Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
What Investors Want in Web3 Projects
Recorded: June 10, 2025 Duration: 1:04:42Space Recording
Short Summary
The Next Moon Project relaunches with exciting developments, including a partnership with Binance Alpha and a focus on community engagement. The discussion highlights key trends in investor expectations, emphasizing the importance of transparency, sustainable revenue models, and effective marketing strategies in the evolving crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you're at in this crypto world.
My name is Cody and I am your host for today's episode of The Next Moon Project.
Wow, it's been a few months since I've said that.
It's great to be back. We are definitely
relaunching this platform, and we've got some amazing stuff cooking. So bear with me here for
just a second as I bring up all the other remaining speakers that will be on this episode,
and we'll get this thing kicked off. All right.
All right, sent out the invitations and we are just waiting for a few of them to join.
So in the meantime, let's go around and introduce everybody.
But before we do, if you're not familiar with what the Next Moon Project is all about,
If you're not familiar with what the Next Moon Project is all about, basically, it is a pretty fun platform that I built about eight months ago, I guess.
Yeah, it's been about eight months I founded the Next Moon Project as a way to basically unite projects and crypto enthusiasts through unbiased educational and entertaining content.
Many of you guys have
probably have heard about the 10-Minute Pit Show. This is the original home of it, and we are
definitely going to be doing more of those around the upcoming week, so be on the lookout for that.
Our goal is, like I said, to try to create unbiased content free from paid narratives and those manipulated tactics that we've grown to
despise from crypto influencers. We want you to be able to become the sharks and make your own
educated decisions. And so since launching the NextMoon project, I've had the privilege of
exclusively helping over two dozen different projects from L1s
to Gamings to DeFi to RWAs and everything in between.
It's been an amazing ride and journey.
And unfortunately, this show has kind of taken a backseat to all of those, but we're definitely
bringing it back.
Needless to say, I'm a firm believer in the power of spaces, no matter the
format. There is a true power behind doing these spaces, and it lies not just in what it offers
individually, but it basically unites and binds us together as both crypto enthusiasts and projects,
reminding us that we thrive the most when we come together
for something that's a lot larger than ourselves. So thank you for tuning in. We appreciate it.
I know there's a lot of OGs and legends on this space with me that also host,
and we wouldn't be able to do these spaces without your ongoing support.
and we wouldn't be able to do these spaces without your ongoing support.
It definitely helps us as leaders, developers, and innovators vocalize and shape the tough
narratives that will eventually drive change, but also it empowers and sparks creativity
and innovation and collaboration.
Can't tell you how many different groups I have brought together through many of my spaces as a result of having these conversations.
And again, we couldn't do these without you.
So hopefully we'll be able to discover some of that in today's discussion.
But before we dive in, let's explore who's joining us up on stage and is ready to add their expertise and knowledge to the discussion.
So first and foremost, one of the legends that I look up to for sure is King Snooch.
How are you, my friend?
Oh, my guy.
Too many flowers on that one.
You're just as good, brother.
Appreciate being up here and love your project and what you're building.
I would say I'm not going to go
into too much about who I am. Most people, if they don't know who I am, just stick around,
find out. Very deep in the gaming trenches. Love everybody that's up here. As far as what
investors want in Web3 projects, I think that's a great topic. And I think there's a lot of
different things from different sectors that different investors want.
So excited to get into this conversation.
Appreciate you having me up here.
And let's get into it.
Love it.
Love it.
Another OG in the space.
Another legend host in my mind is Mr. Consul.
How are you, my friend?
Oh, my friend, my friend.
My heart is very, very humbled.
I'm doing okay.
This is my first Spaces of the Week.
This is a really good day to be hosting.
Shout out to NextMoon.
I love the brief history that you've given us over the project.
I think I first came across NextMoon on Bigger Spaces.
And on that particular space, our founder was on it and you guys really really kicked it off so on my part you're not only my friend but you're a friend of
the project so that means a lot not only to me but to us as a team and us as a community happy to be
here really really juicy topic because everybody's looking for money.
Everybody will always want more money.
Investors are also looking for projects.
So let's talk about that bridge where it all comes together.
It's going to be a really good discussion, my friend.
Thanks for having us.
100%, 100%.
And definitely great to have you as well. my friend. Thanks for having us. A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
And definitely great to have you as well.
Another legend and a good longtime friend.
I think we first met about a year ago.
Joel, how are you? Joel, how are you?
Top of the morning to you guys.
My name is Joel.
I'm from Business Development and Marketing for Dash,
which is crypto focused on being the best digital cash
and payments and money system in the world
with instant transactions, high
level security, great privacy
and unparalleled usability.
If you want to just download the
Android Dash Pay wallet, I
was coming very soon, you can really
experience that and friend me there. I'm
same handles here, the Desert Lakes and I will send you some minor bits of corn if
you do.
As always, I'm very happy to be on these spaces.
Took a break for like a month-long travel hiatus, but now I'm back and ready to talk
everyone's ears off.
Love it, love it.
It's always good to have your good takes
on from the Dash's point of view.
So welcome back.
And we've got some new faces
and some new friends that I'm definitely making
around the various spaces that I host across the Web3.
And let's go over to Adam.
How are you?
