Addressable - How it Came to Be?

The legendary investor Peter Thiel said that the essence of innovation lies in your answer to the contrarian question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”. And for the entrepreneurial version: “What valuable company is nobody building?”

Last year 2,700+ crypto companies raised 33.5 billion dollars in funding, outweighing companies from other top industries including cybersecurity, digital health and EdTech. As with most startups, capital raised goes directly back into the company in order to scale and grow.

But how does growth happen? Growth is all about extending your audience, which is difficult in crypto because the audience is anonymous by design. It is no secret that extending your audience comes down to great marketing. Marketing is part of any well-executed business strategy because it is how you connect with your audience. You need to know your audience in marketing, yet crypto marketers rarely know their audience's age, location, purchase history, and means of communication. This is where we see the most significant issue to tackle: users often adopt crypto because they appreciate its anonymity, which is also the critical factor limiting its growth and further adoption.

“You need to know your audience in marketing, yet crypto marketers rarely know their audience's age, location, purchase history, and means of communication.”

A year ago, Tomer Shlomo, Tomer Sharoni and I were sipping a Chateau Golan Eliad in El Vecino, Tel Aviv discussing the future of crypto. We asked ourselves how would the industry change when crypto reaches mass adoption? We all thought it’s likely that marketing personnel will outgrow technical personnel currently dominating the lines. We also thought the marketers would need tools to drive growth and they certainly could not settle for traditional CRM systems that aren't fit for anonymous audiences. But perhaps the vaguest part of the future was – How will marketers drive growth with INCOMPLETE DATA?

What do I mean by incomplete data? There are currently two types of limited solutions to grow in the face of anonymity. One approach relies on social media data using influencer marketing, paid campaigns and live content. This common practice overlooks the data of the blockchain, where all crypto interactions take place. Therefore, the main drawback is that marketers are not able to target users by their crypto interactions, and can never know which social media activity, if any, made someone buy a product. Twitter, for instance, can optimize a tweet for views and clicks but they cannot optimize for token purchases because the data resides on the blockchain.

“Twitter, for instance, can optimize a tweet for views and clicks but they cannot optimize for token purchases because the data resides on the blockchain.”

The alternative set of solutions relies on blockchain data by identifying anonymous accounts of interest and sending them crypto rewards via airdrops. The drawback here is that airdrops are often associated with scams so they are typically ignored. Where we see customers open to receiving targeted information is on social media.

The crypto marketing dilemma is therefore either relying on social data without blockchain data or vice versa since there are no points of intersection between the two. However, based on our previous experience of blockchain, machine learning and big data analytics, we knew that finding meaningful relationships between events on blockchain and social media would revolutionize crypto marketing. We started researching, building, and validating our thesis. And we’re building the company no one built thus far. Enter Addressable.

Addressable bridges the gap between anonymous crypto users on the blockchain and social media. We collect data from the blockchain AND social media, and find relationships between the two. With our technology, marketing teams are able to describe their perfect audience using blockchain and social terms, and launch a campaign on social media, where users’ time is spent without breaking anonymity.

“With our technology, marketing teams are able to describe their perfect audience using blockchain and social terms, and launch a campaign on social media, where users’ time is spent without breaking anonymity.”

Imagine DeFi companies building campaigns only for audiences of real investors. NFT project building campaigns only for holders of related tokens. P2E games communicating only with active on-chain gamers. No bots, no shouting into the void, no spray-and-pray campaigns, no guessing which campaigns work — but a x10 BETTER PROCESS that starts with building a crypto audience, continues with launching a social media campaign, and ends with tracking performance on social media and the blockchain.

When marketing teams first learn about our solution, they’re often baffled because it sounds too good to be true. While it might seem challenging, for us it is the natural evolution of 15-20 years of experience researching blockchain and data sciences in academia and top data companies like Akamai, Salt Security, Synamedia, Microsoft, etc.

Addressable came to be because WE LOVE THE WORLD OF CRYPTO AND THEREFORE WANT IT TO GROW. The need for crypto companies to grow introduces a significant problem — acquiring audiences and measuring performance in face of anonymity. We plan to overcome this with a novel solution that bridges social and blockchain data, a tech-oriented team perfectly assembled to build it, and a sprinkle of dream dust for the day of mass adoption. Stay tuned!