Wallet Relationship Management: what is is, how it works, and why you need it, with Samir Addamine and Antony Gardez

Everyone in marketing knows CRM, or customer relationship management. Less well known is its new web3 variant, wallet relationship management (WRM™).

In the standard web2 world, marketers and product managers measure results with technologies that capture prospect and customer activity: cookies on the web, advertising IDs like IDFA and GAID on mobile devices, and email addresses for signed-up and signed-in users. While much of that is still valuable in the world of web3, it misses a huge amount of the value that users, customers, and gamers create in web3 experiences.

Why?

Because web3 value is being measured, recorded, and even broadcasted in a very different place: on the blockchain.

“You can actually leverage on-chain data and dive into any custom audience,” says Absolute Labs co-founder and CTO Antony Gardez. “You can look into their history of NFT purchases, their portfolio values, their experience in web3 gaming. All of this is on-chain today. The blockchain is an open ledger, so you can know all of this in a very public way. It’s there.”

While all of that on-chain insight is out there and public, it’s not easy to read. Nor is it easy to aggregate and ingest into a marketing platform. And all of those are necessary precursors to making it actionable.

That’s precisely where a Wallet Relationship Management™ platform comes in: it provides the ability to harvest massive amounts of blockchain data, then provide the insights, segmentation and automation to leverage it.. This is important for native web3 brands, of course, whether they’re targeting gamers, developer communities, token holders, or NFT collectors and traders. But it’s increasingly important for companies and marketers that haven’t typically identified themselves as web3, too.

And that’s because wallet technology is expanding quickly.

“A crypto wallet today is going to replace many, many things that existed in web2 first,” says Samir Addamine, co-founder and CEO of Absolute Labs. “The way we connect to services online, internet services through email, and these complicated passwords and approaches we use … that as well can be replaced by a wallet.”

A crypto wallet doesn’t hold money or art or other digital artifacts and property in the same way our physical wallets might hold credit cards, identification, and cash. Instead, crypto wallets store digital keys needed to buy and prove ownership of digital products and assets. They connect to specific blockchains and display what you own: tokens, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and more. And they can also be used as a form of identity to acquire access to specific web3 experiences.

There are only about 400 million wallets today, Addamine says: less than 5% of the population.

Which means there is a lot of room for growth.

Much of that growth is likely to come from what we’ve traditionally considered web2 companies, many of which are now building blockchain-enabled or blockchain-inspired platforms for customer loyalty, customer rewards, and customer access to exclusive products, services, or experiences. For instance, Nike offers personalized stores in its Swoosh mobile apps for customers, and is adding .SWOOSH, a web3 experience that will offer NFTs and unique experiences such as being able to design your own digital wearables. Over time, that might grow to offer digital twin NFTs of physical NIKE products you buy. And, over time, wallet-to-wallet communication might enable your NIKE digital wearables to show up in Fortnite, or Meta’s Horizon Worlds, or other virtual environments.

To understand community health, uptake, and activity, you need Wallet Relationship Management to manage digital asset strategies.

“Hopefully, soon, we won’t be saying web2/web3 anymore,” says Gardez. “Think of Nike recently announcing their Swoosh platform, which is just the evolution of their global web3 strategy, which is becoming just their digital asset strategy … that’s really what Absolute Labs is helping companies do. It’s helping manage their digital assets strategy, which happens to be called web3 right now.”

Knowledge is great.

Intelligent action based on that knowledge is better.

A Wallet Relationship Management platform is central to marketing in web3: nurturing customer relationships, providing community health stats, and serving as a customer data platform (CDP) and marketing automation system.

Get all the details in our conversation by watching the video above, or subscribing to the Web3 Marketing Podcast. And, don’t forget to subscribe to the Absolute Labs YouTube channel.

