#29 How to Bootstrap your early Web3 game community

Summary: Bootstrapping Web3 Games Community

Major Themes:

• Community Building: The podcast emphasizes the significance of building a community around Web3 games from the ideation stage. It suggests leveraging resources, organizing events, and using rewards to engage and grow the community.
• Partnerships and Support: Highlighting the journey of "Unfamiliar Territory" and its collaboration with Immutable X, the podcast underscores the importance of grants, partnerships, and ecosystem support in the early stages of game development.
• User Engagement and Rewards: The discussion revolves around innovative strategies to reward community members and early supporters, such as the use of social tokens, badges, and other non-monetary incentives to foster loyalty and participation.
• Content Strategy: Advice on maintaining a focused content strategy on platforms like Twitter, ensuring all communications align with the brand's core messages and values.
• Value of Early Stage Feedback: Encourages developers to engage with their community for feedback on alpha and beta versions of the game, stressing that this feedback loop can lead to product improvements and stronger community ties.

Memorable Quotes:

• "It's about the players. If you can go in and look at the mindset of the player and say, 'Well, what do they like?'... rather than just trying to shove your game down their throat." - Unfamiliar Dude
• "Partnerships should be focused on value... it's all about growing and rewarding." - JRP
• "Every new person that comes into your community, that's gold right there." - Unfamiliar Dude

Actionable Takeaways:

• Start Community Building Early: Begin engaging with your potential audience from the moment you have a game idea. Utilize social media, Discord, and other platforms to start conversations and build interest.
• Leverage Rewards and Badges: Consider innovative ways to reward community participation and loyalty. This could range from social tokens to unique badges or access to exclusive content.
• Utilize Feedback for Improvement: Actively seek feedback from early testers and community members. Use this feedback to refine your game and ensure it meets the needs and desires of your target audience.
• Focus on Value-Driven Partnerships: When seeking partnerships, focus on those that can bring real value to your project and community. Aim for collaborations that enhance your game's visibility, functionality, or user experience.
• Engage with Every Community Member: Treat every new member of your community as valuable. Personal interactions, even at the beginning stages, can lead to long-term loyalty and support.

This episode provided a comprehensive overview of strategies for bootstrapping a Web3 game's community, emphasizing the importance of early engagement, innovative rewards, and the value of feedback in the development process.

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

Transcript

NoAutopilot: 0:00

Hey, this is Noah Autopilot, founder of the Gaming Starter Collective and host of the Token Takeover podcast. In today's episode, we share a deep conversation with builders in space around how to actually bootstrap your Web3 games community, especially if you don't have a budget or if you're just getting started. Enough of me talking, let's jump in and see what we can learn. Hey, welcome. Uh, my name's Ryan, no autopilot, founder of the Gaming Star Collective. I'm joined today by JRP, the most networked man in Web3. JRP, you wanna take a second?

JRP: 0:33

Yeah, of course. Thank you so much, Ryan. Yo, what's good, everybody? My name's JRP. Been focused in the Web3 gaming space now for around three years. Really excited to be here and I want to give a quick shout out to Ryan autopilot gaming startup collective founder who is absolutely killing it and bringing the resources that game founders need to succeed. Very excited to talk about community building. I think it's something that everybody should be doing as soon as you start your game, specifically, like literally from the ideas, ideation stage, that'd have to be here and excited to talk more to a familiar family or territory.

NoAutopilot: 1:01

And then our esteemed guest today is unfamiliar dude. Founder of Unfamiliar Territory. Unfamiliar dude, do you want to give a quick introduction to yourself and,

Unfamiliar Dude: 1:10

and your project? Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Ryan. So I've been a part of the gaming collective here for a couple of months. I just want to shout out to Ryan for just making such an awesome place for founders to, to come and, and hang out and learn. So yeah, I've been doing this for a couple of years. Been, uh, working with, uh, IMX to start with. Uh, we put out a few collections, founder cards, equipment, things like that. Uh, got a small game, gaming grant from them. Uh, currently we're building two games. We started building our bigger game and realized that, you know, when you're building something, it takes four years, six years to build, uh, that you really need to give your community something to do in the meantime. So we are working on a Discord prompt based game that is pretty cool and it is in just early alpha testing stages right now, but we're getting ready to release the NFT integration side of it here probably in a few weeks. And yeah, that's where we're at. And we're currently just got our pitch deck done and we're going to be raising seed round soon. So yeah, that is, that is us in a nutshell. We're gaming for good initiative. And what that means is we are trying to do something with gaming for a positive impact on humanity. We are going out and we're building wells. for those that, uh, are in need of clean drinking water. And if you don't know, that is a huge problem. Uh, 9 million people on the earth don't have clean drinking water and airborne, waterborne diseases. It's a mess. So we're trying to attack that problem. We believe everybody should have access to clean drinking water. And yeah, that's us in a nutshell. Thanks. Right.

NoAutopilot: 2:30

You know, what's crazy is, so I've been in, I've been in web three gaming, I guess, three years now. And when the first, the first project I worked on Vi world. Was it immutable? And I specifically remember unfamiliar territory at time, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, were the first ever to get a grant. Yeah, they have

Unfamiliar Dude: 2:50

these early bird grants where you could get your project up, uh, and do, I think it was 10, 000 in sales. It was their first month of basically bringing everything together and they didn't even have documentation. I mean, what they had was, was spotty. So it was quite a task for us, but yeah, we, we had, uh, the early bird

NoAutopilot: 3:05

grant. I did on some early tokens from them. Yeah. Yeah, man, it's crazy. It, you know, there's likely a chat in your discord at some point for me asking to collab with you. It's like, Oh man, right on. Super cool.

