Cutting Through Hype and Speculation with Growth Strategist & Blockchain Entrepreneur, Tib Palin

So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests.

It’s difficult to really put a label on what we do professionally these days, especially now that almost everyone will have had some experience of working remotely, and many more will have been forced my pandemic-induced circumstances to give a go at entrepreneurship.

I use two labels frequently: “growth strategist” and “blockchain entrepreneur”. They’re convenient, they’re what people who’d want to work with or hire me look for, and they’re relevant enough to make sense to the rest who might not necessarily do a lot of things online or know more about blockchain beyond crypto.

So the first label, “growth strategist”, attempts to describe what I’m really good at when working with brands offline and online. I probably don’t deliver to the same metrics that most other “growth hackers” do, though. So I’m not going to be the one to drive thousands of followers to your Twitter account, or get you a million channel subscribers on Telegram -- that’s not the type of growth I advocate for. Instead, I help companies that would benefit from smaller, more focused, more engaged communities. I work with them and their people to cultivate the working culture and online presence that aligns with that focus. I also help them to grow their own resources -- employees, advisors, supporters, often an overlooked area of growth that many self-starting companies neglect. I think a lot of people misguidedly look for hacks and numbers but I think if there’s something really special in the value of a strategy that helps them achieve objective, rather than mere vanity metrics.

“Blockchain entrepreneur” probably captures the spirit of who I choose to work with in terms of projects in the blockchain and crypto sector. There are hundreds to choose from, and hundreds more cropping up each week. Yet it’s an irony of the field of emerging technology that very few are actually building truly innovative products or services, or inventing new technology, or developing new ideas. The vast majority of projects are copy-pastes of existing projects. I wish I didn’t mean that literally, too! So when I do end up working with a new project, you can be sure I believe it’s one or all of 3 things: innovative, inventive, never-done-before.

Oh, and my name is Tib Palin.

Interesting! What was your latest HackerNoon Top story about?

I’ll just give you the title, which was published as is, barely hours after I’d submitted it for review!

In “The Rise of NFT Fakefluencers”, I talk about how the sector is awash with all kinds of overnight influencers, each convincing people to buy a certain type of token or to invest into a certain type of blockchain project. Now, it’s not an entirely new phenomenon, if we’re being fair. Ever since the days of the ICO craze, we’ve seen more and more projects out there to gain a quick buck and they’ve tapped into the pliable minds of social media followers to drive hype and artificial demand for what is otherwise a token that doesn’t at all represent any kind of useful value.

Now, this wasn’t an attack on influencers at all -- if we’re using the term loosely. It’s a recognized marketing tool and there are plenty of legitimate people out there who are social media’s equivalent of subject matter experts. Power to them if they’re speaking about what’s important to them and their followers and helping their audience find the right projects to look into.

But unfortunately, blockchain is still a fairly new and confusing subject for a lot of regular people and NFTs, in particular, are attracting a lot of interest. Eager money, so to speak. We already see a painful number of people spending their hard-earned savings and salaries on NFTs shilled by irresponsible personalities online.

On one hand, I guess fools and their money are often parted, but on the other, I know there are just so many innocent people who genuinely want to make the right financial decisions, and are convinced that NFTs is an interesting and easy way to gain exposure to crypto. For them, it’s impossible to tell what’s authentic and what’s not -- especially when you’re dealing with verified Twitter accounts who purportedly are very successful at profiting from these tokens and whose advice always ends up being sure things.

The article hopes to shed a little bit of light on which of these the would-be NFT buyer should avoid listening to.

Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about?

I guess another tagline I enjoy writing under is “unpopular opinion”. You see, the emerging tech landscape is actually very niche but because blockchain tech has become so mainstream and so loud on social media, almost everyone has heard a little something about it.

We all know how tribal crypto communities get, each deliriously supportive of their own token or project and thus, can get very defensive about criticisms thrown at them.

To get things straight -- I’m a huge supporter and advocate of blockchain, AI, Web 3.0 and what have yous all lumped together as “emerging tech”. The innovations that are being developed and their implications on our daily lives, those are valuable developments that deserve consideration.

But there’s a lot of noise blocking out what’s important, and the most visible information online is always related to markets, that is, the price of so-and-so token. So I try to cut through the hype and speculation, bringing visibility to those that deserve support through my writing.

After all, the most mature technologies are those that understand their deficiencies the most and do their best to improve. I think the real tech people, the actual developers, coders, engineers, scientists… they appreciate and desire criticisms. Much like a software developer would love to have white hackers poking about and exposing back doors and holes in their code!

Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?)

To be frank, it’s not easy to spell out a writing routine if that’s not your actual full-time job. You mention in your next question how tech writers aren’t often writing as a main role. That’s very much a description of me and I’m sure, of the majority of HackerNoon writers.

But I do spend a lot of time talking and discussing with industry people -- especially those working in commerce and building products or services. And I do spend a lot of time with online crypto communities of particular projects. Ears always on the ground, listening to what seems important to people is really important in blockchain I feel because for any project to achieve success, it must reach “mass adoption”. It’s cliche I know, but Bitcoin is perhaps the only truly successful project of its kind because it has achieved precisely this.

And if that’s the end game for tech, then utility is the ever-present objective. And you can’t have utility without users.

So if there’s a routine, it’s probably to sit down every now and then, figure out what people are worried about, what people care about, and then a little bit about what people are currently talking about. Then, figure out also what people are overlooking, what people are forgetting about.

Marry some of these aspects together and hopefully, you have a compelling article.

Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing?

Writing tech pieces for HackerNoon or any other publication requires you to write for an audience. It’s not a diary, or a dream journal, so you shouldn’t write as if you were blogging to yourself.