GM, good to see you. over to adam how are you gm good to see you next moon how are you doing doing well doing well excellent yes very excited to be here i can see my bro
mr console so how many of you guys I met Mr console IRL in Hong Kong uh just uh a few a month or two ago and uh
what what a guy what an amazing guy what a legend and uh what an awesome opportunity to speak
together and looking forward to learning more about your amazing projects. And yes, maybe I can share some nuggets.
I think I know somewhat what some investors want in Web3 sometimes.
So as I've had some success raising some investment.
So I think I can give some small nuggets of wisdom that have passed my way these days.
So thank you for having me up here and and looking forward
to getting stuck in yeah for sure anytime everybody loves small nuggets uh let's shoot it over to
open loot uh good morning guys uh thanks for having me on the show um so open loot is a web
gaming platform um we aim to be the steam of Web3 gaming. Recently, we just had an announcement with Binance Alpha, and there are seven total games in our ecosystem. So we have some more exciting updates. Definitely follow us if you haven't. But otherwise, great to be speaking.
Otherwise, great to be speaking.
Awesome.
Welcome.
Welcome.
We'll skip over Dash and one of my new friends that I just met in a previous space I was
hosting earlier.
Van, how are you?
Hello.
Hello.
Good morning, guys.
Good evening.
Thanks for having me.
I'm Van.
I'm from Omni Agency.
I'm from Omni Agency.
We are a marketing agency with a fundraising focus.
We are a marketing agency with a fundraising focus.
Last year, we did 60 million raise for all our clients.
And we manage millions of dollars in marketing budget each cycle, targeting all kinds of
investors at different stages of our product's lifecycle.
So, and yeah, happy to be here.
And I love the concept behind NextM Moon, the 10-minute pitches.
I'm looking forward to going through them in the next series whenever we have it.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, anytime any project wants to pitch, it is currently sponsored by Layer 1X.
And those are on Wednesday mornings at 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
And they're free for all projects that want to come in and basically shill. You get 10 minutes
uninterrupted to basically talk about your project. It's a lot of fun. Like I said,
we've been doing them for the last eight months, and we have had a lot of fun like i said we've been doing them for the last eight months and we have had a lot of fun
getting to know a lot of different projects so yeah uh if you want to sign up for that feel free
to go through the x co-host platform or dm me directly and we will get you signed up for one
of those upcoming episodes so yeah we'd love to have you on. And last but not least, joining us is Cocktail.
How are you?
Yeah, thank you.
I'm fine.
Thanks.
A lot of work.
Thanks for being here.
Thanks for the invitation.
I'm working with many projects as advisor on the product management,
roadmap, and communication and marketing.
So that's pretty good's all for me.
And thanks again for having me here.
And thanks for the introduction of your project, which is really great.
I know that.
I mean, a lot of people need education on these ecosystems.
So yeah, I think it's definitely something in return.
Awesome.
Yes.
And so thank you for being here as well.
As you can tell,
we've got a great lineup of panelists for today's discussion.
So I highly recommend that you give them a follow.
I'd also ask that you give us a follow as well.
It would mean the world to us as we are not paid by any of these projects that are joining us into today's discussion. So your follow for the Next Moon project is the best way you can help support us and keep the project alive. I know that it would be very beneficial for all of our panelists as well.
of our panelists as well. But if you're just tuning in, my name is Cody. I am the founder
and chief host here at NextMoon. And if you haven't done so, please go ahead and give this
space a follow so that we can beat the algorithms of X, give them the middle finger and get this
message out to the broader audience of X. So with that being said, today's discussion is on what investors want
in Web3 projects. And as we kind of peel back the onion here a little bit, we've seen a lot
of different things. I think Snooch hit it on the head when he basically said there are a lot
of different things that investors look at before investing into any project.
For me, being primarily a UI UX designer by trade, my decision is usually instant.
As soon as I land on a project, if the UI design isn't, it doesn't give me that warm, fuzzy feeling.
I am definitely going to be swayed away from making any investment
decision with them right out of the gate, no matter how good it is. If it's not tutored enough
for me, I'm out. But I'm curious to hear what you guys have to say. What are your personal,
non-negotiable things when exploring investment opportunities? Feel free to jump in and chill your flavor.
Okay, so I guess I'll take a start on this. So at the fundamental level, there is a difference
in valuations between equity markets, which are priced by big market makers
such as citadel and their goal is to find the true value of an equity while in crypto if you take a
look at some of the valuations most of the time they don't make sense so you have to segment them
into two types so number one is the equity model. And the second one is the
crypto model, which is fueled by speculation and global liquidity. And my personal idea of investing
is the reverse investment. So I'm a big fan of shorting first and then buying back later,
because that's always made me a lot of money. So you're one of those guys, huh? That's awesome. Anybody else have anything
they want to share? Thanks for sharing your insights on your personal stuff. I'll just
touch on some very basic things. On paper, sustainable revenue model is something that
I think should be definitely on the table, as in if we are successful,
we should get this much revenue out of our project.
That's just very simple.
Like this many transactions, this many actions,
this many users turns into this much in fees, et cetera,
and have an actual way for that to go back
to the original investors.
This is in 2017, the ICO boom, when people bought tokens related to some company that
had no way of capturing the value of these companies actually turned out well.
And also, we're in a weird spot where people still, the pumping of tokens is still one
of the major revenue models for a lot of the space.
And a lot of that stuff is very hard to control without massive manipulations, et cetera.
