How Grizzly Gained 50k+ Leads With a Contest by Keeping it Simple

Josh:
Hi, everyone. This is the On Growth podcast. I'm Josh Ledgard, one of the founders at KickoffLabs. Our guests today are in the middle of launching Grizzly.fi. It's a liquidity mining platform designed to help you turn crypto assets into predictable income, but you don't have to be into crypto learn the important tactical lessons about building an online audience that we're going to go through today. If you take away one thing from this episode about running a contest, it's the importance of keeping it simple and carefully explaining next steps in your funnel to your customers along the way. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to the On Growth podcast from KickoffLabs and rate us in your platform of choice. Enjoy the show.

Josh:
Thanks for joining me, everyone. I'm here today with Stan and Elias from Grizzly. Thanks for coming on the show, guys.

Elias:
Appreciate it.

Stan:
Good to be here.

Josh:
Can you guys, maybe starting with Stan, give everyone a bit of information about your background, like, are you technology focused? Marketing background? Like where you guys each are coming from, and then leading up into the product.

Stan:
Definitely. Yeah, so, I mean, unlike Elias, I'm not one of the co-founders of Grizzly.fi. I'm actually a strategic partner. So my background is completely into growth hacking, besides that I'm also co-founder of two companies, mostly in the recruitment space. About a year ago, I sort of made the switch to crypto by working on Grizzly.fi And I enjoy it. I mean, yeah, for the core growth hacking community, they all know it has so much potential and a lot of opportunities there. So, yeah. I'm from Amsterdam, that's it. And I love growth hacking, love marketing. Yeah.

Josh:
Great. Elias.

Elias:
Yes. So my name is Elias. I'm from Switzerland, Zurich to be exact. I have the background... Actually, I'm an educated fitness trainer. And while I was in my apprenticeship, I felt like, hey, I want to do something else when I'm older. So I started a bit with watching YouTube videos about Facebook ads and all that stuff. I thought that it was quite an interesting topic. I started my first online shops, not that successful, to be honest. Went then for one year in a marketing agency where I was super forced to go into Google seminars and Facebook seminars to learn more about ads. Then came my first client where I was able to test my knowledge and actually scale their business within one month from 30,000 in revenue to 120,000. And that was the moment I thought like, okay, I think I should give this online shop thing another try because I have now more knowledge with Facebook ads.

Elias:
So I founded my... with two of my friends, actually, like company in Switzerland, where we were focused on building up and scaling up online shops. And the moment we founded that company was the moment when crypto pumped in 2019... end of 2019, beginning of 2020. And yeah, I was already investing in crypto 2017. And 2020, we thought like, hey, this crypto thing is coming back again. Because we already lost the hope, we thought like, okay, now, this crypto thing is probably over. And then we thought like, hey, let's follow our passion and build up a crypto project. And that's actually how Grizzly was born. Exactly. And now two years later, we are here, still in the process and shortly before launch.

Josh:
Cool. So the tagline right now for people... anybody that visits Grizzly.fi says, "Speculate less, earn more. Join the most user oriented liquidity mining platform and generate predictable income on your crypto assets. Keep calm, no matter if the crypto price rises or falls." So can you explain a bit more... I can play the explainer video for people on the podcast later, but in your words, like, what does that mean? Like what does that mean to me? If I'm just kind of coming in and I'm crypto curious, maybe I own $500 of Bitcoin, but like what does that mean to me?

Elias:
Exactly. That's a super good question. So to explain a bit about the background of Grizzly, Grizzly is built around the topic that's called DeFi. That means decentralized finance. And the decentralized finance space is super, super interesting for everyone that's into crypto, but it's super, super difficult to enter. So you need stuff like a MetaMask to connect yourself to the decentralized world of, yeah... so much possibilities to earn money, to invest money, to get into tokens, get into projects. But it's super, super difficult. And especially the topic we built us around, that's called yield farming. And yield farming is just the process of generating yield with your cryptos you already have on your wallet, you already bought, is a subtopic in that DeFi space that's even more difficult.

Elias:
And we found that yield farming like 2020, mid 2020. And we thought, hey, this thing is super, super cool. We just earn 100% a year on stable coins. And we thought, hey, why doesn't everyone do that? And I think that punchline, a lot of entrepreneurs already had when they founded a project or a product. And yes, that's when we started liquidity mining on stable coins or just liquidity mining in general, and we explained it to all our friends, because we thought, hey, it's so, so awesome that there's that possibility of earning that stable yields in the crypto sector. And no one got it. It was super difficult for them.

