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How Share to Click used a Milestone Rewards Waitlist to Grow 10k leads by Keeping it Simple

"the most, I think exciting part, the aha moment for me is this first campaign was roughly $300 in total ad spend right now. And it was wildly successful because we managed to do something I didn't even expect"

Val Bercovici Share to Click- Founder + CEO

10k

sign-ups

Leads that have entered so far.

5k

new discord members

Social conversions for their Discord community.

4k

instagram visitors

Social engagement for their Instagram platform.

3.5k

new twitter followers

Social engagement for 
twitter platform and sharing 10x their starting number.

Key Takeaways

The best way to grow your audience is to just do it, start that contest and see where your company goes from there. 

"Ultimately, running giveaways was actually the only thing that was a positive ROI pretty much every single time."

Start Simple 

They created a one page website and used a KickoffLabs Contest Box. There was no fancy waitlist page series/sequence, making a super simple quick start contest to get leads rolling in right off the bat.

Social Engagement

Share to Click is a social engagement/ creator company so encouraging the social engagement aspect is of course, a top priority. They used low spend of only $300 and focused on meaningful engagement on social media in the right groups relevant to their community.

"I think exciting part, the aha moment for me is this first campaign was roughly $300 in total ad spend right now. And it was wildly successful because we managed to do something I didn't even expect, which was to automatically and programmatically identify and enact our best influencers, our best referrers."

"One of the many benefits of using KickoffLabs has been, I think almost a linear, if not one for one, then certainly almost a two for one in terms of signups to social media followings."

"We do see meaningful engagement now, significantly higher since the campaign started. Engagement across all the social media where we're present."

Enticing Brand-Relevant Rewards

Because the are in the Web3 space, they used Utility Tokens as rewards that will work as a crypto currency in a wallet. This provides value and motivation to using their product, staying involved, and completing actions to earn more. 

"And as you can tell at that point, there's all sorts of payment processing, eCommerce, partnership opportunities that will come around when people have a balance that they're encouraged to spend as opposed to hold in these crypto wallets"

Have a Good Landing Page

Create a space that is simple, easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, and relevant to your crowd. Draw them in by having the content they want to see right in front of them.

"if you have a good landing page, people will follow it. They'll join it. They'll interact with you. I would say that for anybody."

Keep it Fun

People are coming to a social platform for they enjoyment of it, so to keep it enticing- make it fun for users. When building a waitlist, creating that excitement and making the actions and rewards simple as well as fun- your audience will feel more inclined to participate and share.

"We're really trying to be about the fun. Trying to amplify all the reasons we are on social media, to engage with our friends, to follow our favorite creators and support them, to express ourselves. Those are the main reasons why people enjoy spending time on social media. And we're literally all about the absolute minimum friction to amplify that as much as possible."

Company:

Share to Click

Campaign Goal:

 

To bring attention and generate new leads to their upcoming product launch for better monetization for content creators with only $300 in advertising.

Key Features Used:

"I think my approach is perfect is the enemy of great. So that I think getting it started is everything, right?"

Contest Type(s): waitlist - Milestone Rewards

Interview Bio

Melissa picture

James Croyle- Web3 Whisperer: James fully embraces the evolution of the new internet and specialises in working with web3 companies as well as those who are operating in the web2 paradigm and wish to level up to web2.5 and beyond.

His mantra is "Never stop building."

Andrew Katz- COO: Andrew has lead and worked in startups for over 15 years. He is now applying those lessons to web3 while building a “passion economy” that puts creators first with his colleagues at CLICK.

Valentin Bercovici- Founder & CEO: Val is a former Web2 Silicon Valley exec of the Cloud & Big Data era, now passionate about applying web3 to decentralize ownership, wealth, privacy and control for the benefit of everyday people.

Full Transcript

Josh:
Hi everyone. This is Josh from the KickoffLabs, On Growth podcast. Here today, I'm joined by Val, James, and Andrew, from CLICK. CLICK is a platform to help content creators better monetize their work. And they're in the middle of running a wait list campaign on KickoffLabs. And I love talking to people while they're in the middle of running their wait list campaign, because everything they're doing to market it and get people to sign up is just happening and it's fresh in their heads. So thanks for joining us guys.

Val:
Pleasure to be here, Josh. Thanks for having us.

Josh:
Yeah. So can we just go around and do intro of who we're talking to and your role and kind of a brief background?

