#03 Gamifying your Discord NFT Community
Today I’m writing about the ideas I have come up with to gamify our Discord community.
*This post is part of a series where I document my journey running the Cool-Oh NFT campaign from scratch.
Cool-Oh links: https://linktr.ee/cool_oh
Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/mJD86nUtUZ **
How do you start a community? When I join the Discord of one of the well-known NFT communities, with thousands of members, I always wonder how they started. It’s been a little more than two weeks since we kicked off Cool-oh, and our server has 60 members. We’re very far from reaching the 5000 I believe we need to consider we have a critical mass to start minting our NFTs.
So how do you get from sixty members to five thousand? I honestly don’t know how others have done it. I’m sure that every successful community has a different secret sauce that made it thrive. But I’m also sure that there must be some common factors that allowed those communities to grow, and I’m guessing it’s related to a combination of word of mouth, social influence, and consumer behavior. If you want to learn about those subjects, I encourage you to read Contagious: Why Things Catch On
The problem with starting an NFT community is that when you get your first members there isn’t much to do. They get into your Discord, and now what? Especially when like us, we opened the doors as early as we could, when nothing is defined yet. We didn’t have a minting date, our discord had a couple of channels, and we didn’t have much of a strategy. This was by design, as we wanted to document everything as it happened.
The biggest problem I see is that, as I said, when a new curious mind with no emotional connection to our project hops into our server, there’s not much to do apart from reading the messages.
The ideal situation would be that this new member had an onboarding, and could immediately get involved in helping out, in a way that he then gets rewarded. This way, we allow him to get into the rabbit hole, generating this emotional connection with the community we are looking for.
Gamify your Discord
Gamifying seems like a great idea to have your members active. When we started Cool-Oh, the first idea we had was to introduce a celebrity (a Cool-ohbrity) every day and challenge our members to name it in a Cool-Oh way. We set up a #cool-ohbrity-naming channel and we got great interaction from some members. Some names they came up with were Frankasstein, Cool-oh-patra, or Fartaklaus! It’s a great start, but they don’t get anything in return, at least not just yet.
When members ask when are they getting their Cool-Ohs, is not great to tell them: “We don’t know yet, we need a critical mass of members”. But how are you going to get that critical mass if you don’t give them something? We don’t want to start minting NFTs yet, as we believe that they’d lose perception of value, but active members should get rewarded! So what can we do?
A potential solution
Every week Rodrigo and I have a gamification brainstorming session where we try to come up with new ideas. Head up to his Linkedin profile and ping him, he’s amazing, a great lateral thinker! The last day we met, I told him we needed to come up with something to give to our members that would not require us to start minting Cool-ohs yet.
After an hour of back and forth, we started talking about those card packs kids buy without knowing which cards are inside. Sometimes, you get more expensive packages where you are guaranteed a higher valued card, but still, you don’t have a clue which one you’ll get until you open the package.
Inspired by this concept, we came to the following idea: What if we create an NFT depicting a package gift, where you could see an ass sticking out of it? We could give them to our members if they executed certain actions! Those actions could be quests designed by us, and the reward would be a Cool-Oh package. The package could be a guaranteed Cool-Oh when the minting day comes, but it could also be a discount on the Cool-Oh or even a certain characteristic like you are guaranteed that the Cool-Oh you mint will have the mustache of Dalí, or a specific background, making it more unique.
Points and Social Coins
Moreover, what if we created our own social token, the $COOL token, and give it as a reward for the quests we propose. We can then “sell” the Cool-Oh gifts accepting $COOL tokens. Some gifts would be specific to some quests. This way, the more active you are in our community, the more rewards you get, and those rewards are instant, you don’t need to wait until minting day. And you can potentially even sell those packages on the secondary market if the project catches on.
The Quests
Right now we have come up with several quests ideas I’d like to share with you:
Twitter Quest:
This is the first I’m building. I’m coding a Discord bot that allows you to register to the Twitter quest. Once you provide your Twitter handle, we’ll give you 10 tokens for every retweet and 5 for every like. To incentivize participation, we won’t transfer your COOL tokens until you have reached the 100 mark.
Cool-ohbrity Naming Quest
We will have our chatbot generate a leaderboard of members who submit a new name for a Cool-Oh celebrity. If three members vote for the name you suggested, you’ll get 10 tokens. Whoever gets the most votes, will have that Cool-Ohbrity named and we’ll give him some perks we’re still deciding on. For example, if we decide we name Ernesto Che Guevara: Ernestail Cheek Geverarse, the member who came up with that name will get 1% of all the future resales on the secondary market, plus an NFT gift that will guarantee him that the Cool-Oh he mints will have one characteristic of El Che (his hat, beard or boots).
Ping a famous Quest
We are also thinking about having community quests where the quest is run collaboratively. For example, let’s say we have the Cool-Oh of Samuel L. Jackson. We’ll encourage our members to try to have him like or retweet his Cool-Oh. If it happens, everyone who participated will get $COOL tokens and maybe we could raffle the Samuel L. Jackson NFT between those members.
Quest of Quests
One quest will be for you to suggest new quests. If we implement them, you’ll get your $COOLs. One of our members suggested rewarding people who referred new members. We’ll do that quest and he’ll get more $COOLs.
Mama Carlos says
Having a way to measure who did what allows us to be fairer and give whoever showed more involvement more opportunities to win prizes and airdrops. But the most important thing is that we can start giving prizes to our members right away without needing to jeopardize our collection.
Will it work? I’m not sure, but I’m really excited to try it out! And the great thing is that you can have a front-row seat to see how we succeed (or fail). In either case, we’d have learned a great lesson while having fun.
I’m currently coding the Twitter Quest bot, and I’ll share all the code with you really soon, as well as how it does in our community. Will it encourage participation? If you want to find out, follow our blog, and even better, join our Discord!!