Full transcript: Wallet Relationship Management

(This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

John Koetsier: Welcome to the first-ever episode of the inaugural “web3 Marketing Podcast.” This is actually kind of a cool moment. I’ve spent a ton of time recently talking to people in web3, talking to people who work at Axie Infinity, talking to people who are building games or experiences in web3, and the reality is, how do you market in web3? It’s a bit of a mystery. Even the experts, even the ones who are huge, have real questions. And if you’re maybe a web2 company, or a traditional company, a big brand and enterprise, you probably have even more questions. We’re gonna try and answer those in this podcast, not just in this first episode, but in many other episodes with experts, with people who are figuring it out, have figured it out, are doing it on a daily basis.

We’re starting this one with the principles behind Absolute Labs. Absolute Labs, of course, is a company that is building something very, very interesting. It’s not CRM, it’s WRM, it’s Wallet Relationship Management. We’re gonna get into what that is, how it works, what it’s good for, what it does, all that stuff in just a moment.

First off, welcome, Samir. Welcome, Antony.

Antony Gardez: Thank you, John.

Samir Addamine: Thank you, John.

Antony Gardez: Great to be here.

John Koetsier: Hey, great to be here. Great to have you. We’ll get into Absolute Labs, and a little bit of your background, and why you’re building this in a moment. But I kinda let the cat out of the bag, Wallet Relationship Management, what is that?

Samir Addamine: All right. So, I can start here, right? We’re kind of trying to define this category here. And we realize, you know, since we started exploring web3 and its capabilities, and what does it mean, this kind of next internet, this web3 internet. And with Antony, we’ve been building marketing tech products for the past 14 years. It’s our fourth company here that we’re building together on that.

Wallets are about security, about … not yet about user experience, but that will come as well, right? And we believe wallets are very, very powerful.
There are 300 million wallets, less than 5% of the population today that are using them to trade crypto. It’s still very early, right? It’s 4% of the total population. Now, once we get to mainstream, and hopefully, we’ll get there soon, there’s still a lot of work to do here.

And by the way, you know, we removed the phrase “web3 CRM,” kind of the way people described our company and our product, because we believe web3 word itself is gonna disappear, hopefully, soon. It’s gonna be the internet, right? The new internet, the ownership internet, whatever you wanna call it. But yeah, and wallet relationship is about how we reinvent this way to acquire customers, convert them, or do some retention, you know, is marketing in this new internet. And wallet relationship marketing is combining all that.

John Koetsier: Antony, so we got the big picture. Give us some of the details, give us a couple of use cases, give us a couple of ways Wallet Relationship Management works.

Antony Gardez: Absolutely. I think what’s key here is to understand that we are looking at audiences. This is web3, this is wallets, but it’s still, at the end of the day, audiences. So, you know, we’re talking about owners of digital assets, but also players of web3 games, and users of NFT marketplaces. All these people are identified by their wallet address.

And from here, how do you, as a company, look into these audiences and understand who is your average user, average customer? What are their profiles, and how do you actually enrich these profiles? How do you bridge your, let’s say, web2 data coming from analytics on your NFT marketplace, for instance? How do you see more than just this web2 data, and how do you bridge this with on-chain activity?

For instance, let’s say I have an NFT marketplace and I want to better understand who my users are in terms of their interests, in terms of what it is that they might buy more.

Essentially, the idea is to say, “I’m used to this in web2, but web3 is different. I wanna do sort of the same thing, but adapt it to what web3 offers.” And that’s where we come in.

John Koetsier: Super, super interesting. Blockchain is out there. It’s public. It’s a ledger, you mentioned that. It’s a way of reading what’s on the ledger and giving some analytics on that, and maybe some insight. It’s much, much more than that and we’ll get into all those details.

But, Samir, let’s take a step back. You started Absolute Labs, what, a year ago? Why did you start it? What’s your background?

Samir Addamine: So, you know, we built several marketing tech companies in the past few years. As I mentioned, it’s our fourth company, actually, we’re building with Antony. And the previous one was a kind of a mobile marketing leader in its category. It was called FollowAnalytics. And we started it back in Paris in 2013, moved it to San Francisco in the U.S after Marc Benioff became our first investor, and grew the company to become one of the leaders in each category according to Gartner and the Magic Quadrant.

