Building an Audience in Web3

Recorded at Solana Crossroads, Istanbul, day one.

Hodl Up: Hello guys and welcome to another episode of Hodl Up. Today we're at Solana Crossroads. It's day one in Istanbul, and we have a very special guest: someone who is a stand-up comedian by day and a crypto degen by night. We have Bangerz here with us in the studio. Bangerz, why don't you introduce yourself first?

Bangerz: Hello everyone, thank you for having me, guys. Stand-up comedian: that's the title I'll be earning tomorrow when I do the roast of Solana at Crossroads, so we'll see if I can actually call myself that. But yes, I'm a builder on Solana, a content creator on Solana, and overall just a Solana maxi. That's why I'm here.

Hodl Up: Before we talk in more detail about the content you make and what it's like to be an influencer, I wanted to know what you were doing before, and what the transition was like. All the degen stuff we see on Twitter, was it very sudden for you? How would you describe it?

Bangerz: Totally. I got into crypto almost three years ago now. I've had a bit of a weird career path, because I'm an entrepreneur. I studied chemical engineering, but I realized I didn't really want to go into that field. So I went off on my own as a content creator and built an audience on Instagram as an artist, over 200,000 people. That's what ended up getting me into crypto: my art, and the NFT bull cycle, when people were telling me, "You have to make NFTs!" NFTs were selling for the price of houses, and there was this frenzy. So I started to dip my toes in. I started on Ethereum, which was super gross. I just didn't get it. Crypto is obviously very complex to grasp as a new user, but with Ethereum I was like, why do I have to pay money to put this on this website, and why do I have to pay money to remove it, to burn it? It was so confusing to me. So I sold one NFT and then I just stopped.

Realistically, I wanted to focus on what I was doing in Web2: growing my platform. I had an e-commerce business I wanted to scale, and I had previously had shiny object syndrome as an entrepreneur, so I didn't want to try something new that I thought was kind of weird and wonky. But then a follower who turned into a friend started DMing me about Solana NFTs and sent me this one mint called Thug Monkeys. I don't know if you're familiar. The tagline was "Don't mint." And I was like, don't tell me what to do. So I figured it out, got some Solana and minted two stupid monkey NFTs. If you know the lore, the founding team was really stupid, and the community took over right away. They made a new Discord, and it was this crazy 24-to-48-hour experience. My first onboarding was so incredibly chaotic, and I had so much fun being part of an online community. I had been building my own community on Instagram, but it was nothing like this. This was so much more fast-paced, with so many more people. It was really fun. So that's how I fell into Web3 and degening: through art. I eventually went on to create my own NFTs. Something about Solana culture really resonated with me, and I just started to have fun collecting NFTs and being part of the community.

Hodl Up: Perfect. Let's move a little bit toward your content. Personally, I like it. It's funny and it's interesting. Do you think your content actually helps onboard normies to crypto? If you show a normie something about tokenization in a detailed PDF document, they'll quit halfway through, or not even halfway: on the first page they'll say, "Okay, I don't have time for this. It's too much. I missed my train." Do you think the way you approach onboarding actually helps?

Bangerz: It's really hard to say, because I have two experiences of growing an audience online. One is Web2, with Instagram, and the other is Twitter, which is primarily Web3, and I don't see a lot of overlap. In my early days, when I was transitioning from doing Instagram full-time to doing crypto full-time, I tried to onboard people and spread the word, because I was so obsessed with it. I was like, "Oh my god, this whole new world!" I immediately resonated with the ideology and ethos behind crypto, and I wanted to bring that to people. But what I got in return was "Scam. This is stupid." That was pretty much verbatim what got thrown back at me. So I did try to onboard. I would talk about NFT mints sometimes, and I know I onboarded some people. There's still this one guy who's like, "I bought Stoned Ape Crew because of you and I made all this money," and I'm like, incredible. But I also onboarded somebody who got their wallet drained, because I didn't explain security every day and how important it is. They minted on a fake Magic Eden site. So I tried at first, and then I realized it's much more complicated. It's not just "hey, go do this, do that." You really need to handhold people through it. I think the best onboarding experience is having one person you can ask questions, who can hold your hand through it, because it's not a one-day thing. It's very nuanced, and there are layers of culture to it. So I'd say my content now is very tailored to a crypto-native audience. I'm not sure it's onboarding.

Hodl Up: When I think of influencers, especially on X, I sometimes feel it's oversaturated with influencers who don't bring value to the community. They buy ready-made accounts and share tokens, and even a broken clock is right twice a day, so they hit one coin and milk their community as much as they can. So my question is: how difficult is it to stand out? When I saw you yesterday, I said, "You're the lady who threw the Ledger in the water." You make content that resonates with a lot of people, and we like that. To me that type of content makes you stand out. But at the same time, I feel it's very difficult to strike a balance, because you have to be careful that people don't take the wrong advice. That's why a lot of people say "this is not financial advice" and all that. I'll see a Twitter account with a lot of followers, check what they're shilling, and it's scams. It's very difficult for normies who don't know the technical jargon and aspects of crypto to get on board, and they get cold feet immediately. So how difficult is it to make content that resonates with people but also stands out in a space that, in my opinion, is getting oversaturated? Was that a very long question?

