Acquiring users
DM your potential users
Story:
Zora acquired their first users by DMing sneaker customizers, illustrators, and artists on Instagram and Twitter. They educated these artists, explaining why minting NFTs might make sense to them.
The more success stories they got, the easier it was to onboard prominent artists and brands. And they still DM artists up to this day.
Source: Web3 Talks, Episode #45, Dee Goens, Co-Founder & COO @ ZORA
Non-timestamped: Apple
Dogfood
Story #1:
The founder of Unlock initially started by implementing the Unlock subscription NFTs for his own blog. Thanks to that he could show their product in action.
The Unlock team also followed this tactic when they wanted to promote the ticketing use case, using their NFTs as tickets for events they organized. Thanks to that they later managed ticketing for events such as EthCC, DappCon and ETH Taipei.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #43, Julien Genestoux, Co-Founder & CEO @ Unlock
Non Timestamped: Apple
Story #2:
ZORA has been a strong advocate for putting things onchain. So to lead with example, they let people mint their Zorbs, zine articles and manifestos.
Thanks to that users can see how cool is that feature and use ZORA to do it for their projects.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #45, Dee Goens, Co-Founder & COO @ ZORA
Non Timestamped: Apple
Focus on small atomic networks
Story #1:
The most user growth for Zapper haven't come from integrating big protocols like Aave or Compound. It came from the small yield farms, which had tight-knit communites and few options to track your rewards.
So Zapper team were tracking DeFi to find these new farms and integrate them into platform as soon as possible. As soon as these yield farming communities learned they can use Zapper to follow their claimable rewards, they became active users who stuck with Zapper for a long time.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #26, Seb Audet, Co-Founder & CEO @ Zapper
Non Timestamped: Apple
Story #2 & #3:
There are many small, niche museums around the world. So ZORA reached out to some of them and encouraged them to make their works mintable. Thanks to that, they onboarded a whole group of new artists and demonstrated how they can help them to make money.
They did the same graphic designers. They knew that some of them might be interested in the way ZORA designs their brand, so they made the whole process public, thanks to which many people got familiar with their brand.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #45, Dee Goens, Co-Founder & COO @ ZORA
Non Timestamped: Apple
Position yourself on Twitter since it's a discovery tool for web3
Story:
A big part of Questbook's first interest came from people sharing their links on Twitter. That's because Google, HackerNews and Reddit are not the best sources for web3 news.
That's why it's important to encourage your community to share information about your project on Twitter (and web3 social networks like Farcaster or Lens) and think about positioning your content on the right keywords.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #1, Madhavan Malolan, Co-Founder & CEO @ Questbook
Non Timestamped: Apple
Build reputation in the bear market, to become a top of mind solution in the bull market
Story #1
When Zora got their initial track record, and the NFT summer in 2021 happened, they were flowing in inbound.
Brands, sports clubs, artists - everyone wanted to learn more about this NFT technology. So they dedicated a lot of time to educate and onboard these projects.
Thanks to the fact that they started gaining experience before the bull market, they had a better reputation than most project that launched only after they saw a lot of money in the market.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #45, Dee Goens, Co-Founder & COO @ ZORA
Non Timestamped: Apple, YouTube, Spotify
Story #2
Since Unlock has been around since 2018 and already used their subscription NFT in many places, they got attention from the big media projects.
One of these deals were successful and Forbes.com used Unlock NFTs to gate their crypto section which led to a significant word-of-mouth effect, drawing new users to Unlock.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #43, Julien Genestoux, Co-Founder & CEO @ Unlock
Non Timestamped: Apple
Bring your product to your users
Story:
Zora supports their musicians to sell their music NFTs straight off the stage.
You just scan the QR code and mint the NFT in a few clicks. They did that on many occasions, including TK's concert at SXSW in 2022 as well as Latasha's concert at ETH Denver in 2023.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #45, Dee Goens, Co-Founder & COO @ ZORA
Non Timestamped: Apple
Simplify existing user stories
Story:
Many projects in crypto are focused on exploring how we can make new things possible. But sometimes it's good to focus on making old things easier to do.
For Unlock this was gating your content.
Traditional methods of setting up membership platforms can be challenging for small-scale content creators who want to make a few dollars on the side.
They could either go to established platforms like Substack which have good UX but are very rigid when it comes to customizing your blog. The other option is to set it up yourself, which might be hard for less technical people.
So they found out that subscription NFTs make it much easier, since there's no need to set up payments and database with usernames and passwords as both of them are handled by the blockchain.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #43, Julien Genestoux, Co-Founder & CEO @ Unlock
Non Timestamped: Apple
Be careful with paid marketing
Story:
Many projects wanted to take advantage of the bull market and grow as fast as they cain - either via paid marketing, influencer partnerships or airdropping tokens.
The problem is that if you're doing that before Product Market Fit, you generate a lot of noise and you might think that you "created something people want" even if it's not true. And you end up if giving tokens to people who don't care about your product.
That's why it's important to be careful with it in the early days of your product.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #26, Seb Audet, Co-Founder & CEO @ Zapper
Non Timestamped: Apple
Put your users on a pedestal
Story:
ZORA started their Zine, which was an online magazine focused on artists. They get really deep into understanding who they are, how they work, what's their perspective. The whole magazine has a very honest, non-corporate tone of voice and is very interesting visually.
For ZORA's users such as top brands and artists, it's sometimes the first point of contact with ZORA. Sometimes it's also a motivation to promote their mints, so they can get covered.
The Zine got so popular that they started a print edition.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #45, Dee Goens, Co-Founder & COO @ ZORA
Non Timestamped: Apple
Hire your users
Story:
Zora is focused on artists so to keep this perspective in the company, they are hiring some artists. Among their team they have Platinium music producers, award-winning photographers and professional rappers.
Thanks to that, when they're speaking to artists, they're authentic since they speak their language and understand their problems.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #45, Dee Goens, Co-Founder & COO @ ZORA
Non Timestamped: Apple
Offer something more than your competitors
Story:
Zora has been deeply embedded into the web3 space and cooperated with dozens of brands so far and they share this experience with their users.
Thanks to that, apart from providing a tool for minting NFTs, they can consult the brands and artists how to get 100% from their platform. They tell them how to activate various communities and what kind of artworks might resonate with them. They help to plan the social media campaign, customize the minting page and so on.
All that makes their offer more attractive, especially for bigger brands who need some help with onboarding into this web3 world.
Source:
Web3 Talks, Episode #45, Dee Goens, Co-Founder & COO @ ZORA
Non Timestamped: Apple
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