Monad Labs — Launch Plan

The following article is a theoretical launch plan for a new L1 blockchain and has been applied to Monad Labs. This plan has not been approved or endorsed by Monad and the project is serving as a case study only. At the time of writing there is little public information published about Monad so therefore a lot of assumptions have been made to fill the gaps of knowledge.

Website: https://www.monad.xyz/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/monad_xyz

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/monad

Layer 1 — POS — EVM compatible — 10,000 transactions per second

About:

Changes to the consensus layer and a redesign of the EVM execution system allows for non-overlapping transactions to be run in parallel. The speed now rivals traditional finance.

Funding: Pre seed $9m May 2022, $10m Dec 2022

Investors: Placeholder Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Lemniscap, Finality Capital, Shima Capital. Angels including Naval Ravikant, Cobie, Hasu. Total of 70 investors

Team:

CEO: Keone Hon, https://www.linkedin.com/in/keone-hon/

CTO: James Hunsaker, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameshunsaker/

COO: Eunice Giarta, https://www.linkedin.com/in/eunicegiarta/

Location: New York

Stage One: Internal Discovery

Goal: To understand Monad’s vision, what it needs, what is planned, limitations and assumptions in order to create narratives around key news that serves the underlying goals.

• Understand timeline of launch, product roll outs, token issue, upgrades
• Identify characteristics of preferred developers and projects
• Note marketing budget
• Map competitive landscape (future upgrades, developer incentive programmes)
• Macro, political and regulatory climate forecast (MiCA)
• Understanding the lead time, constraints, challenges and costs incurred by a developer team onboarding to Monad
• Confirm any additional support provided from grants, plans for a foundation/incubator
• Solution for chicken:egg, validators:dapps
• What does success look like after 1 year, 3 years, 15 years

Information received will contribute to building a calendar of initiative launches, workload reverse engineered to optimize start dates.

Stage 2: Foundation First

Goal: To onboard the first cohort of developers that will serve as a cornerstone of the community and seed a success story for Monad to publicize. Prioritized attributes of the first cohort likely include being well known, influential with their own loud voice within the industry.

Strategy: Use our professional network to create a call list of ideal projects that would benefit from Monad and understand their incentives and concerns.

• Who do we want, why
• What characteristics does the project that benefits from Monad the most have
• What is more important for these teams: scalability, cost reduction, other
• Which dapps have end users that will notice a meaningful impact after optimizing the project using Monad’s technology
• How do we test these assumptions

Example 1: Uniswap onboards, end-users notice a significant change in speed, allowing traders to develop new arb strategies.

Example 2: Funded but yet to launch a gaming project able to add new features that were not possible without using Monad. New standard across industry bar set.

Stage 3: Defining the persona and activities of our desired market

Goal: Identifying the decision making process of our first 1000 users

Method: incentivise surveys, investigating how different tools within their current stack were discovered, case studies

To onboard developers we need to understand how they receive information and what influences their decisions. Working closely with our cornerstone devs we will gather threads of insight to begin.

• Who influences them, what do they read
• Where do they group up (online and IRL)
• Who do they call upon for professional advice, technical expertise
• Values and hobbies AFK
• Pain points, turn offs, frustrations and dislikes
• Geographical locations
• How are decisions finalized: Community vote or internal key decision maker(s)
• More responsive to authority or peer pressure

Once these data points have been collected the information on how to craft the right message will reveal itself. It will determine a starting point for creating Monad’s external communication strategy.

External Communication:

• Including: Brand personality, tone of voice, identity
• What do we stand for, what is the future we envision and share
• Who do we champion, what causes are important to us (accessibility for all, censorship resistant, other)
• Who is our nemesis, do we punch-up? Do we troll?
• Are we authoritative or approachable: Too playful we may lose tradfi, too white collar we may restrict the brand’s ability to harness more controversial yet cost effective tactics — there is a requirement to deeply understand our target and convey what they consider valuable in a tone of voice that is familiar.

