A behind the scenes look at having 400k+ social media followers

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while as this is a topic I am frequently being asked about. So much of what happens in the crytosphere tends to revolve around what “the influencers” are doing and saying. If you’re consuming content via Twitter, YouTube, Substack, or anything else, you’re generally going to be getting the majority of your info from such people.

I thought today I would talk a bit about my own personal journey, how I got to where I am, and then dive in to some of things I see that most people might not be privy to.

There’s many upsides to having a large following in crypto, but there are some downsides too, so we’ll look at both sides of the coin. There’s also a pretty dark underbelly of the space that I think many people suspect is there and make all sorts of assumptions about. I obviously won’t be able to speak to all of it, but I can share my perspective which I hope will be enlightening.

Let’s jump right in.

Most of you reading this probably already know my back story so I’ll make this brief (or at least, zeneca-brief). When I made the decision in early 2021 to commit to crypto full time, I quickly realized the importance of Twitter. I had an old account that I had been using but it was from my online poker days, and most of my content was poker related. So I said let me make a new account.

The thing to do in this space is create a screen name and avatar (not many people in crypto use their real name and photo). So I looked around my room and on my desk saw a book by the Stoic philosopher Seneca. I took that, turned it into Zeneca, whacked a _33 on the end as that was my age at the time, and thus: my Twitter account @Zeneca_33 was born.

I started out the same way that most people do — by consuming content. Eventually I built up the courage to write a few posts myself, and eventually even a thread or two. They mostly fell on deaf ears, but every now and then I’d get a few likes, and then once I got more than a few. A thread went semi-viral. Turns out people didn’t hate what I had to say! Cool.

A couple of months later I started this Newsletter. I didn’t have massive expectations. I started it because I liked to write, and I wanted to learn, and I knew that I learned the best if I was writing and explaining things to other people. It started out very much as a newsletter, emphasis on the news. I would write about the NFT projects that were in the news each day/week: Apymon (the first NFT rug), Bored Apes, The Gutter Cat Gang, the infamous SuperYetis, the equally infamous Pickles, and so on.

The newsletter stated taking off, and my Twitter account was also starting to do the same. I’d like to say it was because of my hard hitting journalism and excellent writing chops; the reality is that my journalistic bag bias was real and that my writing back then was mediocre at best. What really made it take off was that I had started posting these daily spreadsheets on Twitter, updating the floor price of all the major NFT projects:

Sounds simplistic these days, but this info was not easy to come back back then. At the end of every day I would post my spreadsheet and write a thread talking about what happened that day. People liked it. My follower count started to go absolutely ballistic. It was a perfect storm of creating content people liked + the entire sector blowing up. Every day there were thousands of people joining Twitter going “who are the people to follow?” and my name got thrown in the hat along with a bunch of others.

I went from 0 to 100k in less than a year, and then fairly quickly climbed to 300-400k where I’ve been sitting for a while now. Somewhere during that process, they start calling you an “influencer”. That was back then; these days, they’ll call you a KOL (Key Opinion Leader 🤮). I don’t particular love either moniker, but it is what it is — basically a way to describe those of us with a bunch of followers.

It all happened so quickly for me, I never really had time to process or plan for it. It was an extremely exciting progression, but was also not without its challenges. I started to realize that I could literally move multi-million dollar markets with a single tweet. That’s power. Like most power, it can very easily be abused. I was hyper cognizant of that from day one.

Even if you’re not abusing your influencer power, people are going to think you are. With great power comes great responsibility… but also, great scrutiny. Kinda rightfully so. But it basically means people are gonna talk about you, a lot, and some % of those people are just straight up going to hate you. As a shy nerdy introvert my whole life who hated conflict and always wanted everyone to like me, that took a long time to get used to. I eventually did get to being in a pretty good space, but it was a long and at times arduous journey of learning not to take most things too seriously. Basically, this:

Anyway. Once your follower count goes up, people start reaching out to you. They start offering money to you to promote things. $1000 for just one tweet or just one thread. Or there are advisory positions offered. Or investment opportunities. OTC deals. Pre-sale access. You get honorary NFTs made of you and sent to your public wallet. You get invited to group chats. People start saying you’re part of the cabal.