So, we exited the company almost two years ago, and realized that there was something very interesting here with web3 and with these wallets and this ownership internet. And then, you know, after we started the Absolute project in June 2021 and actually delivered the beta version of our product in June 2022, so four months ago, and a lot has been happening so far since then.

John Koetsier: It’s amazing and interesting to me because we’ve had some boom, we’ve had some bust in crypto, which is closely aligned, but not exactly the same as web3, obviously, and yet, the number of infrastructure companies, and marketing stack companies in web3 that are getting funding and getting out there is quite amazing.

Antony, talk about some of the capabilities here.

You mentioned already in general … let’s say I’m a web2 company, and maybe I don’t even think of myself as a web2 company, I’m just a company. I’m on the internet. I’ve got an app. I’m selling stuff. Maybe I’m doing some digital twin-type products, maybe I’m doing some NFTs as passes, maybe I’m doing something else, maybe I’ve got a loyalty program, I don’t know.

But I’m hearing about this web3 thing, and I’m thinking, “I’d like to understand it. I’d like to get into it. I’ve started building some products here.” What does Absolute do for them?

Antony Gardez: So, it’s very interesting that you’re mentioning web2 companies, and the fact that, hopefully, soon, we won’t be saying web2/web3 anymore. There’s so many brands getting in there, right?

In terms of specific examples, I mentioned audience management, right? This is the data side of things. What really matters for companies is also to be able to go beyond data.

Having great dashboards is one thing, but how do you leverage this? How do you actually improve your return on investment? How do you increase customer knowledge, which is, as we all know, actually, key to all major corporations? They build profiles, so they better know their customers, so they are better at serving them, at creating the right products for them, and marketing their products to their end users.

So, our platform basically covers these two main aspects, which are understanding the customers, but also interacting with them by leveraging this customer knowledge. So, this means marketing automation, which is, again, web3 is an evolution of web2 in a way. So you can think of HubSpot or a Salesforce marketing cloud, or Braze.

How do you transform this into, or let’s say, adopt this idea to Web 3? And so, that’s what we did.

Your audiences in web3, how do you interact with them? Well, you can send email messages and text messages from Absolute Labs, but you can also leverage Discord. You can leverage airdrops. You can directly mint NFTs to reward users for having been active on your platform or for having completed a quest in your game. So, it’s about engagement, it’s about gamification.

All of it in the context of web3, so that’s wallet addresses, that’s digital assets, and much more.

John Koetsier: Samir, I wanna bring you in here because we’re just talking about more traditional companies. But as I mentioned, off the top, I recently had a chat with three people who are deep in web3 — they’re building games, they’re building experiences, they’re marketing, they’re growth leaders in the space — and we had an hour-long conversation.

And there’s lots of ideas out there, there’s lots of technologies out there, there’s lots of things that people are doing, but there’s really no defined path or defined tech stack right now for growth marketing in web3. That seems interesting.

And one person said, “That’s why it’s exciting. We’re new. It’s young.” Your thoughts?

Samir Addamine: Yeah.

We believe there’s gonna be plenty of startups coming in this kind of web3 marketing category, right?

We have built a product that is covering these three main things that I mentioned. Acquisition. You know, web3 is a kind of a dream for marketers. Data, is now what we call on-chain analytics, is public, right? It’s all available. It’s not structured. And we built what we call a customer data platform. It’s a CDP, right? You know, a huge data warehouse with all the on-chain analytics data, and we wanna allow marketers, actually, to use these on-chain analytics and their first-party data ingested here to better target leads. And we wanna help advertisers as well on their spend, you know, leveraging this data.

So, that’s for the acquisition part. Completely reinvented here, we bring the first piece here, which is gonna be a kind of composable data warehouse.

And we’re gonna make it available for many of our startups, by the way, in the coming months, right? But they can leverage. We invested a lot here.