Unfamiliar Dude: 3:18

So, you know, it's funny because I remember when we first started, you know, there were three of us on immutable X, right? So it was like, there were, you know, now you go to immutable X and it's just like page after page after page, but you know, we were actually the third project to launch besides their own game. Uh, and the second project launch had to take theirs off because of copyright issues. So, and we were the first game. The other one was a PFP. So, yeah, I can kind of say we were the first game besides their own to launch on immutable X. Kind of fun.

NoAutopilot: 3:42

Yeah, man. Wow. Wow. So I want to make sure we're diving in the meat and potatoes of today's call. So I see we've got a bunch of founders out there. What's up guys? And the topic for today is community building best guesses. And I think why. This particular conversation was interesting for us is, Untamed Territory could probably qualify you as an indie game, right? That is probably fair to say. Much like most of our founders. You don't have a 3 million budget to throw around and buy opinions on the internet. So you gotta do it the old fashioned way. You gotta, you gotta actually, uh, strap a community who, you know, cares about you, about what you're building, and has like some fun and meaningful ways to contribute. Between where you guys are at today, some of the cool stuff that we're putting together, and then me and JRP's experience building communities for the last 10 years. A couple of years in web three, hoping that we leave this call with some good tips, tricks, best practices for everybody. I'm excited

Unfamiliar Dude: 4:31

to dive into this thing. I mean, cause like you just said, there are so many, well, you know, you've experienced in the past where people go out and they buy their likes, they buy their shares, they buy. They buy their audience, but whether or not those people are going to play the game, if they're going to be interested in the community, you know, that's, they're probably not, they're just throwing a dart against a dartboard trying to, you know, see if they can hit something. So yeah, I'm interested to talk this through interest on JRP's, uh, since he's such a great connector, what he

NoAutopilot: 4:55

has to say. And actually maybe that's a good place to start. So JRP, you and I didn't plan this at all, but I'm going to throw it at you. Anyway, can you talk about maybe like the importance of early stage communities and like, what does it mean for, for some of these communities? Some of these projects that are building.

JRP: 5:09

Yeah, of course. You can throw anything out of here, Ryan. Uh, it's going to be always interesting and anybody, right? I'd really want to be able to help at any capacity that I can. I think everybody has their own goals and when we can mix those together, it makes it really special. I actually wanted to get a step back before even talking about community and actually talking about loyalty and rewards. I think that in order for a community to exist. There has to be value that someone sees within a movement, an idea, a community ultimately can, I'm not going to say be extracted, but be had. And when it comes to communities, I think being able to start something that a lot of people relate to is the first part. And I think that, you know, that's something that we all have experience in, right? It's being able to just start. And be consistent and get a small niche group of people that kind of relate to what we're talking about. I think now what we're now seeing in the space and what I think honestly is a lot more important. How do you reward your community to create an even more loyal community? And so I actually stumbled upon this article yesterday. I'm going to post it in the comments and maybe if you want to pin it, Ryan. And I think it's a really great read for everybody. The Harvard Business Review and a couple of obviously researchers Did a study on like, how do rewards actually create loyalty? And they found a couple of really interesting things. And I think that more and more game communities should join in utilizing these metrics and these tactics. To grow their own communities and I'm more than happy to like kind of dive, you know, deeper into what I learned from that and, and how we can implement it in our own communities. But, uh, I'll leave it at that because I, you know, I also want to hear what you both getting that community started, right? Because this is kind of more growth stage than just getting started.

NoAutopilot: 6:42

Man, JRP with the Harvard reference best practices, like come on now. Okay. So we, we will jam more on that on this call. But I'll pause real quick. Unfamiliar, do you would add to what, uh, JRP reference?

Unfamiliar Dude: 6:55

I think a lot of founders, you know, they, they get very, their mindset is just very tunnel vision. It's about the game, it's about the game, it's about the game, but, you know, really it's about the players. If you can go in and look at the mindset of the player and say, well, what do they like? Who do they want to connect with? How do they want to engage with the game? That's a better way to go about it rather than just trying to shove your game down their throat and show them only what you want them to see. That's kind of my take. So I think alignment is really, you know, like, what we're doing, and where our game You know, for good initiative. So one of the things, even though we're pushing out a game, what we're trying to do is get people to connect on a humanitarian level. And that is part of our, our discord and why we're doing what we do. If you're a fan of Simon Sinek, he always says people don't really care what you do, but they want to know why you do it. So, you know, that's the why behind things is really, I think, important for founders to think about.

NoAutopilot: 7:40

Yeah, that's awesome man. I was just talking to another founder yesterday. He's creating like a web 3 decentralized discord, which JRP, by the way, I meant to talk to you about. It's really sick. Some of the original ethos and purposes of blockchain tech was like the decentralization, permissionless. And there was like a strong undercurrent of philanthropy. And I just feel like over the years, with all the scams and whatnot that have popped up, we've kind of strayed away from that. And so it's, it's super refreshing to see like a novel approach like Unfamiliar Territories where, and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, but I think the vision is players play in the game, and they buy a well, or create a well, or, or make like an endgame purchase, and a portion of the game's proceeds are then used to build drinkable water wells. Did I get that right? You

