#26 How to Fundraise a Web3 Startup w/Shai Perednik

Summary: Fundraising Best Practices for Web3 Startups with Rev Platform Insights

Major Themes:

• Rev Platform Introduction: The conversation introduced Rev, a growth management tool for creators and a management and creator discovery platform for brands. Rev's unique badging system allows for detailed analytics on campaign performance, creator engagement, and ROI measurement, offering a novel approach to influencer marketing in the Web3 space.
• Community and Creator Analytics: Rev provides analytics that enable brands to track the effectiveness of their campaigns, offering insights into impressions, engagement rates, and more. For creators, Rev offers tools to manage communities, distribute badges, and gather audience insights, including on-chain activities, preferences, and interactions.
• Innovative Features for Engagement: Rev introduces several features aimed at enhancing creator and brand engagement, including the ability to issue badges through various channels like live streams, social media, and in-person events. This allows for a multi-platform approach to community building and engagement tracking.
• Strategic Use Cases for Web3 Games: The platform presents potential use cases for Web3 games, including user acquisition, community rewards, and enhancing game economies through merit-based rewards without diluting the value of existing NFT assets. Rev's approach encourages active community participation by offering unique, non-transferable badges as incentives.
• Future Developments and Community Building: Rev plans to introduce more features aimed at providing creators and brands with even deeper insights into their communities. This includes user data control, audience demographics, CRM integration, and a subscription model for additional services. These developments aim to revolutionize how communities are built and engaged with in the Web3 ecosystem.

Actionable Takeaways:

• Leverage Rev for Detailed Campaign Analytics: Web3 startups, especially in the gaming sector, should consider using Rev to track the performance of their marketing campaigns and influencer partnerships more effectively. The platform's detailed analytics can help identify high-ROI creators and optimize marketing strategies.
• Engage Communities with Badges: Use Rev's badging system to reward community engagement and participation. This approach not only incentivizes active involvement but also helps in identifying and rewarding the most dedicated members of your community, fostering a more engaged and loyal audience.
• Explore Innovative Engagement Strategies: Consider creative ways to use Rev's features for community building and user acquisition. For example, issuing badges for event attendance or game milestones can enhance the sense of ownership and investment among your community members.
• Prepare for Future Developments: Stay informed about Rev's upcoming features and consider how they can be integrated into your community engagement strategies. The introduction of user data control, audience demographics, and CRM integration will offer new avenues for personalized engagement and community growth.
• Connect with Rev for Collaboration: For Web3 startups interested in exploring Rev's platform further, reach out to the Rev team for a more detailed discussion on how the platform can support your specific needs and goals.

This episode highlighted the potential of Rev's platform to transform community engagement and influencer marketing within the Web3 ecosystem, offering startups innovative tools to build and manage their communities more effectively.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaiperednik/

Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/GamingStartUp_

Transcript

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Hey, this is Noah Autopilot, founder of the Gaming Startup Collective and host. Of the token takeover podcast. In today's episode, we're taking a deep dive on the fundraising best practices for your web three startup. You will leave this call having better chance to fundraise 1000%. I made that up, but still it's going to be helpful. All right, enough of me talking. Let's jump into the content. Maybe a quick intro would be good. And then to start, let's focus on it from, like, the project side. And then maybe on the back end, we can do the creator side. Works perfectly. I'm actually gonna go inside because I realize that Very noisy out here, but to give a quick intro to Rev, um, Rev is a, for the creators, it's a growth management tool, and I'm happy to share my screen in a bit. And then for brands, it really is a management and creator discovery tool. And so the way that we're able to do this ultimately lands on our badging system. And so I'm just going to share my screen and go through what the actual platform looks like on the actual, on the actual brand side, just because I think that it'll showcase kind of what we're starting to build out and, and kind of like our vision for, for the future. Um, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here so you can see, I believe you, everybody can see my screen. Uh, this is the, the rev analytics dashboard. And so let's say here, I did a campaign for DG and the, the, the crypto recruiters, and you can go in and you can see that we're managing, uh, various. Campaign links that, you know, we can ultimately use to showcase to the crypto recruiters, how the campaign went. And so you can see in general, you know, these are the, the links that