Elias:
And then that was actually the moment we came up with the idea, hey, why is it so difficult? Can't we make it easier and more accessible for everyone. And yes, that's exactly the punchline. We want to enable everyone in the crypto space to get into these super, super interesting yield options that are out there actually, with a super easy and user friendly interface, with a playful bear, as you can see on the website, it seems seamless. It's super easy to maneuver on the website. And that's exactly the slogan and also the philosophy we follow; the easiness in such a difficult sector.

Josh:
I will say the animated bear with the bees kind of floating around on the website does create this, like it looks super easy, like it's friendly. So whoever did your design did a great job capturing the brand ethos that you've been talking about.

Elias:
So, yeah. I mean, it's super, super cool. We have a huge team in Europe. And we have some people sitting in Switzerland, of course. We have people all around the world actually working on the project. Currently it's over 40 people working on the project. A lot of developers, a lot of designers and also a few marketeers. Actually 75% are sitting right here in that meeting. But we have a huge designer team and they're doing a super awesome job. Two of our co-founders are also in the development... actually educated in development sector and are leading the development there, and are super, super focused on having an awesome design. So that's where that awesome design actually comes from.

Josh:
So we're talking to you guys right now, as you guys are in the middle of running a launch campaign on KickoffLabs where you're building a wait list. And so, I want to talk about leading into that. So what made you decide, "Hey, we're going to build a wait list?" What was your motivation for building the wait list?

Stan:
Yeah. So basically, right in the beginning, I was super new to crypto marketing. I was really advanced into growth hacking also because of the companies I already ran before. And I mean, for all the growth hackers that are super into it, there's this one guy. He makes a lot of good courses. And he's kind of a, you can say a guru in the industry, but not the average one, called Jared Codling. And he made like a really good course on growth hacking, like one of the first things, right? I think this is beginning like 2017 or something. And then he has all this kind of growth hacks that you can apply to companies in order to really boost it, make it viral. Right? And there was one... he wasn't using KickoffLabs back then, because I don't even know if it was already there, but every time I work on a new project and I gather ideas on how are we going to do this, how do we make a plan? I go to my resources. Right? And one of them was Jared Codling's course.

Stan:
Yeah. So there, he actually explained about how you can make something viral. How can you make it explode? How can you refer it? How can you get the most out of referral? So that got me thinking like, okay, how can we apply this to Grizzly.fi? How can we get the most out of the people that we pay for? Right? Because you're having an initial pool of people, which will then refer people, right? So let's say you have cost per signup for $1. If that person refers another person, you already reduce it to 50 cents. Right? So it has huge potential. After doing a lot of research, I mean there's UpViral, there's KickoffLabs. There is... Help me out Josh, glow something.

Josh:
I don't know about glow. UpViral, KickoffLabs. People use Gleam, people use viral loops. Some people like figure out how to use Rafflecopter for it. There's a lot of competition that does that.

Stan:
Yeah. So we tested all of them. So we know them. Right?

Josh:
Yeah.

Stan:
And then why we decided to use KickoffLabs is because it has a lot of integration. Right? So you can do like... especially for crypto, Twitter is like one of the most important channels, Reddit, et cetera. And I believe none of them was doing that, like follow on Twitter, follow or subscribe to Reddit. Right? Besides that, also like the building, the interface, and everything, all the resources you have. So that made us decide like, okay, let's just do it. Let's try it. Right? And yeah, maybe we'll talk about it a bit later on. But for us it worked out really, really well.

Elias:
Super interesting to see, because I mean, Stan is a marketing growth hacking geek. When we started working together, I was overwhelmed about all his add-ons and tools and stuff like that. And he came up with the KickoffLabs idea and I was like, "Oh, that actually sounds like an interesting idea." Because I'm more from that traditional side of, "Hey, let's pay some TikTok influencers. Hey, let's run some ads." And he came up with totally different ideas. And first off I checked out KickoffLabs and I was like, "Oh, what are we doing here?" Because it's so difficult to structure everything when you first come to it.