Unfamiliar Dude: 8:26

are pretty close. Yep. So we've got our wells on Immutable X right now, small, medium, and large wells. Uh, those contracts are actually 100 percent owned by Human Brains Humanity, our partner. They've built about 1, 100 wells so far, um, in East Africa. And when you buy a well, you actually are building a well in a community that'll take serve up to about 500 to a thousand people. So yeah, it's pretty important. And then in the game, we're going to be doing drinks of water and other things where it's like smaller contribution, 5 contributions, things like that. And then when we do our bigger mints and things, we usually try and give about 20 percent to Hydrating Humanity just to continue supporting them. So there's lots of ways that we funnel to them. Just finished our first well in Tanzania. So our community is, is raised enough to build a well. And let me tell you, I mean, I almost get a little bit teary eyed when I talk about it, but it's like, we're actually right now providing More value to 500 people than most games out there. So it's like, for them, the, the people that were actually serving, they used to walk three to five miles a day for clean drinking water, right? So now they get up, they go, and that's not, they would walk three to five miles for water. It's not even clean drinking water. So then they'd have to bring it back and make it clean. With these wells, they get instant access. And the other thing it does is it promotes agriculture and, you know, starts building their community. So we're, that. We're pretty stoked about it.

NoAutopilot: 9:36

And you know what, I'd be remiss if I didn't actually give a shout out to Hangry. Cause Hangry also has kind of that philanthropic, I always pronounce that word wrong, but hopefully I got it close, approach with what they're doing. And uh, animals and animal shelters and care. So, shout out to you guys as well. Okay, so I guess bringing this back to like the more tangible things. A lot of folks when they go to launch a project, they expect to share all the hard work that they've done. You know, how cool the game is or whatever. And that alone will be enough to get people excited. And I think it's really kind of quite the opposite. You know, it's a, it's a long journey. Months, years of, of consistently and, you know, framing what you're doing. Not, not why you think it's cool or your tech is cool or anything like that. But to your point earlier, why would a gamer care? Like they're selfish, right? I heard humans are selfish, so why would they take time to learn about your project? And so there really is like, I think there are some processes that teams can follow to kind of bootstrap those early communities. I would say like mistake number one is thinking, I'm going to send out this single tweet and people are going to be like thrilled at what I've done. Invariably it never happens. They kind of lose, lose a lot of confidence. But JRP, I don't know if you have anything to throw onto that.

JRP: 10:42

Yeah, I, I totally agree. I mean, from a lot of the founders that I'm currently advising and just in general talking to, I think a lot of them still have a misunderstanding of, and we talked about this yesterday with, uh, San Dino, which is really great. Like what is a community and what is an audience? When a founder can understand how they can build up an audience and then bring that audience to be a part of their community. That's a really powerful thing, but being able to understand how to build an audience is still very important and I think not really talked about so like, I don't see a lot of founders like replying to the people that reply to their, I don't see a lot of where founder brand first, like these are things that have been proven to work in the past and from my experience as well, right? Like I consider myself now, I want to be more considered as a content creator, like how important it is to create those, that awareness, those impressions, because I don't think that I honestly don't really care. I don't really think that they matter. Yeah. But they matter so that you can ideally want to, you know, bring some of that audience over to be part of your community. Uh, actually today, Jordan from Eureka, we had like a two hour long conversation about, How he can be doing this and maybe Ryan, we can set something up that I do really think it's important for, for people, you know, to focus on that, which is a really long and extensive conversation, but contributes to building that community, right. If

Unfamiliar Dude: 11:51

you don't mind, Jerry, if you want to get a few of your, just the, the bigger topics that you talked about today and just what, you know, maybe give a few real life lessons

JRP: 11:57

here. I would say like, just to go back to basics, like cleaning up your Twitter profile, like making sure that your Twitter profile is, and you understand that it's a website for you. When people click on to your profile. As they scroll through, they have to understand the tweets that you do. And this goes for any social media platform, like who you are. And sometimes we're not focused on that, where we shouldn't be focusing on the quality and the impressions that we make via our, our posts and also not necessarily focused a lot on, on retweets. Like for me, every single time that I retweet something, you know, after a day goes by, I un retweet because if someone goes onto my platform or my, my, my page and then starts scrolling and just sees a whole bunch of retweets, they're not going to know what I'm about. Like what my niche is, what I represent. And that's just like one of the ways to like, essentially like get people to understand and connect with your brand. Another really important thing that I was mentioning to him was anybody that supports you, you should be supporting them back. 110 percent way that you do that is just by simply adding their Twitter profile to a list and commenting on all of their tweets. Forever, because if, if they support you, you support them, you create this bond and you uplift each other. And that's really what communities are about. It's about uplifting each other. And I don't see a lot of people doing this, where, you know, this is, these are your top supporters outside of being able to track your top supporters for any platform. If you can even just hone in on, on Twitter and let's say that every post that you do now is getting at a minimum 15 likes and a thousand views, like that might be able to bring the next 10. I are on board, like I might be able to bring the next thousand users on board. It just really depends on how you want it to be viewed. So like being able to reply or something super, super important. And the last thing I'll say is how important like first impressions are. So your bio, like your bio should be, this is my niche. This is what I do. And then these are, this is the things that make me qualified to do these two things that I just told you. The person that I always refer to is Addis. Addis Gaming does this great. If you go onto his profile and I'll read you his bio, it's like niche, uh, or like, it's like icon is your gameplay trader, Madlass, Madlassy. And then what did he do? Finding new games to play, like how does he do it? Videos and threads, and then some glitchments. So featured by Games. gg, Catalyst Advisor, Ambassador for C to 5. And obviously this varies from like a game profile to like a founder profile, which is probably the last thing, which is focus in on your founder profile being the thing that people relate to first. And this is proven because You can see how many content creators out there, and now they're taking all of their brand equity and pushing it over to a community. Seriously, Eliza with the Discord, Tara, Blossie, Jay, Bolts, Raiden, everybody has built up their own brand first, then brought up all of that to the community that they're building, which speaks volumes. And they don't try to build up their community first. They build up their own brand.