So actual revenue share token, coming back to investors on that, I think is very much a must.
And then the other thing I would say is an actual realistic and sustainable plan of getting those users.
Meaning not just, oh, this is great.
If everyone does this, then we'll make money.
It's like, well, will they go?
Where's the actual idea?
Is this our target market?
Where's the consumer base?
How many do you need to onboard?
Do you need to onboard like 3 billion people for this thing to break even?
Like, do you have a plan for that?
And so basically how are you going to actually get to that point?
It should be, like a lot of this should be duh type things as far as if I want to invest,
where is the money coming from and how is it going to get back to me?
Which it sounds the stupidest question in the world,
but at the same time,
it's the most unanswered question,
I would say, in the crypto space today.
And as we start to move
to the mass adoption era of crypto,
I think that these kinds of like,
yeah, but I like the token kind of like,
you know, vibe investing type things of the token kind of like, you know,
vibe investing type things of the past. We have to move past that.
I can always count on you, my friend, to bring the, uh,
the good foundational structure to a discussion.
So there's some things I'm going to touch upon, uh, with what you just said, but let's kind of circle back and get the rest of the
hands up.
We've got a few.
So Snooch, what do you got, my friend?
I'm expecting a very, very spicy take on this one.
Well, I don't know if it'd be really spicy, but like if I'm going to get involved with
a project, I'm not going to quite go the investment route, but like investing my time and energy
is still an investment.
Right. But if I'm if I'm going to get involved with a company and a project, it's most likely going to be gaming.
I'll throw that out there anyway. But I look for a few things.
I look for one is is the team public. Right.
Does the team get out there? The team that's building it. Right.
The developers. Are they public? Do they make, you know, comments in the chat? Do they talk to their, their, their players, right? Their player base, their community? Do they talk to them? That's one thing I look for. The other thing I look for is I like to get on a Google meet call with them and get face to face and actually try to feel the passion behind them. And I feel
like even the projects that struggle and go through hard times, if they've got the passion
behind them, they have the strength to push through. And that's kind of what I look for
is teams that are building that have a lot of passion behind them. And they have that drive.
teams that are building that have a lot of passion behind them and they have that drive.
Icy says it best. He says, you know, he got that dog in him. And I feel if I find a project where
the founders actually got that dog in him and then we'll push through the hard times, the bears,
to get to that bull, that's what makes me want to get involved with somebody.
It's not a matter of how much money I can make off of somebody or how much ROI I can get or the pumponomics.
I don't give a shit about that stuff.
What I care about when I look at games that I want to get invested into is, are they going to be entertaining?
Are they going to bring, are they going to bring more money in than they're giving out?
And if not, if they're giving out more money than they're bringing in,
then that's just a dead case, right? If you have a play to earn model that people are playing the
game at the minimal capability, and they're just extracting all the time, and nobody's actually
spending money on the game, that's a dead project to me. I don't want to be involved in that.
If you have something though, that people don't really care about, the majority of people
don't care about extracting.
They just want to play the game and they want to spend money to get better at it.
That gets me excited.
That gets me pumped and makes me want to get invested into something.
100%, brother.
100%. I mean, you look at all the spaces that I host, you know, for me, they are projects that I'm both monetarily invested in as well as skill-based invested in it all the way through because I want to make sure that it shows when we do those spaces that, you know, my passion for being part of the team comes out and what the team's cooking.
100%.
100%.
I mean, you look at all the spaces that I host.
Because let's be honest, there's a lot of devs out there that are introverts that don't like to talk, but they've got some wonderful products out there.
And so having the ability to be able to articulate
what they're building is paramount for building awareness.
So yeah, great points.
Van, you were up next, my friend.
Thanks, Cody.
Yeah, Snush made a great point, Van.
Hungry is the hardest.
You can't replace passion.
You can look at a thousand different facets,
but if the team's not building
and they're not excited for their building, even really get get a product like we always talk about oh you need a product
which solves the use case it it can uh you know onboard users and it can get traction all those
things you can't get all those things without hunger so yeah so that's a great point besides
that personally i look at um you at the past projects that the team was
on or they've built in the past. And I also want to look at the revenue opportunities
and how much of that revenue is actually actualized at this point in time. Many of the stuff that
you see in the Gitbox, they're all plans and stuff but i need to look at
you know what kind of business because i i think token is different from business business are
different from token so even before you launch your token your business should be at point at
a stage where you have partnerships logged in where you have the team logged in there's a lot of
um development that has happened, that
has taken place, and now the marketing can come in, do some amplification and drive users
for you, and then you have your communities, you have your core communities at the minimum.
Now before, if, you know, that's non-negotiable for me. And then I look at, you know, what's the stage of the fundraising timeline the
project is at? Is it a pre-sale? Is it at the ideal stage? Is the token already live? Many
considerations go into at different stages. Like, for example, I'll give you a quick example.
If I could not get on a pre-sale and the idea has happened and the idea was successful, I'm not going to invest in TGE because TGE and LOX are going to just eat my capital right out of the gate.
So I'm going to wait for some time.
So it's going to be a different strategy.
I'm going to wait for a pullback, then get in and then make sure that the team has sufficient capital and also an adequate drive to really start shipping product,
start shipping updates.
And if I see that, and if I see the tokens looking at,
the entry zone is looking quite juicy, I'll get in.