This is all a rite of passage and fairly inevitable to anyone who accumulates a lot of followers in the crypto space. How one navigates all of this is entirely up to them. We all have our own codes of morals and ethics that we choose to live and die by. It is a veritable minefield, albeit a nice one where interspersed between all the mines are all sorts of valuable hidden gems.

This post is all about how I have navigated the minefield; some stories from the front, and some advice to anyone who might be considering going down the same route. If nothing else, I simply hope to provide insight about a side of the space that isn’t often spoken about.

Alright so that was almost 1000 words for my brief backstory. If you’re new here, one other thing you should know about me: I like to write. A lot. Definitely to a fault. Sorry (not sorry).

Here’s a list of things I’ll be discussing today:

1. The Cabal(s)

2. The Hierarchy of Alpha

3. Advisory Positions

4. Ambassadorship Positions

5. Content Deals

6. Investment Opportunity & “KOL” Rounds

7. Presales & OTC Deals

8. Alpha Callers

9. Honoraries

10. With the good comes the bad and the ugly

11. Eleven Reasons Not to Become Famous

This is a doozy of a letter — another 9000-ish word monstrosity. Strap in.

If you’re not a premium subscriber, there’s a lifetime 20% discount promotion running at the moment, and/or there’s 7-days of free access for anyone who wants to just read or check out all the premium content before committing 🙂

Get 20% off forever

Spend any time on CT and you’ll hear people talking about cabals left right and centre. What do people mean by cabals? In my view, in it’s most simplistic form, a cabal is simply a group of people. The connotation I believe most people have is that it is one made up entirely or largely of influencers.

An additional connotation many people seem to have is that cabals work behind the scenes to conduct shady business; effectively manipulating markets and orchestrating certain price action to line their own pockets.

Is there any truth to this? Or is this just trumped up speculation and mythos?

Hell yes there is truth to this. But, like most things, it is nuanced. Some thoughts:

1. There is no single “cabal” with all the big influencers in it.

2. You can kinda sorta think of it like high school, with different cliques, many of which keep to themselves and don’t like outsiders (including other influencers).

3. It is my experience that the vast majority of these cabals are actually made up of good people, with good intentions. They are not out to get you. They are not orchestrating pump and dump schemes. They are mostly just degen alpha groups, friends, talking shit and bumbling their way through the space together. Sharing opportunities with one another; talking about stuff they can’t talk about publicly because their tweets move million dollar markets.

4. That said, there are absolutely plenty of the bad-types of cabals too. Where they are orchestrating pump and dump schemes. Where they are outright rugging projects, and coordinating to tweet about them at the same time. Where they are buying on hidden wallets alongside their public wallets to secretly sell.

5. The unfortunate thing is that there’s not much anyone can do about these types of cabals. Sometimes they’re more public facing than others and receive scrutiny and backlash (ala LA Vape Cabal); but many times they are doing shady shadowy shit behind the scenes. The good (and by good I mean good at being awful, unethical, douchebags) and smart ones go unnoticed.

So. Cabals exist. Most people are good. Most of the bad people are, fortunately, stupid, arrogant, and full of hubris. With a bit of experience, this makes it relatively easy to spot and to avoid getting hoodwinked by any shenanigans from such cabals.

I think a lot of what people ascribe as nefarious cabal behaviour is actually quite-normal behaviour for a group chat, but it is seen as bad because of the amount of followers and influence (and power) certain cabals and groups have. For instance, most people wouldn’t think twice if they had a whatsapp chat with a handful of friends and you spoke about tokens and bought and sold things generally as a group. Opportunities shared, etc.

The same thing basically happens in these cabals, except when the collective follower count of the group is 1.5 million, and a few of them organically decide to talk about the tokens they’ve recently bought, it can start to look and feel like an orchestrated pump and dump.