Elias:
And then he said like, "Hey, let's set it up." And we set it up and it worked awesome. Because, first off, I thought like it's a marketing channel. I didn't really get first off how this helps us. And then we set it up and then I realized it's not a marketing channel. It's more like scaling your marketing in terms of getting more out of your potential clients, getting more of your lead, getting more out of your leads, getting them to follow you on Instagram, getting them to like a post, getting them to, I don't know, refer a friend. And this boosted our marketing like 300% easily.

Stan:
Yeah. That's crazy. Especially if you growth hack it in a really cool way, where let's say you work with some influencers, right? And you get them to sign up. And then take a certain post, like their post. It just has so much potential for going viral. Right? And I mean, from my perspective, looking at what we have achieved, it's quite a lot, but we haven't even really started doing big marketing because we're not launched yet. Right? So maybe after we're launched, we should do another podcast, [inaudible 00:12:56] I don't know, like 200K or something, but let's see.

Josh:
Yeah. There are benefits of both. I do enjoy talking to people afterwards when they've got even bigger numbers, but I also enjoy talking to people in the middle of it because you remember a lot more about the setup and how you got the first people. And so I want to talk a bit about that. So you kind of hinted at the setup of the campaign a little bit, where you're asking people to sign up on a form. And then you're asking them to maybe follow you on Twitter, like liking a post. Can you tell me like the thought process and the campaign you set up today? So I can see from your website, your big call to action on the main Grizzly.fi. It says, win 10.0 or 10,000 GHNY. And so I click that. And then I'm taken to a page you guys have, win.Grizzly.fi, where it says five, 100 by 100 Grizzly tokens. And then it asks for just an email address.

Josh:
So talk to me about the prize, because that's your incentive to get people to join at this stage. It doesn't talk about sharing, telling your friends anything at this stage. So tell me about this part of the funnel and how you chose the prize.

Elias:
Yeah. Regarding the tokens of course. But I think afterwards, about the more psychological, Stan, probably I think it would be your opinion. So yes, we were thinking about, okay, how can we give the people, especially in the crypto market, the most incentive to sign up for the win action? And we thought like, okay, what should we give away? Should we give away token? Should we give away US dollar tether or whatever? And then we thought like, okay, let's do a real big giveaway. And 10,000 Tonic tokens, at the moment... when we launch it's 10,000 US dollars. But the GHNY token is actually... it's likely that it will reach 10, 20 whatever dollars. So it will get a bigger amount in the US dollar quite quickly. Yeah, of course the people were like, hey, with your guys' tokens, our mixed tokens, our mixed token economics, it's possible that the token reaches $100.

Elias:
So out of nowhere, people started making YouTube videos, where they said like, "Hey, Grizzly.fi is giving away $1 million. What are you guys sleeping on?" And they actually took their referral link of the giveaway and posted it under their videos. And then people started signing up like crazy. So we actually gave also influencers. We reached out to influencers, we said to them, "Hey, do you already checked out our new crypto project? We also have this giveaway running." And they checked it out. And they thought, hey, it's actually kind of amazing. They are giving them away their own platform token, their native platform token, which is called GHNY; Grizzly Honey. And of course also for me as an influencer, it's quite interesting, because I can get my referral link for the giveaway and hire my entries for the giveaway so that I am more likely to win the giveaway, while I'm informing more people about the giveaway.

Elias:
So they have an awesome thumbnail, like "Get the chance to win 1 million GHNY tokens," or "Get the chance to win GHNY tokens worth X, Y, Z." And in the same time. They hire their scores. So the plan that we have is giving away 100 times 100 giveaway GHNY tokens. So 100 people will win 100 GHNY tokens. And the first 10, just for clarification, the first 10 will win guaranteed. And the other 90 will be like just picked out of all the leads we have.

Josh:
Cool. So let's talk about the different psychology parts. I think, obviously like the main page promotes like a big prize. Like you're going for like one big prize. And the value in that for your campaign, since I can see where a lot of the people are coming from. Like you said, YouTube, I can see they're coming from specific influencers, is that big prize becomes motivational for decent sized influencers to be sharing the link on their channel. Am I correct, that was your thought process?