And if it's a pre-sale, and if I've seen, okay,
the team's good, the project is good,
and there's enough attention that's being driven to the project.
Cool, I'll get on it at the pre-sale level.
So that's personally how I get into most of the Web3 projects.
No, I love it. I love it.
And, you know, Snooch will probably agree with me on this one.
This is definitely something that we agree on, is that we both feel that a lot of times,
especially in the gaming industry, they do not need a token to thrive and survive. And a lot
of times those tokens can actually damage a game. The game could be the next AAA game, but
because it had a bad token launch or a major pump and dump on the token, nobody
wants to be a part of it.
And so the game gets lost.
And in my opinion, again, from a UI UX designer point of view, a lot of times a token is a
bolt-on experience, which ruins the overall user experience a lot of times.
Cocktail, you had your hand up. Let's go with you next.
Yeah, thanks.
Yeah. My investment journey starts with equities.
It was really with investments.
The things I was looking for was the business plan,
the team, their capability to deliver,
and their background, their skills, who they are, and so on.
And when I switched to Web3,
basically it was the same for me,
because it's always business.
So you need to make sure that the team
know what they are they are doing
and how know how they will bring value to their project and to their token so this is still my
point of view on the investment for the web 20 or web3 the same thing for me but on the web3 part
i will also have a deep look on the community engagement because this really, this is the biggest differences
between Web2 and Web3 for me. And it's really because the community can push project really
strong and really far. So yeah, I would say the first thing is the business plan, so the economics of what people, the
scale, so who are the founders and what are their background and what they can bring to
the projects and also check their capacity, their capability to deliver.
So to check if their roadmap makes sense and if they are just not creating just expectation,
but really delivering something to the product.
No, really, really good points.
I mean, you know, that's going to kind of lead us into our next question here,
but I'm kind of curious, and this is a safe space, everybody.
So this question is for you. Just through a show of hands, on the last project that you guys
invested in, did you actually read the entire white paper? If you did, raise your hand. I'm
just kind of curious how many people did i'm kind of curious
if anybody has read any white papers completely exactly exactly um you know i of course joel does
i mean that guy's a that guy's a beast but uh but no i mean he uh there uh it is really interesting
because i mean some of these white papers of these projects, you know, consulting with a lot of Web3 projects, you know, trying to get through all of their white paper to understand their meat on the bone, I guess you could say, like one of them is over 120 pages long and talks about this, that and everything else and alien technology.
And it's like, holy crap, like I don't just a lot of times I have to put it in chat GPT and say, dumb it down for a seventh grader type of thing.
But on the flip side of that, too, is it's like I think that, you know, there are a lot of us that just don't like you said snooch they just don't read the white papers they go off of infographics they
go off of videos they go off of what kols are telling them all of that good stuff so uh cocktail
you had your hand in the grade though you got to bring it up a little higher than seventh grade
come on okay ninth grade we'll say ninth Cocktail, did you have your hand up?
To tell you what you did, I use AI to do some white paper.
But yeah, I think if you don't read the white paper, you can't really have an idea of what the project is about.
I mean, as I said, you have some infographic,
you have KOLs, you have videos,
but it's never complete.
I mean, you are always missing some information.
So yeah, I may be the only one,
but yeah, I'm ready to celebrate the course.
Yeah, exactly.
Adam, you got your hand up.
Let's go with you next.
Yeah, so I think I can't really speak to this from an investor perspective because my only experience as an investor was in the ICO days.
And I literally just picked this project because I don't know if anyone remembers
this project called Dragon Chain, but the guys had just come out of Disney.
And I thought this is a good this is
a safe place to send my eth right and uh and amazingly i i literally just cashed out when i
like not as soon as i got the tokens as soon as i remembered that i had the tokens and that was an
amazing return but it was more like uh that was more like kind of just sitting at a table right i
happened to be in the right time at the right place to be able to grab this.
And everyone knows what happened during the rest of 2018.
But I think from a founder's perspective, what I can speak to, I can speak to what Snooch was just saying about the passion.
And I certainly think that in my experience of having raised like, you know,
just a little shy of a million dollars from investors, you know, largely for equity, frankly,
but, you know, also some for, you know, cryptographic assets as well. It's definitely
been through people kind of getting to know me and understanding me and my passion for what I'm doing.
And I think that something that perhaps is missing could be the macro thesis.
I think that certainly I think that especially when you're investing in an early stage project,
being able to construct a macro thesis is critical. And I do believe that the investors that have come in on projects with me in the past have done so because I've articulated a macro thesis that makes sense.
I can, I can basically it's the why now slide in, in the deck, right?
I'm, I'm kind of all about that when I'm pitching.
And I think that is what has, has led to some, some success in, in this, in this space of,
of raising investment as a founder.
So, and I just like to leave you.
So funnily enough on the, on the white paper topic, I have just completed writing a white paper,
right, which I made to nine pages, right?
And I was kind of, when I was doing it, I actually, I took the Tarantino approach to
writing a white paper, as in, you know, I basically just took the Bitcoin white paper,
I just had it up on the screen, and line by line, I just kind of
found the kind of punchy points that Satoshi made and put that into what we're actually doing right
now, including even lining up some of the sentence structure so that it just is actually the Bitcoin
white paper is only nine pages. It's actually, you know, some people would call that a light paper these days. But in the process of doing that, I did read a number of project white papers,
many of which are like, you know, 90 pages long or something like that. But I had to trawl through
them because I was referencing them or I didn't even reference some of these papers actually
in the end. But it was kind of a crazy experience to write it.
