Understanding Web3 Player Behavior - Naavik Gaming Podcast

[Music] hello and welcome to the medicos crypto Corner brought to you by novice I'm your host Rico vori today we are going to talk all about data and analytics and how to better understand the web 3 player as the legendary engineer W Edwards Deming put it without data you're just another person with an opinion and then on the other hand as Jim Barksdale is the founder of Netscape uh joked if we have data let's look at the data but if all we have are opinions let's go with mine and so that's kind of the framing for this episode today web 2 is uh the demings world where there is data for everything to understand the user Behavior Web 3 as we mostly know by now is very much a world of opinions uh and a lack of great data to to analyze user behavior and and player Behavior and so

what we're going to be doing today uh is actually kind of a follow-on from a previous episode we did for the metacast uh we we did an episode called uh building the web 3 marketing stack and that was a really surprisingly perhaps or maybe not surprisingly a popular episode and we had a lot of follow-on questions uh and thoughts coming in from from our listeners after that episode and so what we wanted to do is is not necessarily look at the the marketing stock again but really looking at that data and analytics question which is why is there such a paucity of great data available in the world of web3 uh in particular kind of understanding that player Behavior across web 2 and web 3. uh and so that's the lens for this particular episode and to answer that question we have a phenomenal guest today uh he is called Nathan Snell uh he's the founder of a company called rayleon which is specifically building web 3 analytics tools uh raelian's all about getting actionable insights for web3 which of course exists in web 2

um in Spades but just doesn't yet in web3 uh and we are going to get answers not just help with our marketing efforts uh for game developers and web3 but also to understand how to find more users where to understand your where are people congregating in web3 uh and then of course understanding your existing users better so without further Ado Nathan Snell great to have you here welcome to the podcast okay thank you you good to be here and uh yeah I listen to other to that other episode you mentioned it was awesome and you know been listening for a while so happy to be here and and help provide some hopefully good information awesome well we are going to drive uh right into this so why don't we kick off with a quick overview of you Nathan uh kind of your journey into into web three I know you've got a strong background in analytics from from your your prior web 2 career um and then of course understanding what rayleon does and then what is the current state of web3 analytics and why is it so hard to understand web3 player Behavior at this moment in time

yeah absolutely um for me I'll spend uh just a brief time on my background your point and since then we're diving then went to the more fun stuff so yeah and so I came from web 2 um I spent more than a decade in fintech and actually uh was a co-founder of a company called Encino you could see a little bit of the Memento above me there um you know we took it public in 2020 at about a seven billion evaluation so you know very familiar with you know uh with the fintech space in particular it's actually how I got into uh into crypto was really as you might suspect from the fintech side you know really getting to defy observing it a lot from the company endpoint in a personal standpoint and then really beginning of last year um you know left the company and I'd say fell further down the uh the web 3 or crypto rabbit hole before ultimately talking with a lot of different projects and sort of hearing the same problems over and over you know a lot on what you were just describing right if people saying you know that they can't understand who their users are they can't engage with those users you know they don't have they don't know how to connect the sort of web tube my activity or business activity to things that happen on chain and uh finally after

hearing about it from just about every project we talked to big and small it sort of became clear of like okay like there's a problem to solve here um and that's kind of what really led us into creating Radeon and the idea of building out this sort of web 3 specific you know marketing analytics and sort of Engagement platform was was kind of the goal there awesome and I have a kind of a clarifying question we we so often say you know we want to understand user Behavior we want to understand player behavior Can you tell me what you mean by that when we talk about understanding player Behavior or user Behavior what does that actually mean fundamentally to you um and and why why build raylion to to better you know solve that problem yeah absolutely um so for us you know when I about uh understanding user behavior and what that means I mean to me it's really about you know knowing uh like knowing what behaviors your users show so you can determine whether they're inclined to take the action that you want and being able to measure those results uh

and I know like depending on sort of what side you're on that sounds you know um you know that sounds maybe like very targeted right of like the actions that you want but I think you know on both sides right it lends itself to you know if you're a game developer like you want your users to be engaged you want your core gameplay Loop to be fun so like those analytics become really important to improving the game it also does become important to things like LTV and things of that sort of you know making sure that you know the offers that you're showing players are in fact attractive and they're you know going to be something that's accretive to the play to the Game Dev and things of that sort so when we think about you know what is understanding you know users mean that tends to be how we sort of encapsulate that right is it's you know not just sort of understanding who the user is which I'd say tends to be more like standard marketing demographics right but really understanding like how do they behave and then how do we sort of help Drive the right sorts of action or understand the kinds of actions they want to take as a result of that and what do you think is the biggest Gap right now between web 2 and web3 I mean again web 2 has an absolute plethora of tools for all kinds of things and you know right down to like literally like

gaming genre specific tools right there will be certain analytics platforms that are like specifically for casual games or specifically for core games or whatever and obviously across different platforms and form factors and iOS versus Android and so on and so forth um and and that's just you know obviously that there's been a lot more time for those to develop you know uh over the years what's the biggest Gap do you think between web 2 and web3 like what is the biggest hole or the biggest black box that is currently you're hearing from developers that you're talking to um that they're like I really wish I could do X so that's a great question I mean I I think to me it sort of breaks down into three areas um you know one is like on the pure web 3 data side uh the majority of platforms and everything that have been available are predominantly uh like Trader oriented right so it tends to be very macroeconomic so usually when you talk about web3 data everybody thinks about Dune and Manson for example which are

both amazing companies you know I mean like we you know we use them even like I use them personally um you know but you know when you think about like the kinds of charts or dashboards that you see on those again it's you know it's TVO it's what you know what's going up you know what's going up with respect to it um a lot of those sort of macroeconomic or sort of macro Community sort of sort of aspects um you know when it comes to understanding user Behavior right like you know you may see sort of the long tail impact to those factors um but you know but there really hasn't been anybody that has been focused on trying to get to some of that really really challenging data which kind of gets into the second you know the second Point um it's like that's there but you know but really looking at it almost like the wallet perspective right or the user perspective and saying okay yes you know like there's you know numbers are going up and the TV all of this or what have you but you know let's focus on the wallet and really start to apply an interpretation layer if you will to understand you know not just like are the numbering up or did a trade happen but you know who did the trade happen with and what was the amount for and again just more of those sort of uh you know more of those behavioral aspects