were posted. This is the impressions that they receive engagement. They receive the engagement rate, and you're able to add a more granular detail with this, um, by just kind of requesting a lot more information. This campaign was specifically set up so that I. Simply just uploaded the links, but what you can also do is essentially invite creators. Um, to your campaigns and have creators actually either drop badges, which gives you access to on chain activity and then to input their social links themselves, uh, if they're running a campaign with you. And so I'll, I'll dive into that in a little bit, but some of the more exciting things that I, you know, I think I've seen a lot of people starting to actually look into is how can you actually see if there's a return on investment on the creators that you're using? And so the way that we ultimately use this, uh, and kind of function, this is managing smart contracts and functions within smart contracts to then attribute specific functions that were set off by a specific creators. Badge holders. And so this becomes really, really important when it comes to kind of KOLs and in general, just, um, understanding like how valuable they were to your specific campaign. And you can see here within the analytics or sorry, within the tracked wallets, what that looks like. And so this is obviously just kind of like a demo here, but you, you would be able to see like the, the token networks, the NFT networks, The top tokens that the community is holding of the badges that your creators dropped and also, um, the top NFC that they're holding and also kind of smart contract interactions. Where are they interacting? It seems like here's gnosis and polygon and then how active were they? So this is all coming in from a brand's, uh, perspective, but we'll in a bit now quickly transition over to the. Uh, community and creator analytics and also, um, creator dashboard. That is tied into this. And at the end of the day, what we, what we really are hoping for is to add a button here, that's like discover creators where we would be able to analyze a creator's social platform, social. And also their community engagement via these badges, which we can essentially get a lot of information as much as the creator and as much as the fans allow us to, and also as much as they obviously like enable it because we are not just absolutely stealing this to then give you as a brand, a better idea of is this, um, creator going to function, like work with me in the best way possible. And so today, you know, what three games. Use KOLs as their main form of marketing. And that's not something that I think it's going to stop. I think it's going to continue. And it's going to be one of the first industries that we see is KOL led, which is not a bad thing since KOLs actually have about 11, 11 times higher ROI, but finding those KOLs and getting those KOLs is, is the most, it's the hardest thing, and then more importantly, also managing those KOLs, which is ultimately where Rev's coming in and actually where we're signing some LOIs with. Uh, various people currently to help, uh, build up the platform. And I can share that deck as well. That's the deck that I was mentioning, uh, Ryan. Uh, but I would love to answer any questions on this side before we move on to the creator's side. I would say if anyone has any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat, or if you want to come up to the stage and ask, I will say, so the Rev platform is the platform that I use. To issue our badges for our demo day, I guess I didn't quite have a plan for the analytic side of it. It was more because I wanted to be able to create like proof of attendance, proof of participation on chain awards. Then maybe at some point in the future, we could reference for, uh, gated events or exclusive rewards or whatever. And it was super, super easy. Yeah. So I guess what you just showed is really interesting. So like, I know a lot of teams spend a lot of money on influencers. Not all of them produce the same results. So the problem. that you're solving with this, you can provably track on chain activity of their audience, the ones who click on their links, register, claim these badges, and then teams can use that to direct future campaigns or activations, try to target those people specifically. Hey, are you a builder looking for a grant? To build your ideal web three gaming startup. If so, you should take a look at the Arbitrum grant program with grants up to 25, 000 and a specific focus on supporting early stage indie game devs. It could be the perfect fit link is in the description. Make sure to check it out now back to the podcast. Correct. And we will take it a step further and say for all of the people that. Collected the GSC badge. If again, you as the creator community lead, you know, allow us to share that data with brands, we will automatically put you in contact with those brands who might want to have a brand partnership with you because they see that One, like let's say that you draw multiple badges per week, that you have an engaged audience and then two, that there is value behind these audience, this audience, like the audience that you have, uh, that can be tapped in, right? You know, we, we really want to mesh this all together and, and we, it all definitely for us starts off with the creator, the creator platform, because if we can showcase that we have retention on the creators and the creators are finding, you know, benefit in this, then we know that we can then, you