How to acquire your first 5,000 community members in web3
User Incentivized Actions to Bootstrap your Community Growth
Introduction: The Zero to One Problem
It’s often said, but can never be said enough — community is everything in web3. A project’s foundation is only as strong as the base which supports it. This is why at Masa we’ve been so focused and fortunate to have built one of the fastest growing communities in web3 with over 180K members across the globe in less than a year.
But if you’re a brand new web3 project or one struggling to build a community — how do you go from zero to one? When a web3 project has just begun, it’s likely you have a beta product in development, Twitter, Discord and Telegram channels set up, and even a simple website. But you lack a community to use it, test it, or engage with once you’re ready to launch. We call this the community cold start problem.
It can feel like a huge uphill climb to establish that community and user base, but it doesn’t have to be. In this blog, we’ll show you some simple steps to solve the community cold start problem.
Secret Sauce: User Incentivized Action
In web3, users will take action, join your community, and can act as extensions of your marketing team to help you grow, but they must be incentivized. Transparent and direct user incentives are at the core of web3 ethos.
Web3 is highly competitive, but also extremely rewarding for users. It offers an opportunity for global community members to directly benefit from your project’s success. The web3 community has come to expect to receive airdrops, tokens and rewards for their efforts, so it’s critical that you come out to the market hot with an offer.
While a red hot offer can lead to a temporary hype, to build sustained momentum in your community, you should be thoughtful in what user actions you want to incentivize using the rewards. It’s important that you build campaigns that can ensure loyalty overtime, to avoid issues in retaining these community members you work so hard to acquire.
Step 1: Determine Your Offer
As a new project, you have the freedom to get creative on how you’re going to reward your initial 5,000 community members. It could be a prize pool in stablecoins, a prize pool in your native tokens, or a cool commemorative Soulbound Tokens.
Step 2: Determine Your Desired User Action
Get super clear on where you want to focus your community growth.
Some projects prefer driving traffic to a community platform. Discord is a great option because it’s highly engaged, well segmented, and web3-native. Twitter is a good channel to build out your content strategy, but can be a chaotic playing field with noise in the algorithm. Telegram is a common channel for web3-natives to receive announcements, but can become overwhelming at times.
Other projects prefer to directly incentivize user behaviors in their product, whether it’s taking an action in your Dapp, depositing into a DeFi protocol, or viewing a section in your wallet. You can leverage these User Incentivized Actions campaigns to drive traffic to your liquidity pool, utilize your product, or try out your Dapp to receive rewards.
Figure out where you want to prioritize your community growth. You want to incentivize the right and long-term sustainable user actions for your product and project. Keep in mind that in your campaigns, they will be more effective with a single call to action.
Step 3: Design a User Incentivized Action Campaign
Soulbound Airdrop: Whether it’s your own native tokens, stablecoins, or a cool piece of NFT art, you can use airdrops to incentivize users to join your community. At Masa we can use Soulbound Tokenss to verify when a user joins your Discord community, or has taken a specific action in your product, which automatically gives participants a commemorative Soulbound Token and qualifies them for your soulbound airdrop campaign.
Soulbound Badge: Community members love having status. Especially if they are early adopters. Consider using Masa Soulbound Tokens to reward community members by giving them a badge to establish their status, such as an OG, an Ambassador, or a Whale. These soulbound badges are non-transferrable NFTs, tied to a users’ wallet. As users participate in your community, they can stack up soulbound badges. Using soulbound badges as identifiers, you can easily find out who the power users are and offer them rewards, opportunities and exclusive perks.
Referral Programs: Refer to earn is one of the best tools to grow your user base. This is how you can turn a small group of users into tens of thousands of community members. Masa can help you build an on-chain referral program, which utilizes Soulbound Tokens to verify users, prevent sybil attacks, and activate the viral loop of user acquisition.
Social Sharing: Here is a massive growth hack in web3. Once you reward a user in a special campaign, encourage them to share the reward or campaign participation on Twitter using viral hashtags. At Masa we embed social sharing at the very end of all Soulbound Token-powered growth campaigns.
Step 4: Understand Your Community
Once you build your audience, it’s essential to understand them. Their behaviors, interests, status as they engage your product and community.
This data can help you refine and inform future campaigns, and ensure you continue to roll out exciting products and offers they will continue to participate in.
This is why Masa utilizes zkSBTs, which provides anonymized user behavioral data through Masa Data Oracle Network. We are in alpha testing with our cookie-less web3 attribution service that follows user behaviors across web3 websites and Dapps while preserving users’ privacy. Unlike other web analytics solutions, we do not track your visitors. We strictly separate the data for each website and don’t sell any information to third parties. If you are interested in becoming an Alpha partner, apply to join the Masa GrowthPad.
The Proof: New DeFi Protocol Solid World Acquired 5,700+ Discord Members in 10 days using Masa Soulbound Airdrop
Masa has had massive success utilizing all of the campaigns above. Using SBTs, in less than 10-months, our web3 community has grown to over 180,000 members, we’ve generated over 1.4 million SBT mints, and had over 50,000 verified users participate in our referral program.
Now, Masa is revealing our community growth tools in our Masa GrowthPad. We’re helping early stage and established projects build their web3 communities using SBTs.
Solid World is a new DeFi protocol launching on Polygon. Solid World is on a mission to hyperscale climate finance, by creating liquid and scalable markets for climate change projects and initiatives. Solid World creates a carbon risk framework to assess risks with carbon credit projects, and support funding for carbon credits and offset initiatives.
Step 1–2: Determine Your Offer & Your Desired User Action
Solid World came to Masa ahead of their project launch to solve the cold start program of getting the first cohort of users.
We did a 1:1 consultation call with the founder and the marketing lead at Solid World. The goal of the Solid World protocol was to get users to contribute to its newly-launching CRISP-M liquidity pools, which will be used to finance the carbon credit market and provide liquidity on-ramps and off-ramps to carbon-sequestering Mangrove Forest projects. They wanted to do this while also building their community on Discord.
Based on their project goal of building activity around their liquidity pool, and their campaign goal to attract their first cohort of engaged community members, we recommended using a CRISP-M LP token soulbound airdrop to bootstrap their Discord community growth.
Step 3: Design a User Incentivized Action Campaign
Here is how the soulbound airdrop campaign works. Read the announcement.
- Users visit Masa’s SBT App and connect their Metamask wallet- https://app.masa.finance/rewards
- Click the Solid World Airdrop Campaign
- Join Solid World’s Discord Community
- Mint a Solid World Whale SBT on Polygon to verify theirDiscord membership
- Share their Solid World Whale on social media, and invite their friends and followers to join the airdrop.
Step 4: Understand Your Community
As a final step, we are performing in-depth, anonymized analysis with Solid World on their initial cohort of users so they can better segment users and design customized product offerings and future campaigns catered to their user segments.
Results
Within 10 days, Solid World generated 5,822 SBT mints, which means they acquired 5,822 new & engaged members in their Discord community. 50 lucky winners will be selected to win $80 CRISP-M LP tokens on Polygon, which is composed of approximately $40 USDC and $40 in forward carbon credits within the Solid World ecosystem and liquidity pool. The reward incentivizes users to further engage with Solid World’s product. A truly amazing result, and the Discord community is excited, engaged, and asking what’s next.
In Conclusion
Community growth can be easily achieved, solving the cold start problem with the right campaigns. Once you know your goal, your offer, and the action you want to incentivize , web3 users will rush in to join.
If you would like help building your first 5,000 community members, learn more and apply to join the Masa GrowthPad.
