Dracula Protocol's Growth Hacking Tricks: A Crypto-Marketing Story

In this article I would like to break down how we do promotion in Dracula, without going into technical details in the text, during our development we have made many updates, launched Snapshot DAO voting and constantly improving our product.

But over time, we began to realize that the entire decentralized finance industry was becoming detached from the Crypto industry. Advertising, PPC, CPA and other classic techniques would be a bad sign. We are aware of this fact and consciously refuse classical marketing methods in favor of Growth Hacking techniques. We will talk about them in today's article.

You can read about the history of our changes and the long road we've traveled here.

ComDev is an integral part of any startup. The vector of work is defined based on the user problem your product is going to solve: how the person now solves that problem, what he likes and dislikes about existing solutions, what ideas he himself has for improvement, etc. But if you try to define the problem your startup is solving, you will come up with too general an answer.

In the DeFi industry, the user, in most cases, doesn't have a sharp and perceived problem that the product solves. However, that doesn't stop developers from reaching billions TVL. 

We conducted a series of surveys of our participants, for this almost 3 months we had to personally talk to almost everyone and find out what ideas and comments exist in general. This also helped to understand the mood of the market. Most were very frustrated that we had a very small community and almost no communication in the chat room.

As part of our work, we decided to attract more people through Growth Hacking. 

Music. Everyone loves music. 

Having studied the main sources of attracting new users (imageboards, social networks, forums and specialized sites) we came to the conclusion that the maximum conversion rate can be achieved with mentions placed in rare places, so we came up with the idea of releasing our own track on Spotify and Deezer.

We found a musician who agreed to do a track for us and record it. We were very happy to support him, and he in turn was grateful for our help. 

• https://open.spotify.com/album/33EzKhlDAXVmHgSMzZkXNu

• https://www.deezer.com/en/album/204935232

That's how we became the first project at DeFi with our track in Spotify and people started talking about us. In itself this action brought only 4 thousand listens, but the very fact of the statement as a manifesto impressed a lot of people. 

We realized we were on the right way and continued to make our community happy.

Sticker-pack. Why does it matter?

Communicating without stickers in messengers and social networks now seems unthinkable, and even in business correspondence stickers have become accepted as the norm. At the same time, the use of stickers has its own trends and etiquette: while some pictures are becoming fashionable, others are losing relevance.

In Telegram, you can create your own sticker pack by yourself with the help of a simple bot

We asked the community to make a sticker pack by themselves and they turned out very funny, each of the stickers reflects some kind of pain of the project.

Sticker-Sets:

https://t.me/addstickers/draculasucks

https://t.me/addstickers/dracula_memes

We also made our own official sticker pack, the number of installations of which has already exceeded 500.

It would be important to say that in our industry, the Pepe frog is a kind of symbol, since most projects started with 4chan and Reddit. We would like to say that we think Pepe is just a funny frog from the suffering farmer meme. 

We do not tolerate any insults, racism, harassment or threats of violence against members, even as a joke. Below I detail our policy on chat moderation. We treat people of all religions and from all possible countries equally.

Meme contest:

In preparation for Dracula Protocol V2, we wanted to bring the community together with a good old fashioned meme contest. With a total of 2,250 $DRC up for grabs. We were very surprised when we saw about 100 applicants. With great difficulty, we selected the best and decided to reward everyone equally.  

Check out #DRACISBACK Twitter hashtag.

Best memes:

This raised the visibility of our profile on instagram, as well as increasing the involvement of the community in the process - now chat members have an interest in visiting it all the time.

Chat Moderation:

The work of a moderator is honorable and demonstrates respect and trust. Appointment of a user as a moderator indicates the presence of such merits as: politeness, tolerance, common sense, psychological and emotional stability, a sense of humor, initiative, integrity and self-criticism.

Our moderator has all administrative rights and full access to the administrative panel of chat and forum. The moderator position is not a privilege, as many think, but a hard job and great responsibility. To ensure a favorable atmosphere and the successful development of the project moderation is based on the following key principles:

• All users are equal before the Rules, regardless of reputation, rank, position, or length of registration. Moderator does not have the right to create their own caste of "favorites", to treat them more gently and remove the ban before the deadline.

• The essence of the ban is not to punish a particular user who has violated the rules, but to protect other chat participants from undesirable situations. Blocking / removal of the offender - an extreme, forced measure of influence on him.

• The moderator is authorized to solve any questions, including disputable ones, which arise in the chat and make the necessary decision on them independently. 

• It is principally important for us that the moderator was literate, as he is the face of the chat and, thanks to him, users have a general idea about our resource.

• One of the most important principles of moderation is respect for all participants of the chat, including those who have been banned. Sometimes it happens that a user proves his point of view, which does not correspond to the truth/rules, or tries to threaten the moderator. In this case, we decide to block the person in the chat room. And immediately write him in private messages to understand how to solve the problem and deal with the situation. Most often the ban is removed. At the moment there are 5 blocked users in the chat room for all time.

Finally, I would like to conclude with a demonstration of our chat statistics. This information is published for the first time:

Merch:

Creating merchandise is one of the most effective ways to expand your brand's impact, increase your visibility, attract new customers, and win their loyalty. To make it work for our company, we've carefully planned a line of branded products and ways to distribute them. 

You can get in line to buy a Hoodie in Discord chat by texting the administrator in the #chill room

Hidden Message: 

In order to incentivize the development of more victim adapters, we have created generic test-cases for developers to use when creating new contracts. Along with a 1–3 ETH bounty for each new victim adapter, we hope this will help incentivize community developers to work with us going forward. We also have a community developer working on Mirror Protocol as a victim, which will also be live with our other victim contracts at V2 launch. Be sure to reach out if you are interested in helping test our contracts on main-net!

Although vampires prefer the dark, we believe our future is bright!

Keep up with us on our socials for further updates, soon to come!