Original Title: "StepN Founder Jerry Talks About the Impossible Triangle of 'Fame, Wealth, and Power'"

Source: Wànwù Dǎo ThreeDAO

StepN founder Jerry Huang shared insights and latest thoughts with 55 Web3 application ecosystem entrepreneurs based on his personal experiences. As a veteran with over a decade of entrepreneurial experience who was among the first to participate in the 3G mobile internet, how does he perceive the human nature and desires behind players, and how does he view economic and business cycles? The retrospective analysis of the gains and losses behind StepN may provide important insights for Chinese entrepreneurs.

Here are some key excerpts:

1. Product Selection and Thinking: How to Find the Right Positioning?

The focus is mainly on analyzing and understanding the demand side. Why do people want to play a game, why are they willing to pay, why do they want to share it with others, and why can it generate social discussions? These phenomena can actually be summarized in the word "desire."

When I created my first game, I tried to summarize what is most important in a game: technology, storyline, or art? Ultimately, it boils down to what desires we satisfy for the users, which is the source of happiness and the driving force behind payment and sharing. So initially, we listed all human desires and created a large desire tree. The desires of players vary by age, gender, and profession. After summarizing them, we positioned our product to meet the desires of specific demographics. Some desires cannot be charged for but can make users happy, while others can generate revenue. Therefore, we believe that any game needs to thoroughly understand desires before exploring player behavior.

Desire is the soul, the game system is the skeleton, and the art and storyline are the skin. This way, we can define a product from the inside out. Desire itself is unrelated to Web2 or Web3, but different technologies can amplify corresponding desires. For example, gold farming existed in Web2 but was only a small part; after assetization in Web3, making money through gold farming became very important. Additionally, assetization has intensified users' desire to show off.

For instance, when 3G technology was just starting to become popular, I transitioned to developing mobile online games. Previously, I had only worked on simple single-player games. Combining the desire tree, I thought about what could be done at the desire level with the popularization of 3G technology. First, the user base would grow significantly, and the gaming scenarios for players would become much richer. Thus, we wondered if we could amplify desires in terms of comparison and social interaction, and we sought ways to fully integrate this idea into game design. Later, our revenue accounted for 20% of the national gaming market, and we ranked first on the App Store for over half a year.

When blockchain technology began to gain traction, I pondered what desires could be maximized through assetization. AI can similarly amplify certain human desires.

So our product positioning still returns to the demand level: what kind of demand makes users feel happy, generates a willingness to pay, and whether the pleasure of payment can form a positive correlation with the amount.

2. What Should Web3 Game Creators Pay Attention To?

First, create a Web3 native game, rather than trying to adapt a Web2 game for blockchain. The starting point may determine the final positioning and product form. It’s not that Web2 games cannot be adapted to blockchain; it’s just that approaching it from this angle may lead to a transformation where it remains a Web2 experience with added Web3 elements, which is difficult to succeed in Web3. It’s like trying to create a video site better than YouTube; starting from that perspective makes it hard to succeed. I believe TikTok’s initial goal wasn’t to defeat YouTube, but it ended up competing strongly with it, so I think it’s essential to start with a Web3 native approach.

For example, in a game we will be launching soon, our philosophy is to put everything on-chain that can be done technically. What can being on-chain bring to users? Returning to the earlier desire tree, in Web2, users spend money to buy an experience and respect, while in Web3, we propose a new impossible triangle of "fame, wealth, and power" in this game. With blockchain integration, users can take on richer roles—not just as resource creators but also as resource managers, allowing them to gain fame and wealth, as well as power. As a platform, we only provide a self-circulating economic model with minimal interference in game development, allowing players to decide the rules and direction of the game world.

Secondly, it’s crucial to manage your real community well. In my previous entrepreneurial ventures, I often emphasized that business should come first, rather than perfecting the product before launching it. My personal style is to launch the product when it reaches 65% completion, build the market, understand the needs of paying customers, and grow together with players, allowing them to participate in game development.

This was difficult in Web2 because players viewed themselves as kings, spending money to enjoy, and would not tolerate receiving something imperfect. However, in Web3, it’s possible for everyone to create the entire economic ecosystem together. StepN was established in September 2021, and within three months, we launched it in November. We developed running modules, GPS anti-cheat modules, built-in wallets, and built-in trading markets, which was quite challenging to accomplish in just two months. Although time was limited and perfection was unattainable, I boldly pushed it to market. We received over a thousand player sign-ups for testing globally, and many complained that we fixed over a hundred bugs on the first day. What they didn’t expect was that we updated the version twice daily, fixing a large number of reported bugs each time. In the following days, the number of issues reported significantly decreased. This process lasted a month, and the product changes were visibly noticeable, so early players had strong participation and later became loyal users.

