Your dApp Is Boring: How to Stand Out in the World of Web3

Transcript

next speaker uh who will do a talk called your app is boring how to stand out in the world of web 3 and your speaker give him a round of applause is Nathan Snell awesome well good morning uh everybody here at eth Barcelona appreciate uh appreciate the time today uh you know as you said I'm Nathan Snell I'm co-founder and CEO of rilon you know Ron's web three marketing platform and really spend a lot of time helping projects grow so helping convert users helping grow Community uh but that said I don't really want to spend time talking about rilon today I'm here actually to talk about uh really you all and the projects that are here the projects that are building in the space because honestly that's what's most

important uh before I do that however I want to do a little bit of housekeeping um so first I'm curious just uh a little bit of interaction here by raise of hands uh how many of you have seen the rilon QR code or actually done some of the quests that are present here at the event that so curious raise raise your hand awesome so that that about matches that we've actually seen that about 30 to 35% of all the folks that have been at this conference uh have done different quests I think we've seen about almost 700 uh a little bit more than 700 quests have been started overall which is really great I mean when you think about a conference the engagement has been awesome we've been giving out prizes the feedback has been really cool uh if you haven't done it so we are actually at 300 p.m. today um

releasing an nft it's personalized based on what you've done at the conference the different quests that you've done and there's a rarity to it so if you haven't actually scanned anything uh I'll throw this up I think next next we'll try this one no do I go back not sure how to get next here I've only got two directions to go there we go thank you I don't know if that was me or not so this is free XP if you have not started or you have not played but you want an awesome nft and or you are playing the game and you want to get higher in the leaderboard this boosts your Rarity so this is part of how it works you can get sort of engag in the app and everything so this is a little Easter egg as a thank you for for coming

to the session so I'll give that a minute um what we're going to talk about today though is not quests and Easter eggs and fun things um we're talking about you know what makes a project boring what makes a d boring and really how do you go about engaging Community how do you go about growing so to do that again on the uh interactive side here I'm going to ask you guys a series of questions you don't have to respond it's okay don't don't feel any pressure uh but I'm I'm going to actually call out a number of sort of phrases and words what I want you to do is to think about what is the DAP that you think I'm describing as I describe these things right so what's the DAP that you think I'm describing so if I said this is the easiest way to trade or you can earn

more fees it's the most gas efficient trading it's got the best slippage prevention or the best pricing what dap do you think I'm describing is it super Sushi swap is it Unis swap is it matcha maybe it's 1 in I know it's unfair it's a trick question it's all of them because this is actually how these daps if you go and look at their sites or frankly if you look at a lot of the dexes out there describe what's great about their decks to be clear I am not at all trying to you know trying to insult these decks is I love them all you know we we've got friends you know at all these F at all these dexes we use them regularly so let's sort of let's shift into another example with this so

your shoes are boring right same idea I happen to like shoes uh that's why I have on brand shoes so again I feel like I can poke fun at this same way that I do plenty of Trades so same exercise right so I'm going to just I'm going to lay out some stuff that describes shoes and I want you to think about what what brand do you think I'm describing when it comes to shoes so they're Innovative right they're comfortable honestly that one I think is funny because I don't I would never buy somebody that said you can get the most uncomfortable shoes give us money that seems odd but they're durable classic it's got celebrity endorsements right all great things like am I talking about Nike or am I talking about Adidas and again the irony here is that

these are the most common words that both of these companies use to describe their shoes so the point with this right is that not so much that you should use this particular language uh but it's that if you think about Nike and you think about adidos or you think about Unis swap for example these are all big companies right I mean Nike is a global billion dollar company like they clearly have done a great job differentiating they clearly have an awesome audience um you know and yet right the language is actually fairly similar so how do they how do they not be boring right if you look at Unis swap or one inch right clearly standing out clearly have great products you know what are they doing to not be boring and honestly it's it's all about how you engage or how engaged your community is right that that's what they

spend a lot of time focusing on because what they realize is that in reality engagement creates loyalty right so engagement creates loyalty and that's where when you think about something like a Nike and the drops that they do or if you think about a Unis swap for instance you know these are these are companies these are projects that have spent a lot of time not just focused on the things that they say but on creating an awesome and engaging and amazing experience for their users and that's not just user experience although that's important um you know it's also the way that they actually interact with their community so in this case for example if you actually look at Unis swap and I wrote about this actually in January on Bank list um you know with Unis swap so they they actually helped Pioneer the airdrop