Val:
Sure. I'll start with-

Josh:
Start with, yeah, go ahead.

Val:
Val Bercovici here, CEO of CLICK. Been involved really in the online and app economy since about the dawn of the iPhone, when apps showed up. So dating myself. Around 2008, 2009, initially on the back end on the cloud front, working with Amazon Cloud and Google and so forth, and some of their more prominent projects. And more recently involved on the content creator side, particularly in helping to mainstream today's very complex NFT technologies. But not so much about technology, much more about enabling creators all over the world to, we believe radically better monetize their content.

Josh:
Cool. And we'll get into that in a minute. James, you want to go next?

James:
Yeah. Thanks for having us in. So I'm James, I have known Val for about 16 years, and seen a lot of interesting things he is been doing over those years, for sure. So I'm based in Singapore. And with CLICK, I have taken the title Web3 Whisperer. So it's quite a title after just being in Web3 probably for about a year or so. So my job is really to grow the community through all different avenues. And I can't wait to talk about KickoffLabs in a bit.

Josh:
Absolutely. And then Andrew.

Andrew:
Andrew Katz. Nice to be here. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at CLICK. I got my start in Austin, Texas, in education technology. Built a company from four guys in the outskirts of Austin, up to 60 employees in Dallas, and about 500 universities around the world. So I got bitten by the startup bug back in 2007, and it kind of has of been my career since. My job at CLICK is to marshal Val's vision into existence.

Josh:
Sounds appropriate for your role. All right. So I just want to ask the first question. I mean, we briefly touched on talking, your product is built to help content creators better monetize their work. I'd like to understand that a bit. I mean, today there's already people on YouTube getting ad revenue, there's content creators on other platforms getting advertising revenue. It seems like most of the revenue's coming from advertising today. Maybe they have some sort of shop. We've talked to some people that have a side shop or something to sell, paraphernalia or swag for whatever brand they're promoting. And then they do through affiliate. They might do affiliate marketing, I can think of. And the last one just sort of being sponsorships, so brands will have influencers online that are quasi creators going and doing sponsorships for what they're doing. How does CLICK fit into all this monetization?

Val:
That's a great opening question. It really cut to the chase of why creators should care. When we look at the creator economy as we call it, and there are according to Linktree's latest 2022 creator report, there's 200 million self-identified creators worldwide. We look at fairly well known anecdotal problem of the fact that if we just pick on Spotify for a second, most musicians just earn pennies per stream, or I should say more accurately fractions in fractions with many decimal places of pennies per stream. And we know that, and I have personal experience. My own daughter does content on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and she's relatively successful with 30,000 followers, I think on tech TikTok. And even she only earns hundreds of dollars a month at best, a thousand or so dollars a year, not really a functional living wage.

Val:
And in May of this year, when we launched the company publicly, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), for those of you that know them in the VC world, they're very prolific. They write a lot of content for crypto Web3 NFTs. And they published a really, I think, illustrative informative report, again in May of this year, showing that when you go on YouTube or Spotify or other platforms, Instagram, TikTok, typical revenue per item of content posted is somewhere in the pennies per year, to single digit dollars per year. And because of the explosion, that can be an explosion of NFT is an innovation over the past 18 months or so, they publish what the comparable NFT figure per item of content is. And it was the average one was $17,000 per item per year. So, that's such a stark contrast.

Val:
We probably know that the truth is somewhere in between in the middle. Not every NFT that's posted generate $17,000 per year, and some artists do better than others, in what we call a Web2 online streaming economy. But the reality is the gap is massive. It's a huge chasm. And what CLICK does is really just fill that gap. It enables more and more creators to earn much more on your order of tens or hundreds of dollars per item posted and get to that living wage concept. And we'll talk about later on some of the published blogs and studies that show that that's possible when you focus on your core audience versus trying to attain many, many millions of followers, which is an unattainable goal and dream for most creators out there.

Josh:
Yeah. I think that explains it perfectly, that you helping fill in the gap there in terms, because it can take potentially hundreds of dollars to create a piece of content. And then if there's no way to monetize that specific piece of content beyond a couple dollars, for anybody but the top, it becomes really hard to make a living or make it worthwhile to do.

Val:
That's exactly right.

Josh:
So, sorry, what made you guys decide to build a wait list before you launched? Why not just bring it to market and say, "Surprise, we're here,"?

