Continued...
2. Dogebonk
I briefly got into crypto in 2018, and left shortly after, disillusioned with how unpredictable and volatile the whole space seemed. In the last few months, however, I’ve found myself back on the hype train, trying once again to try and grasp how the blockchain and Web3 will change the world. I’d watched with fascination this year as NFTs and Memecoins started taking over, even though from afar it seemed like a total shitshow. That assesment wasnt far off. What I was wrong about however, was that there were few to no opportunities there, and what really shook me was that once I got involved, I realized they were doing marketing on a level I’ve not encountered in my 15 years as an agency owner.
I’ll preface the rest of this story by saying what I’m about to tell you is among the riskiest bets you could possibly make, and it is something I treat as a moonshot, and not as something guaranteed. So please do not take this as an endorsement, instead look for the commonalities in this example and the first.
Still, what I’m going to tell you about is the most impressive and unusual thing I have witnessed as a marketer.
About two weeks ago I stumbled upon a Reddit post for a new memecoin that I assumed was a scam, but it got me thinking. I’ve been casually investing in crypto for a few years, but always stuck to the primary players. I’d watched the memecoin and NFT frenzy with amusement, but honestly thought it was ridiculous. And truth is, it is more than ridiculous, it is the wild fucking west with everyone high on crack.
After witnessing the rise of Shiba Inu after Dogecoin, I felt like I needed to understand how exactly millions of people were deciding to make these seemingly insane investments. Is it all just pure speculation? Well, sorta, but there is a lot more to what is driving it than just the promise of money, and the community dynamics and the content they create are what matter here.
Back to the suspect new memecoin. What I stumbled upon that day was a memecoin called Dogebonk on the frontpage of Reddit, where people were griping about a Billboard they had purchased in Times Square. Having known about the power of a single viral post to drive the creation of communities with common goals from my experience with PDAP, I wanted to see if the same process was happening here as well.
I joined their telegram, and was immediately hit with a rapidly scrolling chat of memes. With a few thousand members, 1/3 of them were active in the telegram at any given time. I’ve been working in digital marketing for 15 years, and have very rarely seen such levels of community engagement. This was all within a day or so of a single viral post on Reddit.
It hit me, memecoins are simply the monetization of memes. Take an existing meme, and a community that already exists will pump out those memes quadrupole time if they think their memeing will help grow the coin. ( which it will if enough people in the community do the same).
What you get is a flywheel that is essentially a viral marketing machine, with individual community members promoting the coin in such variety and scale, any marketing company would be paying millions per day for an equivalent reach. This attracts more fans of the meme, more investment, and more members to continue to grow the community and thus the value of the coin.
When you pair a quality meme, with the power to monetize that meme as a coin, the limiting factors are the quality of the meme itself and the skill of the marketing of the community.
At first glance, dogebonk sounds as dumb or random as any other memecoin, but as I’ve found, there are some critical differences.
The first is the meme quality. What makes dogebonk as a meme intriguing is its extensibility. Because it is an “active meme,” a dog bonking another dog, that action can be capitalized on in a way that other memes can’t. This subtle difference is striking when you look at doge or shiba vs dogebonk, the volume of memeing is vastly more common in dogebonk. The more frequently and easily a meme can be iterated and riffed on, the more you will see viral memes emerge. These memes are a fuel for the community, creating cohesion as well as fun. Each new hilarious meme has a dual purpose of solidifying in-group identity, and creating a vehicle for external recruitment. It’s an internal engine that keeps even loosely tied communities together. This was one thing PDAP lacked, and in the weeks that followed my joining of the Telegram group, I realized how critical that would be to maintaining a large percentage of initial true believers.
What I witnessed after joining dogebonk, was in three days they had gotten a Times Square digital billboard, and then frontpaged a Reddit post about it. Then I saw them take over the front page of a bunch of crypto subreddits, meme subreddits, and /biz on 4chan. The collaborative power was mind boggling. With the right meme, a brilliant grassroots community “bonksquad” of meme making and expert marketing has emerged and grown massively, all while utilizing memes to keep high morale, engage existing coin holders, and provide fodder for extending visibility..
The key both examples here is that organic community growth happens when you have two things in common.
1. Something people can get behind and work together on that has a concrete and tangible benefit to them or the things they find important.
2. A highly visible initial post that directs viewers to a community where they can immediately participate and engage.
These two examples are just two that i’ve witnessed recently, and it informed my opinion significantly on the power of a small spark, understanding that there is a real path from complete obscurity to massive community power, and that path isn’t as hard to travel as you might assume.