I'm a growth marketer with a long background in blockchain, which is a slightly unusual combination. I got into Bitcoin back in 2012 when there was really only Bitcoin and Litecoin around. I was studying my master's in mechanical engineering at the time, and a friend invited me to a hackathon in Berlin where I met someone who told me to check out this digital money thing that was going to change how we think about money. It sat with me, and when I got back to university I used some of the high-powered design machines there to mine a few Bitcoin, worth about five dollars each back then.

At graduation I hit a fork in the road: do I go down the engineering path, or chase this. I realized what I actually wanted to do was grow businesses, work with senior people and turn projects into real companies, and that's how I ended up at Ladder, the growth agency Mike Taylor built. While I was interviewing with Mike I was also interviewing for engineering jobs, and the rest is history. Since then I've worked with crypto exchanges, helped build the blockchain discipline at Ladder, worked on NFT projects, and was marketing director at Salad. So I've seen a big spectrum of what Web3 actually is, paired with the conversion-focused marketing fundamentals the agency world drilled into me.

I think the thing that's benefited me most over my career is a very conversion-based mindset. A lot of people get confused about why we do marketing in the first place, so they start chasing vanity metrics, feel like they're making progress, and then three months later they're scratching their head wondering why more followers didn't turn into more money. I credit Ladder and Mike Taylor for beating this out of me. Working across a huge range of clients teaches you to walk into any business and find the fundamentals fast.

So a lot of the value I give as a mentor is asking, what's the ultimate conversion goal here, what's the crux of the problem we're actually trying to solve, and then working back from where you make money into the details. Is your landing page converting? Are you actually speaking to your customer, or writing in a way that makes you feel good because you think you're explaining your business, when the reader is going, I don't get it, I don't know what value you bring to my life? They're small changes, but once a founder has that shift, you can make a tweak, see some results, and iterate from there.

There's also a mental model I use on my own problems. When you're in the middle of something it becomes personal, you're attached, and it's hard to zoom out. So I ask myself, if I were mentoring this person with this problem, what would I tell them? That detaches you, the perspective shifts, the simple changes become obvious, and a lot of the anxiety just dissipates.

The trust issue with crypto is real, and it's different from other industries because there's always a financial incentive in the mix. Every new technology gets its cowboys, the same way the dot-com bubble had people buying domains and claiming they were worth millions, but with crypto you have retail investors, ordinary people who can't afford to lose the money and rightly get upset when they're misled. So I understand the skepticism. But a lot of the genuine value comes down to self-sovereignty: if you hold your own wallet, no one can shut it down or take your coins away, for as long as the internet exists.

Where I get really excited is identity, which is where I see Web3 turning into the next wave. Take a simple example I use: I like whiskey, and a shop needs to know I'm of legal age, but they don't actually need to store my date of birth in a form somewhere forever. With a zero-knowledge proof, an algorithm can ask my wallet whether I'm over the age limit, my wallet says yes, and the shop trusts that without ever knowing or keeping my data. For a marketer that's huge, because identity is owned and permissioned by you and you alone. The same idea lets someone in one country prove their degree and work history anywhere in the world, trustlessly, without anyone having to call up a university to verify it. We're right at the cusp of what this can do, and that future is genuinely exciting.

It's one of my favorite stories, and I still have the screenshots. The founder of Salad came onto the platform wanting to grow his business. Salad lets young people outsource their high-powered GPUs and gaming rigs when they're away from their computer, and in return they get gift cards and rewards rather than money, which is a very attractive model for someone who needs their parents' permission to buy things. A blockchain request came in, the platform pointed him to me, and we had one hour-long call.

In that single interaction I apparently made enough of an impression that he sent me a LinkedIn message afterwards saying he wasn't going to beat around the bush, he wanted to hire me, was I available. That was it. I became marketing director of that company, and the rest is history. It was a real step up, from a head-of role to a director, and a genuinely exciting business to be part of, especially with where decentralized compute is going now that AI needs so much of it. GrowthMentor has given me amazing opportunities personally, and that one came out of nowhere from a conversation I went into purely to help. The lesson I took is simple: always leave a good impression.