⭐️ This article is part of Layer3’s series for product-oriented growth professionals in web3. DM @meowllark on Telegram to join our community and connect with others on all things web3 product, growth, and marketing.
If you’re a product manager or growth leader in web3, you’ve probably thought about innovative ways to grow and scale your web3 company.
However, the current tools that dominate in the industry, especially when it comes to user acquisition, retention, and engagement, are sorely lacking. I’m referring specifically to channels like Discord and Twitter, which crypto products massively over-index on when it comes to turbo-charging their growth or marketing campaigns.
As the lead Product Marketing Manager at Layer3, I wanted to share some indispensable tools currently available for anyone responsible for growing a web3 product.
In this article, you’ll learn how to use tools beyond just Twitter and Discord to drive important metrics like Monthly Active Users (MAU), user and customer retention, as well as overall user engagement. Let’s begin!
Thirdweb offers a powerful overall web3 development framework, including a developer-friendly SDK, ready-to-deploy smart contracts, UI components, storage solutions, and more.
Don’t fear if you’re not a developer, though. Thirdweb is designed so that anyone can deploy a smart contract from just a couple of clicks. As a product marketer, I was able to set up a complete NFT collection and minting system from Thirdweb’s user-friendly dashboard.
Creating an NFT collection is also just one of Thirdweb’s various pre-built contracts that anyone can deploy. You could theoretically even deploy a contract for an NFT marketplace or an on-chain voting system, if you wanted to. The documentation on each contract is clear and concise, and lets you know exactly how to get started.
Aside from pre-built contracts, Thirdweb is a great way to empower your developers, as it saves them the time and resources from having to develop certain web3 user-facing or customer-facing elements from scratch. If you’re just building out your product and want to grow in web3, you can consider implementing Thirdweb’s plug-and-play UI components, such their Connect Wallet button component, or their component to help render media stored on IPFS, a decentralized file storage system.
Developers can also explore Thirdweb’s EVM and Solana SDKs, their GamingKit, Storage Solutions, Auth, and more. All of these resources are built to be integrated into what you’re already working on.
Without any developer intervention, I used Thirdweb’s NFT “Edition Drop” contract to create a collection of ERC-1155 NFTs that I wanted to reward to Layer3’s earliest supporters. Within Thirdweb, I was also able to mint, transfer, airdrop, and burn these NFTs, and upload new artwork that I wanted to feature in the same collection.
For a first-time user, the UI/UX on the Dashboard can be somewhat intimidating, as it’s built to be integrated within your product. Distinguishing between the various contracts were also somewhat confusing at times, especially as some of the NFT contract types are extremely similar.
Regardless, we still currently use Thirdweb’s NFT contracts as a core part of Layer3’s NFT reward mechanism for Quests. The contracts are durable and hold up well even at scale — we’ve minted hundreds and thousands of NFTs for our users and have never ran into any issues with Thridweb’s lazymint function!
Once you have a Discord server, what do you do next?
There is no shortage of Discord bots that allow you to carry out a wide range of community-facing functions, including everything from token-gating your Discord server (e.g. Guild, Collab.land), community automation and role management (e.g. MEE6 bot), support ticketing (e.g. Ticket Tool), and even a continuous Lo-Fi hip hop audio player.
We’ve tried almost every single Discord tool out there, but we haven’t been able to find an integrated tool that really addressed the core concern of what many users flock to Discord for: support.
A few months prior to publishing this article, a spike of new users on our platform resulted in a skyrocketing number of tickets and requests sent directly in Discord. We knew we had to find a solution that was both Discord and web3-native.
Then, we found Mava.
Mava is a community support platform that integrates natively into Discord and is built specifically with the needs of web3 organizations in mind. Users who run into issues with your protocol or platform can directly open support tickets through Discord, which are then funneled to the Mava dashboard for your community team to handle.
Once on Mava, you can assign tickets to individual team members who can categorize, label, resolve, and even privately chat about tickets. Instead of directly messaging users or managing tickets through the chaos of Discord, community managers and support staff can do it all through an intuitive dashboard.
When members respond to support requests, the message is also relayed directly back to the user via Discord.
You can even view the responsiveness of team members through an internal analytics tool for admins, which displays several important metrics: Median First Response Time, Median Time to Resolution, a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score, and the number of resolved vs. unresolved tickets.
Having previously used Ticket Tool for Discord, Mava was a godsend. We could easily see what tickets needed to be resolved without any manual tracking, and could also communicate directly to users within Discord while protecting the community team’s anonymity.
