Marketing Wen-sday, Shard #5

July 6, 2022

Edit: As of September 28 2022, an additional "RCNet" testing phase has been added to Q1 2023, and the Radix mainnet upgrade to Babylon will occur in Q2 2023.

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We’ve now finished Q2.

I don’t want to bury the lead, so I’ll say this…we accomplished the objective. For some strong results, scroll down.

Now on with it…As you’ll recall from previous shards (here’s Shard #4), our Q2 objective was to “Start Your Marketing Engines”.

We selected 3 Key Results for Marketing to help us focus our efforts and to support our claim that we had, in fact, started the marketing engines.

(For a refresher on the OKR paradigm, please reference Shard 2).

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Q2 Key Results

Grow the number of wallets with more than 2000 XRD from 7500 to 10,000

Drive 1500 unique Scrypto repo clones (up from 600)

Grow to 150,000 monthly site visits (from 50k)

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Ok, so how are we doing?

Wallet Growth

We ended the quarter at just under 8800 wallets with more than 2000 XRD. That puts us at about 70% of our OKR goal (and remember, 70% in OKRs is considered very good).

While we are all familiar with the pain of XRD acquisition in many jurisdictions, a significant number of exchanges integrated XRD this quarter, including Gate, MEXC, AscendEX; Vindax, Digifinex, P2PB2B, XT.com (with thanks to the Radix community); and we are excited at the prospects of upcoming XRD listings at WhiteBit, Bitmart, and LBANK. These should continue to help in onboarding new members of our tribe. And we’re not slowing down, as the Head of Token role search continues.

I think it’s notable that, in a bear market such as the one we are in, we continue to see week-over-week growth of committed wallet holders.

Wallet growth will remain a focus in Q3, as we’ve set a new OKR of driving towards 15k.

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Scrypto Repos

We absolutely obliterated this goal, with nearly 2000 clones of the repo this quarter, against a target of 1500. In other words, 166% attainment. Ridiculous.

To point to one reason for this success would be irresponsible, but the combination of our developer-focused advertising on Brave, Reddit, Twitter, our two events (Lisbon and Austin), the “Scrypto Love Quotes” we gather and share, and the great community moderation efforts across multiple teams within RDX works (and the extremely welcoming community when people do arrive), all were factors.

I should also note that we saw a nice bump in those numbers after both Consensus and Foo Hack.

In Q3, we are going to continue to support the efforts of developer acquisition by the ecosystem team, of course, though it won’t be a top-level OKR for the marketing team.

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Website Visits

Sadly, we missed the mark on this one.

Our Key Result was 450,000 total site visits in Q2 and we only ended up with 444,449 or 98.77% attainment.

Brave contributed a huge number of them and the 1-day takeover was obviously a big part. In short, we figured out how to drive large amounts of traffic and grow brand awareness.

As we move into Q3, we’re going to change the top-level OKR to measure organic site visits.

Paid is excellent (and we’ll keep pushing it), but I want us to become a brand that generates unpaid traffic because of our community, our vision, and our tech. We’re about to hire a full-time social media manager who is going to help us with this, giving the Radix brand a bit more personality and (hopefully) virality.

Along these lines, I had a great call with one of the world’s leading Word-of-Mouth marketers the other day and he told me;

“Be Patient with WOMM. It takes a while and kind of like the Pyramids. Not fast, but permanent.”

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June Marketing Activity

The two cornerstone events of June were Consensus (write-up covered in the June 16 Radix Report) and FooHack (write-up in the June 30 Radix Report and the “Smooth as Vegan Butter” blog post) and there’s not much more to say other than WE CRUSHED IT.

That’s not to say there were no learnings from the two events (plenty of those), but all things considered, I think we got a lot of value out of them for the Radix community and that’s going to pay off in the months ahead.

We’ll continue to leverage both of these (and we have some good FooHack PR coming in July that will continue to tell the story) as we go forward.

Some other highlights:

We launched the Radix Dandelion Marketing Program which is designed to give community members the opportunity to test out low-cost tactics that could yield high rewards. So far, we’ve received 49 entries (some better than others), and this Friday we’re going to be hosting a call for those who submitted to help them refine their ideas and coach them up. It’s a promising start and I’m looking forward to seeing how this program evolves.