To be applied across all Monad’s channels:

• Website
• Blog: announcements, quarterly updates, case studies of successful implementation, interviews with, white papers, Monad as a thought leader
• Email Newsletter
• Twitter: AMA’s, threads
• Discord: AMA’s, user support
• Youtube, Reddit, Linkedin
• Less likely: Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok etc.

Stage 4: Time to engage

Goal: User acquisition

Strategy: Display our strengths in the most digestible way

Tactics: Optimize with cognitive biases to concisely articulate the benefits

With the voice of Monad decided and the needs, wants and location of eyeballs of our future market clear it is time to engage and display our positive traits.

Assumption of important factors a developer considers when deciding a blockchain:

• Security
• Scalability
• Interoperability
• Community Support
• Development tools and resources
• Cost
• Ecosystem
• Grants

But being cheaper and faster ain’t gonna cut it.

Facts are facts, features are features. We need to frame the correct message and create emotions. Using cognitive biases, visual displays of comparison, user success stories that make Monad the obvious choice.

Examples (not suggestions): FOMO, inner circle, NFT badge or other gimmick, scarcity through waiting list, referrals = queue jump, gamification, tribe:frogs, validation through status bias, reversal of reactive devaluation, declinism of other L1’s perhaps.

Monad as a network is the rails where success can be built, with that in mind it is important to plant seeds that foster a competitive creativity that creates a platform of possibility.

• What could you do with your project if it was x100 times faster?
• If your users transaction costs were -90% what incremental features could you add?
• If security and UX is no longer a trade off how much time would be saved?
• How much did it cost you when X service went down?

Third party distribution outlets:

(specific outlets to be determined from information obtained at Stage 2) :

Podcasts

Websites: e.g Messari

Non-crypto native outlets

Industry newsletters

Industry blogs

Twitter accounts

Each campaign will be organized in advance, adapted to the outlet, measurable and ideally repeatable with clear CTA’s.

Eventually this will determine KPI’s and OKR’s for subsequent campaigns and funnels so we can optimize according to data retrieved. As we continue to test and learn a higher degree of predictability will be achieved and more accurate CAC forecasts developed.

Stage 5: Gotta touch some grass, shake some hands

Developer marketing is subtle. Third party blogs where content marketing is disguised as impartial advice has now had a light shone on it. While not an avenue to be ignored it is important to not come across as forced or inauthentic.

• Sponsoring hackathons
• Attending industry conferences as speaker or sponsor
• Hosting side events off main conferences e.g breakfast get togethers
• Hosting annual event (e.g Avalanche Summit, Barcelona)
• Astroturfing

If a grassroots campaign is collective action localized behind a cause then Astroturfing is the pejorative of “faking” this. We do however want to encourage this type of community building and not leave it to chance. Monad should seek to mobilize and support meet-ups based in different cities around the world consisting of regional development communities.

Goal: Develop or support localized user groups in different cities that would encourage Monad in becoming the default choice in the development stack and for increasing an individuals’ career prospects.

Strategy: Identify brand ambassadors and Monad advocates located across different cities. Ideally they are already hosting or possess the attributes to host and organize local meet ups. These community leaders will likely already be wanting to raise their own profile and perhaps already be on the conference circuit with a network of industry speakers.

Year 1: roll out 5 major cities

Year 2: 16+

High risk, high reward attention grabs

Considering the state and sentiment of the industry in 2023 where we have just witnessed a large bubble bursting factored with the project in its pre-launch stage it would be wise to proceed with caution around brash tactics (this warning also applies to non-conventional/grey hat growth hacking tactics like vampire attacks, uninitiated airdrops etc.)

The priority is to build trust with the existing community (no matter the size). Team credentials are important and being supported by those with a strong reputation within the industry (healthy skeptics with a reputation for level headedness like Cobie and Hasu) is powerful validation but credibility is what the end user actually needs to be shown. There is a huge opportunity in just being reliable, straight forward and providing ample resources and support to the community. Developers and users will always be the biggest advocates and their recommendation holds x10 the persuasion power than ours ever would.

