In the early stages of building a Web3 community, you need 100 real ambassadors.

Mentor: Calanthia Mei, Co-Founder of Masa

Edited & compiled by BeWater

Preface: On September 21, the second Growth Hacker Camp co-organized by BeWater & PANews came to a successful conclusion in Singapore. In this event, mentors from top projects and VCs in the Web3 field discussed in depth core topics such as personal branding, growth strategy, community building, user retention and conversion, and brought valuable insights and inspiration to the audience.

This growth bootcamp has been well received. BeWater has compiled the content shared by the instructors into articles and built a series of "growth" topics for readers! The second article in this series is "Web3 Viral Marketing Handbook: Growth Hacking Strategies for Every Project Stage" by Masa co-founder Calanthia Mei. The following is a summary of Calanthia's speech:

1. The Web3 community needs 100 real ambassadors

Li Jin, co-founder of Variant Fund, said, "Creators only need to accumulate 100 real fans to spread the word." Today I propose a concept that in the early stages of building a Web3 community, you need 100 real ambassadors.

Ambassadors are part of the marketing team. In order to save money, we generally don't give many partners full-time opportunities. Masa has been in business for more than two years, but there are no more than three colleagues in the entire marketing department, including Marketing and Community. So how to build the Ambassador Program? We first participated in several incubators, including CoinList Incubator and Binance MVB Incubator. Every incubator Demo Day would attract a wave of attention. Many partners would ask how to join Masa. Because we have limited resources, not everyone can become a full-time employee, but you can become an ambassador of our project and start to work with us in depth.

We recruit new ambassadors every quarter. When we recruit ambassadors, there may be thousands of people who sign up, and we recruit about 500 people. After a few months, the number of monthly active ambassadors stabilized at about 100-200 people, and the ambassadors came from 40 different countries and regions. We assign tasks to ambassadors every week. For example, if we want to launch a new product today, we need ambassadors to do product testing, give product feedback, or publicize our activity schedule during Token2049. After assigning them detailed tasks, we can track the completion of the tasks and stratify them according to the completion of the tasks at the end of the month.

Masa has a reward mechanism for three types of ambassadors. Every month, according to the completion of tasks, ambassadors can receive Souldier, Super Soul and Shining Soul rewards, and token incentives can be given every month. If you do this every quarter and every year, you will form a flywheel of 100 real ambassadors. Of course, the group of people you attract at the beginning may not always stay with you in the end, but I think such a cultural system can attract a group of loyal fans. There is a saying in English called skin in the game. Tokens can strengthen the connection between ambassadors and projects, making ambassadors token hodlers, and using token incentives to let them help you promote the project.

2. Use Web3 incentives to attract the first batch of users: 2C, 2B, 2D

How to attract the first batch of users? In the product category, there are three different user groups: 2C, 2B, and 2D.

First, how to attract the first batch of loyal and enthusiastic C-end users in the cryptocurrency circle? The task platform is a very good way, but there are two types of tasks, one is relatively simple, and the other is more precise and effective called Action-Based Quest. For example, if your product is a C-end DApps, then your tasks should not only let people follow Twitter, join Discord, TG, but also incentivize their behavior based on their transaction volume or daily activity on your DApp. So don't waste money on those tasks, you should deliver tasks more accurately to attract the first batch of loyal and effective C-end users.

The second is 2B. There are relatively few 2B businesses in the cryptocurrency industry because it is difficult and requires long-term and serious product development and relationship maintenance. For example, we recently won a client from one of the top 20 Web2 companies in North America. I have been trying to persuade this client since the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival in March, and only now have we done a POC. It is the same as the traditional Web2 technology circle, that is, enterprise sales. People’s true character will be revealed over time, and we must always maintain relationships and prove the attractiveness of products. So the best way is Proof of Concepts. In the cryptocurrency industry, everyone has tokenized their products. Many people start to announce partnerships during Proof of Concepts, and then the token will rise, because Buy on the Announcement, Sell on the Actual Launch. When Proof of Concepts really becomes a product, many people start to sell tokens, so we must master the subtle relationship between the Announcement and the rise and fall of tokens.