Elias:
Of course, not only even if they have a big incentive, like posting their referral links, we said that we won't pay any influencer out of our pockets that use their referral link. So if we pay an influencer, they won't be able to use their referral link because then they're eligible to win also the giveaway. It would be kind of, yeah... it wouldn't make that much sense. So, of course, also the influencers that posted about us also have an incentive by talking about our project, this upcoming... a lot of people will search for it as soon as we launch. So they have more clicks on YouTube. It's also in their favor.

Elias:
And I think they wouldn't talk about us if they think we are completely trash or we are a scam or whatever. But also in the crypto scene, we are more, I would say a more certified project for showing faces on the website, having quite some audits already made, having a good team behind and so on. So of course the giveaway is a big, big incentive for them. And of course, a lot of people just did it because of that. But even though the giveaway is super interesting, it's also about the project that's behind, of course.

Josh:
Yep. I mean, it always takes... for something to be successful, it takes the combination. So you can't just turn anything into like getting thousands and thousands of leads. If you could, anybody would do something like this. That's something that people are interested, that they think is worth talking about, because they're not going to throw themselves out there on YouTube or Instagram and like promote something that they don't think themselves is potentially worth talking about.

Elias:
Yes. I mean-

Josh:
No matter how much [inaudible 00:19:36] them.

Stan:
I mean, the giveaway... Sorry.

Elias:
Sorry, Stan.

Stan:
The giveaway, I would say the number one mistake you could make regarding this would be to just focus on what you're giving away. Right? I mean, it's a great hook. It's a great opportunity to get people in, but at the end, especially initially, like what are you focusing on? Right? We're focusing on crypto people. So it would be super stupid to just get random people in, right, because it's not going to make any sense. So I mean, it's great for a hook to do like a good prize, et cetera, but you have to back it up. You have to back it up with credentials, so you have to be a credible company. Right? And that even boosts the sharing and the referral, like beyond what would be normal. Right? So yeah, it's a great hook to get people in, but there are way more steps after that, that you need to do in order to make it a real success. Yeah.

Josh:
So let's talk about these other steps because it's one thing, as you said, to just capture a lead and have like a, to use... I keep thinking about it on your site, to use the honey pot to capture the lead on your site. It's another thing to get them to take these other actions. And I'll post pictures of these pages for people listening, but just so people understand. So once you sign up, you're told you can earn additional entries below. And each entry gives you an extra chance to win. So if you have 10 entries, your chance is 10 times higher than someone who only has one entry, which explains kind of the basic KickoffLabs contest mechanics of this Bonus Entry Giveaway you guys are doing.

Josh:
And then, you're telling people, you can share a link. And for every person who enters, you get plus one entry. If they confirm their email, you get three entries. And then the drawing, as you described, you're going to draw 100 people win 100 Honey tokens each. But let's talk about the actions here. So to earn these additional entries that are valuable because it increases your odds of winning, you settled on a Telegram action, Twitter, following on YouTube, Instagram, joining a subreddit, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Discord. So are you seeing people taking those actions?

Stan:
Yeah, 100%. I mean-

Elias:
Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

Stan:
Yeah. It's crazy. A lot of people are taking these actions. So I mean, looking at our Twitter page, we literally haven't been that active and we got, I think, 8,000 followers there, I think like four or five on Instagram. And like I just said, we haven't even... we just got warm. So it's crazy. Like also maybe you can, I would be okay with you pulling up some stats on our campaigns as well, just to see like how many of those people actually take action.

Stan:
I would say referring people is a bit more difficult than getting a follow on Twitter or a subscribe on YouTube, et cetera. It's a bit more difficult. You have to push it a bit more, but yes, people are taking a lot of actions, but they're not just going to do it by themselves. Of course, you got that sign up. They come from somewhere. They know a bit about the company. They think you're credible. They like the project. So they like you as a person because you're also showing your face and it helps a lot. Right? But there's way more stuff you can do in order to increase that even more.

Elias:
I mean, what's really crazy, I mean, we are not launched yet, not launched yet. We didn't pull up great marketing and huge budgets. I mean, we actually said that every budget we have, we will wait till post launch. So we spent really, really, really... basically no money on marketing so far. And that's the craziest thing, because if we would do it without KickoffLabs, we would probably also have a lot of followers on Instagram and probably another amount on TikTok, probably not really much followers on Twitter because we are not that active there. But with KickoffLabs, we were actually able to build like a same following on all platforms.