Second piece here is the conversion … and when we talk about conversion, we talk about segmentation, you know? Think about tools that exist in web2 like Segment, for example, that have a CDP and other products, right?

But also, you know, Marketing Automation Platform, MAP, right, Braze, that Antony mentioned, HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So, this conversion is made here on web3. So, on web2, it’s made through email, right, mostly, and some push notifications, some SMS, social media, and all of that.

You have, you know, wallets have these amazing capabilities to allow advertisers, actually, and companies to airdrop tokens or NFTs directly to a wallet. But you have to do that in a way that is automated, respectful of privacy, opt-in, etc., right? So that’s why we needed a tool, and we built it for that. You know, you wanna be able to do all these things.

And then you have the retention phase here, how are you gonna be able to reactivate these dormant, potential customers?

Here, there are wallet customers. And we incentivize them with rewards, with tokens, and NFTs.

And that’s these three things, you know, acquisition, conversion, and retention. That’s the future marketing stack, web3 marketing stack that needs to be built. We believe we’re bringing our piece here and are doing our part of the job.

But this is the very beginning here. We believe there’s gonna be a lot of companies. We’re already seeing many of them and partnering with many of them building connectivity. You know, web3 is also composable, right? Platforms are like open, and, you know, you collaborate with all the technologies, and everyone is adding his piece of innovation here to better serve the end user, right? There’s this community thing in web3 that is very powerful.

John Koetsier: It’s interesting that you mentioned segmentation, and when you were talking about retention, that word came back to me. Because, guess what, you also wanna know what they are using? What are they using of my services right now? What are they most interested in? What’s the best methodology to get in touch with them, not just to get in touch with, but what’s the best message to deliver that’s gonna be most impactful, correct?

Samir Addamine: Yes, it’s exactly that. This is the same, you know, marketers, we cannot say web2, web3 marketers. I mean, they’re the same people. And web3 marketers are coming from web2, right? But they’re just, like, embracing it and discovering the capabilities of wallet, you know, and its utility as a customer ID, and discovering the capabilities of on-chain analytics, right, which is huge here.

You know, before that, we had to do things. When web2 marketers come to web3, and you see many, many of them now that are transitioning to that, once they discover the capabilities here, they’re quite amazed actually.

And, plus, it’s more beneficial to the end user and the consumers. We don’t need to know them. We don’t need to have their names, their demographics, you know? A wallet is enough. We learn a lot about them already. We keep their privacy and security here safe, right?

John Koetsier: And knowing is really actually important, just to stick on the segmentation thing for a moment. I was talking to Quinn Campbell, VP of Marketing for Sky Mavis, which makes Axie Infinity.

And he said, “We actually have 11 or 12 different personas in the game, different types of people, and only half of them actually play the game.” Now, that’s in gaming, but this is gonna be the case for any web3 experience because some people, their point is to engage in the experience. If it’s a game, playing the game, if it’s an activity or utility, using that. Some of the people might be investors, some people might be just kind of the glue that brings the community together. They’re invested in different ways for different reasons, and if you treat them all identically, you’re really gonna fail.

Samir Addamine: That’s completely right.

That’s one of the things that is very important here in web3. Your customers are holders, investors, developers. You know, there’s different kinds of levels, stakeholders right here, and they can have different roles, they can vote in the governance in your DAO. They have different levels of interaction, right, with your dApp, or your tokens. And here, that’s where, again, the web3 marketing platform is gonna be different. Before that, it was an email, one person now, right, but that’s not working in web3.

John Koetsier: Yep. Antony, let’s bring you back here. You talked about some cool capabilities and a new space. Who are you working with right now? What are you doing that is helping them?

Antony Gardez: Yeah, I think it’s very relevant to what we’re just discussing in terms of approaches to different personas. If you think of companies like The Sandbox, they’re a huge metaverse, they’re actually bringing a lot of corporations to web3 as well. They’re doing a huge part in, you know, working on mass adoption, future mass adoption, this big theme in web3.

