Amanda Cassatt: The Storytelling Playbook Behind Ethereum, Web3 & AI

Amanda Cassatt invented the CMO role at ConsenSys around 2015 to 2016, pitching it directly to Joe Lubin after attending the first Ethereum meetup in New York. She describes herself as the de facto CMO of Ethereum in its earliest days, with an explicit goal of making Ethereum a household name comparable to Starbucks or the MLB. Nearly everyone at ConsenSys and the Ethereum Foundation carried the word researcher in their title at the time, including people doing marketing work, reflecting a cultural fear of appearing too commercial. Cassatt took MIT OpenCourseWare computer science courses specifically because she feared acting as a layer that would make technical content dumb and wrong before projecting it to the world at scale.

The early Ethereum go-to-market strategy was centered entirely on attracting developers. ConsenSys packaged potential use cases as startups with products and sent them on tour through global meetup groups to refine those products, coordinating organizers through a large Discord so the organization did not have to execute every local event itself. Cassatt rebranded her internal team to Catalyst to reframe their work away from the word marketing, and she helped build marketing for MetaMask, Infura, Truffle, and Gitcoin during this period.

Because Ethereum and Bitcoin were banned from advertising on Facebook and Google, the community was forced to invent alternative growth strategies from first principles. Cassatt argues this became a productive forcing function, and that in-person meetups created real bonds, co-founder relationships, and collaborations that endured through market cycles far better than vanity metrics like Discord follower counts. She defines good marketing as market making, matching people who would want something with knowledge that it exists, and argues that misrepresenting a product makes that matching impossible.

On the NFT and metaverse hype cycle, Cassatt argues the peak around 2020 was partly driven by COVID creating a bias toward believing screen-mediated life would persist long-term. She notes Meta spent billions on a cartoon metaverse product because its leadership genuinely believed that was where people would spend their time, making it a larger loser in that cycle than crypto. Her core principle for distinguishing lasting trends from hype is that tokenizing an asset does not create value out of thin air and only places existing value somewhere it can be traded with other on-chain assets. She argues every attempted intersection between crypto and an industry fails to the degree participants believe wrapping something on chain creates value by itself, while also crediting NFTs with paving the way for broader institutional comfort with bringing real-world assets on chain.

Cassatt founded Serotonin in 2019 because no external agency understood the crypto space deeply enough for her to feel comfortable working with one when she was CMO at ConsenSys. The original Serotonin team did more token launches and product launches than anyone else in the ecosystem around that time, which she argues gave them superior pattern-matching ability. She warns that raising hundreds of millions of dollars and achieving a large market cap without actual users is a disastrous position because the company must start from square one while being unable to project that image publicly.

On marketing strategy for founders, Cassatt argues marketing and product should not be treated as separate functions early on because they form the same feedback loop. Early-stage marketing should probe for product-market fit by talking to target audiences and feeding that information back into product development. She describes old airdrop structures where people receive free tokens as basically the worst ROI marketing campaign in the world, and argues structures where people pay something to receive something, similar to ICOs, produce a better-composed holder base, which she says is really definitive for a project. She also notes that paid scaled marketing platforms are now available to crypto founders and that once a founder can calculate CAC and confirm positive ROI, they should run scaled campaigns.

On AI, Cassatt argues that if someone could not create economic value doing a certain thing before AI, AI will not help them create economic value doing that thing. She uses photography as an analogy, noting that access to the same tool does not produce equal economic outcomes and that specialized skill and judgment determine results. She also argues that the multiplication of internet content since the advent of LLMs in 2023 makes judgment, discernment, and curation more important rather than less.