right of the wallet so that's a so that's one area um you know the second piece of that too is now I kind of alluded to this you know uh wall um like while the blockchain data is technically like public and available to everyone that doesn't mean it's easy to get access to right doesn't mean that it's that it's not complicated so you know you see some companies and even early on when we were talking with uh with some of the largest projects you know some of the really big ones they've grown this a little bit right but it's taken a lot of development and Engineering time data engineering and things of that sort um you know because even though the data is there it doesn't mean that it's in a valuable state right it's like if you think about Google for instance I mean like technically web pages are public right anybody can go on index a web page and yet Google's built obviously an entire Empire on public data by making it useful by making it actionable and by being able to do something more with it so that's kind of the second piece and I think uh you know the third and then I'll you know stop um you know is really uh you know we're seeing a lot of like of money going even from a VC standpoint into Data like investment wise but even

you know one of the challenges we dealt with early on is you know while there's more and more sort of data providers growing or apis growing you know they still tend to be largely focused on you know making an nft Marketplace better right or building I call like a more lightweight data oriented app you know it's not really geared towards you know really in-depth deep sort of big data analytics kind of volumes and Analysis and sort of number crunching if you will that's required to get to you know behavioral analytics or into sort of an Insight you know that that's really simple like cool like where do these new users come from you know before us right um so those can be the kind of the three things that we've seen today that's that's been a challenge as far as like why aren't more priding I would actually get access to this so I wanna uh so great list there and and actually a lot of those I want to talk about I'm going to go into the the second one you you brought up uh first because this is the almost the ultimate irony of of of blockchain in in general and but for games in particular which is this notion

that everything is public right it's all there for anybody to look at but it's just incredibly difficult you know unless you build your own tools which you know most game devs don't want to do or most developers don't want to do right they just they want to do what they're good at right and so as a Game Dev I want to just focus on making a game and let somebody else deal with that that data side of things um and so that's kind of the ultimate irony in my mind is is you know everything that we're doing on chain is is theoretically you know transparent in public and we can just look at it and say oh okay it came from here and they have these other nfts in their wallet and this is what they did right before and here are the transactions and they're this active or that active um and and the irony is that that's just really really hard to do or painful maybe it's not hard as maybe the wrong word but painful to do right so yeah a little bit of both right and so I'm curious to hear uh you know how do you think about that that problem how do you think about that irony in my mind it is an irony because you know in web 2 all of my game data is completely

proprietary right like I'm not going to share what my players are doing with anybody else unless I want to share it and you know that's something I'm doing deliberately right um and here it's it's the polar opposite like everything in some other game or some other dap is completely there for anybody to look at at least the Unchained part is and we'll get to the off chain part soon and I'm just very interested to hear how you think about that problem and how are you tackling that problem um in terms of actually getting something actionable out of there something that you can actually use both for competitive Intel and competitive analysis but also of course for you know bettering your own product making your own product more sticky yeah yeah absolutely um man I mean there's a lot of different aspects of it I mean I think if I if I were to boil it down um you know to like how we tend to think about it is it's sort of twofold and maybe in simple terms you know one is like there's just the complexity of getting the data right um you know and I think you know getting the data isn't particularly you know challenging like

when you get into kind of the volumes that we're dealing with right you know you get into more infrastructure needs but I'd say you know um you know getting the data like there's aspects of that and being able to get it in the right format um I think being able to interpret it right is really uh one of the bigger challenges so to your point like even the idea of knowing cool so you know a player is holding some erc20 token with some random address right and knowing like what does that address even mean like and then there's a whole lot there's a whole sort of layer of enrichment that lives around that right so that's where I think a lot of people that start off or sort of embarked to build it themselves I I think underestimate at times the complexity that goes along with like okay well you know that's great that you like this player has the nft but there's a whole Litany of other questions which kind of get to the second piece you know to your point of like how do you make this actionable right so the end of the day like good behavioral data is fundamentally actionable data right and that means that it needs to be sort of synthesized in a way that doesn't require to your point A Game Dev to spend hours analyzing a bunch of data right ideally it sort of it bubbles up in a way where you can look at it and go okay cool like I immediately understand what this says and I know how to put it

into action so with the nft example you know we've got projects for instance um you know the israelion where you know they've gone through and uh and they've looked at you know to your example you know who were sort of who are holding particular nfts we don't just look at that right they'll say okay well of those holders how many more primary sales right in other words they minted It For the First Time versus how many of them purchased it secondary and if they bought it secondary how much did they pay for it and like are they flippers right so you get into like all these other Dynamics behaviors become really really valuable but your point yeah the data is there but there's quite a lot of sort of number crunching enrichment things like that that has to happen to be able to get to something as simple sounding as they have the nft you know they were the primary mentor and this is what they pay on average and as a result this is why you actually want to Target them so uh great uh segue into one of the questions I've been wanting to ask player personas um player personas are absolutely critical you know in in gaming in general and understanding like who are you making this game for what is where is it going to resonate with the

demographics where I'm going to find these people um how do I keep them engaged and that's one of the things that's it's relatively straightforward to do in web 2 Gaming um is to develop these player personas and then to target them through the various places that they congregate online whether it be through websites or social or whatever um how how is this different in web3 what what makes building these personas because I find this a challenge for us how is this different in web 3 how can game devs go about or start to think about developing better and more targeted uh player personas the way they can currently in web 2 which is not to say it's like oh it's so easy like oh anybody can do it of course it's still hard you still have to understand like a lot of the psychologies that go into you know playing a certain kind of game and you know why isn't this game going to resonate versus that game but at least it's a known entity in web too but in web 3 it's it's it's really quite challenging to figure out how to do that and and that's something that I struggle