Foundational: FAQ on steroids

More Gitbook + Figma, less Quora or Youtube for publishing. Explainers, common technical questions, objections and concerns from AMA’s and Discord addressed here. Displayed visually for a quick high view understanding and then into the weeds.

Goal: After 15 minutes spent by a non-tech savvy journalist they should be able to describe Monad without having to say a “faster Ethereum” — instead they should be seeded with the idea of possibility of what will be getting built on top.

Reversal to above: Pick a fight like the first day on the yard. Maybe against L2’s? Capture attention from them publicly (Twitter) first, then hit them with questions around functionality you know they cannot solve but Monad can. Constantly pull apart statements made in recent interviews. Provide example scenarios they are unable to accommodate but Monad can and ensure to always be “punching up”.

Telegram

A lock out at 999 members on Telegram was recently put in place. It could be good to build in a referral system that serves as a sign-up queue. Each current member is allocated a number of referrals, or referral invites can be earned, that gets put on a short list for the “next opening of the gates”

Periodically let more people join which creates a bit of a “have you got an invite you can send me”.

Public displays of long term thinking

Invest in and publicize heavily an educational program. The short term impact is it displays a long term mode of thinking which is comforting in an industry where there are many opportunists who hype, inflate and dump on their community. The long term benefits are there also as it is investing in a future band of incoming developers.

Monad certificate

Create an award as an NFT certificate (non transferable ERC-6454) that individual developers could use as an accolade of sort. This doesn’t directly bring onboard developers nor project to use Monad but signals a hierarchy within the community.

Branding starting points

The team needs a label: innovators, builders, realists (the bridge between trad and crypto), safe hands, technologists or engineers. If you do not claim a label then a label will be assigned to you by the media — just like Monad was tarred with the same stamp as every L1 by lazy journalists being an “Ethereum Killer”. No bueno.

If any personality it should be displayed then apply it to something that translates to optimising and efficiency. Whether that’s packing a travel bag or writing a shopping list — a fiend for unreckless speed.

T-minus 2 months until testnet (ETA Jun 2023):

Once the foundational components have been built (FAQ’s, landing pages, website, brand voice and tone, marketing materials including white papers etc.). The task requires higher sales skills and less branding skills to get real results. Onboarding the right developers requires persuasion and needs to be done on a case by case basis.

Focus on: Authority building in the media, sales skills to onboard existing dapps for testnet. Spending time raising Monad’s profile and generating awareness at this stage may generate a broad range of incoming projects suitable for testnet however being more selective and focussing on projects with strong communication and reporting is more resource efficient.

Media

Save CEO for podcasts but designate a subordinate to becoming a contributing author to industry media publishers.

Example content (very broad, less mention of Monad):

• Explaining what testnets are andthe expectations one should have around Monad’s (Coindesk or other with solid SEO)
• Comments around Ethereum Cancun (execution layer)-Deneb (consensus layer) upgrade. Remarks should be positive, full of hope and excited for the possibilities. Allowing readers to know that any improvements made on Ethereum have an amplified positive effect on Monad and do not threaten or make redundant.
• Thesis around the AI and crypto, where the impact will be
• A subject that splits opinion
• MiCA implications

Pitching the media:

T-minus 6 months until mainnet (Dec 2023):

Goal: create a steady building of excitement:

Campaign Idea 1: The idea of possibility

“what if…”

Internet was x1000 faster

Bricks were x1000 stronger or x1000 lighter

“what could you build if?”

Multi staged campaign comparable to HSBC adverts seen at airports.

Driving to landing page: using variants in copy — deploy, operate, scale, build, develop

KPI’s and OKR’s / understanding the task

The only metrics that matter are growth rate and revenue. Raising awareness and focussing on above the line authority building is required but does not equal growth neither does reporting pipeline metrics as it doesn’t impact them. The same applies for the number of whitepapers released and case studies published. Metrics to measure should be from website visits, to projects onboarded to the numbers of DAU’s the dapps have.

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