Rocket Insights, a one-stop product solution provider that specializes in the entire design and development lifecycle. The firm is focused on creating beautiful applications for mobile and web. On the Algorand blockchain, the firm has also created the first open source, white label solution for rolling out NFTs marketplace. With services ranging from product strategy to designing to development to launch and growth, Rocket Insights is helping many businesses in the digital ecosystem.
The Coin Republic has recently interviewed Josh James, the founder of Rocket Insights Inc. In the exclusive session, James discussed his spectacular journey. Furthermore, he also discussed marketing and strategies in the Web3.0 ecosystem.
What does Josh James do?
I do only online marketing. I’ve been doing it for over a decade, usually specializing in emerging industries like marketing technologies. The primary focus is Web3, NFT, blockchain, crypto, and Metaverse marketing. So I’m president of Rocket Acquisitions Inc, a national marketing agency in Canada.
We serve clients globally. We’ve done like 1.5 billion in sales since 2014. Furthermore, we, for clients, have put as many ROIs driven, AB-tested, proven strategies as we possibly could since we’ve started. And we’re always trying to make sure we are always deploying marketing efforts that generate real dollars and value, and hopefully can see big bucks and get you started right foot with a few good insights here on the show.
Josh is where he is without an MBA degree
So I’ve high respect for ‘University Degrees’. And love getting people with, like, higher education on my teams and just milking them for their knowledge, skills, and efforts. I think it’s like really important and really valuable. But having said that, the US is like I have been. I’ve dropped out of university a couple of times. The first was to be a professional gamer. And a second time was to help create systems to enable internet privacy because I found it was really, at the time was like, personally, really important to me. And both times, the university had experience in business programs and had full scholarships when I was there, so I didn’t have to pay for school, luckily.
Those times and really fun parts of my journey have been like I went from like dropping out of my marketing class first marketing class, where my teacher came over and closed my laptop in front of everyone. And I was very into my marketing contract for like a client, and there’s no way she wouldn’t know I wasn’t taking notes, so it’s frustrating for me. So I just like that onslaught of like I shouldn’t touch my first property as a teacher.
Dropped out then and was got hired by seniors. He’d run their marketing like my company within six months of leaving the program, which is cool. So we were doing marketing for the same university that we couldn’t stick to our marketing class. I also have been pretty fundamental working with a team to create one of the first blockchain degree programs or certificates out there in the world, like today’s, overturn universities, how to create and write smart contracts, if you’re a programmer. So we did that in 2017.
Marketing isn’t something easy
Yeah, it’s really hard. It’s the hardest in this category, in my opinion, and it’s the most valuable. It’s also the most competitive, and it’s the deepest knowledge rabbit hole that you can go down in my opinion in business if you can’t, you can’t doubt like how secretly, impossibly hard. Very difficult.
It’s the most over the falsified thing that it’s easy to market that people will post, like, and sell. And all the best marketers in the world that are selling you tools and systems themselves forget that don’t they have the marketing backgrounds they had before they were successful and what they’re doing. Usually, they’re selling stuff that is very difficult to get your money’s worth or profit off. Because if you put your credit card into it, and it’s like a multi-billion dollar company and doesn’t refill your credit card for you, then how easily could this system possibly be?
Was marketing always something challenging?
I feel like it’s always hard. It’s never easy. Because you’re like really driving sales. There’s psychology, and there’s attention, there’s timing, there’s consistency, there’s a novelty. As a category designer, you got to do a lot of things. The deeper you go, the more you map out how much skill is needed.
In marketing, you’re either making money or losing money. It can be punishing.
How is marketing done in the field of Web3.0?
It was going on that for like all cryptos it was I’d say I was doing, I would have done a lot of private equity raising, marketing for, venture capital companies and how-to, and I’ve spent a long time learning the legal end of marketing securities, and what you’re allowed to do and what not to do in different regions. And so it started like, I’m just Wild West.
I remember the first thing, ICOs and going. Wow, it’s the most illegal security marketing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. That is, you can’t promise 30x returns on anything, and you can’t run to return anything and not be selling the security. It was, wow, that’s, that’s like, not going to last long. And yeah, kind of crazy. The enough they let through, and it just kind of like quite a wild rush. And now the projects, you’ll see, quite a bit of company care about the legality and ensure they’re just back. Things happen that don’t lock your project away in the depths of court for life. Essentially, it is cool.