with personally as a Game Dev and I know others do too and I'm very curious to hear because it's a perfect kind of uh follow-up question for what you just talked about uh how do we do this and why is it different web3 yeah it's funny I mean I think um I don't know like when I think about like the difference in web free you know and really to the points that you made I don't think there's much of a strategic difference right I mean to your point like the the value that personas provide in terms of being able to like cluster right or group users you know um you know for into whatever sort of categories you want and as a result being able to Target them I think like you know conceptually the strategy of that for web 2 and web three uh at least from what we're seeing I mean is the same right it's like it's the same sort of mentality um where the challenge comes in you know it really to one of your first questions is um like there's just the access to the data has been really difficult to get um so like you know until you had certain platforms available um you know the made it sort of no code easy um you know it basically the only results that you're the only way that you could do it was by going back and you know pulling the data yourself

having developers run through it right it was a very manual and arduous process so you know to your executive point on the web three side you know when like when it takes you know hours and hours and hours of really valuable developer time right time where instead of making the game way more fun and awesome which is what you know myself is a game right but I want you know spending time you know doing something that's still valuable I put a lot of time into trying to make sure that this you know that the personas the game can grow in different ways that becomes a really challenging trade-off uh and that's largely because there hasn't really been you know good technology around to make it sort of push button easy right or no code easy um you know I think the other thing too of it is that um yeah there's a like if you're needed a web you know native to web3 like the concepts sometimes of even creating a Persona we find it newer so you know we've actually been working with a number of different projects recently um actually going through this process with them right uh and I'd say and we're finding those I'd say there's different degrees of maturity and sort of understanding like how to create this Persona strategy and how to execute it uh and some of it's you know we've got

some folks that are you know more web to Native right and they kind of they have it they have that understanding already and they've even have sort of well-documented like this is what we think our personas would look like and then we can kind of work alongside them and say great well here's sort of what that talks like combining your web 2 web 3 data and so on but then we have others right that it's more like they've heard it and they're like hey like we know we need personas but we're like you know they're not sure you necessarily how to think about it they don't you know they don't know where to start on web 2 or web3 so I think you know even because of the Paradigm Riders you've got web3 native folks that are making great things you've got sort of web 2 folks kind of innovating and leveraging web3 you've got some of those sort of done in place too that that I think becomes sort of a learning curve challenge if that makes sense yeah it's I want to dig a Little Deeper on this personas piece because it's uh it's in fact this last episode I have referred to which is the building the marketing stack episode we had uh Quinn from from Sky navis um and I had actually seen him or somebody from his team talk earlier about how they have a whole bunch of personas that don't

really exist in web 2 at all um and they're they're still very very valuable they they want these people around um and these are personas who are you know holders but not players they don't want to play the game necessarily but they want to be a part of the decision making process they're in the Dow for example um and they're they're out there are a number of different personas that they identified that don't really exist in web 2 uh but do in web 3 and traditionally you'd be like well if you're not playing the game like I don't know if that's you're valuable to to to the experience but they find Sky Mavis finds that these folks in the axi community are very valuable even though there not playing the game and then of course there are the value extractive folks who are you know just pulling value out of the the economy and I think those are just very unique web 3 specific things to think about and I I wonder my follow-on question to you really is I wonder how does

you know how do you help folks understand and really uncover these types of personas that don't necessarily have an analog from the web 2 World um how do you even start thinking about that it's a really interesting area that I find fascinating personally as a developer because you know understand like basically we're talking about human beings right these are all human beings these human beings all play games or invest in nfts or flip nfts for whatever reason like they're all their motivations right but they're all human beings ultimately um and data only goes so far you know a data point can only tell you so much about that human being and how do you go deeper how do you get that extra Insight uh to really uncover this this notion like wow like this this is a whole different community of people that consists of Gamers and holders and investors and owners and the owner of the Tao class and the folks who want to

speak and the social whales and you know like it goes so much broader I know like kind of hitting this point pretty hard but like it goes so much broader than what we've ever really seen in web 2 or in any game in my career uh obviously there's lots of different folks but boy like is it different in web 3 in my opinion um and so I was very curious to hear your thoughts on that and how do you start to go about thinking about like uncovering these different types of personas um and really figuring out what their relative value is or their relative importances to your particular product or game yeah yeah no I mean you're right I mean there is um like there's definitely sort of your more traditional personas that I think still apply but you're right there is sort of a much broader Universe of of like what uh like what's important right to a project you know that is really unique to web3 and I think you know the last part of what you're saying uh to me anyways is part of at least how you know how we think about it on how how we've been seeing successful projects like you know the folks at Sky Mavis um you know starting to kind of tune them and get to like what is the right Persona

um you know and that's really around measuring right so you know at the end of the day like you know part of the value in your quote kind of alluded to this at the beginning is you know you're making an assumption right and I think you know part of the value of having this sort of user data and the behavioral data and sort of marketing analytic data is you know is to be able to sort of you know see what things could inform right you know the kinds of assumptions you want to make be able to do the targeting around it and then measure the results right so to be able to see you know like what kind you know how valuable is sort of a community whale or a dow voter or you know what or what have you you know um you know overall to you know to sort of the ecosystem um and then honestly I think there's and we're starting to find this already and start to kind of roll this out within our product is there's also just new metrics you know to your so um hopefully Quinn doesn't mind I don't know how you know how much you shared on it but you know Quinn and I were talking about um you know it's like there's LTD right which is ultimately measuring the value of a player but like as these ecosystems are growing more you know uh you know Quinn was sort of describing and even this idea of like the network LTD right so the idea of you know there probably is to your point of the personas not

