[Steemhunt] Own Sign Up system

Hi, Hive account@jayplayco here.
Steemhunt is running smoothly, and RC mana is full again. Most of the hunters are now able to hunt and curate on Steemhunt again. As HF-20 is now "successfully" implemented, it is time to plan the next steps.

0. Repository

https://github.com/Steemhunt/web

1. DAU and MAU

Steemhunt is snowballing, and after introducing the Social share Airdrop the DAU (Daily Active User) and MAU(Monthly Active User) numbers are increasing.

At the beginning of September MAU was on a level of about 10K but is now close to 60K.

2. Next needed steps?

One of the main issues Steem based Dapps has, is to get the attention from users outside Steem. If you have managed it well, the Steem community is very open for new Dapps or SMT projects. But your user number stops at a specific moment because of the limitation of the Steem user base. The difficulty starts when you want to outgrow your service from the Steem user base.

3. Limited User base

Source: @arcange

If we have a look into the numbers of active authors, it is stagnating, and the active unique users are also decreasing on a level above 100K per month.

With an MAU of about 60K at Steemhunt, it is needed to get users outside of the Steem economy.

4. Current Status

Steemhunt started already with different activities like Social Share airdrop or promotion contribution airdrops and these activities helped to boost the MAU now up to 60K.

But to convert visitors to users, you will need to get them signed to Steem. You can imagine several points that make this problematic.

Waiting time to create an account
Difficult and long password system for Non-Blockchain users
Login into a different site (Steemit)

Landing pages have a bounce rate of 60-90%. A login site on a separate site with a waiting time for two weeks or even paying for it would result probably into a bouncing rate of 99%.

5. HF20 and RC Mana

Source: Bailey Heedick

With the introduction of HF20 and RC Mana, it is now possible to use this Mana to create accounts. This change is very important for Dapps like Steemhunt. It would have cost at least three Steem for each account to produce it on your own. Based on a user base of 200K accounts, you would need at least 600K Steem. This is about 600K USD in the "current" moment. Five months ago you needed more than one Million USD only for account creations.

Now with RC Mana and enough Steem power (delegated or owned), you can use your RC Mana not only for interactions within the Steem Blockchain. The cost of creating an account is high when compared with other activities as writing an article or upvoting. You can create only a limited number of accounts per day because of your limited RC Mana. But even this limited number of accounts will increase the accessibility of users.

Steemhunt will need a separate Sign Up page that is not forwarding to Steemit to keep the users on Steemhunt. The Sign Up process should be as less irritating as possible to avoid that the user cancel the sign up.

After peaking into the Discord channel, it seems that the new signup process has already been planned and the launch is already next week.

Having limited numbers of accounts per day should also not limit the actions of Steemhunt. I am sure that the team will find an exciting way of gamification to use this limit as an accelerator. It could be based on the thinking of, "High demand creates desire."

As soon as this "Steemhunt Login System" is ready, Steemhunt will have to start a separate marketing campaign or Airdrop targeting new user acquisition. Some ideas could be the already announced Referral Airdrop or real targeted Facebook marketing. The important part is that it would be now possible to organize and start this kind of activities.

3. Conclusion

With a current MAU of about 60K, a bald goal for this year should be at least to reach an MAU of 300K. A milestone of 300K MAU is going to be an essential step also for the upcoming SMT. We could see a different kind of blockchain economies like EOS and Ethereum being very successful because of their abilities to launch significant and relevant projects. Hive account@ned, I am very confident that Steemhunt is and will be one of these projects carrying SMT to a success. We will get the investors interested in Steemhunt and at the end in the Steem Blockchain.

"Keep the hunt on"

Thanks for reading!