Third, if you are making a product for developers, then making a developer testnet is a good method. We have done several Incentivized Testnets with CoinList, which is actually using tokens to reward developers for doing various things. Each time, you can stipulate that this testnet uses 1 million $MASA, or this testnet gives 100 tokens to each participant, etc. Different game rules can be formulated according to the different purposes of the testnet.

Based on my experience of building 4 or 5 test networks, it is best to shorten the test network cycle for current projects. The test network time should not be 6 months or 1 year, because after the first month, no one remembers what the test network is for. The test network should be small and beautiful, and a period of 3-4 weeks is more appropriate. Then, based on everyone's feedback, we can build a better, more beautiful test network that better meets product needs.

3. When TGE comes, how do J people make plans?

First of all, the most important thing is the community, which can be understood as product users, social media followers or token holders. Building a good community is very important for listing. When evaluating projects, large exchanges will look at the number and activity of users on Twitter, Discord and TG communities, so these three must be done well. If you want to build an advanced community, you can open some foreign language communities. Discord can open Sub Channels, and now Telegram can also do so.

The second point is Owned Social and KOL Promotion, that is, post articles on the project's official Twitter, Telegram, WeChat and other platforms. After each post, you must let everyone forward it within the first hour, because this is related to the timeliness of the Twitter algorithm. You must understand the Twitter algorithm itself to let more people see your content. KOL Promotion is very important. You can ask them to forward & comment, or you can ask them to move the content to their own community. Whether an article is effective or not, everyone's forwarding is the most important point.

The third point is Token Tracking websites like CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko, which have a list every day to show which tokens have the best growth, and then there are various track classifications. But CoinMarketCap accepts so many applications every day, and the fees are rising, so if you want to be included in CoinMarketCap before listing, you must negotiate 2-3 months in advance. You can pay the money, but CoinMarketCap must include your token.

The fourth point is Owned Long-Form Content, which is the articles written by yourself. Medium and Mirror are the more commonly used publishing platforms in the English area. You can write a long article for partnership, product, and test online launch. This long article can now be completely AI-based. All previously published articles (including social media content) can be fed to GPT to adjust GPT's writing style, so that the AI ​​flavor is not so strong.

The fifth point is the PR layer, which is the biggest difference between the Chinese-speaking area and the English-speaking area. If you want to be reported by Cointelegraph in the English-speaking area, paying is useless, and you don’t even know where to pay. You need to build a good relationship with your journalist friends for a long time, let them follow the progress of your project, and cultivate the real interest of your journalist friends in your project, so that you can let them report on this matter when there is a big promotion or listing. Especially since this year, many journalist friends in the English-speaking area have been laid off, so they have fewer and fewer staff, so you must build a long-term relationship with them. When you want to publicize a major event, he will pay attention to you.

The sixth point is activities. Activities must be held, and there are some tips. First of all, before you go to an event, you should think clearly about why you want to do this event. For example, the purpose of my coming to Singapore to do an event last year was to raise funds, because we were still in the stage of needing to raise funds before listing the coin. This time we came to Singapore for two purposes. One is to find more product users. For example, I went to Near's User-Owned AI Conference and Bittensor Community Meetup. There are many developers there. We usually demonstrate the product. After talking about the product and technology, we will leave contact information with everyone, and then they start to use our products. This conversion is very obvious. Another more subtle conversion is exposure. Sometimes I find that when I am speaking, there are friends in the audience who can see that they are buying the coins of our project, so my goal is to speak to more communities, so that everyone's impression of the Masa project can be visualized, and then every time I think of Masa, I think of the happy hour we have experienced together. So the event must be very purposeful and ROI, don't run around aimlessly.

