Lessons of Marketing Pt. 1

What is this research based on?

The starting point was the idea that the project generates various events around which certain marketing effects can be built. For example, these could be online activities aimed at community engagement, or the team's participation in major industry conferences. These could also be regular publications intended to inform the community about various topics. For convenience, the events are categorized as follows:

• Announcement — any simple project notice that do not require community participation
• Conference Event — project activities within industry conferences
• Off-line Event — IRL activities for the community, organized by the project (people can come to the event location and participate in something)
• On-line Event — online activities for the community (people can go to online resource and participate in something)
• Release Report — notice related to updates and patches of the main repositories and applications of the project
• R&D Report — publications describing the research work conducted by project members
• Online Publishing — any regular publications (typically blog posts) by project members
• Collaboration — notifications and publications about project collaborations (if there are real results, not just an announcement)
• Token Event — any activities around tokenomics: TGE, memecoins, airdrops, listings, staking, etc.

To collect statistics, the blog and Twitter account of Robonomics and three other projects from DePIN were examined. Statistics were collected from January 1 to December 1, 2024.

Results and discussion

The collected statistics are presented below:

Over the year, Robonomics has provided the community with 53 different activities, distributed almost evenly across all categories. That is more than one event per week (to be precise, 53 events / 48 weeks = 1.1 event per week). Among the notable events, we can recall:

• Conferences: two Sub0 (March and November), Polkadot Decoded, Coindesk Consensus Hackathon, Blockspace @EthCC 7, Web3 Summit Berlin
• Offline events organized by the team: Robonomics Bangkok Quest, Cyberpunk && Bangkok art show, Robonomics Meet-up Bali
• Online events: Robonomics School 2024, Hack Johnny's Lab Quest
• Major releases: Robonomics 3.0.0 Update, parachain launch in Polkadot, Home Assistant integration 2.0.0, ROS 2 Wrapper, Libp2p integration in dapp

As can be seen from the provided statistics, the main difference between Robonomics and other projects is collaborations, but the numbers associated with conferences, organized offline events and publications are comparable. The team believes that direct activities that the community can see or touch are much more effective for the project. Through these, we can demonstrate both our technological capabilities (sometimes in quite creative ways) and the team's skills in organizing these events.

This is much more effective than numerous strategic partnerships (or, even worse, empty announcements of such partnerships). After all, the best "collaboration" is the direct use of other projects' technologies. For example, how we use Crust Network for storing important device logs or Libp2p for creating the connectivity component of our civil sensors network.

Looking at the number of online events, we can see that other projects have significantly more. This is because other projects frequently hold calls on Twitter or Discord (sometimes weekly or monthly). Indeed, Robonomics is currently less involved in constant online communication. We previously tried this strategy, for example, holding AMA sessions, but we realized this path was too exhausting for us with little return. Instead, we focused on creating online demos and quests, as well as live interactions during conferences. We found this to be much more engaging for both people and ourselves.

It's important to note the third main difference — the absence of token-related events. And perhaps this is the main marketing distinction between Robonomics and most DePIN projects. The fact is that our tokenomics has a long, but by DePIN standards very old history. In fact, we were working with DePIN technologies long before this term even existed! It's not surprising that we have practically no token events, unlike new, explosive projects.

The only event this year was dedicated to burning 7M XRT on Ethereum, and we had been working towards it for several years, conducting on-chain voting for the community. As a result, almost all project tokens are in free circulation on the market. Moreover, even during the parachain slot auctions, we offered a very small XRT reward for participation to minimize additional emission.

Our current tasks are more similar to those faced by older crypto projects like Ethereum, so the trend of focusing on technology over tokenomics will continue. Of course, the necessary basic functionality for token circulation will be launched (for example, bridges between Kusama<>Polkadot<>Ethereum), but don't expect Robonomics to arrange an airdrop or launch a memecoin.

Conclusion

Overall, given the team size (25+ people), Robonomics demonstrates very effective activity when comparing our key metrics with other projects. The main difference is that we don't behave like a typical fresh DePIN (or just crypto) project. Moreover, since we are primarily focusing on Robonomics Hardware, our marketing strategies will ultimately center on attracting users to our devices rather than traditional crypto-related activities.

In the next blog post, I will demonstrate what Robonomics could look like if it followed the DePIN trends, and explain in detail the reasons why we don't do that.