There are so many ways to market. And, with crypto and blockchain, it’s crazy that a lot of the marketing strategies that people are running just can’t move the people. The high enough volume to generate explosive growth or explosive sales that are necessary for certain markets, even for marketing, or business marketing, we can easily be onboarding a client at a time potentially like marketing to do ads and funnel through one person. But in crypto, you can’t get away with one person at a time. You need like 20k people to move in today, and then tomorrow, they need 80k people.
You’re not going to guarantee you’re keeping momentum for very long, and it’ll just bottom out. And so it’s fascinating, a completely different analogy. Most growth hacking in Silicon Valley is not done through paid ads or any efforts besides referral or affiliate marketing systems. Everything feeds, which usually is supposed to feed into your referral system as a reinforcement to encourage people to, keep preferring, because your referrals, one person can take and can bring you 10. And those ten could bring you 10, 10, 10, and 10, and then those 10s can bring more 10s. And if you open any major app in 30 seconds, you can find their referral program. Like you have 25 bucks, you open casual commercial $50 Share DoorDash share different $20 you get like I see additions, Yeah 20 bucks to write to your friends.
There’s a secret sauce: referrals are what, and all the other marketing goes round is you remind your community to keep referring people.
We are still learning about marketing into cryptocurrencies. It’s evolving. Hiring for every day is like, I think we’re closer, and we can eliminate a lot of stuff in crypto as well, which is trying to call an alias to some major ones. Keep eyes on is always see a project take off and sustain itself. That’s like always a good sign to go. Okay, there’s some perfect marketing going on. What are they doing, what do they do, or what’s the system they’ve just run that has generated this type of momentum.
Often there are two or three undervalued stuff you don’t notice, which is one. A good marketer markets the only projects that are making it in Web3.0. It’s like, they’re sick marketing, they’re really good. They’re not those guys, under 30 years, that’s like they’re new every 30 years, and have boomed a few billion-dollar companies at least once, or at least read the book, you know like they haven’t, and some strategies and stuff going on. It may seem like an overnight success, but a lot of stuff running can be up to a year of prep for a one-day launch. And you only see the one-day thing, but if you would like to try and set yourself up, you would look at like easily like over a year to coordinate some stuff like the ETH coin, for instance. Launching nearly 20 on every exchange simultaneously in one day is a year prep. Like it takes six months to get on some of those exchanges.
A marketing dedicated person is always essential
There’s a need for a marketing person, a dedicated person just like a compliance person, for the beginning of changes. But yeah, the mortgage is really important. I think the coolest hack is to try arranging 30 days’ worth of your marketing ahead of time. And then do it all pre-programmed to run and execute for you and see what happens.
If you can put together 30 days first and try and see what happens off it because the best marketing will be the longer, more depth, and more complex physically, the more complex, the more successful it is. Unfortunately, there’s no simple marketing that’s simple 10,000 steps together. You get money at the end. And the money journey is very interesting. I’m always begging and clawing at every company to keep monetizing things and never stop selling things. Or making more money, and never stop trying to arrange things ahead of time, the hardest thing you can do. And the biggest challenge is trying to do things as they come.
If you can lose all your time, energy, and efforts by doing, say you have a new partnership. And you’re, Oh, that’s awesome. I can’t wait. Then you go to all the content you like, find the hashtags and content, ready to get all the courses and coordination of book parties you go to and push it out there on a Tuesday. Is it good times?
Everyone’s online on Tuesday at 9 am. And they used to push it out there, goes out there. It is drill receive, Kinetic, and you have to respond to comments like you’re making sure people get pushed out there, hits the road algorithm, you’re on LinkedIn. So it’s a 10-minute window, you’re on YouTube, you get the watch time, you’re on Twitter, it’s like it gets pulled up by the automation tooling.