even just your player personas and what they look like but you're sort of ecosystem personas right and how do we make sure that you know those are being fostered in the right way and that they're valued in the right way because the last thing you want to do right is a game that's creating this thriving Community is the inadvertently alienate you know the community right or market makers or what have you that are that are not necessarily even playing the game but are really excited about it you know that are they're involved in engaging what's going on you know so there's things like that that we're seeing as well as um you know some of the stuff that we pull together analytics wise um you know combining web 2 is even the idea of like new engagements and wallet connections so you know if you think about like the sort of standard flow you know of user activity again these are sort of new you know new metrics that come out where it's like somebody could come to your you know come to your game and depend on a game it is say it's you know it's a web-based game or a mobile game maybe they connect their wallet but then they never do anything right well like that's that's sort of a new sort of marketing funnel or onboarding funnel that has to be considered you know versus somebody who you know who connects their wallet you know and maybe you know and that's the first time you've ever seen them and then they do something right so you know there are a lot of these sort of newer

nuanced uh metrics and I think frankly more as we all sort of you know get better data and work together uh to kind of iterate and test and experiment but I think it's still fundamentally comes back to you know you have to measure it right so I think being able to have a really easy way uh you know to be able to do this targeting and we see uh excuse me we see folks you know in our product doing this today where you know they'll create sort of broader you know broader you know personas or art in your audiences and then they'll go really narrow right of like okay I want to know like how many people you know just our primary Salesforce how many people you know to your point have been LPS you know so like on the deck side for instance we've got folks that have targeted LPS but it's like how many have been LPS on a specific exchange and have done these other things and I think you start to as a result of having the you know the ability to create really narrow audiences in an easy way you can see right like is it working is it not working what is the value of that and do you adjust or pivot over time that sort of thing yeah it's uh it's amazing how in web 3 the importance of individuals becomes

almost like so much bigger than it is in in web 2. you can have just one person or a handful of folks a handful of human beings who can truly sway a community in one way or the other and I'm not talking about the influencers and the shelters from crypto Twitter I'm talking about the actual community members who are truly part of that Community um and of course that's always existed to a degree in web 2 you know where you've had the players like people look up to if it's a skill based game they're like wow this you know or streamers um in that genre of gaming but it becomes almost outsized uh importance in in web3 and I wonder how uh how does does the data analysis change in order to identify those people or like you know it's one thing to segment your player base and say okay we got this segment this segment this segment this segment and kind of understanding those personas kind of come back to that point um but here it's almost like oh we have these like eight individuals who like here's the Dow guy like here's the

social whale here's the one who sets the tone for the gameplay right um is is there a is there a place for that in the data analysis or or is that is that more of a qualitative thing where you as the Game Dev and you as the community team needs to just be like okay I gotta have the finger on the pulse on these individuals but it's not really a data question um or is it I mean I think a lot of it can still come down to date I mean so you know in most cases it's happening on chain right then you can still run analytics on Dow votes and again if you're sort of blending web 2 and web3 data you can sort of draw the lines and the parallels right to say awesome you know this user has been active in game and they're also voting every single time you know in the Dow or if whatever comes out um so you know I think there's there's aspects of that but also at the same time right I mean you know to your point like a community is fundamentally about relationships so you know from a data standpoint I think the data should help you know should help do things at scale right so it's you know in some cases it confirms got you know sort of good intuition it confirms assumptions or you

know or it's um you know rejects assumptions right and shows that they're not right you know but they're still you know there still needs to be that sort of interaction you know from game deals to the community I mean and there's always going to be um you know those folks right that are special that like you can't really boil down into a single wallet and say or user and say oh yeah like this user is clearly really valuable because you know like there's a point where like the trying to trying to bring in data right to say oh well this person's post you know a thousand times in Discord like how valuable is that really and how informative is that really you know hard to say I think that's where it becomes more of having great Community managers or marketing folks right that are that just have that engagement into your point have the finger on the false um you know and I think that's especially true where you know there's some games that I've seen uh that you know have been driving the sort of you know narrative based concept where they have you know effectively you know Dao or token holders that can vote on like how things get named right or sort of what the next progression in the story looks like and again in those cases those are also to your point like new sort of interestings that don't happen in web 2 um you know but are still like you know

are they playing the game or are they not playing the game right like how much is sort of story Evolution via votes and actually um you know become a part of the game and I think and again those those can all be Quantified But ultimately in terms of the actual impact of community growth and everything else I think that's where yeah there's data there but ultimately it comes down to you know being able to again sort of measure like okay you know is that something that's worth trying trying to scale and from and engage from a tracking standpoint or you know does it come down to there is just the sort of this tight-knit community and their VIPs and they need to be treated you know you know much like sort of early adopters or inside tracks right that uh that folks have that say you know uh more uh competitive games have with sort of the pro gamers yeah uh we've been kind of skirting around this issue a little bit I want to come straight into which is this notion of and then this is one of the biggest things for me which is connecting the on chain and off chain activity um you know it's one thing to say yeah well everything on chain is is transparent you can you know track it you can look at it and you can analyze it um but off chain stuff isn't obviously

uh and yet there are obviously very robust web 2 tools uh to allow you to do that and there are very very very few if if any at the moment that really combine the two the on chain and the off-chain activity and so you literally just made some examples where okay I have this holder they have this many nfts they've bought them mostly in primary they've bought these in secondary okay that's all on on chain stuff cool cool I can track that um but they're also happen to have a large Twitter following or they're very active in Discord not necessarily my Discord but somebody else's Discord um or they're in this many discords um like that's that's the magic that I would like to see happen where you can really start to develop a very robust I mean it's a little big brother of course dystopian like okay like we can track everything you do but we can already so like you know there yeah I think it's