But what I realized while I was writing it is nobody does read these damn things.
So I can write pretty much whatever the hell I want in this document.
It doesn't have to be even that accurate.
And I think I was actually inspired by this paper recently I found by Professor Hui Li,
by this paper recently I found by Professor Wei Li, who's basically like building the,
you know, the kind of post IP architecture for like the physical architecture for the internet
that's going to replace like the existing kind of internet protocol. So like all around the world
and he's Chinese, right? So his paper, his English paper, which is read by people in the UN
is so bad. Like, I mean, the English is so bad, but he gets the point across so damn well.
And it really got me into this zone of like writing this thing.
And, and yeah, as I say, like really people are going to skip through it.
They'll look at some of the pictures and they'll read some of the words.
They might look at some of the references, but at the end of the day,
as long as like there's a point, I think that's the important thing.
And I think that some of these projects that are composing these like, you know,
S like fucking thousand word like theses, it's like you actually read it and there's not much
in it. You know, they're just kind of regurgitating other information that people already know.
There's no point actually. And it's because the point is just to try and get some investor to
not read it. And, you know, hopefully just ape into your dog shit project.
It's not going to go anywhere.
So, yeah, anyway, that's that's some of my my point on that.
But, yeah, really, really interesting topic, guys.
And, yeah, definitely appreciate many of the insights I've heard already.
sites I've heard already. So yeah, I'll hand this over. Well, first of all, I appreciate you taking
So, yeah, I'll hand this over.
the time to change at least 70% of the sentence structure to avoid plagiarism. But I can say
that's more than what most people have done. I have probably read in the last month, I've probably
read 10 white papers for new projects. And out of them, I would say there was like two or three of them
that are forks of previous projects.
They didn't even take the time to change the freaking name
in the white paper, except for on the first page.
And as you're reading through, you're like,
oh, I can see exactly where they forked this from.
Perfect.
I have a funny story about that, actually. Do you remember back in 2018, 19, somewhere around then,
do you remember when Venezuela, the government of Venezuela launched their first version of the
Petro, their government coin? They forked it from Dash. And the reason we know that is you look in
their white paper, et cetera, and the
smallest denomination was a Duff, which is named after Dash's founder, Evan Duffield. And so they
just left that in there. So smoking gun. I mean, come on, guys. You at least got to
take a little bit of effort and put it into the white paper for sure. Van, you're up next, my friend.
In my experience, the only times I've really got some value out of white papers
was when I was looking at tokenomics structures,
best-selling schedules, and all that stuff.
And sometimes, you know, revenue opportunities and then use cases
or maybe even some information on team.
All the other things I can find on the website
and I can only get to the white paper after I've got to the website.
So it's a lot of repeated unnecessary information
and I think the reason, the big reason why that happens
is because projects often mistake the white paper for the docs and I think docs are
very resourceful when you have when you're targeting developers when targeting actually
you know people are going to build on your layer one let's say and they need to understand all the
APIs and you're going to find all the different parameters different facets and that's why your
you know your docs become 90 pages 120
pages long if you're not doing that and let's say you're just building a game
just make sure your socials are looking good there's enough UGC content when
someone wants to find it let's say on YouTube or there's enough you know
things going on or next that people can discover your game essentially. Besides
that, a game
and many projects do not need
a long white paper.
The shortest
you can make it
and to the point you can get to it,
the more benefit you'll
derive from it.
I 100% agree with you on that one. Definitely agree. Snooch, back to you, my friend.
Yeah, so I think it was Adam that was kind of talking on something that it really like triggered
for me is, you know, the whole anybody can put anything on paper. And it brings me back to back when I was a supervisor for a big company and we were doing hiring. It just blew my mind how many people would come in
that looked really, really good on paper. Like their resumes looked amazing and they could make
it like you'd think, oh, these guys, they got to be the best. And nine times out of 10,
they were the worst employees that we'd hire
but yet we would get these people that had like a trash resume we'd get them in person and you
could just talk to them and you could tell that they had a good work ethic you could tell that
they were honest and that they just they're willing to learn like you could tell a lot more
in person than you could on paper because let's be honest, people can lie on paper very easily. It's much higher to lie to
somebody when you're face to face. I would say it kind of, this brings me back to like why I don't
really go into the white papers and I would much rather just get on a call with somebody, let them
talk to me and show me their passion. Tell me their project, tell me their vision, tell me what
they're trying to do. That hits a lot harder than
a white paper. Granted, I understand like the legal side of having to have a white paper and
like having it down on paper. Yes, that's great and grand. But if you're looking for investors,
show them who you are, not what you're building. You know, it's even funner than a white paper as
well is live code. Now, obviously, sometimes you want investment
to build the live code,
but sometimes you want more to build more.
There's something on testnet or whatever.
But one of the coolest things is,
let me show you how this works.
And invariably, anytime I'm on a call
or a presentation or watch someone at a conference
or talk to someone and they try to
shill their project to me or whatever they just happen to be talking about it uh nine times out
of ten the coolest ones are the one where the founder or whoever gets out his phone where he
just like it just gets out his phone and wants to say hey look so you do this and he's showing you
something if he's showing you something on his phone, I know it's kind of a very simplistic,
almost animalistic type thing of like, oh, look, he has a thing. He has a shiny thing.
