Before I went all in into Crypto back in 2017, I went from being an intern into a financial & strategic planning manager at Walmart Mexico. I positioned myself very well at the beginning, hustled my way up and climbed four corporate positions in three years, something that usually took seven to ten years to the average employee in that company.
I was considered a Top Talent by Human Resources and a couple of VPs took me under their wing because of how useful I was in the meetings with the top dogs, providing numbers and insights live to their ears so they had powder to negotiate, parry attacks, and return the attack efficiently.
It was all about the numbers. I understood the numbers and the numbers liked me, we had a good relationship.
Daily Sales, supply chain efficiency, amount of customers per timetable, average ticket, growth... pretty boring stuff compared to the Crypto Space and way way less dramatic than the Hive Blockchain (lol).
But hey, the numbers were everything and I was pretty good at it. I used to look at numbers all day, and based on the charts and results I would make decisions, create strategies and then model execution plans for the stores to implement after creating a guide for dummies.
Then I came to the Crypto Space thanks to Hive and after a few months of learning about our ecosystem, I started poking around other projects and concepts outside of our sphere, and by learning as much as possible from everyone who was willing to teach me, reading as much as available to the average rookie, and listening to as many podcasts - there were few back then - I realized that 99% of the projects were just playing it by ear, leveraging Hype and their community to achieve growth; an unsustainable growth that was bound to fail at one point. For most projects, the community is everything, including the revenue for the company. Their community was both the growth driver, and the revenue driver yield.
Now don't get me wrong, the community is key for every Company, especially in our space, in fact for us LeoFinance we consider the community our Layer Zero and most important part of the company, but it not our yield, it is not the source of the revenue for the Leo.
That's exactly what a community should be, a foundation. It shouldn't be a revenue driver by itself, using the people's bags to pump the project's.
You have to leverage your community to achieve growth while also providing value for them and giving them the tools so they also grow individually.
But for that you need numbers. You need metrics. You need goals.
And then, you need plans to achieve them. Strategies backed by numbers. Gameplans based on your user base behavior.
Of course, it was easy for me back in Walmart to put plans together when we had unlimited budget and I had people that would pull all the data for me, make charts and I all I did was analyze, plan and implement.
It's not so easy for Crypto projects, we are dealing with a whole different type of user base, customer behavior, economy behind, and most importantly, we're dealing with a completely different type of product.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't approach our Crypto Companies as a business. On the contrary, our space is so new that any company that tracks and pushes growth the way big companies do will have a huge competitive advantage versus the ones playing it by ear.
Above I mentioned I'm head of growth and business development for Leo.
Every single Monday and Friday I wake up and the first thing I do is run numbers for every type of transaction our database handles for our ecosystem and then I get to the analysis part.
Yeah, we don't have an intern to run data for me, I have to do the leg work. It's fine, we're not a billion dollar company, we have to things differently.
Then, after analyzing the numbers, identifying patterns, predicting tendencies and forecasting EoM (End of Month) results while comparing them to our goals, I get to business.
I'm not gonna tell you how to create a strategy for your Crypto Company. Every single blockchain is different and has different patterns and user behavior.
We dwell in a space that is chill, full of frens and GMs, where we actually make connections that last.
But that doesn't mean we should approach our companies as a playground.
Start treating your project, no matter how big or smol it is, as a company. Approach your company as what it is, a Business.