perfectly fair to say that it would be very valuable very valuable as a product as a tool to be able to connect all those dots across the different presences that they have whether they be on chain off chain on social you know XYZ right um what's happening in that space like what tools are we lacking at this moment in time to be able to do that um and what are you guys doing to to make that more possible at least a little bit easier yeah yeah um I mean I'd say with the last part we're doing a lot I mean that's I think one of uh one of our core focuses from the beginning and this some of this is probably just coming from web two right is um when we talked about you know with a lot of projects and even so today you know there's a lot of sort of like web3 Maxi going on right which which is not a bad thing in most cases but when it comes to like you know if you're a Game Dev and you're thinking about a user like the reality is like we all start off as web 2 numbers right like if you come into web3 like you came in through like a web 2 Channel whether that's crypto Twitter or you know like you know or uh you know games the app store or

what have you you know you you're what you're at one point a web 2 you know normally before you came you know became a d-gen or whatever it may be um you know so for us you know we really took the approach to saying you know like there is behavioral data right that exists in web 2 and today you know part of why uh you know it hasn't really been Blended together you know up to date in our view anyway and what we've done is by is saying you know if we can create you know web3 sort of marketing analytic behavioral data from unchain information then we can actually marry these two things to create a really really rich perspective and frankly experiences that you couldn't create before in web 2 alone I think a great example of this um you know that just sort of happened with us last week was you know we were you know talking about our customers and and we saw sort of via our analytics and everything and talking to them that you know they had you know call it around you know three thousand uh what we call at-risk users right in other words it hadn't really been active on chain for you know in the last 30 days um but what we saw from the sort of cross-section event is that at least 75 of those users have actually come to

their website in the last 30 days right so to your point of like what's sort of the value I mean sudden you get into the situation where you're like wait you know if we think about a web 3 user not as just the actions on chain but it's like the sort of holistic view of everything they're doing now to your point you suddenly get this really rich perspective where you can say well hang on they're not doing things on chain with us but they're still coming to our dap or to our game you know like how do we make sure that we re-engage them when they come back because like you know something's going on right whether it's a lack of Market fit or there's a feature lacking or something right it's like how do we make sure that we recapture their attention because presumably have done something with us once or twice they want to continue and I think that's where some of that that sort of value comes in um but again it's but that's also more than just Discord right so I think you know there's some projects that we see where they um you know they like all they want to know is like okay well you know I want to connect Discord user and wallet and I just want to know like you know how many are the same and like that's that that can be helpful but it's a very sort of uh it's a very thin right or a very shallow sort of layer of

understanding versus being able to get into awesome this user is coming to your game you know like you know like their their uh their daily active user activity is very high they engage with other things they're doing things on chain you know and now you can start to run cool you know cool even promotions in game because you can see sort of this cross-section of heavy secondary market sales um you know to you know high-end game activity and things like that and I think that's really when you blend those two things together where the magic happen I'm gonna switch gears a little so yeah uh that is where the magic happens I completely agree with there um but but I'm gonna switch gears a little bit here um one of the things that uh in in web 2 is very very effective um or or can be very effective let's put it that way is the idea that you're gonna poach players from a competitor game right and there are lots of ways to do that I mean Facebook is obviously the the best way to do it but there are lots of other ways to do that too through uh networks and other social tools and what have you uh and I'm personally not at

all ashamed to admit that uh I ran marketing for a classic style slots game so mechanical single pay line uh through you know three uh symbol game um and uh back in 2014-15 we relentlessly targeted a competitor game that was on Facebook canvas but not on mobile yet um and so we were able to kind of make that connection between okay there's there's this audience here that's playing this game that's likely to be a very high Affinity we have a mobile product that they can't play at the moment uh on mobile because that game's on canvas we targeted those folks through all of Facebook's tools and it was incredibly incredibly effective like incredibly effective like the conversions and the ROI and everything was incredible um and that's just not possible right now in web3 um unless I'm sorely mistaken if it is possible you tell me because I'm gonna go and start doing that um but uh you know is this a thing is this kind of like okay I can identify a competitive product I could literally

find a single tool in this case Facebook allows me to Target these players and essentially poach them from this competitor uh and then vice versa of course there's the there's the flip side which is like okay how do I know if somebody's doing this to me like how can I you know better engage my players uh in my product uh to prevent this from happening to me right and and this is something that is very much I think nascent in web3 um there there have got to be a lot of competitive products where I mean let's take a very obvious example this you know nft communities right let's not even talk about games I mean there are certain nft communities that are clearly just a great fit for a new and upcoming nft Community yeah to go on target but other than doing it one by one by one there isn't really a great way to have a set of tools or use data and analytics to actually identify where these folks might be and so that's really the question for you here is is that a thing are is anybody

developing this are you developing this um how can I go about actually identifying communities of users in competing products and Target them with my messaging with my product and try to bring them over yeah yeah I mean so um I mean selfishly that's what we've built I mean that's a big part of what we've built so uh and honestly that's one of the areas that gets me you know that gets us most excited is is this idea of you know how do we provide that level of targeting um you know so for us I mean our sort of premise right kind of from the beginning was you know again in order to be able to actually Target people effectively you have to understand those behaviors um you know so we started off deep on the analytics side and then sort of built out targeting and have been building out the the sort of Engagement and reach piece on that sort of understand to reach um you know concept and um so yeah I mean so for us yes it's possible I think you know not just similar to the question but you know to the question earlier of you know like why do we see less people doing it today because you know until say I bought from like Ray Leon like it it's impossible they come to the complexity of data and

everything else it's been really expensive I mean and in some cases right as a result you know impossible to do um you know and so you know it's your example one of the things just as a for instance the kind of targeting that you were describing um so we uh we were working with a project um you know and uh one of the things they were doing was sort of flexing that you know the targeting capability that we have within with an Iranian platform and um so exactly your point on the community side so they and sorry I took a note on the different things they looked at so the game was um specifically in polygon and they were looking to do an nfg drop and it honestly it was really cool actually because they even sort of took it past what you know what some of the stuff we had thought about but they were looking at wallets that were playing similar games you know on different chains and they were using us to to also then look at like of those wallets which ones actually played games.com you know so they uses two dollars to see like which ones had been active in sort of the we call them categories but like you know the gaming category or D5 so we had sort of different kind of high level insights within our platform but basically saying okay how many these users are active have been active in the gaming category

