How to create a 70k-strong Web3 community in a bear market: Case Study
Shared and sponsored by BDC Consulting
Hey-hey! Ana from HUMANS is here 🖖
We frequently knock your inbox with some fundraising tips and hacks. And we believe that creating a successful fundraising strategy involves a combination of well-thought-out elements.
How about focusing on a less obvious aspect today? It’s community building. Not just the standard 'build it and they will come' spiel, but an actual example of how a Web3 project can onboard 70K+ new members.
This case study is shared by Ales Kavalevich, Managing Partner at BDC Consulting. Since 2017, they have helped launch 90 projects, attracting more than $80 million and 3 million users.
The Case Study
Given:
— A Web2 gaming studio with no experience or brand recognition in the Web3 space.
Needed:
— Create a strong and vibrant Web3 community for launching the game from the ground up.
Key Results after 4 months:
One of the most active communities in GameFi.
35k followers on X, 70k in Discord, 7 active regional chats, hundreds of daily messages;
10,000 free NFTs are minted out in 2 minutes on Magic Eden, 68% unique holders;
Ranked in the top 3 by volume on Magic Eden in the first 24h after the mint;
2,500+ sales on OpenSea on day one.
Quick note for investors: don’t miss this project! 🌟
We’ve recently started collaborating with the RHIZOME project — AI-powered simulations for professional up-skilling, co-created with leading industry experts.
Behind it — two co-founders that previously drove global expansion of top Web3 media Cointelegraph, launched OTC crypto exchange crypto360, and managed $81M market cap Everscale blockchain.
And now RHIZOME is raising $1,000,000 in a pre-seed round. If you want to take part in this journey, get to know the team better, or ask them your burning questions, we’ve got you covered. Find their pitch deck below with everything you might need 😉
Crafting a Detailed Strategy
The key to success lies in a detailed day-by-day strategy executed by a well-coordinated team. Ales emphasized the importance of aligning each team member's activities with common goals and specific KPIs.
The plan contained:
Defining the financial objective and how to reach it.
Market research: Identifying the benchmarks for mint revenue and collection parameters and setting a realistic goal.
Stripping the goal down to clear metrics: NFT price and number, community size, WL size, and conversion target at each stage.
Analyzing the Benchmark projects and asking their team members via Linkedin / X to provide a consultation.
Drawing up a step-by-step, month-by-month implementation plan.
Defining the team structure (lead community manager, community managers, collab managers, etc.) capable of achieving the goal and setting the budget.
The implementation plan included:
Influencer posts on X & Telegram to gain trust in the community
Quests and WL spot giveaways
AMAs and Twitter Spaces 2 or 3 times a week (starting from the 2nd sprint)
Selecting projects & guilds for collaborations
Medium blog posts
Media placements
Months 1 & 2: Starting from scratch
During the first two months, the initial focus was on creating an X profile and setting up a Discord server, building up 100+ Twitter Score, creating a core community, and planning activities to attract users.
The team faced a challenge during a QuestN launch, managing Discord bots cleanup. It involved monitoring and manual removal of bots, emphasizing the importance of protection measures. To identify bots, they monitored community activity to find repeated behavior patterns and removed bots manually based on the joining time, nicknames, repeated IPs etc. They also removed users who were inactive for over a week.
Tip: Set additional protection at the entrance and various filters that can be set up on Discord. It will help you avoid this bad work later.
Building Twitter Score
The Twitter Score metric is a vital factor for gaining trust in the NFT and Web3 community. It shows how much influencers, projects, and investment funds are interested in the project.
Tips that can help grow your Twitter Score:
TweetScout rating should be at least 100 during the active community growth stage.
Influencers provide the initial base for the rating.
Ask everyone you know (influencers, projects, funds, advisers, partners, contractors) to follow the project on X.
Fast growth can help you get featured on the site's top early-stage projects or the general top trending list.
Discord Growth Strategy
Recruiting the initial 10,000 Discord members involved a multi-faceted approach. This result was achieved by:
Building a core of 50+ members using shilling, alpha groups, and influencers who cover alpha-stage projects
Starting an invite campaign with OG roles as rewards
Launching a quest to get 1k+ followers (via QuestN, Zealy, etc.)
Launching audience exchange collaborations with Tier-3 projects; once 5k members are reached, starting collabs with Tier-2 projects.
💡Pro tip: For collaborations, choose projects of comparable size. Don’t try to reach Tier-1 projects from the beginning: start with Tier-3, gradually moving towards Tier-2 and Tier-1.
Months 3 & 4: The Road to 70,000
Intense preparations for the NFT mint characterized the third and fourth months. A day-by-day roadmap for community activities, influencer engagements, AMA sessions on Twitter and Spaces, and the announcement of the free mint were meticulously planned. Collaboration with local ambassadors, directory listings, and increased blogger collaboration expanded the reach.
💡 Pro tip: Collab forms can become an excellent tool for effective collaborations. Although 80-90% of responses may be irrelevant and spam, the rest 10-20% may be precious.
Month 5: Preparing for Paid Mint and Game Launch
With the game launch planned for the first quarter of 2024, the focus remains on community engagement, ongoing preparations, and attracting an audience from Web2.
Lessons Learned
Bloggers and collaborotaions:
Influencer collaborations should start as early as possible, and the partner bloggers should actively engage with the project on X. Their followers will see that they follow the project, which will stir their interest.
An open collab form in X and Discord generates a stream of submissions by bloggers/influencers who are open to collaborations on very simple terms. Many of them are garbage (make sure to run tests & identify fake followers), but there are also quality accounts that perform better than regular bloggers.
Collaborations should be held progressively, starting with Tier-3 and ending with Tier-1 projects.
Avoiding mistakes:
Making sure math is precise, double-checking, and testing complex mechanics can prevent costly mistakes. For example, the BDC team faced an unexpected eight-fold increase in the referral program budget.
Bots can disrupt various activities like quests, rewards, invites, referrals, WLs, and the minting process. This can harm collaborations with other successful projects since they rely on the community being transparent. Dealing with and removing bots from the community can be tough, emphasizing the need to have good bot protection from the start of the project. Unfortunately, there's no affordable tool available for automating this work effectively.
Did you like the case study? BDC Consulting can help you deliver your own success story! Reach out to them and you’ll get crypto-native experts in GTM strategies and product launches, including token sales and NFT mints, helping you grow. It just costs a call.
Alright, wrapping it up here!
Cheers,
Anastasia, Head of Production @ HUMANS
Catch us on Twitter | Telegram | LinkedIn (because stalking us is the best way to get some alpha 🕵️♀️)