But if he has a shiny thing that he's excited to show off, unless he's like in so many cases,
that means there's something exciting because there's something real not just
hypothetical and there's something that this person is proud to show off in an unscripted
environment so it's real there's something that they're proud of and it's also well we don't set
up a demo it's like i can just it works every time you pull it out at least it's even if it
doesn't work perfectly it'll work well enough to where, you know,
you can impress some people where it's worth showing.
And I mean, I do that personally
with the Dash Paywall at any time I can.
I'm like, look at all the way, please, you can spend it.
Look at how easy it, look at my friends list.
Do you want me to friend?
Y'all send me some money, all that kind of stuff.
And I've noticed that with the,
when the acronym foundation shows off their spending tools that work with Flexa and things like that.
I know it's like Zcash people really like there's Ashley Wallet now, and they're always pulling it out to show to people.
There's a list of things where people are like, look at this thing.
This is so cool.
And that's a really great sign.
That's a really great sign.
And it's just, even if you don't have something
that's production ready for the general public,
to have a testnet or devnet or some kind of a thing
that shows you the beginning elements
of what this could look like, I think really helps out.
Oh, totally agree.
And I think that there's a lot of founders
and head developers that
are leery about putting stuff out there until it's 100% perfect, right? And yeah, you want it
to be secure. But I think that everybody can understand and be forgiving when it is there
that they can see that there's actual code for it. Yeah,
it might have a few bugs here and there type of thing. But being able to see that, yes,
I agree. There is tons of power behind that 100%. Mr. Consul, welcome to the conversation.
Let's hear what you have to say. Yeah, for sure. My apologies. I had actually double booked and i needed to just have some sort of mod
review so that's where my attention was but i really have picked up a lot of really key points
i think all in all the game of raising capital is a numbers game you're gonna have to put yourself
as a project the project itself in front of a lot of eyes
it is and i think in as much as people don't read white papers you need to have a good one
i also concur with the great thought that joel raised and that is have some sort of prototype which you can demonstrate, that
goes in.
But above everything, I think the ability for a founder to sell the story, the speech
ability, like my good friend Adam here naturally has, the way to connect to the emotion of an investor is really key in getting them
to get pocket to get money in your pockets right and this is not just in raising capital it's in
trying to make a sale especially a high ticket item sale. If you're not appealing to that
other individual's needs or trying to make some sort of emotional connection, you are out of the
game, no matter how good your demo is, no matter how good your product is. Sometimes it's just a
people thing, right? And that's why it makes sense for some founders
to actually fly out to meet investors
because all you're doing is building
that personal touch further,
making them comfortable to you,
you're comfortable to them,
and that's gonna make it work.
As far as I know, in the web two world, in quotes,
majority of the deals are made playing golf, right?
You get someone outside of the office environment.
You get someone feeling sportish, lively, out in the sun.
And that gives that human element to whatever you're pitching.
I think this is really at the top of my list.
You need to be a good storyteller.
You need to know how to sell.
But importantly, you need to make that emotional connection.
I love that we have this topic
because there's a man I follow called Andrew Chen.
He is part of the partners at A116Z.
He was involved in Uber.
And he has this quote,
which I'll just read to you all briefly.
It says,
if you are in pre-seed, pitch your team.
If you are in the seed phase, pitch your product.
If you are in series A, pitch your transaction.
So I think we also just have to tie to that story element If you are in series A, pitch your transaction.
So I think we also just have to tie to that story element,
the phase that you're in and what you're really selling and sell that big.
No, 100%, brother.
100% agree with you on that one.
We'll come back to some things you said,
but first let's go over,
shoot it over to Van real quick.
Yeah, and if your founders,
if your team can't, you know,
create that story,
maybe they're introverted,
maybe they don't want to come to forefront,
then they better make sure that the design is there doing that job.
The design needs to, you know, UI, just like you said, Cody, in the beginning.
Many people, and many people decide this subconsciously.
Good design is a good business.
If a website sucks, and not even sucks, if it's not par with the competitors in the space.
And if it's not just, you know, because there's a reason why you play one game,
why you don't play the other one.
And this communication of story, this communication of, you know, we have the capability to build something really, really unique, really, really powerful that you've never seen before.
We can't come through as a team.
We can't really say much.
But you can see it on the website.
You can see it in the game we are building, in the product we are building.
That will speak volumes, even better than, you know, many of these speakers,
many of these founders go on to spaces and they can see the way they share it.
100%. Let this number sink in. 93% of first-time visitors will not return to a website if it
100 percent. Let this number sink in.
doesn't give them the warm fuzzies. Colors, layout, simple navigation, all those kind of things add
into that where users will not come back. And it doesn't matter if you've got the next Bitcoin
project, what we call here at NextMoon, the next moon project does not matter. You will not get
past that first impression, right? And 100% agree with you guys on that. So we have just about 10
minutes left. I want to get your guys' outtake on this.
We may have to do a part two of this because we didn't get to all of it that I wanted to.
But the main question is, you know, we've talked about getting out in front of everybody,
having the passion, being able to do the grind.
