Growth, Engagement and Developing a Community of True Fans

Growth, Engagement and Developing a Community of True Fans - LeoFinance.png

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 Hive account@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.

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