Val:
James, did you want to tackle that one?

And KickoffLabs looked to be nice and simple. So we said, "Let's try this one." So just a search, right? We just did a search and we just happened upon it. And we find it to be very easy. The setup very straightforward.

James:
Yeah, sure. So last year when I started in Web3 in Discords, I actually run a large Discord for gamers, I saw that there was very manual ways to track spreadsheets. Somebody had Discord channel, give them a role. It's extremely hard to navigate all that. The admin is complicated. It's easy to make mistakes. And as we were having people just sign up on a waitlist, I was thinking, how can we find out where they came from? And we had a couple of these calls, and we looked around at a few different ones, a few different options. And KickoffLabs looked to be nice and simple. So we said, "Let's try this one." So just a search, right? We just did a search and we just happened upon it. And we find it to be very easy. The setup very straightforward.

What I like the most is the referral code. So maybe it's not super, super innovative to have a referral code, but it is amazing when it works, let me just say that. So we're able to really track the top inviters to the wait list. We get to see where they are. There's some anti spam and anti fraud detection in there, which I like too. There's so many good things about KickoffLabs. And the reason we're sticking with it is it's like I said, easy to use.

James:
What I like the most is the referral code. So maybe it's not super, super innovative to have a referral code, but it is amazing when it works, let me just say that. So we're able to really track the top inviters to the wait list. We get to see where they are. There's some anti spam and anti fraud detection in there, which I like too. There's so many good things about KickoffLabs. And the reason we're sticking with it is it's like I said, easy to use. Even when we were blowing past the 10,000 wait list mark, we got a warning from KickoffLabs saying, "Hey, 20 signs per minute," or something like this. Just good like error detection or bandwidth detection. I was impressed, and it's not easy to impress me. I'm in the software business. My day job is Microsoft. Almost nothing impresses me honestly. But KickoffLabs did. And I said, well, I'm impressed.

I was impressed, and it's not easy to impress me. I'm in the software business.

Josh:
Well, thank you. I appreciate that-

Andrew:
I come from the land, and this is Andrew, for those who are listening. I come from the land of startups and fundraising in the first place. And effectively in the early days, when you don't have a product, you have, what's known as a smoke test, right? Which is to say that if people smell something that they really like, then they might sign up for it. And if you have those numbers to show to potential investors, then you have some real evidence attraction. So the next best thing to actual revenue is the great interest of customers to pay you for what you do. Or in this case, give information for what you do. So KickoffLabs has been a wonderful way for our early fans to be able to spread the word and spread it on many different channels. And the gamification, especially in the Web3 land has been a powerful vehicle for James's marketing efforts on that front.

Josh:
Absolutely. I imagine. So I want to talk about, get into the campaign a little bit that you guys set up. What I like about it from what I saw is you guys didn't go crazy trying to set up different mechanics. You didn't go crazy with custom landing pages, really in building it out within KickoffLabs. You have a website, the website has a roadmap and some introduction to your service. And on that website, you're using a feature we call the contest box to get people to sign up. So it pops up where they can click to activate it. The form you ask is pretty simple. And then you're simply asking people to tell their friends, join on Discord, follow us on LinkedIn, follow on Twitter, visit on Instagram. And then you've got a leaderboard there where you're showing the top people.

Josh:
And what I like about it is because I think some people get bogged down when they're building out a wait list campaign. It's like, "Oh, what if I add these rewards? And oh, I need a dedicated page for this. And I need it to look exactly like that." And you guys use the feature we intended to be used for, which is like, let's just get this thing up. Let's just start getting traction. If we want to add on down the road and expand it beyond our website, we can do that. But you don't have to get started, and this is great. This was what I liked about your campaign. This is great proof to me when I tell people, just start simple. What are the basic things you want to capture from the person? What are the basic actions you want them to take? Throw that up there and see if people will do it. So if you can't convince anyone to do it, maybe it's not worth investing a ton more effort into taking the wait list to the next level.

Josh:
What was your mindset when you guys set this up like that? Was that what you were thinking as well, just trying to keep it really simple or-

Val:
Andrew, I'll let you lead that, particularly the time you have left. Because you were pretty instrumental in going through all those motions, you mentioned Josh. And concluding as you did, the kiss principle, keep it simple is best.

Josh:
Yeah.

