A hard-earned lesson:
Direct enterprise sales don’t really work in web3 infrastructure.
If you’re a Web3 infra protocol, your users are apps. They integrate directly and pay the protocol with a nominal token fee (like Graph, Arweave, Filecoin, Chainlinks, etc of the world). The whole point of Web3 was cutting out middlemen and rent-seekers, so there’s no room for the traditional “enterprise sales + account management” playbook.
That’s also why Web2 SaaS companies enjoy sticky revenue moats. If we only paid Dropbox or Vercel strictly based on usage, the cost would be much lower. What you’re really also paying for is their margin inflation; the business overhead needed to sustain their enterprise sales model.
So in Web3, the only enterprise-sales strategies that stand a chance are from protocols or companies that build their own Web2-style client/UI product wrapped on top of infra. They need to wrap the protocol in a productized experience — because otherwise, there’s no margin in sales. And not nearly enough users (/big enough market) to rely on just protocol rev directly.
And from a web3 infra protocol perspective, churning out [inbound] content marketing, making sure PMF, and cutting ops costs as much as possible.
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