When Web3 Growth Enters the Agency Era: How to Achieve Real User Growth with Professional Teams?
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When Web3 Growth Enters the Agency Era: How to Achieve Real User Growth with Professional Teams?
You have to listen to user feedback in order to drive organic growth.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsThree Stages of Project Growth
From my personal observation, Web3 projects generally go through three stages of growth:
First: Running campaigns and attracting users via task platforms (often referred to as "freebie hunting");
Second: Buying and exchanging traffic within the TON ecosystem (essentially following the same logic as past partnership-based user exchanges, except that on TON, traffic acquisition has become standardized and quantifiable);
Third: Running paid ads on traditional platforms such as TikTok or Xiaohongshu. Each of these stages aligns closely with a project’s own growth trajectory.
In the early days, most projects start by leveraging task platforms to acquire initial traffic. Once they’ve built up some followers, they move on to buying and swapping traffic—particularly within the TON ecosystem. Many projects don’t even need to issue tokens; they can sustain themselves purely on traffic-driven business models. However, the top players in the TON ecosystem have already directed users to too many different projects. When you enter any given community, you often see users coming from the exact same channels—indicating that growth has, to some extent, plateaued.
The New User Growth Platform—TikTok
At this point, more perceptive project teams begin eyeing TikTok. While there are now countless crypto KOLs on TikTok, very few projects are actually leveraging them effectively. This is partly due to lack of resources—teams don’t know where to find TikTok influencers—and partly due to unfamiliarity with how to run effective crypto ad campaigns on TikTok, which takes time and experience to master. Sonic is a great example here: it reached one million users in just two weeks, largely thanks to TikTok advertising. This demonstrates TikTok’s enormous potential as a new growth channel for crypto. Let’s take a look at Sonic’s case (with anonymized data) to break down the specifics of their TikTok ad strategy [see image below] (note: data shown is illustrative only, not actual performance metrics):
As a growth lead, you must be crystal clear about your key performance metrics. In this example, those include views, engagement rate, trending tags, and discussion volume, each with clearly defined targets. Other goals—such as boosting token purchase intent or expanding brand awareness—are ultimately extensions of these core metrics. Once your data hits target, brand exposure naturally follows. This is where growth leads need to truly understand what their project actually needs.
I've spoken with many founders who tend to be idealistic, placing high hopes on their products but lacking market understanding—leading to frequent missteps in marketing or growth strategy. I personally believe founders who don't actively engage with their communities are problematic. You need to listen to users if you want organic growth to happen. Growth is a practical, execution-driven function that must be data-driven—a point I emphasized in my previous article on user segmentation and精细化运营. The good news is that we’re seeing a clear trend: more projects are starting to prioritize data and use it to guide campaign decisions. Of course, strong growth requires mastering multiple domains simultaneously. In fact, a great growth lead could practically serve as a mini-CEO, overseeing user acquisition, marketing, conversion, and retention. But people who excel across all these areas are extremely rare—which gives rise to another business model: the agency. This specialization signals a maturing ecosystem, with increasingly professional and segmented growth services. Given that many projects have this need, I’ve compiled a list of several solid agencies I’ve encountered, along with their respective strengths and weaknesses for reference.
Marketing Agencies
1. LKI
Strengths: Externally, everything—from website design and award showcases to SEO ranking—the firm presents itself with strong branding. The founder, Laura, is highly active on social media. With extensive industry experience since 2016 and positioning as a female founder, she attracts significant attention. The agency offers both marketing and listing advisory services, and boasts rich resources—including access to over 1M-follower KOLs with claimed “personal relationships.” They’ve also partnered with well-known names like Binance, Gate, and even mention a16z in their VC network.
Weaknesses: Entirely foreign team, leading to language and time zone barriers. Headquartered in London, their service fees are high. During conversations with the founder, we found she lacks deep familiarity with exchange listing requirements. Their recent track record of successful TGEs appears weak (this is evident from the case studies showcased on LKI’s own site, which mostly highlight user growth rather than successful token launches).
Case Study:
Deck: ⬇️
LKI Consulting - Intro Deck.pdf
2. Zerostage
Strengths: Strong localization and top-tier resources. The team is fully international, with PMs deeply familiar with their local markets across different languages and countries. Both incubated and in-house projects exhibit high quality.
Weaknesses: Rarely serves Chinese market, relatively expensive, currently only works on their own projects unless approached by exceptional teams. If you're based in China, time zone differences may slow communication and execution speed. Case Study:
Futureverse (@futureverse) on X
Deck: ⬇️
3. Mango Labs
Strengths: The most narrative-savvy and communication-focused agency, excelling at embedding a project’s vision and positioning into community consciousness. Their audience includes major institutions, exchanges, and sophisticated users. They help clients craft dedicated narrative Notion pages and are among the most degen agencies, having handled multiple meme projects. They deeply understand meme-driven virality, and their storytelling style perfectly matches current market cycles. Pricing is reasonable.
