If you’re a partnerships or BD manager for a web3 startup, you probably spend a lot of your day on Discord and Telegram identifying and reaching out to leads. As the web3 space - and tools around it - aren’t as mature as web2, you might find that the business development process can feel a little chaotic and manual. In this post, we’ll be giving some tips and tricks on how to identify leads at scale, create your hit list and reach out to potential web3 customers. 

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Lead Sources in Web3

The first step to generating leads and getting customers is finding names of organizations and individuals you might want to reach out to. Below are a few good places to start.

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General Aggregators 

General aggregators are a good starting point for getting a broad overview of the market. While these lists aren’t as curated as some other sources, they will often contain the highest volume of potential leads. 

• Defi Llama
• Dappradar
• DeepDAO
• The Dapp List
• Long List of Crypto (LLC)

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L1 & L2 Ecosystem Overviews

Most Layer 1s & Layer2s have dedicated pages showcasing dApps built on their blockchains. Below are a few examples.

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• Polygon
• Solana
• Near
• Cosmos

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IDO Launchpads 

If you want to keep an eye on new projects, launchpads are good to keep an eye on. These launchpads are typically used to crowdfund from the community. 

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• Synapse
• Polkastarter
• Trustpad
• Seedify

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VC, Accelerators and Funding Databases

If you’re specifically targeting projects who’ve raised a certain amount of funding, you can check out portfolio pages of VCs and accelerators and keep an eye on funding databases. Some examples include:

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• Binance Labs
• DCG
• GBV
• Crunchbase
• Milk Road Funding Database

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Lead generation platforms

In web2, lead generation platforms such as Apollo or ZoomInfo are a popular way to generate and reach out to leads. While it doesn’t hurt to give it a try, these platforms don’t always work as well for web3, as they might not be connected to the right data sources.

New web3 specific platforms such as 3RM are now also coming up; in addition to providing a CRM system, they are looking to facilitate lead generation and introductions between web3 founders. 

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Similar Websites & Communities

Tools like Builtwith allow you to generate lead lists of websites using specific technologies, such as Web3.js. You can further enrich this data by using data providers like SimilarWeb.

Various web3 BD & CRM tools, such as Absolute Labs and Kazm, have built features to compare on-chain communities to see what communities might have the most overlap with your community and might therefore be a good partner, if you’re looking for collabs.

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Social Media

Social media is just as important in web3 as in web2 when it comes to business development. On Twitter, some fruitful tactics can include checking competitors’ followers of, searching for people tweeting around certain keywords, or searching for people with specific keywords in their bio (e.g. web3 community manager, web3 VC); you can also use tools to help you automate these searches.

While LinkedIn has a bit of a bad rep in the web3 community, our experience tells us that many web3 founders are still (very) active on LinkedIn, so this is another channel that should not be discarded. 

Lastly, Discord can be a great way to make connections and reach out to potential contacts, however, it’s typically not the easiest platform when it comes to identifying new leads or communities. 

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Creating your hit list

After checking out all of the lead sources above, you will have noticed that there are thousands of potential web3 companies, DAOs and projects you can reach out to. The next step is consolidating that data into one system, whether that’s a Google Sheets or CRM, and segmenting it. 

There are various tools that simplify scraping data from websites and social media platforms so that you won’t need to go through and copy each record one by one. Popular tools include, for example, Web Scraper and Phantom Buster. The typical flow would be to export the data into an Excel, where you can make sure to clean it up, before potentially importing it in a CRM system. 

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Managing your workflow and outreach

The next step is reaching out to users keeping track of messages. Many web3 business development managers use traditional CRM tools such as Hubspot. As Hubspot has been around for many years, it is packed with powerful features and automation, such as sending up follow-up emails to leads who haven’t responded or sending educational materials after an initial sales call. The downside of traditional CRM systems is that they don’t always integrate with all the different sources you might be using to communicate with leads in web3. Companies such as Barracuda have developed a web3-specific CRM system to better keep track and follow up on outreach keeping web3-specific channels in mind. 

However, no system is perfect yet, and it is a very manual process following up with leads. This is  especially the case if you’re doing initial outreach in a public Discord channel or via a Discord support ticket and then continuing the conversation on Discord DMs, which typically doesn’t integrate with existing CRM systems. To solve this, it makes sense to at minimum set reminders and keep track of when you last spoke to a lead, in a traditional or web3 CRM tool. 

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Conclusion 

In this post we’ve provided various sources to help you get started with lead generation in web3. These sources feature tens of thousands of projects and with new ones coming out every day, there will be plenty of work to do for any BD manager; we also covered various traditional and web3 CRM tools that can help you organize that work. Over the next few years, we expect more new tools to come out, leveraging on-chain data in the business development and user acquisition process. 

Once you’ve brought in dozens of new customers, the next step is to make sure they’re happy in order to retain them. This is where providing excellent customer support is crucial and where Mava comes in. Mava is a customer support platform specifically designed for web3 organizations, you can learn more about Mava here.