Perhaps it’s my naivety, but, once again, I think this is usually not the case, and that most people are generally navigating the space with a pretty decent set of ethics.

Sadly, it is definitely not everyone, and so for self preservation and the sanctity and safety of your portfolio, you kind of have to always begin from the default position that someone with a tonne of followers is not of good-moral-standing and then only change your mind when they’ve proven otherwise.

Basically, your status quo position should be to simply not believe anything at first.

Distrust quickly; build trust slowly.

This is something I first heard about from Su Zhu of all people. Hate the guy, but gotta hand it to him, this is a killer concept. Basically, you always want to be considering where you are in the “hierarchy of alpha”.

If you’re getting your alpha or information from your favourite neighbourhood influencer on Twitter, chances are, you’re pretty low in the hierarchy. If someone is tweeting about a project, a token, etc — they’ve almost certainly already shared it with their close crypto friends, their best group chats, and of course, their cabals.

If they run any sort of private group, they’ve then probably also shared it there — on Telegram, in a Discord server, a Patreon, wherever.

So by the time they’ve decided to share their oh-so-great alpha with the world, how great actually is it? Probably not very. It’s made much worse if you don’t even see their tweet for half an hour (or half a day!), because that means thousands or tens of thousands of others have now seen it before you.

You think you’re getting some hot alpha; in reality you’re becoming exit liquidity for all those that came before.

Most influencers or KOLs have large networks, and many have their own communities. They almost always share it with their friends and fam first. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that — I do it! Why wouldn’t I? When I am actively trading, I share any alpha I think I might have with in the ZenAcademy Discord Server first and foremost. Maybe I eventually end up mentioning it on Twitter, maybe I don’t. But I tell those closest to me first.

I say that there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it becomes wrong, imo, when the alpha being shared is stuff like the CA (contract address) for super low marketcap memecoins. When your tweet is moving the market, and you (and your close circle) are jumping in and out of positions in the very short term — that’s just outright scummy behaviour.

There’s no hard and fast rule for when it stops being scummy — this is something everyone with a bunch of followers has to decide for themselves. Is it okay to bull post a 50m marketcap token? 100m? 1bn? And so on. Everyone has their own definition for what is acceptable.

But as a general rule when you see an influencer share alpha on Twitter? Be weary. Be very weary. Like all good rules, there are exceptions, and sometimes you see something on Twitter and it is still good alpha. But always remember that’s the exception, and not the rule.

The rule is: if you’re seeing it on Twitter, you are not early.

Once you have a following there are a bazillion ways you can reap a financial upside from it, ranging from the brazenly unethical (undisclosed promotions, cabal pump and dump schemes, etc) to the perfectly legitimate (getting access to angel invest in a project), and everything in between.

Most “advisory positions” fall firmly in the in-between category in my mind. When people think of what being an advisor for a project entails, they tend to (rightfully) think that the person is playing an active or at least semi-active role in, you know, actually providing advice to the team.

The reality is that while this does sometimes happen, many times there is little to no actual advice given. An advisory role is created in order to leverage the influencers name and reach for marketing and promotional purposes. It’s a way for influencers to feel better about themselves (I’m not taking $$ for promo, I’m an advisor!!!) and for teams to seem a bit more legitimate.

What’s worse — or at least what makes this all that much more difficult to have insight into — the compensation is very rarely disclosed. An advisor could be receiving tokens (either up front or vested over some time period), stablecoins, equity, and/or any number of things, and most people have no idea.

My personal approach is to only take advisory positions if I genuinely like the project, if I find it interesting, and if it’s something I would like to provide active advice on. Also, if it’s one that the team has a genuine interest in hearing my perspective on. I don’t need (or necessarily want) to commit a tonne of time to such thing, but a call roughly once a month + a group chat with the team is reasonable enough to me personally to be considered actively advising.

I like to make my intentions clear from the outset and if we align on everything, great. If not, that’s also fine. Things don’t always work out the way as intended either — I have advised projects where I thought I would only very occasionally be offering advice, and I ended up chatting for hours a week helping out. Other times, the reverse — I thought I would be a lot more involved and then was never really called on.

