Web3 User Growth Methodology

Web3 industry has been pursuing mass adoption, which seems far away. Most projects are still in the stage of boosting numbers, focusing on data growth rather than real user growth.

The definition of user growth is: utilizing all resources to enable more users to use core product features more frequently. For projects, there are three issues that need to be addressed: "more users," "high frequency," and "core product features." This article will analyze the difficulties of user growth, explore the reasons behind them, and seek efficient solutions.

High Difficulty and Cost of Customer Acquisition

In the fiercely competitive Web3 market, it is challenging to stand out and attract users. The intense market competition leads to high customer acquisition costs as various projects compete for limited user resources.

Low User Quality

New users often lose interest after their initial contact, and even if users are attracted, maintaining their engagement remains a challenge. Many applications find that users merely browse quickly without truly engaging in the community ecosystem.

Insufficient Community Stickiness

Building an active and loyal community is crucial for Web3 projects. However, the lack of effective user education results in insufficient understanding of the project’s concepts and features, leading to inadequate long-term engagement and loyalty from users.

Roots of Growth Difficulties

Compliance Issues

The regulatory environment is complex and ever-changing, requiring projects to comply with strict laws and regulations to avoid illegal activities or violations. However, achieving compliant customer acquisition not only requires significant time and resources but also a deep understanding of the regulatory policies in different countries and regions. This not only increases the operational costs of the project but may also affect its market expansion and user acquisition efficiency.

High Entry Barriers

The complexity of industry technology makes it difficult for new users to understand and participate. Terms like blockchain, smart contracts, and addresses can pose challenges for new users in terms of understanding and operation, making them feel hesitant to join and engage in the Web3 community.

Poor User Experience

Many projects lack user-friendly interfaces and smooth user experiences. Issues like slow interaction speeds and complicated operation processes can affect user engagement and retention, making them unwilling to stay with the project long-term.

Severe Homogeneity

Emerging projects need to find entry points to attract and retain users.

Insufficient Awareness

Users still have a vague understanding of Web3 and lack in-depth knowledge of the potential application scenarios and advantages of projects, which affects their enthusiasm.

Lack of Resources and Experience in Community Management

Some projects may lack resources or experienced community managers, making it difficult for them to effectively manage the community and lacking the ability to create a positive and active community atmosphere. The absence of effective community management and incentive mechanisms can lead to insufficient community vitality, low user participation, and users being unable to deeply experience the project, making them less willing to recommend it to others, thus hindering the formation of a positive growth cycle.

Growth difficulties have both intrinsic reasons and are influenced by external environmental factors. External factors cannot be resolved solely by the efforts of one project but require time and accumulation. For projects urgently needing growth, it is essential to use tools to mitigate the impact of external factors as much as possible.

Overview of Solutions

Growth Alongside Compliance

For Web3 projects, forming a compliant legal team and blocking clearly prohibited regions is a routine operation. However, for operational personnel within the team, it can sometimes be challenging to avoid regulatory risks without significantly affecting growth, especially regarding technical operations like IP blocking. In such cases, one solution is to collaborate with growth platforms to utilize the regional restriction features provided by the platform to mitigate regulatory risks.

The collaboration between the Tron team and the growth platform TaskOn is a typical example of a current growth strategy. By using TaskOn's regional restriction feature, the Tron team can block user access to its project in regions that do not meet regulatory requirements, thereby reducing the legal risks faced by the project. This approach not only effectively avoids potential regulatory risks but also maximizes the project's growth effectiveness.

Collaborating with such platforms not only reduces regulatory risks but also significantly aids growth:

• Simplifying promotional task setups: Web3 growth platforms provide various task templates, maximizing the simplification of promotional task setups and reducing the development costs for the team. By using the task templates provided by the platform, project teams can create and launch various promotional activities more quickly, saving time and resources.

• Expanding reach: Web3 growth platforms have their own native user base. By launching activities on the platform, projects can maximize their reach. Utilizing the platform's features, projects can collaborate with multiple projects to launch joint activities, sharing their users with each other, further expanding their audience and increasing project exposure and influence.

• Reducing user education workload: Web3 growth platforms may have already accumulated a certain level of Web3 user base, and these users may have some understanding of Web3 technology and projects. Therefore, launching activities on the platform can reduce the user education workload for project teams, making it easier for users to understand and participate in project promotional activities.

By utilizing growth platforms, customer acquisition efficiency improves, and the issue of attracting more users is addressed. However, newly engaged users may not have enough understanding of the project, making it easy for them to churn. How can we encourage them to use the "core product features" "frequently"?

This requires a three-pronged approach: user awareness, product optimization, and community management.

