While some people may find New Year’s resolutions to be an exercise of vanity, I’ve historically found them to be extremely helpful in driving me to reach my goals.
This year I wanted to publicly share my top resolution of 2023 with all of you, so you can help hold me accountable.
In short, I want to build Web3 Pills into a powerhouse Web3 media platform in 2023.
While this goal may sound straightforward, it will ultimately come down to execution over the next 12 months and beyond.
To help guide this process, I’ve written this blog post to help articulate why I made this decision and how I plan to accomplish this goal.
In It for the Long Haul
I received my first real exposure to Web3/Crypto back in 2017, while I was living in San Francisco.
While there, my roommate Adi Kancherla quit his job at Google and went all in on crypto. He applied and was accepted to the Binance Labs Accelerator where he was in the same cohort as projects like the Matic team (now Polygon).
As a Product Manager at Intuit at the time, I helped Adi on the side with things like content creation and GTM strategy.
I also briefly lived with Ivan Bogatyy, who was working at Dragonfly Capital. He was the first one to expose me to NFTs, when he pulled out his phone at the dinner table one night and showed me a CryptoKitty that he had bought. Keep in mind that this was YEARS before the first true NFT bull run.
Despite being deeply philosophically aligned with crypto, I did not have the conviction to make the jump into crypto full time like them.
This was largely driven by the fact that I was (perhaps rightfully) suffering from a degree of imposter syndrome. Having lived in Wisconsin for almost my entire life until college graduation, I always felt like I was a bit of an outcast in the big tech industry.
My parents blessed me with a great upbringing; but I didn’t come from a super wealthy family, I didn’t attend an elite or Ivy League University, and the vast majority of my elementary classmates were starting careers FAR away from the big tech world.
For this reason I chose to spend a few years doing big tech product management, cutting my teeth launching & maintaining products at Intuit and LinkedIn.
I scratched my crypto itch by meeting up with people like Sid Ramesh and Christian Kaczmarczyk, visiting the Crypto Castle, going to conferences & grabbing free dinners at the Coinbase offices (Thanks Tommy).
While people like Adi and Ivan kept building through the bear market, I chose to focus my energy on developing my operational skill sets and trying to build a financial foundation for myself.
When COVID hit in 2020 and DeFi summer started to take off, I was hooked immediately. I began participating in yield farming/liquidity mining and moonlighting on the side as a product consultant for a few projects.
By 2021, I had built a financial base that finally allowed me to submit my 2 weeks and go full time into crypto.
My plan was to build a product consulting studio and work with projects across various blockchains. However, I was quickly sidetracked by an opportunity at the DeSo Blockchain (shout out Allen for sending me the whitepaper) to work in an interim-COO capacity for a few quarters.
After some very deep talks with Nader and personal reflection, I realized that I was in a founder mindset and needed to step away so that I could start that journey.
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I wanted to give that somewhat long-winded background, so it would help contextualize the key point I’m about to make.
Despite all the chaos from the past year, I have complete conviction in Web3 and am here for the long haul.
After the 2017-2021 period I told myself I would never step away from this space again until I had finished playing my part in helping it succeed.
I will go down to my last $ and my last breath trying to reach that goal if it comes to it.
Finding Product-Market Fit
While building the conviction for Web3/Crypto has been a fulfilling experience, I quickly realized that I was now stuck with a new question… What should I build?
Coming from a big tech product background, my natural inclination was to try to build a typical software product that solved a real problem.
However, I began to hit a wall when I realized that it’s REALLY difficult to find product-market fit in crypto right now. To put it into perspective, only a small group of companies such as Coinbase and OpenSea, have found any meaningful amount of product-market fit. And even these companies are getting hammered in the bear market.
The situation is even more bleak when you go to the decentralized space, where only a few blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) have had sustained network usage, and even fewer dApps have had durable success (Uniswap still only averages ~15K Daily Active Wallets).
While I have confidence that this situation will likely improve over time; and I have massive respect for the teams that are in the arena trying to crack this code, I’ve decided that the typical protocol or dApp path isn’t right for me at this time.
For the past few months I’d been spinning my wheels, until I realized that the answer had been in front of me all along.
While many dApps still do not have strong product-market fit, many crypto media projects DO.
Outlets like Coindesk, The Defiant, and Bankless have content being consumed by hundreds of thousands of people EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Once I began viewing content/media through this lens, it made it increasingly clear to me that this was not only the right path to pursue, but would actually require my skills in product, design, and marketing more than I had anticipated.
The Special Dose
There’s a number of existing Web3 media platforms already out there. While I’m an extremely competitive person, I draw a lot of inspiration from them.
Seeing the Bankless guys grow their platforms into a behemoth over the years or how The Milk Road went from 0 to 250,000+ followers in less than a year helped give me the confidence to know multiple blueprints exist.
However, I believe I have a strategy that is differentiated and will ultimately allow Web3 Pills to one day become THE premier source of crypto media and news in the future.
Without revealing too much about the strategy there are a few core tenants I will be leaning into:
1) Cover the full breadth of Web3: While I think it’s important that some creators/platforms have narrowed in on specific segments of Web3 such as the Metaverse, NFTs or token trading, I want people to be able to find content on ALL of these topics when they come to the Web3 Pills platform.
2) No Blockchain Maximalism: A few months ago, I wrote an Op-Ed for Coindesk about my goal to put an end to maximalism in crypto. The reality is that our industry is too nascent for us to be turning on each other now.
Unfortunately, there’s already strong signs of maximalism with existing media platforms. As was the case with The Block, we now know that this bias is often fueled by financial incentives.
Web3 Pills will strive to cover ALL blockchain ecosystems fairly and objectively, not just a few favorites.
One way we are already doing this is by launching sub-communities under the Web3 Pills umbrella, such as Cardano Pills.
3) Actually leverage Web3 tech: Long term, we will use the power of Web3, to help grow our platform. Web3 offers new ways to monetize content, run decentralized governance and store/distribute media.
For instance, this blog post was published on Mirror, which is a decentralized blogging platform that stores the content on-chain.
In the coming quarters we will be building features that will help make Web3 Pills a better platform than the existing legacy media outlets.
‘I’ Turns to ‘We’
I titled this article why ‘I’m’ building a Web3 media platform, but in reality this will be a team effort.
There is only so much impact I can make on my own. That’s the difference between being a lone content creator vs a full-scale media platform.
While I will still be leaning into my online presence to help drive growth for the platform, ultimately we are building a community of creators.
I’ve already brought on all star content creators like Alan, Jami, and Suhail to create content, and I plan to hire dozens more creators in 2023.
If you are interested in applying to be part of the team, please fill out this application.
We are also partnering with other groups like Mario Nawfal’s Crypto Round Table Spaces, which offers a great entry point for those just getting their feet wet in crypto.
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In conclusion, while our industry still faces significant headwinds, I am confident that we are building the future of the internet together.
I’m excited to be playing my part by scaling the Web3 Pills media platform, and I Invite you all to join us along the way!
-Alex Valaitis
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