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

A day in the life of an influencer, or, eugh, a "KOL"

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.

My Journey

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.¹

I started out the same way that most people do — by consuming content.² 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.³ 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:

this is from Nov 2021. look at those prices. what a god damn fever dream 2021 was.

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 Famous⁴

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

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