TwitFi is a social game called X to Earn, which allows players to earn income by posting tweets on social media. Simply put, users buy NFTs in the game, and then use the Twitter account bound to the address to post tweets. Each tweet will receive a reward in the platform token TWT.
This article mainly analyzes from the product and operation level how the TwitFi project found a breakthrough in the GameFi track to attract attention, how to quickly acquire seed users in the early stage, and how to extend the project life cycle in product design when facing the X2E "death spiral" problem.
Creativity and positioning
The innovation of TwitFi is that it has built a bridge between Web2 and Web3 through tweets and NFTs. TwitFi also has a very clear target audience, namely people who frequently use social software. In addition, Twitter is the main battlefield of Web3, so the main user group of TwitFi is naturally Web3 users who often surf Twitter. You can earn some tokens while tweeting, and it takes almost no time and effort compared to games. These are the key factors that TwitFi began to attract early users.
Project Packaging
Judging from the information on the official website, although TwitFi wrote the positions and names of the main members in the team information, there are no real profile pictures, and all of them use pseudonyms. The real information of the team members cannot be found from other channels, so it is actually an anonymous project.
The project team intentionally packaged it as a project with a Japanese team or a main user group in Japan. For example, when the project was first launched, the project team used many Japanese resources, including media and KOLs. At the beginning of the launch, news about TwitFi was almost all in Japanese. When you searched on Twitter using the hashtag #TwitFi, the search results showed that the majority of users were Japanese. In addition, the project often used multi-frame comics to publish game rules, which is also a common form for Japanese projects.
The purpose of this packaging may be due to the market's good expectations for Japanese projects. For example, Japan's regulatory environment is relatively loose, and the project compliance risk is low; Japan's game market is huge, with an inherent advantage in the number of players; and Japanese players are willing to pay for games (Japanese game paid revenue ranks first in the world). This GameFi project that requires users to pay to purchase NFTs first may be more easily accepted by users.
Product iteration
In previous articles, we have discussed TwitFi’s economic model in detail and believed that TwitFi’s Tweet to Earn economic design is unsustainable.
The article mentioned that the TwitFi project has taken many measures to avoid the "death spiral" problem. For example, when users receive TWT rewards, they can only get 50% directly each time, and the other 50% will be unlocked after a month; players will be charged a higher fee when withdrawing money, and there will be a limit on the amount of each withdrawal. However, these measures can only slightly extend the life cycle of the project and cannot fundamentally solve the problem.
When the article was published, TwitFi had just been officially launched. At that time, TwitFi was still version 1.0, and the overall gameplay was relatively simple. The project has now developed to version 2.0. In fact, in the process of product iteration, TwitFi is basically focusing on "extending the project life cycle", that is, reducing the circulation of TWT, reducing market selling pressure, stabilizing prices, and allowing subsequent players to continue to make profits.
For example, more consumption scenarios for TWT are added in the game. At the beginning of the launch, there were relatively few props in the game. In addition to upgrading, feeding, and taking medicine, there were no other props that could consume TWT. Now many new props have been put on the shelves in the store, such as wings (you can earn TWT by tweeting without using a hashtag), bird beaks (one tweet can get rewards equivalent to multiple tweets), slots (support more bird NFTs to earn coins at the same time), vaccines (to prevent bird NFTs from getting sick), etc. The original intention of designing these props is only one, that is, to increase the consumption of TWT and reduce market selling pressure.
The concept of "T Point" was also introduced. T Point is TwitFi's in-game points, representing the user's contribution points to TwitFi. T Point can be obtained by staking TWT. Holding T Point can obtain dividend rewards such as platform tokens TWT and platform revenue (ETH), and can also purchase game props in the TP store. T Point cannot be withdrawn or transferred, and the user's T Point will return to zero if the user cancels the pledge. The purpose of T Point is also to lock more TWT through staking rewards, thereby reducing the number of TWT circulating in the market.
The project has also adopted a very radical approach to consume the TWT in the hands of users. TwitFi uses a "gambling" gameplay, that is, users can use 10,000 locked TWT to challenge each time. If the challenge is successful, it will be unlocked immediately, and if the challenge fails, the entire principal will be lost. The success rate of the game is 1/3. Users who are eager to cash out will use this method to unlock, but this unequal odds setting clearly shows that the project wants to consume a large amount of users' TWT. However, this gameplay was quickly removed from the shelves due to "legality issues."
The above are all methods of "cutting costs", and now let's talk about measures of "increasing revenue".
The first is the launch of TwitFi Sky, a viral marketing service for B-side users. Projects can post tasks (such as browsing, following, retweeting, downloading, etc.) on the TwitFi platform by paying a certain fee to TwitFi, and users can get bonuses from the platform when they complete these tasks.
