Block Zero Stage | Growth Hacking Tactics for NEAR Projects

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   all right um next up we're going to hear from Alejandro Jordan and VIN on growth hacking tactics for near Projects please welcome Vinnie to the stage growth and hacking two things we do often yes in life got to hack this audience to be grown how do we hack this audience I don't know maybe uh we could put up a bounty on Heroes to come watch us talk and pay for some engagement that would be one way Bounty an open bar engaging

2. 1:08

   smart guests oh wait we have that cool um I think we can get started um thanks everyone for joining us for this interesting panel on growth hacking something we really look forward to in the near ecosystem so uh I've got with me two awesome people who are very well known in this ecosystem uh Jordan and ab um yeah I think we can get started with presenting ourselves yeah um hi I'm Jordan uh in the near ecosystem have

3. 1:42

   built a lot of Da and nft infrastructure and lately I'm focused on growth hacking for mint base and also helping out on the heroes project leading product and also growth there so kind of my favorite thing right now thank you Jordan hi my name is IB I've been around since uh 2021 and uh across various roles I've also been doing some personal growth some hacking and uh no but seriously um there's been many different attempts of trying to find ways to grow the ecosystem acknowledging that there is

4. 2:18

   value and that we need to find a way to communicate it uh from the early days silicon Craftsmen product and user experience marketing Dow podcast YouTube I've always been trying to find those those areas of opportunity to yeah unlock value yeah and for myself uh I work at the near Foundation uh I'm part of the community support team so we always constantly are looking for new ways to experiment uh because nothing in web 3 is set in stone right um yeah

5. 2:49

   we've grown a lot in the near ecosystem uh in the last three years and since we are in the hacker house or the hacker HQ we are also hacking right uh but putting those two terms together could mean something totally different and like I kind of want to set the stage with defining what we would consider as growth hacking so if someone would like to um kind of Define what would that look like yeah for me it's about being able to measure and having a framework

6. 3:22

   in place so that when you have a cool idea and you want to see if it's going to work to actually get people into your ecosystem or whatever you're trying to accomplish that you have a measuring stick to see how the experiment goes um if you have a framework like that set up where you've identified your audience and you have an activation that you think could speak to that audience and you follow up after doing your campaign

7. 3:46

   you'll have lessons learned even if the campaign was a total failure you'll have some things that you learned from it things to do differently things to do better um if it went well then you've got things to repeat but without that framework you can't really have you need some way of seeing if the things you're trying to do are having impact yeah anything to add from you of course if I ever say Sil call an ambulance yeah growth hacking is about

8. 4:14

   having the simplest actions to drive the most value if you were to compare growth hacking with a traditional marketing campaign marketing is a bit more drawn out established traditional you may just want to maintain what you have growth hacking says if we don't grow we're dead in six months time and we don't care if it's legal illegal whose job it is we're going to find a hole and get in there and yeah I think that it it really calls

9. 4:44

   for Rapid iteration and I guess got to find the balance with what Jordan was saying you want to iterate but also be able to capture you know is it having impact and if it's working how do we double down no 100% agree um yeah I I think what we could do is give a few examples of growth hacking that we've seen in the broader web 3 space and kind of then draw similar examples of what have been happening like in the near

10. 5:15

    ecosystem um so does anyone of you want to sure yeah I think that if we're looking at concrete examples with um an organization like mint base there's kind of two audiences that are being targeted and that's developers with the API tooling and then kind of end users with more of the marketplace um front end and examples like minsta so those are like two audiences and if you're going to be doing a growth hack you probably want to pick out one audience and go after that um trying to capture multiple audiences

11. 5:48

    with a single activation uh is is challenging it means that your measurements are going to mean less because you aren't even sure which one you were going after to begin with um um in the case of Heroes the two audiences are the funders the people who are putting bounties up and then the hunters the people who are showing up to do work so again you have to have some kind of measurement in place some framework and then pick out your audience and then

12. 6:18

    come up with your legal or illegal or side legal thing that you want to do to get those people engaged and make sure that you're like talking to them and that means coming up with whatever ever number metric it is that actually makes a difference and allows you to have a a single number that gives you some idea of how much impact you had yeah the thing about growth hacking and looking too close to home is challenging because some people may argue that you may not have done or succeeded growth hacking if you haven't

13. 6:49

    seen the growth so there's a lot of reflection to do within the near ecosystem if we look at it more historically which has a survivorship bias but there's some good examples if even things like a BNB creating a Marketplace of sleeping sleeping at uh strangers houses and paying them for it uh is challenging if you look at it in abstract but a growth hacking technique was we're not going to go after every city in the world or we're not going to go after Grandma's house we're going to go after conferences and we're going to

