Repositioning Filecoin - People First, Technology Second

Overview

I set out to train an LLM to write about Filecoin. Halfway through building it, it became clear that everything I was feeding it described how we wanted to talk about Filecoin, rather than what would resonate with an audience. We were putting ourselves first. So the work split in two.

Approach

I led the repositioning without a mandate to change anything, because in a decentralised ecosystem nobody holds one. Several influential stakeholders were attached to the brand as it was, so this was a problem of consensus building before it was a problem of design.

The rigour of the process was part of that. Every stage of it was documented and every input traceable, so when I went to a stakeholder I could show the depth of the work behind a recommendation rather than ask them to take it on trust.

New technology, new tools

The first track was the training itself. Everything we already had went in — the blog, the YouTube library, the white paper, the live site, the GitHub project, third-party research — and came back out as writing about Filecoin. Then people went through it: the team edited the output, ranked the concepts, flagged what was missing, and every round of that went back in.

People first, technology second

The second track started from the outside. I took 80,000 Hours’ list of the largest problems facing humanity and looked for the common threads across thirty of them, which gave four groupings: runaway technology, collaborative advancement, centralised power, and collapse. Each one became a quadrant on the positioning chart.

The axes were outlook and focus. Optimistic to pessimistic on one: space exploration is an optimistic problem, civilisational collapse a pessimistic one. Technology to human impact on the other: Monero talks about privacy features, Solana about transactions per second, Worldcoin about proof of humanity. That second one is really a communications axis — whether you prioritise the technology or its impact.

Mapping the landscape

Mapping the field meant reading the competition’s own language. The brand strategist went through how other networks write about themselves and placed each one on the chart from that, which put Filecoin in the middle: kind of new, kind of positive, sitting close to Ethereum.

Getting consensus

That left the four nearest clear spaces on the chart — up toward optimism, left toward human impact, right toward technology, down toward the defensive. I put all four to leadership with my own recommendation: go up. The Star Trek version, let’s explore the universe together.

They chose human impact instead. That surprised me, given how technical our communications had been. The process isn’t about being right. They’re the experts on what they’re trying to say; my job is helping them say it as effectively as possible.

Building on strong foundations

The key concepts and the writing samples from the first track trained the copywriter space itself. The creative briefs went in separately, as the prompts. Then people reviewed and edited what came out, same as every other stage.

The strategy was written with the assistance of these tools and the creative briefs, and the brand was built from it: Filecoin as the authenticity layer for a more resilient internet. The visual identity we developed from that we called space punk — exploring the galaxy together, but from a human perspective.