You have an algorithm that favors all this stuff. And then you have your Instagram, and you’re like, people liking my Instagram post as well. And then you think about like, then you’re, done, and you’re just exhausted it’s like, that’s two days of hard work, and you got out there and glow. But then what next, you know, you must do it again. And we also have to think about coordination and timing, efforts and energy and people involved, and then all platforms, everything. But if you don’t follow it up with something, your momentum dies. You got your momentum, but now it’s like, oh, no, I have a deadline of momentum. Keep going, and I have to do it again and again. And I see a lot of people get trapped in social media loop situations where it’s like, I could, hire somebody who was 20 years old, to, be on tour 18 hours a day and, grow pretty good and do very well. But it’s much more effective to plan three days ahead of time and organize things as quickly as possible.
We should use automation tools for marketing
100% Yeah, it’s always easy, especially for you there. And you take a break for a week, and your tools still got your back. You can sleep on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Not to lose your momentum. Or lose that consistency.
AI is good. It’s really good. And AI was the heart. And thank you, AI, for existing. That makes life easy. And thank you, automation tools exist because there’s a full-time job to grow any individual platform, no matter who it is, you’re going to, and also what the dress need is there are API limits that, like our audit automation tools can do surpass.
Top 5 marketing strategies for NFTs
Web3 NFT space has its own rule set and works like other industries. They also don’t have the marketing industry. It’s just tough.
For five things, I’d say, if you’re going to grow through social media, you need automation tooling, and if you’re doing automation like, don’t DM 1000 People work hard on the way you’re doing figure out the sequencing. Mover a good example. Remember, it is a project 1,000% through Twitter automation only, and it was amazing. It was all Twitter donation, so no influencers, nothing. That project the solo of 6 million in April it’s a three-day only Twitter noticeboards, no brands behind them that didn’t exist, prior that could drive that type of traffic. It was full automation.
The other one would be the Eagle Labs systems which are doing a lot of projects. The myth misnomer is you have to sell out when you launch. If you don’t sell out, your project is a bus. But like bait like board a yacht club, they think you sold like 500. The first one they launched, they like didn’t sell out their projects for weeks and weeks and weeks. How they got to selling out is so much to get out there and start creating kind of promo collaborations with other project communities that have similar size to you or bigger size. And so you do what would you call it like an airdrop redeem for your community for both communities, and then you make a public sale to the rest of the world. So like you have a percentage of the promo or the essays land or the token, the current communities, you want to make sure they get a free redeem availed, then you sell the other 90% to the public at like a good price. So what happens is the current communities get excited. And they see tangible value attached to it, as other people in the world will want to buy at full price. And you get a kind of free marketing going on that you get. I don’t know if you ever seem like every time there’s a utilized drop like I don’t know if you can like to open your Twitter without just saying, oh, I’m $1.5 million off of a point, and I just got the two years lands for free. It’s just taken over. It just takes over Twitter, and you can’t even net nobody is talking down on it. It’s all like a positive vibe, and they’re all the people who own it going crazy. And because they got to redeem. And so they take over the airwaves and just snuff out everyone.
It was all it does, like creating a FOMO for the rest of the world who’s not part of the project yet. And it also creates excitement for the current communities, and usually, if you look back at the history of almost any project is up or invisible friends or all these guys. They’ve done 10 or 12 of these AirDrop collabs; they can be one-off promos with nothing to do with anything. Big poster, get a colored poster and empty that has no contractual integration was any projects or anything. Boy, does it like gives the energy like you always have. It’s they have to redeem pay gas fees. But it creates an extra thing for the current people to be excited about. And there also it goes like man, if I don’t get in now when I miss out again, I just watched the people make $10 million, every week if I don’t get it now. I’ll never miss out again. So we all go crazy and try and get in while it’s hot. And that’s what the US does every month, and they make these taxes a company every time, so it’s like knowing they’re in the billions of dollars. It’s somewhat okay. That’s a pretty mark. That’s a good market strategy. And it’s like a complex, and it’s hard to get around, get your head around, but it is like really important to a compound that to the holders and the communities, and so they get excited, and then you make sure that the rest of the world can buy-in, but that pay you guys.
