I’m not new to marketing. But the past nine months as Content Person™ for Hylé have been a whirlwind, and recent discussions made me feel like we’re not getting any closer to settling down.
It’s great and interesting, and I love it! But it’s also a bit overwhelming sometimes. And since this industry is all about building in public, I feel like I should start doing that too − it’s not just a product thing.
So here’s a first entry in this lil marketing blog.
Hi! I’m Alex (they/them), asteure on socials, and I’ve been the Head of Content at Hylé since early 2024. I’m French and spent my childhood in Québec; now, I live in the French Alps and wouldn’t leave them for anything in the world.
I started doing digital marketing in 2012, launching my first big blog. The following year, as I was finishing my bachelor’s degree in business translation, I volunteered to lead the social media accounts of Noob Development, my first foray into tech and also my first adventure with ambitious projects. That year, we beat the European crowdfunding record.
At the end of that summer, I started my master’s degree in marketing at emlyon. My blog was my primary source of income for these two years, except during my two digital marketing internships: one in luxury and the other in consumer goods.
My first job was as an inbound marketing consultant for HubSpot. It taught me a lot, and I’ll always be thankful for this harrowing and fascinating experience with 80+ companies, all with different goals and resources − and spread out over three languages and on four continents.
I then decided to come back to France and settled in Paris. I worked at JobTeaser, where I met Hylé’s co-founder Lancelot, who was our data scientist in residence. During that time, I started two very important pastimes: editing Wikipedia (or rather, Wikipédia), and playing Super Smash Bros Melee. I’m still very much involved in the former, as I’m on the board of trustees of Wikimedia France and an admin on the French-language Wikipedia. The second I’ve left, but not before being the president of the French federation for nearly four years, building a European consortium for rulesets and events, and bringing Smash Sisters to Europe to foster a community for gender minorities. Most importantly (somehow), that’s how I met Sylve, Hylé’s other co-founder.
In 2018, I joined Meta (then Facebook) as the French language manager for business content. That meant I decided which campaigns were appropriate for the French market and then oversaw our localization agencies as they were translating the content. Product-market fit and quality content were my obsessions.
Six years later, Sylve called me and asked me to join Hylé. I said I wasn’t sure − I knew I’d like the role, but I had no crypto experience or knowledge and had had my fair share of industries where being a gender minority is not fun, and I was quite anxious. So I started out by freelancing for the team, and three months later, I confirmed that, yes, there was a lot that I could relate to in the zero-knowledge proof space and that I wanted to join full-time. After attending ETHCC in July and meeting my future team in person, I joined Hylé in late September, just a couple of weeks ago.
And as I said: it’s been a whirlwind.
This will be a semi-regular braindump. I haven’t figured out the rhythm yet and don’t think I necessarily want to uphold a regular frequency.
I’ll talk about:
Content marketing, what I do best (in my opinion at least!)
Social media marketing
How we approach our brand & marketing work at Hylé
Recent developments in ZK use cases and/or crypto marketing that I’m excited about
Is it onchain or on-chain? Why are my founders giving me contradictory instructions? I’m scared
Marketing stuff, like:
Talking to tech people. That’s a whole skill
Realizing that I’ve been designing for long-term scalability, and that it’s way too early for that
Being a comms person in a founder-led industry
Starting a podcast with no previous experience in that genre
Partnerships? What even are these supposed to be?
My impostor syndrome, probably
Hylé being great, but I’ll limit the shilling
I’ll try to finish each issue with a recommendation for something cool in the Internet. This time, it’s Sarah’s newsletter. Sarah’s the CMO for Playmint, an onchain games studio. She’s also the first crypto person I’ve talked to IRL outside of Hylé. It was at ETHCC 2024, and she’s been wonderful from the start.
Sarah does great work, has always found time and energy to support me through my « aaaaaa why is everything changing again » phases, and now she has a newsletter for building in public, where she summarizes crypto news for us non-technical people (remind me to write about that phrase sometimes) and writes more thematic updates.
I think you should follow her.
See you whenever inspiration strikes again, and please: this is about building in public, so share feedback with me!