Ryan Selkis on Building Messari in the Crypto Space

Jacob: You and I go way back compared to most of my guests since we’ve both been in crypto now a long time though. I suppose you could say I’m technically a passive participant now and we both used to work together at CoinDesk since you hired me there exactly four years ago.

Ryan: Isn’t today the anniversary?

Jacob: Yes. I started two days after election day 2016.

Ryan: Wow. There it goes.

Jacob: It was something but before we dive into the nitty-gritty of what you’re working on right now, what’s your background, and how did you find your way to working in media and information products?

Ryan: Sure. I started my career in venture capital. Got into crypto in 2013, really as an independent analyst. At the time I was an analyst just writing a daily newsletter for no other reason and there weren’t really any technical jobs or non-technical jobs, I should say to be had across the industry. CoinDesk the first and largest media publication was started about six months before I started writing full-time.

Actually joined CoinDesk as a freelance contributor to their early team as well. Really for me studying the industry was more of a means to an end, just getting to know everybody and ultimately making a name for myself as an entrepreneur. First and foremost I ended up getting to know a ton of people really quickly in the industry because I broke the largest story that had come out at the time the young history of the industry the bankruptcy of the Japanese Exchange, Mt. Gox in February of 2014.

Through that, got a pretty significant following from all the major investors, executives, and other hardcore Bitcoin folks in 2014. Parlay that into starting full-time when the founding team in Digital Currency Group which is a large investor in the industry-led seed investing activity helped the company get off the ground and form initially. We acquired CoinDesk to bring things full circle with how I started in the industry in early 2016.

In mid-2017 after we’d completed the restructuring, as you know I left and ended up taking a couple of months off. It happened to be around the same time that the token economy and the IEO euphoria was hitting in 2017, realized that there was going to need to be an information provider that focused on more than just Bitcoin and Ethereum and could actually merge the quantitative and the qualitative because this emerging asset class was so young and everything seemed like it was an edge case and there wasn’t really any regulated norms around data and information as you’d expect another financial services.

We basically set out to reverse engineer things like EDGAR reporting requirements and all of the quantitative feeds that you’d need to set up to have the equivalent of like a Bloomberg terminal. If CoinDesk was the paper, the newspaper record, or however you want to describe it, then Messari, from day one was always aiming to be the Bloomberg terminal, the second screen that individuals and hardcore crypto users or professionals would use to access information.

Jacob: Let’s jump right into Messari because I’ve become increasingly fascinated with niche data plays ever since chatting with Craig Fuller from FreightWaves one of my early guests on the show. What does Messari actually mean, the word? Then looking at the market in 2017, what need did you identify that really led to launching this company, and what was the early thesis that you shared with your early investors?

Ryan: Sure. I’ll start in reverse order. The thesis is pretty obvious. There need to be information-dense resources for professionals and power users that are trying to stay up to speed on all of the daily developments in what is an insanely fast-moving industry. Anything that’s growing exponentially like crypto that has the insane level of unstructured information is going to need a healthy aggregator and curator of information.

If you look around at some of the most valuable activity in the industry that’s actually born out with two larger acquisitions. We said we want to build for the crypto professional and that user isn’t necessarily here yet, although that’s definitely an emerging persona. The way I think about the crypto and broader Bitcoin industry, in general, is as one that’s gone through now three full cycles and is going into maybe the end of the third.

Each one of those is going to have different information needs. The first was just a hardcore hobbyist and the tinkerer and I’d say that the winning data platform at that point was a company called blockchain.info. Essentially all it was a blockchain monitoring tool for the Bitcoin blockchain. If you wanted to be able to confirm where your transaction went, whether it actually was confirmed, you would enter your address, you’d get basically a very easy search tool to monitor high-level on-chain activity just for the Bitcoin blockchain.

Of course, it’s expanded since then but the persona was the early user, the hardcore hobbyist if you’re trying to get a little bit more granular about what’s going on in the blockchain. The second phase was in 2017 and a company called CoinMarketCap, which earlier this year sold for $400 million aggregated high-level price and quantitative information on the universe of tokens that just exploded in late 2017.

