Hola there!
Welcome to One Azzy, a newsletter written by me and sent out only once a month. In it you will find the most interesting stuff I find about Marketing and Startups from every corner of the internet.
You can also follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Fun fact first! Did you know that blue jeans were official invented in May of 1873 after Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis obtained a patent for the pants on May 20th?
🤯 Too busy to read it all? In a nutshell, this is it.
Two cool Marketing tools: X.ai (my favourite 2021 tool) & Streamline Icons (a lot of cool free icons, emojis and illustrations).
Marketing must read (an interview to Social Media Director at McDonald's US), watch (a behind the scenes video from LaLiga’s soundtrack), listen (to a podcast about how to pitch ideas well) and love (a hand drawn plot map from Christopher Nolan).
Hot stuff: Coinbase (+ update on Clubhouse & NFTs).
All about (a) Startup: You will need to wait for this until next week 🤫
All about Marketing
·· Cool Marketing tools 🔨··
X.ai (such a 🤯 domain): This tool is my absolute favourite of this year. If you spend lots of time checking your calendar to fit in all your meetings, you need to try this Instant Meeting Scheduling tool. It finds compatible times in my calendar, I set limited meeting hours, I have a maximum meetings per day and some scheduled breather time (and many more cool features). I know some people use Calendly (which is great too!). If you fancy to have a 30mins chat, feel free to use this link.
Streamline Icons: Everytime I need a specific icon, I turn to one of these. You can download here 30,000 icons for free and use straight away as PNG files. You will also find some cool free emojis and stickers and some nice free illustrations.
·· Marketing must ··
📚 Read (10 mins): Working on Strategy I learned how important it is to directly observe and learn about people directly from the source. The bigger the brand is, the less Marketers from big corporations tend to do this. Glad to read that Guillaume Huin (Social Media Director at McDonald's US) doesn’t fall into that category.
👀 Watch (3mins): If you are a soccer fan, the soundtrack from LaLiga must be familiar to you. Did you know it was created by recording the rhythm of 42 supporters - one of each club – heartbeats? Have a look at the behind the scenes video led by his composer Lucas Vidal.
👂 Listen (20mins): Listen to this podcast from Gimlet (I am such a big fan of all their podcasts!) about the 3 key elements that a a good pitch for podcast stories need to have. Use that same frame for your Marketing pitch and carry your listener throughout a story.
❤️ Love (1 sec or as much as you want to stare at it): I used to work on my Strategy presentations straight on Power Point, until one of my best ever bosses (Catherine Rushton) taught me to always start working on paper first. It helps me focus and plan the full storytelling in advance. I love this hand drawn plot map of Christopher Nolan’s film Inception.
·· Hot stuff 🔥 ··
Status update from the hot stuff from previous months:
Clubhouse’s clones are emerging from everywhere. Spotify, Facebook and LinkedIn are into it now. Plus rumours say that Twitter is planning to acquire Clubhouse for 4B$.
Some classic viral images are selling as NFTs for thousands of dollars. We are truly living a (pretty crazy) meme gold rush amigos.
So what was hot in April? On April 14th Coinbase went public and the market went nuts. Coinbase’s debut was a 🤯 moment after years of skepticism from Wall Street giants.
What is Coinbase? Coinbase is an app that lets you buy and sell all sorts of cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and other 105 different cryptocurrencies. Coinbase can also be used to convert one cryptocurrency to another, or to send and receive cryptocurrency to and from other people.
How many people use this? Coinbase reported in March 2021 they had 56M verified users. For perspective, Coinbase was founded in 2012 and had 30K users by January 2013.
How do they make money? Coinbase makes money by charging fees for its brokerage and exchange. Transaction fees represent the vast majority (85.94%) of their revenue.
And how much money do they make? Coinbase generated US$1.28 billion in revenue in 2020 and has already made US$1.8 billion in the first 3 months of 2021 alone.
Surely, they spent lots of money in marketing? In 2019 they spent US$24M and in 2020 they increased that amount up to US$56M1. In 2020, that represented 5% of their net revenue. Other big techs tend to spend between 20% and 30% of their revenue in sales and marketing.
Does that mean that a big volume of users came from organic growth? Indeed. Coinbase reported that, since inception, over 90% of their users had found them organically or through word-of-mouth.
Are there any other competitors out there? Sí. There is some fierce competition from other players such as Binance, Kraken and Gemini (at home we use Binance).
🔮 My 2 (future) cents:
When competition arises, your Market Share is at risk. I believe Coinbase will, at least, double their Marketing budget in 2 years time to face this challenging market.
I expect cryptomania to stay and become mainstream sooner than later. Cryptocurrency won’t substitute traditional currency anytime soon, but we will start seeing lot of businesses accepting crypto payments in 5 years time.
Crypto payrolls will be the new normal in 10 years time.
All about (a) Startup
In April I focused on one single startup. I can’t share any details with you yet though!
🤫 I will definitely have some news to share with you by the end of next week and I will write a specific post about it.
Thanks for reading One Azzy!
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Azahara (aka Azzy)
You can find this info in its public market prospectus filed on Feb 25th.