Onboarding Millions to Digital Collectibles

Transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] oh this is working hi my name is Mirella and I am a senior engineering manager at Reddit and I've been working on the collectible avatars project since the beginning so it's really going to be a pleasure for me to introduce you to our journey of onboarding millions of users

to digital collectibles so start with a demo so you get a feel for how the project looks like and I'm going to bring you back last year when we started thinking about the goals of the project and the landscape was really interesting back then and then in hindsight I'm going to show you the critical user experience decisions that led to Our Success our wide adoption first who here is a Reddit user great and do you have an avatar our regular one wow very many lurkers I love it so uh

the Avatar has been um on Reddit for a long time so Reddit very short is a community focused social platform and users um are pseudo-anonymous but they have a way to express their identity with the Avatar so on the left side they can mix and match different parts of it and it will show their unique design on comments and their profile and in July last year it's just about a year ago we released a collectible avatar version so those were blockchain backed they came with an nft minted on

polygon and we distribute them as free and purchasable Creator collections so you can see how the collectible looks like on the right side users get to see it on polygon scan and ipfs and there's a unique ID to The Limited collection all right so first really we released our creator collection and this was a storefront that was available right on the mobile app and the web app on Reddit and it was very affordable so the Collectibles were between five dollars and now up to 250 dollars

and now I'm gonna show you the experience but think as if you're a user who has no idea about blockchain let alone having a wallet or any amount of crypto so on the right side you go to our store you select your design let's say chompo and then you're ready to purchase if you've never had a wallet we create one for you there's multiple ways to secure it it's called The Reddit volt in the app and then you're ready to just purchase your first ever nft ride on mobile with in-app purchases

and now you're a blockchain user and I'm gonna also show you our free collections those were a lot more abundant but we're still Limited users were able to earn them if their High Karma highly engaged users or we had events as well and we worked with several Partners like NFL or rabbits the experience is even simpler you pick your design you click to claim and again we create a wallet for you if you don't have one and there you have it you can now use collectible avatars within Reddit awesome and um here are the results this

is outdated by several months but artificial numbers I can share we onboarded over 8 million users to our wallets and to digital Collectibles and made over one million of Revenue to creators and our creator programs were small we had from 30 to 100 creators and these numbers don't even show the full picture there's a slew of Highly engaged users not just owning but also using their collectibles on Reddit cool so back in 2022 last year the landscape was a little different and we're the first

ones to think about our goals and how can we onboard a wide range of users we wanted our creator collections to be really successful to make money for creators so building a project that is just for a small number of uh crypto enthusiasts was not negotiable and I remember the first time I minted my first nft um it took me an hour to figure out how to create a wallet what the recovery phrase was it was a little scary and my first nft was free so I only had to pay a hundred dollars in gas fees and it took me another hour to figure

out how to to show my nft in my wallet so I was dedicated but we couldn't have expected that from our users so a sub goal to achieve this wide adoption was a really straightforward user experience all right so we were working in a really ambiguous space we had to figure out what wallet to use how to secure it how people pay for their Collectibles and how the experience is going to be once they own it so I'm gonna drive you through um all of these biggest decisions and the thinking behind them and which ones were critical for us

first I alluded to this but reducing friction was something we did very intentionally we looked with every screen on porn onboarding a user with a microscope it has to be very simple and very clear what people were doing so that amount of reducing friction was costly we had to spend extra design cycles and a lot of extra engineering for example in order for people to onboard for under 30 seconds we had to create our own wallet at the time we were one of the first to have a non-custodial wallet secured by a

password because this is something that users were familiar with we couldn't take them through the Journey of figuring out recovery phrases similar similarly we had to use Fiat purchases both on web with stripe and mobile with in-app purchases and again we're one of the first ones where you can get an NFD right within your IOS and Android app and that one was also really interesting in-app purchases are not meant for um are not meant for limited item Goods that are you know more expensive so our Engineers spend a lot of time figuring out how to use in-app purchases to sell

a hundred of something that's in very high demand if you're interested I can tell you later the last thing was that the blockchain is an external system that we don't control so I can tell you the first time I remember the first time when I tested our prototype I took the app and I clicked to claim and there was a spinner it was a very well designed spinner but it was spinning for a while so I didn't think that that's experience we can ship to a majority of our users so we built our experience in the way that when you claim you get your benefits you get your collectible avatars right away and then

