In this video we dive into how Web3Wesley grew his YouTube channel to 30k subs in the crypto gaming space, and how he got into crypto and Web3 Gaming through Axie Infinity. We dive deep into content marketing and how to grow an audience rapidly on YouTube.
We also discuss his involvement with WolvesDAO, the leading gaming research DAO in web3. Finally, our conversation takes a detour towards NFT Gaming in Japan and Asia. Wesley throws light on the public sentiment towards NFTs and crypto gaming in these regions while dissecting the dominance of mobile gaming, regulatory challenges, and the growing popularity of the Play-to-Earn model.
In this video we dive into how Web3Wesley grew his YouTube channel to 30k subs in the crypto gaming space, and how he got into crypto and Web3 Gaming through Axie Infinity. We dive deep into content marketing and how to grow an audience rapidly on YouTube.
We also discuss his involvement with WolvesDAO, the leading gaming research DAO in web3. Finally, our conversation takes a detour towards NFT Gaming in Japan and Asia. Wesley throws light on the public sentiment towards NFTs and crypto gaming in these regions while dissecting the dominance of mobile gaming, regulatory challenges, and the growing popularity of the Play-to-Earn model.
Welcome to the Crescendo Go-To-Market podcast. Today Web3Wesley have , who's my business partner, but he is better known for building one of the Web 3 Gaming Gaming YouTube channels to 30,000 subs. He was involved in Axie in the early days and he's also the community manager at WolvesDAO, which is the most exclusive community in Veptory Gaming. So, vestley, do you want to give us a quick introduction to yourself and how you got into Veptory Gaming?
Wesley:Yeah, absolutely so. As Shash pointed out, I'm Wesley. I have a YouTube channel, web3wesley as well, and we're working together at Crescendo on the marketing engagements. It can also catch me over at WolvesDAO. But as to how I got into Web3 and Web3 Gaming specifically, it's a bit of a long story.
Wesley:But I guess we go back to crypto in general. I started in late 2014 and I don't remember how I first heard about Bitcoin, but I'd heard about this thing. You could use spare computer parts and earn money, and that sounded good to me because I've always been a gamer at heart and you know. So it's funny because crypto and Web3 Gaming started with gaming for me, even though it began with using my old gaming PC, putting all these parts into a milk crate, and I had this ugly mining rig in my basement where I wasn't paying any electricity at the time, and it was right then that mining Bitcoin kind of became unprofitable without dedicated mining units or without bigger pools, and so we actually switched and me and my buddies were some of the first people mining dodgecoin back in the day, which I dumped right away Otherwise I'd be retired, as I think a lot of us have that kind of story in crypto, but I shipped it away from crypto. I wrote my economics thesis on remittance payments and how Bitcoin was going to change them and how it was going to revolutionize remittance payments around the world.
Wesley:But I stepped into other roles and I ended up working in not Bitcoin mining but physical gold mining. And I did that for a number of years working with public companies, taking companies, public, doing marketing and operations, and the whole time I was keeping an eye on crypto as a retail investor and 2017-2018, nfts started popping up and I remember one day someone sent me a deck for a trading card game and it was a trading card game they're gonna use NFTs with. And I called my buddy and I was like, whoa, how we use crypto is gonna change like this is revolutionary. And it's funny because the project died. It never got off the ground and I was like, okay, so people aren't too serious about these NFT things. And I kind of left it alone and I didn't get too involved with Ethereum and it wasn't till Axie kind of came around that I looked at gaming and NFTs again. I was like, okay, here's something that's actually picking up. And then that's when I started kind of shifting things and really focusing on the web 3 side.
Shash:Interesting. So tell us about the early days with Axie, because I think that's what you're best known for. In those early days, as you got really involved, you were helping a lot of guilds, you had these crazy spreadsheets for reading and so on. So tell us about the early Axie days.
Wesley:Yeah, I definitely wasn't the first. You know, I wasn't one of the first round of people in Axie, because Axie started building in 2018 before anybody knew about it. Where you know, gos often talks about putting a message in the discord and waking up in the morning, and it's still the same message and I wasn't around during those days. I got in as it sort of started to get popular. Before the, there was a documentary about Axie scholars. Before that went viral.