Mr. Consul talked about how important demand gen, lead gen is,
you know, that kind of stuff. All of those things add up to a very unique marketing and sales
tactic. Twitter is a great spot. Telegram is another great spot. Social is another great spot.
YouTube's a great spot. I mean, there are lots of verticals and platforms out there to basically drum up a lot
of noise. And I'm not just talking about actually building true, authentic awareness and good,
high-quality content. There is just noise after noise out there from bots to paid KOLs to, you know, things like that that are just making noise.
How do you get above the noise and actually have people sink their teeth into the meat on the bone
of your project and really become those brand advocates rather than just kind of
getting lost in the shuffle?
Yeah. rather than just kind of getting lost in the shuffle.
I can jump in here because from the question I'm hearing how to get the community involved in your vision.
Am I right there next month?
Yeah, get them involved, but also get your head above all the noise and attract new people.
Grow, kind of right up your alley of demand gen, lead gen, right?
How do you get more people to become aware of your project when there's already so much existing noise out there?
Okay, yeah, that's a really, really good, brilliant question. And I think the starting point that almost all tech projects have to be on is the point where they're sharing their vision.
Okay, yeah, that's a really, really good, brilliant question.
your vision through the right medium whoever you're sharing your vision to on this particular
platform you have to bring into a closed society a community your followers does not really equate
to your community but you can use platforms and especially in this day and age, which favors us, to say the right things, get the algorithm, keying that in, and presenting what you're saying to the right people.
Now, when you have them somewhat involved in understanding what your vision is, you have to integrate them to build this vision with you nobody's gonna be more invested than he
or she who has skin in the game i don't mean sell them anything i don't mean have them have equity
i just mean that you somewhat integrate them into the responsibilities of building this vision.
But the first and foremost thing, and this is what legendary leaders throughout history have been able to do,
is to paint that vision very immaculately and letting everybody know that it can only happen with their input. I think that's
how you stand out from the noise and you make a real wave. You become the trend.
I love it. Love it. Good call out on that one. Joel, Joel, go for it.
Joel, Joel, go for it.
I would say there's two big ways to do it.
One, and you should probably do both.
One is you as a founder, as a person of whatever,
person who's real and not just a representative,
go out there, meet people and talk to them.
Like conferences are a great thing for this.
Talk to people, really explain what you do and why it's important and things to them. Like conferences are a great thing for this. Talk to people,
really explain what you do and why it's important and things like that. People remember personal
things. They remember personalities. They remember meeting people. They remember faces. And you're
like, oh yeah, that guy there, he talked to me about this thing. So kind of cool. That's how
you get out of the whole kind of, you know, ocean of things.
Obviously doing things like coming on spaces
and being interesting is good too.
In-person is always better,
but just get out there and make those connections.
And then you have a captive audience
for whatever you're doing.
And the other thing I would just say is
make direct advertisements that actually communicate the message and get in front of
people what i see a lot of is people just like the the most shiny polished looking
hype filled sort of ads that just say you know immersive web immersive web to the B2B SaaS this,
and just a bunch of buzzwords and crap.
And it's just like, oh, what is this?
I don't care.
Just say what it does and why people should care.
And maybe a lot of people might not,
but some people will if it is something worthwhile.
I'll give you sort of an example
of one of the effective advertisements I've seen out there.
Brave, which is a great browser and a great ad platform, especially for crypto people.
I saw a Brave ad that popped up one time that said, pay all your bills with crypto.
And I'm like, this is exactly what I like.
This is what I want.
And it was an ad for Spritzz spritz.finance which
you know free shout out to them they're they work with dash so why not give them a free shout out
um the reason why they work with dash is because i saw this and i'm like dude i've been wanting
a bill pay solution that can do like mortgage and stuff like that that takes crypto and so i just
talked to them talked to the founder had him on my podcast and it was like, yo, you know, it would be great if you had a dash, I'd be your best friend. And
then he is my best friend now because he had a dash. It worked. But the point is one ad one time,
it's not like the seven ads in a row kind of thing. The second I heard about this company,
I jumped all in only because it just told me what it did,
why I should care.
And most people who don't care about paying their bills in crypto,
fine, they won't click it, but who cares?
Get the people who care about what you do.
You don't want to scam people anyway and get people to be like,
oh my gosh, I want to make it rich off of some Web3 gaming thing.
And then you, oh, guess what?
You can pay your mortgage.
And then they're like, oh, you don't want to scam people just tell people put your message in front of everyone that says why like distilled down to its simplest elements and if you suck at communicating ai
doesn't so you can just say give me a three word or a five word condensed punchy version of this.
Why should I just ask, ask it to do it and it'll do it.
And I think I'll stop.
No, it's the whole talk app versus talk with and knowing who your audience is.
Definitely sounds like that ad hooked you when you were definitely in need of something,
maybe consciously or subconsciously, they were able to
get you triggered to the point where they provided the ability for you to take action. The classic
motivation, trigger, and ability, the three ingredients to getting any online user to take
action. So yeah, thanks for sharing that. Van, go for it.
Yeah, it might sound unsexy, but one thing I've had the most success with has been co-marketing.
On the back of co-marketing with other projects, we have done two things. We have raised,
you know, a lot of money, like 500k, 600k pre-sale. And we also made sure that we are actually reducing the timeline to TGE because those
projects that we co-market with, they had built this audience over years of grind, right?