Elias:
And especially on Twitter, it was super interesting because one of our actions is also repost our tweet. So they have to repost the tweet. And of course, when someone with, I don't know, 100 followers on Twitter, reposts the tweet, all his followers will also see it. And when it's an interesting tweet, they will probably check it out. And then they come to our YouTube video, where they can come to KickoffLabs, where they can also retweet it. So then the whole process gets started. And that was also our thought behind it. And what's crazy is, even though we're not launched yet, we were able to grow bigger than projects that were already launched, competitors of ours, in terms of following, in terms of YouTube views, in terms of also reach on YouTube and Instagram. And that's actually quite crazy. And I would say, yeah, the KickoffLabs campaign made a huge impact on that.

Josh:
Cool. Yeah. I mean, it's so important to build, not just like an email audience. So that's one thing, but to build the audience in all the different channels, because everybody has sort of their primary communication channel that they follow and scroll through on a daily basis. And it's not always email. It's not always Twitter. It might be Instagram for somebody. It might be TikTok for another. And so it's important to think about all the different channels that you care about promoting your product in. So if you don't mind me sharing a couple numbers that stood out for me about your campaign, do you mind at this point?

Stan:
No, no. No.

Josh:
So, I'll say like, you guys are still in the middle. You have, as you said, you're just sort of getting warmed up. You've gotten over 50,000 people signed up. It sounds like you've gotten a good percentage of those to take action on... if you've got several thousand people additionally following you on Twitter and Instagram during this campaign. You've really grown that audience, as you said, without much effort within that channel. It's like, you're not tweeting a lot, a ton of interesting content to grow the audience. You're just right now saying, "Hey, as part of this contest, come follow us as well on Twitter." And you're getting that. "And follow us on these other channels." The conversion rate looks really good. I mean, this is kind of just... if I was reviewing how your campaigns were going, the conversion rate for a crypto campaign around like 25%, staying around there is a stable thing, is a really good conversion rate for a campaign like this.

Josh:
And then about 70 to 80% of your leads, depending upon when you look at it, are coming from sharing. And of course that's kind of the big thing we look at, is like, are you getting the actions? Are the actions happening? And are people sharing it? And are people signing up after the share? And you guys are getting all of that stuff from one thing in the campaign. And I can tell like the other thing I look at, like the email open rate for the different emails you're sending through KickoffLabs and the campaign, you're seeing like a 40% email open rate. And that's... You don't usually see a 40% email open rate, which tells you like, people are really interested in what they can do next, how they can earn more entries like about your project.

Josh:
And then in terms of like where people are coming from, as you pointed out, you're getting a fair percentage of your leads from your... Obviously you're promoting your homepage. You're getting a lot like clicking through from the homepage. You're getting a good percentage of your leads coming from YouTube, seems to be one of the biggest sources that's not necessarily owned by you directly. And that's probably the influencers you talked about earlier, sharing their links on their YouTube channels, I imagine, is how that's happening. And then you've got some links from some other DeFi websites as well. So, I mean, this is all really good. And I love seeing the success that you guys have had so far on the campaign. What's the thing you would do next in the campaign? You say you were just getting warmed up. So what are you guys thinking about trying next for your campaign before you launch or during the launch?

Stan:
So, basically we're doing a lot of different things, right? We had a lot of time to prepare. So we have a huge list of influencers that we will work with after launch, but before the KickoffLabs win action ends, because we just wanted to see what that does, like getting 1 million impressions or 1 million, let's say a couple hundred thousand clicks to the page, really using the credibility of influencers with their core base and see how that works out. We have a nice PR plan in place. We're pretty much approved on every social paid platform, which is also kind of unique. It's super difficult in the crypto industry. So we will be running a lot of ads as well. And then of course, the traditional crypto thing, so getting listed on like Detrado and Etherscan, et cetera. I know that I'm missing stuff, so hopefully Elias, you also have some things in your head that you can add on. A lot of Reddit, fortune, the crypto forums, maybe a little bit of automations on Discord. What else we got?

Elias:
So, I mean, you covered the most important parts, which we were definitely most focused on the past few months building up, like you said, all the paid media, the PR plan we figured out and all that stuff. But I mean, in terms of... all that stuff is actually quite nice, but even nicer is to get the most out of these impressions because otherwise, I mean, what's the traditional way getting these 1 million impressions, getting them clicked on the website and hopefully signed up to our project, our protocol. And that's also a big thing.