At one point it got, I think bigger than Yahoo Finance for the number one finance site on the entire web. That was right around the time Messari launched but our focus was not on the retail speculator, which is what 2017 was about but it was thinking about what’s the next cycle going to be? Our thesis was that we are going to get to a point in the next cycle where the universe of investible assets expanded well beyond just Bitcoin and Ethereum for legitimate investors, not just retail audiences.

They were all going to have different reporting requirements. They were going to have different levels of care with the diligence that they would do around investments in these assets and their ongoing portfolio monitoring. As such, they were going to need a more reliable set of books to refer to and more reliable set of tools that could give them a 30,000-foot view and a very nuanced view of what was going on within a different sector, different asset, and make sure that they never missed a beat.

That’s where the concept behind the Messari name was really born because it harkens back to the Venetian merchants and the history of accounting actually. I’m sorry merchants were basically the treasurers in Venice that invented triple entry bookkeeper or double entry bookkeeping rather. Popularized that as a just part of doing business essentially. What’s interesting about the history of accounting is it actually got popularized in many respects because of a Franciscan monk named Luca Pacioli, who is widely regarded as the father of accounting.

He popularized double-entry bookkeeping, which is one of the most boring but important innovations that led to a lot of the revolution in capital and in the Renaissance. He basically was able to popularize this notion because he argued that good clean books weren’t just a nice to have or a good business innovation but they were moral imperative to be able to better trust your counterparties.

A lot of what we’ve thought about at Messari, especially if you think back in 2017 that triple entry accounting and that innovation around these distributed ledgers that underpin these digital assets as independent verifiable sources of truth and unique public records was going to be as bigger than the double-entry bookkeeping innovation from 600 years ago. Messari in many respects is that third ledger for many of our users.

Jacob: When you started Messari, it was primarily, at least, if I recall correctly, primarily started as a content play. You were curating a lot of information that was going on but you made an early acquisition by purchasing OnChainFX, which even then was probably one of the best price sites out there, even if it wasn’t the largest. Your co-founder at Messari also created OnChainFX. Was Dan a part of Messari at the inception, or did he join when you acquired OnChainFX, and why make this acquisition so early on in the history of Messari?

Ryan: When Dan, and I first started talking, he was working OnChainFX and I was actually a consensus as an entrepreneur in residence, and he said, “Hey, I’ve got this new site, you should check it out.” I basically called them back, and I was like, “We should work together, we should put a company together.” By the way, OnChainFX could be one of the primary users of the data that I think we ultimately want to get.

Your problem with OnChainFX on a standalone basis is going to be getting high-quality information out of these projects, because a lot of the data points that you want to include in this screener that you’ve built, just aren’t that easy to come by unless you’re actively working with the projects or you know some of the insiders. You can think about it almost like the public markets for stock, right? If you want to get private company valuations, it’s very difficult.

You don’t know when the last mark was, or the last investment, what the precise valuation was, you don’t know who the shareholders are, you don’t know if there’s any secondary activity with different shareholders transferring ownership. As soon as the company goes public though, who all that key people in the org chart are, how much equity they have, you know who the large institutional holders are. There’s some semblance of communication with investors, and stakeholders through quarterly, and annual reporting.

Yet, if you look at the 2017 ICO market, a lot of these projects were just raising tons of money, and there was going to be no transparency in how their treasuries were managed, or how their tokens were ultimately distributed over time. There was just these earmarked funds. You’d launch a token, you’d basically pre-sell the token, and then 30% of it, or 20% of it would be reserved for the team, but you didn’t know. Are there any strings attached to that? Is there any vesting period? How does the team or foundation, or whoever discloses over time?

That’s really important particularly in these e-liquid ecosystems because if you don’t have that information, you have no idea when basically there’s going to be a massive wall of sales that hit a given small market. Our concern was that the market was getting so hot in 2017, this was going to be a pervasive issue in 2018, 2019. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that it was a bubble in 2017. Sure enough, most of these assets collapsed in value by 90% plus. Almost all of them. In fact, even Bitcoin was down by 85% in the worst part of the bear market.