Wesley:I started dipping around with Axie because I noticed in the crypto space, all of a sudden, there was a bunch of people talking about this game Axie Infinity, like on Reddit and stuff. People in the Philippines were asking about how to set up wallets and crypto questions, and I noticed some of this. I was like, wow, what's all the sudden hype? That's kind of picking up and I saw an opportunity there. I saw that, wow, there's actually a lot of people that want to play this game and have heard about it, and so I started playing. I started with a couple axes just to check it out, you know, and and I did actually find the game fun.
Wesley:I've talked about this before. A lot of people, I think, got in only because they wanted to earn. But I've been a Pokemon fan my whole life and I could see some Pokemon elements in the game and the earning element was nice on top. But I did enjoy the game and so I was in crypto. I enjoyed the game and I thought, you know, and here's an opportunity for this to grow into something. I saw a lot of potential and that's really why I kind of dived in headfirst and thought, you know what, let's try this breeding thing, let's try this guild thing.
Shash:And it sort of spiraled from there interesting, and why'd you decide to start making videos on Axie?
Wesley:so why I just started making videos on Axie. I've been casually making videos for a long time and I've made this. I've monetized three YouTube channels. They're not as big as this Axie one, this web three, gaming one, but the other ones got some decent hyped, I think the first one. I was making Call of Duty videos 12 years ago and YouTube offered to monetize my channel pretty fast because I was getting getting a lot of views on that. I'd taken the videos down since because they're they're horrible. I go back and look at them, but it was always a hobby of mine making videos on the side.
Wesley:When I was in the mining operation to before I started working in the office, I did some work in the field, and part of that I used to run a drone, and so I used to make. I was making drone footage, and when I started working remotely, I've always been in photography, so I had a good camera as well, and so videography in general has always been something that I've been passionate about. I've worked on a few video projects in the past, done a documentary on beer funny enough, that's a story for another day and so I called up one of my buddies one day. I was like hey, do you think I can fit crypto content into one of my other channels? I was doing some videos about Japan and I was like, do you think I can fit some crypto content on here? Because I know the algorithm on YouTube doesn't like it if I start mixing and matching. And you know they supported my theory that you know what, it's time to make a new channel just for crypto related activities.
Wesley:And that was when I was just starting to get into Axi, and the original idea wasn't really Axi necessarily, and as I started thinking about it, I was like you know what I want the channel to be about? Web through gaming but there's only Axi. That's like the only game. Really, that's any good. There are a couple in the mix, like Splinterlands has been around a long time. I was aware of them but I hadn't played it. And there are a few games, but there weren't much before Axi blew up, and so it was kind of like, okay, I need a new channel to focus on a new topic.
Wesley:And so I started making I was already doing videos and I thought, you know, let's make a dedicated channel for the web three gaming. And I called it attack on Axi originally, and that was a reference to attack on Titan, just because I'm a big anime fan, if anyone who watches my channel as well. And I was like you know, I like the, the. What do you call that association? No, the grammatic term for it is like a, with the double, the double letter, and it just sounded good. I was like you know what, eventually, if I have to rebrand this to web three Wesley which I did, but that was always in the start of my mind but I was like you know what, let's focus on Axi, let's dive in, because I was doing it right, I was learning these things and it felt like an opportunity to help other people learn as well that's very cool.
Shash:And why did you decide to kind of pivot from just Axi to broader web three gaming? What was the reasoning behind that?
Wesley:yeah, that was always the long-term goal, but when I started there was only Axi really there was only a few options for gaming and so I wanted to keep it in a small enough niche that I wouldn't have a new channel again, and so I thought the web three gaming, the NFT gaming space, just kind of made sense, and so making that pivot was a little bit difficult, of course, because a lot of my initial audience was interested in Axi specifically and but a lot of them in general were also just I. My channel was built up of a lot of like medium and small guilds, a lot of people that were doing something similar to me and the fact that they were not necessarily a scholar, but they were organizing groups of scholars or they were buying and selling Axis in large amounts and they were participating because I didn't really make content around how to play the game. That's the other thing. When I started the channel was, I looked at what was out there and I was like, okay, there's a few channels about. There were two or three back then. One in particular was large, the rest were fairly small, that we're talking about how to play axi, and I was like, okay, this content is covered? What is not covered? What have I had to learn from scratch? That's been kind of difficult, okay, like learning how to breed, learning how to set up an ROI calculator, learning how to track all these statistics and Make sure that you're not wasting money, wasting time, etc.
