u/SilentHarboree

Went through six agencies across three projects since 2022. Total spend somewhere around $120k, the first $40k was basically tuition. Writing the pattern down because it kept repeating regardless of agency size or price.

"We have 200+ tier 1 KOLs in our network."
In practice you get a google sheet of accounts that post four sponsored shills a day. We paid one telegram channel with 110k subs and got 11 clicks from it. Not a typo.

"Guaranteed placements in top crypto media"
It turns into a paid press release on aggregator sites with a Sponsored tag. Nobody opens those except your own team, screenshotting for the investor update.

"Community growth" was my favorite.
8k new discord members in one week, none of them ever typed anything. I checked join analytics later, most accounts were under a month old.

"Full funnel performance marketing"
This means a monthly pdf with impressions and CPM. The moment you ask about revenue attribution you hear that crypto is a brand awareness play and tracking is complicated. I got that line almost word for word from three different account managers.

So now I open every call with one question, show me please revenue from a past client. Most conversations die right there. Found ICODA this year that didn't flinch, they pulled up a portfolio project where 48 campaigns ran at the same time, $3.6M revenue, 6.24 ROAS on Meta and the ROAS held across months instead of one spike they cherry picked for the deck.

But, accroding to last experience any agency still an agency and you still have to babysit everything(money is huge motivator), but at least the conversation started from numbers instead of reach.

Maybe I just got unlucky six times in a row, who knows.

Still received three more cold emails this week promising 10x community growth. Everyone wants my money, but no one wants to provide quality services.

Read earlier thread about Trezor Suite with the swap stuck on "exchanging" for 40 minutes got me curious who even started this no account swap format. Wasted half an evening in old Voorhees blog posts because of it.

2014 year. You sent coin A, coin B came back, nobody asked your name. In 2015 he pulled the service out of New York because he refused to log users for regulators. 2018, the pressure won anyway, mandatory KYC, volume died and the 2021 fix is the part I can't get over.
They quit being the counterparty, turned the site into a router over DEXs, then that july dissolved the entire company into a DAO. Airdropped FOX to about a million wallets and stopped existing as a business.

Format itself never went anywhere though. Simpleswap, Fixedfloat, Godex, all running the same loop today pick a pair, send, wait ten minutes, receive.
Twelve years and the UX is basically untouched, which you can't say about much else in crypto.

They cover the spots DEXs still handle badly, native BTC and XMR legs mostly, plus people who just don't want to deal with wallet extensions and gas.

Thoughts?

when i started out APY was the whole scoreboard for me. higher number, better, end of thought. every week or so i'd drag my stablecoins over to whoever was flashing the biggest one.

and most of those numbers just melted. half were token rewards that thinned out to nothing once you looked away. a couple were the platform itself going poof. embarrassing how long it took before the shape of it clicked.

the fix wasn't hunting down a smarter yield. it was making myself sit with one dull question before anything went in

who's actually paying me and why?

if i couldn't spit out the answer in one breath, i walked. and it pretty much always shakes out three ways. either somebody borrowed and owes interest on it or a token's being minted as a reward that some poor soul has to offload down the line or nobody can tell you where it comes from and that silence is the answer right there.

these days i only sit in the first bucket, where you can trace the money back to a person actually handing it over. right now that's a little slice in lending that goes out to real companies instead of crypto just chasing its own tail the return's fine, but the straight tradeoff is genuine default risk, some business stops paying and you're sat waiting months to see anything back, so i keep the ticket small on purpose.

smaller numbers than my chasing days for sure. but nothing's rugged me in ages and for once i can actually tell you what i'm holding and why.