Growth, Engagement and Developing a Community of True Fans
I’ve found myself thinking about engagement the past few weeks. After a few conversations with people on Hive and within LeoFinance, I’ve been thinking a lot about the primary growth drivers of LeoFinance as a community, project and tokenized ecosystem.
The main growth drivers are:
- Core community growth
- Development
- Outside attention
I may chop this up into a few posts because this will probably run on to several topics and several thousand words. In this (likely to be first) post, I’ll lay our some of my ideas about community growth specifically.
Growth Advice from Facebook’s Success (Chamath Palihapitiya)
- “Measure some shit
- Try some shit
- Test some more shit
- Throw out the stuff that doesn’t work“
“What it’s about is a simple and elegant understanding of product value and consumer behavior.”
These are some quotes pulled from a talk given several years ago by Chamath. He was an early employee at Facebook and also led the growth division at snapchat. Today, he is a billionaire investor and managed a fund which owned 5% of all Bitcoins back around 2014-2015. I’d say his opinions on growth, technology and investing are well validated at this point.
What do your products do that make the consumer’s life better? How do they interact with it?
At LeoFinance, we’ve got 4 core products:
- LeoFinance.io (blogging)
- LeoDex (exchange interface)
- Hivestats (statistics app for Hive)
- LeoPedia (a library of crypto educational content)
In a previous @steem.leo post, we talked about the sources of ad revenue from these 4 products. Since ad revenue is one of the most consistent drivers of positive cash flow to the LEO economy and ad revenue is directly tied to the viewership/usage of each of these sites, these stats are highly relevant to how people are using our products on Hive.
We struck a nerve on Hive with Hivestats. That much was clear from the beginning. Keep in mind that this chart was created 24 days ago, when Hivestats was barely 2 weeks old. After just 2 weeks of being live, Hivestats surpassed LeoDex in ad revenue (LeoPedia was launched a day after Hivestats) and is fast approaching the LeoFinance ad impressions as well.
Clearly, Hivestats fills a wider need on the Hive blockchain. It’s not just aimed at people who use tribes or use LEO specifically. It’s aimed at people who use Hive regularly and who want to track their account growth and other relevant metrics.
Trying Shit, Failing and Iterating
I relayed that Chamath quote above and it’s the model that we’ve generally been following for the growth of LeoFinance. We’re trying a lot of stuff, figuring out what works and what doesn’t and focusing on the things that have shown promise.
I also mentioned that community growth is the focus of this post. The core community can be defined as the core users who utilize LeoFinance and the Leo Apps on a daily basis. People who not only enjoy using these apps but who also enjoy spreading the word and who have invested in LEO and thus have a vested interest in seeing LeoFinance grow and succeed over time.
Kevin Kelly wrote a now infamous article called “1000 True Fans” in which he laid out the math of why 1000 true fans is all you need to “make it” as a content creator, business operator, etc. on the internet.
The same concept applies to LeoFinance — we have a core base of diehard users. People who would stop at nothing to convince their friends to join LeoFinance, utilize the apps on a daily basis, spread the word across other social platforms, etc. These are the marketers of the community.
Community growth happens in an interesting way as you see a core community grow and then you see the network effect take hold as that core community expands it’s reach and brings in more core community members.
We see this idea of a small but powerful community on the Hive blockchain. Look at everything that Hive has been through — all the ups and downs. All the in-fighting. Ned. Justin Sun. The only way to survive such events is to have a strong tribe of “true fans”.
More True Fans on Leo and Hive
Obviously, this question is at the top of all of our minds. If I were to guess based on the number of daily active engagement on the LeoFinance apps, I’d say we have a core community of about 30-40 people. That sounds really small, because it is.
With that said, we’ve got over 1,000 accounts that hold LEO tokens and we’ve also got over 500 accounts engaging in our community and even more using our apps. The core “true fans” are the 30-40, but then we’ve got more fans out there that are utilizing the apps on a daily basis. They just aren’t die hard LEO users for now…
The obvious places to look for growth are close to home. You want to convert those 500-1000 people that are Leo Users into Leo True Fans over time and you also want to find people on the outside (on Hive and off of Hive) and convert them into regular users and eventually into true fans.
The idea is simple — a user goes from Hive User to Leo User to Leo True Fan.
And if you’re also targeting groups who don’t even use Hive yet, you can follow a similar process — a non-user becomes a Hive user to Leo User to Leo True Fan.
As we release more apps that serve not only the Hive blockchain but other blockchains, our core mission is always to convert more “true fans” to the dark side Leo community.