A lot of these lost 99% plus of their value along the way. The whole concept behind Messari, and what we worked on basically throughout that entire bear market was developing communication channels with either community representatives, or the actual companies or teams behind these projects, and built out a disclosures framework that was common sense that was opt-in, but ultimately answered some of these unresolved questions that would ultimately feed into things like free float, or liquid supply, and implied inflation rates, and other quantitative sets that ultimately, could be leveraged not just by OnChainFX but by basically any other third party who would build on top of that open marketplace.

In the first iteration, I’d imagined a data marketplace, where Messari is this open data library that is basically run through open source contributions, but then anyone that’s contributing information, and data would have a mechanism to be rewarded for their contributions, or for the work that they’re doing in curating certain data sets.

A lot of the incentive schemes that we thought about, and that we worked on in early 2018, ended up, I don’t want to say being a non-starter, probably would’ve been a non-starter at the time, because the US regulations, particularly around securities, and it would’ve been dangerous for us to get started that way because it might’ve looked like if we were doing a token, or something like that, or even just a mechanism somewhere to that it could’ve looked like a security since we hadn’t actually built anything just yet.

We ended up putting that in the back burner. The market was also cratering. Instead of thinking about these as two separate entities, I just said to Dan we should just acquire OnChainFX, and incorporate it fully into the product. We’ll run this as a centralized information business for the foreseeable future, because, hey, a byproduct of some of the work that we’ve done is people tend to trust us more than they trust tokens right now because they’re so mature. We end up combining the two businesses, and you can think about Messari as the API layer, and OnChainFX as the first front-end interface that we’d offered to the world to access that open information.

Jacob: I want to talk a little bit about your audience because you mentioned them as a professional crypto investor. If you had to describe this audience in more detail, who is it, and how are they using Messari day-to-day to make investments or things like that?

Ryan: When I say crypto professional, I intentionally don’t use the word Bitcoin, because I think Bitcoin is basically an asset class in and of itself in some respects, right? When I say crypto, I’m really talking about everything except for Bitcoin. Yes, Bitcoin’s a part of that from an information standpoint, but Bitcoin is also pretty plain vanilla, right? It’s money. It doesn’t have a team.

The code base is very slow to be updated for good reason because you want it to be resilient from censorship, and potential future attacks. It is important in a macro context, but at the end of the day, you don’t need an information provider, particularly a research firm that just focuses on Bitcoin in particular, because for most people that are making an investment decision, it’s Bitcoin would be thought of as one component of a portfolio. It’s a binary decision.

Yes, this is interesting. No, it’s not. If you’ve made that decision, then you’re just thinking about how do you manage your allocation over time. It’s really tough to build an information business just around a single asset. When I say crypto professionals, I’m talking about the folks that are thinking about assets beyond Bitcoin, and that need to stay up to date on developments for a whole post of reasons. You could be working in an exchange, and you needed to know which assets to list, or from a compliance standpoint, which ones are supportable in a given jurisdiction.

If you’re talking about a custodian, they need to know how governance works, if there’s ever any concern about folks, or how do they handle airdrop tokens, or how they handle security updates. If you’re talking about investors, obviously, they’re going to have different set of requirements, and are going to look beyond just what the day-to-day price looks like, and into the fundamentals like the capital structure of the entire network, how assets are dispersed, et cetera and so on down the line. I’d say it’s really any sophisticated party that’s thinking about non-Bitcoin crypto assets as a universe of activity.

Most of that is going to be investment activity, but a good chunk of it is going to be also supporting investment activity through custody, through trading tools, through exchange, through staking services for some of these newer networks, where you are essentially, not only speculating, but also actively participating in the network by actually putting up the stake that you do own.

There’s a whole ecosystem of professionals that have emerged since 2017 that just frankly did not exist until this last cycle. That’s the audience that we thought would emerge beyond just the raw speculator crowd that really was the only crowd available when we started the company.

Jacob: Let’s move now and talk about the business and products that Messari offers because there are a few different pieces here. First, can you talk a little bit about the disclosures registry, which you refer to as EDGAR for crypto, having survived the bubble of 2017. I certainly understand the opacity of crypto and therefore the need for this.

Many of the listeners of this podcast, A, probably don’t understand crypto very much at all, and B, don’t really quite understand why this needs to exist. How does this work and is there a revenue component from Messari?