The Sandbox, as you mentioned, they have people buying land because it’s an investment. There are people investing in the token. The token itself is actually a currency in a virtual world. The virtual world, there’s players, there’s just exploring, others are here to actually build as well. And that’s interesting because it’s part of their objective. There’s multiple objectives. There is getting people to play, getting people usually to buy assets, because that’s revenue for the company, but, overall, they want people to build experiences as well. That’s what creates the engagement in the game.

It’s both, right? And you need to be able to do both to be relevant because if you only look at what people invest in, you’re missing the whole part of what they do in game. Do they actually play the game? Do they build in the game? And only if you get the full picture, can you actually be relevant. So, you create the segments, you import the data. And from here, you get to actually being relevant as a brand, and that’s what marketing is about. I mean, it’s been decades that marketing is about being actually relevant, and trying to get to the one-to-one relationship with your customers so they really feel nurtured and feel like they’re precious and unique for your brand.

John Koetsier: Mm-hmm. Interesting. What’s the vision for the future, Antony? What kind of capabilities are you going to be building?

Antony Gardez: There’s three, four different aspects. One is data, of course. And this is a key thing we have, and this is a huge expertise we have as well. As Samir said, our background is in mobile marketing. In terms of big data, in terms of managing this amount of data, this is really our expertise, and there’s a lot more we can do compared to what we are currently doing.

We’re just getting started, right? The company’s very young.

So, if someone is about to leave, as a holder, as a person in my community, what can I do to try and keep them around? Maybe I can airdrop something, some tokens, or more of a, not necessarily an asset with specific value, but something that makes my customers feel, you know, valued, in a way. So that’s one aspect.

Another one is expanding the marketing capabilities in terms of data collection.

Of course, if you wanna be able to communicate with your users, there’s airdrops, there’s Discord, but there’s email as well, and there’s other channels that you wanna be able to leverage. To do so, you need to be able to collect some of this data. And this is pretty traditional marketing. That’s what marketers call “landing pages.” You spin up a page or you launch a marketing campaign where the main objective is to collect email addresses and to be able to then, in the future, get back to the users and be relevant on the type of communication you have. So that’s a second topic.

There’s a third one, which is becoming basically the hub of web3 in a way. So, we mentioned this marketing stack of web3, how, as a company, can you be relevant and be embracing all aspects of web3? For instance, there’s a hot topic, I would say recently, which would be wallet-to-wallet communication, right? There’s companies out there such as Push Protocol, which is formerly known as EPNS. There’s protocols like XMTP and other amazing ideas and amazing companies working on trying to find how to do web3 communication right.

We want to be also the hub that companies can use to leverage these technologies without having to pick which one is going to be the one they will use. They can just create their customer experiences and leverage the best technology there through our network of partners and technologies offered.

I could go for a long time on innovation ideas, but these are some of the main themes. Maybe, Samir, you have things to add here.

Samir Addamine: You know, John, to summarize, we’re adding more intelligence, more recommendation, more machine learning. And, obviously, we are delivering new features every month on this platform. There’s a huge team actually working with Antony, and we invested a lot here. And fortunately, we did it at the right time, because the reality is that this crypto winter, and these crises and crashes that we’ve been seeing since June now has been in some way accelerating the need for companies to do more marketing and get closer to their customers.

John Koetsier: Let’s hit on that because I was recently talking to Jon Hook, who’s the CMO of PlayEmber, they’re building a web3 experience right now. And I asked him, “What do you think about the current environment?” He said, “It’s a beautiful moment of a bear market. A beautiful moment of a bear market.” Expand on that a little bit, Samir. Why is now the right time?

Samir Addamine: Look, we had probably like five big crashes, right, since crypto exists, like, since Bitcoin, right? The first one was probably in 2011, the second one in 2013. I’m not going to go through them, but the third one in 2015. We had another one in 2015, and then, you know, we’re in 2022, and we probably had like from, you know …

But this industry is very resilient. They keep learning from these mistakes and adapting to it. And this is an amazing ecosystem of very smart people, that’s what we discovered in the past like two years, and it’s quite amazing to see this.

