Why does web3 marketing need a different playbook in 2026?
Crypto can't buy its way to attention the way SaaS can. Google and Meta still restrict most token-related advertising, which means the channels that scale — earned media, organic search, AI-engine visibility, KOLs and community — are exactly the channels most agencies treat as afterthoughts.
Meanwhile, the discovery layer itself moved. A growing share of your buyers now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity which wallet, protocol or launchpad to trust, and Google answers more than half of queries with an AI Overview before anyone sees a blue link. If LLMs don't know your project exists, you are invisible to the fastest-growing segment of your market. We build campaigns where every press hit, every page and every founder post is engineered to feed both human trust and machine citation.
What does Chalk Labs actually do?
We run the full web3 growth stack, but we don't sell it as a bundle of deliverables. Every engagement starts with a growth model: where your users come from, what a conversion is worth, and which lever moves it cheapest. Then we deploy the relevant services against that model.
Everything reports into one dashboard and one weekly call. No account managers relaying messages between six sub-teams — you work directly with the operators doing the work.
- Crypto and AI PR — tier-1 placements, exchange listing announcements, narrative design
- SEO, AEO and GEO — rank in Google and get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini
- AI-optimised performance marketing on compliant channels
- KOL and influencer campaigns with anti-fraud vetting
- Founder personal branding on X and LinkedIn
- Outreach automation for BD, partnerships and listings
How do we run marketing as science?
Agency marketing usually runs on vibes: a content calendar, some posts, a monthly PDF nobody reads. We run it like an engineering discipline. Every initiative is framed as a hypothesis — for example, that a data-led research report will earn more AI citations than three generic press releases — with a defined budget, timeline and kill criteria.
Experiments that clear their threshold get scaled; the rest get killed in writing, with the learning documented. Over a quarter, this compounds into a playbook that is specific to your project, not a template we recycle across clients. It also means you can audit every dollar: what we tried, what it returned, and why we doubled down or moved on.
How much does a web3 marketing agency cost?
The market is opaque, so here are real numbers. Crypto marketing retainers run anywhere from $3k to $50k+ per month depending on scope. A single tier-1 press placement through a legacy PR firm costs $6.5k–9.5k. Full token launch campaigns typically land between $40k and $150k all-in.
Chalk Labs retainers start around $3k/month for focused single-channel work and scale with scope. Because the founders do the work — not a pyramid of juniors billed at partner rates — you get senior output at boutique pricing. We'll tell you in the first call whether your budget can realistically hit your goal, and if it can't, we'd rather say so than take the retainer.
Who is behind Chalk Labs?
Chalk Labs was founded by Rahil Jain and Shilika Jain. Shilika leads PR and narrative: 500+ media placements, over 5 billion earned impressions, and 50+ token and product launches across web3 and AI. Rahil leads product and growth engineering — the systems side of marketing: analytics, automation, SEO infrastructure and the AI tooling that lets a small team outrun large agencies.
That pairing is the point. Narrative without distribution engineering is noise; engineering without narrative is spam. Clients get both disciplines in the same room, on the same weekly call, accountable to the same numbers.
Questions we hear about this
Our retainers start around $3k/month, at the entry point of the $3k–50k+ market range. The difference is composition: you work directly with senior operators instead of paying enterprise-agency overhead. Most clients run $3k–10k/month depending on how many channels we own, and launch campaigns are scoped as fixed projects.
No. Roughly half our work is web3 — protocols, infrastructure, token launches — and half is AI and B2B SaaS companies that need the same skill set: earned credibility, AI-search visibility, and performance systems. The overlap is deliberate; AI-era search tactics we prove in one vertical transfer to the other.
Generative engine optimization is the practice of getting your brand mentioned and cited when AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews answer questions in your category. Crypto users increasingly research through these tools, and because most projects ignore GEO entirely, early movers capture outsized visibility at low cost.
We typically kick off within a week of signing. Month one covers a growth audit, analytics and tracking setup, a prioritized experiment backlog, and the first campaigns in flight — usually PR outreach and search foundations. You'll see the full hypothesis list with expected impact before we spend anything.