Bangerz: No, I hear what you're saying. I think it's all about providing value to people. Maybe the audience of those accounts is memecoin traders, and people do log on to Twitter every day to figure out what to buy, so that does serve a need, even though it's convoluted, and obviously there are paid shills and all that, which we won't get into. For my content, I think creating content is very iterative: what works, and how can you do it again, but better, maybe in a different way, with a spin on it. I shape my content around what people like. I never thought I'd be making videos online. I went from just posting my art on Instagram, which was my main way of sharing and communicating with the internet, to being on camera. When I started doing that, I thought it was so weird, but it was the thing that resonated most with the audience, so I kept doing it.

Hodl Up: We've been mentioning Solana throughout the episode. Do you think you could have pulled this off on Ethereum? I mean the community, not the tech side.

Bangerz: I don't know. I'm not super familiar with the Ethereum community. I think Ethereum and Solana have kind of merged, and a lot of key people from Ethereum did come to Solana, I would say. So I'm not sure. That's a hard question to answer.

Hodl Up: Today I met two builders on Ethereum who are now looking to transition and build on Solana. When you ask them why, it's mainly because of the fees and the whole UI/UX problem, because Solana is way better in that respect. Now I have a yes-or-no question.

Bangerz: Okay.

Hodl Up: Did you tokenize the baby you were talking about five days ago?

Bangerz: No. Not yet.

Hodl Up: Not yet, perfect. So what do you think about tokenization on Solana? This one's more technical, since we've been talking about community and influencers.

Bangerz: I think it's brought a lot of eyes to Solana, which is great. I think Pump.fun is the breakout app of crypto, period, and that's really what people see when they see Solana. It attracts a lot of builders, which is a real net positive for the ecosystem. Seeing that Pump.fun has made over half a billion dollars means there's tremendous opportunity on Solana, and that kind of flywheel is really what you need. You need users, and builders don't want to build for no users. A blockchain foundation can only fund startups on its chain for so long; if you don't have the liquidity and the users, there's really no point. As for the "tokenize everything" narrative, this whole thing with Base and coining, it's admirable what they're doing, because it's a controversial campaign, and controversy, as we've seen, and as I use in my content all the time, really propagates online. But it's happening on Solana too. So overall I think it's a net positive. If people want to be part of the casino, that's their conscious choice. We can't speak for them. If they're choosing to lose their money or get scammed, they're also choosing to maybe make money. It's their choice.

Hodl Up: I also think one of the reasons Solana outperformed so many altcoins on so many metrics is that it's much more user-friendly. You have a platform like Pump.fun that's super easy to use, where you can launch a token in just a few clicks, whereas four or five years ago you'd have to pay a good developer who knew the programming language just to get an average coin. But at the same time, this simple UX is maybe bringing in bad actors and making it easier to flood the market. Personally, I find it very hard to find a good conviction buy these days, because narratives change so quickly with so many new launches. Money may be flowing in, but it's dispersed across millions of tokens. I remember four years ago the whole market had only about 10,000 tokens, whereas today you get that in an hour, something like that. Speaking of Pump.fun, I have to ask: what are some of your favorite memes, or narratives you've seen people use on crypto Twitter? Personally, I liked MEW. That was my conviction buy. It's maybe not doing that well at the moment, but what about you?

Bangerz: Obviously BONK is the Solana savior. I think memes are great, but I think just by buying Bitcoin you'll probably outperform the majority of people trading memes. People don't have enough Bitcoin. You don't have enough Bitcoin. No one watching this has enough Bitcoin. No one here has enough Bitcoin. That's my play. If I buy a meme, it's a gamble. Sure, it's fun, but I'll probably forget about it, so realistically I'll probably just be somebody else's exit liquidity. So I just think you should buy Bitcoin.

Hodl Up: Well, you heard it from the exit liquidity guys. We have to wrap it up because we're short on time. Just a reminder that Bangerz is the closing speaker tomorrow, and you don't want to miss her jokes roasting Solana. Do you have a roast for us? Please.

Bangerz: Oh my god, this is putting me on the spot. What's an Albanian joke? Why don't you tell me the joke, then I'll say it, and we'll act like I made it up.

Hodl Up: Okay. What's the difference between an Albanian and a goat?

Bangerz: I don't know. What is it?

Hodl Up: I don't know. They're both goats.

Bangerz: Okay, I feel roasted. That was terrible. I love Ethereum. No more Solana for me. This is too much Solana for me.

Hodl Up: Okay guys, thank you very much, and thank you, Bangerz, for the joke specifically.

Bangerz: Thank you!

Hodl Up: We hope you have a good day.