14. 7:19

    go after Tech conferences and we're going to go you know even in specific markets where we know there's a premium so people earn more during that weekend and then there's a break there's no detention you need to find another stranger and Etc so that's the sort of framework perhaps that Jordan is mentioning where you try to find where is your opportunity how can you get the most value from it and embedded in that

15. 7:42

    is the experience that you're creating for the user that ideally triggers that flywheel at some point people should be coming to you and saying hey when is the next conference can we do this again that was a great experience and that's when you start growing your fan base that's the definition of product Market fit you actually have more demand than you can serve right now the only demand that we look at is blog space which is the shittest metric in the world we should be thinking about what are the

16. 8:05

    products out there that people are demanding and we don't have enough capacity to meet so we have to go Recruit new developers and whatever yeah and talking about nailing that um that sweet spot of even knowing who you're growing it for with kod the art and Tech nonprofit that I started um my co-founder Bruno was doing more like Tech meetups things like that I was doing music promotion and just by seeing each other around San Francisco a lot we were like let's throw an event together where there's a bunch of like Tech art

17. 8:38

    type stuff because we had friends coming into town for a conference and that was one of those things where you know it it was a total experiment we had no idea how it was going to go and people came to us afterwards and we're like when's the next one and that's when we knew like okay I don't need to be putting energy into these side things when there's actually something for people to do over here and the only reason that was able to grow and was successful is because there was something to do once

18. 9:02

    people came into that Community we had workshops we had art shows where people could come and show their art and share their projects um and we always had a performance schedule so people could come and do something it doesn't matter if you have a ton of growth and inbound if there's not some kind of action for people to take where you're wherever you're trying to get them to go and that's what needs to be in place before you even think about growth hacking is

19. 9:27

    like is this thing that we want people to do even worth doing like have you asked yourself that question before you say we need people and the the particular challenge that comes up in web 3 is because we are an ecosystem and we're all tangentially related we can just ourselves with the metrics so for instance normally in a startup you have the luxury and the curse of choosing your

20. 9:50

    own metrics you can be succeeding or failing you can just paint it in different ways depending on who you're talking to in web 3 we may p back on someone else's metrics that they're actually failing but we want to claim it's a win number of users number of transactions these are all vanity metrics you really need to see in context I give you specific examples of good honest attempts and then we can deconstruct where we are you know what a

21. 10:14

    really good growth hacking technique is Mina superb onboarding experience that leverages state-of-the-art on boarding fast off SDK they did it faster than pakota by the way meta transactions only application on near that I know that uses Metro transactions I just orted three uh young fellows from Avalanche ecosystem they've been in the near conference for 3 Days didn't have a near wallet it was after using Minster that their minds blew and I think they're recovering outside from it so then you have two

22. 10:47

    questions is meansa a really good growth hacking application yeah it's free to you you have the niche Flagship event with hundreds or or thousands of people attending and then you move into the metric are we just going to look at the number of people that got it are we going to look at the number of photos that they posted are we going to look at the quality of the photos because we're artists or are we going to look at how many people that

23. 11:12

    were hackers so Mina said these people did all the work for us and they go Fork Mina and start a real business or they add to the code base and every single conference we can have richer and richer experiences yeah and that's for you to answer Jordan yeah well I do like the direction that mpace is going with focusing on the infrastructure stuff and you know just showing that these kinds of experiences are possible and then enabling people on the other end of that um kind of similar

24. 11:45

    uh really tangible example you don't necessarily have to overthink it when you're talking about what you're measuring with Heroes we're looking at how many new bounties get made and then how many people are interacting with those bounties and we're seeing a lot of good traction with people that like got in early on the meme contest that was run and just talking to other Founders around the hackathon and having people sign up and start posting bounties right

25. 12:10

    here is like it it demonstrates the value a grow Haw could have been last night well I wouldn't say was packed but there were more hackers than I was expecting building here I I woke up on the floor oock in the morning I don't know what time other the people dropped off would have been a good idea to create bounties for somebody to go and get us food Min walked in at 1:00 a.m. in the

26. 12:34

    morning with pizzas from the new fation I was like this is like six hours too late so anyway um those are the small opportunities that we can try to uh identify perhaps other examples would be you know The Shard do and gathon it's a fantastic un boarding experience but depending on how you structure the sequences it may not have the impact that you want on unless you require the booths to you know promote it unless there is the right information attached to it at the right time the right set of

27. 13:06

    incentives perhaps a better example and I'd be really curious to see what metrics are attaching to it would be Encon Enon is obviously worthless and we were going to give up the merch anyway but being able to build an entire app using the key pump stack everything from ticket to spending money this is a case study thisas for a team to take uh to prospective buyers and say hey guess what we run a conference with 6,000 people we gave out 600 Burgers people had a black market for hoodies because we didn't order enough merge