Ryan: The disclosures registry was always a means to an end for us to just bootstrap our research library and do so in a way where we were simultaneously setting standards around different qualitative data sets. Basically, we started by reverse engineering at 10K or a prospectus for a company that would go public. What are the things that you want to know?

You want to know what the overall ownership looks like. That’s any detail around token supply, how it’s issued, how it’s allocated on day one, whether there’s any inflation incorporated, whether there’s any programmatic buybacks or burn mechanism within the protocol itself that would change the supply over time, et cetera. You also wanted to know who the key stakeholders were.

Those could be core developers. Those could be companies that have basically raised money through an ICO et cetera. These token protocols themselves are not securities, so they are not representative of ownership stakes in a company. Even if a company ended up raising money to ship and ultimately develop one of these tokenized protocols. I think that’s if you’re in the industry, that there was a lot of double speak around that time for regulatory reasons.

At the end of the day what’s important to know is that at scale, a tokenized protocol is supposed to be decentralized in both ownership and operation. That means you’re not necessarily going to benefit from having a company and executive team and a board of directors that’s responsible for ongoing community updates and disclosures. The question behind the disclosures registry early on is how do we brute force this?

Our answer was pretty simple. You’re not going to get anyone to speak on behalf of Bitcoin because Bitcoin is not a company. A team that raised money through a corporate entity, through an ICO in 2017 was almost certainly a centralized entity, even if the aspirational goal was to ultimately disintermediate themselves over time and decentralize the protocol over a period of years. In fact, this is what’s happened for the past few years.

The good teams that raised money in 2017 used that to build out the protocol to build out the ecosystem around their project, and in some cases have even dissolved the corporate entities that were affiliated with the project at first in favor of just letting the new protocol live on its own. We knew that was going to happen. Begs the question, what happens with the teams that work with us early that ultimately disrupt themselves and decentralize if they’re not able to speak on behalf of the project that they helped give birth to in just a couple of years before.

When I say the registry was really a means to an end, what I mean is we have transitioned slowly to the model of working with communities versus just working with teams. It’s a continuum. We now have been able to bootstrap our research team to such a point where we can proactively monitor these different ecosystems, use the same rubric “disclosures” framework that we previously developed.

Instead of that information being sourced by a company, now it’s usually sourced from a combination of a company, a set of representatives within a certain community, or a research team directly. Over time, I imagine that’s going to get progressively more decentralized for truly open networks Bitcoin, Ethereum, and for either smaller or earlier-stage projects. It will be much more centralized. In either case, our team is working to ferret out misinformation and also verify claims that are made by more centralized teams in the space that service you can think about much an audit service.

Messari being one of the big four accounting firms for crypto, instead of combing through a 10K and ultimately scrubbing the financial filings of a company though we are looking at all the key metrics that drive these different tokens and their underlying protocols. Using a combination of our team and direct disclosures or publicly available information and positioning it in a way that’s easy to standardize across projects.

Jacob: The core of the business, I believe is Messari Pro, which is a $300 per year subscription. What does a subscriber get if they become a subscriber, and how does this help them again, with investment decisions or trading strategies or things like that?

Ryan: Pro is actually secondary. Our primary business is this product that we call Intel. Intel is an umbrella enterprise product that covers both token-affiliated teams through what we call Intel coverage and then just Intel itself, which is for the consumers of that information. You can think about these corporate actions alerts and monitoring in the traditional financial realm.

We’re basically doing that with protocol-level events. One way to think about it is the prospectus that we would create and maintain for a team that we’d traditionally work with on the registry side is that profiles is static, but any changes to that are ultimately what investors really care about, what professionals really care about, so they’re not quite flat-footed down in developments.

All of those events, all of those updates are what we’re focused on curating and keeping in the system through Messari Intel. It’s a two-sided information product. One, we’re cleaning information from teams that are working with us and giving them white glove service in return. That’s basically subsumed the registry model. Then the other side of that is large exchanges, custodians, investment firms, and other data companies and some cases et cetera.

