How Web3 startup went from 0 to 45 000 active users in just one month
Epic Web3 Weekly Newsletter
Hey there, growth lovers 👋
This is the Epic Web3 Newsletter — a weekly dose of best practices & insights from the top industry experts to help you dive into Web3 and boost Web3 products.
In this week’s deep-dive, we’re going to talk about:
How to boost the number of active users from zero to thousands in DeFi;
Approach to valuing Web3 communities;
The most exciting deals & news from the Web3 world;
Remember we’re organizing the Web3 Growth Summit?
Some growth stars from our speakers line-up couldn’t help but share their stories of success with ya.
Right, even BEFORE the Summit.
Like Julian Ivaldy. He’s the co-founder of the startup studio The Secret Company, who launched Web3 Island (the Web3 lab of the startup studio) one year ago. And since then, three startups have emerged from the lab: StaySAFU, Safetin, and Mobula.
At Mobula, a decentralized data aggregator, they grew from 0 to 45 000 regular active users on the alpha version in just one month. Here are four main steps they followed to succeed:
1. Build an engaged community from the start.
Before you create a site, start by building your community — the easiest way to do this is on Discord. Create routines with call-in days, regular posts and product updates to get better engagement.
The rule is simple: for the first 100 members, go to your primary network, friends, contacts, entourage, people from personal networks. For the next 1000 members, make a maximum of collaborations. With Mobula, they’ve done a lot of AMAs on Telegram groups as well as on Discord investor communities.
2. Co-build your product with your community.
Make everything about your product open-source — you can do this on Github or Radicle. Ask your community for feedback, for example by letting them share their ideas in a dedicated "Co-Build" channel on your Discord. You can also organize live brainstorming sessions with your community to get valuable feedback from them.
According to Julian, they’ve completely reinvented the DAO's operation following a call with all DAO members to optimize the token verification process for Mobula. For Safetin, they chose the graphic identity after a call with the community on Telegram.
3. Develop strategic funnels.
Create partnerships with agencies, tools and influencers. Start by entering the conversations without asking for your collaboration but with an interest in their project.
For example, for an agency, you can contact them to get information about their services. You will then broach the subject of a win-win collaboration. What Mobula has put in place is a partnership tracking via Airtable to follow all the deals and to be able to take maximum advantage of the current partnerships.
4. Develop features to retain your users.
Retention is even more important than acquisition and should be your main metric to track. In order to retain users, try to implement Use-To-Earn or Play-To-Earn strategies — there's no better way to engage them.
For Mobula, they developed a dedicated “Earn page”, encouraging users to discover tokens that they promote. By discovering the promoted tokens and visiting their listing page, users can earn MOBLs. They also developed a button that allows each user to share a token's listing page and get Mobula tokens as a reward. All these features contribute to the brand awareness of the platform and are therefore beneficial for the company.
What are the other secrets of product growth in DeFi? Julian Ivaldy, Mobula co-founder, is going to share them with you. He will talk at the Web3 Growth Summit, which starts on July 25th.
P.S. Don’t forget to subscribe to Nomad Pirate – a weekly newsletter with all the behind-the-scenes of Web3 product development, run by Julian.
🧑💻 How to estimate DAO’s success? Community insights on the approach to valuing a Web3 community.
In one of the previous posts we explored actionable tips on how to build an effective DAO — and it's time to find out the ways to estimate its success.
Let's dive deep into the article by Superteam that goes into details about the types of DAOs and how to measure their value.
According to that article, communities can broadly be classified into the following three categories: project, social, service, and investment communities. But as there’s no single metric for valuing DAO’s success, we should rely on their key features and answer two main questions:
What is the possible monetary value of the fully realized vision of the community?
What is the level of censorship resistance or decentralization?
Thus, we get the following approach to valuing Web3 communities:
Project DAOs
These are organized around products like DeFi protocols, consumer apps, games, etc. So, the whole purpose of this kind of community is to operate a project, and that’s why its future largely depends on its success.
So, the first step here is to determine the potential value of the project & how much of that benefits the community. If only the original core team is building the product, then the community isn’t really empowered enough.
2. Social DAOs
These are arranged around any culturally significant theme, such as curating historical moments, blue-chip NFTs, memes, movies, literature, etc. The value here is a function of cost of membership, value of output generated (market value of anything produced by the community), and value of curation.
The level of decentralization can be measured by the number of members who really engage with the community & the number of those who contribute to generating its output.
If one of these figures is low, the DAO is vulnerable to attacks from small groups of creators or power users who are holding it hostage.
3. Service DAOs
These are focused on providing a range of services from design, writing, development for bounties or project work.
The value generated in service DAOs is revenue generated from products and services provided.
The level of decentralization is measured by the following:
Is there a small % of members servicing a large % of the revenue?
Is there a small % of members generating a large % of the revenue?
The answer to either of these questions determines how resilient the DAO can be to exit from contributors.
4. Investment DAOs
Similar to venture or hedge funds, these are organizations that pool together capital to invest in projects.
The value generated is measured through IRR (Internal Rate of Return) similar to an investment fund, and needs to be normalized for AUM (size of the fund)
The level of decentralization is measured by the following:
Is there a small % of investors providing a large % of the capital?
Is there a small % of members sourcing a large % of the deals?
Again, there’s no universal metric to track Web3 community’s success. However, as Superteam states, the easiest way to estimate it is to determine a combination of generated output normalized for the percent of the community that contributed towards that output.
Read the full article to find out more👇
1/ Magic Eden raises $130M and reaches unicorn status. The top NFT platform on Solana is now a crypto unicorn with a $1.6B valuation — and it’s going to expand beyond the ecosystem.
2/ The e-commerce giant Shopify launches tokengated commerce for brands, breaking out of the website with 100+ new features including NFTs, local shopping and more.
3/ NFTs are coming to Facebook! Mark Zuckerberg announces that Meta begins testing NFTs on Instagram and will bring them to Facebook soon too.
4/ Doodles NFT hits $500M in sales, reveals new funding from a VC firm led by Reddit's co-founder & hires Pharrell Williams as their CBO.
5/ Mindset Ventures is launching a DAO as an experiment in decentralizing VC. More than 150 VCs have joined VC3 DAO which backs Web3 startups.
6/ Binance partners with the legendary Cristiano Ronaldo to launch exclusive NFT collections. It’s a goal!
Alright, that’s it for today! If you found this post valuable, why not engage with it?
Cheers,
The Epic Web3 team