Unfamiliar Dude: 14:34

I think you're spot on on there. That's really cool. One of the things that, uh, Ryan and I have been talking about is, is putting things. So if you want to take away from that, we've been putting things in buckets, right? So it's like you have three buckets and you try not to stray from, from those buckets. So you're either talking about, You know, game and store, you're talking about your partnerships, or you're talking about for me, hydrating humanity, you know, and trying to keep things aligned, really help with your content. And then you're not straying from your brand. That really helps a lot for me. I just gave a tag,

NoAutopilot: 15:01

shout out to Addis. I don't know, by the way, GRP, that was a great. That's a great reference. So yeah, I guess let's, let's, let's kind of break this back down to like fundamentals what founders right now could do to bootstrap their community. You know, looking at this as, as a funnel, it's really easy and popular. Open mouth at the top, little tiny opening at the bottom. And so maybe you find one or two platforms where your ideal customer, like where they consume information. And so if that's Web3 gaming, you know, maybe that's Twitter or YouTube. And now you got to create to at least post a couple of times a week. And what I've always recommended is you kind of look at it in content types. So maybe you have a post about how fun the game is. Again, what, what do the gamers get out of it? Maybe you have a post, the partnerships, like credentializing you and your company and your team. And then maybe you have another post about like your mission or your values. So like your, your ideal customer can, you have a deeper connection to, to your brand. A lot of people see it, very few will interact with it. And that middle of your funnel, in gaming projects that I've worked on in the past, typically that's been like, something like Discord. They cared enough, or they were curious enough to like, click through your Twitter profile, hit the Discord. And now this is really your place to build a real, like, human relationship. Yes, these are potential customers. Yes, these are potential mentors. But you really have to kind of pass the vibe check. Are you mentioning it and saying, Hey, welcome just to get you orientated with what we do here. We are so and so I'm so and so we do this, keep an eye out for that. And if you're part of the gaming collective, you see me still do that to this day. When new people kind of join in and added as a, as a private member. I, I provide that, like, one on one introduction. And then at that point, now, now your bottom of the funnel, like, assuming that you keep this thing going, now your bottom of your funnel is maybe your game. Or your mint. Or your product. Or your service. Or whatever. I guess that's the way it's always worked for me to kind of think through these things. And, and also kind of rationalize and come to peace with the fact that, or everyone, 50, 000 people view campaign that I ran on Twitter or a course of a week, but only a thousand people joined the discord. Only 10 percent of those went through verification and actually entered the discord. And then from those minutes, I spoke to five, but yeah, the consistency again is the key. You know, you just keep doing that for days and weeks and months. And it really does

Unfamiliar Dude: 17:11

add up. Well, I get how many people fumble the bottom of the funnel, right? So they get the top part, right? But then when it comes down to, Hey, I finally got that one new user and they don't even introduce themselves or they don't. Make that connection or they don't like those guys are gold, especially in the beginning, like, you know, every new person that comes into your community, that gold right there. So I've actually watched you do that and put that into my own best practices as well.

NoAutopilot: 17:32

You know, another cool thing that I've seen, this is from, uh, Oh, Justin. From Safari, I mean, in your early days, like doing things that don't scale, so like slowing down your building to just stop in two people in your community, so, and you've seen this within the Gaming Startup Collective too, and people will book time, and like the sole purpose of that is, one, to again pass the vibe check, let them know I'm a real human, I get to recognize that they're a real human, understand why they joined, what they're looking to do, and this is what Dustin did at Safari, I think he has like 500 members or 1000 members or something like that, he literally met With every last one of them. And so at the conclusion of it, you know, he had just the greatest possible understanding and pulse on where the gaps are in what that niche of person is looking for. Then he's been able to spin that into a product he's developed and launched. He's hired a team for, I think they've fundraised and raised around 3 million all by doing things that don't scale. I think as founders oftentimes it's really hard to maybe lock yourself in your room, get your computer and like build and kind of settle. Cool. Uh, but you got to be able to like, check yourself, break away and do some of these things that maybe aren't as, uh, immediately gratifying.

Unfamiliar Dude: 18:42

You know, it's hard because I think, you know, personality wise, a lot of times, you know, founders, some of us anyways are introverted, right? So it's like, we want to be in our room and building. We want to be left alone. You know, those guys, it's like, no, I'm building, I'm building. But it's such an important to be able to go out and connect, you know, with the community. The people and I remember in the early days, man, it was like, we got our first piece of concept art, you know, taking us a month of back and forth and everything else. And, you know, you release it and then it's done. Right. You're like, Oh man, all this work and like getting that one piece of art that costs a whole lot of money. Now it's out there and you know, I don't have anything else to do. So it's hard in the beginning. Cause you just don't have a lot of content to push out there. So I think a lot of people make the mistake of saying, well, I'm going to wait till I have. An MVP, I'm going to wait till I have a product and they've really missed. I mean, because no matter what you got to start from zero, right? So it's like, if you had a year of building that you could have gotten that number up to 500, even that's 500 more and gets you to that next level. That much fast. Maybe it's a thousand or 10, 000 whenever it is. You know, I think a lot of people just wait too long to start.