That’s the core of the business that two-sided enterprise information product. Pro is really another way for us to scale with the industry because our thesis is that there’s going to be individuals at most major companies that need different information services before there are teams that actually need an enterprise level of information. PRO is priced at $300 a year just because we want individuals that are trying to stay up to speed in the industry to have the tools they need or at least the very basic tools that they need to be successful and stay up to date on everything that’s going on.

Pro is basically a combination of daily curated insights from our research team access to our screener, which was OnChainFX. The tool that you’ve mentioned before that’s now just called the Messari screener a full charting library and then an alerts system for staying up to date on asset-specific news. That’s something that has, has been growing very nicely the last year or so.

We think about it really as the middle step between a free user and then an enterprise user. Those Pro users are where we will find the individuals within their respective organizations that ultimately become Messari Intel or Enterprise purchasers.

Jacob: Then finally, Messari has an advertising component that many who visit Messari.IO might not know because you do have a podcast and a newsletter. The newsletter, which I imagine has been the same one that you’ve had since early 2013. How do you think about advertising in relation to Messari and how have these products helped support the more critical parts of the business that is Pro and Intel?

Ryan: Like I said, the core of the business is focused on enterprise, and we do have the ability to monetize small professional subscribers as well, but we think about them as almost qualified leads for the broader product. It’s very difficult to go B2B and B2C simultaneously with the business. We are B2B, so I don’t really think about the podcast or newsletter as advertising-driven B2C businesses.

They really what we’re doing is net negative marketing spend, we have a brand in the industry. We’ve got a network in the industry that we develop in part because we do have these other broader megaphones that we can tap. We found out pretty early on that we could have our cake in ’82 by offering some very subtle, and less egregious forms of advertising. I wouldn’t even call it advertising, call it sponsorship that allows us to monetize some of these marketing channels that we do have.

I’m not sure how other folks in media think about it, but to me, the difference between advertising and sponsorship is. Sponsorship is probably a little bit more passive and more aligned with the advertiser in an advertising model.

You think about podcast hosts, they’re going and, and saying, “Hey, we want to acquire this demographic of users for our product or service.” We’re going to find someone that has an audience that looks just like that. With us, a lot of our audience is the same as our users, is the same as our sponsors, right? There’s a ton of alignment, and to the extent that we can work with teams that ultimately are either data partners of ours, or other infrastructure partners of ours, very oftentimes it’s we’ve got multiple different business relationships simultaneously.

You won’t ever see a mass retail brand as the advertiser in the newsletter. It’s going to be usually a crypto-focused company, an infrastructure company that’s targeting and working with the same users. In many cases is working directly with us as a part in some other capacity as well.

Ryan: Between Intel, and Pro, and the negative CAC marketing products you have with the newsletter and the podcast, is Messari profitable today? If not, when do you forecast reaching that point?

Ryan: Yes, I think we could be profitable. I’ll put it to you this way. We have plenty of runways and the revenue has grown significantly year over year multiples of last year’s revenue. We are just scaling the team along with revenue, and the health of the overall market. We’re not profitable. I don’t think it’s really smart for us to be profitable knowing that capital will be available, but we could get there if we were fortunate into a corner said another way our runway is long enough that isn’t really a concern right now.

Jacob: I remember reading the piece where you announced the acquisition of OnChainFX, and you wrote regarding your flywheel that you want to build the largest, and most engaged audience in crypto, “by any means necessary.” What has that looked like over the past couple of years, and what have you learned about audience development that you didn’t realize when getting started with Messari?

Ryan: We compete with Google Chrome as much as we do with other data companies. One of the challenges in being an effective aggregator is being the only source of information that people need to turn to, right? When we think about owning an audience and becoming the portal through which people access information period in this industry we need to be able to capture everything, and you need to be able to present it in a way that’s just in time, that’s consistent quality.

I think I didn’t realize how willing most people in this market would be to rely on 20 different data sources, right? Just have a different routine that they actually went through in terms of tracking information across all these disparate feeds. Really our goal at Messari is to allow people to access all 20 of those feeds that they would go to independently in different browser tabs on a day-to-day basis directly through our site. The question is how do you do that?

