Satori Labs: The Road to 1,000,000 Users
Satori’s mission is to bring the next billion people into web3 by helping creators and communities use simple tools to grow and engage their audiences.
It’s going to take a lot of time, a lot of help and a lot of experimentation to get a billion people to onboard to web3. It’s the hardest and most important problem in the blockchain space right now and progress to date has been tentative at best.
Earlier this year, Satori released a powerful NFT minting and claiming toolkit for marketers which we hoped would make a dent in this but we haven’t yet seen it achieve its true potential to solve that problem. We built the tech but “they haven’t come.”
So, for the next few months, Satori is putting on our “labs” hat and building apps on our own APIs to showcase what they’re capable of. Specifically, we’ll work to drive growth in the NEAR ecosystem directly as first-party developers so we can show what’s possible with web3. We’re going to publish our progress along that path so others can learn from what we’re doing and, we hope, bring in new users of their own.
This is the very beginning of the journey. Our ultimate goal is to bring in 1,000,000 new accounts to the blockchain but we’ll start by focusing on bringing 1,000,000 new signups to Satori by using web3 (more on this below). Until now, only a few thousand new NEAR accounts (and no Satori accounts) have been created this way, so the road ahead is steep.
This post will cover some of the reasons for targeting this goal, how we’ll do it and how you can follow along.
NFTs are the Tool for the Job
The web3 toolkit contains a number of new primitives but NFTs are the most exciting for retail audiences because they provide value at every stage of the marketing funnel:
- Acquisition: They stand on their own for acquisition because people are still curious enough about them to take actions to receive one.
- Engagement/Retention: They are great for engagement and retention because utility can be added over time, for example creating special access, discounts or memberships for holders.
- Referral: They can be multiplied and altered to create interesting referral incentives as well, so a loop can go viral.
That’s why Satori started by building an NFT minting and distribution API in the first place — so marketers and projects can not just create large numbers of NFTs but plug them into user acquisition and engagement campaigns.
Unfortunately, when we first spoke to marketers about our APIs shortly after release, they were a bit stumped about how to use these tools. We built a web-based Creator Studio so they could create campaigns themselves without developers, but the most common conversation we had was, essentially, “Cool! We’re really excited about using NFTs. So… how do we use them to get new customers or engage our existing ones…?”
It became clear that the market is too early to just push technology solutions into it. We have to prove it ourselves.
Where to Start
As said in Satori’s mission statement, we break down the high level problem of bringing new users to web3 into two zones:
- Growing audiences: how can we get outside people (eg. web2 folks) to take their first step into web3 so they can grow the audiences of our creators and communities?
- Engaging audiences: how can we make sure these people move beyond just first-touch experiences and get long-term value out of participating in this ecosystem?
Given that the entirety of web3 currently hosts only a few dozen applications with more than 10k active users (!?!?!), the problem is dire at every stage of the marketing and product funnels. No wonder adoption has been slow. Which part of this should we tackle first?
Web3 builders have spent a decade making apps first and then trying to get users to use them. But some of the best web2 companies have started from the other end by bringing in users first and then letting them help determine what products are best. That’s the approach we’ll take.
So we’ll begin by answering the question “how can you use NFTs to drive growth?” first and, later, shifting to answer the question “how can you use NFTs to drive engagement?”
Thus, our first goal is to get 1,000,000 new Satori users by using our NFT-based campaigns. This can only be accomplished by creating extremely tight product experiences that have viral sharing loops. We’re going to stay away from Ponzi Mechanics and instead rely on more genuine user motivations for sharing.
Once we’ve brought in those first 1,000,000 new users, we’re going to shift focus to promoting *good* users — aka optimizing for their quality and engagement — to answer the second question above and make sure growth is sustainable and real. While we can get *new* users without them necessarily creating wallets on-chain, the only way to continue to engage them will be to make sure they have accounts on-chain which give them ongoing value.
Satori’s Growth Lab
To do this effectively and at scale, we’ll need to drive users into extremely tight product experiences and incentivize them to participate in viral sharing loops. We haven’t found applications in the web3 ecosystem that do this effectively so we’re going to build some ourselves, under a “labs” umbrella. The goal isn’t to create full-featured apps, but rather to drive MVPs that will prove out the market and help give apps in the ecosystem product and growth recipes that they can replicate.
The first “third party” app that the Satori team built on our APIs was Proof of Memories, which launched at NEARcon 2022 in Lisbon. We had several hundred people take photos and turn them into NFTs, which were then minted and sent to wallets they indicated and posted on Twitter.
It was a very basic concept and wasn’t optimized for growth but it captured a lot of imagination from the attendees and we were surprised how hungry people are for apps in web3 that actually work.
Over the next few months, Satori will be running an internal growth lab as “Satori Labs.” We’ll release a series of product-based growth experiments and, we hope, begin moving the needle on top line growth in the NEAR ecosystem.
To do this, we’re going to have to overcome all sorts of product hurdles as well. We’ll take advantage of the existing Satori NFT minting and claiming APIs but we’re certainly going to make and release some new technology along the way. An obvious zone to tackle is The Great Onboarding Problem In Blockchain, since you can’t have viral growth without extremely good onboarding.
We expect to incorporate these learnings and artifacts into our product suite so we can provide a more complete, effective toolkit for teams that are looking to grow and engage their audiences in the future as well.
Follow the Journey
We’re going to build a bunch of apps, run a bunch of growth experiments and talk about what’s working and what isn’t. We’ll check in on the metrics along the way and try to overshare the gritty details. We hope you’ll follow along and contribute so we can all benefit from the learnings ahead.
To do so, drop your email below and get new posts as they come. At some point, we’ll probably set up a community engagement hub (like a Discord) but for now, email is the best way to follow. Let’s take this journey together!
With excitement,
The Satori Team
