The Third Internet Revolution Demands a New Growth Playbook

I’ve been thinking a lot about where the internet is heading and it’s becoming painfully clear that the evolution of the internet is in crisis. Over the past decade, a handful of centralised platforms have consolidated unprecedented power—capturing user attention, monetising data, and stifling competition through closed ecosystems. At the same time, artificial intelligence has emerged as both a beacon of progress and a vector for further centralisation. Large language models (LLMs) and AI infrastructure are now controlled by a few tech giants and well-funded startups, threatening to lock us into a future where creativity and innovation are bottlenecked by gatekeepers.

The question I keep asking myself is: How do we fix this?

The Internet’s Original Sin—and Its Second Chance

The early internet thrived on open protocols like HTTP and SMTP. These decentralized systems enabled permissionless innovation, allowing anyone to build and distribute tools without corporate approval. Then came Web2: platforms that traded convenience for control, amassing power by mediating our digital lives. The result? A stagnant ecosystem where startups struggle to compete (think about all the AI wrapper companies today that can’t capture value relative to the tech giants that power them), users are treated as products, and AI entrenches monopolies.

Web3—blockchains, decentralized protocols, and crypto networks—represents a return to the internet’s roots. By shifting power from centralised intermediaries to users and builders, it promises to revive competition, redistribute wealth, and rekindle creativity. Open-source AI models and decentralized compute networks further this vision, offering alternatives to the walled gardens of Big Tech.

Yet despite its potential, Web3 has struggled to deliver. The problem isn’t the technology anymore—it’s our failure to grow products & protocols effectively and sustainably.

The Missing Growth Machine

Web2’s dominance wasn’t accidental. Behind the “organic virality” myth was a sophisticated growth apparatus: data-driven marketers, scalable acquisition loops, and product strategies honed to exploit human psychology. These systems turned startups into giants.

Web3, by contrast, has no such machine. Most Web3 growth marketers are forced to rely on legacy Web2 tools or non-actionable analytics from tools like Dune, turning what should be a strategic approach into a scattershot, “spray and pray” exercise. Projects rely on NFT drops, poorly designed token incentives, and dubious influencer campaigns—tactics that attract mercenary users rather than loyal communities. Look at how Axie Infinity’s play-to-earn model exploded with millions of users—only to crash as soon as the incentives dried up. Or how Decentraland, a bold attempt at building a metaverse, still struggles with engaging its community despite a billion-dollar valuation. Retention? An afterthought. Monetisation? Often an unsolved puzzle. Without a systematic approach to growth, even the most groundbreaking protocols languish in obscurity.

For all of the reasons above, the promise of open-source and Web3—decentralised protocols, crypto networks, blockchain-based trust infrastructure—remains largely unrealised. These technologies offer an alternative internet architecture where permission isn’t a gatekeeping tool wielded by tech behemoths. Chris Dixon famously said, “Your architecture is your destiny.” And he couldn’t be more right. If we’re going to see a future where power and economic rewards are distributed fairly, one where Web3 and open-source revives competition, fuels innovation, and places user ownership at its core, these technology teams must be well-equipped to compete in the global war for attention, or the internet’s next era will be shaped by the same centralised forces we’re trying to escape.

This gap isn’t just a challenge—it’s existential.

Enter GrowthAXUM: Building the Web3 Growth Engine

I founded GrowthAXUM with one purpose in mind: to help web3 teams build a robust growth engine for their products that bridges the gap between their breakthrough technology and market success.

Our vision is simple but radical—we believe that the future of the internet depends on decentralised, open-source, crypto-enabled approaches to AI and internet infrastructure. In other words, we’re not just here to build or fund another crypto project to make money; we’re here to catalyse a course-correction for the internet.

We’re helping Web3 teams build a systematic & deterministic, growth machine that respects the unique challenges of decentralised environments—one that can take a $100 investment and reliably generate meaningful revenue or active user growth, all while staying true to Web3’s expectations around privacy and decentralisation.

At GrowthAXUM, we’re building an institution that will ensure Web3 and Open-source projects grow effectively to rival dominant web2 startups and incumbents.

We have a multi-decade plan to ensure we succeed in our mission and today we’re going to share our first step towards this.

Today, we’re launching what will become the most advanced growth & data science hybrid agency/consultancy in all of web3. We will work with only a few select companies that are aligned with our thesis to help them build a growth engine for their product and/or protocol.

Our Three-Phased Approach

We work closely with founders to diagnose and fix their growth issues:

• Done For You: We land on-site, evaluate your product both qualitatively and quantitatively, and immediately start driving impact with weekly reporting.

