Pirate Nation's BOOTY Dashboard
In web3, points, referrals, and questing have become table stakes for a go-to-market strategy. Many participants and communities are used to connecting their X and Discord accounts allowing these platforms to track task completion and gather more insights.
Most of these platforms have been relatively simple and straightforward, but a couple have stuck out to me over the past few months. One of them was Blast’s airdrop dashboard, and the other one is Pirate Nation’s BOOTY Dashboard, which I’ll be going over today.
Speaking of pirates, I once dressed up as a pirate for Halloween. Look at that dope skull and crossbones shirt 😂 ☠
What is Pirate Nation (PN)?
Built by Proof of Play, a web3 game studio founded by the co-creator of Farmville with $33M raised
The game is fully onchain and the team developed their own Layer 3 blockchain, Apex, to support transactions and games at scale. The game is approaching 1 million transactions a day
In the game, players create a fleet of ships by collecting resources and completing quests, decorate their island and explore others, and battle monsters through a card battler game with pirates and ships.
I’ve been a PN holder for over a year and a half, so it’s been fun to see the team make significant progress.
So what’s up with the BOOTY Dashboard, what are the 12 features, and why is it interesting? (I’ll let you make conclusions about what BOOTY will eventually translate into 😉)
PS: Shoutout to Jonathan Goodwin (Head of Community) for clarifying and confirming my notes in the breakdown prior to writing this.
User profile
1. Tier badge - The badge is a visual indicator showing the BOOTY points that a player has accumulated
2. Holder multiplier - Players receive a BOOTY multiplier based on the number of Founder’s Pirates they hold
3. Daily Streak multiplier - A daily streak multiplier is applied based on the number of consecutive days a player plays the game (defined as using at least 1 energy point). The more days you play in a row, the higher the multiplier.
The team also has a one day grace period before players lose their streak, which is a prudent move (reduces complaints and is something they can reference to if players still complain). If a player is at risk, a little warning tooltip pops up.
Polly Dashboard
4. Driftwood 404 - A couple weeks ago, the game suffered an outage due to a technical partner making an unplanned update. As a token of appreciation for players’ patience, the team created and airdropped a new item in-game, with a BOOTY point value associated with it to players. This is a typical practice in gaming, especially with server maintenance downtimes.
Although unfortunate, this is also a nice example showing the dashboard’s flexibility to create new quest categories while encouraging in-game engagement (players had to claim the item).
5. Social quests - Nothing new here, the typical social quests we KNOW AND LOVE. We love them…right?
6. Pirate Level + Gauntlet Battles Won - BOOTY points earned in these sections are progressive, meaning the higher the level your pirates are or the further along you go in the gauntlet battles, the more points you get.
This encourages players to actually play the game vs. just like and retweet social posts. Add on the holder and daily streak multipliers, and these numbers get much larger over time.
7. Referrals - Nothing interesting to see at first glance. However, looking at the fine print and FAQs:
Referral points are only earned when referred players reach Command Rank Level 2. Currently, you can only level up your Command Rank through playing the Gauntlet (the card battler portion of the game)
Every player has a limited number of referrals and can earn more referrals by leveling up their Command Rank
The referral points earned depend on the Command Rank of the referred player. The max referral points earned is 40k, when the referred player reaches Command Rank 6.
Referral codes are pirate-themed. My original referral code was actually ‘P-sly-brig-2907’. Small detail, but a fun one.
Again, this type of referral system creates multiple nudges to play the game.
Speaking of referrals, if you’re interested in playing or checking out the dashboard yourself, check it out with my referral code. I had to share since Jonathan gave me a custom one! 😂
Jolly Dashboard
Ok, this all makes sense. Even straightforward for some of us. Now here’s the twist — Who the hell is Jolly?!
Jolly is Polly’s evil twin, or something like that. While the Polly dashboard is focused on in-game and social (specifically X) engagement, Jolly is focused on social engagement for Discord, which is all verified through players connecting their Discord accounts.
8. Global profile pic - If you change your Discord PFP, you earn points. The PFP needs to be ‘global’, meaning that it’s the default PFP for all servers, not just for one server.
9. Discord name - If players add ‘Pirate’ to their Discord name, they earn extra points
10. Compliment like a Pirate - Players earn more BOOTY points by sending messages in partner Discord servers (I’ll get to this in a bit) in pirate speak. Something like this (thanks ChatGPT):
Shiver me timbers! Ye've stumbled upon a treasure trove fit for a king! With a keen eye and a fearless heart, ye've unearthed riches beyond yer wildest dreams. Gold, jewels, and relics of old now fill yer coffers. Celebrate this grand find, fer ye be the luckiest pirate to ever roam the seas. Yarrr!
11. Meme competition - An oldie but goodie.
12. Partner servers - IMO this is the most interesting aspect of the PN dashboard. The team partnered with other web3 communities to allow for #10, Compliment like a Pirate.
The partners were announced in 3 waves: 12, 16, and then 32 communities (60 total!).
