your content is, the higher likelihood that it’s not very useful to the other person.

Starting a web3 business or getting some award in the space might be very impressive for you but might not be useful content for your audience. 

On the other hand, you can write something as bland as how to set up your Metamask wallet but do it with more detail than anyone else, and it’s likely that your audience finds it useful.



Thought leadership content is about showing people how to do something or presenting them with ideas that they might not find elsewhere. 

Of course, you need to present proof of why people should listen to you. But if it’s just you sharing all the great things you’ve done, people might not really care. 

3. Self-Proclaimed Thought Leaders

If you walk into a room full of people and keep telling them you’re the smartest of them all and you’re the one they should listen to, it’s very unlikely that they will ever consider you the smartest person in the room.

The same goes for thought leadership.

If you keep calling yourself a thought leader, every time you do that, people will perceive you as less so.

The right way to do that is to share content that makes other people’s lives better, and let people eventually give you the tag of a thought leader. 

What Thought Leadership Actually is…

In the process of unwinding what thought leadership is not, we’ve also established what it is or should be.

But to recap, from the three points we discussed above, good thought leadership is:

Defensible: You’re willing to stand by your ideas. You are not doing it to play the cool card and you don’t vacillate between contradictory opinions to get attention.

Helpful: Your content is helpful to people or your industry in some way. You’re not putting out things you find impressive but those others can learn from.

Authentic: You have experience in what you’re talking about and are willing to stand behind your ideas in the long run. (and people recognize you for it)

Now that you understand what thought leadership is and is not, let’s get you up to speed with how to exactly start working on thought leadership content. The process can be broken down into three simple parts: ideation, execution, and distribution.

Ideation

The hardest part of writing thought leadership content isn’t writing as most people believe. 

It’s NOT through analyzing headers, flow, formatting, etc that you can write better thought leadership articles.

How do I know?
A lot of people we know and respect in our industry often don’t write that well. There’s usually no flow break, it’s usually just text, written in old-school formatting. 

However, these people still have a huge following. A following that regards them as a thought leader — something you want to be.

So, what is it that makes them stand out?

Their thoughts. These people have something unique to share. Something that’s valuable and not a lot of others know/ understand.

And that’s the hardest part of writing thought leadership content — the ideas themselves. 

Your first step is always to figure out the answer to “what the hell are we going to talk about?”

As a Web3 company just starting to build thought leadership from scratch, the best way to find your answer is to pick an existing idea and derive from it something connected but also relatively fresh. 

And to simplify the process of what this “newer version” of the existing idea can be, you can come up with ideas in these three ways: affirmative takes, contrarian takes, and unique takes.

1. Affirmative Takes 

One of the biggest apprehensions for a company new to content marketing is to say things that other people wouldn’t find interesting.

That’s why a good place to start is to pick the latest ideas, stories, or events that everyone is talking about, piggyback on them and add your narrative angle and ideas to support the original idea in a way that’s unique to you. 

Tweet from David Hoffman after the FTX saga

For example, let’s consider the Ethereum Merge, where Ethereum switched from proof-of-work (Pow) consensus to proof-of-stake (PoS).

An affirmative thought leadership idea originating from this event could be as simple as, 

Ethereum is Done with PoW. And for Good. Here’s Why

Or 

7 Ways Developers Benefit from Ethereum PoS Over PoW

By picking something many people are talking about, you’ll be discussing an idea that has proven to be interesting. Besides, having an audience that’s already warmed up to an idea also means your content has distribution built into it.

The idea is not to tear down the trend but present the argument in a way that’s comfortable and adds to the trends and discussions happening.

Think of it in the “Yes and — ” framework. What you fill in the blank is your idea/thought leadership content seed.

To find what you can add, break down the events or ideas and ask questions like “what actually happened?”, “what can we learn?”, or “has something similar happened in the past?”, etc.

2. Contrarian Takes

Not everything that’s believed or shared by a majority is true or agreeable. 

Take for example the legitimacy of Terra or FTX. Most people believed that Do Kwon and SBF were a godsend to the crypto space. Yet, few people questioned their legitimacy based on their knowledge and opinion of how this space works.

In this case, it took some time, but those who contradicted the common belief were proven right.

We don’t mean that you need to go all “flat earther” mode to contradict a point for the sake of contradicting it. That would be like trying to play the cool card. And thought leaders don’t do that.

There is a thin line between contradicting a common belief and sounding delusional. You get to define that line based on your beliefs, values, research, and experiences.

Take this snap from Tascha’s opinion piece for example. It contradicts a very common bullish sentiment around Ethereum’s native currency ether (ETH). However, Tascha doesn’t express salty opinions but tries to back what she says with stats and facts. 

Tascha’s take on why she’s bearish on Ethereum

Let’s go back to the Ethereum Merge example. A common belief around The Merge is that it may kill all Ethereum Layer 2s like Polygon and Arbitrum. So, a contrarian take on that could be:

Ethereum PoS Won’t Kill L2s. It’ll Make Them Better

Or

The Merge Won’t Replace L2s. It’ll Give Rise to Application-Specific Rollups

The common format for contrarian takes is to say “Hey, X is wrong or only half-correct. Here’s what I think. Here’s facts, stats, and research to back my claims.”