Wesley:And these were things that major guilds were doing, and when I talked to the big guilds, they'd hired someone for this and but the little guys, the medium-sized guys, you know, maybe you had 50 scholars, maybe you had hundreds scholars. They didn't have tools for this and a lot of people were losing focus, wasting money, and so I thought you know what? I'm building these tools for myself. Here's a good niche for me to help other people, and I still get to be passionate about crypto, I still get to be passionate about gaming, but axi was the only thing to focus on at the time. So the shift was because I always wanted to talk about more than just axi, but there wasn't any other decent game around back then to talk about.
Shash:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I think lately you've seen a lot more of that. Three games come out that are interesting, that are fun. So, you know, while axi still going strongly strong, this a lot broader a furnish. And yeah, I'm kind of curious with, also kind of, your involvement with wolf's down. So we're both members in wolf's down. I think it's a really great community. Can you first give us a quick breakdown of what the wolves are about and then how you got involved with them?
Wesley:So wolves down? Yeah, for those of you who don't know, wolves down is essentially a collection of thought leaders in the web through gaming space. Now I say a Dow, we call it wolves down, but there's been some topic this has been a topic internally that we're not really a Dow in the sense that it's not voting on decisions. There's no token. It's an application based alpha group, essentially, and we have a variety of members from across game founders, devs theses Everything you can think of content creators and the central pillar for everyone is web through gaming. This is what brings us together. This is what we're all passionate about and we sometimes call it the only guild you can't buy your way into because it's application based and based on people's merit and Experience and passion about gaming. We accept them into the Dow and we do kick people out regularly. It's one of the things we're known for, not in the sense that we're harsh about it, but if someone doesn't contribute to the conversation, which happens, you know, sometimes you join a guild, etc. You're too busy and you don't contribute, so we do kick people out because we get a lot of applications and we want to cycle in new members when someone's not contributing. We are 300 members Approximately. That number fluctuates a little bit and we come together and we talk about everything related to web through gaming.
Wesley:And so how I first got involved was Peyton the founder, about a year and a half ago, and I jumped on a call with me and just said hey, watch your videos, like what you're doing in the space, how'd you like to join wolves now? And for me at first I was like you know what, I'm not sure I have enough time to contribute because it's something I was worried about. And he said you know what, don't worry about it, jump in, try it out, see how it goes and we'll go from there right. And so I got a. He got me some of the application, I filled it out, they they grabbed me in because I had already talked to Peyton and the team and I loved it.
Wesley:Honestly, the conversations are amazing, like anything to do with web 3 gaming. Whether you're a Founder trying to figure out how to set up your legal structure, whether you're a content creator who wants to know how to improve its video quality, or whether you're a D gen and you just want to know what's the next gaming NFT that's gonna 100x. We have all these kind of conversations in the Dow and honestly, I just got sucked in and as I got much more involved, we have a group of Admin that make the decisions. Basically run the Dow based on volunteer, and so there were some spots. Originally I was doing mostly analytics work, like how do we evaluate the games we think are worth looking at and talking about, and then that expanded into into community management as well, where I take a lot of the calls and set up a lot of the Collaborations we do with the wolf style.
Shash:Awesome, yeah, and I mean I agree 100% like wolf style is probably the purest and one of the best communities in that tree I've seen, just number one. You can't buy your way in. There's no product being sold, you know there's issues purely a place to hang out and Because of that I think the conversation quality is extremely high and you see some of the top leaders in the industry there. It's definitely one of the places where this you know, you keep your ears to the ground there and you're kind of ahead of what's happening, and I know there are other a lot, I know there are a lot of other web-free gaming communities and a lot of them are NFT based, but Wolfsdale, by far, I think, is the highest quality.