Elias:
I mean, when we talk about marketing, retargeting is a huge thing. And also having that mailing funnel. And that's also what I wanted to say when you said, "What's the next thing you want to focus on? It's definitely mailing. Because, as you already said before, we have a 40% open rate and we have also very nice open rate on our backend email funnels. And that's huge thing when we talk about retargeting, getting these guys which signed up for the giveaway. And that will be hopefully a good amount after a million impressions on our website, getting these guys back into the boat, getting them informed about our project, getting them informed about our possible next win actions, our contest that we run besides, and all that thing, all that stuff, actually. Yeah. I mean, in terms of general marketing, we have a huge, huge plan, which will start as soon as we know our launch date, as soon as we know when the action is happening.

Josh:
Yeah.

Stan:
Also like to add that, making sure that people actually like your project, like your company, like interact with them, engage with them, is probably the best tip I can give, because if you do that in a good way, people will start loving the project, they'll be activated. And from activation, comes referral. For all the growth hackers out there, they know this. It's really important to engage with them. Make YouTube video, show yourself, talk to them, do AMAs, hop on a call. Also reach out to... it is actually one tip that Josh gave us in the beginning, was to actually reach out to top referrals and make like a group together, because these guys are important. Right? They can do even more. They've been successful in the past.

Josh:
And then have a... So that's a great tip. So, I mean, I do tell that to people all the time. So what ways have you worked to activate people? You kind of mentioned that really quickly, you like talked about having a group, you talked about like an ask me anything about the product. So in what ways, during this campaign, have you guys worked to activate some of these influencers in a little bit more specifics?

Stan:
Yeah. So we do post a lot on YouTube. We talk a lot in the Telegram groups, in our Discord groups, really on a super personal level. Right? Because we also can. I mean, we are Grizzly.fi. We're not like a super formal company, so we can really level with these guys. And a lot of emails, keeping them engaged, referring them to videos. And then also doing a lot of retargeting on Facebook, showing them videos about what's happening, what's going on? Why is it cool? Answering everything, like everything they ask, everything anyone says in a chat, always communicate with them. Always be nice to them, give them some sneak peeks, because I mean, especially pre-launch, these guys are actually early adopters, right? So they're interested into the product. And if you really manifest this core base of people, they will pay you back 10 times.

Josh:
That's fantastic advice. I mentioned earlier, the conversion rate, when I looked over the past year, it's actually been closer to 40% on the conversion rate. So I just want to mention that. Because I was looking at just the past couple of weeks at first, and now I was looking at the past year. So it's actually more impressive than I first called out on the campaign, where I was mentioning it. So it's really good. And it speaks to like, you can tell from the waves, I can't visualize this for people listening, but like you can tell from the waves of their campaign, they have what we see all the time, which is there's an initial wave of signups where they're doing something to get it. There's a little bit of a lull and it takes a couple weeks.

Josh:
And then all of a sudden there's another peak that comes up. And you can see these waves or the peaks as you get the referrals, then activating other referrals. And you guys are doing stuff on the back end to keep pushing that channel. And so each successive wave gets progressively higher when you look at the stats in your campaign and that sum. That's exactly what we like to see, because obviously you guys are doing a lot on the back end. It's not just a... No good campaign is, just set it and forget it. And we all wish it could be, but it does take that activation. And that personal approach I'm sure is helping you guys a lot.

Josh:
The other thing that stood out to me about your campaign, that I see some people missing on their campaigns, and we could probably do a better job at KickoffLabs with some default text, is like your brand trying to make something that's complicated to explain, trying to make it really simple with the bear, with the animated video, and the explainer text. Even the contest, you guys took the time to write the extra copy on the contest page about, here's how it works. And you explicitly draw it out. And then you say like, example, if you have... And you list the example. And then you're going through each of the different actions, like why it's important, how it helps, what they'll get out of doing it. And I think some people forget to mention those things about why these extra steps are important for the person and for you as a business. And the fact that you're explaining it to people probably has something to do with the fact that they feel then more comfortable taking those extra actions after the fact.