There’s like hundreds of teams all over the world working on the next innovation, adding to the existing…it’s an open-source industry, so they add all to the existing, you know, building here that we are … and as an example, with this kind of disaster that everyone has been reading about for the past few days …

John Koetsier: FTX.

Samir Addamine: … and this big crash, FTX. You know, the exchanges have launched with CZ first, with Binance first, but the others were doing it before, a few of them. Proof of reserve, right? It’s a new … it’s collateral. It’s transparency. And, you know, and this industry, and the way it’s resilient, it’s learning, it’s coming with new ideas, and smart people come in with… And proof of reserve, as an example, we had a meeting this morning with one of our partners to be able to provide this kind of metric to our customers in our own dashboards, having, you know, because using absolute segmentation features allow us to look at users and what kind of exchanges they’re training with.

You’re gonna have this kind of view as well. I mean, this is very important, and we believe what we can bring is that data is about transparency, right? You know, you can trust the data, actually, when it’s structured and presented in a way that is actually very clear. And this is very important for us, to be able to have this transparency. So, you know, I believe we have our role to play here as well.

John Koetsier: It’s super interesting because the thought that came to my mind as you were speaking there is that whatever company I am, whether I’m web3 native, whether I’m a brand, an enterprise, and I create something that is web3 that offers tokenization, that offers ownership as well as participation, that offers maybe portability of assets, or something like that, I need to have some data on what’s the health of my community.

What’s your participation in my community, right? How many wallets do I have? What’s the contents of those wallets, in aggregate, right? Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Where’s the activity moving to? What are the parts and components that are most interesting?

Samir Addamine: That’s exactly the point, John. This existing marketing technology, you know, they’re not working in web3. And that’s actually, it’s interesting, we see some web3 companies’ customers starting implementing them with the idea that they would help them with that. But they cannot use them. web2 marketing platforms are secondary here. We actually believe they’re commodities. You know, email marketing is a commodity. SMS/push is a commodity, right? We integrate it in our own platform, but they’re not the primary channel here.

And another reason why these existing marketing technologies won’t work for web3 is because they’re not managing the wallet as the customer ID. And it’s much more complex than a crypto key, right, than a private key here to manage. It’s much more complicated than that. Anyhow, it’s very interesting. I think web3 companies or web2 companies operating in web3, they need to get closer and better understand the stakeholders here. As you just said, who are my holders, who are investors, who are my dApp users and gamers if I’m game? What is the activity in my Discord, etc., right? All of these questions are here.

John Koetsier: Antony, if we think web3, crypto is important in web3, but it’s not synonymous. Can you tease out those two realms?

Antony Gardez: Yeah, I think it’s quite interesting you … I was actually thinking about that because you mentioned, you know, this bear market is a bit different, right? And I think a reason for this is that there is now an actual distinction between crypto and web3. Web3 is a space in which people build, in which companies are coming as well, and crypto is, you know, a way to define crypto is cryptocurrencies and prices of assets, and looking at Bitcoin going up and down, and this is not impactful.

If you look at what’s been happening in 2022 so far, there’s been a couple pretty sizable crashes when it comes to asset prices and liquidity exiting the market, and so on, from Terra, to FTX, and other smaller-size crises. But at the same time, companies have never been filing that many patents as this year when it comes to web3 as a whole. The old major companies, you know, the Metas, Googles, all these companies, they keep on innovating in web3 as well. If you look at all the big retailers, everybody’s coming, everybody’s very active despite the current market activity, globally, there’s a lot of investment going into web3 as well, as you mentioned, in terms of infrastructure, and so on.

This is not stopping. Prices are going down. Investors are sad at times because of this, but it’s different from web3, right?

They’re here. And so, for builders, it’s actually not a bear market. It’s actually extremely exciting.

John Koetsier: Samir, let’s bring it to a close here. There’s two key audiences, two key markets that you’re developing this technology for. There’s, of course, the web3 space, and there is also the traditional brand and enterprise, which we could call web2, if we choose. Let’s start with web3. What’s their biggest challenge, and how do you fix it?

