I personally shut down my market company — goodbye XDO, hello Y Strategy

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

Growth has become a matter of life and death

In the past, product development costs were high, and without funding, it couldn't be done. What about now? The cost structure has been completely rewritten by AI; things that used to take two years can now be solved in a few weeks. When "getting it done" is no longer a threshold, growth has become a matter of life and death for all projects.

However, most of the growth I see, to put it bluntly, is morphine-style growth.

Before launching a token, a budget is smashed in, the KOL matrix is fully utilized, and the project team feels like they are the next big 1B project after reviewing the data report, then they go to negotiate with exchanges in this self-indulgent state. Once the money runs out, you casually ask someone in the community------

"What does this project do?"

They can't answer.

If you can't figure out the ultimate marketing purpose, the outcome is only one: a mess.

The core of what I discussed in the "XDO 2025 Annual Marketing White Paper" is this------Web3 projects must shift from false prosperity to genuine growth-driven strategies. The real bottleneck for growth often lies in just one or two key points. Identify the growth bottlenecks, resolve them, and growth will naturally occur. If you can't find them, every penny you spend is paying for your own cognitive blind spots.

The label of a marketing company has always been a drag on our progress

What is the industry's perception of a "marketing company"? Knowing a bunch of KOLs, then you promote content and I give it to KOLs to post, and the service fee is pocketed.

But what XDO does has never been these things. Over the past year, the most time we've spent is sitting down with founders to rigorously tackle four questions before any budget is spent:

Is this demand real, or is it just for investors?

What are your barriers? How long can your barriers last?

Does your product have applicable value for users? If product activities are only for false prosperity data before launching a token, or are they genuinely paving the way to enhance your barriers for the future?

Is everything you promote externally self-indulgent, or is it what users truly care about? What is the indelible impression and mindset that users can't shake off?

If these four questions are not resolved, all subsequent campaigns and promotional collaborations are just burning money. So what we have always helped clients with can be summed up in one sentence------"helping founders calibrate growth 'bottlenecks'." Identifying where the project truly needs growth is our responsibility.

What we actually did

Here are a few examples:

WLFI ------ The main growth of WLFI revolves around the issuance of USD1. Our responsibility is all global and multi-channel marketing related to the issuance of USD1. After developing a market share strategy specific to USD1, within just over a month, USD1 rapidly grew from 1.3B TVL to 5B. Exposure on platform X alone exceeded 15 million, and the pioneering Binance Square live event allowed USD1 to dominate one-third of the live streaming rooms.

KiteAI ------ KiteAI is a purely technical project, and such technical projects often face the problem of being too difficult for users to understand. So for Kite, the first thing was to get them to abandon any obscure technical content marketing. Centered around the idea of becoming a leader in AI payments, we broke it down into several very small points that community users could easily understand and genuinely buy into. That is, major players who understand payments are optimistic about Kite + all the leading and hottest technical solutions are partners of Kite + any major players with a payment business landscape could potentially be Kite's customers. Thus, Kite AI, riding the momentum of Paypal and the x402 protocol, has directly become the definers of this narrative line. One of only two projects launched on Binance Launchpool in 2025, with over 5 million Twitter exposures on TGE day alone.

GoPlusSecurity ------ By the time I took over GoPlus, it was already the leader in consumer security products, holding over 97% market share. However, the security sector is one that everyone knows is important, but people won't pay unless absolutely necessary. Moreover, a To C security company lacks direct consumer-facing products, leading to users completely misunderstanding what GoPlus does. For GoPlus, the first thing was to reshape brand positioning and product line strategy. We quickly proposed and launched a consumer-side plugin, and within two months, over 300,000 users downloaded GoPlus as their protective product for surfing various web3 products. Instead of choosing to output a lot of PR and market education externally, we directly linked with users through the product, decisively changing the perception of the To C product leader.

SaharaAI ------ When Sahara launched this labeling initiative, the market had not yet deeply understood AI labeling. Most people were stuck in the outdated perception of checking whether something is a car or a bus. Therefore, Sahara's interactive design authentically restored the labeling experience they provided for other traditional major clients. Users who interacted with Sahara from day one could experience the difference between Sahara and other projects that merely claimed to "label." Additionally, we established the image of the desert fox and conducted extensive community cultural building before the ICO. Instead of choosing the UGC platform Kaito, which was a must for projects at the time, we utilized innovative UGC activities on our own platform to allow the community to creatively express themselves regarding Sahara. In 14 days, 330,000 people participated, producing 24,000 pieces of content, ranking second on the X finance trend list. What other projects envied the most was that all this community building and creativity was not based on airdrops. They all became Sahara's earliest investors.

Common points of every case

People often ask me how I help other clients. I say, "The definition of success for a project varies. Therefore, it is not replicable."

When 'one' is calibrated, growth becomes a natural outcome.

So I shut down the marketing company XDO, and Y Strategy officially launched

"Y" = WHY + the Chinese cultural concept of "one" is our core methodology and culture for growth; finding the essence of business matters; understanding the true purpose and definition of each background for success; one gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to all things.

If you are looking for

Not just a marketing company that helps you pay for press releases. But a long-term co-founding team that runs alongside you to solve growth issues, then we should talk.

Y Strategy ------ We are here as a co-founding team running alongside quality projects; we also hope to become your project's greatest advantage for success.