Stan:
Yeah, definitely. Also reminding them by email, YouTube videos, talking about it, like having influencers talk about it, all that kind of stuff. You can even do ads talking about it. Right? You just want them to know. Like, you have this... If you set it up right, which is pretty easy to do, I mean, after that, it's just super important to tell them as much as you can. Well, but not as much, because you don't want to overload them with information, but the key things to have them take that action. I mean, as long as they sign up and they're on your Twitter, it's basically done because you can reengage with them all the time. You can get them on different kind of things. You just want to have them do one thing at least. From then on, you can keep on boosting the referrals.

Josh:
Exactly.

Elias:
That's a huge thing we saw first because, I mean, everyone knows it; when you're an expert yourself, it's super difficult first off to explain it to another guy. And especially that, follow us on Instagram and get more points, was super difficult for some people to understand it. And we thought like, hey, we have to write a description so everyone can understand it. And we have to write the terms and condition that they know, that they shouldn't like just add a bunch of fake mails. And we will recognize it when they do that and they will get disqualified.

Elias:
And yeah, of course you have to... When we started with our first 100, 500, 1,000 leads, we had a lot of learnings and explaining that stuff, how it works and also what you shouldn't do, what you should do. And yeah, it's of course that learning curve. That's probably also why we started high. A lot of leads came in a lot, a big conversion rate. Then it went a bit down. I have it also in front of me. And that was probably that time when we learned, and then focused back on it and then we scaled it up again.

Josh:
You mentioned briefly you can advertise to them. Have you guys spent 50,000 in advertising so far?

Stan:
No, not at all. No, not even close. I would say a couple grand. That's all, like at max.

Josh:
And what do you... Like, I don't have an example of the ads you guys are running in front of you, what's a typical ad that you are running as part of the campaign? Are you doing retargeting? Are you reaching out to new audiences? Like how are you using that budget?

Stan:
Okay, so we do retargeting, right. But we also do a lot of... or we used to do some cold ads, which we're working very well. And basically you can do it super simple. Like you can make this animated video and spend like 5,000 euros on it and advertise it. But what we did was just starting off with like a cell... just with a phone, talking about the project, talking about why it's cool, actually showing your face. And yeah, that works super well. We do have animated video, which we did spend like three or 4,000 on. And yeah, it didn't perform as well as the video ad, the personal ad. I mean, as Elias also mentioned, we both have a background in paid media, so we do know what works. So yeah, we really used that to our advantage and made like personal videos, and along the way we made it more professional, still using the phone angle. But yeah, that's what we did mostly.

Stan:
In the beginning, I made a video in Canva, like with just motions. And it worked. So yeah, you definitely don't have to spend thousands of euros on animations to create some good ads. Not at all.

Andreas:
Hello. Andreas here straight from the Crypto Valley. Do you already know about our 10K giveaway? So we are now in the process of launching our first DeFi platform, which will make it as easy as possible to invest into DeFi. So if you are into crypto and this sounds interesting to you, make sure to click on the link below or swipe up on whatever platform you're watching it. And join the community and make sure to not miss out. See you then in the community. Bye-bye

Josh:
Yeah. The two things I heard you say, that we've seen work as well for us and other campaigns is the simple, like signing up for Canva, which is free or cheap, and they've got templates with some simple animations on graphics, and just having like a person's face and some words coming in, is a pretty effective way to like stand out a little bit in someone's feed. And then the other way of just, you mentioned, just shooting with like your phone, like just shooting like a really quick video, which I think especially for new and smaller brands probably works out really well. Because you're making it personal. Like you're saying, "This is us, this is what we're doing."

Stan:
It's probably even the best way. I mean, how many of us see like these boring crypto ads? I mean, Crypto.com does it quite well, but, I mean, you just see them. You have almost ad blindness to them. You just keep clicking, right? It doesn't stop. And that's where everyone goes wrong. You need to capture them and you actually want them to read it. Right? I mean, these big companies can pay like three year or four year or five Euro per click, but when you're launching, you really don't have to be paying that amount.

Elias:
Especially when you're in such an interesting space as we are, it's super nice to make educational content. So we also said like, okay, let's focus on educating people in terms of crypto, in terms of DeFi. And therefore, the conversion rate of these people like signing up for something we built is way higher. And the marketing angle there is super important. And I think that was definitely in our favor, and also is a part of the success we had with the campaign.