Wesley:Yeah, wolfsdale honestly has become more than just a group or a Dow. It's like a family, honestly, there, the friendships I've established in the Wolfsdale are very meaningful and it's a very amazing group of people. Honestly, it's it's one of the other reasons that I got so involved with it. Just, it's an amazing space. If you haven't checked us out, make sure you check out Wolfsdale on Twitter and, you know, fill out that application, because we love to have like-minded people in there.
Shash:Yeah, absolutely. And then the other. The other cool thing I remember is when we went to token 2049 at Singapore. We constantly were hanging out with other wolves and you know we had. Basically it was such a great experience. We went to that Chinese restaurant, all of us that just like ate crab with our heads. It was a great time, right, like it was like really awesome just having beers and hanging out as like actually establishing friendships Did not feel like a networking event or anything.
Shash:It was just like a crew of, you know, people who are interested in similar stuff and we're just all hanging out. So definitely recommend checking out Wolfsdale. And so that brings me to my next question, right? So, if Wolfsdale is obviously blown up quite a bit, your YouTube channel also has gotten to 30k subs plus. You've also done a lot of work with a lot of different gaming projects, right? So you know we've worked together with Halica, where we basically did a lot of their content marketing, helped, you know, build out the creator program and really help them get a lot of game studio leads. So Could you give us like a very high level. So yeah, I guess the two-part question is how did you blow up your audience? And then how can anybody blow up their audience, whether it be a company or whether it be an individual who wants to be you know, that's re gaming kind of influencer?
Wesley:Yeah, fair. So for me a lot of it Goes hand in hand with Axie doing well. Right, I can't discredit the fact that I Started making content right before Axie got popular and mean part of that not to sound, you know, conceded in any way, but part of that was me making a Bet that Axie would do well and I could see the demand was there. I thought honestly I believe in the principle of web through gaming and NFTs and so I thought this is a horse I want to back and that worked out quite well. I didn't expect the price when I started, just in like pricing terms, when I started making videos on Axie, axs was maybe $2 and then it blew up over a hundred dollars and all of a sudden there are all these people looking for content around Axie. So that helps for sure. And the other thing was really finding the niche that no one had done right, because, as I said, there were a couple videos about how to play Axie, how to have the best team and how to win on the leaderboard, but there wasn't anyone who was really teaching you how do you manage 100 scholars that want to play this game? How do you breed your axes without losing a bunch of money and how do you put $10,000 into this game and make it as safe as possible so that you're going to make a profit and you're not just going to lose this? You know, 10 grand, right, and I was talking about things like what are the risks as well. You know, because I've always tried to be rather unbiased. You know, I told people, of course, crypto itself is very risky. This space is very new. Now we're talking about altcoins, now we're getting even more risky, and so I have no delusions that. You know, these things aren't hugely risky in a lot of senses. Right, you can see this with Axie having a bridge hack in the past. You can see this with people losing seed phrases in crypto, right, so I was making content around that to like safety principles how do you make, how do you run all these aspects of crypto and NFT gaming that no one had talked about yet, right, because at first, people are just, they have the gameplay and they're talking about how do you make the best team? Right, like traditional video game videos, and those are great.
Wesley:But I also knew that niche was a little bit saturated and I kind of found this niche that no one was making, and so that's definitely something you can do, and it's not necessarily finding a niche that is no one's in it, because often that's hard to do. Sometimes it's just about finding that competitive edge that no one else is doing, finding a way to make videos and add value that someone else isn't doing, and so for me, I did find a niche that was very under saturated, but I also gave away a lot of tools. I gave away a lot of spreadsheets, as you said, that I was making, and those are one of the things I got the most compliments on. Like, even now, two years later, some people will message me like, hey, this spreadsheet you made two years ago, I'm still using it and I've adapted it for a different NFT, a different game, because it was just super useful, and so to me, that always makes me really happy and those were the kind of that was the kind of way I was giving value back to the community and, honestly, people are always looking for an easy way to blow up on Twitter, youtube, etc.
Wesley:But for me, some of those tools took me like the whole week to make in my spare time, right, and I just gave them away because I wanted to give value to the community, and so the one thing I would say is it can be hard work.
