ZED Run Community Update #2 — May 2019
Discord structuring, Building Socials and Defining Strategy
The Fortnight’s Happenings
Hello there Zedders! 🐎
The past fortnight has been crazy! Honestly, it feels like time has flown by. So much stuff is happening behind the scenes that it is easy to get swept up and to forget the achievements that have been made along the way.
At any rate, I’m having an absolute blast working for ZED. These past 2 weeks consisted of a 3 day trip to Sydney and a lot of work behind the scenes getting some very high-level frameworks in place to start growing the ZED user base.
Here are just a few things that have happened on the Communications and Community side;
- Animations and first video draft for ZED team interviews completed. One published.
- Team has now grown to 16 people, 10 of whom are Developers
- Instagram, Twitter and Facebook all growing in followers
- Daily content being pushed out across all Mediums
- First Developer Update completed and published
- ZED Discord has grown by over 45 people
Per our new tradition, here are the top questions and concerns raised by the community this past fortnight with my best answers.
Horse sales have slowed down. Why?
To the early adopters of ZED, they no doubt have seen a slowdown in the sale of the Early release horses. Questions have been asked and concerns raised in the community that ZED is not doing enough to drive sales.
The truth is there has been a lot of internal and external factors affecting sales in just the past 4 weeks, such as;
- The price of Ether has nearly doubled in price, making early-release horses twice as expensive than they were previously.
- Our ‘skip’ horse function has been removed to unload the stress of our smart-contracts.
- ZED rarity is going down, i.e. Z8 is less-rare than Z7. There is less incentive to just collect horses than there was before.
- Marketing and competitions have ceased for the time being.
Whilst the sale of ZED horses is imperative, it is important to communicate that this is just the first phase of a multi-phase project that is delivering huge amounts of functionality in the months to come. The slow down in sales does not represent what is happening behind the scenes in any way!
People are ‘dumping’ horses
There have been concerns from several community members around certain users selling horses on Open Sea. Some of these users own large amounts and bought several during ZED’s early days when ZED was generally ‘under the radar’.
No doubt, the recent price in Ether is playing a large part in this, and the fact that some horses have recently been sold for up to 100x their initial sale price. Granted, a huge incentive is clearly there for some users to make the most of their initial purchases by selling on secondary markets.
Consequently, this may give the community the impression that ZED is not delivering and that is why users are selling. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth.
ZED does not control secondary markets, nor do we want to. We are a building an incredibly diverse, complex, and technologically advanced NFT ecosystem where users play an intricate part in its ongoing value. With this in mind, there will be fluctuations and changes in valuations as time goes on. This is part of being in crypto and unfortunately, is inevitable!
This is, however, part of the exciting challenge to build something truly game-changing and incredible. We are held accountable to the extreme by the market and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Peaks and troughs, as they say 🙂
Why is ZED not communicating delays?
A reasonable concern raised by some community members is the lack of communication around delays in major deliverables, such as Breeding and Auctions.
As the Community Manager, I take full responsibility for this. Please know that I am actively working on strategy around communicating timelines as part of my role.
Having been around crypto over 2 years, I’ve seen many many projects miss milestones time and time again. Not only that, I’ve seen terrible communication and a combative attitude with its own community on a number of occasions. This will never happen with ZED, as our community are highly valued to us. We are not a platform pushing empty platitudes, we do truly value our community.
Coming soon will be an updated Roadmap that gives the community open and transparent updates as to our progress, whilst giving the team room for unforeseen changes and issues that may arise.
When is ZED going to start marketing?
Marketing will come! Some early marketing was done to drive users into ZED, which was very effective. Some concerns have been raised within the Community as to when ZED will start a full-fledged marketing campaign. TL;DR, it will come, when the time is right.
Marketing a product before functionality has been developed is a risk. We saw issues arise in our smart-contracts when demand for Early Release horses exceeded expectations. This was great from the outset but took a toll on the team who spent a lot of time and energy resolving the issue afterwards.
We want growth, but the product needs to be at the right stage before it ramps up. We understand there are expectations from the community for rapid growth, and I do not blame them. But we need to take a balanced approach that will ensure sustainability, over the long term.
What to expect in the coming month
So with all that being said, what can you expect in the coming month for the ZED Community? Heres what’s on the cards;
- Continual refinement of Discord roles and a format for Community input
- ZED user-guide will be expanded and new content added
- Video interviews with founders and key team members published
- Video guides and tutorials published on YouTube
- Bigger push on user-acquisition across social channels
Catch Robs Interview
Before I sign out, make sure to go and watch our interview with Rob Salha, one of the Co-Founders & COO of ZED!
Continue the discussion
Head over to www.zed.run to buy your very own digital thoroughbred, join our Discord group, or follow one of our growing social channels below;
Twitter
YouTube
Instagram
Facebook
Thanks for reading if you made it this far :)
Beau, signing out! 🐎