OnChainFX was the first instance of us satisfying that need for a given user, right? Day one Messari was just the open API and then the profile data on all these different assets. When we acquired OnChainFX, then we had pricing data, we had a whole slew of metrics. When you clicked through on a given asset, you would see our profile data from Messari, right? Now, you’ve captured two use cases when we added the charting library, now, you don’t necessarily need to go to Trading View.

Most power users will still have their trading view library. At least that core functionality is there and anybody can build and create user-generated charts. Our team can use our own charts and we can drive people back to the core product. Now, you have a screener or comps table, a chart, and then research profiles. The next thing that we have is alerts and events specific to given assets. That becomes almost a mini newsfeed.

It’s not a newsfeed in the sense that we’re aggregating third-party articles per se, but instead we’re aggregating specific events or 8K-type corporate events that are happening on a day-to-day basis. Once again, now you’ve brought all that in-house. We’re going to continue to both invest in relationships with others, what we’d consider best-in-class data providers, and then also aggregate other third-party information.

Will you see the equivalent of a curated RSS feed on Messari? Probably at some point in the future will you see you know a whole host of other third-party data sets piping through those core tools that we’ve built, of course. I think the holy grail for any aggregator is to basically have your own search bar that people can type in a search command, and just get the information they want.

That’s Google in a nutshell. That’s Bloomberg in a nutshell. If we do things right and we are thoughtful about how we scale this up that should be Messari as well. It’s a very, very long road to get there, obviously. In the meantime, I think we look at actions taken on site and time spent on site as some of the key things that we need to solve for, because if people are doing more different types of activities Messari, it’s a good sign that we are slowly replacing one-off third party resources, and more people are just relying us for that specific dataset of that specific tool.

Jacob: Building a research and data company is perhaps a little different than running a traditional content media company. You’ve now done both with Messari and CoinDesk. How do you think other traditional B2B media companies should think about this strategy and potentially replicate it for their respective industries?

Ryan: I think it’s insanely difficult to monetize research and content standalone. I almost always, and by the way, this was true with CoinDesk as well. We always and I can tell you definitively we thought about good strong editorial content as marketing, not in the content marketing way, but in the brand building and audience development way that ultimately you’d be able to sell other products.

In CoinDesk’s case, it was large, expensive annual conferences, right? That turned into eight figures of revenue within the first couple of years after we acquired the business. I know this definitively because we acquired CoinDesk for that editorial coverage and that brand, we were already in the process of building an event, right? The brand and the top of the funnel for the audience was basically our conference marketing funnel. The business was a conference business.

It just happened to have this really, really powerful marketing engine and something that a community would regularly come back to for information. I think there’s obviously going to be different ways to monetize, but I think either memberships or subscriptions are obvious. Advertising-based models are notoriously difficult and they get more difficult by the year. I think the more you can do to directly monetize audience versus indirectly monetize is probably the only way that I would ever think about building a media business.

I’m not sure just at such a massive scale. Your good examples of this would be sports media, Barstool, or other entertainment media, but not high-importance information businesses where the stakes are a little bit higher and maybe the information is a little bit less sexy.

Jacob: Looking forward, which admittedly is exciting today considering where the crypto markets are. Where do you see Messari in the next three years?

Ryan: It’s all a function of the crypto market. I think we have been shipping products really quickly doing a lot with a small scrappy team. I think our coverage and our analyst research has been top-notch. I think we are– like I said, going to continue to refine the rough edges of our products, but really focus on the core of what we’ve already built and just try to ingest more types of data more assets, and generally improve our discoverability of different content types within our library as a core focus.

Where that leads in the next few years is really going to be a function of how quickly the crypto markets develop. If we see the next supercycle of growth, then we’re going to have a pretty good run over the next few years. If the market is sideways, then we’ll just keep plugging along like we have for the past few years during, this most recent bear market. If Bitcoin gets somehow shut down or there’s a material exploit in the code, or we go into a depression and everybody runs away from magic internet money then we like any other market-dependent information provider will not be doing very well.

So far we’re in a good place. We’ve just crossed $15,000 again with Bitcoin as Bitcoin goes so goes crypto. I expect that the next couple of years are going to be pretty darn good for us and others that are in the market. On the data info side for crypto.

Jacob: I want to wrap up with the same two questions I ask every operator that I speak to on this podcast. First, throughout your career, what is a mistake that you have made that you obviously wish you hadn’t, and what did you learn from it?