We also conducted many operational activities on Discord, and even now, many projects reference these activities. After winning third place in the Solana hackathon, over ten thousand users flooded into our Discord, but we found that 95% were ineffective users just looking for whitelist spots. I made a bold decision to remove all suspected bot users; anyone who didn’t speak for a few days was deleted. The development of the game ultimately requires a clean, pure, and motivated early community, not just a focus on numbers.

At that time, coinciding with the New Year when WeChat red envelopes were popular, we wondered if we could give users red envelopes on Discord. However, there were too many people trying to game the system, so we hesitated. Instead, we devised a method where users could answer questions about the white paper. We created many questions for users to answer quickly, and those who answered correctly would receive a pair of Genesis shoes. We required them to invite three friends to participate, which brought in many real users. As a result of this activity, our Discord community organically grew from a few hundred users (after my cleaning) to 100,000 users, and this was while I was still continuously deleting suspected bots. The remaining users were almost all real users, and as the activity gained momentum, the requirement evolved from answering one question correctly to answering ten questions correctly to receive rewards, prompting users to read our white paper carefully.

This activity helped us gain tens of thousands of high-quality loyal users who read the white paper multiple times, playing a significant role in our subsequent explosive growth, allowing us to quickly reach five million users. All of this stemmed from our community having these users who had read the white paper dozens of times, and they genuinely recognized our product and even actively helped us spread the word.

Finally, I want to emphasize the globalization of the market. At that time, we also spent a lot of effort considering which market to enter first. Ultimately, we decided to go for all markets, and whichever took off, we would focus on that. In the end, it proved that our conclusion was correct; our largest market is in Japan, followed by France and other European countries. We still gain one to two thousand new users daily, so our initial globalization allowed the market to filter itself, and then we helped the rapidly developing markets grow even faster.

3. How Should Founders Face Economic Cycles?

In Web3 games, I believe market cycles are not that important because games are different from other applications like DeFi. DeFi is indeed very dependent on economic cycles because, in a recession, users and funds disappear. However, games can form their own systems; they can have their own pricing, tokens, and ecosystems, and are not so reliant on external macro cycles.

Additionally, I want to say that bull markets do bring more users and funds, but there are also many competitors. StepN was at the tail end of a bull market; we initially had a lot of competitors, but if we could establish our ecosystem during a bear market, there would be fewer competitors, and the market's focus would not easily shift away from us.

4. When is it Appropriate for a Project to Hire a PR Team?

To be honest, we didn’t do very well later on. For Web3 game projects, the first thing to do is to let players feel that we are very real and together with them. So in the early days, we held weekly AMAs even before the product was launched. The first one had only a dozen people, but we persisted every week until more and more people joined and could feel our sincerity. Eventually, we became too busy and hired a PR team, but later realized we should have done it ourselves. The most a PR team can do is crisis management, but for daily branding and influence, we still need to do it ourselves. Our communication with users is the best PR.

5. Should Chain Game Entrepreneurs Focus on Web2 New Users or Web3 Native User Needs First?

When we internally positioned users, we unanimously agreed that we should convert a large number of Web2 users, including many features in StepN like wallets and built-in trading platforms, all aimed at lowering the threshold for more Web2 users to enter, allowing players to experience the underlying technology without feeling it. This is something we have been doing and will continue to do in the future.

Our future games will also achieve login, transfers, and gas-free transactions through decentralized methods, all aimed at converting more Web2 users into Web3. At least half of the users in our entire StepN community had never interacted with blockchain before.

6. How to Treat Users Who Come to Play Games for Money?

First, we need to determine whether they are purely looking to exploit the system or if they are part of a gold farming guild. If they are the first type, we must eliminate them. The second type may involve real people behind them. Different games have different views; some are very friendly to gold farming guilds and even invite them to join because they quickly bring traffic. However, StepN was also somewhat resistant to gold farming guilds, and we rejected collaborations with them.

7. How to Ensure Web3 Games Continuously Generate Value?

The core is still about creating games that bring joy to users. So if your users experience happiness while playing the game, that value is already sufficient. There’s no need to overly worry about the definition of value itself or others' judgments. At its essence, gaming is an experience economy; users spend money to buy the experiences they desire, and as for how others define this process and whether it has value, each user has a different perspective.