I think my approach is perfect is the enemy of great. So that I think getting it started is everything, right?

Andrew:
Yeah. I think my approach is perfect is the enemy of great. So that I think getting it started is everything, right? So embed it on the page. And even if you're starting off with simple mechanics, like follow us on Twitter for a few points and sign up for a few points. You can come back every week and add an additional new mechanic. And that's a reason to ping your fans. If you have an active customer base, they want to earn some more points. And if you actually have something to offer them in terms of additional rewards for those additional points, that's a way to build that interaction. So I think that's something that really appealed to us out of the gate is that KickoffLabs kind of comes set up with a cookie cutter list of good things to do. And you don't have to do all of them, but you have many more options to employ when you're ready to build a more elegant solution.

Josh:
And I want to talk about a couple things. So I saw you did set up, one of the things you just set up was an automatic reply email where you tell people, Hey, they can move up, and you're giving them some incentive. So can you talk about the incentive that you're giving people to share the list as part of the campaign? Because there's a small incentive to get people to earn points.

A way to be able to accrue some value within a system, right? So at different levels, there's different rewards. Just for signing up you get double the tokens when you download CLICK and we actually release the app, we'll double your token count that we give you right out of the gate. And there's some interesting use cases...

Andrew:
Yeah, absolutely. So the list is really a wonderful way to figure out who our early fans are. And being in the Web3 space, we have an opportunity to provide some rather fascinating rewards. So within Web3, there's what's known as tokenomics. That's the economics of tokens in the community. It's kind of like, if you want to think about it in layman's terms, you could think of it as like Chuck E. Cheese tokens. A way to be able to accrue some value within a system, right? So at different levels, there's different rewards. Just for signing up you get double the tokens when you download CLICK and we actually release the app, we'll double your token count that we give you right out of the gate. And there's some interesting use cases I'll let Val talk about here in a second about what the tokens can be used for inside the community.

And then for those very ambitious community members that have accrued a certain level of points, we're going to give them five times the tokens, and that's going to be our beta tester community.

Andrew:
And then for those very ambitious community members that have accrued a certain level of points, we're going to give them five times the tokens, and that's going to be our beta tester community. We call them the beta bunch, kind of a play on the Brady Bunch. And that's an ambitious group of Web3 folks that are really trying to earn as much as possible out of the gate. Because well, maybe Val can talk a little bit about what we're going to be doing with these tokens.

Val:
Just to cut to the chase briefly, and that might prompt some of the questions Josh is, we plan to convert these tokens into our own cryptocurrency. And that currency on the one hand, it'll be very familiar because you'll be able to exchange it for Bitcoin or Ethereum or Dogecoin, or whatever you prefer. On the other hand, it has a very specific differences in that it's not intended to be one of those pump and dump, hope that you get some and hope that the mushrooms in value and then you cash out and leave. It's intended to be used as we call a utility token, which is literally as currency. Meaning that you can expect its price to be relatively stable and constant over time. And the whole point is to accrue more and more of these tokens so that you can just spend them. Spend them on other creators, spend them on other promotional programs with creative studios that we plant to invoke. Spend them ultimately, when we manage to spend up a partnership with Starbucks on coffee.

Val:
It won't really matter because you're going to have now a wallet, just like your Apple wallet on your phone, you're going to have a crypto wallet on your phone. And given that we're intending to target this at all social media users worldwide, that's up to 4.6 billion people totally. If we succeed, it will be the most popular wallet on the planet, on people's phones. And as you can tell at that point, there's all sorts of payment processing, eCommerce, partnership opportunities that will come around when people have a balance that they're encouraged to spend as opposed to hold in these crypto wallets

One of the many benefits of using KickoffLabs has been, I think almost a linear, if not one for one, then certainly almost a two for one in terms of signups to social media followings.

Josh:
Absolutely. So we've now talked about how you're getting people to sign up, the motivation you're getting to get them to sign up, and the motivation you're giving them to participate in the launch program here. I want to talk about the, you mentioned briefly 10,000 people had signed up so far on the list. And I imagine there's quite a bit of people taking actions. Have you seen a good growth on your Discord or your social media profiles as well as part of the wait list?

