Web3 Quest Platforms: Get Real Results with Galxe, Zealy, and More

It’s the end of 2023, and it seems that we are entering into the start of a new crypto upcycle. To many teams, it comes as a surprise: Just a few months ago, large funds were actively spreading memos of doom to their portcos. The resulting attempts at runway extension led to industry-wide layoffs of entire marketing and business development teams. The manual aspects of community-building came to be wholly neglected. Advice to “go into the cave” until an uptrend was taken literally and growth simply was not expected. 

Now, teams that had spent the better part of the last two years doing very minimal marketing (a social media post here or there, the occasional Twitter Space with a partner), find themselves in a hurry to make the most of newly arising opportunities. Many pre-token projects see a glimmer of hope for a successful private round. Others feel rushed to finally launch. Teams with traded tokens are pushed by holders (and are incentivised by their own leftover allocations) to bring valuations back to where they were in 2021 or earlier, or even to regain traction beyond such expectations.  

Unfortunately, founders quickly learn that rebuilding a dedicated marketing team from zero isn’t as easy as one would think. Many of the more skilled (and trustworthy) marketers that stuck around during the bear learned that the most stable way to build their careers was through consulting, freelancing for multiple project clients. Hiring someone without Web3 experience is an option, but they will require time for acclimation – a marketer being crypto-native is worth a lot. The right candidate will come along eventually, but it’s not going to be a short process. And teams definitely feel that the time to get ahead in the market is now. 

So what might be the lowest-hanging fruit for these teams? In 2023, it may very well be to use Web3-native marketing and community-building (also called ‘quest platforms’), like Galxe, Zealy, and Layer3. 

There’s nothing to be afraid of, anon

Yes, I can hear your objections already: These platforms are full of bots, or worse – airdrop hunters! By using these platforms, founders fear, they are feeding the dark side of crypto, occupied by armies of braindead clickers. Honestly though, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You can actually get useful results and find real users and community members. It’s just necessary to follow some basic principles. 

Rule 1: Set Campaign Goals

The first thing to really understand about quest platforms is, despite anything said by the teams behind them, that they are performance marketing tools. In other words, they are resources that you and your team can access in order to achieve measurable results and specific KPIs. Make sure to set some KPIs. 

So what are your goals? To get users? To grow your community? Figure out what this means in numbers. Many founders feel ashamed to want to boost social media numbers. But honestly, for most categories of projects, doing so is a necessity in 2023. Ranking sites and social media algorithms understand where to place your project based on these numbers. Investors, from analysts at large firms to retail users, are pressed for time and will – like it or not – make decisions according to your Twitter follower count or Discord membership. At least at the present time, these things will add legitimacy to your project. 

Rule 2: Create a Funnel & Use Multiple Platforms

Quest platforms can be shockingly powerful. If your project fits into the right narrative, you may find yourself suddenly with tens of thousands of individuals (and of course their alts and bots) interacting with your campaign. You might not even understand why a campaign got traction – it could be something as simple as it making to the front page of the platform’s gallery. The worst thing you can do in these kinds of situations is fail to execute on converting some percentage. There are real people in these numbers.

To do this, you need to set up a funnel. In marketing, a funnel is a way to represent the customer journey through various stages, from the start (awareness), on through consideration, and on to purchasing decision and conversion. When creating a campaign using Web3 native marketing tools, always take a moment to think through where each user goes, from when they first appear (generation) to when they convert (i.e. starting to use your product, participating in your token event, et al).

Don’t hesitate to use multiple tools or quest platforms in creating your funnel. For example, a project that is still pre-product may set the goal to have a certain number of users join their Discord and share their email addresses. This would enable these users to be continuously updated and ‘kept warm’ for an eventual launch. In this scenario, the project may want to create a Galxe campaign that includes a requirement to join Discord, and to also connect to the project’s Zealy. On Zealy, there could be regular new tasks that can earn rewards, and alerts of new tasks would only be available via Discord. One such task would be—of course—to share an email address!  