NoAutopilot: 19:39

And I'll give you another good example of that too. So I'm like, I'm not just preaching here. I'm, I'm like falling through. Some of you may know that I've been working on a startup concept over the last couple of weeks. Idea I've had for a while, but just. Finally, I've had time to dig into it and as we're determining the minimum viable features that this MVP needs to have, we're actively reaching out to and interviewing our future customers, right? So like we're, We're understanding, like, we already have a pretty good sense, I feel, but we're understanding, like, maybe there's things that we're not perceiving or prioritizing where there would be an opportunity. But then also, it just really helps with your network. I didn't even mention this before, but, yeah, like, Justin from Safari, he met a thousand people, he learned maybe some things that he can target. If Justin at Safari has a problem, he has his Rolodex of a thousand people that are extremely intelligent, bright, in the space, aware, they themselves have a network, and so it's like, yeah, your network is your net worth, and so there's, there's a ton of value in that. As well. And actually JRP, you're, I mean, I mentioned at the start of the call you're, you're the most networked man in Web3 as far as I know. I'd love to hear kind of your, your opinions and, and feedback on that too.

JRP: 20:49

Yeah. Like for, for two sides, like building Rev as well. When I first started, I joined the web team'cause they hadn't been building for the last two years. We, you know, we were really confused and lost. Like we didn't really know where to go in terms of a product. It took me around three months to, and, and also bringing on an advisor, Mananj, who was helping us with UI, which by the way, kind of invited to the Gaming Startup Collective on Discord. Until for us to realize like, where do we need to focus in on and niche down in so that we can actually deliver value to this very, like this very much needed problem that people are having. And then how can we then kind of push out a solution that can be brought essentially to the entire market. And that's kind of what we're focused on. And it was only, I was only able to do that by being a content creator. And so it's been a really great thing to just like sit down with people, learn and, and kind of go slower. And now I'm really excited to say that. You know, this month, this upcoming month, this month, I guess, is going to be probably the first month where I don't need to do user research. I'm going to just focus in on the people that we have already, that love the product, build with them, get it all, all the bugs ironed out and then launch with what people say that they want. And so we're going to see that probably mid March, which I'm really, really excited for. And there was something, and a couple of other things that I wanted to say about community building that I think a lot of people do wrong, but I'll leave it at that unless we want to mull over to that. Oh man, keep rolling. The thing that I think we don't talk about enough is not being able, like we We try to build communities without having data driven decisions. Anything that you can't track, you don't know if you're getting better at it, or you don't know if you're really growing. Usually the way that we track these things are, I have more followers, I have more engagement. When in reality, like those are just, as I mentioned before, like vanity metrics that can help you build community, but aren't very, things that are concrete. So one of the things that, which is the product that I'm telling you about, how can we help communities, creators, games, understand who their top supporters are and retarget those supporters so that they become the most, like a super fan with your community. Imagine if you had, you know, 20 people that had unfamiliar territory in their bio, it hadn't like your BFP. They had, they were commenting under your posts on Twitter every single day. Like those 20 people are going to essentially allow you to build a platform to reach more people without them. If no one's commenting under your tweets, you're going to get maybe like 500 or 200 views automatically with those 20 people. You're going to reach 5, 000 views every single time. We realized that our badging system is great for this. And so now that. We're going to launch that again middle of next year, middle of next month. That's something that I'm excited for because I think that we're finally going to get to a spot where we can do data driven community building. Quite literally, nobody has done this outside of just like, I have more followers and that's kind of it. Exactly. Like I want to, I want to push it out. I, I, you know, now we're just kind of focused on again, fixing the core product and the bugs and stuff. And then after that, it's like, imagine if you can say like this person. Has been to my last five events. They are really acting for the last, you know, week in my discord. I'm going to reward that person as soon as they see that you're rewarding them. Whether it just be, whether it's just like a DM every single morning or like a weekly call with them, like now it's going to build so much momentum for your community that it's automatically organically going to grow. And then once you figure that system out, once you start putting in paid advertising. To get more eyeballs, to bring in more communities and you start retargeting those people. I see like a, like so many different opportunities popping up for games and for communities in general. And so I'm hoping to kind of spearhead this and I'm going to be doing this for the next month or so. It's just like dropping a shitload of badges. Once we launch our product, I'm going to be able to be like, Hey, These five people are my top supporters. You know what? I was going to give them all 50 bucks and I want to see what that does for people moving forward. Like, wow, this guy for whatever's coming, his way is going to reward his top people that might incentivize them and encourage them. Not financially, but just like, I believe in him. So I want to support him. It's definitely an experiment, but I think something that more and more we'll see people do and that we're already starting to see, but like a lot of it is like alpha bot, which is just, you know, collecting social information and that's kind of it, but like, that's not really, it's not really community building. Right.

NoAutopilot: 24:35

Hey, are you a builder looking for grants to build your ideal? Web3 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.

Unfamiliar Dude: 25:01

That's, uh, that's definitely something that I think that is lacking out there. You know, we just integrated, like, the Zealy board and just try to do rewards. It's such a huge thing, and like you said, it doesn't have to be cute. It can be a DM, it can be that, that one on one, or it can just be a role in the Discord. It can be, you know, there's so many ways that you can reward. That's one of the things that we're trying to do. So we've got a mint coming up, looks like we're gonna be doing a loop box sale, but before we did that, we're going to actually do a free mint. And that's just for our Toby. We're going to a first edition Toby character free mint. But really, that's just a reward for our people that are coming in and interacting with our events. So, I mean, the whole system there is just to reward people that are are actually spending time and. You know, being involved in our community.

