Building Hype in DeFi With A Little Help From My FRENS
Aavegotchi is having a moment.
It’s not their first, and definitely not their last.
With listings on Binance and Gate.io, along with topping the NFT Gaming weekly sales charts, the Dapp is rounding out its big week with raffle #2 (of 3), where token stakers can potentially win rare wearable NFTs.
Despite my compliments, I do have to admit — it has taken me a while to fully wrap my head around the concept behind Aavegotchi.
It’s no knock against the Dapp, but rather, a sign of my relative new-ness to the world of crypto beyond the retail coin listings. Although it didn’t take me very long to understand how DeFi works (and then also how NFTs work), it’s been a bit brain breaking to understand how they can function together.
But there’s no regret here — I am very excited for what’s to come in Aavegotchi.
And that’s because the team has made it easy for simps like me to get it with an excellent wielding of the crypto community handbook.
Let’s dive in.
Crushing it with Community
There are many place to start. Let’s look at the founders.
The founding team is active. They do the typical PR tour when big news is coming (Q&As, Fireside chats, Podcasts, etc.), and they do so with a relatively straight forward business demeanour.
But in the community channels, they are anything but serious. Rather, they set the slightly-immature-but-incredibly-charming tone of Aavegotchi, by constantly monitoring and engaging on Discord & Twitter, and really pumping the Dapp’s signature meme-term, FRENS.
This type of lead-by-vocal-example is something I have always admired, and in my past social-media career always encouraged when dealing with Senior Executives who wanted to try their hand at a personal channel. Quite simply, it breeds advocacy in an immeasurable way.
Next are the user Missions, which can be accessed in the Discord. Designed for newcomers to earn easy participation trophies in the form of Discord levels (and wearable NFTs should they complete all of them), the missions really stand out upon entering the Discord. And they feed FOMO to those who don’t participate.
The missions give the audience something to do while they wait and wait for the mainnet launch. This is absolutely vital and almost unique in the space. I’ve seen so many completely dead Discords sporting hundreds (or thousands) of members who are simply hanging around waiting for months (or years) until the big drops come.
Aavegotchi’s got this boredom handled, with a tool (the missions) that also feels inclusive to the newbies. Also full disclosure: this blog post is one of my outstanding mission tasks!
And the last community element that Aavegotchi aces are the Channel Mods. Again, it took a while for my rare smol brain to fully understand how Aavegotchi functions, and the mods were spectacular in helping me do that (notably Vanilladelphia, thank you!) (and then also unintelligent_nerd and appellants).
The mods are active, polite, casual, and clearly very excited about the project. They know what they’re doing, and have been enabled to help lost community members (like me). They respond within minutes at worst, and instantly at best.
These are markers of good things to come.
Driving Advocacy for the Win
These strategies, albeit seemingly simple, are very difficult to do well and consistently. And when executed properly, they drive advocacy in the short and long term from the user base.
It’s worth noting again that this project has not even officially launched yet. And when it does, the base it has cultivated so thoroughly will propel it to new heights.
PS — here’s my creation from one of my missions.