know, You know, automatically type them into the brands on the back end. And one of the last things that I'll mention is the thing that we're working on the most right now. And the thing that I'm most excited for is the community management system. And this community management system will be, in my opinion, revolutionary to how creators manage their communities because currently there is no good way to showcase your community activity outside of doing PoEps and then essentially tracking who has PoEps and who doesn't. But now we're bringing that all into one area and then ultimately utilizing that community management system to enable almost like loyalty. Uh, systems to be put in place for communities or for audiences or really anyone, including even gaming audiences, right? Like if you can know who your top gamers are in your community, and more importantly, your top vocal kind of community members, that is only going to enhance and increase the, your retention for them, but also the awareness that you can have outside of that community. Super cool, man, but let's keep jamming and then again, if anyone in the audience has any questions, feel free to, uh, feel free to drop them for us. So yeah, you can see here we have the creator platform. The creator platform allows you to start creating that community again. We, I think about it as a growth engine for communities and creators and now also for games. So to create a badge, it's really easy. You upload the artwork, you pick what type of badge you'd like. We actually just implemented an upgrade feature actually, like I think a couple of days ago, so I'll show you that. Uh, and so let's say that we were to fill this out and then, you know, we just end up upload a piece of art. You would go over to my badges where it would show up and you can click on, let's say here, angel investing in web three was a badge that I dropped a while ago. If I were to have made a, uh, issue or a problem here, I can edit now that the titles we can edit the descriptions and we can also edit when we're distributing this badge. Um, another feature that we just introduced is, uh, removing the claim period, which means that the badges would be almost like infinite, which works really great for me since I have a couple of badges. For gaming group that are, you know, supposed to be kind of meant to be forever, not like a one instance thing. And then obviously you would be able to change the image here, which is, uh, supposedly an angel version of me. This is the distribution methods that we have. And so this really is what makes. Uh, Rev shine is being able to drop these badges in unique areas for your community. So we have live streaming within Twitch and also YouTube so that you can drop badges within the chat by a bot that will drop them for you. Uh, we have discord channel claim, which allows a bot to drop a badge for a specific amount of time in a discord channel. Uh, the discord voice events, which has been one of the features that people have liked the most, which allows you to not only track community members within a discord voice channel, which we can technically do right now, but it would also allow for you to drop a badge after so that those individuals can claim. And again, the reasoning for that really would be for you all to, for Ryan to see like, all right, these are the people that are coming to every single event. You know, how can I, you know, reward those individuals for being active community members? And let's say that, you know, 10 people were to come and 10 people were the super fans. Like that every single time that, you know, Ryan's running an event is a huge thing for the community, right? Because it shows everybody that there's a lot of people that are engaged, which is the hope of what Rev is looking to solve and, and bring to light even more so. We also have like a Twitter engage feature that we're currently reworking and, and, and wanting to launch soon. We have a secret phrase feature, which is very similar to a static link. So just the URL. But the individuals would have to know the actual password to be able to mint. And then finally, what I'll say is that we have a QR code dispenser. So if you are a game that is doing some sort of in real life activation or community, you're able to still track the audience that's going to the community. And then finally, the airdrop feature, which you're able to simply input wallet addresses and airdrop them the badges. What I'll also showcase here is you're able to ask questions upon mints. So this is really innovative in the way of. You know, let's say that you want to get some really like really in key data from your audience right after a live stream. As soon as they meant the badge, you can ask like, what is something you liked about this live stream? What's something that you didn't like about this live stream? And it allows you to get more granular data of what you can do to improve your, your actual content and also essentially grow as a, as a creator. Uh, and then finally here, you know, we mentioned this a little bit, you know, what is my web three audience looks like? So this is. a general audience like insights for all of my badges, but we will actually be adding in insights for specific badges really soon. I think possibly even this week to be able to get a better understanding of what your, you know, what that community actually looks like and what is the badge snapshot of that community, which will be really interesting. As you start to grow your community, you might be