Wesley:You know, starting a YouTube channel, starting a Twitter threat Twitter account and becoming big is very hard to do, and I often tell people, if your goal is to make content full time and you just want to make money, you're going to struggle. If you find for me, video making videos was a hobby, right, that's how it started and I really enjoyed it and I enjoy making tools like that, spreadsheets like that. That's why it came easily and I was able to put in a lot of work and give a lot of value to people without it feeling like a grind, and so I always tell people like, if making a YouTube video is a grind for you and you don't enjoy doing it, there's not a lot of money being a content creator for most people, and so I think starting for the right reason is a big part of it, and then finding that niche that you can really succeed in is another part. Finding a way to give value that is missing to a certain niche or to a certain community will get you a very long way.
Shash:Yeah, I agree 100 percent, and I think that's one of the most important pieces that people miss is if you're trying to do something that you know there's an niche that is competitive, the only way you can get ahead in a niche that's competitive is by being absolutely obsessive and like creating something that's ridiculous, right. So at that point you're doing like 10 X the effort and I have seen friends do that right and succeed and like niches that are competitive. I recently had a friend of mine, tim. He basically made a programming, like he started a new YouTube channel and there was a video he worked on for like months on how he learned programming and got a job with it in six months and it blew up Blue really thinks God, over a million views or whatever, and he's really blown up in that way. But that also, like with that competitive niche is like requires a massive amount of effort, right. That literally took like months and months and, like you know, maybe like a thousand hours of work.
Shash:So it's like you can I do think that, like what she did, there was, you know, essentially find a niche that was growing right and then create content and provide tools that nobody else was doing. So there was a lot of differentiation, and I think that's probably like the smarter way to go about it is in terms of just being able to get like the maximum ROI. And I did something similar with my first YouTube channel, which was a YouTube advertising channel. I didn't really blow it up to crazy numbers, but I got to like 10 K subs and that was mostly through just you know, basically finding a niche that nobody was talking about, youtube ads and essentially building authority and writing a lot of content building agency around it, and that was a great way to grow that business and our. You know, we're getting leads through content, right.
Shash:So I do think that really being able to think from post principles and thinking that, hey, am I just competing with a million other people who are doing this, or do I have a unique angle? Do I have a unique niche? And even if the niche isn't unique, am I approaching it in a way that's fresh and can allow me to like succeed? So I absolutely agreed on that. Now, one thing that I'm also really curious about is you are based in Japan, right, and Japan is obviously pretty big in the gaming space and the vector gaming space. I'm curious how Japanese gamers view vector gaming. What's the feeling like on the ground there? And yeah, I would love to dive into that as well.
Wesley:Yeah, I would start off by saying it's not as negative the sentiment as it is in the West. Gamers in the West hate NFTs, and you can see this from any of the big gaming magazines. Whenever they write any kind of article, they're tailoring to their audience that despises crypto, nfts. But it's not so much so in the West, and I think it's hard to speculate on why. But I have a few theories. One of them is in Japan and in Asia in general, mobile gaming is very big. It tends to be the PC gamers that are more opposed to crypto and NFT. They're a lot more hardcore. The mobile game scene is much more casual. People don't have such strong opinions, and you can see this in your communities too. Like FPS communities can be fricking toxic as hell, but you very rarely get a hyper casual gaming community that's very toxic and very, you know, has very strong opinions one way or the other as well. So that's part of it.
Wesley:And the other thing is I think there's been less exposure to crypto in Japan in general, so there's been less people have been less exposed to some of the hacks and scams that we've seen more in the West.
Wesley:Part of that is to do with regulations, crypto regulations. The government has been saying that they're going to make things better in Japan, but tax regulations are pretty harsh on crypto. It's often Delta's income instead of capital gains, which just means that a lot of people don't want to touch it, and so there's less knowledge, less experience about NFTs, which can be a good thing. We can also be a bad thing, but I do think it helps with the whole sentiment. There's less negative connotations with NFTs here in the West and we'll see like mobile gaming is big, even though PC gaming is been rising year over year, it's not nearly as prominent, neither as console, as it is in Canada, america and a lot of Europe as well. So definitely a more positive sentiment overall, honestly, but I wouldn't say they're, I wouldn't say they're overly like super bullish on NFTs and gaming. I think there's just a lot less awareness around it.