with games and polygon in the last 30 days you know how many of them are a part of the following NFC communities what types of games have they played and then like what kinds of nfds do they hold so they kind of went through this you know this big list of stuff to ultimately create you know a very targeted list of wallets that they then ran through a variety of sort of acquisition tests right so some of it was you know more normal ads say Twitter you know crypto Twitter kind of ads they did some sort of crypto native ads inclusive of uh even some like I'd say like an NST based ads like airdrops sort of ads to wallets um and side aside theirs is uh some additional Alpha those don't work so like I think the the overall number of views that they even got was like less than one percent and it was Zero conversions so in case you're debating dropping random nfcs into wallets uh turns out that yep people do in fact think they're complete scams and they don't click on them um but well that's that's actually super super useful because uh they're I mean that happens all the time obvious nicely and I haven't actually heard

definitively anybody actually come out and say they don't do jack um you're telling me they don't do Jackson I mean I suspect it as much but okay there you go early data would be an indication that they don't work yet now and look I mean I think over time I mean to me that's that's a really exciting area to innovate so I think as wallet providers you know provide better tooling around it and that sort of thing and better experiences you know like that'll probably change change over time but yeah right now I mean on a pretty good sized campaign for what we saw it was the results were yeah I don't I don't I have to go back and double check I don't think there was a single conversion that happened um so you know but but it's kind of back to your initial question you know that's that kind of targeting has been really difficult right if not impossible before and like honestly a lot of the time that we spend with our you know with our targeting capabilities is to be able to provide that sort of visibility right you know who's um you know what not just you know what's you know uh where what are your users doing but you know what kinds of users right you know could you actually bring in and then again tracking it right so to even see okay if you're doing you know some kind of vampire

attack or promotional campaign or ad or what have you you know like how you know how much does that audience even actually can and is it worth your sort of continued time money and effort so yeah this actually brings me to vampire attack um I I have actually honestly not heard this phrase before I probably should have heard this phrase before um but I when I was researching this episode I I'm going through your website and you actually even mentioned vampire attack on your website and so I I had to ask the question what is a vampire attack how do you do an effective vampire attack um and uh you know how effective are they I guess uh I mean I I think they've proven pretty effective thus far so so a vampire attack um really is when one project targets another Project's users really in an effort to acquire them usually by offering some kind of of incentive right or some kind of reward so like the most popular example is is like looks so looks for it when they launched they launched effectively with a vampire attack on openc and in the way that that attack worked is they basically said uh

if you're an openc user and you've and you have spent I think it was more than a certain amount of eth using openc then you can come to look for error and claim some number of looks tokens for free right so that was you know one of the early uh in the early vampire attacks um you know and if you look at lifter I mean like they were able to sort of bootstrap the community as a result you know they did some other kind of incentive campaigns to kind of keep it going and obviously you know they're you know they're a Marketplace that that's in place now so I think you know in terms of uh can they be successful I mean I think as with anything you know like if you do it right you know I think in this case you know the the data thus far anyway shows that vampire attacks you know can be successful um you know but again I think some of it comes too as well like of doing it in the right way so another example you know we've got a game that we're working with and they're looking at doing a vampire attack and one of the really cool things actually that I liked about it and this was this to me was a really actually neat um almost like sort of culture setting like you know um you know for the game where you know they did sort of the normal stuff like you were actually mentioning targeting wise where they said hey you know players

that play these games or have nfps from these things on chain you know we think would really like our games so they built a list around that but then they also said you know um there's a handful of games that some of them they had played and they know um and they just kind of watched um you know through say FTX issues and things like that you know collapse right or implode or in treasury issues or things like that and they said you know we want to do a they were saying they want to do call like a targeted airdrop just to players that have sort of uh you know that have almost been like disenfranchised if you will right like from those games so almost as a way of saying like hey like we know you were in this you know it stinks what happened you know but you know we want to invite you in and reward you for you know for being a long time holder of this thing that sort of went defunct and things like that and I think that's honestly a great way too right to be able to say look there was an active Community here that's sort of vampire attack but almost like in a positive way because the value isn't there anymore to say come join us and we'll incentivize and we'll you know even give you a reward right for sort of you know your you know your loyalty to this previous game and that sort of thing

we've talked a lot about um new users and bringing in users from other projects to your project to other games to your game um what about your existing users um that's another area where you could arguably start using some of the web 2 Tools in order to you know once you've got the users in your community once you've got the gamers the players playing your game um you can arguably use almost you know any of the the web 2 tools um but but how do you see it being different in web3 or you know is there a difference between effective life cycle Management in web 3 gaming or web3 products in general versus web 2. um what data what data is different what data is the same when looking at okay is this player engaged are there retaining properly are they coming back on the right days when I think they should be coming back are they doing the right things taking the

right actions that a lot of that is very traditional you know data analytics you know user analytics um but but how is that different in web3 what have you seen um different projects products teams do uh differently from from web 2. yeah and it's so uh you know it's funny what we it depends on the audience a little bit but you know what we see is actually a lot of um Webster games unless they unless you really came from gaming from a strong background uh aren't even running analytics um and then to your point some you know are running call like a lightweight web 2 analytics uh but a few that we've seen are running really in-depth you know web 2 analytics Alone um you know almost almost none I mean it's just a very very small portion are running some kind of web tree analytics on top of that but again usually if they are it tends to be like the Dune dashboard right they're more like macroeconomic thing is here's the total token Supply and here's what TVO looks like and things of that sort so yeah I'd say not sort of meaningful and meaningful

