Part 1:Should you use Zealy to grow your community?
This is one of the 5 part series on everything you need to know about Zealy, from how to set up a campaign to how to lower your CAC cost 12x with optimized tactics. We will release the report every week. However, if you like to get the full research note, raw underlying data of 100 sprint 2024 sprint campaign and bonus content, including this one tactic to be 10x more effective, head to our Dashboard and find all notes under “Exclusive Resource”.
In the ever-evolving world of online communities, Discord has emerged as a powerful platform for creating and managing groups. However, growing your Discord community can be a challenging task. This is where Zealy comes in. Zealy, a quest platform, offers a unique and systematic way to track member engagement and reward their efforts. But can it truly help you grow your Discord? Let's dive in and find out.
In this post, you will learn about Zealy, how it can be utilized to enhance your Discord community, the challenges you may face, and how to measure your Zealy performance. We will also discuss the competition and pricing for Zealy. Finally, we will show you how our bot can keep the bots count low and help you continue to optimize your campaign.
Zealy: An Overview
Zealy is a quest platform where you can keep track of how many members are completing quests and reward them with different XP, which can then be converted to tokens or other rewards. It is a unique web3 product that helps you monitor how many people are actively participating in your tasks.
Despite competition from similar platforms like Galxe, Wonderverse, and smaller competitors like Drip, Zealy, formerly known as Crew3, has the most traction and is growing the fastest, as evident from SEMrush data.
Zealy:
Galxe:
The pricing for Zealy can get quite expensive. All major key features are free. Clients usually pay for two major features: extracting user information (wallet, Twitter, Discord name, etc.) to their own excel sheet, and being advertised on the front page of Zealy. If you really don't want to pay Zealy, you can choose to copy and paste the user information and manually clean up the dataset yourself. In the later part of the blogs, we will go over how to get on the top page for Zealy for free!
Utilizing Zealy for Growth
In reality, you don’t have to pick between quest platforms. During the initial stage, you should view these platforms more as a top funnel growth tool to acquire new users rather than converting existing users. Many projects post quests on all platforms simultaneously during a sprint to attract the most users.
Another way to use Zealy is to engage members continuously. Many communities use Zealy for ongoing sprints, with new quests happening regularly so that members can earn fresh points. One of the most unexpected benefits of Zealy or any quest platform is users' ability to discover new features. Think about it from a user perspective, currently it is impossible to onboard a new server and keep up with the latest events.
One case study we have is a community that uses our QuestGPT, it's a custom Discord game bot that plays DnD with a chatGPT powered game master based on their communities own story plot. The community uses our QuestGPT as a quiz bot for their upcoming games. As they update the task onto Zealy, we are seeing 8x more engagement vs communities that don't put it as a quest task.
The Challenges
With any quest platform, the biggest issue is bots. Depending on how you market and set up the bot, you should expect at least 50% to be bot, but ranges will be around 60-80%.
If you want to know exactly how many bots your communities are attracting via the quest platform, you can try our Discord bot that gives your comprehensive amount of data on user acquisitions, including how many bots join in your server, but also the quality of new users via looking at the way they chat.
Chart below shows a community that is actively using quest platforms to attract users. As you can see, it is inevitable to have many bot account entering the system.
If one of your quests is to invite X amount of users, then do use our analytics to keep track of which users and who they invite. You want to only reward users that invite high quality users that are engaging with others in the communities. This is the easiest way to attract bots.
Our analytics help you track number of users joining in from various invite codes on a day to day basis.
Many shades of bots
There are two kinds of bots: fully automated and human hybrids. Fully automated bots are relatively easy to gate by adding captcha-based verification bots. We recommend Wick! You can also set filters to allow only accounts that are 5 months old or those with verified phone numbers to join the server.
Human-operated bots, on the other hand, are trickier to handle. They are most active around 1 am-8 am PST time, corresponding to about 9 am - 5 pm West Africa time. They typically enter the server one by one, have similar names, profile, and account creation dates, and do a similar stream of activities.
The right KPI for your Zealy
There are roughly 120 sprints happening on the Zealy platforms at the same time. The right KPI when it comes to top funnel growth should always be CAC. For example, a $100 campaign that runs over 7 days with 1,000 active users will be more effective than a campaign of $100,000 with only 50,000 members. You can use our analytics to get an accurate sense of CAC. Otherwise, assuming that 50% of your users are bots.
In addition to CAC, Another measure is to check how many new people you are getting via Zealy. Our data shows that a non-successful project would have about 38 people joining every day, and a successful one will be 3x more at about 105 people. In second and third part of our blog, we will go over some tactics to significantly increase your participation rate.
Ready to give it a try? Don’t!
Understanding Zealy and its potential is the first step. However, setting up Zealy without understanding the risks can be costly. Average CAC cost is about $1.6 per users, compared to about $0.5 via collab managers and $0.2-$0.6 via youtubers and tiktokers. This means that more than half of the projects are BETTER OFF without running Zealy campaign.
In the next blog, we will dig into the best and worst spring campaign and teach you how to lower your CAC by more than 3x.
Can’t wait till next week? Go to your dashboard and click on exclusive resources to get a early peak on the article. You will also find all of our raw research data exclusively for our members, in case you are curious, or if you would like to see your peers data