Rule 3: Stay on Brand & Educate

One of the biggest fears I hear from teams considering using a quest platform is that these resources may negatively affect their brand. Product-focussed founders worry that silly campaigns and giveaways would look bad to serious users of their platforms. Many have noticed very poorly executed campaigns, with gigantic botted-out Twitter Spaces and zero conversion. Things don’t have to work this way, though. You just have to use these platform’s very own features to stay on brand, highlight your product, and even educate the wider Web3 ecosystem about your project and the problems you are solving.  

To start, if any aspect of your product is already on-chain, you have a major advantage: Platforms like Galxe and AirLyft (but unfortunately not Zealy) allow teams to connect their existing indexers and APIs built using the Graph or Subsquid to their campaigns. This way, the platforms will be able to instantly check if a user has completed a tasks you have set. 

By checking on-chain actions, you can very rapidly get new users to directly begin using your product, or you can reward an existing user base through Web3-native loyalty campaigns. 

Even if your product or token hasn’t launched yet, there’s still plenty of things you can do to create brand-appropriate campaigns. For example, you may want to public educational materials then create quizzes on Zealy that reward users’ achievement with Discord roles. Or more simply, check that participants in your Galxe campaign actually have picked up something about your project with a quiz question here or there. Another idea is to create polls and open-ended questions for campaign participants. There can be some really valuable insights that can be gotten from these.

Rule 4: Don’t Set False Promises

There was a time in the last cycle where it seemed that every project created an NFT collection. It was virtually always a marketing ploy, and the hope was that by promising some kind of utility in relation to the core product, they could grow their communities whilst funnelling new users to the core project. Few, if anybody, succeeded in this strategy.

Worse, many of these projects found themselves trapped. NFTs, like all blockchain assets, have a certain amount of permanence. At the very least, especially if money was taken for these NFTs, the holders will have certain expectations set. Seriously, for the sake of your project, don’t ever allow these kinds of promises to be assumed by your community, even if you’re giving NFTs away using a quest platform like Galxe.

In other words, set up rewards mechanisms for your campaigns that do not leave you and your team with long-term responsibilities. Your focus should be your product, and building a community around that product, not around some short-sighted NFT drop. 
If you want to use NFTs as rewards for quests, make very clear in the descriptions (even in the metadata!) the real purpose of the collection. If you want to give away tokens, only do so when you actually know how much they are worth (meaning as close to your launch as possible, if it isn’t traded yet.). Don’t be afraid to give away cash. Stablecoin rewards do attract bots (just like any other reward), but they do bring in real people as well!

The best part? It’s a transparent, easy-to-understand reward. Your community will appreciate it.

Rule 5: Utilize Sybil-Resistance Features

As has been admitted several times already in this blog, there are many bots on these quest platforms. Nevertheless, there are also plenty of real people as well, and almost certainly (if you’ve got a consumer-facing product) ones that will want to try out your dApp, and individuals who can get involved in your ecosystem.

If you set up an effective funnel, these people will join your community. However, you can make your life a lot easier (and save resources) by implementing sybil resistance into your quests. 

Galxe might actually do the best job of this. For every campaign, you can choose from dozens of pre-set sybil-resistance options, of different levels of intensity. You can have the platform check on-chain activity (i.e. number of transactions on a specific chain) or that users have gone through some kind of KYC or on-chain identity process (i.e. the Galxe or Gitcoin passport). You can of course create your own on-chain requirements, using your preferred indexer via GraphQL API. 

Rule 6: Stay Safe

This final rule might just be the most practical: Secure your accounts! If things go as planned, you’re about to get tens of thousands of eyes on your project. Unfortunately, many of these people won’t share your ideals of an honest and transparent Web3 future. Learn the principles of security for all your social accounts and your wallets. Communicate these things to your entire team, even the CTO (you’d be surprised) and especially the intern! 

Conclusion 

In the last cycle, Web3 marketing platforms faced quite a lot of scepticism. They were viewed as a sure fire way to spam a project’s social media with bots. In the new cycle, things are changing. Major projects with great reputations have already started to understand their value as marketing tools (go check out the list of active Spaces on Galxe for proof). Hopefully, this article will help you make the most of these platforms and achieve your project’s goals for 2024 and beyond.