Building Community and Growth

Transcript

to wrap up our Workshop session today let's welcome to powder and head growth at ckes.com with the topic building community and growth welcome on stage [Music] I have a confession I do not have a plan for a presentation I uh I went to this

party last night and uh I was studying my phone quietly because I had this realization that I had messed up big time but I thought today was going to be a one and a half hour Workshop so I had all these slides and always prep content then I looked at the actual schedule and I had 30 minutes I was like oh man I've totally messed up so I was just sitting in this party normally normally I talked to everyone I'm at Social but yesterday I was standing in the corner thinking what am I gonna do tomorrow like what do I talk about how can I keep these guys engaged for 30 minutes and Shred down my content how do I tell them how to grow a startup in 30 minutes I thought it's impossible so I'm Gonna Keep makeup really really simple we're gonna talk

about you guys basically I want you guys to do some intro uh thinking to think about who you are as a person and what the hell you're doing now let me introduce myself I want to talk a little bit about Community growth and and it's really really about you you as a person and you as a team what the hell you're trying to do now the question is what's your underlying motivation of who you are and what you're trying to do If we're honest with ourselves no one talks about this in any conference we are here to make money right if you're not here to make money I mean if I'm rich you are in the wrong industry seriously this is the industry to make money but should you do it in a good way or

about it and honestly speaking there are a lot of scammers in our industry I swear to God half the people in this room are probably these cameras you don't even realize so if it doesn't feel right look in their eyes you're probably looking at a scammer maybe hopefully you're the one but do you do it in a good way or a bad way and I wanted to give you guys nine questions to think very very carefully about what you're doing the first one is why do you care what are you doing okay fine they're trying to make money but we do it in a good way right but what is your underlying motivation in the future that you wanna when you have a project do you want to give it up give it to the world in a very Outdoors that kind of way or

are you trying to do something short term now for us our team at zkex we come from a very cheap very very deep technical background and to tell you guys a little bit about us we are a small team of about eight people and we freaking hate scammers I swear to God that's an underlying motivation whenever we meet with anyone we always ask us a question is this person a scammer and we hate people to steal money is what he needs but we want to make money in a good way so our online motivation is basically we want to become Legends famously that's our online motivation money is kind of part of the process as well now for you what are you trying to do why do you care about this project

you're doing and the question comes in like when you have a really really good product it gives you the confidence to behave in a certain way which actually leads to the way you communicate with people whenever it's a partner or your community and all the media the way you communicate is really important because it gives you the confidence that you have something really really cool so to give you a really example is if anyone has gone on a date and you've realized that the other person likes you more than you like them it automatically gives you this confidence and Society then you start acting a little bit toxic like when they text you you're like oh I'll text them later you know but when you like the other person you're the one doing the chasing you're texting them

like immediately as soon as they respond right but when you're the hot one like you just kind of slow down and as a starter I swear to God it's the same way when you are the heart of then then people are chasing you and you don't have to taste them and it very much depends in terms of your attitude of how you communicate I I don't encourage you guys to be toxic that's disgusting but it does give you the confidence to go in a certain way what's up with this Slide Man like it keeps moving so you ask yourself a really big question like uh what is the big picture like what is your attitude to what you're trying to build like is everyone on your team have a attitude as well as well as you do is everyone very very clear about what exactly you're

doing and are you building for the short term or the long term and are you actually trying to build uh for a real use case that is actually going to help people in the world not like create some problem and create some solution like a lot of people doing crypto that no in the end you know it's not really going to work I swear it's auto moving it's not really me I'm not pressing spine anymore okay thank you though so you think very carefully like if you guys are all aligned in your team we know each other very well you have the same attitude motivation uh for a new project but are you structured in the right way so are you how is your team structured and the way crypto should be is that you should be as decentralized as possible like there are some crypto projects which are

very centralized such as coinbase which are fairly trustworthy but like we've seen very recently can you really trust them and the answer is probably not most people projects are moving towards decentralization not only all the actual uh products because of the team as well so that you're all kind of like community over and Community one essentially but it's very very important because in the early days I think there has to be a degree of centralization and even the zkex our infrastructure is uh is decentralized but our team is centralized at the moment but in the in the future maybe we'll have a doubt uh so our priority was the infrastructure first because we will on multi-chain