able to see that, Hey, we're actually growing in the type of. Uh, community members that we have, like we might have more whales. We might have X, Y, Z. And the beauty of crypto inherently is financialization. And so we think that this is going to be really helpful for brands to also make decisions for who to mark, who to partner with. And here creators can sign up and community members can sign up for partnerships that this is the portal that I was kind of mentioning. This is our first version of it. And then finally we have the, the active campaigns, which allow a member to simply add a social link here. Uh, to give them, uh, give the campaign manager, uh, the ability to see, you know, the metrics of the, the things that they had posted, uh, which we hope that, you know, if you're a rev creator, this is going to be something that's going to be really easy for you because you're familiar with the system already. And if you're not, then your campaign manager can actually, you know, upload the link for you and still get all of the, that information on the back end. That's what we have so far. Like I said, happy to answer any questions and kind of also hear, um, some possible like ways that people are thinking about using it. But we are definitely still in the early iterations of Rev and, uh, currently looking for funding like everybody else. Uh, to get us to the next level, which will include, um, adding payment services for creators and also implementing, uh, analytics dashboards to be able to see a creator's current following and, um, essentially like cross reference that to the badges that they dropped to get a better idea of. You know, what creators you should be, uh, ultimately reaching out to. Yeah, that, that was going to be my next question. So like, so if someone claims a badge, I have wallets and I can show like on chain holdings and stuff, but is there also a way that's like tying that to a web to identity me as a game? I'm like, okay, Hangry and his community are like our most engaged whale gamers. But I wouldn't know that if I just see like a wallet address, you know? Exactly. That's a great point. And so I want to showcase this, which is what I'm, once we launch this, in my opinion, it's like Rev publicly launches because it's the thing that people are generally looking for. And so it's being able to see the username and the socials of a specific holder. How many badges are they holding? And then what badges do they have? And because obviously, you know, I, I love GSC and I want to, and you know, I want to drop some alpha. Like here are the things that we were looking on adding for future iterations. Version 2 will be user data control and transparency. So being able to allow a user to actually say like, Hey, I don't want to show my data or I do, which means that the first iteration isn't going to show you a whole bunch. Like we're going to have to like mix up the wallets and the names every single time, but this will allow us to start allowing people to say, Hey, you know what? I want to show my information to the Gaming Startup Collective because I want to support them and I want to see them succeed. And also just kind of again, having it be community based. V3 will actually allow for the creator, Ryan, to start asking like, Hey, like, how old are you? Like, what gender do you identify as? Where do you live? Adding fan detail, audience detail that could never have been essentially collected beforehand, which is something that is like, for, for, for us is absolutely revolutionary because there is no other way to get that outside of, you know, mint, like sending a Google link and asking this information where we're now asking it in a way that is actually benefiting the creator and. Again, allowing them to get more partnerships and sponsorships from brands. Then finally, V4 will look like a business integration for CRM data sinks that can help higher kind of volume badges and audience members to start getting, keeping, keeping track of those individuals. So that's, that's what we have for that. I'm very excited for the future. There is a lot of work that needs to get done and there's a lot of time that still is, is, I think needed to have to get to where we want. But at the end of the day, we all know that Web3 gaming is the future and Web3 gaming, I think will keep influencer marketing as a number one source of marketing. And I actually want to explain and expand on that because I've realized over time that audience members in Web3 are not only just audience members, they're also You know, investors of sorts. And so when you can start to attribute ownership to an audience member and allow them to be a part of that community, even more so like tangibly, we think that it's really going to be able to start outgrowing and outpacing web two communities, just simply for that fact. And being able to track those holders that you do have and, and, you know, how they're interacting and, and, and giving them more ownership over the project, which I think we've seen somewhat tried with, you know, snapshot. And I think there's like another tool. For like DAO management, you know, I think we, we are definitely leaning into that, but in a community oriented way outside of, you know, Hey, you have, you know, this NFT do this, but rather like, Hey, you're the most active person in this community. You're now able to show like to give your ideas on where you think the community should go or content. The great thing is that this isn't, you know, this is multi platform. This isn't