But like everyone else has stood in line at the club, you know your friends can all walk in the short line, high-five bouncer free drinks for life. And then everyone else is in a world that they know they’re talking to you about is waiting in line pink overcharge, and they’re going to be there for a few hours, you know, it’s just how it is, and they’re going to pay $1,000 for the big news that you’re getting for free you’re selling Yeah, that’s kind of the equation for those guys. So I see. Yeah, so there is automation. I see collabs, and then I’d say you’ll have liked your lane to think things out strategically ahead of time. And there’s just planning, so the next one will be giving yourself enough time and being okay with just getting something out there and seeing it’s humbling to know that we’ve launched six times to be successful. However, you can always re-launch as if no one knew about it first. When you launch, no harm, no fall. Nobody discovered that you launched at that time, so there’s no audience or users. You can easily try again next week, maybe put an extra month in between, and there’s no need to sell out within five hours to succeed.
What does the future hold for the crypto project?
I see the features are really exciting. Imagine, everyone whose Web3 right now is like your family and part of the team because we’re trying to onboard the whole world from Web2 to Web3. So it’s not even big enough to not pretend everyone’s like working together. There’s to get assembling people, having 10,000 people working on Web3 or something. We will refresh like one company, getting everyone from 2 to 3. So yeah, I would say exciting stuff is coming up for it. And I had a good thing for that.
The one thing that everyone is unaware of is one of the biggest things I see that nobody understands fully yet building the Metaverse, and a game and ecosystem for Web3 is building World of Warcraft. Do you think it really how much work, like can people, work on World of Warcraft? To create it, think of 1000 of the best people in the industry, or the industry, working 24/7, sleeping under the desk for years, and then watching world Warcraft. It’s a and then running it, and then suddenly is, you, gotta look at game development if you need to understand.
Even if you don’t, for games, see:
How often does a new version of my favorite game come out?
And how many people work on that secretly?
For how many years before? The new version comes out?
When’s the next game come out?
How many years?
How many people?
How many millions?
How many skill sets?
How many people are going to work on that every day?
And then when does that next game come out?
One of my favorites is it’s a 3D virtual world. And yes, I’d say, the great big thing of it was for us, enabling us to, create the enough of, founding scale up to be able to build the unique. It was around for a long time. What is it like building that full game if you haven’t, and if a project hasn’t known, what is it like? What’s behind the scenes of those full, successful RPG, open worlds game systems. It’s worth looking at least to know, “okay, this is how they got to where they are”.
Josh’s point of view on Metaverse
So if you’re going to marketing, if you guys are marketing, it’ll work and succeed, and it’ll get there. There’s always no matter what, up or down or economy it is or what is going on in the world. Somebody’s always making money somewhere. There’s always money to be made. There’s always a transaction to have. We’re all making transactions 24/7. We’re buying, selling, eating, and traveling. Commerce goes on. There’s always opportunity everything we do is like, based around a status equation, usually, which is, if I, do this, give me more status, or, if I do this, give me less status. And it’s, the micro of, every decision everyone makes in the world is status if I buy this now have less money later.
That will decrease my status. But I’ll have this like-new shirt, which I’ll look at the party. So current status of the party, something I should buy a shirt because I’ve higher status. And then investments where I’ll be out money now, lose status because we’ll have fewer resources to do things. But later on, I’ll have more than $10,000 of this. So I have more status and resources to do things, and I’ll look good to my friends. If it wins, I’ll look like a pro. So I’ll get more status. So it’s all in on the green. All it comes down to this equation, and it was really fun. Secret universal principle going on. And so there’s always high growth right now. I’d say you can make money. A lot of money works for you right now. And marriage is going like crazy. Bust it for the moon. Everyone who likes hasn’t been in a game world, community connection and all that stuff. So it was going crazy to the moon. And it’s good to get in now. Just by taking your time, selling stuff, and making money, there’s a lot of stuff going on. One might like you put a lot of time and effort into it, then they haven’t seen their turns, and then the wayside or things have cancer. Your balloon as for people, the scariest thing about Web3 now in custody and ownership of like government slowly because, things on-chain isn’t the most track system wallets on time, like of all time.
Organic marketing or paid marketing
I used to be in the camp of paid marketing, only everything else. Who cares if you pay to be number one on Google? You get first business. Nobody even notices nicely. People wouldn’t notice it was an ad. You just did open their phone, hit type in a taxi, type in hotel, type in the airport. The first thing that comes up click on it by the time. You couldn’t see. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even go to bed anymore for a long time, and it would only be, hit check and paid ads, and then go back to bed, check paid ads. You’re not doing anything else SEO. Get out here, get organic stuff now. What are you doing? For three bucks? I get the clients, so you don’t get them. You’re just giving me better and better at this marketing stuff with paid ads. And so I always do that. I was not a crazy psychopath that only did one thing and was just paid ads, and other marketing companies came to us, almost all kinds of American companies like you guys. People do pay ads for us. And yeah, we can do banner ads, like can’t do what you got to do. But we can do paid ads and be announced.
