Learnings From FloorNFTs & LinksDAO
Customer Acquisition and Controlled Growth
Always good to be back writing. Recently, two companies have stood out to me and have the potential to be written down in business textbooks in the coming years for their powerful execution in customer acquisition and controlled growth.
Let’s talk about Floor NFTs and LinksDAO.
I hope this is a thought-provoking piece for everyone. If you want to interact more, follow me on Twitter.
As we know some of the biggest problems startups face come from the cold start problem. It is hard to get customers and it is hard to grow. NFTs present an incredible opportunity to help mend this problem and some have already been used to show off the potential of this customer acquisition strategy.
Floor NFTs
If you were on twitter last week and follow the crypto/web 3 space, you probably saw something about the Floor NFT app. This app, built by Chris Maddern, is by far the best app for people to watch, discover, and analyze their NFTs. The inviting UI/UX mixed with great product design helped them raise an $8 million seed round a few weeks earlier.
This success started back when Chris and team decided to debut the app through Gen 1 membership passes. Potential users were able to buy a token that would grant them access into the app. Soon Gen 2 and Gen 3 followed.
Masterclass In Customer Acquisition
On August 11th, every single Genesis token holder was granted 2 NFT app access passes. They could send them to friends, give them away, or just keep them.
The special part about this strategy came Aug 13th when Chris and team revealed that if you successfully transferred the 2 app passes out of your wallet, you were granted two more. If you sent those? 2 more. This trend kept going. If you were sharing your passes, you kept getting more to share.
This is what we can call controlled growth. Eventually you will reach a plateau where people don’t have anymore people to give passes to, but there is a steep slope of user growth in order to get to that plateau.
This is similar to clubhouses acquisition strategy back during the time of covid. Similar to clubhouse, Floor was surronded by a ton of hype. From their Genesis community along with their recent seed round announcement, this translated into users who were EXCITED to get on the app. That is the key difference in this customer acquisition strategy. When users normally explore an app, they can just download it for free, take 5 minutes to see if they like it, then go from there. In Floor’s case, users entering the app were excited, which ultimately probably led to a higher long-term retention rate than a traditional app.
Snowball Customer Acquisition Strategy
There is definitely a name for this strategy, but I want to have fun so I am calling it the Snowball Customer Acquisition Strategy.
This is a great strategy for some startups, but maybe not for others. I would love for some college professor to make a case study out of this someday.
LinksDAO and the Future of Social
When people think of LinksDAO, they usually think of the main goal which is to purchase, renovate, or build a top 100 golf course. Although I love this goal, I am more interested in the way this DAO is revolutionizing the way that you can build an online community.
A quick disclaimer, I have been a global member of LinksDAO since the public mint and follow the updates very closely. Everything mentioned here is public information or me speculating on the future.
Back to the online community. As many large NFT projects know, having a large % of your membership active and paying attention is discord is tough. The team realized this and built out the first membership portal called “clubhouse”. This portal was at first just an MVP with a member directory and a page dedicated to the benefits we received as members.
It didn’t take long for the community and team to realize what clubhouse could become. Quickly, a redesign was put in place and a roadmap of what was to come was released over some community updates. Soon, members of LinksDAO will be able to connect with other members and play together at different courses. People could possibly post tee times, and other members can join and fill them up. To a golfer, this is 100x better than being paired with a random stranger.
The Future of Social
This is where my speculation starts to come in. I believe the future of social will leave centralized platforms like Facebook and Instagram. I spoke with some smart friends, and we believe it will become smaller and more niche. No 5000 person teams, no need to become a multi-billionaire dollar company, just a paywalled community with people who really care.
This is where I believe LinksDAO can pioneer a new business model for the social and golf community. Right now, only LinksDAO members (9,000+) can access the clubhouse feature. As the team continues to build out and test features with this small community, we can start to see how much larger this could become. We could maybe get to a point where you can log on and see all the tee times this weekend where other members are playing near you. This all of the sudden becomes valuable for all golfers who have access to this technology.
This becomes a situation where LinksDAO can utilized the same customer acquisition strategy we talked about with FloorNFTs. Every members can get NFT passes to give to their foursomes. This controlled growth will help make sure features are built out for a growing audience and to prevent any massive firedrills.
The imagination can run from here. You can maybe add a new membership NFT with an unlimited supply so anyone can join, and from here you could spin out a crazy amount of features. Online handicapped tournaments, bet tracking for your foursome, a integrated USGA handicap system, a social network to talk all things golf, a golf-exclusive betting platform.
Soon, LinksDAO becomes a whole lot bigger than just 9,000 people trying to buy a golf course. It can become a global community with hundreds of millions in annualized revenue.
Final thoughts
A lot of this is speculation, but I believe it is where the future of communities & social is going. None of this is investment advice. I am a holder of both a FloorNFT app pass and a LinksDAO NFT.
Have a great weekend.
Tom