There’s the whole spectrum. I have probably taken about 15 advisory roles over the last 3-4 years. In virtually every single one, in addition to any potential advice, and with literally only one exception, they all also wanted to leverage my name and brand. They wanted to put my PFP and name on their website (or pitch deck) and say I was an advisor. They usually wanted to put a tweet out announcing it. Etc.

Clearly — and it doesn’t take a genius to see this — the bulk of the value to most teams is in this. I wish I could say I was a genius and could turn any business into a winner, and while I do still think I have a lot to offer, I am not an expert in building apps and scaling tech startups. The teams that want that kind of advice tend to hire the Nikita Biers of the world.

All this to say, if you see someone listed as an advisor for a project, don’t read too much into it. I mentioned my rationale and ethics above; many people have much looser definitions. They’ll gladly take on 50 advisory roles. Many times they’ll literally sign a contract that includes marketing language, such as “must make two tweet threads per week talking about our project”. That is not at all uncommon. Literally a paid-promo contract diguised as an advisory position.

I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve seen that language (or something similar) in a contract and had to ask them to remove it. If I am an advisor, it means I like the project. If I am involved, it means I will naturally be keeping an eye on it. If I like what they’re doing, I will commonly and organically want to talk about and share with my followers what they’re up to. If that’s not good enough for them then I won’t be an advisor, simple as that.

I don’t actually think there’s anything inherently wrong with stipulating such requirements in a contract, and for someone to accept an advisory position with such conditions attached. It’s a free market, they can do what they wish, and I know a bunch of people that I like and respect who do this. It’s just not for me.

Where I do feel a bit ick about it is that it’s just oh-so-rarely actually disclosed. Not throwing shade, it’s not easy or practical to always be disclosing this kinda stuff, and I don’t think it’s necessary either. But I do think it often leads to false impressions and people thinking a person is more bullish on a project than they really are. They might come off mega bullish, be an advisor, and write regular threads about it.

What you don’t know is that all of that is a requirement for them to receive their 0.5% total token supply allocation, or something.

Something to always keep in mind.

This will be short (lol) but I wanted to add a quick note here as well on ambassador positions, which I do believe a distinct and separate from advisory positions. Or, at least, they should be.

An ambassador in this context is someone who is paid to promote something. They are paid for their brand, their name, their content. It’s pretty clear in the name, and there is far less sleight of hand trickery involved with ambassador roles vs with advisors.

Truth be told, most advisors are just ambassadors being called the wrong thing. They don’t really offer advice, and instead they sell their brand, name, and content.

Again — nothing inherently wrong with these things. They exist and have existed for the longest time, well before crypto (or even the internet). The issue, to me, again, is when disclosures aren’t involved and/or when deception is.

I’ve taken a couple of ambassador positions over the years. They tend to come up less often than advisory positions, and they are also something I tend to accept with far less frequency. But if it’s a product I know and love and especially if it’s one I already actively use, then I don’t see much harm in aligning myself and brand with them.

One last note on both advisory and ambassador positions, a perk that often isn’t spoken about is that by being close to teams, you are often privy to early alpha. To be clear, the line between “early alpha” and “insider information” is about as thin as it gets — I’m not oblivious to that.

But it is the reality of how it all works. Teams have inside information. It almost always inevitably leaks to some people close to the team, who then usually leak it to their group chats (aka cabals), and so on. This is often how so many influencers are always so damn early to tokens. They knew about it in advance.

Love it or hate it, that’s basically how the whole crypto trading world works. The earlier you can get your information, the better chance you have. Your network is your networth isn’t just a catchy and pithy saying, it’s full of truth.

So for those keeping score, chalk another W up in the pro-column for influencers. Not only do you get these advisor style opportunities, you often get some pretty crazy alpha out of it all too.

Once again, a topic that covers a very wide range of things. Content deals range from paying someone $1000 for a single tweet, to a six month long sponsorship deal for a podcast, twitter space, newsletter, etc; and then everything in between.