Weaknesses: Primarily focused on Chinese-speaking regions. They specialize in narrative development and marketing strategy, but do not typically handle community management or ROI-driven user growth. Case Study: Notable example: Sonic, where they crafted two distinct narratives across two phases (“Solana Layer2” and “TikTok Chain”), enabling rapid spread through unique positioning.
Deck:
4. Cube Labs
Strengths: Full disclosure—I run Cube Labs. We offer diverse services, primarily full-package solutions, and specialize in customized offerings tailored to project needs. Our team responds quickly, has strong resources, and maintains active communities in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Turkey, and beyond. We can reach global TikTok influencers and excel at driving real users to Twitter and Telegram via targeted campaigns.
Weaknesses: Relatively new team with no marquee cases yet. Most collaborations are with early-stage startups or pre-TGE projects.
Case Study: Dechat has 500K followers and highly active Telegram—all real users driven through our channels. Below are projects we either incubated or supported as an agency. Dechat and Tars AI—both incubated by us—have listed on multiple exchanges including Bybit. Tars achieved up to 30x price appreciation with strong market performance. Dechat’s app ranks in Japan’s top 7 downloads. [See projects below for more examples]
TARS AI 🤖 (@tarsprotocol) on X
Deck:
5. PrimePicks
Strengths: The founding team includes Howel, founder of the largest U.S.-based TikTok MCN, who has served top Web2 brands, and Wayne, a Web3 veteran with years of experience across exchanges, blockchains, projects, and incubation—deeply familiar with every aspect of Web3 marketing. With 8 years of global influence management, they possess exceptional expertise in high-traffic content. The core team comprises seasoned professionals from leading companies like Google, Meta, and Douyin. They offer comprehensive digital management and premium customer support.
8 years of global influence management and collaboration experience with outstanding expertise in high-traffic content. Core team consists of experienced industry experts from leading companies such as Google, Meta, and Douyin. Full-spectrum digital management and top-tier customer support.
Weaknesses: Web3 marketing on TikTok is an emerging, fast-growing demand space. Currently, only a limited number of influencer collaboration models have been developed, requiring more case accumulation to expand playbook diversity.
Case Study: Sonic SVM, as the newest generation Solana SVM closest to TikTok, leveraged TikTok influencers to reach over one million users, generated over 5K hashtag uses, and—thanks to TikTok’s powerful algorithm—achieved more precise targeting than traditional Twitter promotion. Together, they’re paving the way for Web3 to attract the next billion users.
[Besides the above, Snow, Jiayi, JE Labs, and Block Focus are also excellent agencies. Due to space constraints, I’ll cover them another time.]
Marketing Strategies for Different Types of Projects
Now that we’ve covered agencies, let’s discuss tailored marketing strategies for different types of projects and how to work effectively with specialized agencies. I categorize projects into three types: (1) early-stage projects with no traction yet; (2) projects preparing for TGE without a token launched; and (3) post-token-launch projects aiming for coordinated price moves across primary and secondary markets. Each requires a different approach.
Type 1 projects should follow the earlier path: acquire initial traffic via task platforms, then buy traffic on TON. Once they reach tens of thousands of users, they can begin traffic swaps. Retention depends entirely on product quality. These partnerships are typically CPA-based. This covers growth, but marketing must complement it with coordinated campaigns and PR to boost overall metrics and gradually build a user base.
Type 2 projects need hype before TGE—fast and intense. Within 4–6 weeks, they must generate strong shilling momentum, push token-related keywords into Twitter’s top three, and achieve exponential metric growth. Meeting exchange listing criteria should be the main growth objective.
Type 3 projects must identify buyer sources and align internal growth efforts with market makers. Typically, market makers are third parties while growth is managed internally—making coordination difficult. From talking to many founders, I’ve seen cases where strong positive news fails to move the token price, which is awkward. Few growth leads can close the full loop, and dual-responsibility demands are hard to meet. Post-token projects need to find buyers—many of whom are now non-crypto natives from Korea, Turkey, and Europe. These outsiders often show more enthusiasm than seasoned crypto insiders.
Projects that survived the bear market are usually proficient in the first two stages. The next frontier is converting users from mainstream traffic pools—where TikTok shines. Due to space limits, I’ll dive deeper into TikTok ad strategies in a future piece.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Wayne, Alex, Dov, Bowen, and all friends who provided information and support for this article! If you’d like access to any of the resources mentioned, feel free to reach out. I welcome discussions—My TG: SunnyZ_Crypto [please excuse slow replies].
Next, I’ll write about how projects can acquire users on TikTok at low cost. If you’re interested, let’s chat!
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