NoAutopilot: 25:42

This is interesting, but I was on a call last night with a very popular Chinese influencer, and I've never been exposed to the Chinese web influencer scene. It was a tremendous pitch. I think we may end up doing some partnership stuff with them for a project I'm contracted with. One of the things that really stood out to me was the focus on early adopters. And it doesn't necessarily have to be like you print a bunch of cash and hand it over to them. Obviously, if there's a way to do that, then that kind of kickstarts the whole FOMO engine, gets you off to the races, at least for a short period of time. But yeah, just, You know, maybe it's private access to you and the team. Maybe it's more priority feedback and suggestions on how to improve the product. Maybe you relinquish some control and allow them to help you with like partnerships or create competitions or art contests. I mean, just look at Axie Infinity. Like obviously it's a massive brand. So it's a bit different, but like they have all these. offshoot IRL events that are put together that actually itself isn't coordinating. It's just like the community, maybe get some, some brand guidelines or maybe a little bit of a budget and they run off and do it. So just try and think creatively about how you can reward and empower your early community members. I really do think that goes.

JRP: 26:50

A long, long way. Yeah, and the ways that we have to do that right now are, are pretty limited. It really is at this point, it really is manual tracking. Like I, I, I've talked to community that at least three of them now that they manually screenshot Discord events. And then they transpose all of that information over to an Excel sheet and then assign points to people that were there for like that were there and active. But they do it off of memory, right? It's like, Oh yeah, I remember this, this person was like texting a whole bunch because you can't screenshot the chat every single like five minutes. You can, but it's just like a lot of work. So yeah, there's people doing it already. I think it's now how can we automate it? Because it has to be automated in my opinion to be sustainable. You can't do that and you're not going to do it. Everyone's just going to be too lazy to do it.

NoAutopilot: 27:26

Yeah, the, uh, this isn't meant to be a shill session, but I will say, uh, JRP and his startup, uh, Rev, we are looking at incorporating its batch system. Uh, I'm catching a bit of feedback from you. Unfamiliar dude, just heads up. Yeah, so we are looking at incorporating his, uh, badge and merit system into the, uh, the gaming startup collective, uh, likely as, as early as next week. So if you're looking at similar ways to reward people from participating in your community, uh, JRP best way to reach out is probably in the DMs.

JRP: 27:56

Yep. DMs or telegram or discord. Yeah, really anywhere. I, um, I'm always active, so you'll, you'll catch me.

NoAutopilot: 28:03

All right, folks. So you know what I'll. You know how this goes, but these are meant to be communal spaces. Like, yeah, we're up here where the talking heads, but if you have any specific questions about community building, Um, that you'd like to ask. Feel free to drop them. Char P says, yep, Dante got that first in. Once a legend, always a legend. We got our shout out to Addis Gaming. He hitched back saying, always appreciate that. Philip, what's up, Philip? Can you share links to unfamiliar territory here? Yeah, so probably the, uh, the best way to do it in the Twitter space, we have either his profile, you click on it, take you there. I also have one of his videos. Tweaks pinned to the top. Yeah, or you can drop the link. I put in the, uh, the link tree. So it's got everything on there. Legend. Building Dwarf here. I'm going to try and listen while I'm finishing up some work and Neutrino says, Hey. All right, folks. So we got, we got about 15 minutes left of this thing. I guess I'm trying to think what other tactical immediate things could folks leave this call doing? I guess I'll pass it over to you, unfamiliar dude. So I guess with your community brought up, like what things are you guys looking to Continue doing, maybe start doing, and maybe stop doing. So

Unfamiliar Dude: 29:08

start doing, one of the things like we said earlier is just, uh, really working on our tweets and keeping them within brand, those three funnels. So I'd, you know, challenge anybody out there to, you know, if anybody wants to book some time with me or you or whoever, I'm sure we're, we're both open to helping out, um, but to really figure out what your brand is. The other thing is, you know, having that, all that media, one of the things, uh, you want to do is maybe put together a Google drive or a Dropbox something so that you've got, you know, Everything in order that you want somebody else to use. So if you are getting an influencer or somebody out there, it's really handy to have something put together that is on brand for them. I think that's super important. Otherwise you're really leaving it up to them to, uh, your game in a way that they talk about it instead of the way that you want it to be presented. Yeah. Other than that, I think, you know, we're really diving into the rewards part of this. So again, that Zealy board trying to go out there, we're going to be creating quests, uh, all of this is leading up to our free mint. And then after that, that free mint will feature them or our loot box. And, uh, also an upcoming. Uh, river token drop. So it's like you just start piling things on top of each other and, you know, momentum starts to grow. If you're going to be doing a sale, I'd almost suggest do something else before the big sale, right? Do a couple of things, get that momentum going. So people are just like, well, yeah, I see you got a sale, but I didn't do anything else. So why would I buy now? You know, this is a web three space. You really have to think almost like the web to the last 16 years in e commerce. So one of the things in NFTs remind me of is it's still a marketplace, right? And each little. If you can look at each place that you're going to as a marketplace, you know, this place might have 50, 000 users. This one might have a hundred thousand users. This one might have 200, 000 users, you know, and grab from, from that funnel. A good way to look at it. Yeah. I think those are, that we're going to be working on. I actually, yeah, I

NoAutopilot: 30:48

want to take this spotlight and I want to shine it right at JRP. So get ready, mate. Okay. So let's say JRP, you're a early stage gaming founder. You just finished your alpha build so early, early stage, maybe it's a single level, like some core functionality. And now it's at that time that you start, you need to start getting some initial users in to like play this thing and bootstrap your community. We've talked a lot about social media. We talked about community management. What would be, maybe, like, your, uh, your couple step process for these teams to think about partnerships? Reaching out to other games, or protocols, or quest platforms. How should they do it? Should they do it at all? Like, I know you're all across that stuff, so, if you don't mind, maybe in these last few minutes, just, uh, just, uh, walk us through that.