But how do you write for an audience that doesn’t exist? When you start out on a new platform, you don’t have anyone you know. You can’t be writing for an old audience, not completely anyway, otherwise it’d be pointless (or unless you want your old audience to move to your new platform).

So you have to try a few things to get started. One thing to try is to write to attract the audience you want, fine. But you’d need to be writing a lot, and hope you’re hitting the right notes, without having many people at first to tell you if you’re on the right track. The other thing to try could be to find out what others are writing about and then produce articles that try to ride in the wake of what’s trending. Not my preferred method because you’ll never be as successful as the wake-maker.

The ever-present challenge for a writer, starting out or otherwise, is the discipline to keep on writing. Real-life issues, work commitments, or a switch in direction aside, writing has to be habitualized. The less writing has to do with inspiration, the better.

What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career?

Earlier in my career, I did spend some time working with creatives for the broadcast industry. I still pull some strings in that area, finding ways to work together with those in tech, and it’s always rewarding to see shared synergies. I think when it comes to media, there’s still a huge cap between blockchain projects and traditional ones.

Take gaming, for example, where the creative aspects in conventional games are probably oh much higher standards than those in blockchain -- it’s simply because the talents in the former aren’t yet exposed to the makers in the latter. I hope to see a day when the overlap has become natural. Where decentralized apps are mere extensions of the talents in various industries. I’d really like to be a part of that happening.

Speaking of creatives, it’s great to see artists come in and dabble with tech like blockchain. And while I have reservations about how NFTs will truly empower artists, it is an undeniable entry point and could lead to serious amalgamation in the future. Writers on HackerNoon, painters and illustrators on OpenSea, perhaps dancers, musicians, theater performers, street performers can all expand their audiences with the help of open blockchain.

Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice?

I shouldn’t feel guilty about this, and perhaps someday I’ll learn not to, but I love taking long trips to a quiet place, removed from the concrete bustle of urban working life. If that seems a bit of a writer’s cliche, then I’ll happily admit to it!

But I suppose I’m coming from a place where we’ve just emerged from the situation of the past couple of years. I’m aware it’s a real privilege to travel a bit out of the city to the beach, get in a good breath of fresh air and wrap yourself in thoughts for writing. Not everyone in every part of the world is free to do this just quite yet, so if that serves as a bit of grounding.

The new normal will require a long period of normalization for a lot of people as well, and I suspect we haven’t yet come to grips with how realistic it will be, or even how healthy it will be, for the majority of people globally to work remotely. If you have the privilege of being outside, enjoy it!

And even if you don’t necessarily believe in that discrepancy, I’m sure few would disagree that the highly intensive tech work culture could benefit from a physical break. I know many in the blockchain, crypto, and NFT sectors, myself included, have been guilty of spending far too many hours in front of a screen. The frontiers of tech, it’s just so fast-evolving, it can be tempting to get drawn in!

Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it?

If it counts, then poker is what I’d say is a hobby that’s been with me throughout adult life. I probably don’t have as much time as I’d like to these days but I used to participate in poker tournaments. Fingers crossed, there’s one coming up soon that I’ll be able to play in.

I get that most people wouldn’t call poker a hobby but I have to say, playing it as a serious hobby can change your perception of things, even professionally. It’s easy to dismiss it as a type of gambling and that’s certainly how most people play poker, as a bit of gambling fun. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that type of entertainment at all. But poker isn’t at all the game of chance that other casino games might be.

For instance, there’s freeroll poker you don’t pay anything for, and there’s the buy-in type where you pay a fee. You can immediately see the difference of human psychology between the two types of players. Give people something that costs them nothing and they’ll value it less than something that they paid for.

I could talk all day about why I find poker attractive but let’s just say that there’s more than meets the eye. I don’t think it’s coincidence that you’ll find professional poker players who are also grandmaster chess players or have other high-functioning jobs.

What can the HackerNoon community expect to read from you next?

Right off the bat, huge disclaimer: this is not a shill. I do handle a lot of different projects and I’m always on the lookout for interesting projects and people to collaborate with. But for the past few months, I’m doing a lot of work with a project called Cradles: Origin of Species.

It’s a pretty ambitious project. A blockchain MMORPG that will attempt to introduce a metaverse element that’s really not been done before in gaming -- “entropy increase”. To put it simply, a game that uses block time to simulate the laws of time and physics. So what we have in games already are persistent worlds, but they’re static in the sense that the elements -- items, buildings, weather, things -- are actually pretty static. But if you could use block-time to progressively alter items (digitally represented by NFTs), you get the effect of entropy increase -- just like in the real world. Building crumble slowly. Plants and animals age. Weapons get rusty. And player interactions leave their mark.

Cradles has been in heavy development for the past year, particularly because of a new type of NFT or token protocol, EIP3664. That produces a new type of NFT capable of storing a much larger amount of data to enable it to execute a much more sophisticated range of smart contract functions, essentially producing the effects I just mentioned.

So don’t worry, you won’t be getting shill articles shoved down your throat. I expect that gamers interested to see actual metaverse innovation and new ways to implement decentralized aspects of token economies to try it out themselves once it launches this year.

Instead, I will continue to write about blockchain gaming, metaverse developments, and NFT goings-on, since these are all closely related to what takes up the majority of my time.

Thanks for taking time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words?

The pleasure’s mine. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to get personal!

I’m always on the lookout for human interest stories in tech. If any reader knows of any story that deserves attention, I’d love to hear from them.

If it’s some form of professional collaboration you’re looking for, or even just to shoot the wind with me about blockchain, marketing, writing, crypto, NFTs, you can reach out to me via my website: CryptoMarketeer.com or DM me on Twitter @growthpunk.