28. 13:38

    that's what product Market fit looks like and you growth hack it at your own conference because you don't have to convince anyone to pay you a lot of money to do it so those are the small opportunities that sometimes I get frustrated because I don't see enough people looking for them I feel that people are waiting for the Bulls to return and for the backs to inflate but we're not really thinking of how can we take this technology and activate these

29. 14:01

    dorm cells of very smart people that will get excited at the opportunity to take the technology or or or the products and and and grow and hack and grow and hack and grow and hack and grow and I know that it's yeah hacking growing to the camera people at the back we love you hack and grow that's how you cra hacking an audience yep everybody's excited now the levels are up they woke up I did I did at least yeah want to take that um yeah I

30. 14:33

    mean I completely agree an con is has been a huge success to the point where people yesterday were in two states of mind like should I spend 15 Enon for a slice of pizza or should I get myself a hoodie and you could see like uh people having those uh those mental uh dilemas right um but even that is a metric of success yeah it is if you've reached the Google level of my madeup word is now a verb you've succeeded indeed nobody's saying like oh go get the tokens go get

31. 15:09

    the shitty piece of paper with a time stamp in it to get pizza because you're hungry and con is now a thing honestly not the best name but it's a thing and there was probably a lot of thinking around it's going to be swag we're going to give it for free but it's going to be swag it's going to be food it was going to free anyway like you need to build those experiences exactly and like you could see like

32. 15:31

    pretty much at the end of each uh panel talk especially at the nearon HQ people would actually like get ahead at front like try to scan those and it really like gets people going uh and I think like that's that's a solid uh use case uh for conference growth hacking right um but I I really want to touch up on on the minsta thing because um what we've done what mbase has done in the last last couple of months it's kind of created a blueprint um so Min minsta and Min through the mbased wallet they've

33. 16:05

    been now kind of iterating and making this better and they haven't really in my opinion looked at the metrics in isolation so they haven't been looking at number of wallets number of nfts obviously they do as as stats but they look at success from Impact point of view and I think that's very important like what is the individual impact and feedback back uh from the people who use

34. 16:30

    this uh this solution right of fast on boarding complemented with like creating NFS out of your photographs um so yeah these iterations we've seen it we've seen the latest one for uh nearon where you have ai descriptions it's insane how good this is uh and yeah there's it'll only get better so w with that example because there is a tradeoff when you bring in the AI description it's slower yeah and more expensive to them do you

35. 17:02

    think that the metric or the desired outcome is that when a photo has a caption it's just a better experience for people going through the photos or that they want to showcase that they integrated AI seamlessly into a smart contract flow or both I'd say a bit of both but the former takes more weightage in my opinion cuz we know how cool Chad GPT was when it looked launched you people were asking Chad GPT very basic questions just cuz they wanted to know

36. 17:35

    how Chad GPT would respond uh so here you have a similar framework where you you're kind of inclined to take a picture to see what the outcome of the AI description is going to look like so yeah I do think there's that feedback loop of hey um yeah I'll see what's what's the outcome of X picture I think it's more of the ladder you mentioned with it proving that you can do AI as part of the flow because it's not front and center in the minting experience

37. 18:06

    like the front and center experience is you go to the site and you have a wallet and you can take a picture and then it's minted and that is a very easy tangible thing for people to understand whether they're in crypto or not they get it they're like oh I collect pictures is something that happens other places and I keep them forever and it's in a wallet great makes sense um the AI thing I think is more targeted like that's the first thing is that end users the AI

38. 18:32

    integration is more to get developers to think like oh not only can I have easy access to like blockchain technology that I can throw in my applications but I can also integrate it with AI very easily and it gets those gears turning so I think it's more thinking about that audience with the um with that particular activation um but one of the interesting things about newcon is like we're all here because of technology and the

39. 18:57

    technology has brought brought us together and we're starting kind of from that technology like stance and point of view but if we're talking about growth hacking we really need to be looking at users end users whether they're developers or end users and how you walk back from that and meet them with the technology what you have at your disposal um if you start with the technology and just make excuses for people to come and use it then you're just kind of like convincing yourself

40. 19:21

    that things are going well but if you're solving real world world problems then everything that we're building starts to add up and make sense and people will start using it because it's better than other things in the world not because it's cool Tech the term the role of a growth hacker is a modern phenomena but the reason why you may want to have someone that thinks about that specifically is because it really does take a special

41. 19:47

    type of probably so sociopathy or something you know if you think of what is the real value of an AI generated caption on a photo which by the way is hilarious sh share it the fact that there's no a share button and people share the photos on Twitter with a hilarious AI caption cuz I can tell you I share The Shard dogs because I care about the team having the same standard message