Val:
One of the many benefits of using KickoffLabs has been, I think almost a linear, if not one for one, then certainly almost a two for one in terms of signups to social media followings. So our Twitter handle, our Instagram account, our Discord all saw proportional bumps, meaningful bumps in signups on the order of thousands and thousands. So that was just a very encouraging thing to see on top of the fact, as Andrew, I think and James mentioned earlier, that there is already some built in spam detection and bot detection and so forth in KickoffLabs. We do see meaningful engagement now, significantly higher since the campaign started. Engagement across all the social media where we're present.

Josh:
Great.

James:
Can I add to that? Just-

So one thing about KickoffLabs, it's able to track a lot of different things.

Josh:
Yeah, go for it.

if you have a good landing page, people will follow it. They'll join it. They'll interact with you. I would say that for anybody.

James:
Let me add something that many people may not know. So we really inspect these type, I really inspect these type of things. So one thing about KickoffLabs, it's able to track a lot of different things. If you follow a Twitter account, it can track it. We don't do the retweet one, but we might add that one in. Basically on Instagram, for one of the buttons on Instagram, it just says visit our Instagram page. We found a good conversion about one out of eight people would go to our Instagram and then they followed. It's like Val said, just under 2000 people, right? So even though it's not tracked, we still got click through, we still got people interested. On Discord, we went up a couple thousand. The Twitter handle, it's unbelievable, it went up by about 10 X from where we were. So a lot of good things. Even though not everything in the world is gamified, but if you have a good landing page, people will follow it. They'll join it. They'll interact with you. I would say that for anybody.

Josh:
Yeah. I think when you have something that's exciting that people are interested in and you just lay a roadmap in front of them and say, "This is how you can participate." Even if it wasn't gamified, we've seen campaigns that just almost aren't gamified at all, but the product is interesting and people just want to become part of that community. We see the actions tend to take place regardless. I mean, that might be more if you can certainly pump it with the gamification. But, when you have a product as you guys do, that I think speaks to a good audience, that audience is going to be willing to take the additional steps. And as you mentioned earlier, that's part of the validation, or I think James was talking about that earlier. That's part of that validation is like, there's one kind of validation, which is, are people going to hand over money? And there's the other kind of validation is like, are you getting people to take these additional actions?

Josh:
And we can always tell, is it going to be, if somebody had set up a campaign like this, if you guys had set up the campaign like this, and you were telling me that no one was taking any additional follow on actions, then I might say, "Wow, you've done a great job getting people to your website, to many signs." But if none of the follow on actions were happening, that might be a sign that you guys might want to switch something about the product or the campaign, because people aren't as excited as maybe you were hoping to be. But it sounds like people are taking the follow on actions. People are excited about the product. What are you guys doing during the campaigns or outside of KickoffLabs to promote the website, to seed it, to keep people who are engaged re-engaged along the way? What kind of things are you doing during the campaign to keep it growing?

Val:
You want to start James? I've got a couple of things as well on my end.

James:
Yeah. I'll just say that in addition to KickoffLabs, I'm fairly active on Twitter. I would say very active on Twitter. And also in Discord, I joined a lot of Discords. I won't name all of them because there's like 40 of them. You can really find like-minded people in these Discords if you join the right ones. And I learn about other people's projects, they learn about CLICK. It's not a hard sell. It's just a lot of sharing. And I think there's a lot of organic growth that comes from that.

Val:
Yeah. And I would actually say for context, this was our first campaign of many. And so we are continuously A/B testing other kinds of promotional actions to grab new users' attentions, to raise awareness of what we're doing. And we're trying to walk a fine line here, because as much as we love getting new users and growing the wait list, we're really mindful to not overhype our technology. We know that there's been an excess of hype and fraud and scams, quite frankly, in the Web3 crypto space. And to your point, Josh, about the attractiveness of the product, we're all about a sustainable way for people to convert their social media time and attention into additional income, and enhance that through the loyalty program with the cryptocurrency and so forth. So you'll find us not trying to go all out and just be crazy in terms of, follow us, retweet us, do everything you possibly can. The grind as we call it inside the industry, right?

We're really trying to be about the fun. Trying to amplify all the reasons we are on social media, to engage with our friends, to follow our favorite creators and support them, to express ourselves. Those are the main reasons why people enjoy spending time on social media. And we're literally all about the absolute minimum friction to amplify that as much as possible.

