Web3 Leader Spotlight: Brandon Turp
This week, we sat down with Brandon Turp ☕️⚡️, the Founder of BD3, a professional community for business-minded crypto and digital assets professionals. He also leads the Marketplace at QuickNode YC'21.
Brandon previously founded BitcoinHub, an iOS app, and Tech Runs, a web3 sports community. Before breaking into tech, he was a player development assistant for the Washington Wizards in the NBA.
Feel free to follow him on X and Instagram at @brandonturp.
What sparked your interest in crypto, and how did that lead you to create BD3?
I fell into the crypto rabbit hole a bit differently than most. Before crypto, I worked enterprise sales at Oracle where I sold cloud infrastructure to the Fortune 500. When I started hearing about crypto from my friends, I became intrigued in learning about the tech behind it, and wanted to learn what made blockchain different. Naturally, this led me to falling face first down the crypto rabbithole.
After hundreds of hours of learning and tinkering in the space, I started to build. This led to me founding 2 different companies. The first was a mobile app called BitcoinHub, which offered bitcoin education, price and mining data, and a community chat. After gaining several thousand users, eventually it fell flat, but it taught me a lot. Then, mostly for fun, I started a tokenized basketball league called Tech Runs. We grew to 500+ members with a presence in Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. I was doing all of this on the side of my web2 job, and eventually it became clear to me that I needed to work in crypto full-time.
I knew that when I made the leap, I wanted to work at the ground level of the industry. Coming from Oracle, to me, placing a bet on blockchain infra was a no-brainer and billion dollar opportunity. Oddly enough, I became good friends with one of the Co-Founders of QuickNode ⚡ through the basketball network I started. I then became the first sales and go to market hire at QuickNode, now a YC Top 100 company.
After spinning up several revenue functions at QuickNode, I realized how much easier it would have been if I had other people to network with in the space. So, I took it upon myself to create a community for business focused leaders in web3. Over time, its growth has compounded. What started as a small telegram group, has now grown into an invite only, application based, paid network of 300+ of the most elite business leaders in the industry.
How do you stay updated with the constantly evolving Web3 landscape, and how does BD3 facilitate ongoing learning and adaptation for its members?
Staying current in web3 is extremely difficult. You’re either learning or building, and I try to spend at least 80% of my time on the building side. Falling behind on trends is inevitable, but in order to really push the industry forward, it’s important not to get caught up in the mental masturbation of endless learning.
One of the main ways I stay up to date is by daily writing. Every morning, I spend at least 30 minutes scrolling through my X feed and reading the headlines of major crypto news outlets. My goal is to broadly educate myself on what’s happened in the last 24 hours, then choose one topic to do a deep dive on. I spend another 15–20 minutes writing a LinkedIn post on the topic, which gives me even more clarity on the subject.
BD3 facilitates learning in several different ways. The first is our Ask Questions channel, this serves as a place for members to spark conversation around a trend they’re seeing or event that occurred. An example might be a user sees an article on a new DEPIN project and shares it in the group to get the feedback of other BD3 members. BD3 also hosts a Speaker Series where we have subject-matter experts from within the community join me on a fireside chat where they talk about what they do and what they’re seeing from their perspective on the industry. These sessions are extremely insightful as you often get the chance to hear from someone who’s in a completely different day to day than yourself, which leads to really unique perspectives gained.
What is a common mistake that Web3 projects often make when it comes to marketing and product strategies?
One of the most common mistakes I see when it comes to marketing in web3 is focusing on short term adoption over LTV. Balancing between the two is a delicate dance, because in order to get new users to try your product you need a compelling reason for them to give you a shot in the first place, but what ends of happening (most of the time) is projects offer attractive incentives to gain traction in the short term but end up losing these users in the long run. At the end of the day, no matter how good you are at attracting new users, they won’t stay if your product isn’t good enough to keep them coming back.
When it comes to product, I don’t think web3 founders talk to their customers enough. In order to go from zero to one, you have to be relentlessly obsessed with doing things that don’t scale. This means understanding all of the nuances and intricacies of your earliest users, and absolutely nailing your product before you try to reach the masses. Again, it goes back to chasing short term growth numbers Vs. sustainable long term success. If I had to guess, I think the casino like nature of crypto is to blame. When markets are hot and people are buying, it’s important to ship fast because you never know how long the hype will last. This said, cycles are inevitable, and the teams that can stay consistent without falling into the hype are the ones that will actually be around in the next bull run.
Imagine a future where DAOs become the dominant form of professional networking. How do you think BD3 would evolve or adapt in such a scenario?
So funny enough, before BD3 I ran a social DAO called Tech runs. It was a tokenized basketball network where 75%+ of our members were completely new to web3 and crypto. It was a massive experiment and we had a ton of fun with it. Members bought crypto via Coinbase for the first time, downloaded wallets for the first time, and even used Uniswap to swap their ETH into our native tokens (also for the first time). Tokens were used to gate membership, vote on treasury spend, pay service providers, and unlock special access.
One of my biggest learnings was that current businesses' leadership structures evolved the way they did for a reason. There needs to be a chain of command with hierarchy that can control order and keep people accountable. We reached a massive bottleneck of scale with Tech Runs, which is ultimately why it failed.
When I started BD3 I knew if it ever became paid (which it is today) that I’d be collecting membership fees via Stripe and staying in control. This said, I do think that there’s a place for crypto to play a role in global communities like BD3. We have hundreds of members from around the world and unified currencies are important for interoperability and value exchange within a group. Something I have battled with is seeing members interested in countries who are unable to join because their currency is 1/30th or 1/100th as powerful as the US Dollar. I also love the use case of members using tokens to cast votes on non critical business decisions. There’s a loyalty play here that hasn’t been solved yet.
So to answer the question directly, I think BD3 could definitely adopt a DAO like model for non critical business decisions, but only if the use cases are proven and clear.
