Shantelle
Awomoyi

Goal

Identify why compliant SME applicants were failing automated KYC and being routed to manual compliance review, reverse engineer the onboarding workflow to find the failure point, and redesign the logic so that the product worked as intended for the accountants using it.

Context

Modulr's SME channel was a payroll product for accountants. The accountant was both buyer and user: they onboarded onto Modulr themselves and then used it to run payroll for their clients. Getting that onboarding experience right was not a marketing problem. It was a product problem with commercial consequences.

How I Found the Problem

Compliance flagged that companies who should have been passing KYC automatically were consistently arriving for manual review. That was the entry point. I pulled the data and started working backwards through the onboarding workflow to understand where the logic was breaking down and why eligible applicants were being treated as exceptions.

The problem was on our side. The eligibility logic had a flaw that was misclassifying compliant accountancy firms before they reached the automated decision point. The workflow was routing them to manual review not because they failed, but because the system couldn't correctly read what they were.

Goal

Establish Gnosis Builders as a credible voice and distribution channel for the Gnosis ecosystem. Convert fragmented community activity into measurable adoption: validators running nodes, builders shipping products, partners integrating across the stack.

ICP

Three distinct segments, each requiring a different narrative. Validators: technically literate Ethereum participants evaluating where to stake. Motivated by network credibility, economic incentives, and ideological alignment. Deeply sceptical of marketing. Needed technical fluency and transparency, not product messaging. Builders and developers: early-stage founders and protocol developers looking for a chain with low fees, an aligned ecosystem, and access to infrastructure, grants, and distribution. Needed to understand what Gnosis made possible, not just what it was. Ecosystem partners and protocols: wallet providers, DeFi protocols, and infrastructure teams evaluating integrations. Needed business rationale and proof of distribution reach before committing engineering resource.

Positioning

Gnosis Chain was technically strong but positioned as a secondary Ethereum network in a market with a clear hierarchy. The positioning challenge was to make Gnosis Chain the obvious choice for specific builder and validator profiles, rather than a generic alternative to Ethereum mainnet. The frame: Gnosis Chain as the credible, values-aligned Ethereum network for builders who needed pragmatic infrastructure without ideological compromise.

Messaging

Different audiences needed different entry points into the same story. For validators: network credibility, decentralisation thesis, economic case, and technical stability, communicated with transparency, not persuasion. For builders: speed, cost, ecosystem support, and the pathway from idea to funded, deployed product. For partners: distribution reach, aligned user base, and integration ROI. The Gnosis Builders channel was built to hold all three narratives without becoming incoherent, a harder editorial problem than it appears.

GTM Motion

• Built the Gnosis Builders distribution channel from scratch, scaling to 20,000 followers on X in under 3 months
• Sourced and closed 10+ wallet and protocol partnerships, enabling $GNO and $xDAI support across platforms with 30M+ MAU
• Designed hackathon and builder activation strategies to drive sustained ecosystem participation
• Led validator adoption through targeted messaging, education content, and activation campaigns
• Executed GTM for joint venture products Mu Exchange and Genome Domains
• Built repeatable pathways moving builders from discovery through experimentation to funded, deployed projects

Goal

Shift Circles from a UBI experiment understood only by ideological early adopters, to a Social Money infrastructure layer understood and trusted by builders, developers and ecosystem partners who could extend and distribute it.

ICP

Before repositioning: economic activists, UBI believers, cooperative communities. A real audience, but one with limited growth ceiling and weak product-market fit with where the protocol was heading technically.

After repositioning: protocol developers and ecosystem builders looking for composable social money primitives. Community operators and DAOs seeking trust-based economic infrastructure. The key insight was that the people most likely to drive adoption were builders who would deploy Circles inside other products, not end users who would use Circles directly.

Secondary ICP: mission-aligned partners and grant-making bodies who needed to understand Circles as infrastructure, not ideology, to justify funding or integration.

Positioning

Before: "A Universal Basic Income experiment on the blockchain."

After: "Social Money infrastructure, a protocol for trust-based economic networks."

The old frame was limiting in three ways. It anchored Circles to a political idea rather than a technical capability. It attracted believers rather than builders. And it made the product harder to explain to anyone who didn't already agree with the premise.

The new frame repositioned Circles as infrastructure: neutral, composable, and useful, which opened the product to a builder audience that could deploy it in ways the core team couldn't anticipate.

Messaging

The core messaging shift was from why Circles exists philosophically, to what Circles makes possible technically.

This required building a new messaging architecture from scratch: top-level positioning for external audiences, a technical narrative for developer audiences, and an internal alignment framework so that product, ecosystem and leadership teams were speaking consistently.

Rapid OODA-loop feedback cycles were built into the process: messaging was treated as a hypothesis to be tested, not a document to be approved.

Goal

Define Metri's initial market position, identify the ICP most likely to adopt first, and execute a launch that generated real user data, not just awareness.

ICP

Crypto-native users with existing stablecoin holdings who were already moving between wallets and DeFi products, but lacked a simple, consumer-grade way to spend in the real world. Early majority adjacent: willing to experiment, but expecting a product that worked without friction. Key insight: the barrier was not awareness of stablecoins. It was confidence that spending them would be as simple as spending fiat. The product needed to feel inevitable, not experimental.

Positioning

Metri as the simplest way to spend stablecoins in everyday life, not a crypto product that happens to let you pay, but a spending experience that happens to run on stablecoins. The positioning deliberately avoided technical language. In a market where most competing products led with infrastructure, Metri led with outcome.

Messaging

Core message: spend what you hold, without converting it first. Messaging was designed to be testable at beta stage, not finalised. Each element of the launch was treated as a hypothesis: who responds, on what channels, with what language. The Dappcon launch was specifically chosen as a live testing environment with a high-signal audience, not a mass awareness event.

GTM Motion

• Defined initial positioning and value proposition from scratch with no existing playbook
• Designed a phased rollout treating the launch as a learning environment, not a product debut
• Led Metri beta launch at Dappcon 2024 through combined in-person activation and digital distribution
• Built Dune Analytics dashboards to track wallet adoption, activation rates, and campaign performance in real time
• Used post-launch data to refine ICP and messaging before broader rollout

Goal

Enable cardholders to move from fiat to stablecoin without leaving the product ecosystem, and take that capability to market in a way that made the regulatory complexity invisible to the end user.

ICP

Gnosis Pay cardholders who held stablecoins or wanted to, but were hitting friction when converting from fiat. Also: payments and compliance partners evaluating whether to integrate Gnosis Pay rails, who needed a credible GTM story, not just a technical specification.

Positioning

uRamp as the missing link in the Gnosis Pay stack: the piece that made a regulated, real-world spending card into a complete stablecoin financial product. For external partners: a compliant, ready-to-integrate on-ramp with distribution through an established card network. For end users: a seamless way to fund your Gnosis Pay card without leaving the app.

Messaging

The messaging challenge was that different stakeholders needed to hear completely different things about the same product feature. Compliance partners needed regulatory assurance. Product teams needed integration clarity. End users needed simplicity. Building a messaging architecture that served all three without contradiction was the core PMM work, and required holding the complexity internally while presenting simplicity externally.

GTM Motion

• Delivered full GTM strategy for uRamp including positioning, messaging, and launch sequencing
• Coordinated payments, compliance, partnerships, and growth teams across multiple organisations around a shared launch narrative
• Built partner-facing materials that translated technical integration requirements into business-case language
• Designed user-facing messaging that made regulatory process feel like product quality, not bureaucratic friction