Josh:
So you guys are putting educational content out there I get on YouTube, or is the educational part of what you're doing in the ads too? You're advertising the educational content from the YouTube channel?

Elias:
Exactly. We often also don't close people or just advertise for our website itself. We often just advertise for our videos, if we advertise. We say like, hey, did you already know about that interesting topic in DeFi? It's called yield farming. You're able to generate yield on your cryptos. You're interested. Okay, let's check out the YouTube video we made about it. And we don't talk about our project itself. We more talk about the space in general and what the possibilities are. And of course, then also share what we do and what approach we follow with our platform. And often it's also in their favor because everyone likes easy stuff and likes the beautiful and simple approach, and therefore get the people quite naturally on our project. I mean, that's a general marketing approach, which is actually to follow when you market a project or product in general.

Josh:
So we're running out of time for this call. This has been super educational. I think I've taken away a lot myself in terms of thinking about how we can make things easier and giving people more education throughout the process, adding some of these bits of education to our own template, to KickoffLabs so that people don't forget to add this stuff in to their status pages, where people are tracking the contest, how you guys are promoting it online, how you're working with influencers behind the scenes, all this stuff I think people can take away and use not just on a crypto campaign, but any campaign that they're working on. I think these are great best practices. Is there something that you think is key that we didn't talk about that you think like, oh, I wish we talked about that or I wish we'd kind of... this is something that's missed in terms of best practices.

Elias:
The only thing I would say to someone that says like, hey, I want to start off with KickoffLabs and the crypto marketing or whatever, what should I consider? Is fraud detection. Because as I mentioned, there are definitely some people that try and fill in fake emails and get themself a good score. So therefore I would recommend having a good terms and condition page, which exactly explains what's allowed and what's not. And having the KickoffLabs fraud detection in place, it's awesome. You can just put in like, yeah, double IPs. So if too many IPs at the same... when too many IPs are registering at the same time, they get blocked and you have to manually approve it if you want to approve it. And therefore just keep an eye on fraud detection. And having a good terms and conditions always helps.

Stan:
To be honest, KickoffLabs also has quite a good fraud detection system, which we upgraded to. And, yeah, it helped us a lot.

Josh:
Cool. That's that. Thanks for... It's something, we obviously, we work on a lot with people. And for larger campaigns, we'll tell people like, hey, and if our system doesn't see like a pattern and you're seeing this pattern of fraud, let us know, and we'll work behind the scenes to figure out how we can add that to our rules because you see a lot of the public facing rules, but then we've also got a whole bunch of stuff we're doing on the back end to try and like eliminate fraud to detect those bad email addresses and stop what people are doing from entering. Because we want to make... Like, I believe personally in this concept of engagement marketing and getting people engaged, activated, promoting yourself, which is why we do this company, but that space is fraught with the difficulty of... the flip side of it is people like, oh, they can game the system and right, and try and look like they're an influencer when they're not.

Josh:
And so there's a constant battle and there's a value in having a platform like ours. And there's some other good ones too that detect fraud out there, as opposed to just building yourself or just putting up an email collection form and telling people you're going to trust them that they're referring their friends. And you're going to find people to do that. And then they come back to us a couple months later and ask, can we clean this list for them? And like, not really, put the information you've got, but...

Stan:
One tip from my side also, coming back to your first point is, there's a lot of people that are, or a lot of companies that are like, okay, we want to go viral. Right? Everyone wants that big boost. Right? And they think they'll get it by just getting a couple of influencers. But this is by far, and I've been growth hacking for a while, the best way to get a large amount of people in a short period of time. I mean, we're even considering it right now to use it for our other company, Block Lancers, which we're connecting solidity developers, actually developers in general to crypto projects. And even for that, you can think of hooks, how you can make it work and how you can actually do it right. Any company could do this stuff. You just have to be a bit creative and you'll be able to really boost and grow in a short period of time.

Josh:
That's great to hear. Thanks. Thanks for that. Well, Stan, Elias, thanks for coming on today. This has been, like I said, super educational. I can't wait to see what you guys do over the next few months. And when you guys wrap up the campaign and you've got some final numbers, feel free to reach out to me. It'd be great just to do a recap and sort of, where are they now? Now that you've launched promotion, it'd be cool to do that and follow up with you afterwards. But, yeah. Thanks everyone for listening and be back soon.