we built a system that asynchronously will query the mintix state the transfer State and we'll update the collectible metadata once the nft is minted cool so another thing I wanted to emphasize is how we message the Collectibles to users the first time they were interacting with the experience it was funny a lot of the times in news articles they pointed out what that we didn't use the word nft and that's true but there's a lot more to it we wanted to really portray the value

the users are getting with Collectibles and the experience that they'll be receiving so first Collectibles are based on a core familiar Beloved Community feature the avatar second for the first time we had artists draw them and they had very much Unique Designs that we've never had before with this product and we had extra benefits that we wanted to showcase for identity expression we had standout in comments and profile and the final bit is that you're actually getting an extra layer of value with your blockchain backed Avatar you

get to feel you own it you get to see it on the blockchain and transfer it so it's an important distinction The Way We messaged it is that you're getting a collectible experience that is blockchain backed and you're not getting an nft with other stuff and okay so now we onboarded people with a very uh low friction right we showed them we marketed the value that they'll be getting the other thing that we really wanted to build was a holistic experience of ownership it's not just about onboarding but it's about sustaining a very easy

collector's experience so the core components of it we integrated natively within the app as I mentioned we already had the wallet called the Reddit volt so users are able to go on it at any time view their Collectibles manage them learn more get education we also had the App Store so for everyone who wanted to purchase more it was all available on the Reddit app uh in app store and we also decided to build free transfers for anyone who is not a blockchain Enthusiast they're able to leverage the fact that this is an nft of course not everything is worth it to

build natively so we did Leverage the rich ecosystem of web 3 for resales we used our we use the nft marketplaces like openc all right so to wrap it up with the collectible avatars we onboarded millions of users to digital Collectibles and the blockchain and the critical decisions that led to this wide adoption were the minimal friction especially upon onboarding we also emphasize the value that users are getting even though it was under 30 seconds this is still something that

millions of people have to decide and invest in so showing why they should care was vital and finally for onboarding and owning we integrated everything natively and now that I think about it if we made any of these decisions differently I'm not convinced that we have gotten this result all right and I am not done I have a bonus content here this is not something we decided or planned but I am really um I find it's a rewarding experience working on this project by looking at

the rich Community created from our collectible Avatar project there's a lot of users who use collectible avatars across Reddit but we have a dedicated couple of subreddits for example of our on our collectible outdoor subreddits there's 30 000 organic members and their constantly submitting their collections their mix and match designs artists are engaging back with the community they're rewarding their members with airdrops all on their own and the most interesting bit is there's already people building on top of the ecosystem they are building different tools on collectible avatars and

investing back so that others can have even richer experience and that for me is the final thought here I think Collectibles it's not just a solo experience it's not just about ownership like an artwork you can put in your living room it's not just about the potential additional benefits like getting a premium seat at a concert it's also about Community interacting together investing back and building together so this is something that we can add on top of all of these other pieces that we're improving uh on web3 products cool and that's all about I had to show

you I'm curious if you guys have any additional questions one over here yeah I thank you for that uh do you have any idea of those eight million plus wallets how many actually went on to have non-collectible related usage like on polygon blockchain what do you mean by none Oh you mean trading and things like any any other like non-redit related usage yeah I think that's um you know part of it is like transferability and things like that we did have resales I don't

know how many to be honest but it is are publicly available on the blockchain how much um the trading activity was I think there's a definitely like a core community that was interested a lot in the designs as well and that we observe in my opinion is kind of like a really big use case but I don't know exactly the percentages of the other um yeah thank you thank you for the presentation did you put in place specific teams for

supports like if a client has an issue or has questions yeah that's a really good point uh we actually do have support we have extensive help articles on our website that we continue to grow and we do have support where users can have tickets ask questions and navigate some of this it is not a big team that's what I will tell you so so far it it has been available to users but at least like not costing um as much trouble as far as I can tell uh hi Maria thanks for the talk big fan

of the Reddit ux with respect to collectibles but I feel like your presentation jumped a little bit uh straight into how you design around the limitations of the current blockchain ux could you elaborate a little bit on why you choose to do it on train in the first place yeah so as I mentioned we did have the Avatar project I think um something that we realized is that ownership is really important to experiment with and this is something that was already into the ready DNA moderators uh are something moderators are Builders of the community we

actually did have a blockchain project even before with Community points um so we thought that if creators are actually building the Avatar and users are buying them we should um not own them within the Reddit ecosystem so you buy it but then you can do whatever you want in a way with it great I think this was the last question yeah thank you so much feel free to reach out on LinkedIn [Applause] [Music]