and what they did is one part of why I say they pioneered is they're one of the early ones to do it but what was so unique about what Unis swap did is unlike many projects today they didn't actually tell anybody they were going to do it they actually just one day announced and said hey by the way if you've been trading with us there's a bunch of tokens that are waiting for you right you know you can govern with it and so on and so forth so it's was this retroactive thing that they did and as a result right it built a huge amount of loyalty you know within their Community now it also did Drive user acquisition and dve awareness because suddenly people are like wait what just happened well I want some of that and they traded and so on so it did help with the

awareness side the user acquisition side but it showed a strong emphasis right from a crypto standpoint on the community the value of driving loyalty and that sort of thing you know Nike and aidas again they do the same sort of thing right of you know of thinking about how do they drive loyalty not just try to create attention awareness how do they create raving fans because at the end of the day you if you don't have a lot of Raving fans if you don't have customers that are sticking around like you're you're not likely to succeed so let's make this a little bit more tactical so we're going to jump into the growth funnel because at the end of day we've been kind of talking at a strategic level uh but when it comes to growing and being successful as a project and everything else you do have

to think about growth you have to think about your audience and to me one of the most amazing things right is if you look at a Unis swap if you look at a 1 inch you know if you look at Nike uh you know they're like they think about all the stages of this funnel but what's surprising is that a lot of times a lot of the projects we talk about in this space in the web three space in the crypto space they tend to be overly emphasized here on awareness and awareness is great right it's important at the end of the day if nobody knows about you then you're not going to be particularly successful however awareness is also arguably the easiest part right you kind of just you load money into a machine whether that's ads whether that's sponsorships whether that's you know endorsements you know

what have you and awareness sort of happens you know and like I'm oversimplifying some but at the end of the day it's sort of the easiest part of the process right there's a lot of different ways that you can create awareness the challenge though right is if you think about again like the Best Brands out there really they spend most of their time spent focused on the conversion and loyalty side where most web3 projects forget that aspect of it right they spend so much time you know trying to pump or you know or being you know exposed or getting awareness they forget to think about okay so now I have you know a thousand people that you know that come to my site or to my you know to my adap to my community how do I activate them how do I make sure that

experience is great how do I keep them loyal and frankly and we'll actually show some data on this uh in a minute here if you think about blur for example right so blur if you're not familiar is an nft Marketplace you they focused on Pro Traders we'll kind of talk about that in a little bit but blurs rise to success and it isn't because they did the best awareness it's actually because they spent the best time focused on conversion and loyalty they call it Seasons it's loyalty right they spent the most time and they made the one of the best experiences in in crypto and web 3 today around how do you keep users in engaged how do you make sure that they continue to stay engaged you know how do we make sure the community is growing that they're having fun and they're getting value right so that's

sort of that's some of kind of the importance there you know Nike again has has a similar sort of focus so it's something that we can kind of learn we can borrow ideas from the web two side while going into you know or bring it into the web three space so am I broken again I don't know which direction I'm is that me is that that's not me there it is okay so uh just to to continue to make this tactical here uh I like to kind of start off high let's give us sort of the frame of thought now let's get into something really practical right so if you've got a project and you're wanting to go and you want to focus on growing you want to

stand out right the way that some of these other projects are the way that the Unis swaps of the world the blur of the world are you know to me and there's a lot more to it than this but from a 20-minute standpoint there's sort of three areas that you can really spend time and focus on that I think are great starting points it really lays the foundation of how you can grow from a project standpoint and the first is identify your ideal customer profile or What's called the ICP I can't tell you I'd say probably 90% of the projects that we talk with um you know we always like to start off with a question of like what's what's your goal what are you trying to accomplish right and most folks right I mean especially if you're earlier stage and you're saying oh great well like I

want I want to build awareness right I want to bring in users and everything else awesome you should like I mean if you don't have people coming in that's a problem um you know again converting them is is a harder problem but nonetheless if you don't have people coming in that's a problem so we ask okay great well what kind of users do you want and honestly the the answer most of the time is well like everyone it's like okay well like if you're a DEX and I said great so you know you're a DEX now who's your ideal Target anybody who trades crypto that's a large Market but that's really difficult to actually penetrate right because ultimately if you're targeting everybody you're not really targeting anybody you can't really have like a good conversation with somebody if you're just if if the answer is oh I just want to talk to

