I personally shut down my own marketing company: Goodbye XDO, hello Y Strategy

Original Author: jiayi plus one (X: @mscryptojiayi)

After the AI explosion, something that has been overestimated in the industry for a decade is collapsing: the necessity of fundraising.

Growth Has Become a Matter of Life and Death

In the past, product development costs were high, and you couldn't build without fundraising. Now? The cost structure has been completely rewritten by AI. Things that took two years in the past can now be solved in a few weeks.

When "building it" is no longer the barrier. Growth has become the life-and-death question for all projects.

But most of the growth I see, to put it bluntly, is morphine-like growth.

Throw a wave of budget before the token listing, max out the KOL matrix, create data reports that make the project team think they are the next 1B project, and then go negotiate with exchanges with this self-intoxication. Once the money is burned, go ask anyone in the community—

"What does this project do?"

Can't answer.

Marketing without understanding the ultimate goal has only one ending: a complete mess.

The core of what I discussed in the "XDO 2025 Annual Marketing Whitepaper" is this—Web3 projects must shift from false prosperity to genuine growth-driven strategies. And the real growth bottlenecks are often stuck on just one or two key points.

Find the growth bottleneck, solve it, and growth happens naturally. If you can't find it, every penny you spend is paying for your own cognitive blind spot.

The "Marketing Agency" Label Has Been Holding Us Back

What is the industry's perception of a "marketing agency"? Knowing a bunch of KOLs, then you provide the promotional content, I give it to the KOLs to post, and the service fee is collected in the middle.

But what XDO does has never been these things.

The area we spent the most time on in the past year, before any budget was spent, was sitting down with founders to hammer out four things:

• Is your demand real, or is it written for investors?
• What is your moat? How long can your moat last?
• Does your product have applicable value for users? If you do a product campaign, is it just for false prosperity data before listing, or is it really paving the way to strengthen your future moat?
• Is all your project's external promotion just self-indulgence, or is it what users truly care about? What is that indelible impression and mental imprint in the user's mind?

If these four questions aren't resolved, all subsequent campaigns and cooperative promotions are just burning money.

So what we've always helped clients do boils down to one sentence: "Help founders calibrate the growth 'bottleneck'." Wherever the project's growth truly needs it, that's within our scope of responsibility.

What We Actually Did

Let me give a few case examples:

@worldlibertyfi —— WLFI's main growth revolved around the issuance of USD1. Our responsibility was all marketing related to USD1 issuance across all global channels. After a specific stablecoin market share strategy for USD1 was developed, USD1's TVL grew rapidly from 1.3B to 5B in just over a month. Exposure on the X platform alone exceeded 15 million, and the pioneering Binance Square live stream event allowed USD1 to capture one-third of the live stream audience.

@GoKiteAI —— KiteAI is a pure technology project. A common problem with such projects is that they are too difficult for users to understand. So for Kite, the first thing was to get them to abandon any obscure, hard-to-understand technical content marketing. Centered on forging the mental imprint of being the leading AI payment solution, we broke it down into several very small, single points that were easy for the community to understand and truly buy into.

That is: payment-savvy giants are bullish on Kite + all the most advanced and hottest technical solutions are Kite's partners + payment/commerce giants with vision are all potential Kite clients.

Hence, today everyone sees Kite AI riding the momentum of PayPal and the x402 protocol, directly becoming the definer of this narrative line. One of only two projects launched on Binance Launchpool in 2025, with Twitter exposure breaking 5 million on TGE day alone.

@GoPlusSecurity —— When I took over GoPlus, it was already the leader in to-C security products, holding over 97% market share. But the security track is one where everyone knows it's important, but they don't pay unless necessary. Moreover, a To-C security company lacked a To-C product directly facing users, causing users to completely misunderstand what GoPlus was doing.

For GoPlus, the first task was to reshape the brand positioning and product line strategy. We quickly proposed and launched a C-end plugin. Within 2 months, over 300,000 users downloaded Goplus as their protective product for surfing various Web3 products. Instead of choosing to output a lot of external PR and market education work, we deeply connected with users directly through the product, solidifying the perception of being the To-C product leader.

@SaharaAI —— When Sahara promoted the concept of "annotation," the market still didn't have a deep understanding of AI annotation. Most people were stuck in the archaic perception of checking whether something is a car or a bus. Therefore, Sahara's interaction design authentically replicated their annotation experience for other traditional large clients. From day one, any user who interacted with Sahara could experience the difference between Sahara and other projects that just paid lip service to "annotation."

Additionally, we established the Desert Fox image and conducted extensive community culture building before the ICO. Instead of choosing Kaito, the UGC platform that was a must-pick for projects at the time, we used innovative UGC activities on our own platform to let the community freely unleash their creativity about Sahara. 14 days, 330,000 participants, 24,000 pieces of content produced, ranked #2 on X Finance Trends. What other projects envy most is that all this community building and creativity was not based on airdrops. They all became Sahara's earliest investors.

The Common Point of Every Case

People always ask me, how do you serve other clients? I say, 'The definition of success is different for each project. So it's not replicable.'

When the "One" is calibrated, growth becomes a matter of course.

So I Shut Down the Marketing Agency XDO, and Y Strategy Officially Sets Sail

"Y" = WHY + the Chinese cultural concept of "One" forms our core growth methodology and culture;

Find the origin of the business matter;

Understand the true purpose and definition behind each successful endeavor;

From One comes Two, from Two comes Three, from Three comes all things.

If You Are Looking For

Not a marketing agency that just helps you pay for posting articles.

But a long-term co-running team that solves growth problems together, then we should talk.

Y Strategy —— We are here, a co-founding team running alongside quality projects;

And we hope to become the greatest advantage for your project's success.

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