If you’re in need of an elegant customer support solution for your Discord community needs, Mava is by far the superior choice. However, we did notice while using the product that there were several bugs present, including difficulty with changing the status of a ticket, seeing responses to some tickets, and in having the latest tickets appear at the top of the inbox stack.
We particularly liked the ability to have a private channel between community team members for each ticket, as well as the ability to to group tickets by certain filtered categories in your inbox.
Note: Mava is still in beta, and is actively looking for customer feedback to improve their product.
If you’ve reached the point of product growth where you have a significant number of on-chain wallets and users that you want to reach, then congratulations! That’s a huge milestone. However, blockchain infrastructure isn’t nearly quite there yet when it comes to communicating between wallets. So, how exactly do you communicate with your users and customers in a “web3 way”? We have Etherscan chat and a few hack-y on-chain ways of doing so, in addition to the usual spray-and-pray methods utilized on Twitter and Discord. Unfortunately, that’s kind of all we’ve figured out.
Here’s why the spray-and-pray method is NOT effective: It’s an absolutely horrible way to communicate with and re-target valuable users, who may not be dialed into social media at every waking moment.
👀 Today, advertisers blast and drip communications to users in hope of capturing attention at the right time.
Enter: Dispatch. To solve the need for on-chain communication, Dispatch enables teams to send dynamic messages anywhere across web2 and web3. Your audience can engage from their their wallet, an embed, or permalink, and most importantly, you’ll be able to brand your message to your heart’s desire.
How does it work? Messages on Dispatch are sent in the form of NFTs. You can import a list of wallet addresses that make up your community, then customize, mint, and send a message or advert to each wallet address as an NFT — all on chain. This ensures that the end user receives your message.
Previously on Dispatch, we minted a dynamic HTML NFT to send to over 33,000+ users to mark the end of a 5-week campaign at Layer3. It was easy to create, customize, and mint the NFT from the Dispatch dashboard. However, because our NFT included a dynamic element, we had to do some custom work with the Dispatch team, in addition to manually importing the users that we wanted to reach.
We loved the feel and look of the product when it came to creating and minting the NFT, but be advised that you will need to reach out for a Product Demo and receive a Dispatch Admin NFT before becoming officially verified as a community on Dispatch. We wish there was a more explicit ability to import multiple EVM-compatible addresses, along with a way for teams to internally categorize their users without revealing too much information to other communities.
As with most on-chain tools, it’s also difficult to get the user to “check the chain” (their wallets, mostly) without integrating with other off-chain tools, such as e-mail and socials. A good example of this is Daylight, where users are notified of their on-chain rewards and unlocks via e-mail.
We’d be eager to see Dispatch craft up a slick e-mail or text integration, where users are pinged to check their wallet every time a message is sent!
Though technically not a tool yet, Safary is one of my favorite web3 communities filled with some of the best and brightest minds in web3 growth.
I chose to add Safary in here because one of the biggest unlocks that you can achieve in web3 is to have a thriving community with what I call a “positive feedback loop,” which can often be a tool in and of itself!
As a play on the original definition, having a positive feedback loop in web3 product means is to create a community that you can build a product alongside with, instead of a group of users you are building a product at.
Safary should be a case study in how to do the former. Starting off as a niche community for growth specialists in web3, Safary launched a series of cohort-based programs that were intended to solve the growth conundrum in web3: How do you grow and reach mass adoption, while maintaining some of the fundamental tenets of web3, like security, decentralization, and permissionlessness?
With each cohort, interest in the growing topic of web3 growth bloomed, and more and more people applied to join the Safary community. By keeping Safary’s community small and focused, Justin was able to capture the best insights from web3 growth leaders — for both his community, and for Safary’s new product.
Now, Safary is building an on-chain attribution platform, to help web3 teams determine which of their marketing channels contributed to revenue and conversions. And herein lies the power of the positive feedback loop: Build a community of specialists, then build out a product based specifically on their most urgent needs and problems.
According to Safary, they’ll be adding powerful features like the following:
🦁 Teams will be able to answer questions like: 🦁
What does my marketing funnel look like (channel ➡️ web visitor ➡️ wallet ➡️ purchase)?
Which marketing channels drove the most revenue? (Twitter drove $1M in NFT purchases while Discord only drove $300K in NFT purchases)
Which marketing campaigns drove revenue? (Tweet A drove $30K in revenue, while Tweet B drove $0)
Which marketing channels / campaigns drove the most revenue by time period?
Note: Safary is still in private beta. I have not tried their tool at the time of writing.
Layer3 is powering the next generation of web3 companies as the best place to learn, discover, and succeed in web3. We take users through your product via interactive on-chain experiences and educational Quests, and have helped over 40+ customers take 200k+ users through 10M+ on-chain actions.
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