I think that you can’t move enough people with paid ads for Metaverse and work through stuff, so you can keep going. You’re going to do well with paid advertising. If you have optimized correctly, you have the right systems in place and good copywriting. It’s wishy-washy with what’s paid what’s not paid because if your time is going into it, that’s putting your money into it too. So you’re and then their gang stuff if you want to be using the tools that work you want to be used if you need SEO, you want to be having, SEO Surfer that typically analyzes keyword infrastructure for you want to be making sure that you’re finding good links, backlinks you want to be, but a lot of stuff is paid, get good links is paid a lot of press is paid. You can get things for free, like having a good press kit for those links.
You have to move big groups of people to Web3, and you just can’t do it with paid ads. There’s not enough. You can’t move enough. There are limits on accounts you serve, and new accounts get banned. Right away. If it’s like a universe on most platforms, they usually have a certain aged Google Ads account to be able to run NFT queries, or you’re against the band. Facebook is similar. There are all these, Twitter has a golden energy marketing, but you can still do it. There are limits and restrictions. And I say the Bull. You can’t do unpay anymore, unfortunately, which sucks because, just all my paid ads skills, I can no longer go and has neural platforms to Google search, and we’ll be fine. But I guess I’d say like yeah, you’re going to no matter what marketing you do, it’s like you have got to put the time into something that has a high skill ceiling that you’re going to have to pay for the training or pay for somebody to do or have a really good friend that can pay a good price to get him to do the work for you. But you’re looking at any organic stuff, and cooperating is powerful. It can make a lot of money, and I’d say yeah, so move enough people you have to do this like really powerful marketing efforts that are just kind of very destructive and very new and fresh, but a real good move.
Who has the one thing that doesn’t align with me in paid marketing is the like, particularly in Google Search, you see that ad in that search? So it kind of like triggers something in my mind, like, “Oh, this is an ad, so I’m not going to click on it,” that means they are not so good at it.
Paid ads get ignored mostly
It’s true. If you’re an internet person or savvy Internet user, you skip. You’re naturally going to skip past that paid ad spot for sure. And via Google Search has like declining, and utility, as well as the topical analysis, search results for your SEO results. So it used to be a direct keyword, backlink to keyword situation, or you’d be typing in the Rolex watch, and it’ll find the words Rolex watch. If you type in the words Rolex watch, he’s looking for the topical analysis around the terms Rolex watch. He’s, trying to find things, okay, what are words that are related to watch and related to Rolex. Okay, those are, around this cloud of things, I guess close enough. It shows them that stuff. That’s just when you use your passwords.
Not as useful anymore in my sadness, as well. And I am symboled, I would always skip those, but the personal phone is different. Many buyers in certain demographics don’t know that the word ad would not again, or previously would have, there would be no real differentiation between the ad spot and the next buttons on mobile devices. So they would just say, tactics click, and then like, boom sale. And so whenever we get to the local search, it’s different. But yeah, it would be a little different back in the day. And so I agree with you. 100%. There were conditions to jump that hoop to the first. The first results, I guess, but they’re not as good as they once were. They were honestly good before. I feel. And I feel like nowadays, it’s really hard to find stuff on Google and the other things. As marketers, we’re always going to game the system. So it’ll always be gamed by somebody. So, give us someone who works through it, so we can find the information we need. That’s relevant, not the tropical analysis of the category using a cloud API tooling system or something. There’s value, and in the long term of getting those spots is this hard work, a lot of effort, a lot of money, you’re going to have to jump into, you be looking at long term plan, a lot of people will have full-time people try it in the links all the time. The website backlinks because your overall trust values are based on the trust value of the other sites that link back to you. But there’s also like a lot of under the hood, and extra is going on that is punishing and awarding the linked keywords.
So there’s a whole strategy.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/06/18/find-out-about-marketing-in-web3-0-with-josh-john/