The Subnet Growth Blueprint: How & Why You Need to Market Your Subnet

Intro

I feel compelled to write this as if the universe is instructing me directly (or maybe it’s just my TAO subnet bags!). 

I wanted to share some thoughts as a dTAO holder and as a career Marketer. If it provides one nugget for one subnet owner then I’ll consider that successful - if not I’ve spent a few hours creating rather than consuming which in this modern world is a win in itself.

I’m going to start with something that will fly in the face of what you’ve been told - so hang tight and to quote Bruce Lee…Empty your cup so that it may be filled….

There I said it…if your strategy is to knuckle down and build the best Product, you won’t win. Simple as that. 

Tell me I’m wrong….OK - look up NEO vs Dogecoin - one has Smart Contracts and quality tokenomics and the other inflates like there’s no tomorrow and the technology is looking like a dog, yet Dogecoin is frequently ranked in the top ten, has a marketcap of $25 billion whereas NEO is a mere relic of a past cycle dropping from a top 10 coin to #184 with a market cap in the millions….

That’s before I start talking about Shiba….or Fartcoin! 

The same plays out in the analog world - such as VHS vs Betamax, or QWERTY vs. Dvorak or even Microsoft Teams vs Zoom. The better Product doesn’t always win. Or as I like to say.

If a Product has no distribution and no users - can you really call it a Product? 

I often see indie founders spending upwards of 5 hours a day on LinkedIn/Twitter/Podcast interviews/Collabs/Partnerships and attending events claim they reached X revenue with 0 Marketing - newsflash….all that stuff was Marketing!

If you can spare me doffing my cap for a moment in Marketing school you’re taught the 7 P’s - Product, Price, Place (distribution), Promotion, People, Process, Physical evidence (design). 

Some of these (such as Product) have since spun off to become their own category - some are even categories of categories such as Product Marketing. Whereas some have all been forgotten by modern Marketers such as Price which can be a huge growth lever.

But as a whole the foundation remains and ideally you need to be kicking ass in all of these.

Another lesson you’re taught in Marketing school is that you have two main levers to pull:

In Bittensor we also have two additional categories:

Unfortunately you’re going to need to give up your engineering brain here…there is no exact formula - each subnet is different so will have to forge its own path but I recommend starting with Product Marketing - this means figuring out the right wording and narrative to align your products and services with the wants and needs of the customer.

For a bad example see: https://bittensor.com/ literally the homepage is a moving image of a web of lines - no headline, no description, no selling points - bad boy Const! 

You’re going to need to drop the complicated terminology and focus on the needs of the user - figure out your ideal customer profile and align your wording and narrative to them, have a narrative to stand behind, build distinctive assets and above all else - don’t be boring!!

Once you’ve got that nailed, I suggest you start with Demand Capture within the ecosystem, shift then up to demand generation within the ecosystem before expanding into the Crypto world, then the investor world and then retail. 

Here’s some examples:

Demand Capture within the ecosystem:

- Up-to-date profiles across all marketplaces and exchanges (Taostats etc)

- Subnet number and where/how to buy on all social profiles
- Regular, communication across official TAO discord channel
- Notifications set-up and replies to mentions and comments across official and unofficial discord channels, Google and Social Media

- PPC bidding on brand name

Demand generation within the ecosystem

- Frequent communication and updates across Discord official/unofficial and social media - if we don’t hear anything we assume you’re not doing anything - frequent and often beats big and infrequent, aiming to put a single Tweet out once you’ve fixed that bug next week is NOT a Marketing strategy.

Ideally, you should be Tweeting at least 3 x a day alone and should have a full go-to-market checklist to run through for minor/major updates alongside providing weekly updates of what you got done that week

- Attendance in all major podcasts/YouTubes/Newsletters/Blogs etc and promote them! Go to them, don’t wait for them to come to you! Siam Kidd’s revenue podcast, Novelty Search, Mark’s Hash Rate etc you need to be on all of these and importantly - promote you’re going on them, then promote the actual recording and respond to all the comments etc. Ideally even put some paid ad spend behind for some co-marketing

- Engaging with other subnets: Whether you’re aiming to build direct partnerships or not, but becoming friends with and helping others in the ecosystem will reap rewards, comment on their updates, share their posts by a net positive to the wider network

- Build your own community: Foster and nurture your users and investors. How can you make them feel they’re part of something bigger? Build a newsletter, put regular videos out, engage with your community, whatever you do don’t refuse to engage by sticking your head in code all the time!

