How We Got 3000+ Web3 MVP Users In 5 Weeks

We're building a platform that connects Web3 gaming investors and gamers. It's called CryptEarn. Think of it like Upwork for Web3 gaming.

Think of it as a job marketplace where users post which digital assets they want to rent. Gamers apply to be selected and start playing gated Web3 games for free. They earn in-game crypto coins when they beat monsters and defeat opponents, and both parties split the rewards. The whole process is automated along with ratings, reviews, and payouts (coming soon) which keeps the marketplace transparent and trustworthy.

Here's our road to getting 3,000+ Web3 native users for our MVP in 5 weeks:

We had a small community on Discord with about 800 people, and we started an inviter’s contest. The person with the most invites was going to win a reward, and the results shocked us. Within a week, our community grew to 3,400 members, which is when we revealed the MVP.

First day

On the first day, we had more signups than we believed would happen, and our website broke down.

We fixed it immediately and saw how users interacted with the MVP.

First week

In the first week, we had 120 new users.

We got these users organically. We connected with a community manager from Nigeria who really liked our idea and offered to help us with finding our first users.

Second week

In the second week, we had 518 users.

For the second week, we tested the power of referrals and word of mouth. We gamified the process of interacting with CryptEarn and asking for feedback by introducing tasks. It worked and got us more users.

Third week

In the third week, we had 1,643 users.

For the third week, we were in communication with Jumptask – a web3 platform with over 6 million users and offered a sign-up bonus (30 cents) for new users.

And the interactions spiked.

Fourth week

For the fourth week, the campaign with Jumptask was still live, and we got to a number of 2,250.

Fourth week

In the fifth week, we had 3,065 users.

Troubleshooting

But that doesn’t mean it was all sunshine and rainbows. Here are some of our behind-the-scenes adventures:

• Our inviters contest got botted and we had to disqualify and ban members
• Users tried to abuse our platform to get the most points
• We went on 130+ meetings to explain our idea, ask for feedback, see how users interact with the website in real-time
• Tested a new marketing channel, advertising on Twitter/X, and it failed (0.23% CTR)
• Made improvements to the site
• We spent the first week of our launch waking up every 15 minutes to help onboard users and resolve tickets
  During this time, we were, and still are actively participating in soonami’s cohort 3 (an accelerator program) where we’re competing for $125k in funding.

We experienced the first marketplace problem, which is an unequal percentage of user types. Most of our users were gamers, and they were hungry for more digital assets and job postings.

Based on the feedback (one of the tasks was for users to leave feedback, and we got 1,700+ submissions) we’ve got a few roads to follow when it comes to a pricing model:

• Charge a 1% transaction fee
• Add subscriptions, similar to Upwork or charge per job post/ application
• Offer our community of 2k people to test out new games
• Expand to gaming in general, not just web3

And here’s a fun fact: all of these suggestions came from our community.

Lessons learned

We also learned a few lessons on the way:

Feedback is worth more than gold. We had 130 calls that showed us that.

A single posting on our site gets met with 1,500+ gamer proposals, so there’s a lot of demand for what we’re building.

Our gamers are mainly from Nigeria and the Philippines, aged 18-30, and look at web3 gaming as an additional source of income, mostly through play-to-earn gaming, farming airdrops, and joining tournaments.

Our managers are mostly people who heavily invested in play-to-earn gaming a few years ago. They’re either solo investors, or founded a guild, and are looking for a way to use their assets to make more money. We talked to people from the US, Italy, and France, and they spend most of their time on crypto Twitter, Discord channels, and in the comments of the Web3 games they have assets from.

What do you think of our first MVP users?