TwitFi Sky is equivalent to a revenue-generating product created by the project using its own traffic and influence. The income will also be mainly used for user staking rewards, adding liquidity and marketing activities.
The other is to deploy cross-chain to BSC and obtain more revenue by selling a new batch of NFTs to BSC users. These revenues will also be used for project promotion, market value management, user incentives and other purposes in the future.
Operational Strategy
At the operational level, TwitFi's main strategy is preheating and external resources. For every major product update or NFT release node, TwitFi will conduct a long preheating in advance and cooperate with external resources such as KOL to expand publicity; and gradually release detailed rules to ensure that users can fully understand the product when it is officially launched; in addition, some small-scale operational activities will be interspersed in the meantime to keep users fresh.
In terms of the timeline, TwitFi has done its homework. It started operations 4 months before the official launch, used KOLs to build momentum 3 months in advance, held operational activities to attract product traffic 2 months in advance, and finally, one month before the launch, it began to focus on large-scale marketing and product activities such as pre-sales, white distribution, beta version launch, official version launch, Token listing, etc., continuously releasing game rules and content in the meantime, and cooperating with small activities such as Meme Contest to increase interaction.
The effectiveness of this operation strategy is also very obvious. A lot of preheating work allowed TwitFi to attract enough user attention before it went online. After the early KOL's "calling orders", users were already familiar with the product. In addition, the low operating threshold and the "first mining effect" (the early return rate was very high, and the low-cost NFT combined with the currency price at the time could pay back the investment in a few hours) set off social media as soon as it went online, and TwitFi also successfully "went out of the circle".
TwitFi's product development rhythm and sales rhythm are coordinated with each other. For example, the NFT pre-sale and website test version are launched at the same time, and TWT is launched on the exchange at the same time as the official version is launched. At important development and release nodes, users are given dual incentives from both economic and product levels.
Attached is TwitFi's product and sales rhythm:
- On November 5, we will announce the pre-sale of rare NFTs and look for KOLs to promote the sale
- On November 8, the official release of white began (a total of two weeks)
- November 9, official launch date
- On November 24, Twitter announced the whitelist winners
- On November 26, the beta version of the preview website was launched
- On November 28, NFT pre-sale will start
- On November 29, the website beta version will be launched. The beta version will be online for two weeks and a beta version usage guide will be released.
- On December 1, the TWT launch price was announced, and TWT Launch was announced in mid-December.
- December 2, pre-sale ends
- On December 4, continue to encourage users to use the beta version and receive rewards
- On December 5, the mysterious blind box sales started on the beta version
- December 6th, the second round of pre-sale will be announced for 24 hours
- On December 8, the second round of NFT pre-sale will start for 24 hours
- On December 9, the second round of pre-sales ended and the sales of the two phases of pre-sales were announced to be 65.58E
- On December 11, the beta version and related activities ended
- On December 16, the official version will be launched and the GA of rare NFT will be launched
- On December 17, it was announced that TWT would be listed on Uniswap the next day
- On December 18, the official version of the App was launched and the TWT contract address was announced
- On December 20, the sales volume of rare Egg exceeded 20,000; TWT was launched on MEXC
- On December 21, we will announce the viral marketing service TwitFi Sky for project owners
- December 25, rare Eggs will be on sale at reduced prices
- On December 26, the rules of the game of TwitFi were adjusted, and the team repurchased TWT
- On December 27, the team announced the purchase of TWT to stabilize the currency price
- On December 30, the anti-virus vaccine was launched, which can prevent NFT from being destroyed by the virus
- On January 4, the project was deployed to BNB Chain
- On January 7, the pledge function rules were announced
- On January 13, TwitFi Sky marketing communication service was launched and the promotion cooperation with OKX was officially announced
- January 22, TwitFi 2.0 launched
- On January 30, the TWT staking function was launched, allowing users to stake TWT to obtain points
- On February 10, the centralized exchange Gate was launched
- On February 19, BNB Chain NFT sales rules were announced
Summarize
Although from the current information, TwitFi seems to have not been able to solve the "death spiral" problem of X2E, and it can also be seen from the on-chain data of TWT that the number of users has dropped a lot from the time of launch.
But just like we know that 90% of the projects in this industry will eventually die, it doesn’t stop us from having fun together while they are alive.
Web3 is an industry that updates and iterates very quickly. A project that survives for two or three years is considered relatively "long-lived". X2E is only a concept that has been around for less than two years. There is no ready-made successful experience to learn from. The vision is beautiful, but it is difficult to achieve. The so-called "failed attempts" of projects like Axie and StepN are also worth learning from. Which successful model does not require continuous trial and error and verification?
