Awesome People - Ep 98
Marketing Ops, Agencies, Branding, Customer Research
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
Each week we deliver one awesome person to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hirable!
In addition to this newsletter, we also run a Web3 Pallet job board.
Know someone who wants to work in web3? Tell them to join our Pallet board.
Want to hire top talent? Join our Pallet Collective to almost 150 pre-vetted candidates ready for interviews. We’ll drop another 20 candidates this week 💃🏽.
Get 1 month 50% off the Pallet Collective with the code awesomecollective50, cancel anytime.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Matchbox DAO, a developer community that builds infrastructure and produces events and content for on-chain games. They’re hiring for a technical investment lead.
I’ve worked with Yoni, one of the founders of Matchbox, for a couple of years and I love working with him.
They’re looking to add a member to their investment team. This is a dream job for someone who is technical, likes games, and has experience with product or investing.
They are offering $80-120k per year + bonuses and tokens.
If you are interested, or know someone who might be, let us know and we’ll connect you to the team.
Now, with no further ado 👇
Please Meet Melissa Lindsay Freedman, Your Marketing Expert 🎥
Melissa caught our eye because she was the first Marketing Operations hire at Coinbase in 2019. WTF is marketing ops? Marketing ops helps marketing run more efficiently.
At Coinbase, Melissa owned vendor onboarding, worked on strategic planning, and improved marketing processes. Prior to Coinbase, she worked in marketing at Endeavor and Creative Artists Agency, two of the largest talent agencies in the world. At Endeavor, she managed a $5M industry research budget, and at CAA she worked with top brands like Coca-Cola and Cirque du Soleil. One little known fact about Melissa is that she loves a good steak.
You can hire her to:
conduct customer and industry research
map your customer journey
develop your brand
construct an integrated marketing strategy
build end-to-end processes
Her secret? She’s excellent at scaling a team and hiring external contractors and agencies.
Want an intro to Melissa? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
Melissa was gracious enough to share 3 pro tips with us here ✨
It is no secret crypto startups are struggling to attract non-crypto native users. This is partially due to poor marketing and branding. However, web3 startups are ignoring a solution used by more-traditional companies: using agencies.
Startups are often afraid to use agencies or contractors. They don’t feel comfortable ceding control of their business. But, as a result, they fail to take advantage of expert talent and niche expertise until it’s too late. Early-stage companies are often confused about customer profiles and their brand’s personality. By partnering with an agency and delegating them certain initiatives, startups can gain:
An unbiased perspective on the customer and brand
Time and money
New growth opportunities
Product clarity based on customer research
I’ve worked with agencies my whole career. Here are three tips for working with a marketing agency:
1. First Define Your Customer and Brand 📝
Before marketing begins, you must define the customer and the brand. Together you’ll start by fleshing out your own definitions. From there, an agency will provide an unbiased perspective of how your products match customer needs, compare to competitors, and identify gaps. You’ll use this data to define a positioning strategy.
At Coinbase, my marketing and design teams outsourced market research to better understand our brand. The agency helped outline customer perceptions of Coinbase and the industry. The design teams used the research to adjust our brand to match our ideal customer. From there, it was easy to define the brand guidelines such as voice, narrative, copy, color, etc.
At William Morris Endeavor, I led an initiative with a research agency to determine celebrity and product brand overlap. We used brand agencies to evaluate partnership opportunities for celebrities. For example, I worked on Dwayne Johnson’s Project Rock, a partnership with Under Armour. An agency helped us understand his brand. The research showed that Dwayne Johnson’s fanbase was especially interested in his workout habits. We used this intel to partner with Under Armour, an established sports brand that resonated with his audience. The collaboration was a huge success. Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO stated, “It… really helped re-energize the Under Armour brand in our stores.”
2. Assign DRIs (Directly Responsible Individuals) 💼
To work successfully with an agency, it’s important to assign DRIs on your team and the agency’s. DRIs create clear communication and defined timelines. They reduce confusion and work overlap. Both parties work together to set meetings, own documentation, and set a cadence for the project. Do not skip assigning DRIs.
As a program manager at Coinbase, I was a DRI handling multiple ongoing work streams around product framework, mapping, and narrative. This meant I owned our agency relationships and kept everything on track both internally and externally. On our end, there were a number of different endpoints in the C-Suite (CEO, CPO, Head of Engineering, Head of Design, etc.) that needed to provide approval and feedback. To deal with the variables, I used a RACI decision matrix (an example is shown below), which outlined the projects, tasks, and sign-off needed both internally and externally. This helped our team meet deadlines and communicate with the agency’s DRI effectively. Without a DRI, outsourcing work becomes messy and disjointed, dampening the benefits of working with an agency.
3. Take Advantage of Time Saved ⏳
One of the biggest reasons to work with an agency is to save time. But to reap the benefits, you actually have to make use of the extra time.
While at Coinbase, I realized our regional teams were working nights and weekends to localize copy in expanding markets. Because crypto moves so quickly, users were receiving newsletters where the copy was outdated. To fix this, I suggested outsourcing the work to local agencies.
Once we localized support, we expanded our content output faster. More importantly, it helped us stay engaged with a regional customer base and improved our relationships with customers. Regional teams had time to focus on their core job — growing local events, launches, and partnerships in geographies including Japan. This resulted in a major partnership with Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), one of the largest banks in Japan with over 40 million customers. Use an agency to free up your time for high value activities and your core competencies.
Want an intro to Melissa? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to Melissa!
Stay awesome,
Julia Lipton + Will Johnson (our amazing fellow who edited this newsletter)
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
If you liked this, ❤️ it below. If someone forwarded this to you, sign up here 💌
Awesome People Continued 🤩
Recent Features
P.J., Your Content & Product Expert — He was the first product and content hire at SuperRare, an NFT marketplace. He also was on the blockchain team at Medal.tv, a game clipping company with millions of active users, and started his own video company that served over 100k+ unique live viewers.
Uneeb, Your First Engineering Hire — He’s worked across infrastructure, back-end, and front-end teams at Amazon, Microsoft, and Coinbase. He recently took Coinbase Pay from zero to one. He led technical implementations for multiple fiat-to-crypto integrations.
James, Your Head of Content and Brand — Head of Communication and VP of Brand at two successful startups. He has experience leading messaging, working with Fortune 500 companies, and even interviewing Presidential candidates.
Feature Openings 💼
Arkive: Growth Manager
Syndicate: Fullstack Engineer
Kairos Art: Founding Engineer
3Box Labs: Head of Engineering
Mirror.xyz: Design Lead