User Awareness: Interactive Content

To address the issues of entry barriers and insufficient awareness, education and training are effective solutions.

Educational content is crucial; the public needs timely access to necessary information and to find the project's positioning. Help manuals are also essential. A good help manual can reduce a lot of repetitive work. Help manuals assist members in understanding the project's positioning and serve as the first guiding material users encounter when they start experiencing the product. Platforms like Medium and Gitbook are primary platforms for projects to place educational content.

Merely showing users project materials is just the first step; ensuring that users truly remember or understand the content after studying it is vital. To achieve this, interactive learning sessions can be implemented:

Set up interactive learning sessions, such as Q&A and quizzes, allowing users to test their understanding by answering questions or participating in quizzes. Such interactive sessions can encourage users to actively engage in learning, enhancing their awareness. This can also be accomplished through TaskOn. For instance, EarnM has set up a series of automated quiz tasks in its TaskOn community, effectively improving users' memory and understanding of project content, thereby enhancing user participation and engagement.

Product Optimization: Feedback and Improvement Mechanism

The core of product optimization lies in deeply understanding and meeting users' actual needs, which is the foundation for providing a seamless user experience and enhancing user engagement. To achieve this, project teams must establish ongoing, two-way communication channels with users. This includes setting up an efficient user feedback system to ensure that valuable questions and suggestions are taken seriously and responded to positively.

Contact emails, dedicated feedback channels on Telegram or Discord, or building a feedback forum on the official website can allow users to easily share their insights and suggestions.

Ethereum has set up an online forum section on its official website for users to communicate, discuss, and provide feedback:

Community Management: High Frequency & Incentives

Users will only develop stickiness with applications and product features, so it is necessary to use means to encourage users to use the "core features of the product" "frequently," with community support being essential:

• Shared Experiences and Interaction: Community activities can promote interaction and connections among users, allowing them to feel a shared experience. By participating in various community activities, users can share their experiences, stories, and insights about using the product, deepening their connections and understanding of each other. This shared experience not only enhances users' sense of belonging but also increases their loyalty to the product, making them more willing to continue using the core features of the product.

• User Education and Training: Community members often voluntarily share tutorials and practical tips to help other users better utilize the product, improving their efficiency and satisfaction. This knowledge sharing and mutual assistance among users can accelerate the learning process for new users, lowering their entry barriers to the product, thereby promoting user participation and loyalty.

• Information Dissemination: The community is a collective of individuals, and effective community management can facilitate the easier dissemination of product features and advantages to users.

How to effectively manage the community and promote user engagement with the product?

Defining Value-Adding Behaviors

First, clarify the behaviors within the community that hold value for users. For DeFi projects, the number of assets traded and the duration of engagement are important considerations; for NFT projects, the number of NFTs held and the holding duration are significant. Different sectors have different value-adding behaviors. During community management, it is essential to identify user behaviors that generate value for the product and continuously encourage members to repeat these behaviors through various methods.

Incentivizing Value-Adding Behaviors

If users receive positive feedback each time they complete a value-adding behavior, it facilitates the repetition of that behavior. Introducing incentive mechanisms is a common practice. Previously, incentives were often offered in the form of TGE to attract users. Recently, point-based ranking systems have become the choice for most projects. As time passes and points accumulate, the higher the cost for users, the stronger their stickiness to the project.

How to quickly establish a point-based ranking system?

Using tools, TaskOn has set up a comprehensive point-based ranking system building tool to help projects complete the setup quickly:

It also provides a fully informative leaderboard, so community managers do not need to manually calculate the points earned by each member, greatly reducing their workload. The leaderboard updates in real-time, and competition among users can enhance user enthusiasm:

Increasing the Frequency of Behaviors

Frequency creates habits. For community managers, repeatedly mentioning behaviors in the community daily is relatively inefficient and involves a lot of repetition.

Why not try presenting these behaviors as tasks? Community users are unlikely to carefully read through every message in the group; community managers need a platform to clearly display the tasks users need to complete at each stage, making it easy for users to check their task completion status daily.

TaskOn supports setting the repetition frequency for each task: Once/Daily/Weekly/Monthly. Task statuses are updated regularly, eliminating the need for manual operations by community managers.

Effectively managing the community, optimizing product experiences, and providing good user education are all key factors in driving growth for Web3 projects. By collaborating with growth platforms, establishing point-based ranking systems, setting up incentive mechanisms, and optimizing user interactions, project teams can better attract users, enhance participation, and achieve sustained growth. Through continuous exploration and practice, Web3 projects will be able to tackle various challenges and ultimately welcome true mass adoption.