Samir Addamine: So this, yeah, so this is very interesting because web3 companies, the native companies, they were in this since actually, I would say, the beginning of this year, they were in this kind of bull market where everyone was buying tokens. There were not even tokens in NFT platforms for everyone, right? That was quite amazing. And they moved from this situation to a kind of a crash, and, you know, and then plenty of other web3 NFT projects that were like starting, and a lot more, and maybe not enough yet users. And it was really fast, right, you know, and it’s just a question of a few months. So they have to adapt to that.

So then, again, we’ve been very, very fortunate that we built during this bull market, and now in this bear market we are actually selling a lot because they all need that kind of product, right? They all need that kind of… And, again, these existing marketing technologies, we call it web2 marketing platform, they don’t work for web3.

But now, some of them have been desperately going after these tools, you know, these web2 marketing tools, hoping they would help them with emails, etc., but they don’t know how to tie an email to a wallet address. I mean, all of this is not working that much, right? Not very well, actually.

So, web3 companies now have been hiring a lot of marketers and CRM marketers, reacting, because they need to increase their level of marketing automation and CRM capabilities inside their companies. So they have been working hard in the past few months, and we are working with many great teams on that.

John Koetsier: So, what’s interesting there is that I was talking to First Light Games, building a web3 game, and their excitement around this current market is that in the bull phase, everybody’s winning, everybody’s going, you know what, whether the game is good or not, whether the experience is good or not, because you sell the tokens, and everybody’s happy, rich and happy, and maybe not so smart.

Now, there’s an opportunity to differentiate. So, that’s the web3 side. What about the web2 side, the brand, the enterprise side? What’s their biggest challenge?

Samir Addamine: So, this is very interesting as well because these companies, and we know them very well, right, we come from this world, we used to work with these companies and they are like established businesses. They don’t really have tokens, they’re looking for the long-term.

The first interesting thing that we see with them is that these days, right, they continue to invest massively. They’re thinking about 10 years from now, they’re not thinking about like, 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years. We’re quite impressed with a few of the teams we’re working with on this, large web2 companies. And there’s a lot of retail, luxury, entertainment, right, even media as well, investing in web3 business, whether it’s NFT, metaverse, but they don’t see web3 just as, hey, I’m gonna launch an NFT collection or buy a LAND. They see it as, how can I create products or connect my product and services to web3 and add also some innovation here and create things?

And what is interesting, and maybe one of the challenges we have with their teams is they’re also, they’re the opposite of the web3 companies, they need to be evangelized on the web3 marketing capabilities, right? We need to help them. So we put in place a kind of a customer success team with some kind of experts on web3 marketing that have experienced launching an NFT collection and doing this kind of stuff, or partnering, or doing some business development in the metaverse, etc. And they need that today because they already have their marketing stack. And that’s another challenge here, which is, they’re using the existing marketing platform. They don’t wanna remove that, they don’t wanna displace them, right? So we had to work as well on connectivity and integration to leverage their existing email marketing and CRMs so they can continue leveraging our platform, you know, the wallet relationship, but then also have this journey, you know, this flow that is gonna continue on an email for their existing platform.

So, this is what is challenging with web2 companies, they wanna go there, they’re investing a lot, they have to leverage their existing assets as well. So, it’s a kind of a different approach here, but we’re adapting with them.

John Koetsier: Excellent. I think we’ll call it there. This has been exciting, it’s been informative, it’s been interesting, it’s been enlightening. And this is just the beginning. This is the first episode. There’s going to be so many more.

We’re gonna talk to experts. We’re gonna talk to people in the trenches. We’re gonna talk to people who are implementing. We’re gonna talk to thinkers and strategists and others in the web3 space, in the marketing space, in the web3 marketing space, and more about this Wallet Relationship Management — what it does, how it works, how to use it, other things like that.

Stay tuned, subscribe, and see you next time.