Shash:Interesting. And what about the rest of Asia, like Korea, philippines, vietnam?
Wesley:Yeah, I mean Philippines of Vietnam. Southeast Asia has had exposure on the play to earn side a lot, especially with Axie being a large, large proportion of the players being in the Philippines. So there's been I think there's definitely been some bridges burned because tokens have dived, but overall it does seem like when I talk to these regions they're still very bullish on crypto because they like this play to earn, they like the idea of playing video games and earning money, and even when it's only a little bit of money in a country where that, you know, 10 cents US goes a lot farther that still can be quite profitable right, even when their token prices are quite lower. Because I think, you know, when we have low token prices, you're only earning a couple dollars a day on some of these games. You know, if you're in the States, you know you can't even buy a meal, but in some of the cheaper places in the world in terms of like purchasing power, it goes a lot further right, and so people tend to be play these games a lot more.
Wesley:I still think when I talk to people, like when you talk to Web3 Game Studios, a lot of their audience is still coming out of Asian countries like Vietnam, like the Philippines. Ladam is picking up, for sure, countries like that, but that has to do more with the earning side of things. The other thing is these are also countries that are heavy into mobile. Asia in general like is just a lot more mobile heavy. The Philippines. People have cell phones, smart phones readily available, with internet readily available, but not many of them have a gaming PC or a gaming console, for example, and so there's that's definitely a big factor in it as well.
Shash:Got it, got it. And you know you just mentioned, obviously, like a lot of the Southeast Asian gamers, like the, you know Play Door and actually you know even a couple of dollars a day works for them. But what is your opinion on, like, the economics of Play Door and do you think there's a way to make it sustainable? Or is Play Door an as a concept flawed? Or yeah, what's your opinion around the tokenomics slash viability of a model like Play Door?
Wesley:So it's tough to answer that, because Play Door means a little, means something a little different to everyone, right? In general, I would say Play Door is not dead. I think it's okay. It's just a matter of and I had this conversation on Twitter space the other day about big time and someone was talking about how big time is pay to play.
Wesley:You have to buy a bunch of NFTs and stuff to play the game in an earning sense, and to me, as long as the pay is higher than the earn earn, you can have a balance. Right, you have to have some people that are willing to pay money to save time, and then you can have people that are willing to spend time to earn money. Right, people can grind in a dungeon to sell assets to players who don't have time to grind that dungeon and we see this in web 2 sometimes as well. Right, people will spend money to buy skins and stuff that they can't earn themselves because it saves them time. So it's just a matter of knowing that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Wesley:It is a zero sum game in a lot of ways, and by that I mean not everybody can win, not everybody can be playing to earn. If you have a play to earn game, you have to have people that are spending money, which means you have to have a game that is worth spending money on. It has to be a game that's fun enough, with the right ecosystem, that people will actually want to spend money with no hopes of getting anything in return, and then there's value for people that are playing to earn to capture some of that value rather than all of that value going to the gaming studio. Right, it's a different kind of economy where the revenue is distributed differently, but I do think there are sustainable models that we will eventually see, or could potentially see, but it's just a matter of setting the expectation right, because there's no way that everyone who plays the game can earn. That will never work. The money has to come from somewhere.
Shash:Yeah, I totally agree. I think play to earn is really. You can't have a game where everybody earns, but if there are players who are willing to spend, then you know there's. The economics allow for some people to earn as well. Right Now I wanted to move on to another question, and this is going back to the content and growing your audience. So obviously you went pretty in depth on how you grew your audience on YouTube. One thing I'm curious about is so when you did a lot of work with Helica in terms of growing their content marketing and really figuring out a lot of the content strategy there, it was interesting because it was much more B2B. Can you run us through your strategy there? What were the results accomplished? And, yeah, just go over how you approach, let's say, content growth for, like a B2B product in the gaming space.
