A day in the life of a crypto CMO

Steph Alinsug’s playbook for how to win on the new internet

“Do I need to hire a head of marketing” is the question circling the crypto zeitgeist. Who are they? Do they need to be crypto-native?  What do they focus on?

This week we caught up with Steph Alinsug, FWB’s newly announced CMO, to shed light on the subject fresh off of her introductory post, “Don’t hire a CMO.” 

In today’s interview, she walks us through melding metrics with community engagement, her journey orchestrating major campaigns, & her personal playbook for winning on the new internet. 

Elan: Steph! What does a day in the life look like as CMO at FWB? 

Steph: As a CMO I spend a good amount of my time building processes and establishing infrastructure for the DAO and optimizing our marketing practice by leaning into data. The other part of my day is researching and being online to interact with people on socials, looking for through lines, and how they’re affecting crypto Twitter and culture at large. I also spend time on IG and are.na (non-crypto native cultures) and other places on the internet. Just like how a plant needs to absorb the sun to thrive, I think about my role the same way: I spend a lot of time absorbing information, synthesizing it, and using it to level up our brand marketing strategy.

Right now, we’re in the home stretch leading up to FEST24 on August 1-4 in Idyllwild, CA. With 9 weeks to FEST (!!!!) we’re executing on around 8 critical roadmaps concurrently, which includes something like 25 distinct roadmaps for FEST itself. Most of these roadmaps involve partnerships and collaborative marketing campaigns. Beyond our acute project roadmaps, I’m also building processes and marketing infra so we can continually refine and scale our marketing. I’m assessing the previous marketing strategy and looking for opportunities to innovate. Since I’m FWB’s first CMO there’s so much design space, it’s really exciting. I’m also posting and interacting as FWB across X, Instagram, Lens, Warpcast, and Zora (onchain media) daily. And strategizing and creating our platform-specific content with support from our designers. 

I spend a lot of time in Google Docs preparing and executing partnership briefs and gtms. I built out a notion that links our content calendar to my global project tracker to my task manager. I still post pretty much all content manually, so I also spend a lot of time in our various tooling (Beehiiv, Klaviyo, Easol, Sanity) and on our social channels (IG, Twitter, Lens, Warpcast, Discord). I’ve experimented lightly with GPT-4, and have built a decent bot to help me with partnership briefs and voice-to-text synthesis. But y biggest hack has been to walk and talk my ideas out when I’m feeling stuck and then feed GPT-4 the transcript to help me define next steps.  

Elan: Tell us about your journey to becoming CMO. How did it all start? You “walk” in the door on your first day, what happens?

Steph: In November 2023, I was about three months into fundraising for Vessel. I was also going through a significant transition in my personal life and needed to create consistent income. I messaged my network to say I was open for freelance/contract work. One of the people I messaged was Greg Bresnitz. Fast forward to January, I’m working in a part time capacity as FWB’s head of brand marketing and Greg hands me Worldcoin. I’d been on the job for about four weeks, one of those weeks was a holiday break, but I knew that I wanted to be all in. 

We took The Paradox of Personhood to CDMX (more on that below) and the partnership overall was such a huge success. That’s when we decided it was time to level up my role and capacity at FWB. 

Elan: What are some of the unique challenges you’ve faced since taking the reins?

Steph: At FWB, we have a very distinct branding opportunity: We're now a slightly matured community with a big audience that we're stewarding, and a lot has changed since we first came on the scene. On one end, we have the OGs who are interested in technology and they are fundamentally concerned with remaining niche and subverting trends. They're the trendsetters. And then on the other hand, we have our technology native founders, builders, VCs, and executives who are interested in culture or understand that culture is a really critical part of the consumer crypto thesis. But they are concerned with growth and also with trend hacking. So when I'm thinking about my role as CMO, my job is to figure out how to create the umbrella for these two oppositional archetypes to exist within. And so there are just many strategies that come from there.

Elan: Tell us about some of the projects you’ve worked on. 

Steph: The first end-to-end project that I took on was our partnership with Worldcoin. That was a real journey, but I'm proud of how we executed that campaign and the partnership.

To prep for the campaign, I read Worldcoin’s original whitepaper to better understand the tech, the product, and the philosophy. I always make a point to read partner source materials when shaping a campaign. Greg brought the positioning of Worldcoin within Zona Maco, Mexico City’s annual art week. I used the lens of the dystopian aesthetic of the chrome orb, with a focus on the paradox of using cryptography (an emerging technology) as a means to verify personhood in an age of accelerating AI (also an emerging tech).

Partners often want to lead with the tech. They’re used to talking about the underlying tech and product features as their primary value proposition. But we’re always looking for the narrative, the humanness, the culture behind the tech. To Worldcoin’s credit, they came to us because they knew they needed to speak to culture. 

We definitely pushed Worldcoin a bit on their positioning. We were very clear in our partnership that everything has to point back to this idea that culture drives adoption, but more specifically that we are platforming a better internet. We all come into web3 with the insight that the way we were doing the internet previously is bad, maybe even broken. And we have a shared belief that a better internet is possible. So all of our partner campaigns should speak to their versions of a better internet. 

