[Approved] September 2022 Marketing for Waka

Marketing DAO Marketing DAO
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Hello Marketing DAO! It’s waka here again. You can find our first proposal and report here.

In August we got 120 payouts totaling $230 via influence marketing and exclusive tests. The biggest expense for our marketing is the search for bloggers and rewards for them. we need to optimize these costs:

  1. We have reduced rewards for bloggers from 70% to 50%
  2. Now we need to find a scalable channel to attract them
    waka introduction

Waka introduction

waka was born one year ago as a response to increased loneliness and lack of social bonding opportunities in the digital world. It has incorporated gamification techniques to take away the burden of breaking the ice and finding ‘friends and dates’. We have already made a very cool dating app with more than 8 matching mechanics and 70.000+ registered users. Recently we got a grant from Human Guild for developing the digital sandbox for finding friends and dates on NEAR.

We have assembled the Bonding DAO from 6 projects and 160 researchers and industry professionals to find the solution to the problem of loneliness and build a metaverse of Socialization projects on the NEAR Blockchain.

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What we achieve with first Marketing DAO grant

In August 2022 we worked with 4 influencers with a summary audience of 87K followers. We made 4 payable tests inside the waka app and got an advertisement for them via influence marketing in instagram.

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Let’s check out our marketing metrics:

metric july august
influencers 1 4
registrations 176 1961
CPR $0.31 $0.20
MAU (people who use waka 2+ times) 498 1780

We also can check our WAU (weekly active users) metric

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How you can see, waka has stable growth in all main marketing metrics. This is because we found the way to attract users in the best way using influence marketing. Aaaaand this is not all! We continue to test our monetization. This month our revenue is: $230.
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And we are also preparing for our PR activities. Writing articles about our community rooms and our CEO. In August NEAR Explore posted an article about us. In September it will be much more.

We have a good traffic channel (influence marketing) but the waka team really likes to look for new ways of user acquisition. So in this month we have launched #wakatest competition. This is a contest where users need to create their own test inside the waka app and 10 guys whose tests will be the most famous in our app receive prizes in NEAR. Waka team really likes the creator economy idea and this contest is also about this. This contest gives us 161 users that passed the tests.

Waka is absolutely open for any project and any specialists so this month we have an AMA-Session with Near Games and Ru Guild.

As businesses, we understand that subscribers in social media are not the main goal, but real users who will pay for our solution and use it on a daily basis. But our social media is still growing! twitter (from 124 to 165 subs). instagram (from 945 to 1266 account reached). discord (from 164 to 174 subs).

Waka roadmap

Next 4 months we plan to make this activities:

  1. Create NEAR Wallet login integration.
  2. Flow for wallet creation for non-crypto users
  3. Development of creator economy rewards (for room creation and room sharing), token-gated access to rooms and use of community tokens in all other waka-rooms for matching between token holders.
  4. Set up influence marketing with their exclusive payable test. We have already checked this type of marketing. The next step is to scale this traffic channel. We want to pay influencers in $NEAR. This is also a task for our developing team to create a reward system.
  5. Development of waka Social Graph, Digital Identity and Social Reputation infrastructure. Opportunity to enrich Digital soul through finishing waka-rooms.
    #Marketing plan and funding details

We can divide waka marketing activities into a several main tasks:

Influence Marketing. We have already tested a lot of traffic channels but this one works better than others! We can attract each user from Europe for less than $0.20.

How does our influence marketing work? Our marketing team in cooperation with influencers develop a special test inside the waka app. It’s an exclusive payable test. The audience of an influencer must pay us more than $1, and 50% of income goes to the influencer. Yes, it’s exactly the Creator’s Economy! In the future we want to pay 70% of income to influencers automatically using NEAR.

And we already have plan for this activity. Our main goal is a gradual growth of waka and accustomed influencers to pay in $NEAR.

PR. We have big experience in marketing for digital products and understand that if you want more attention and more audience, then mass media must write about your product.

This month we plan to publish 2 articles about waka on hackernoon.

We already have publications about waka in hackernoon, startupjedi.vc, etc. and the goal for the next 4 months to make MORE!

Special Events. We really like to try new marketing activities. For example we launched Teleport to Metaverse Competition and Meme Competition. Our audience really likes to interact with waka in different ways.

Our special NEARCON room will launch this month, as well as the #wakatest contest on the best test inside waka and the AMA-session with NEAR Insider.

Influencer marketing on TikTok. Over the past 2 years, we have seen many growth cases from products using this traffic channel. We have experience in this type of user acquisition. Our goal for the 4 months is to achieve predictable user growth with TikTok influencers.

This month, we plan to make at least 10 videos for Tiktok.

Social Media Marketing. While SMM is not our first priority, we understand that they are our face, so we will continue to make content for Twitter, Instagram, and Discord.

month activity budget
august searching and communication with influencer $600
august influence marketing reward $1300
august tiktok influence marketing $300
august twitter, instagram, discord posting (4 posts/week) $400
august special events organization (2/month) $100
august special events rewards $200
august PR $600
TOTAL: $3500

Why we really like NEAR Ecosystem

Currently waka has 70.000+ users and majority of them are non-crypto. Those users came to our app to solve their loneliness problem and not for short-term monetary gain. Those users more than others need smooth onboarding and seamless user-friendly experience. NEAR can offer infrastructure for building web3 apps with web2 UX. Additionally, the Near ecosystem of projects is highly cooperative. This allowed us to build a DAO of projects looking for solutions to the loneliness problem. Currently, the Bonding DAO members are: Amber, Nepbot, Popula, Moodbot, Intimatica, TelegramSurf, Waka and 150+ industry specialists.