Demand generation within the crypto investor world

Basically take what you learned above and apply into the crypto investor world - here you’ll find an endless amount of podcasts, influencers etc you can then scale into the regular investor world and eventually….retail itself.

If you think this is far fetched - consider Score (SN44) is about to buy a football (soccer for those that don’t speak Kings English) club! 

It might feel safe sinking into that comfy sofa of TAO emissions - but at best the subnet platform is an incubator and as each block ticks by we get closer to the next halving where your income will be slashed which leads me too…

Beyond buy-backs, you need to use the magic of the TAO subnet incubator to rapidly figure a path to revenue - this will make selling your concept and narrative considerably easier and open a huge amount of paths to better promote your product.

Another secret of high growth start-ups is using product-led growth to expand user bases - generally this works best for systems with a front-end to them where a logo or link back to the original website can be promoted - think a freemium booking system for hairdressers - competitors look to see what others use as their booking system, find the link and click. 

I’d also bundle referral programs and viral growth tactics under this bucket (think share on social etc to gain free access etc). Product-led SEO is also a similar tactic whereby you slice off a valuable part of your product and give free access (think a particular tool etc you might offer) - with the idea being it contains proprietary, unique information Google bots will love to crawl - examples include sites such as Hargreaves Lansdown that have wide dynamically updating template pages containing stock prices etc that index very well.

These can be an excellent way to grow and I’ve had huge success in the past with all of the above - the secret I’ve found is adding a bit of paid marketing into the mix to really drive the virality even further which leads me onto:

This is the life blood of a huge amount of businesses and is often hidden in plain sight - examples include bundling a version of your product with an existing product that has an established customer base you can tap into, for example Google pays Apple billions to bundle in their browser into Apple devices by default.

Affiliate based offers can also work here - but you’ll need to ensure you nurture partners and keep them happy, ideally you should seek our partnerships with other subnets allowing you both to grow together and creating natural content both parties can redistribute.

When many of us think of Marketing we think adverts and generally campaign based adverts such as famous TV ads like the Guiness surfing ad or Apples here’s to the crazy ones. 

The reality is the best start-ups grow by mastering a single channel first, iterating and iterating to squeeze every drop available whilst launching other channels off the back of it - if you get stuck thinking in one-off campaigns you’ll lose out the mastery and full potential of Marketing. 

Saying that, one-off campaigns still should be done - but likely further down the line when your foundations are up and running.

At a certain point of $cost demos and Sales calls become imperative - generally you have a team working to qualify leads who then pass these onto a closing team - in a small business this is often done by founder who then also defaults to the account manager to grow the account long-term. Dealing with Sales as an engineer is a bit of a necessary evil - you might not like the idea of it but that doesn’t stop it from being beneficial to your business and as a subnet owner you are by default a business owner, you are no longer a coder. Repeat after me - you are now a founder….

Commission rates are key but the main issue you’ll have is being able to attract strong players into an unknown company - hence founders often work best in the early days as they are able to seamlessly carry a confidence behind the product. 

Ultimately you want to build your brand, market share has been proven to go up directly with category brand awareness even more so higher brand awareness drives more repeat purchases and a higher conversion rate.

Essentially this will make everything easier and you do that by reaching more potential customers (see demand generation above), by targeting the existing eco-system first before going wider and eventually into retail.

A common misconception companies make is going and remaining too niche with Marketing - as they find their customers are heavy category buyers whereas the reality is the only reason these are your customers is because they are buying from across the whole category.

So start within the eco-system and move out as mentioned above, each step acts as a spring board to the next.

As mentioned, the reality is most successful start-ups find a single marketing channel and really nail it to grow rapidly (the best even build products around a channel - see Airbnb and Craigslist for example) before expanding into others - if you spread yourself too thin to begin with you’ll get nowhere. 

Paid Ads can be worth it depending on your end product - Google is incredibly expensive so your return on investment really depends on the amount your customer generates your business (known as LTV in the trade…) but I’d aim for a one year payback period at most and potentially start with social media ads and branded Google.

SEO, is in a flux right now and I say that as someone who once got ranked on page 1 Google for the term ‘SEO’ :D - Google is pushing AI overviews hard so the old rule book is being thrown away and basically everyones trying to work out what the play is - mentions and links still drive rankings and are correlated heavily with ChatGPT mentions so that is worth exploring but can take 3 months plus to yield so I wouldn’t start here.

TikTok is great for retail, but not until you’ve got your foundations in place and in the meantime can be like having a crack cocaine dispenser in your pocket so avoid using it if you can.

Well, that brings me to the end of my ramblings much more could be said but I’ll leave it as that. Apologies I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

–

The Subnet CMO