Wesley:Yeah, sure, so, honestly, even when it's B2B, the principles are not too different, because what we were doing around Helica revolves back to giving value to the community, right, and in that way, helica's content was set up in a way that they introduced the games, they give them a bit of a background, and then they were show their dashboards. They would demonstrate their dashboards and say you know, hey, studio XYZ, look at how much money you missed in Royalty fees this month. Look at how much your competitors are charging on XYZ versus what you're charging an XYZ. And the Threads that we ended up doing, because we ended up using Twitter threads as a core fund, it as a core pillar for the content, right, and it was a nice hats off to the game. It was providing value to these gaming studios for for free, as an as a like, a preview of, hey, here's what we can do. And it was a great way to get these studios to Republish or repost. Now it's no longer retweet on X to repost these threads, which was also a way for Helica to use their existing audience right to engage with the gamers that were passionate about that studio, to get some of their audience into the Helic audience, and it was a way of providing value, like I keep saying, to these gaming studios that really didn't require any work from them, and so we combined this with what was trending right, looking at the games that were hot, the games that were talked about a lot on Twitter.
Wesley:Whenever there was a Piece of news or a game that was in the spotlight, it meant a lot of people were looking for threads about that game, and when Helica can provide these insights that no one else had, which they can, so a lot of it comes down to on the B2B side is using your strength which, in this case, helica was had at dashboards and analytics that a lot of the gaming space Hadn't seen or hadn't had access to yet.
Wesley:So we're able to play on that strength, play on the strength of what's trending Looking at the games, and part of that is being involved with the web3 gaming Audience. Right, we didn't hire just anyone to write these Twitter threads. We hired some of the a lot of the wolves down members actually were people that I reached out to to see if they wanted to work with, work with Helica, because I knew they were very entrenched in the web3 gaming space and they could identify the trends and the gaming studios that were quality that we could talk about in order to make this content fit well with the narrative currently in the space, and they would be able to write threads that gamers and game studios would Resonate with right. So, yeah, does that answer your question? There's a lot of compiling factors there.
Shash:Yeah, that totally makes a lot of sense and yeah, definitely, I think the the big thing here for B2B is you really want to think from first principles and you really want to figure out that intersection of content that is going to attract both. You know broader, that three gaming audience, because if you don't get engagement, nobody's gonna see your content, right like you might be trying to reach founders, but if the gaming community is not engaging with it, nobody's gonna see it. And so I Think there's that aspect of creating content that, like the web3 gaming community really likes but also provides value to your target customers and gives them insights that they perhaps they didn't have. So by this combination, gaming founders would actually see this content because it's starting to trend, the community sharing it. You know they're getting a huge number of new notifications and getting a bunch of new followers, but they are also getting valuable insights from the dashboard.
Shash:So I do think that for each web3 B2B company Right, it's gonna be a different strategy. You really have to think from first principles. You can't just, you know, copy and paste, but it is important to really understand that there are nuances in the space and it's not the same as the web2 playbook. There you may want to focus a bit more on the B2B side, on Web2, but like, let's say, you know doing, let's say, google search ads, having a lot of news, you know, having a newsletter, really having, let's say, a strong presence on LinkedIn and a lot more outreach, right, while in web3, I think where I would start is actually starting with Twitter and then Expanding out to other platforms, because Twitter is really where everybody's here, including every single founder in the space. There we're all addicted to Twitter in the space, so that's the place to get started now.
Shash:Wanted to ask you a couple more questions. So number one what are the web3 games right now that you're most bullish on?
Wesley:Yeah, that's an interesting one, and I'm most bullish is A relative term, because I think one of the games I'm most excited for is shrapnel. The reason I'm most excited for shrapnel is I play a lot of FPS as a gamer. It's something I think I would enjoy, and extraction shooters is a genre that I think has some very unique principles that will lend well to web3 in the fact that You're competing, you're taking value from another player and you're risking it. When you Extraction shooter, you kill someone, you take their assets and then you have to extract from the map to get those assets out of there and when there's a value to them, there's like this whole nether layer for Players and for audiences to get excited about. Now, this also lends the problem of. In that genre there's a big issue with Cheaters, people using aim bots and stuff, and when you financialize these assets, you're gonna make that problem way, way more severe. So there are pros and cons to this, but it's actually a genre that I'm very excited for and I think shrapnel is doing it well. Midnight society Doctor disrespects game is another one I have. I think I just have had more exposure to shrapnel, which is why I lean more to that side, but I am excited to see how that goes as well.