Expected impact

We plan to succeed at bringing web2 users into Near Blockchain for the following reasons:

  1. Our priority is to create a smooth web2 experience in a web3 app. Our web2 users will need to acquire Near wallet in order to grow their digital identity and benefit from all other perks, which Bonding DAO has to offer.
  2. We have vast knowledge of attracting web2 users to our app (waka currently has 70.000+ registered users). We will continue to apply our knowledge in attracting new users and converting old users into web3.
  3. Together with popula.io from Bonding DAO we develop a social graph and decentralized reputation of our users. All other projects of Bonding DAO will gradually be connected by this infrastructure. This will allow us to turn Bonding DAO into a Metaverse of Sozialisation Projects.
  4. Waka’s creator economy is designed as a viral system, where any representative of some community can create a matching and socialization space specifically for their community in minutes and then share it in that community. Room creators and room promoters are rewarded for their contribution. Thus waka and Near network are being spread virally.

Total amount requested: 3500 USD IN NEAR
Wallet: waka_marketing.near
Hryhorii Tynenik, waka CMO

https://app.astrodao.com/dao/marketing.sputnik-dao.near/proposals/marketing.sputnik-dao.near-510

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Hey @gregerua,

Thanks for the additional level of detail in your proposal. I reviewed your august report. I don’t have any follow-up questions.

Happy to support Waka again for another month.

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Thank you so much for your support! It’s a pleasure for us to contribute to the growth of the NEAR community!

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Happy to support. Have a great day!

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thank you soooo much!

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Thanks for providing the report for previous month and for this detailed proposal.

We are all rooting very hard for dApps on NEAR to succeed, so I am willing to support this for another month.

Notes:

  • I am worried about projects becoming used to getting unlimited funding from Community Fund. The issue is not the funding, but rather how this might affect the project drive to improve the product and push hard for growth (like your next round of investment relies on it).
  • I’ve started using the product, it’s a work in progress for sure
  • How long until NEAR integration? Are you guys doing Wallet Selector?
  • How advanced are you in designing the flow for user onboarding? Have you checked out how Sweatcoin does it? They would be a good example
  • I’m wary of influencers this early. You may get the views or signups, but it is much harder to retain - a dating app is doubly hard: not only do you need other users, you need others users that you want to date. Reminds me of the early days of Tinder how they went to the frat houses and got all the students to sign up at ~same time. You should be very strategic on these onboarding and go-to-market flows
  • Decentralised reputation sounds amazing

Moving this proposal to approved, you can now proceed with AstroDAO poll

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Please,

1)Proceed to Poll on AstroDAO.
2)Once the poll is approved, you need to submit THIS form Ironclad.

How to create a poll? Here is instruction.

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Thank you! We made it!

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Hello! Thank you sooo much for your support and let me address your concerns!

  1. For us funding from Community DAO is first of all a responsibility. We understand that money comes to us to help the whole ecosystem grow. So for us it’s a big motivation to create quality activities and grow much faster in future.
    Currently, we are promoting with niche influencers, but those influencers create their own room on our app and bring their audience, which needs to pay to access. We pay those influencers a fixed amount of money + %of revenue from paid access. Slowly but surely we learn how to work with those influencers on a purely performance based modelю Additionally we learn how to make onboarding of new influencers more scalable. Making this model work will improve our unit economics and will be the way to grow in the early phase.

  2. Work in progress for sure. However it is vital for us to still bring users to the platform and test the app in the “field”

  3. We have partnered up with some guys who are currently developing a new Near Wallet in a stealth mode. The wallet is planned to be integrated into waka UI for a more smooth onboarding of non-crypto users. This will be firstly brought to room creators (influencers). They will receive bonuses if they choose to withdraw their earnings in Near. Since they are people with millions of followers, we anticipate a trickle-down effect on their audience.

  4. We are aware of that model and we plan to incorporate it. Waka is becoming a gamified way to socialize, so in-game currency is an important part of it. Making our currency (or one of our currencies) crypto-market-tradable is a logical future continuation.

  5. Most of our marketing budget goes to creating small groups within our app. Those groups interact inside of our rooms and a lot of rooms currently are from influencers. Having an influencer to create their own matching test and a room is our way to go to frat houses and get people with common interests at the same time on our app. First Near Integration will actually be rolled out next week. We are creating a matching room for NearCon together with roke.to and their partners. Users will need to connect through their Near Wallet in order to swipe profiles and match. Thank-you-tokens for all room visitors will be provided by roke.to and partners. Another Near Integration which should become available this month is an NFT-gated access to community rooms. Those functions are a part of our early-growth-strategy to create dating-matching for niche communities in web2 and web3. An interesting fact is that just 2 days ago Kurzgesagt (19,2 mln youtube followers) announced their own “reddit-matching room” for subscribers https://kgs.link/kgs_meetup.

  6. Thank you very much! We strive to bring all our features asap to see the true potential of waka!