42. 20:12

    that sometimes do describe why it is or that you get can get a free wallet like we don't really have people in the ecosystem who are hardcore product people or who are truly trying to growth hack things we've all been comparably and conservatively building infrastructure and that's why we need to put out the bat signal I don't know maybe trigger a fire alarm or something get people in this room not what people do when a fire alarm goes off we have reached the point where we have The Primitives to truly grow this

43. 20:45

    and now we need Savages out there that do whatever it takes to grow and hack that is true yep got to meet the people yeah I know I agree I think Shard dog are doing great stuff it's just like I do agree like the same caption or like the Tweet draft you get when you share that those are things that can be improved uh but they are improving on other fronts so um I think overall they are great growth hackers in my opinion uh and engage Aon is a perfect example of that um yeah I kind

44. 21:23

    of want to dive into since we have about five minutes um something Jared from Shard dog had brought up and I think pretty much when his tweet went out everyone in the ecosystem felt uh identified that this was a genuine problem and solution to that problem so uh Jared was talking about the fire Hol thing right uh so I kind of wanted to get your perspectives I think I've seen both of you uh react positively to that uh when that went out on Twitter but

45. 21:56

    kind of get your perspectives on where do you think or how do you think we can make this happen in the new ecosystem a fire hose yeah I think he's about like fire bed I there's always Nu on arguably we did have a fire for host on boss I am against group think I am against uh you know poorly targeted campaign being passed down from above and community members feel that you can't speak about anything else CU it's not sanctioned so I think that we do need a fire hose

46. 22:34

    approach like we need to truly understand the potential of technology and like triple down but you can have many verticals maybe some of the challenges are that leading up to nearon we hold back on a lot of announcements so that we have things to say on stage but now that we have all these really good Primitives people can pick whatever interests them whatever they may be better suited at but really triple down

47. 22:58

    the fact that we have you know resources to be given out to Market and to promote and that basically no one that I know in the community could explain to me what account obstruction is and that we've now moved to chain abstraction we're wasting money you may as well say we'll give $100,000 you know go all in to the first person that brings me users from other blockchains through a chain

48. 23:23

    abstraction we don't understand it we don't know it I've seen slides and everyone's in all that this is now live on Main it but we do need to yeah Focus but diversify yeah and I think the tangible example there is bringing it to the real world again just the people with things like the littles where they identified that by going after a night market where there's a captive like audience of like

49. 23:52

    the different vendors you can actually talk to each different vendor in a night market and get them to sign on to using a token like it's kind of Encon but bigger because it's it's in a market like that's an approachable size of a thing that you can do you're not going to get a whole city necessarily to do that but you can take a smaller market and do an activation there where they understand the value of tokenization and loyalty points and things like that um

50. 24:17

    and I think it's rather than just a a strict fire hose approach of like do it all and there's going to be some conversion somewhere um thinking about what those smart opportunities are where it's the you can imagine being successful um before jumping off like the the diving board like having some idea of what success looks like and knowing that you stand a chance of uh actually making it happen it's a little bit big thinking to to put the technology out there and expect everybody to build on it um if it

51. 24:51

    if there's no builders that are willing to pick it up and actually bring it to users then it might as well not have happened and um a lot of technologists will focus on the fun Tech problems and then once the tech problem is solved they think that everything is is done um and that's kind of just the start of having something that you can sell yeah I know that we're almost out of time but just a really quick example of the way that I've approached growth hacking with a

52. 25:13

    podcast every guest is a distribution channel to the audience so you get inbound new people and then the threshold is do they stay but then there's the cross pollination of exposing different audiences to different people the growth hack is not me using other people to get more views on my the podcast is me asking them do you have a release do you have an announcement like how can my platform serve you so that we join forces and like maximize visibility and there's going to be shorts coming up

53. 25:44

    there's something about organic content that is very valuable especially in like decentralized communities and yeah that's a small example of just being thoughtful about the timing of things and if you're going to do it anyway just make it worth it no I I 100% agree and I think like platforms like your podcast are good Windows to Showcase what's happening Deep dive in some of the different

54. 26:09

    pockets in the ecosystem uh and I know like um I mean there's there's I've I've listened to a few of them and they really are very insightful so um I think like it does do you have a favorite yeah I've watched a few but um I I kind of prefer the shorter Clips cuz they they go straight to the point and like address a specific thing uh but yeah I think you're doing a great job on that and that's another example of how

55. 26:40

    we're doing growth hacking in please I'm going to stop crying great content reappropriation yeah great content reuse uh I think we are up on up on time but uh was really nice uh bringing this topic on stage and yeah growth hacking will continue evolving and there'll be more of this in near especially so yeah energy is contagious you want to see growth hacking you got to grow and hack and grow and hack and grow go near 2023

56. 27:12

    woo thank you can do the oh yeah