Players who join or are already in the partner community Discord servers and change their PFP and name count as a member in the target server, resulting in the leaderboard above. The top 10 servers get a BOOTY point bonus. So players that participate in the Discord quests earn points in two ways:
Individually - #8, 9, 10
Communally - #12
Even more interesting is…
This goes against general best practices. The hilarious hypothetical example would be if adidas had a promotional campaign where if you wear adidas sneakers in the Nike store you get a discount for your next adidas purchase. And Nike was like ‘ok cool, let’s do it. Advertise your products in our stores!’
Your local Nike store would look something like this:
A less consequential version of that is happening in these partner Discord servers.
At first glance, this seems like a pretty lopsided partnership. However, this is actually a win-win for both sides:
PN players are cross-pollinating across different web3 community servers, with both sides benefitting (not just PN). The PN community is incentivized to earn more points by joining partner servers and learning about the partner communities.
Some partners aren’t in web3 gaming (eg: NFT communities or alpha groups), so there is no direct competition
If the partner is a web3 game, the cannibalization concern is diminished if the game isn’t live yet. That’s the case for Smolbound in the screenshot above.
If the partner community Discord is less active, they get a boost in activity and engagement
The new members are pre-qualified, they’re likely gamers to some degree
PN does the heavy lifting coordinating and organizing the partnership, with partner buy-in (the partner and their respective Discord mods need to be informed and bought in of course)
There is 0 to little financial cost for this effort
The partner gets a front row seat, observing how effective this type of campaign could be, taking notes on how they might incorporate their own version of this
In terms of user acquisition, the traditional paid acquisition campaign is now a massive organic cross-pollination exercise. This reminds me of the multi-community scavenger hunt concept, but more scalable and for a longer period of time.
IMO, PN deserves a lot of credit for a) pulling this off, and b) taking a creative approach with partnerships, which goes beyond what we typically see. On top of that, the first mover advantage with this strategy is hard to quantify initially, but I believe it is significant as they’re the first (that I know of) to do this in such a direct manner.
If we compare the types of questing across breadth (roughly defined by total high quality eyeballs) and depth (roughly defined by the level of partnership integration) it looks something like this:
Blast farming is deep because of the ecosystem-level engagement across apps and communities
I imagine other games or communities will emulate this approach, but it will show diminishing returns if multiple games attempt this partnership approach at the same time. Imagine your favorite community’s Discord having pirates ‘yarrrr’-ing, cats meowing, and memecoin PFPs sharing memes all at the same time 😂
Questing has leveled up once again, this time thanks to Pirate Nation.
Do pirates say ‘Yarrrr’? If so, share or subscribe!
Farcaster’s first growth playbook by Farhackers
It’s been a big week for Farcaster, as the protocol announced a $150M fundraising round. During all this excitement, a group of growth folks dubbed the Farhackers created a growth playbook featuring 20+ case studies of apps/projects in the ecosystem.
What’s notable about this playbook launch is that it is arguably a growth case study in itself, utilizing concepts that are well-understood in concept but now possible to execute with a web3-friendly distribution stack.
So what did Justin and the Farhackers do to distribute the Farcaster Growth Playbook?
1. Announce the release of the playbook
Justin shared the announcement of the playbook through various channels, including but not limited to Substack, Paragraph (a web3 newsletter publishing platform), and of course Farcaster.
The Farcaster post utilized a Farcaster Frame, leading to the Paragraph post.
2. Create a token-gated component
The Paragraph post was token-gated, requiring readers to mint a Farhackers token from Zora (a minting platform) to view the post and retrieve the link to the playbook, which cost 0.001777 ETH (~$7) to mint.
Once minted, readers could read the Paragraph post which included the playbook URL.
3. Sharing results of the experiment
In addition to the report, the Safary team shared the results from the distribution effort, showing how they tracked the conversion funnel with their own Analytics tool.
Takeaways
The B2B report download strategy is evolving
The best comp for the Farhackers report is one that many of us are familiar with. A vendor creates an industry report and you provide your email to receive a link to download the report in their inbox.
The Farhackers approach is a modern version of this, with positive friction (paying a small minting fee to ‘download’) to validate interest and intent.
This experiment shows that this approach is promising and will likely have even better results in the future with an optimized funnel or lower/no mint costs.
Reengaging and remarketing onchain
Instead of emails, the Safary team received wallet addresses and Farcaster profiles.
And some interesting possibilities arise as a result:
Bonus token-gated content can be provided to Farhackers Playbook minters
People who minted the playbook were likely operators or growth professionals in web3/crypto. Other companies could even target them (hopefully not in an annoying or spammy way though 😅)
Having tokenized access to a report isn’t necessarily better than an email. It certainly is more dynamic though.
Rewarding co-creators programmatically
One unique feature of Zora is that minting fees can be distributed to multiple addresses. The Safary team set a .001 ETH minting fee (the other .000777 ETH cost is Zora’s platform fee), which was split between those who contributed to the playbook.
This was a nice way to incentivize the contributors to distribute the playbook and function as a small token (literally and figuratively lol) of appreciation. I wasn’t expecting this, with the gesture being more meaningful to me rather than the financial incentive itself.
Although it took a little effort to set up the distribution initially, the distribution process afterward was automatic and persistent.
I’m looking forward to the ‘download the report’ strategy evolve 📄
See you next week!