um to driving player engagement as it were um you know what uh and again I think some of that is even you know like what's really on here we're starting to see some of that change because we're being able to say hey look you know if you're using a web 2 tool awesome if you want to use ours awesome you know but let's go and take all that really rich web 2 behavioral data combine it with you know with the on change data and as a result you can start to really you know move from these kind of generic experiences in some cases right these really personalized tailored experiences that bring the two things together uh you know and when we think about that and sort of what that looks like um you know a really cool instance that you know that came up recently so um like I mentioned before the idea of uh you know we're kind of so we're starting to do a lot more on the engagement side right so it's sort of once you understand folks the natural question is you have the Insight you want to do something with it and in particular when it comes to engaging players and keeping them active you know what uh what we've been you know one of the things that we've rolled out recently is what we call an action prompt um you know so you know so one of the things that we really liked idealized from a game that we're working with is this idea of being able to have this really hyper personalized or hyper

targeted personalized experience such that when they're in the game and the player is inactive after a certain period of time if they're holding nfcs on chain you know if they're sort of contributing in these different ways and they get this very specific action prompt that actually draws them deeper into the community right so again if they click on it then it gives them actual special role within their Discord Community as a whole and I think that's where you start to get you know to kind of your question earlier this really neat crossover where yeah like a gamer is one you know like there's a grouping of personas that's maybe Gamers but then there's also this other grouping of personas that you can still really connect with and engage that might be you know deeper community members and maybe they don't play but once a month right but like but the impact they have more broadly is really high and you want to reward that right so by blending up stuff together you can start to provide these really really neat and sort of tailored experiences um another one's onboarding so to your point on if you're targeting somebody you know if you're uh if you're targeting say actually infinity players you know by being able to blend the two data sets and engage players you can actually say cool you know you know you came and we know that you played

actually Infinity so maybe they're like maybe the landing page for them in game is totally different and the steps that you ask them to take is different and the rewards you give them up front are different so that sort of Engagement I think can start to really you know transform uh almost as if like you know if you were playing a game on Steam like if you can if you knew all the achievements somebody could have and you can get gamify that more like it's sort of that same concept right of imagine having that sort of data available in a way that you can make actionable what's the what's the biggest surprise you obviously get to see a lot of different projects and products and not just games what's the biggest surprise for you you know obviously you've come from a rich background of data and analytics and fintech and you know presumably a world of numbers lots and lots of numbers what is the most surprising thing that you've seen uh you know in web 3 that that you haven't seen in web 2 like what's the what's the biggest a shift I guess from user Behavior player behavior from that world in this world and maybe there isn't one because then and again these

these are all human beings right like human beings are human beings and they're complex individuals and so you wouldn't expect somebody to be totally different just because they're engaging with web3 but but uh I'm very curious to hear if you have any insights around like what's the biggest weirdest thing that you've seen that you're like wow I've not seen this before or like this is 10x bigger or smaller or whatever compared to what I'm used to from from uh you know previous experience yeah I mean I think the the things that um you know the things that that stand out most immediately you know is really I mean the community is an obvious that right the level of community engagement is one but uh but I think even within that you know this like the value of um of like an nft or like a digital collectible right you know whichever sort of you know the more casual version right digital collectible versus nft like the value of ownership right and players getting that you know it's it's amazing to see the results of uh like in in the desire for players to be able to actually like you know to own something and what that concept looks like and I think you know it's neat to see like

limit break and some others really interesting and pioneering you know ideas of like free to own uh and even like the NFC factories right as a I don't know if that term will stick but some of those Concepts that are happening um but you know but what's really neat is just like um the more the the more that we've been kind of watching it even as I've been thinking about it there's just almost this aspect where it's like web3 is almost sort of like inherently gamified right like because all this stuff is on chain because you can things like you sort of have this level of like inherent gamification that doesn't really exist on the web to side and and I think honestly like what's really neat is we'll see that continue to evolve in web 3 which will play really well for Game Dev because again like the data we've been talking about uh and the ability to take action on it like we've been talking about is that continues to evolve I think those that are on the Forefront you know Game Dev wise will be able to have a really great opportunity to you know capture new users at a cost that you know that was probably low in what they experienced before you know retain them in ways that were lower and really have almost a little bit more of an open landscape to be able to sort of gamify aspects of the game right you know of Engagement that if it wasn't

possible uh moving as popular previously that is now becoming I think what will become more commonplace and frankly I think what we'll see too is actually web 2 games and this is some of uh some of where we're looking to you know and and where they're going to want to say hey like we want to bring that pin concept to web too so I think you know I would anticipate over the next year we'll see a lot of innovation happening in web 3. I wouldn't be surprised if in 24 we don't start to see a lot of web 2 games adopting sort of kind of web 3s Concepts to drive some of this really cool you know new ways of engaging users that haven't really been possible in the same way before and so I mean I shouldn't be surprised by this because we see this every day but you calling out this idea of digital you know like pride and digital ownership as a concept I it's existed of course up until this point but it somehow has really had a step function change upwards uh with the notion of nfts and and digital Collectibles and Reddit and you know doing what they did and um that that is something that whether

or not we end up calling them nfts which we probably won't in case into the future they've gotten a bit of a bit of a bad name recently um or or you know being associated with crypto or whatever but like this notion of digital ownership you know the uniqueness Rarity things like that of course that's always existed but I I feel like there's been a real cultural adoption of that concept um over the last you know couple of years and I think I think you're right I think that's to me shouldn't be surprising as a game long-time Game Dev um people do take pride in their game assets of course course always always have always will but it feels it feels different this time in a way where you are actually showcasing that that digital collectible or nft in ways that that hasn't really happened in the past and and this notion of uniqueness hasn't really existed in gaming up until this point and I do think that is one of the things that has really changed uh user behavior in in some ways um because you are not just playing a

game and and doing well in it and burning Loot and getting stuff but you actually like are playing with your thing your asset your character your whatever right um really interesting to hear you kind of like that to me is intuitive um but I'm I'm glad to hear that the data that you're seeing from multiple projects kind of backs backs that up um absolutely because I mean that's I think a lot of ways a lot of game business are taking that bet right they're like well we've heard about digital ownership we've heard about nfts like we've heard about people spending a bunch of money on you know um on characters and what have you and like cool that's interesting like let's let's lean into that but I think a lot of leaning in has happened at the financial level or like oh look there's there's you know a financial reason to do this I think fewer game devs have really leaned into the what does it actually mean to own a digital asset like you're your game character um anyway uh I could I could philosophize this for for a long time because this is

