You’re 100% right — $60k is a lot of money anywhere, no doubt about it. I totally respect that perspective. I think one of the reasons I’ve been able to do well in my career is because I never take that for granted — I treat every dollar like it matters.
That’s also why I’ve tried to structure everything to be sustainable. The marketing plan isn’t just about throwing money at ads — it’s part of a system that feeds itself: NFT sales drive revenue → revenue goes into buybacks/burns → that boosts the token → which attracts more attention and sales.
But to your point — if it doesn’t work as expected, then I pivot. I’ve been in performance marketing long enough to know that you have to test, learn, and optimise constantly. The spend would be monitored tightly, and if the ROI wasn’t there, I’d adapt the strategy fast.
Totally agree with you both @fabsltsa/@HODL —community is a huge part of it. But I do think there needs to be something to kickstart that momentum and keep a presence in the background. The community then takes that and amplifies it even further. It’s a team effort.
That’s exactly why I want $SUNGOU to be different. Not just another pump-and-dump backed by inflated influencer hype or short-term greed. I’d rather build something that works for the community, grows with the community, and earns sustainability through time and effort—not manufactured buzz.
It’s not the flashy route, but it’s the honest one. Day-by-day over the next 5 years, I’d rather build something meaningful than chase a 1000x only to watch it all collapse. The best things in life—and in crypto—are built, not bought.
Surely some sort of presence in the background is required. We have seen a good project on TRON with great kickstart going sideways just because the team decided to abandon it and make it purely community take over. A project can only be taken over by the community when there is a community actually building around it. Like Satoshi did not move on until there was enough community devs working on Bitcoin.
I see these really as just two sides of the same coin—community and marketing. Both play a role, and they’re most effective when working together, not in isolation. While influencers can be useful, I’ve seen too many early-stage projects taken advantage of, often at the cost of long-term sustainability.
I don’t plan to just walk away or hand SunGou off in a “community takeover” like many devs do. I want this project to be different. That’s why the roadmap includes a gradual transition toward DAO-style governance—once there’s a stable ecosystem, the right participation mechanisms, and a strong enough community to take the reins in a meaningful way.
That said, it would be my preference to remain leading SunGou for the long run (if the community will have me ), but I’ve also built in a plan for full DAO transition if that’s what the community wants at that stage.
I just try to plan ahead for every possible outcome.
You hit the nail in the head, when you been around this space long enough, you’d pay attention to projects where community shills out there like the growth is almost symbiotic with a cult following, also agreeing with what @fabsltsa .
Imo, the projects with paid marketing that goes thru alot of push by influencers ends up being a rabbit hole that gets rugged so fast, and quite recently I see Instagram and tiktok push has started being a thing, I used to think they were fronts for modelling but I thought wrong.
I know true hustlers when I see one, I respect the fact you recognize that every dollar counts.
It’s quite relaxing to see that you got it all laid/planned out in the event of lower ROI, I’m really eager and interested to see how your project turns out, eventually.
Yes exactly, marketing and community have to work together. And there are several forms of marketing. Some cost a lot and some can also be free like partnerships/co-marketing.
You talked about influencer marketing, resulting most of time in pump and dump. That kind of marketing often focus only on one thing, promoting a token. Those are organised by projects that either don’t have a product or count on a pump to sell part of the team holdings to support the project -or unfortunately rug. Imo influencers can be good if the focus is on the products or to shade lights on a special event (for instance influencers promoting sunpump helped onboarding people from other ecosystem, it wasn’t made to pump sun token). I agree that the cost and the final result are often disproportionate and barely lead to a long term sustainable impact. So if influencers may be a good option to get quick visibility, it also has to be accompanied by other forms of marketing, an active team and an active community.
My main critic against influencers is that when they promote a project, it’s often very superficial. They don’t seem to have deep knowledge about the project they promote and give an impression of “ads factory”. Take money, post a tweet, and then go to next project. They are not all like that of course, but I’ve met a lot that are more interested in how many usdt (no project tokens) they’ll get and when they’ll get paid than by the content. They sometimes even ask you to write the content by yourself so they just have to copy paste
I’m not even talking about some agencies that will onboard influencers without communicating properly the content and without negotiating wages (they take about 20% commission so why would they negotiate ).
So I think influencers is a good option if:
handled personally
making sure they understand what they are promoting and how to promote it
Avoid to center it around a token but rather products, vision, ongoing event,…
Chose the ones that are in line with your vision
it should be “part of a strategy” and not “the strategy” itself.
That’s also a reason why I like to open TG groups with other projects. So we can learn from each other’s experience and share the good tips. Individually we have our own experience which is limited but together we can avoid repeating other projects mistakes and understand what worked for them, what didn’t and why. Btw @TBULL & @cryptoferus I’ve sent dm to you some time ago, would be glad to get in touch Same to other projects, if you see potential synergies with JM or just want to get in touch, let’s connect
Copy and paste got me but what you just said it’s nothing but a raw truth, most of them don’t have any deeper knowledge about the project they are promoting, sometimes people worship them like God because of their larger followers thinking they are more professional than others with lesser followers , most of them have caused more harms to most of their blínd followers
No lie bro, honestly the hype for some of this big influencer is something else.
Checking of the huge followers, usually heavy bots followers. And approaching them will be charged based on their account.
On the part of copy and paste push content. It not only in Web 3 or crypto space.
Same as Web 2 where an influencer will push different products or projects without testing to know how each project works.
It is believe, just post up the promotion, get paste, the flowers will do justice to that.
Sometimes can be waste of funds @fabsltsa made very good point above
Sometimes can be very helpful, but the long term impact is worriesome
the truth is influencers work with numbers, you can have all the knowledge in the world, yours will be at events when it comes to shilling they will get it to the one with numbers.
Crypto is about hype.
Have you forgotten, when we needed someone to push tron memeseason they went for bull.bnb
someone with bnb as a name , there were a lot of tron OGS with all the knowledge about tron but they were not contacted. And remember, projects needs such people, for memecoin knows that they will come and milk. Bull bnb added trx to his name right but changed it and moved on. He brought people in, we can’t deny that fact and left with them. So in crypto not only in crypto, these influencers are very much needed.
Recently, Ghana’s election one party made use of some social media influencers and it really made a huge impact on the election, truth is 90% of them know nothing bro but they have the numbers.
The data own is the challenging part, I spend like 20k+ cfa here every month and it is looking like the network provider is using the data with me from the way that it is exhausting
Hehe true am not against the fact that they are not important but mostly for hype and pull up some attention, for bull.bnb he has taking many souls to village
Hehe this Data matters, I tire, only in Nigeria you can wake up to 200% pump, if I start complaining till next year nothing will, we learn to adapt , how will I tell people that monthly data plan doesn’t last up to 2 weeks
), but I’ve also built in a plan for full DAO transition if that’s what the community wants at that stage.
).
Same to other projects, if you see potential synergies with JM or just want to get in touch, let’s connect 