Secondly, we need to do a good job of publicity before and after the event. Before the event, we will make a poster, for example, what events did 2049 Masa participate in this year, list them all, make a thread, put every Luma page and registration link on it, so that everyone can see that we have participated in many different events, on the one hand, it is exposure, on the other hand, it is convenient for everyone to sign up for face-to-face meetings. After the event, it is best to write a summary article, you can make a super long poster with photos of each event, or you can post some small experiences to make a long thread. The event must have a good start and a good end, so that your conversion rate can be increased.

Finally, at the top of the pyramid is Research. Now everyone is ready to go and prepare for the next bull market. There are many projects outside. In this case, we need to connect some real data and real product conditions with very reliable and authoritative research institutions, and use their real and independent methods to report our projects. In this track, the English research institution Messari is the top 1, and the top 2 is Blockworks Research. Messari charges very high fees. They will send a small team of data analysts to specifically understand your product in depth, including precise product and token data such as the Holder, circulation, Validator and User of the Token. There are also several ways to cooperate. One is a one-time research report, which is acceptable when the market is relatively good; the other is to write a quarterly report and track the progress every quarter. If you have financial strength, you must cooperate with professional and authoritative research institutions after the token is listed, so that the credibility of the project can be built.

Question: Every project recruits ambassadors, but yours is relatively large, so what challenges do you encounter when managing ambassadors?

Answer: First, you need to adjust your expectations, because ambassadors are very enthusiastic at the beginning, but they become quiet after three months. So you need to estimate the retention rate, which is about 20% to 40%. After a quarter, about 60% to 80% of people will be inactive. But it doesn’t matter, you can recruit new ambassadors every quarter, because the token incentives are based on their completion of the tasks, so you don’t waste money because you don’t give them monthly or annual salaries.

Second, managing ambassadors is a very tedious and manual task. We have not yet found a suitable platform to automate and streamline the entire process. We now have a partner in the marketing department who assigns tasks to ambassadors every week. The completion of the tasks is calculated every month, and then tokens are issued to them. The whole thing is very complicated, so it is recommended to have a dedicated community manager to do this. So my current experience is these two points. The main thing is to keep fresh blood coming in so that the ambassador program will not start high and end low.

Question: I have two questions. First, are there any characteristics in the distribution areas of your ambassadors? Where are they concentrated? Second, before you go public, if you don’t use U to motivate, what are the motivations or expectations of everyone?

Answer: We often do regional statistics and found that our ambassadors come from 40 different countries, which are all clustered and regionally distributed. We found that there are many professional ambassadors in Nigeria, and many people have joined our ambassador program. The last time we recruited ambassadors, we had more than 5,000 applications, of which 2,000-3,000 were Nigerians. They are really very positive, and I really appreciate that they have professionalized the ambassadors. In the Asia-Pacific region, we have many ambassadors in Vietnam. Vietnamese friends are very enthusiastic about cryptocurrency trading. There is an active community in South Korea. We only started to deepen our presence in the Chinese-speaking region this year, and we hope to do better and let more Chinese-speaking friends know about Masa. Here is also an advertisement. We are recruiting our No. 1 employee in the Asia-Pacific region to be responsible for community and growth.

We also have many ambassadors in the Russian-speaking area, because we have a very deep historical connection with the CoinList platform. We previously worked on the CoinList incubator and CoinList Launchpad, and now we are also promoting the testnet with CoinList. The top three communities of CoinList are Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, so we inherited some of their communities, and many of their community partners have also joined our community.

The second is how to incentivize them with tokens instead of U before issuing the tokens. Just like convincing people to buy your tokens, you should always speak with strength and project progress, because it is difficult to measure the labor value of Ambassadors with U. For example, 5 US dollars is the price of a cup of coffee in Singapore and New York, but it may be the price of a meal in a different market. If you link the labor value with the token, they will feel incentivized to grow your token, which will bring the ambassadors closer to the project, so I still prefer the token incentive system for Ambassadors.