• Done With You: Once we prove our value, we build systems alongside your team—documenting every process, creating a detailed Growth Wiki, and training your team.

• Done By You: When it’s time, we help you hire a dedicated growth leader, upskill your team, and then step back so you can ride the growth engine independently.

Systematic Growth Machine

We’re not interested in random acts of marketing. Our approach is built on:

• Retention & Engagement: Creating robust frameworks to systematically diagnose and improve how users stick with your product.

  • Growth begins with engagement. We start by diagnosing retention across three levers: activation, resurrection, and sustained use. For a decentralized social app, this might mean rebuilding notification systems to respect user privacy while still driving daily activity. For a DeFi protocol, it could involve redesigning staking mechanics to reward long-term holders over speculators.

• Acquisition: Engineering and testing multiple acquisition loops—from viral and content loops to carefully optimised paid channels.

  • Web3 demands acquisition strategies as sophisticated as Web2’s—but without surveillance or spam. We deploy hybrid loops:

    • Viral mechanisms that incentivise sharing (e.g., referral rewards tied to onchain actions).

    • Content engines that educate users while embedding product hooks (e.g., governance tutorials that double as onboarding flows).

    • Paid campaigns optimised for community-building, not just clicks (e.g., targeted ads that funnel users into DAO discussions).

• Monetisation: Deep-dive analysis into your pricing and revenue models, iterating until we find the optimal fit.

  • Pasting Web2 monetisation models onto Web3 fails. Instead, we architect tokenomics and fee structures that align incentives across stakeholders. A decentralized AI marketplace might use token burns to balance supply/demand, while a ZK-rollup could tie sequencer fees to network usage.

• Growth Model & User Psychology: from art to science, We build qualitative and quantitative models that uncover the truth behind what drives growth, removing human bias and focusing on deterministic, sustainable, and repeatable strategies.

  • Growth isn’t guesswork. We build quantitative models that map every input (acquisition cost, churn rate, LTV) to outputs (revenue, DAUs). These models become living documents, updated in real time as experiments run.

Building Our Own Tools & Community

We’re not just a service provider—we’re also building proprietary tools that become part of the Web3 Growth Stack. And we’re investing in and acquiring companies that share our mission, creating a network effect of mission-aligned portfolio companies.

Why Now? The Convergence of AI and Web3

The urgency has never been greater. Every day, AI is advancing at breakneck speed, and governments are scrambling to regulate—often with limited success. At the same time, the architecture of the internet is being rewritten. AI is both a threat and an opportunity. On one hand, unchecked AI can exacerbate centralisation, giving even more power to a handful of companies. On the other hand, AI combined with decentralised, blockchain-based computing can democratise innovation. Web3’s decentralized infrastructure is critical here. Projects like Bittensor (decentralized ML training) and Gensyn (peer-to-peer GPU networks) are laying the groundwork. But without growth expertise, even the most revolutionary protocols will stall.

Our growth engine isn’t just about marketing—it’s about building a new infrastructure for the internet, one that ensures startups and small tech can thrive.

GrowthAXUM believes that by investing heavily in this approach—through both resources and advocacy—we can steer the internet away from a future controlled by a few and towards a future defined by competition, innovation, and genuine user ownership.

A Call to Builders

The internet’s next era won’t be won by superior technology alone. It’ll be won by teams that pair breakthrough innovation with breakthrough growth strategies.

At GrowthAXUM, we’re assembling the playbook—and the partners—to make this happen. Our approach:

• Services: Embedding with teams to build growth engines, from retention diagnostics to acquisition loops.

• Content & Community: Sharing frameworks like the “Four Fits to $100M ARR” and “ELMR Psychology Maps” to elevate the ecosystem.

• Tools & Investments: Building the missing infrastructure of the Web3 growth stack and backing founders who share our mission.

The stakes are too high to accept the status quo. If we succeed, we’ll do more than grow companies—we’ll grow a better internet.

If you’re a founder struggling with growth in the Web3 space or a team that believes in decentralised, open-source solutions for a better internet, I invite you to join us.

Subscribe to our newsletter to follow our journey and get actionable insights on building sustainable Web3 growth. And if you think you’re a fit to work with us, drop me an email at [email protected].

Growth isn’t a tactic. It’s a system. Let’s build the future together—a future where the internet remains open, competitive, and driven by innovation, not controlled by a few centralised giants.

Inspired by builders like Chris Dixon, Vitalik Buterin, and the teams pushing decentralized AI forward. Special thanks to the GrowthAXUM community for their relentless feedback on this post ❤️🙏