People had loud opinions on the partnership. The Discord sort of exploded with activity on launch day with a handful of people who were really upset about the partnership. There were a few negative Tweets, but mostly the launch was positive to neutral. We took the community feedback seriously though and held a Town Hall with Tools For Humanity (Worldcoin parent company) CMO and the Head of Product, open to members. It was a wild opportunity. We additionally revised our partnerships SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) to integrate community feedback on decisive partnerships moving forward. But this is what it means to build an internet-native brand and community – you have to be responsive. 

We brought The Paradox of Personhood to Feria Material, the premier contemporary art show during Zona Maco Art Week in Mexico City (think Basel) in early February. El Universal, Mexico City’s paper of note, covered the show and called the Paradox of Personhood “the most daring work of art” at the show. Wild.

We’re now taking the Paradox of Personhood to Tokyo and Worldcoin is a presenting sponsor of FEST24. 

Elan: How does FWB contribute to the idea of a better internet?

Steph: We want to be the place at FWB where founders and builders can be in on that insight and talk about the philosophy of what they're building. We want them to be able to step out of the “VC pitch deck”. We want them to come to FWB to talk about the Paradox of Personhood, for example. What does it mean that in 2024, we are using cartographically verifiable pieces of technology to confirm that we are human? In the face of accelerating machine learning and artificial intelligence, that's duality.

Elan: Could you walk us through what the playbook for how to win on the new internet looks like? What are some things you've seen, some things you've tried, some things that worked, and maybe some things that didn't work?

Steph: The future of marketing on the new internet is a wide open design space. I like to point back to when Instagram first came on the scene because that's where my marketing origin story started. I was someone who just learned how to use Instagram early and then was able to integrate that into the places where I worked, which allowed me to move up. What I know is that the ‘preciousness’ has to go out the window. What I mean by that is this: anytime there is a misstep at FWB, we use that as a marketing moment. 

For example, we had a hiccup in our ticketing site for FEST24 where the early bird tickets got incorrectly marked as sold out. So someone pointed this out in the discord, and of course, there was internal panic for a second on how many ticket sales we were losing. But I decided to screenshot the discord comment, and tweeted about it. 

You have to lean in when things don’t go as planned because the tooling is kind of messy and incomplete. There are no roadmaps. You have to be ok with it being a little chaotic and owning it in a way that will be beneficial for your brand. Seed Club is really great at doing this. I think that also, it just demonstrates a sense of self-confidence that we're not going to get this totally right. We're humans. We're also coordinating a ton of amazing things at once with a very small team. And don’t you relate to that? So maybe what it comes down to is just totally humanizing your brand. 

Another thing that I'm playing around with as well is doxing myself as the person behind FWB's social accounts. Previously, no one was breaking that fourth wall. But I think the space is small, and I'm fairly visible in certain corners. Also, the reason people liked FWB was the feeling of it being a scene. And the way that you navigate scenes by knowing people. So I'm playing with that carefully a little bit on our main channels, on Twitter and Instagram. So that's another interesting strategy we're messing with.

Elan: You’ve talked about how the tension between marketing and belonging is really core to your approach when it comes to storytelling and growth. Could you tell us a bit more about that? 

Steph: The way I think about marketing is a bit like curating an event or thinking about a physical storefront. An example I like to use is the experience of going out to eat at a restaurant. There are so many signals: Who belongs here? What are the stories we can tell? And, what are the various experiential things we can provide that will showcase who belongs here? Every time you tweet, you're communicating with someone that they belong here. And that's really about helping people see themselves reflected in whatever it is that you're putting out there. I love that.

Elan: We talk in quite a few food metaphors at Off-Menu, so I love the example of equating belonging to the scene of eating at a restaurant! 

I feel like marketers have been at the center of the crypto online conversation lately; specifically on the need to hire a CMO. You even named your introductory post, “Don’t Hire a CMO” in what felt like a partial response to John Wu's perspective on the topic. What’s your take here?

Steph: The way that a protocol approaches marketing on a 3-5-10 year time horizon is going to be very different from the way that FWB markets. You have to consider a few factors: Do you have a charismatic founder who's good at telling the story? Some founders just have that in them and sometimes it's important to train the founder to be a great storyteller or to have someone else focus on it. So it just really depends. In the context of FWB, we were on the rise when followers and funding were fluid and easy to come by. Today, it's different. But I actually love this problem set where now we're years in and there is a little bit of the grind of marketing and maintaining a really strong persistence and brand. I prefer this longer game in which we think about other companies that are coming up to that part in their lifecycle.

About Steph Alinsug

Steph Alinsug is the CMO of FWB. Currently obsessed with putting on perfume every day and recommending things on PI.FYI. Previously she led media and marketing at Seed Club, and instigated Broadcast Summit NYC, the first onchain media summit. She is also the founder (briefly) of Vessel.  

If you’d like to connect with Steph, DM her on Twitter or LinkedIn.