JRP: 31:32

Yeah, dude, of course. So, like, how do you think you should it? I would. I think that there's a lot of people that say that they want to get partnerships, but they don't know why they want to get partnerships or the reason that they want to get partnerships is because they think that it's going to help grow their brand equity or their community. And I don't like that because partnerships should be, should be focused on value. Like if you're partnering up with someone, you want to make sure that there's actual value being passed there. And even if there is, you don't mean to announce a partnership to make it valuable. If you're already using something that, or partnering up with the community, like outside of being a little bit more like of a social, you know, thing doesn't really work. If you don't really have a game that works, right? Like, what are you partnering up with someone? If game isn't playable, if what I would recommend, and if I was a founder of that specific stage of build, what I would do is I actually have an alpha game plan for this. So D gens, and that's going to be D three gens. Recently did a mint with Rev that was absolutely genius. And what that was, they were on a, on a Twitter space and they said, Hey, we're going to launch for OG badge. This badge is not going to be claimable for anybody moving forward in the future. So if you want to claim this edge, go into the discord, claim the badge and go out to social media, take a screenshot of the badge. Or, and just say, I am djens, we are djens, you know, and post the, the picture of the screen, of the badge. This, he did this, the badge got 150 mints, and he got 600 people to join the discord. What I would say then is, alright cool, get that strategy down, like, get, make sure that that's like a really great launch, maybe get a couple of like AOLs that really believe in your game to help you out with that. Then focus in on those people that have badges and bring them into the alpha. Test their game, ask them what they like, ask them what they don't like, and utilize all that information to do the same exact thing, but do it for a set of users that you know are really gonna be into your game. Like, if you ask all of those people, like, Hey, by the way, just so you all know, like, we want to reward you all for being here early. We already have your wallet because of the badges, so you can expect something, you know, a reward in the future. And we just want to thank you. Like, it's gonna be our thank you for you. And, but if you want to like really support us, fill out the survey, right? It's like, all right, cool. What type of gamer are you? What type of games do you want? Obviously, if it's a strategy game, like a first person shooter person, isn't going to love it. The next space is going to be get really niched down and say, all right, cool. From the, what we learn, what community should we specifically be targeting to bring into our alpha build and build a community around because that OG is really that OG badge. It's really like a catch all, right? It's not going to be, this is going to be your, your community forever. Although some might say, now it's going to be like, we have targeted data. Let's go target those individuals and try to do it and replicate it as much as we can. And once you're able to do that and say, you do it for various communities that, you know, have a strategy game or whatever that may be. And again, it depends if like your game is playable because then you can just share within communities. You're going to have a list of, let's say a hundred people that you can consistently hit up and say like, Hey, just so you know, these are our updates and you can find their Twitters and say, Hey, just so you know, like I'm going to support you because you supported us back in the day and you're going to comment under the things, all of that combined is going to, you're going to come back in a month after launching that. And you're going to see that you're going to have maybe, let's say ideally like 50, a 50 person community. That's super tight niche niche. That is. Essentially following up with your game that is excited for your game and is willing to go out and be your supporters and scream from the rooftops that this is what they're, you know, this is one of their identities, right? Cause like people can have multiple identities and when you get to that point and now you, let's say you launch your beta, you're going to do the same thing, create FOMO, bring people in and retarget those individuals. That 50 percent community should grow to 500 people. And then those 500 people, again, these should be hardcore fans. If you have 500 people tweeting or yeah, tweeting under your like posts that you just went live on a public. Or that you just launched FFT, it's going to sell out. But yeah, you've been working to this for this for a while now. The thing is that again, like without Rev in reality, you can't really do that. But again, that's part of the reason why I'm so excited for it. And these are the ways that I'm envisioning people use it. And so like, that's a really short way of saying or like a process that I think that, you know, more people should follow. Um, and we've seen it work already. And actually Kearney, Kearney Crypto is actually just got a sponsor because of the badges. Yeah. Cause those badges actually give you insight to the people that are collecting them. So like, for example, he can see the value that people have in their wallets. He can see the top NFTs. He can see the top tokens. He can see the top smart contracts. He can see the top blockchains that they interact with. He can see how active those wallets are on chain. All of that is just data that you can use to make better decisions. And which is, which is what he did, which is allowed him to get a sponsor for the show and for his community. So. That's like my, you know, mic drop. Hopefully that was helpful. And again, it's just a reiterative process. And, and I'm really excited to see how, you know, people use, uh, the tech for ultimately going to market. We're

NoAutopilot: 36:01

going to do that,

JRP: 36:02

like

NoAutopilot: 36:02

written down in a step by step process. So then I can blast it out to, uh, to everyone in the community. That'd be cool.

