Dennis Gräf is the GTM Lead at OneFootball Club (OFC), one of the fastest-growing crypto sports communities. Earlier in his career he did strategy at Kolibri Games, scaling Idle Miner Tycoon into one of the first breakout idle mobile games and grew the company to a $120M acquisition by Ubisoft in just four years. After running his own web3 marketing agency, he joined OneFootball Club full-time to drive global community, partnerships, and distribution, with ambitions of bringing millions of football fans onchain.

I’m Dennis, 28, based in Germany. After university I started out in a big corporate environment, and that was my first exposure to blockchain back in 2016. The tech was promising, but corporate life felt uninspiring. Everything was about process, not progress. I wanted to be in a place where things moved fast and where I could actually build.

That break came when Daniel Stammler, one of the founders of Kolibri Games, decided to take a chance on me. I had no gaming CV, but he said he wanted me because I was structured, young, and hungry. Daniel made me his right hand, and I threw myself into every part of the business. Together we grew Idle Miner Tycoon into one of the first breakout idle games on mobile, introduced monetization mechanics that later became industry standard, and grew Kolibri into one of Germany’s fastest-scaling startups. Four years after inception, we bootstrapped and sold the company to Ubisoft for over $100 million. That experience gave me a front-row seat to how you scale a company from zero to acquisition.

After the exit I dove into Web3. I played around with NFTs in 2021 and later built a community management agency to help Web2 companies grow in crypto. That agency is how I met Vince. He first came in as a customer, and I ended up asking him to be a mentor. What started as a weekend project supporting OneFootball quickly became week after week of collaboration. We realized how much we complemented each other: Vince driving product and fundraising, me driving GTM and marketing.

Eventually I joined OneFootball Club full-time because the potential was too big to ignore. OneFootball has the global distribution that every crypto project dreams about. Done right, we can onboard millions of fans into Web3 in a way that truly delivers value back to them. That’s what drives me today.

I’m the GTM and Operations Lead at OneFootball Club, which means I manage a wide scope: community and socials across X, Farcaster, and Megaphone, partnerships with groups like FIFA Rivals, plus the growth of our OneFootball Heads IP. If it touches marketing or distribution, I’m driving it.

This may sound cliché, but the biggest highlight has been the friends we made along the way. Because of OneFootball Club I’ve been able to sit down with incredible leaders who are shaping the future of this industry. Meeting Coinbase at Basecamp, working with D3 in Las Vegas, representing OFC at NFT Paris, and partnering with Megaphone are all experiences I hang on my wall.

Crypto is global by design. That gives me energy. Connecting with people across Europe, the U.S., and beyond reminds me that what we are building isn’t just about football or crypto. It is about creating something that connects people worldwide and makes them feel part of the movement.

For me, community building isn’t about hype cycles or get rich quick schemes. Over-speculation and overpromising don’t create lasting value. At OneFootball Club we take the opposite approach: underpromise, then overdeliver.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in Web3 is brands trying to be “on” 24/7. Constant posting does not equal community. Sometimes you need to step back, focus on building, and then come back when you have something meaningful to share. Your community will understand. When you return with substance, attention is stronger and trust runs deeper.

I think the real unlock is cross-ecosystem incentives. Too many projects only think about their own backyard. The future is communities creating value for each other, giving fans privileges that extend across ecosystems. That is the vision behind OneFootball Club Fan Pass. Football has always been about bringing people together across borders, and I see Web3 in the same way. Done right, we can set the standard for how sports IP connects with the broader Web3 world.

We’re preparing a move that will open up OneFootball Club more broadly in Africa. The response we’ve seen from the OFC community has been massive, and the next step will unlock a new wave of participation.

We’re also doubling down with Base. We are very close to their team, and what we are planning together is core to how we see OFC evolving. When it is ready, it will create opportunities that both the OFC and Base communities have never had before.

And then there is the World Cup. In 2022 more than 1.5 billion people watched the final, and the tournament reached 5 billion viewers across the month. In 2026 it comes to the U.S. for the first time, and it is expected to be the biggest in history. That level of global attention only happens once every four years. We already tested the waters with Eurocaster. Now we’re preparing to bring that kind of onchain engagement to the world’s biggest sporting event.

When we evaluated other onchain engagement tools, none of them felt good enough. The products were either too generic or too complicated, and they didn’t reflect how communities actually behave. Then we found Megaphone. From the very beginning it felt different: simple, intuitive, and it just worked.

What’s impressed me even more is the team behind it. Megaphone hasn’t just handed us software and walked away. They’ve been in the trenches with us, brainstorming campaign ideas, making key introductions across the industry, and backing it all up with world-class customer support. That kind of partnership is rare and has played a huge role in helping us scale faster and smarter.

We launched a new X account alongside our Megaphone page and hit 50,000 followers in a single weekend. That kind of traction gave us conviction to double down. Since then, our numbers have grown to over 500,000, and Megaphone has become one of the key drivers of that growth with their points program, referrals, and incentive system.

Post-launch, our explosive growth unlocked new ecosystem partnerships. We use Megaphone as the engine to amplify our core updates to the wider onchain community. Megaphone has become a core part of our GTM tool stack to launch quests, allowlists, airdrops, and more.

There’s a saying:

“First-time founders care about product, second-time founders care about distribution.”

In Web3, distribution is everything. It is not enough to build something great, you need to innovate on how it reaches people. Go-to-market should be a playground for experiments, not a checklist.

Too many projects follow the same playbook: Discord on day one, nonstop Twitter posting, 24/7 hype cycles. That is not community, that is noise. At OneFootball Club we chose a different route. We did not launch with a Discord, and we are fine going quiet if it means the next push lands harder. That rhythm makes attention more durable, and communities will naturally form when there is a product and a story that has value.

To succeed in Web3, stop copying, start experimenting, and build in a way that only you can uniquely do.

The best advice I can give is simple: just start. Find something you care about, share value with the community, and let it grow from there. Some of the best partnerships in my career, including the ones that became full-time roles, began as small, organic exchanges of value that snowballed over time.

Do not overthink it. The playbook is to show up, give value, and keep building. The rest follows.

One of the biggest mistakes is assuming you need to be everywhere all the time. Constant content does not equal real community. You do not need Discord or Telegram on day one. If people care, they will find each other first, and your job is to support that demand once it is real.

The same goes for airdrops. The meta is not dead, but it is evolving. Too many projects regret giving tokens away for empty hype. The airdrops that win will be those that reward true early adopters and tie incentives back to real usage. That is how you create loyalty, not just noise.

X: https://x.com/dnns_eth

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-graef/

Farcaster: https://farcaster.xyz/dnns

Web3 marketing is full of gate-kept secrets and confusing careers. That’s why we’re launching Megaphone Spotlight, where real GTM stories + career advice from leaders in the crypto trenches unfold.

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