Become a True Fan:
LeoFinance is an online community for crypto & finance. We run several projects that are powered by Hive and the LEO token economy:
| Track Hive Data | Blog & Earn LEO | Our Twitter |
|---|---|---|
| Hivestats | LeoFinance | |
 |  |  |
| Trade Hive Tokens | Learn & Contribute | Hive Witness |
|---|---|---|
| LeoDex | LeoPedia | Vote |
 |  |  |
Posted Using LeoFinance
Leo sounds cool, I might give it a try one of these days 🙄
HAHA.
Yeah that Leofinance thing has some potential.
Might have to give it a look.
Posted Using LeoFinance
lol I hear it's pretty fun 🤷🏽♂️
Posted Using LeoFinance
Surely, engagement is the best way to grow a community but community must offer something tangible to win the engagement. Thanks for inspiring our trust in the LeoFinance community with solid build and strategy for growth by plowing back the Ad revenue to grow LEO.
On the ad revenue generation, Hivestats.io will surpass Leofinance in the near future due to the solid usecase it has created for Hive users. That will be a solid gateway to the Leofinance community. More development should continue there. I will soon share my review and suggestions for addition.
As for LeoDex, I had made a suggestion in this post but it seems no one saw it. LeoDex should add more value to the current by including Smart trade options that fetches from the top "Ask" and "Bid" prices in the market for amateur traders.
It can only get better.
Posted Using LeoFinance
It is a circle that needs to keep growing. The chicken or the egg.
We need to attract attention to get people here to attract more attention.
Posted Using LeoFinance
Well, that's easy. First came the egg, eventually thanks to evolution and human intervention we got the chicken we all love to eat.
Where did the egg come from?
Posted Using LeoFinance
I agree, we need a balance of new features/apps alongside community engagement. At the end of the day ( similar to what TM4450 said above) we need to be able to attract attention to the apps in order to build better apps in order to attract more attention.
As for your idea on the smart trade - we actually created that already and had it running a few months ago. The problem is that nobody used it. I think that kind of "smart trade" (or token Swap) as we called it is an interesting feature but we need more attention in order to have actual usage.
That's a good example of a feature that looks good in theory but doesn't play out well in practice. I think there is a use case for it, but only when the community is much larger and more widespread. For now, it's not worth pursuing.
Same goes for the LEO delegations -- right now the community is small enough that everyone could offer peer-to-peer delegations of LEO, but it's not a worthwhile pursuit in terms of resource allocation. When the community is larger, it might also make sense to bring that back.
Posted Using LeoFinance
I'm still using peakd for my posts because most of my posts are not investment related. With Hivestats you managed to created something quite amazing. I've been using almost daily to measure my curation and author rewards. For the first time it's possible to measure in an easy way the return of hive-engine tokens. Continue the great work!
I hope to see you make analysis of your curation efforts and earnings on Hive through Leofinance.
Posted Using LeoFinance
I sure will ;-)
yes, it would be cool to hear from you on LeoFinance. As a Hive user, there's plenty to talk about related to finance/crypto.
Glad to hear that Hivestats has been useful for you! We're going to continually roll out more features and I think that gamifying the Hive experience with stats like that needs to be a core conversation going forward.
Posted Using LeoFinance
All is good with Leofinance. The numbers keep growing across the board which is vital.
Each uptick adds to the entire ecosystem. As more people get interested in holding the tokens, that will help to push things further. Capturing a percentage of the token holders and converting them to Leofinance users will lead to massive gains over time.
It is just a process.
Posted Using LeoFinance
It's a slow grind and as I hinted with the featured image, these things take time and we're just building brick by brick, user by user.
The coming updates are exciting and I think regularly adding apps/improving existing apps will be one of the core ways we convert people from token holders to true fans.
Posted Using LeoFinance
If nothing else, it will garner a lot more attention.
And that is what is needed, both within Hive and outside of it.
Posted Using LeoFinance
in response to your points above.
This is some good shit here.
Leo continues to impress.
Oh, look leopedia
Another great addition.
I think it is sticking.
Leo ON!
I'm often sad I'm not really a finance/crypto blogger as I would love to be part of LeoFinance more - but hey, I can enjoy the succes from the sidelines as well. Doing great and can't wait to see where it's going <3
Leo is the best, especially the blogging platform, I highly recommend you check it out and use it if you haven’t.
Next to close the loop and replace 1/x ad slots with an ad to a Leo post, paid in LEO. At which point Hivestats goes from revenue stream to growth hack, with built-in revenue stream.
Yes, that's most likely more complicated in dev and the traffic may not yet justify it. For a finance platform it probably makes more sense to invest more time in developing launch features of an ad platform than to go full agile and ship fast, ship often. Writing this comment, the timeline in my mind for this is nearer to "before end of year".
didn't know there's even leoDex, might give it a try.
Growth, Engagement and Developing... Three magic words to build a lot of solid and quality stuff.