one single platform. So if we really want it, once we grow at scale, we can introduce a subscription model that enables a Patreon like. feature. But think about all of the other things that we would have built on top of it. So that's also something like alpha there, but I'm very excited. Like I said, it'll take some time, but what three is definitely the place for it because it's just simply how communities are already built. Super cool, man. And it's funny, I've been in the platform now, I don't know, probably half a dozen times, and you covered a bunch of stuff today that I haven't, I haven't even like. Peeled the onion back on. I think there's a real opportunity kind of for what you're doing. As Web3 games continue to try and find ways to creatively bring on users, they're going to keep leaning into influencers. You know, right now a lot of teams are just kind of throwing money at it and hoping it performs well. And so like, if there's like analytics that help guide that decision and like help you find good people to work with and maybe give recommendations, even on like the campaign, I think that's all some next level stuff. That's legit. Appreciate it, man. Yeah, it's a big, uh, goal. And like I said, we're, we're hard at work and we're playing for the long game. We're not going to be dropping a token. We're not trying to like push this down people's throat. What we have found in the recent months is that people are actually coming back to us and saying like this idea I love and I want to use. And so let's get set up. And through those onboarding that are not now coming organically where you're really debugging the platform. I mean, Ryan, you've seen it, everybody else that, that has used it has been like, all right, like, I love it. But like, this is not working. Can we get it to work? It's like, yeah, of course, let us debug that. And so it's been a really great way to grow with the community and we're slowly building that up. And I envision a world where we have our own Rev badges that essentially lead the way for other communities to try new things and to kind of bring in a whole sense of what it means to build a community via a business. And that gets me really excited because I like to be community oriented. I think. Businesses that are community oriented are going to be more successful than those that don't focus on it. Uh, and that goes for really anybody, creator, game, DeFi protocol, really everybody. So let me ask you a couple of questions. So, so Hangry is building kind of like a Web3 metaverse kind of game experience. And Aria, I don't know if we've spoken Aria, so I'm sorry, I don't remember your project directly. And then I know, Alex is building Isotopic, which is kind of like the Web3 version of Steam, but players can actually own their games as NFTs. So I guess like, since we have these folks here, are there any specific ways that you would recommend they think about maybe using Rev to help with user acquisition, growth? Yeah. For sure. Yeah, I think in general, again, just continuing the ethos of Web3, right? Which is. Why so many people launch an NFT project, but they don't, like, you can't launch multiple NFT projects. Like, you have to have one NFT project is kind of like what the vibe is. What I would say is, like, that doesn't actually allow for anybody to, like, grow more than what that NFT project allows. And so I guess I'll speak on a case study for that. We've been working with a pretty close community and I think that they feel comfortable enough to be able for me to be able to talk about this. And we're working with only one. So only one is like an anime NFT project that is super OG. Like recently has been launching a whole bunch of you like a fortnight based maps, greater Island maps, and want a way to. Bring in more people, but how can you bring in more people when your NFT is at 10, 000? And, you know, people can't buy that. And so I say this to say that I think there's two problems here that Hangry and Alex may have, which is again, user acquisition and then existing NFT projects. What existing NFT projects do is They create a lot of hype, which is great to launch, but then what happens after, like, there isn't really much that you can do. And so what I have, and we're talking with Oni for this is like being able to encourage engagement via other types of ownership, which can be badges. And then providing those people rewards based off of like their engagement that grows the entire community. If you're able to find, you know, your top supporters, people that are going to Every event, people that are playing the game, people that are actually engaged on socials, you know, you can really start to almost create FOMO from not having, like, and not having to launch another NFT project. So an example of this is imagine if you had, you know, five people that were always The biggest supporters in, in your community, you can create a badge that is only five on there's only five available of this badge and give it to those five people and say, Hey, here's this badge. No one else is ever going to get this badge. And only you will have it. And so in the end, by the way, these badges in the future, like, Can be transferable. So they can turn it into NFTs, but they're not that right. That you're simply giving it for merit based rewards. And so that ownership right there, just, I have something that no one else has, even if it doesn't monetarily focused, can still provide a lot of community value and psychological value for that community member. I