Val:
We're really trying to not be about the grind because we personally hate it ourselves. We're really trying to be about the fun. Trying to amplify all the reasons we are on social media, to engage with our friends, to follow our favorite creators and support them, to express ourselves. Those are the main reasons why people enjoy spending time on social media. And we're literally all about the absolute minimum friction to amplify that as much as possible. But you will see us, and the long and short of it is run more and more of these campaigns. And some of them will be very successful. The home runs that we hit with 10,000 followers, some of them might be just a few hundred. But we're going to continue to publish new content, generate more campaigns. And ultimately our total market isn't the billions. Our addressable and attainable market will be in the millions. And so we certainly hope to keep growing the wait list as we finally launch the app later on this year.

Josh:
So you describe what you're doing as generating first party content, right? So you guys are also being content creators to promote this and just be part of the community and then also community engagement. So being part of several Discords, joining related communities, participating in related communities, and either just having in your byline or mentioning it while you're participating in the communities where it comes up naturally. That's kind of how you guys have approached the marketing. Have you spent any money on advertising campaigns?

Val:
We're beginning to. And that's, I would say James can go into more detail, but let me tell you for me the most, I think exciting part, the aha moment for me is this first campaign was roughly $300 in total ad spend right now. And it was wildly successful because we managed to do something I didn't even expect, which was to automatically and programmatically identify and enact our best influencers, our best referrers. That's typically a manual go to market process where you have to do market research and begin a relationship with these influencers, and then sometimes even get them under a regular contract and negotiate terms and stuff like that. With KickoffLabs, with the right incentives, with the bonusing and the ultimate deal conversion of cryptocurrency and so forth, all this happened automatically by configuring the campaign correctly with a very minimal ad spend. So that's the exciting part to me because that shows that we can scale customer acquisition. We can scale the application effective influencers. And that's really what I'm most excited about continuing to do with KickoffLabs.

Josh:
Absolutely.

James:
And maybe I'll just add to that one. It's definitely a great explanation Val, as always. So one other thing that we did to really recognize our top inviters, so anyone over 25 invites got access to a special VIP channel in our Discord, we call it OG. So it's an OG channel. And I just ran a contest in there, a giveaway. Only eight people reacted. So only seven or eight people got in it. There was no losers. So the winner got a $25 prize in USDT, and everyone who just reacted to the post got $5. So that OG, I mean the OG channel, are you going to get rich in there? You're going to get rich slowly, right? So like I said, we continue the gamification and we really recognize one person had a thousand invites. One or two people had over 500 invites. Lots of them had 25. So there's some people really went the extra mile, and we will absolutely reward them today, tomorrow, next year and onward.

Josh:
And so speaking of that, would you say you found people that you've invited to this channel that you wouldn't have discovered without a tool like KickoffLabs? That like, oh, this person is influential or you really didn't know them in this space, but they got us a hundred followers here, or they've joined up and they're really participating well. Have you discovered that kind of VIP group as part of the campaign?

James:
We wouldn't really-

Val:
Very much so.

James:
Sorry, go ahead, Val.

Val:
It's very much so. Again, it's not only did KickoffLabs help us find these people faster and certainly get them to influence and amplify our campaign more broadly than we ever could have alone. But for me, it comes back to the fact that this was automatic as part of using KickoffLabs for our campaign. And I think it was a mix of getting the incentives right. Aligned incentives is a big part of the tokenomics that Andrew brought up earlier and success in these crypto Web3 projects. But also making sure, as you said, that the product is attractive, that there's some ultimate value for clicking through and engaging there. And we believe that there is.

Josh:
Absolutely. And so in addition to the participation that you guys have had with the members of the Discord channel and the OG channel and the other channels you're participating in, have you guys sent additional follow on emails as part of the campaign from another email provider to encourage people to keep participating?

So I did. Yeah, absolutely. And just this quick example, so everyone who had 25 and higher invites, I sent them a personalized email, right? There's no form email. Sent them a personalized email, even visited their Twitter, if I knew it, or their Instagram, and I just personalized it and said, "Thank you, thank you for participating." And out of that, I had really good response back.