We’ve continued the Rekt Retweet series or, as I like to call it, “The EVM-based gift that keeps on giving” and we’re not going to slow down. As we deliver more of these, more people will have their Radix Revelation.
Our paid media activity continues to improve in terms of both yield and effectiveness. We are adding 2 marketing platforms for Q3 and are hiring another member to the Performance Marketing team to help us optimize our spending.
Our efficiency in attracting developers continues to improve with over 1,000 developers signing up for our events in Q2 via paid marketing. We have established a strong partnership with Stakingrewards.com and other vendors in the space to further build awareness as we move into Q3 and towards Babylon.

And we finished the quarter strong against many of the OKRs we set, including:

Enabled 27 Radix Revelation Meet-Ups around the world
Grew the number of Radix Ambassadors from 2 to 49
Increased Twitter follower count from 140k to 187,400
Built relationships with 42 University Blockchain Cubs. More on the here.
Added nearly 2,500 new members to our Discord
Captured and published more than 36 Scrypto Developer Love Quotes
Generated nearly 60k views of our content (driven by Rekt Retweet’s popularity)
Had nearly 200 developers attend our events in Lisbon and Austin
Had more than 750 people visit our Consensus booth

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I don’t know about you, but given all of those numbers, I think it’s fair to say that we have “started the marketing engines.”

I am so proud of each and every one of the members of the RDX Works marketing team (and everyone in the organization and community) who have contributed to help make this quarter as strong as it was. Really, they put up with a lot (especially a bipolar CMO), put a ton of sweat into their roles, and committed themselves to the vision of a radically better financial system, built on Radix.

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But, starting the engines isn’t enough.

We need to accelerate.

With the help of the marketing infrastructure we have put in place thanks to our Marketing Ops team and soon, our new Marketing Director hire, (she starts in late July), I think we are well-positioned to do this.

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Q3 OKRs

Our top-level Objective for Q3: Radix is a Growing WOM (Word-of-Mouth) Phenomenon.

As for our Key Results, here’s what I’ve proposed.

Grow organic site visits by 2.25x
Grow the double opt-in email house list by 4x
Grow XRD wallets >2000 XRD to 15k from 9k

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I shared the thinking on organic site visits above. A growth of 2.25x would support our objective. The same goes for our email list (especially double opt-in), as it’s an indication of increased demand. The email open rate, which is very good now, should at least stay flat (if not grow), as it demonstrates that we are delivering quality in addition to quantity. And, of course, none of this matters if people don’t decide that the Radix vision and community is for them by putting skin in the game.

The rest of the team has aligned itself with these top-level OKRs. It’s not going to be easy, but decentralizing $400 trillion of global finance isn’t either.

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Looking Ahead to July Activities

I’ve often said that the summer (in the northern hemisphere) is a great time to really push on the marketing. Why? Because conventional wisdom says that things slow down in the summer. In my mind, that’s a relic of a bygone era.

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Today, even when you’re at the beach or traveling, you still have your phone and, since others slow down, there is proportionately less noise. More opportunities for us.

So, with that in mind, we look forward to our first Decentralized Finance Summit on the 7th of July and the innovative pilot we are calling “Dev Swarm” with simultaneous events going on in Lisbon, Vienna, Munich, Szeged, and Budapest on July 23.

We also have our first University-focused event, Intro to Radix: University Zoom Chat on July 12.

In addition, Piers is one of the featured speakers at the AWS FinTech Executive Forum in London on July, 20th. Great recognition that Radix is perceived as a thought leader in the next generation of FinTech.

This will all be complemented by our 3 Wen-Marketing calls (see Discord and Telegram for details), the launch of our first Dandelion activities, increased activity on the PR and influencer front, and the anticipated completion of a new Radix vision video.

Our community team is also increasing our efforts on growing Radix in Asia. We’ve seen a LOT of interest coming out of India and we are exploring ways to build awareness in Korea as well.

Rekt Retweets will continue and we are rapidly building out the “Journey to the Radix Revelation” framework to help people move along that path faster.

Lastly, we’ll be developing and begin planning for August and September campaigns designed to attract more members of our tribe and build momentum as we head toward Alphanet launch at the end of the quarter.

Of course, this will all be foundational for the big Q4 release of Betanet and the Q1 release of Babylon.

I will be spending more time on that this quarter as well and am open to radically different ideas about how to make the launch successful.

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