think that that's something that in the long run actually benefits everybody, because let's say that hangry decides to launch another NFT project that is adds on to their game. You know, those people can be the ones that. You know, you can reward now instead of going out and doing some and excuse my language I just feel really kind of I don't I don't like this. It's like doing some like bullshit whitelist Like what is that going to do for you? It's not going to do anything It's just going to bring in people into your community that are probably just looking to do it because they Want to sell and they want to make money and they want to do a quick flip That's not for every community. But like in general when you just go out and spray your whitelist out It's like of course Or so it's going to happen. Like, come on, y'all. Like, and so one of the things that I've personally have been experimenting with per a couple of like agencies and game developers that I've been working with, imagine if an NFT holder was a wholesaler of your product, if you were to sell a new NFT angry, that 100 and you sold it to them for 10, they're incentivized to go out to their community that, you know, they already, you, you've proven via the badges or reward system that they love your project. They're going to go out there now and start spreading the love for people that support them. And it's going to grow, in my opinion, the community much better, much higher quality than just going out and spraying whitelist everywhere. And so I think that we're going to see a lot of experiments in that sense start to arise once we have our community management system launched. And once we get a little bit more of like personally for me, if we can get a couple of brands that say like, Hey, we're going to be hiring exclusively and not exclusively, but like via rev every creator's like, shit, like there's liquidity there for me. So I'm going to start launching badges, like outside of me providing ownership and, and wanting to use it as a creative tool. A growth tool. And so, you know, I'm very excited for the flywheel effects that are, are to come in the future. It's been very difficult to build, especially as a two person team and also bootstrapping it very, very difficult, but a very great learning experience and I genuinely feel that we're innovating the way that communities are built and that Web3 will function in the future. People might not see it now, but I think, you know, in a couple of months and even years, people, people definitely will. It all just takes time. You know, good things take time. Yeah, you know what? I haven't even thought about that before. You know, the traditional method of, uh, emitting an NFT to, like, rally your audience. That can have detrimental effects to, like, your game economy or whatever. Whereas badges allow you to accomplish the same thing. Actually, well, with even more kind of visibility and control through Rev. So I want to keep us tight on time here. I want to be respectful of your time, JRP. I guess any parting comments from the community, any questions, and then JRP, while they're thinking on that, where can they find you? Where can they dig in more? All those things. We'd love to get any questions. You can find me usually on Twitter. I'm starting to use Forecaster a lot more because I think being able to have build my platform. On something that is not going to rug me, nor, and also I can bring my audience everywhere, is really interesting to me. Uh, I think it's going to be the future of social media. Uh, so Farcaster at Juan. Love to have, obviously, the OG badge, the OG kind of at there. Twitter, it's at jaredp underscore gg. Uh, Rev is Rev with two Vs underscore gg. You can sign up today at rev. gg. And I'm more than happy to answer any questions. I'm, I'm the guy kind of doing BD customer service marketing, doing it all for now. But, you know, we have some very exciting things that are up and coming. We have some exciting partnerships that we're going to be announcing soon. And, you know, feel free again to ask any questions. Like for us, it's, it's really a learning experience and it's really. Building from the ground up, because I think that that's how the best communities are built. And we're definitely on, on, on the road there. But like I said, it, you know, still trial and error is the way that failing forward is the way that we're pushing. Uh, but I appreciate you having me, Ryan. Um, again, if anybody wants to get in contact to talk specifically about Rev, that is my, my main focus currently. And I'm looking forward to seeing how GSE uses, uh, Rev and, and how other projects as well. I'm very curious to see the experiments that will happen. I think that's, those are the things that push us forward. Yeah, I love it. Now I need to brainstorm on how I can, uh, meaningfully create more cool badgets. So now you got me thinking. There you go. All right, folks, I'll get you back to your day. Thank you so much for showing up. Hangry, Aria, Alex, JRP, pleasure as always. Now, folks, if you didn't know, we are on another call. See here in about two hours from now, uh, the state of fully on chain games. We're going to be joined by one of, uh, well, the founder of Moonstream. to, which is like a. on chain user monetization strategy platform, but then we're also going to be joined by a gentleman who I just met, so I can't recall his name, but he was working on the on chain game for Star Atlas. Should be pretty legit. Anyways, I'll see you guys there. Have a great day.