James:
So I did. Yeah, absolutely. And just this quick example, so everyone who had 25 and higher invites, I sent them a personalized email, right? There's no form email. Sent them a personalized email, even visited their Twitter, if I knew it, or their Instagram, and I just personalized it and said, "Thank you, thank you for participating." And out of that, I had really good response back. And the only people that got in the OG channel were the ones who replied to the email. Not everyone wanted to do that. Some people just want to get in, they've already got a mass following. This is their full-time job. This is what they do. And I completely understand that and I respect them for that. And we even pay attention, I pay very close attention to one of the columns, do not email, there's a do not contact or do not email flag. We're very cognizant of that type of thing. We don't disturb people. I love the KickoffLabs has all these things in it. So I really can't talk enough good about it. It's just a great product.

Josh:
I appreciate it. You're giving me some great clips to post as part of this, as part of addition to the tips for people that I think people will learn from doing this. Because what you just mentioned is something that I do like to call as a best practice, which is, as you discover these influencers, they've seen a lot of success both, we've had lots of customers building a private channel to them. So inviting them to, like you're doing the OG channel. And also having that personal engagement because they really appreciate being recognized. Because if you think about the psychology of why somebody would participate and share something, a lot of it is not just because they think the product is cool, which makes them look cool.

Josh:
It's also that you are recognizing a behavior and giving a positive feedback cycle that says like, oh, that was a good thing. People really appreciated what I did. I should go do it some more. And that's a big reason why people then continue to share the word and from a community is because they feel seen, they feel heard. They feel like it's worth the amplification that they're giving the product. And so that certainly I'm sure no small part what James is doing behind the scenes is certainly no small part to why this has been really successful. So I'm glad to hear there's consistency in what we're seen with other campaigns as well through here.

Josh:
So let's talk about what's next. So you guys are leading up to a beta launch and a launch. Is the beta going to be a private beta with a small set of people first? Or are you going to start just adding a thousand people a week to the launch? What does that look like for you? Or are you still figuring it out?

Val:
That's a great question. So the beta is going to be kind of a cross reference or interception of these two things. One is, as you say, we hope to be at more than 10,000. We hope to be at 30, 40,000 people by the time we launch the beta later on, hopefully only a month or two before the end of this year. And we're going to gradually onboard everyone on the wait list, particularly in priority order of the points they've earned and so forth. On the other hand, this is a global product. And in trying to make it as accessible as possible to a mainstream audience, there is no crypto required for this. Even though often you would think you have to have some crypto and a wallet, crypto wallet to purchase an NFT. We're encouraging mainstream people to have that Amazon style, one button and one click checkout with the credit card or fiat currency as we call it in the industry.

Val:
And therefore there are global sales tax considerations, in some cases even global income tax considerations when some of this content appreciates and value. And so we've got to be a bit more mindful jurisdiction by jurisdiction, country or continent by continent as we roll this out, particularly through the app stores. The Apple and Google app stores of course operate on a national basis. So as we get closer to the release of the product, you're going to find us engage more deeply with our beta testers and the countries we plan to launch in first.

Val:
Over time, over the first couple of years of the company, we'll cover the globe, but we have to start with certain countries. The plan is you can imagine right now just for familiarity is US, Canada, and then the UK, and then parts of Europe will be some of the first countries we start at. But there's massive adoption, and we've actually seen a disproportionate interest on the wait list in Southeast Asia. So that's going to be very, very high up on a list as well. Singapore is one of those friendly countries when it comes to not just business, but cryptocurrencies as well. So you'll see a lot of countries serviced out of Singapore, that James is very familiar with living in Singapore, be some countries we go to early as well.

Josh:
That's fantastic. So you're about a month away from hopefully starting non-board people on the beta. And then as part of that beta, you're going to go with a limited set, but then prioritizing the different countries in of orders. What's easiest to bring people on in, where do you have the audience and kind of matching that up as part of it. And then as you're doing that, are you going to continue the wait list for people who are in the other locales and regions that are looking to get on?

There's a waiting market as we enter those markets, that's what we're all about. And we're going to continue with KickoffLabs pretty central in that.

Val:
Very much so. We hate saying no to people, and we're going to try and say yes as quickly as we legally can in every country in the world. So in the meantime, just accumulating, accruing people on that wait list, creating even additional parallel campaigns after we ship the product, just to make sure there's interest. There's a waiting market as we enter those markets, that's what we're all about. And we're going to continue with KickoffLabs pretty central in that.

Josh:
Oh, I'm happy to hear that. Is there anything that we haven't covered today that you're surprised on or just things that you would want to tell people if somebody else was considering running a wait list campaign or building a product, even if it's not related to the wait list? But just things we didn't talk about that you were thinking, oh, I wish we talked about that, or this would be a good tip for other KickoffLabs members?