everybody so it needs to be specific right so on as a contrast you know if you're a DEX and your answer is oh well I'm targeting retail specific traders that on average trade less than $5,000 per trade okay like is that a smaller Market to start in yes but like you actually can say something that's meaningful to them because gas efficiency probably matters a lot to somebody who's on who's on average doing a $5,000 trade right because suddenly that GS into the profits quite a lot if the gas fees are really high so that's some of the idea of that ideal customer profile you know the second one is need to use you know what I like to call your secret weapon and your secret weapon I'd say again in the web three space it's often overlooked um it's frankly it's your dap right it's your app if it's a

project if you're a project or a protocol rather you know it's your site um and and again if you look at blur as an example and I'll show some you know some date on this in a second you know blur did a fantastic job using their secret weapon using their site right even on the IC side on the the ideal customer profile right blur said hey look we are targeting nft traders to start and then they released the lending product right which again is very much geared towards folks that are trying to do sort of prot trading from an nft standpoint so again they have a very targeted audience that they started with and on the same token Blair has the seasum system they've got a great website they've got you know different sort of onboarding things they come up to convert users these are all tools

right of using the know their sort of secret weapon their own site to be able to drive conversions and to drive loyalty with the season stuff and yet when we look at our data it's amazing because actually if you if you look at uh the number of uh like the number of say of daps that are out there that have what I'd call atrisk users um you if you look at how many of those atrisk users before they fully churn come back to the daps site before they churn it's at least 60% on average so that means if you think about if you had 5,000 active users or if you had 5,000 users that were at risk of churning in a given month that means that more than half of those users are actually coming back to your dap or to your to try to re-engage with you and

ultimately don't and end up turning out that's why I say this is sort of the secret weapon right it's one of the easiest tools that you have and most available tools that doesn't really cost you money to be able to re-engage these users so if we look at blur as an example so this is some data from our analytic side of our system so one of the things that I I wanted to kind of really drill in on here is I I looked at the number of Highly engaged blur users so I defined this this my own definition of these were users that have used blur for 3 months in a row so that's they've traded they have you know they've listed something they've bit you theyve placed a bid on something you know 3 months in a row so this month last month and the

month before so that's a pretty high degree of engagement right this is somebody who is actively engaged with blur actively using the products and yes and if you look at the chart like the number goes down what you begin to see right is it starts the plateau and then you begin to hit the consistent and true user base right and then actually you start to see it growing right so you can see this idea of moving sort of out of call the awareness boring category into my true customer base my true you know ideal customer profile and then some of this too I think is frankly driven by season 2's you know likely coming to you know to a closer fruition so you see the activity begin to pick back up but again that actually shows the power of the secret weapon if you will of them using

their site of them driving you know more engagement and more activity so it's pretty awesome and frankly there's some other really interesting data too where if you actually look at openc um you know openc actually has pretty significant engagement even across the blur user base so I think it's something like at least 15% of blur users are still actively using openc for instance so that kind of shows another example of you know like the power of actually using the DAP itself to drive engagement and that's without open see having like a loyalty or a true sort of loyalty system like blur does so that's using your secet weapon right that's some of the some of the power benefit there so last one here um it's important to measure right so if we think back to the funnel you know if you don't know you know how many people are coming to

your Gap you know if you don't have if you don't if you can't measure your awareness if you don't know how you know what your conversion percentage is if you don't know how many users are staying or leaving it's really hard to stand out right it's really easy to fall into the boring category when you don't know if you're being boring right and measurement is sort of a fundamental tool to be able to understand well like are you standing out or are you more in that boring category and frankly like if you look at it like the the crypto landscape is littered with dexes that you know haven't measured and don't stand out right and as a result you know they're not at sort of the level of you know a Unis swap or a macho or a 1 inch you know or even call it a calot or a

quick swap or or what have you right and it's because you they're not doing sort of the right things to effectively measure and understand what are the things that are working and what are the things that may not be working so I wanted to make sure we had some qu some time for questions here at the end um I don't know how to switch to the question thing but if there's any questions in the audience happy to take it and I guess I'll sort of wrap up too if you think about the things that we talked about and even what we you know really focus on so we have a lot of analytics around daps around different projects you've seen and sort of experienced our embedded Quest you know capabilities you know all of that right is geared towards the same thing it's geared towards being able to

you know understand what's actually going on so that way at the end of the day you can actually take action on it you know our our philosophy you know tends to be one of you know data is awesome and it's great but actions are better right at the end of the day you know you can know plenty about who you're about who your users are but if you can't do anything about it if you can't re-engage them if you can't make them loyal doesn't really matter so with that I thank everybody for your [Applause] time