Wesley:In terms of like bullish, some of the studios we've worked with closely like I'm really bullish on. It's one of the reasons we were able to get so involved, right, one of the reasons I was happy working with them. So pixie on, for example, building fableborn their game is fun, cams a great founder, and the way they have Built up the game so far has been entertaining and I know a lot of the wolves really enjoy playing it as well. It's not just me. So that's on the mobile side. That's a different genre. That's a game I think I'm more comfortable like using the term bullish on. Not only is it fun, but I see it having a good Potential to be quite successful, whereas the shrapnel I think it's more of a risk but more of a reward and like I get really excited about the opportunity here and seeing what develops.
Wesley:So, yeah, other other games I'm a bullish about games like a arena as well. I'm excited because they're doing something very different. The mixing the AI into a platform fighter, where you have the opportunity to Learn about AI while you play, is is an interesting aspect as well. So, yeah, and then there's a bunch of you know, there's a bunch of games that have been hyped up because they have strong founders things like wild card, I think, are gonna be interesting down the road for sure. And there's a lot of games that I know are building, because Seen some pitch decks from companies that are raising that aren't public yet, and and there are a lot of web 2 founders that are entering the space with very, very strong gaming backgrounds and it's gonna be a few years before we see more of these games like hit the surface, even with a demo. But there's a lot cooking under the surface that I've seen. That just makes me bullish on web 3 gaming in general as well.
Shash:Hmm, got, it makes sense. And, yeah, I agree, I think, a arena fable-born. You know, one game I'm really bullish on is the bornless. I think Toby is an absolutely Amazing founder and I'm very, very bullish on the game they're building and, yeah, short bound, as well as one that also that we were very involved with, that I think is going to do extremely well. So, yeah, lots of good games coming out soon and yeah, I guess the the last question I have what's the moment in rep tree that made you the most proud, or you know, the proudest moment in the space?
Wesley:Yeah, that's, that's a tough one, but Definitely I touched on this a little bit now and again, but I Touched on this a little bit earlier. But now and again, someone reaches out to me and they're just like hey, this video you made a year ago, this spreadsheet that you gave up for free two years ago, was so helpful. I'm still using it today. That, to me, is when I get really proud, when someone tells me that I helped them with their journey to education around web 3 gaming and crypto. Because for me, it's that's what it's been about. It's always been about giving back to the space and helping education.
Wesley:Because crypto needs to grow, it needs to be an easier space and and crypto in general, but web 3 gaming as well. It needs to be an easy space to onboard gamers. There has to be no friction there. And how do we get there? We get there by Sharing resources, like making the education around it better and taking down barriers. And so for me, I've always just like how can I help take down these barriers to make crypto have a wider adoption? And that's going to help everyone who's already in the space, right? And so when someone comes out and tells me I was successful in one of these goals and my Resources or my videos really help them learn a certain concept or help them in their journey into web 3 gaming. That's when I get the most proud.
Shash:Yeah, that's, that's awesome and you know, that's definitely something very nice. It feels good to help people and hear that okay, that you've had an impact on them or their business or you know whatever they're doing. So, to finish it off, how can games Studio okay, I'll say that again. So, to finish it off, how can, let's say, game studios, gamers, anybody in the space reach out to? How can they connect with you?
Wesley:Yeah, absolutely, I'm always. Dms are always open on Twitter. Web 3, wesley. You can find me on LinkedIn as well. I think we can put some links down in the description of this video to to make it easier. And you can hit myself or shash as well up on email as well, wesley, at crescendogg, and checking those regulars, checking those regularly and, yeah, whatever is most convenient for you, but I'm pretty easy to get hold of.
Shash:Yes, pleasure chatting. And guys, go check out Wesley's YouTube channel. It's an absolute like trove of information. Lots of great videos in there and, yeah, thanks for tuning into the podcast. If you're an Apple, if you're wherever you are, give us a rating and I'm looking forward to seeing you on the next podcast. Cheers you.