JRP: 36:09

We gotta get Kearney. The guy, honestly, that like taught me, I saw him do it and I was like, holy shit, like, this is something right here. Like, this is essentially. I. Retain, when you think about it, right? Like, that's how, like, going back to, like, human fundamentals, like, that's how a muscle grows. Like, you have to really stress it. And then you gotta leave it out for like a couple, like a rest day to grow, which means that it's gonna, like, like, like a stock, it can't go up all the time, like it has to, you know, it fluctuates, but yeah, I would, I would love to try to do that with, with Kearney as well. Alright, I'm jumping

NoAutopilot: 36:37

through the comments here. We got four minutes left. Let's see. Angry Animal, what do you guys think about social tokens as rewards for dedicated community members? Uh, Tri Role HQ have been awesome for us. Yeah, so I haven't dug into that project, but I guess with what JRP has said, like, you know, that, that definitely seems like a under explored area for founders. Highly advise folks to take a look at using these type of things to incentivize and rally, uh, community around. See what else we got. Uh, Philip, I only look for partnerships where I can set up, uh, mini games for them. The others are just a bonus. Here to support. Alright folks, so we got three minutes left. I want to give time for our panelists here to give any, any outro to share. Let's, uh, let's start with you. Unfamiliar territory. What do you want to end on for all these lovely folks? Yeah, I appreciate it. Do you

Unfamiliar Dude: 37:22

guys, uh, just throwing out best practices that really helped me? Um, as far as just what we're doing, one of the things that we started doing is being more regular with what we do. So we're doing a Wednesday, basically it's just a game day. So we're gonna be live streaming and just kind of playing all with It's just about getting those few people at the start to continually be your best supporters and push your brand out there and then rewarding them. And once you can get that, if you can get that cycle going, then it's just a never ending cycle. And automated thing, awesome. For me, it's like automated process,

NoAutopilot: 37:54

then

Unfamiliar Dude: 37:55

you're

NoAutopilot: 37:55

golden. Alright, JRP, passing it over to you. Shout out in comments for our guests here.

JRP: 38:00

Yeah, this was super fun. Thank you all for letting me talk so much. I hope it was somewhat helpful. I'm really excited to see where the next generation of gaming takes us. The next generation of community building takes us. And, you know, those people that are in the audience, shout out to Hangry. Um, Neurotrino and Philip, like, You are all what makes community, right? And it might be small, but again, it's all about growing and rewarding and growing and rewarding. And so I'm really excited to, as a, as a founder of a company, doing that to help others do that. At the same time as a supporter of these communities, being able to do that. And so if there's any way that I can support you, please do let me know. I can do what Ryan does. Like what Ryan does specifically is a very niche thing. And I realized that it's not, it doesn't fit my forte, I guess. But what I realized is that I'm really good at like touching goes. And so I'm realizing that, and you know, for those Ryan, we haven't even talked about this, like my vision for gaming group, which is the community that I started a while back was really like to funnel my community and my network in that and for my network to then kind of talk with each other. And so the thing that I'm doing now is that every time that I meet a founder that I believe in, I'm giving them a badge so that I can track who that person is within my community. That badge gives you a role within the GG discord. And that badge gives you, that role gives you access to specific channels. So what I've been asking, I asked Tom yesterday, I want you to post a founder update, like for it's like a forum thing, post a founder update. And whenever you text me and say like, Hey, we have a new update. I'm going to say, Hey, post it there. And I'm going to let all the VCs in my network go to that channel. Because it's very hard for me when I'm getting three messages per day saying like, Hey, can you find me this person? Hey, can you find me a VC? Hey, can you forward me to this? Like, I can't do it. It's just like not possible anymore. It's just too much inbound. And so I'm hoping to kind of aggregate all of that there and for it to have positive network effects there and, and honestly use that to support the Gaming Startup Collective and, and vice versa, right? Because we have that relationship and, and a lot of the resources there are absolutely amazing. And I think more and more people should, should see those and utilize those. And I'm hoping that this directory of sorts becomes a go to for a lot of the B2B community moving forward. So I'm very excited for it. But Ryan, thanks again for having me. You know, any way that I can support it for everybody, again, anybody, please do let me know. You know what we could do?

NoAutopilot: 40:01

We should do. We should probably set up a question and answer session. Uh, JRP. We can show Rev to some of the, uh, Solve our founders, that'd probably be a good idea. Let's see, maybe, uh, maybe tail end of next week or early the week after. If that works for you, that'd be cool.

JRP: 40:13

Yeah. Earlier the week after we're probably better just so that we have some of the bugs fixed out, but everything works. You can sign up today at rev. gg. We were just kind of fixing some of the, the quality of life issues, which includes like changing your BFP, adding a new collection, getting data analytics for each badge, et cetera. Gotcha.

NoAutopilot: 40:28

Sweet. Let me know in the comments, what you thought of this space, what you liked, what you didn't like. Who should we talk to next? Uh, as for the Geng's Collective, what to keep an eye out for. Tomorrow, in the Discord, we have our Crit It Community Call. That's where we all get together and, uh, cry on each other's shoulders about what didn't go well, and then wipe the tears away, and then celebrate what did go well. After that, Tuesday, uh, we have our Geng's Collective. Game Demo Day Finale So if you recall last week we had 17 games to present Uh, we whittled that down to 3 And now those 3 are going to be competing For the prize pool we put together Which is a little bit north of 5, 000 In total prizes So make sure you set a reminder for that And yeah, if I can help you in any way, don't hesitate to let me know JRP, Unfamiliar Territory Hangry, Tom, Neutrino Appreciate you guys Y'all have a great day