Q&A: Blocksee’s co-founders envision a better future for marketing (hosted by Nameless)
Maybe web3 can help fix where the marketing community went wrong — treating people like transactions.
Everyone in web3 has a unique story about how they stumbled into the space.
Josh Hashemzadeh and Eric Forst have both had interesting career journeys as digital marketing experts in web2. They co-founded Blocksee because they saw a need for marketers to connect with customers in more human, meaningful, and authentic ways.
They both realized what the field of marketing was missing. After all, web2 was built with an obsession for user acquisition and growth metrics. Companies normalized prioritizing shareholders above the interests of everyday people who patronized businesses with their time, attention, and money.
The people who marketers label as “consumers” and “users” were treated less-than-optimally along the way.
Maybe web3 can change that.
That’s the bigger picture that the team at Blocksee is working toward. In this interview with Blocksee’s co-founders, Josh Hashemzadeh and Eric Forst go deeper into the topic of how marketers can orchestrate higher integrity campaigns in web3.
q: what’s blocksee? what brought you to web3? what’s the story behind it all?
Josh Hashemzadeh (Co-Founder/ CMO)
JH: We set out to create infrastructure that powers artist communities and helps them better market their web3 services and products. Practically, that means building a clear solution for how you can bring more first-party data, information, and equity to creators of web3 initiatives.
Before pivoting into a CRM, Blocksee was a fine art marketplace specializing in NFTs. But in 2021, when Blocksee first launched, the market was saturated. That’s when we decided to pivot into web3 marketing technology.
I had gotten into web3 during my senior year of college. I was studying art as a painting major. Through that journey, I had become interested in the marketing side of the galleries and museum world.
When I met Eric, my day job was doing media buying for Fortune 100 companies. I was looking at big players who were throwing budgets at social media platforms. Some of these products weren’t tied to any real conversion metric. I started thinking about whether brands were getting access to their intended audiences. I was also privy to conversations about the declining effectiveness of cookies, with an increasing number of people opting out of conversion pixels.
Major social media networks operate as intermediaries, so you never know if the people you really want to reach are engaging with your brand. I had been thinking a lot about the value add of strategic targeting in web3 and how to combine all of that with the transparency of the blockchain, which is essentially a public database.
I thought it made perfect sense that we could utilize the entirety of the ledger of blockchain that shows every hash ID, every wallet ID, and transaction data pertaining to purchase volume, frequency, and types. Our CRM structures this information into a UX that an artist like myself can use.
Eric Forst (Co-Founder/ CEO)
EF: We believe that the wallet is the new cookie because of all the public, first-party personalization data that exists.
In terms of my background, I used to run corporate marketing departments for about 12 years. In 2007, I switched over to selling SaaS to marketers. Around 2013, I was invited to a Facebook group called Radical Decentralization by a good online friend. That was my introduction to Bitcoin.
For about a year and a half, I was active in that group once or twice a week. I’d look at the conversations every once in a while and chime in. I invited my dad, who had a PhD, to participate.
We’d follow high-level conversations about topics like “what is money?” and “what is fiat?” We’d also watch the price of Bitcoin go up.
In 2014, I started investing in Bitcoin because Coinbase had come along, and it was an American company backed by Sequoia. In 2018, I started working on my first blockchain project called Crypto Coin Trader, which was a Facebook Group that needed help with digital marketing.
In 2020, I built my first blockchain startup, which is a COVID testing platform that we put on an IBM Hyperledger Private Blockchain. I left that project but my co-founder kept it going. Josh and I met through my cousin, who is an art dealer. Our combined background in arts and marketing led us to the web3 CRM that we’re building.
q: why aren’t web2 martech platforms the best fit for initiatives in web3?
JH: If you look at the structure around traditional web2 tools, they are very centralized platforms. So anyone who’s trying to build in a decentralized way is going to run into some friction.
A lot of this thinking operates around personal, end-user data. Today’s advertising, marketing, and media ecosystems are driven by the mentality of how we can get someone to click something — followed by formulas for engaging that individual and pulling them through a funnel, whether that’s something beneficial to them or not. That marketing is done based on our most personal credentials and information.
In web3, this dynamic is inverted. Marketers aren’t looking at personal information first. The goal is to build community and engagement around purchase activity, with digital records being visible on a public ledger. This dynamic gives marketers a unique opportunity to access more first-party data that is more transactional and transparent, with a higher ROAS as a result. At the same time, marketers are able to give their communities a higher amount of anonymity and privacy. It’s a powerful combination that the industry lost sight of in web2.
With web3, we’re circling back to web1. We’re figuring out what becomes centralized and what becomes more decentralized. It makes sense to have infrastructure that deals with both. Web2 CRMs don’t extract any data. So marketers are sitting on valuable insights that aren’t actionable.
On the flip side, average people can own and monetize their own data by choosing what information to share. It’s a way to operate with blockchains as opposed to how Facebook and Google operate with email.
q: what are your thoughts about web3’s current reputational and trust issues?
EF: I think FTX was a combination of negligence and nefarious behavior. It was negligence that became nefarious when the company didn’t do anything about it.
Things have really changed since FTX went down. The space is starting to evolve beyond random token projects and NFT collections to prioritize the exchange of real value. People are even afraid to say NFT, like they’re something bad that lost value due to being based on a house of cards.
The people who are left in the space are interested in the educational and innovation elements. They’re dedicated to building a better future with the tools that are available.
q: what about existing social media platforms that are going for aggressive metaverse plays?
EF: Is Meta still going to be called Meta in a year? It’s like no one is there. Nobody wants to wear giant headsets and play lackluster games.
I think we’re going to see the adoption of AR, not VR. And it’s going to be about great content and digital asset ownership. People are going to lean more into the decentralized web. That’s where the metaverse is really going to come to life.
q: how does tokenomics fit into the equation?
JH: With the token model, it’s easy to get wrapped up in a new platform, especially when the assets are increasing in price every day.
For us, we intentionally went with a SaaS model to defer any anxiousness around new business models that haven’t really been proven yet. Even with the token model that we’re outlining for Blocksee, it really comes second to the SaaS platform.
Our approach is to deliver value for customers first, build your platform, and then use ancillary things like tokens to increase value. The tokens need to be deeply rooted in something, not just in speculative market-making.
I think that’s something we have all learned in the industry now, so hopefully we can pivot away from that to double down on self-sovereign identity, self custody of assets, and the power of decentralization.
q: so where is the utility in web3?
EF: It’s the core use case of people wanting to digitally own something and have that asset be interoperable. Gaming is an important application here.
JH: The utility is also about where the engagement is going to come from. If you had asked me two years ago when we started Blocksee, I would have undoubtedly said the United States. I’m not sure that’s the case today or will be in the future. We’re seeing engagement from India, China, Africa, and parts of the world that we wouldn’t consider to be the dominant force in tech and finance.
Web3 is something we need to think about on a global level, to understand how these technologies can scale for independent entities. Hopefully, by doing that, it makes the world a little bit more hospitable too. It makes exchange and free market capitalism, all these things that we’ve built into our commercial systems, more accessible and more importantly, more equitable.
That’s a value proposition that we’re not ready or willing to let go.
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This work was a collaboration between the nameless editorial team.
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