Audible decks we're basically trying to build an alternative to binance to coinbase into other cexs but fully decentralized so it's completely self-custodial I think this is a boring story because everyone's going self-custodial but we had this idea over a year ago that that's what it was going to go and we used to see her role for security so it's super secure uh you can't be censored it's completely private so we have all these kind of beautiful use cases but as a team we have to be centralized because the community is an area we don't trust the community yet to actually vote it out but we need them to build with so there's a big change in governance and a lot of organizations are at quite flat and you think of yourself more not

really of like a kind of like a builder but more of a gardener when it comes to working building community so that you kind of build the Frameworks the elements and the regulations to your community for the long term but initially you have very strong control so your branding is also part of that too all right so in terms of your competitive mode you have this like idea but you think very carefully about what exactly it is that it makes makes you stand out from the competition and in the high and other uh web free projects usually it's liquidity so if you're building for example our own example is as a DEX as a crypto kind of trading platform liquidity is the most important thing but it's very easy to get included and very easy to lose liquidity so it's not really a very strong competitive

look even though it is uh uh important for us what we realize is that even at the technology I think we have like a one year Advanced uh ahead of any other Decks that can do something similar to what we're doing honestly we have a one-year Head Start but within a year some team maybe one of you guys might catch up so the technology is not really a competitive mode at the moment for example when unusual was forked into Sushi swap a lot of people moved over to Sushi swap if they lost uses even though they're both growing as as projects but this vampire type attack it's like you know you do have the idea that you might lose you might lose users and that leads to composability as well composability is ability to kind of split yourself up

and uh have duplicate for yourself without actually harming your protocol so for zika ex our composability is basically the ability to White Label our exchange and if you're a game for a project you like you can have your own Zex decks inside your project or any other kind of uh project and ztx itself becomes invisible it's under the hood and the protocol becomes more simple now when you actually have that competitive mode you have an idea of what it is that's special about you and then you think okay what about the product markets there and this is like the thing that keeps me up at night time I'm so scared that we will we don't have competitive we don't have to product Market fit and to tell you the honest truth right now I don't really know like because my test net phase but not live

so all the uses we have like 40 000 people who are testing our product and that's like who they are really like I don't have a very detailed view if they're actually going to stay with us and it's only when you actually go live the ultimate test is when you go live people actually using a product on a regular basis and to at least to try not as possible you do some plus owner building meanings like you have a fictitious user in mind and for us it's a very truthful like average retail people count uckx right now it's too complicated Traders right now are have left the market so the average guy or girl who's gonna use TTX in the future is going to be this uh D5 guy D5 person who uses D5 so they use metamask they

buy crypto they buy nfts they're kind of a little bit technical a little bit nerdy and they like to experiment with projects so those people have certain fears certain worries in their mind for example or most recently they're scared about losing custody of their assets uh managing assets across all these different chains is a pain in the ass you guys have like stable coins and tokens across like DND Avalon Avalanche and Eve and whatever I I lost track of where my money is to be honest I have no idea and it's like that's a pain in the butt and they're also worried about like abridging hacks and losing money on their wallet all that kind of stuff and they really hate gasps everyone freaking hates Gatsby's and slippage right on

Nexus um so that's the pain points which like oh we can actually kind of solve that right so what features do we have like first off like we have self-custody all the money is in your wallet we aggregate all the stable coins together from different chains into one pot for USD and you can use that USD to buy anything from anywhere so if you want to use your USD to buy on a token on ethereum or Avalanche you do it in one place it's kind of the same thing as a CDS that's decentralized and the last thing is we have no gasket so we had a very very clean thing in mind that we have like a user in mind that pain points and what features we have to solve that problem the benefit of course of us is that you can't lose your money on ztx that's and that leads

to our marketing right our growth of the actual attractive thing is you cannot get hacked on zkex very confidently I'll say that hopefully it won't get access to the next this time next year like SPF but honestly we can't steal we can't steal your money even we can steal your money and it saves you time and hassle when you're trading right like who's bridging stuff from chain to chain and it's a nightmare I hate this stuff I just want to buy and sell in one place right so time to house it was a you have peace of mind as well essentially about all this hacking stuff as well and we save you money like there's no gas fees right and it's instant instant instant uh Native uh buying and selling as well so like no hassle of basically on that side too so you're having all these kind