And we are actually just, you know, making sure that we are getting in front of those
real users who are going to actually play your game, you know, or make trades on your
protocol or build things on L1, things like
that. We're just making sure that with co-marketing, we're able to get those users in. And the
one point I'll make is you only want to do that once you have a great MVP or a great
full-fledged product, and it's prime for retention. Acquisition is cheaper. It's cheap, I would say.
Retention is very, very hard.
And the whole point of building a community is retention.
You can't retain it.
They are just people coming and leaving.
And then you're just,
your bank account is down
and there's nobody in your community.
100%, 100%.
100%.
Let's shoot it over to Cocktail.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, I think there is already a lot of great insight
on this topic,
but I just wanted to add that most of founders
make big mistakes by paying keywords or media.
Sometimes they spend thousands of dollars in keywords or stuff like that. And each time they
want to push their vision to a new audience, they have to feed them, to feed all those keywords,
all those media that they want to use.
So that's why it's really important
to have, in my opinion,
two things.
What we call today
the founder funnel.
To have a founder that has
already some
leadership in his industry
and has already
kind of
is leading the opinion of some people
and the other part is the community i mean if you are spending thousand in kors you could
have a wider and a longer massive effect by incentivizing your community with this money and you will spend a lot
of less money uh aware less money to do that and you will you will create advocates to your project
heroes are here because you pay them they will, yeah, they will never do something for free. So yeah,
I think the two most important things are, yeah, the voice of the founder and the voice
of the community.
Love it. Yep. Again, that's why the Next Moon Project is in existence, because we want
to provide unbiased uh entertaining and educational content
around the projects that are building in web3 so i do have some alpha to drop but before i do uh
let's go to adam and we'll get his last take before we drop the alpha yes so great yeah great Alpha. Yes. So great. Yeah, great stuff, guys.
And I'll keep it quick, but a shameless, somewhat shill.
But actually, I was getting so sick of trying to figure out how the hell to break through
in this space, like how to get a project up there.
So I just ended up building the tooling for this.
And it's called SongJam.
And you can check it out.
But it's number go up tech for X and it's designed around X spaces.
So it does all the transcription, it pulls in all your listener data and it
automates all the outreach.
So it's an agentic CRM, right?
So AI, DMs, everything, it does it.
We just did the space earlier.
We had Ultra in, right, the guy who did Laudio.
He was speaking with us, like just automate the whole thing and blow up very quickly.
It's, you know, the proof is in the pudding.
And you can check it out at Songjam Space, which is in my profile there as well.
which is in my profile there as well.
But yeah, it underpins a much deeper and impactful vision,
which is related to voice sovereignty.
And just to speak to Mr. Consol's point there,
which is missing, you can't copyright your voice.
In the age of AI, there's a deepfake attack every five minutes,
but you can tokenize your voice.
So we can front run the legal system
with our tech. And I've honed in on X Spaces because this is the place where you guys are
insecurely sharing your voice data and actually exposing yourself to the potential of deep fake
attacks. So yes, you can read about it. Check out my profile, Check out Song Jam Space. And yeah, number go up. Tech for X.
Yeah, I had to build it and it's working. I use the product every day. And I'm a testament to
how well it works because we're growing. I love it. Love it. I'll definitely
be checking it out myself for sure. So yeah, thanks to all of our panelists for tuning in
or participating. Thanks to all of our listeners that have tuned in today.
Today's topic, a lot of things kind of came about as you kind of listened through.
You know, a lot of those is kind of a resonating theme is, you know, kind of getting through
all out there, trying to get above
your head above all the noise out there. And that's the alpha that we want to drop with the
relaunch of the Next Moon project. I've been working with some friends behind the scenes to
build a few AI agents that go out and basically help gather public-facing data
from white papers, docs, githubs, websites, socials, media,
video, news, CMC, CoinGecko, you name it.
If it's out there, these bots will crawl it
and bring it back on a specific project.
And working with a couple of VC friends of mine,
we have built our own algorithm for evaluating projects
based upon their moonshot potential,
like if they're going to basically have what it takes to become a moon project.
Kind of a fun little thing, helps you sift through all the noise,
all of that kind of a fun little thing, helps you sift through all the noise, all of that kind of stuff.
We will start releasing those reports on your favorite projects coming out here starting in
the next few months. So we're still tweaking a little things here and there, but definitely,
definitely worthwhile. Like if there is a URL attached to a website, it crawls it as far as it will go
and scrape everything, analyze it. And we use the acronym Moonshot in our model to evaluate and
provide a moonshot score that is all predetermined, pre-weighted so that you can see how we basically weight it so that we can take
out human emotion and everything that way. So it is all based upon facts and figures and data.
And we hope it'll be a fun tool for a lot of you guys that are evaluating projects
in the near future. So stay tuned. Make sure you give us a follow
so that you know when those will start coming out
and they'll be accessible to you guys.
In the meantime,
thanks to all of you again for your participation.
We appreciate it.
If you guys are interested in pitching any of your projects,
make sure that you DM us.
We will help you guys get onto the 10-Minute Pitch Show
every Wednesday at 8 a.m until
next time thanks everybody we appreciate you and keep working to discover those new projects out
there have a thank you thank you for hosting us my friend yeah no problem always love it okay
see you guys yeah cheers