3. Unique Takes

Not everything and every argument can be classified as wrong or right. Sometimes there are middle grounds to be reached. 

Mostly, that’s where unique takes come in. Consider this LinkedIn post on FTX by Pete Huang.

Pete Huang on why you shouldn’t tell me FTX is not crypto

Here, Pete reasons with people who were taking an extreme stance about “FTX not being a representation of crypto.”

He says, yes, while crypto exists outside of the FTX scam, we cannot deny that it was a big enough part of this space. And that FTX’s fall has broken the trust many people placed in crypto, which pushes us back on the adoption curve.

(yes, nerds among us would identify this as the Hegelian dialectic) 

Once again, if we go back to the Ethereum Merge example, a unique take on this could be,

Everyone’s told you the good. Here’s the ugly and what you did not know about Ethereum PoS

Or

The Cost We Will Pay for a Faster, Energy-Efficient Ethereum

Execution

While some thought leadership ideas can of course be evergreen, those that work best are related to current events in the industry. They keep you, your ideas, and your startup relevant through time.

And the three frameworks above help you come up with such ideas at any time. But what after that?

You execute. And here are some things to keep in mind when writing out your ideas and arguments.

1. Steelman The Argument

The best way to create a strong thought leadership piece is to look at all sides of the argument, think through the objections the reader might have, and address them in your piece. 

Don’t just present your side of the argument. 

Explore the why, how, action steps, context, etc. in which you’re thinking through the idea.

2. Don’t Say. Show

There are hardly any statements or arguments we can make that haven’t ever been made in the past. 

Yet, to make what you say stand out, you must say it better than everyone else. To do that, you can explore different POVs, use your real-life experiences to contrast certain aspects of your arguments, and share examples to support what you’re saying.

By doing this, you’re not just “saying” something. You’re showing your readers what you mean.

3. Implement Frameworks

Since the point of thought leadership is to help your readers adopt your way of thinking and be able to easily attribute the original idea as yours, it’s important to make your content sticky. 

The best way to do this is to use frameworks and mental models, either your own or ones borrowed from other fields and disciplines. 

a. Borrowed frameworks:
You can borrow frameworks or models that are popular or universally applicable and use them in your argument to make it more easily understandable and also stronger and memorable.

For the best results, we can use something that most people relate to so that they remember your argument through the ideas they already believed in. That way, what you say in your thought leadership piece isn’t just some crazy thing you made up. There’s already precedent for something similar in the world. 

A good example of this is David Hoffman’s piece “Ethereum: Slayer of Moloch.” 

b. Creating frameworks
This is the harder way to go about it, but it’s also more rewarding in that if the concept picks up, you know it came from you.

You would also then have an objective way of assessing how well your thought leadership content performed. 

The more your concept is used by people, the more you know your thought leadership is successful. 

Distribution

When you want to throw the best party in the world, you don’t go inviting friends and family on the day of the party. You plan it beforehand.

That’s how it should be for your thought leadership pieces. 

Content distribution shouldn’t be an afterthought — something to be done once the content is live. 

And like many other Web3 startups, if you think that just spamming your Twitter, Discord, and newsletter community with the link to your thought leadership piece would make the cut… I’m sorry to break it to you, IT WON’T.

We all hate links. Especially when they come across our feed without any context. And if done in excess, it does just the opposite of positioning you or your company as a thought leader.

To do it right, you should plan content distribution during the ideation phase of the content.

As a start, follow this:

1. Pick up a channel where you want to distribute that piece.

2. Look at what content is already working on the platform

3. Create your content accordingly

This is crucial because understanding the platform and the audience for which you’re creating content gives you an edge.

You can then plug into the format that works best for a particular platform and audience.

Specifically speaking of Web3 startups, they have a unique edge in this matter. Web3 companies start with the community and can hence use their Twitter and Discord as the place to inspire ideation of their thought leadership content.

You can assess the conversations people are having and the problems they’re raising. Then when you find a pattern of questions being asked, see if it relates to a macro concept, and create a thought leadership piece around it.

Once you’ve created a piece that you know a lot of people in your community are asking, share it with them and ask for feedback. Analyze the feedback, implement, and repeat.

You would get a flywheel out of this that you can capitalize on to get people to become habitual readers of your pieces.

Tying it all together

Thought leadership has a lot of upsides—it helps you get seen as the go-to authority in your industry and helps build trust, which is the ultimate brand asset. 

Once your customers know who you are, what you stand for, and what they are buying into, they also feel good about themselves and want to tell other people. 

Unlike the common belief, thought leadership isn’t a type of content but an approach to it. It isn’t about creating hype-filled viral content but about asking how to create valuable, sticky, and meaningful content for your audience around subjects that you strongly understand and can defend.

It’s an approach to content that as a content marketer, I wish more web3 companies learned how to do. It isn’t easy by any means, but it’s something worth investing time and energy in. And once you get it right, there’s no looking back.