of uh four Concepts in your in your project but you think very carefully about your community and you think very carefully about what community is and honestly speaking communities product it's not only the actual app you're making but the community is a product because it is one of your competitive modes in the future if you have a badass beautiful lovely community that even if you love your community as well truly you truly love them and care for them and it becomes a massive competitive mode because in for example Define gamified people follow liquidity right but they will not leave you if they have an amazing experience and a social experience in your in your app but we've seen over and over again like I said the

very beginning what are you trying to do something full-time awesome in long term if you want to be with for the long term you have your community to the point where you freaking love the people so much that you're willing to sacrifice for them and the people who know it it's like you kind of love them you know is anyone here married or in a long-term relationship you know what love is love is the feeling that other person has your back that's a feeling and everything good starts from that like if you are in love with someone it means that you have their back and they have yours so even you have a feeling from your community that they actually care about us like we're building for them and we love them and they love us back that's a competitive mode all the projects have

failed over the last few years is because the community was like this nonsense I just pretend pretend to be so that's a really really important thing now what are we doing in terms of community so we actually are have a really important thing about culture like the way we behave on our social channels is quite down to earth and very friendly and very direct all our team members are there doing their own thing uh and the most important thing for us is that when we onboard a mod we have about 15 mods we do a one-to-one session with them to really understand who they are as people so we actually are very careful about who we psych has mods and then we in terms of the organization as well we try to give them as much power

as possible and you can trust them by default to go into the right thing but in terms of a community like if any random person come to our community and joins and that's not a good thing because if you're a person you can make it toxic like very easily and if you're a good person have you guys ever been in community where there's like toxic people I think oh forget this project I hate this email it's nonsense like it was on the right you leave very quickly so what we have is the most important thing for your community is to have certain circles or membership tiers or like or like groups and it's actually quite hard to go from one group to another so we have these three groups called uh ZK newbies ziki friends and it's really hard to get from one to

another and we didn't even go on to ckoz cko G for us is gonna be like this Premium Gold Standard where you have to apply to get in and we're gonna onboard you and if you do you get out a lot of rewards that have an nft with lots of like loaded rewards you get air drops all kinds of stuff but these three members these members you misbehave you can get kicked out or drop down to the below one so in terms of your community as a product to make it exclusive you have to make it hard like easy to join but not hard to level up so that makes it more attractive like if you like if you've ever gone on a date and the other person is like way too available you think why are they so available does no one else

want them and if when someone is too available and no one else wants that thing or person then it makes you think about is it what I'm tasting really valuable in the first place because you have limited time and you maybe if you're a great husband you have lots of options as well so you want to be with someone in a dating world that other people are chasing down as well but you're lucky enough to get in so that's the key thing with Community as well it's like that feeling of being special is really really important you will stay with that Community if you are one of the special ones but you leave if you're just an ordinary guy on the street so in terms of growth sources like when you have this very cool um uh this very cool uh product then do you

know there's like very a lot of like spreadsheets and a lot of information about the growth sources but actually there are only six probably only three three to six growth sources and so when your co-founder or your team comes in and says dude like how do we get growth six individual sources and you've got to pick one and it's very tempting to pick one two three four different sort of growth sources and promise to your team hey man we're gonna like have a million followers on tour about this time next year but actually that's it's absolutely you have to pick one it's very hard to pick one those six uh those six sources basically the first one is paid advertising the second is going viral third one is content the fourth

one is Partnerships the fifth one is PR media and the sixth one is is using tokenomics as your growth model now you probably have a misunderstanding about those six now what I will do is the reason I put my oh now it has a little one what happened okay there we go the reason I have actually got my you are my uh my ID here is I have written a report for this thing but I don't have time to give you guys all the sources and all the references and all the detail but so if you just DM me either on Twitter or telegram then I will send you the report okay so basically you guys probably have a misunderstanding and for you to justify to your co-founder or to your