Val:
I'll let James give you a bit more detailed answer. Again, he's been even closer to it than I have. For me, I think it comes back to our philosophy is, we want to let people do what they love, be on social media and engage or contribute in the way that they already do it, and own what they do. So I think it's that sense of ownership and the ability to see the rewards of your actions through the point system. And KickoffLabs, and a big part of it for us at the end of our tagline is right where you are. So the fact that it's easy to do this, as you said earlier on Josh, with a simple website and a very simple, if you need it landing page and get up and running. And from a product perspective on our side, we piggyback directly on social media. No new social media, personalities or identities have to be created. No new actions really have to be taken unless you want to actually buy something. But just posting, just liking and commenting and sharing earns you points in our product and reward system. So keeping it that simple and low friction is what we're all about and what KickoffLabs aligns with so well.

Josh:
Absolutely, James?

James:
Not much detail I can add from this one. However, what I would just been thinking about here, Josh, you mentioned something that kind of maybe want to talk about this. So the KickoffLabs community, your customers, I think it would be very interesting to be able to have a bit of a network. Some of your customers like CLICK, we're a customer, it might be good to have some type of community forum. I don't know if it's, not an email list. That's less [inaudible 00:36:14], but some type of interactive area that we could actually share ideas, maybe some type of collaboration in the projects. There's a lot of, that is the key in Web3, collaborative. All collaborative. So I would say that that's a bit of an ask, if you wanted to do something like that, bring more people together. I think that'd be very powerful.

Josh:
Yeah. It's top of my mind, it's something, to be honest, we did launch at one point we had community.kickofflabs.com. Not sure why I gave the URL because it's not active anymore. It'll just redirect to our main page. And we used one of the platforms that were designed to kind of be like your personal Facebook group. I'm not a huge fan of let's force everybody to go on to Facebook to participate in our community. And that's just me personally. It works for other people. For me personally, that wasn't what I wanted to do. And we saw the start of a couple bits of good interaction. And then all of a sudden the spam bots came and the moderation became a huge toll with people just posting in there. And then at that point we're like, okay, we don't have the resources to manage this right now and deal with the moderation of this tool. Because once there was a form on the internet, people could post to, then they're like, oh, we're going to post to that.

Josh:
Which is funny, because we'd handle all the moderation of our side, but we weren't like the community platform we're using didn't have a great moderation tool for us to go through. And we asked them at one point, "Could we use our moderation stuff before people post and run it through our checks?" And they're like, "No, you can't do that. That's just too custom." Then we had to shut that project down. So I've been looking for another way to start that engagement. So if you have ideas, I'm all ears to think about a way to have that engagement for people who are using the KickoffLabs product. Because I do think there's, as you said, there'd be benefit to people who are currently building campaigns to connect with people who have an ongoing campaign, to connect with people who are doing similar things or have done similar things. I think there's some benefit to that, which is something I've wanted to take advantage of.

Val:
Yeah. I think we're not surprised. So sorry to hear that botting spamming experience you went through. But as you conclude the business development opportunities, the cross promotional integrated campaign opportunities are definitely right to be had there.

Josh:
Absolutely. So you have any ideas just send them my way. If you have any feedback on the product, feel free to send that to me as well. We're happy to take your feedback. And otherwise this has been a great conversation. It's been great validation, seeing things that are consistent from your campaign to other campaigns that cross boundaries, not just like Web3. You guys are taking best practices that we've seen work in other spaces in gaming and Kickstarter launches. And you're applying them to this technology, which is great. I love to see it. And I wish you guys all the best success leading up to your launch. And hopefully once you guys have a successful launch, maybe we can have you back and you can talk about, "Hey, we're a year into our product and it started here and here's how we close the gap from this point to launch."

Val:
We would very much welcome that and look forward to that, Josh. Thanks.

Josh:
Cool. Thanks again for stopping by. And tell James thanks or tell...

Val:
Andrew.

Josh:
... tell Andrew. Yes, Andrew had to drop off early. So tell Andrew thanks for me. And it was great speaking to all of you.

Val:
Likewise, Josh. Again, thanks for a great product. And we hope to be doing a lot more with it.

James:
Absolutely.

Josh:
Absolutely.

James:
Thanks all.
 

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