a really fascinating topic to me and really um intriguing and I'm just very glad that you're here to kind of validate from a broader data set that yes that is a thing that you're seeing that hasn't necessarily been as true as it is now from your own website absolutely and honestly I think there's a really new opportunity even with that for you know for game devs to to like to explore that space I mean like you see folks like Kazuki for example where you know even the idea of like you know you own a particular digital item and as a result it sort of unlocks a physical item for you and I could see you know in a world where it's like you know if you're a fan of I'm a fan of you know card games and things like that whether it's digital otherwise and you know the idea of being able to take even this you know even something that I own digitally and now all of a sudden you know like what gets shipped to me is like it's some physical rendition of that right and it's like wow like so you know like even that sort of I think the crossover aspects of that will become really interesting you know and like and you can even see the evidence of like if you look at those projects that use digital digital Goods or Collectibles from a marketing standpoint right so they'll say hey if you retweet this you know you

get this nft you know 100 of the time right then you know the retweets on those sorts of you know actions versus ones without the reward you know is higher right so I think you know we're going to see that continue to evolve and uh and honestly it'll be it'll be great to see you know what kinds of ideas folks come up with and how kind of those sorts of interactions innovate and what that drives yeah so so we're building on Solana um and there was a recent kind of hype moment meme moment where uh if you're a holder of a certain projects uh you would get air dropped um this coin called Bonk yes bunk and I got a bunch of bunk and I was on vacation when I got it and then I I saw everybody tweeting about bunk um I was like what's going on here like oh Solana's back you know crypto's back yay back to the bull market um and uh yeah my bunk ended up being worth not an insignificant sum and I was like cool and I did sell it I've learned my lessons from from 20 to 22.

um but but the point I'm making there is it because it's on chain because it's web 3 you can do things that like okay I'm going to reward people who are holders of X Y and Z and you can't really do that in the in the real world right in web 2 like it'd be quite hard to identify people who actually hold like I can identify that you've played a certain game but I don't know if you actually still own that game or you still play that game or you're active and that you're like and that's the kind of stuff that I think you're you're right gets really interesting really quickly um in web three and it's not necessarily about digital ownership it's about what you can do when there's this level of transparency uh around what you actually own at that moment in time or where you've actually been active or like how many times you did X Y or Z and that's really interesting both from a marketing perspective but also from a you mentioned uh web3's gamified by definition in a way that web 2 really isn't uh it really does gamify

the the entire ecosystem in a way that is is really unique and really fascinating and I can I don't really have a a a core Takeaway on this one but it's just the idea that you can go and identify People based on what they actually own and what they're actually doing at this moment in time and then do something meta around that whether it be airdrop Bonk or whatever um that's just a silly meme but but it does open up doors um in in really interesting ways and I think the data is going to be needed in order to be able to because one of the things that bunk didn't do is they punished d-gods which is uh the biggest project nft project on on Solana because they're they're leaving um and so it was like this whole thing you know like this whole drama around like well these guys holders didn't get any and anyway um yeah but that's where you need that data right like you need that data in order to identify like these are the these are the people this is this community of people who hold these particular projects and they've taken certain

actions and I can now do something right something actionable around that information and that that is just not entering web too so yeah anyway I'm very grateful for what you're doing and what you're building um one of my big passion passions is um data analytics really trying to understand that that user Journey all the way from you know acquiring the user through you know life cycle management to you know when they inevitably at some point uh decide to leave um understanding that Journey has to happen through data and this there's really no other way to to do that otherwise it's just an opinion right to go back to the very beginning absolutely so anyway no sorry go ahead yeah I was just saying that's you know I'd say with with a lot of projects that we've worked with that's that's sort of that's been the starting point right and that's what we've heard a lot of is it's like oh you know suddenly you know you kind of flip on the lights and you can see what's going on in the room and you can start making some of those decisions and you know and even like you know the stuff that you that you're getting set about on the digital side and the gamification side you know which I think is spot on

is like as platforms you know like ours you know become available and make some of these things easier you know it'll be neat to see that sort of next wave of you know Innovative and creative ideas happen because suddenly all that stuff becomes unlocked versus you know being stuck in a situation where you're like well I wish I could measure it but I'm going to do the best with what I have now right now what that is is quite a lot more so a lot more should come yeah I mean so much of of what has happened in web 3 so I mean and it's a cliche to say we're so early we are so early a lot of it so far has just been you know like oh look that seems to be working I'm going to copy that right and that's fine there's nothing wrong with doing that but that's not really very data driven or data informed approach it's just like oh look that looks like it's successful I'm going to do the same thing and then there's really not been any way of measuring what success or failure looks like or whether that even was successful in the first place right so so uh I think that's the next wave that's that's going to be that's going to unlock the next you know set of innovation in web 3 uh I I mean I'm a big believer that web3 is here to stay and this is absolutely a

movement um it's just going through a bit of a blip like just like many movements do um and I think that data and analytics is the thing that's going to unlock the ability for developers you know game developers and and others too just developers in general to unlock those user insights and really get that next wave of uh adoption and Innovation happening so all right well with that I think we we have reached the the end here I just want to say a huge thank you Nathan for for being on the Pod again very appreciative of what you're building what you're doing uh very valuable stuff and and you know more valuable than people really give data credit for data is is incredibly valuable um we also want to say big uh thank you to our listeners we will be back next week with more interviews more insights more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of web 3. so until next time friends stay cryptic curious and feel free to send requests for guests questions or any feedback to me my email

is Nico navic dot Co and you can always find me on Twitter at Lego defend DMS are always open Nathan thank you please again [Music]