team that will go to pick one like let's say you double down on like let's go viral that's going to be our growth strategy like other people say no what about content yo what about SEO and like what about partnership Eco system growth and whatever like air dropping like they'll you'll just be HIPAA by all these questions you need to have a very clear understanding about who you are in the marketplace what the market is doing right now and so you're gonna pick one growth strategy at a time if you're amazing if you're amazing you can pick two now I'll give you a really good example like this viral is like I get questions all the time on my team like why do you guys why do you make like a viral tweet man like like if it was like viral I'm like that's not that easy and

that's that's kind of my luck what viral actually is is actually these growth strategies are connected to your product a viral growth strategy is is a natural fit one for example your product is used by by not only you but also your friends and family like social media is a classic viral strategy where if you're on it and you tell your friends about it and they want to get on it too that's viral it's not about like going becoming famous and doing a tick tock video on like that's not viral it means that your product is really fun to use and you want to tell all your friends about me yo like I have this amazing game it's so much fun you guys want to join it that's your growth strategy so like for example gamified with a lot of people here are

into that would be like your cool thing to make your your game so much fun and so easily shareable that people are addicted to it and they want to tell everyone you don't have to worry about the other five forces even although they're part of your strategy long term but immediately if you pick one strategy that would be like that that would be that one and for us we don't always want to do at the moment so when you're really really near you try a little bit about all those six goal strategies you try a little bit of game marketing you try it a little bit of viral you try a little bit of content right through a little bit of punishments a little bit of per media a little bit of tokenomics and then you as a marketer or growth person you track what the hell happened what the hell

which one is hitting is the attraction and you're like all right let's take a bet this one is the best one content was like pretty good like let's go double down content and you hit hard for like three four months you continue tracking if it messes up switch to another strategy but you have to like do a little bit of experimentation right now we are experimenting with and I got a fair idea which one we're gonna go for but we're still experimenting for those things so that will give you an idea of how to uh grow in terms of source what do you do exactly you have the time right like you can't do everything okay go to market strategy is the one thing that every VC when you go to

funding they'll ask you about like what's your what's your go to market strategy and people come up with all kinds of and honestly I I have these sleeveless knife the other day because uh everything was happening in the marketplace right and I realized that I'll go to market strategy was completely all because we uh high frequency Traders as our first kind of like o strategy the most important one and we know a lot of guys who are in trading I was having lunch with them a whole lot week last week and everyone pulled back from the market right now every single high frequency Bible trainer or like professional trainer right now is like oh he's really really cautious right now they're all de-risking everyone's pulling out from the market so for us what the hell do we do like do we just like sit quietly for

three months but actually in a way the wave thing is the marketplace is actually not a favor like SPF I know everyone freaking hates them but I kind of like him because he has made our story much more attractive think about self-custody decentralization that made our story so much more attractive so we're getting all these phone calls from everyone in Austin everyone's awesomeness when you guys want to go live I want to trade on ztx I was like uh we've never thought about you as a user actually we're thinking about all these high frequency Traders instead so I'll go to market storage was messed up and what we realized on mistake was our legal state it was we did not dig deep enough into the users but when we're evaluating into the habits to really understand how and

why and when they use their product for example one of my co-founders is buying like one easy per day like um like that's his strategy right now and I was like oh so are your ultimate thing at the moment like this buy one a day because buy one a day like I was like oh then you're kind of a case study of like someone who's like okay actually accumulating in the better Market which but we don't have any automation on our platform right now we just have like a decks like oh we should do like old information like you know this time every day or based on a certain trigger you also buy Ultra by Auto Buyers and you just send forget so we never thought about him and I was like you wouldn't

use zkx because you didn't have that functionality you needed so like that would have been a really nice uh uh insight to pull out like another example is social training like one of my friends they have this social group where they share kind of signals about what to buy and they're using telegram at the moment and they're only using different dexes but what if we integrate that social and objects as well so people can kind of like track each other and have groups and I was like oh that we're kind of missing that future too so we're actually missing a lot of small features because we didn't understand deeply enough our eyes were on the wrong thing and we dig in deep enough to really really really really understand how involved when people are using their product for example if you're building a game is your game the game which you would