Ryan: Oh, man. There’s some inside baseball here, Jacob, you know what the real answer is? We’ll leave it at that a lot. I’ll try to come up with a second answer. I’d say I think this is probably true for most independent authors. I think one of the biggest mistakes that I made was looking at small numbers early on and getting discouraged instead of just focusing on compound growth.

If you’re getting off to a good start in any given market and you’re going to start to make inroads. Get into the first couple hundred people that will actually pay attention and follow you or care, even with a free newsletter is really tough because there’s just so much fucking information about everything, and a lot of its just noise, it can be very very difficult to just break into people’s attention spans.

As you’re thinking about producing content like that slog of developing each individual persona and making sure that you’ve earned their attention, not just that you acquire it, but you can build some stickiness into the audience is very difficult. I don’t need to really tell that to anyone in your audience because they’re probably mostly operators themselves. I think the only time that I kicked myself for when I took my foot off the accelerator because it seemed like things were getting a little bit too flat and the growth wasn’t quite there. I think crypto exacerbates this too because of the different market cycles.

Things get hot, you think you’re a celebrity, then the market cools off, you lose a bunch of subscribers, best case scenario things go sideways for a little bit. That can be frustrating because it feels like you’re just running in place. Really every single post every single high-quality insight it’s all cumulative at the end of the day. I’d say for individual producers especially, that’s probably what I focus most of my attention on.

The good news is it’s never become easier as to get those first couple hundred subscribers, to get those first few hundred users or members that will actually chime into what you have to say provided you pick the right market and the persona and you’ve got the right subspecialty to really hone in on a specific audience that you can grow from and grow with as that audience matures.

Jacob: Second, if you could give other perspectives or current operators some advice either around managing editorial teams, which you have done, or building data companies what would that advice be?

Ryan: I think with editorial, it’s obvious you want to build good communication habits and policies and procedures between the business and the editorial side. I think I’ve seen situations where the two are almost indistinguishable from each other. Those tend to not be very strong editorial brands when the perception is that everything is paid to play. On the other hand, if the firewalls between the two sides of the business are too steep or too impenetrable, then you basically just get this unaccountable cowboy behavior on the editorial side, which I don’t think is healthy either.

At an extreme, sometimes you can lose your finger on the pulse of the market. One tangible example of how we’ve tried to think about this at Messari is we’re very very clear about expectations with our analysts who aren’t editors, but they’re still covering the subject matter. They’re the ones producing content about two things. One, you are able to and probably in some cases expected to be investing in these assets because if you’re not invested in them, you don’t understand how they work in many cases.

These aren’t like passive shares of equity and ownership stakes in operating companies you have no affiliation with. In many instances owning a token or owning one of these assets, requires you to actually use them. In traditional financial services, that’s a fake no-no. In our case, we say as long as the conflict is disclosed, then it’s not problematic, or at least people can make their own assessments. There are limits to that, we don’t have people buying assets and then writing them on the next day, if they did and we found out, then they’d get fired.

All that is very very clearly laid out so that the rules of engagement are well known. Then the other thing is just knowing that we are going to build hopefully an army of analysts and we’re only as good as the process that we put into place. We cannot become dependent on any individual rock stars. I think the only way that works is if the celebrity talent that you have on the content side is basically part of the absolute core team, it’s incredibly disruptive if that talent ever turns over.

In Messari’s case, I started as an analyst, I have more followers than every other analyst on our team combined and the corporate Twitter handle. It sounds silly, but I am the celebrity talent in that respect. We can always build underneath that brand and then hopefully accelerate a ton of younger up-and-coming analysts. Even if they’re experienced analysts that are up-and-coming within crypto. It makes it much much much easier to sustain.

If you’ve got that trusted brand to begin with, then I think it pervades the rest of the organization and you can balance that need to make money with the need to be independent and not pull any punches on the editorial side. You mentioned data as well. I don’t think there’s any difference though. I think whether you’re curating sentences or raw data points the core ethos are the same. You want to make sure that you’re presenting everything in context that it’s reliable, that is ultimately on its face, best in class, not just whoever’s paying the bills.