use when you've got like 10 minutes on the toilet you know like you actually like if it was then you want to design your game to be playable within 10 minutes like even the complete one level or like do one toss in 10 minutes you guys like a four hour game you you messed up like you don't have product Market fit you will not go to your marketing strategy or be a failure because you didn't sign it on the right way like another example is like you know when you go on the streets and stuff even at night time you hold these kids sitting in cafes and they're all over their mobile phones and a lot of them are playing together right in circles and they were usually playing the same game I've seen them all the time so that would be like where you

would you know make sure your game was like easily shareable it has bluetooth enabled in case you didn't have Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi or uh with technology it's like you the usage would drive your product okay so that's really important so the last thing is about tactics and people often jump straight tactics without thinking very deeply about growth sources and go to market strategy and that's all the freaking waste of time if you do them these tactics without thinking about the deep thought about your users uh in the first place and everyone knows about funneling right like oh like you know like typically three stages awareness consideration and decision making and that is still valid in web free people like to dismiss web 2 and technology and

classic marketing and advertising but honestly if you're if you come from that background a lot of these principles still apply in web free as well and what you'll see over the next one year is a lot of failures which is great and you'll see a convergence of tactics of both old school tactics and musical tactics and version them together for example the airdrop uh was like you know the classic uh grow strategy back in the day right let's throw out some tokens to everyone but it's such like Aptos is a really good health is no one here if you have for us but like it's so stupid what they did honestly like they just gave away all their tokens and most people just dumped on our thoughts token and this they didn't actually build the

community around it there's no loyalty there's no retention whatsoever people just there to like collect four or five thousand dollars for an nft and they got the hell out of them it's like ridiculous instead of that they should have thought about like you know drip eating their tokens maybe for actual usage so like you know over the year or two years of music of using Aptos you might get like you know a few thousand dollars that would be a much better effective long-term strategy but they didn't think that intentions right do you think they actually give a like for the long term maybe there's gonna make some like money over the next year and get the hell out of there and like start some new project so like it's really about you like what is your intention that in drives your strategy for growth and security they have their

strategy in their mind like they would make some quick money in a year or two and they'll be like chilling and like the farmers or something uh next year so like you as a person fine you can do that too but it shows what kind of person you want like the other kind of like growth tactics are the classic ones like SEO uh social media and email surprisingly everyone shits on email but even was actually we have like maybe 15 000 people on our email list and then you'd be surprised most people read out and read the email like when we post on Twitter and other places like we get really relatively low engagement rates compared to email email is still really good and and I think SEO old school boring strategy is still really good most people make shitty content so like it's still like a really really good

source of traffic and everything and the very complicated thing I have a kind of this uh map of tools so like in terms of tactics we need some really good tools for web 3 it's in in the old school days you had this very clear um tool structure for like SAS tools which give you a very clear idea about the user so if you know everything about that for that person like where they are what they eat what they like uh the media challenge they use instead now we have wallet IDs and very little information and even recently people are against giving away giving out more and more information like for example like uni swap are collecting a lot of information secretly everyone is kind of hitting them they actually lost uh uh

like a revenue because of that over the last one week like they went down like 15 because people are scared of using uniform now metamask recently kind of was kind of unveil is secretly tracking IP addresses and your wallet IDs and everything they have this thing called service called infuro which is inside you can actually switch to another provider if you want to but they're tracking your IVs they know exactly where you are what you're doing and how they and who you're paying so like as a crypto person you really want to use metamask anymore so like these things actually really matter like having a very free native schools for some purposes is really important so they're doing old school cookie tracking all this kind of weird stuff right so a tools coming through categories my crms uh data analytics and communication and

messaging so CRM we're using this uh system called crew 3 which is also like a growth platform as well and I find that to be really good but there's actually lots of other others as well so I'll finish up there and if you DM me I'll send you all the research there's a lot more like links a lot more pages a lot more text you can study on your study next week when you go back home and you're relaxed and look up all the URLs and I will share to you what we're doing and also share like our growth and like at some point we did something and something happened and some other points we tried other stuff and other other things didn't happen as well so it's very much a an attitude of having good intentions

um loving your users your community growing with them using them to grow as well and actually trying to give back to them in the right way but also as a result you will become rich in the future as well you can do things the right way okay so thank you very much and see you around in the conference cheers [Applause]