From Idea to Top-5 Project: How to Launch on the Near Ecosystem

Launching a new crypto project is a fascinating yet incredibly demanding time for founders - you need not only to come up with an innovative idea but to generate attention from investors, supporters, and community members to assure your idea’s survival and success. Every emerging project needs a comprehensive and strategic growth marketing approach in times like these.

Luckily, at 42DM we have accumulated our 5-year-long expertise in launching and scaling crypto projects into one framework, which we have just used to help our partner PembRock Finance to become a top-5 project on the NEAR ecosystem. Let’s look at how we did it and which insights you can adopt from our road to success with PembRock.

The setup and challenges of launching a blockchain product on NEAR

Our partner PembRock is the first leveraged yield farming application built on NEAR Protocol. It allows users to borrow funds and farm with up to 3x leverage, lend to other participants for returns, and stake tokens to get protocol profit. They came to us with this incredible idea and a goal to become a top-5 project on NEAR in just 5 months.

The challenge was in the fact that our partner had just an idea, and needed our support to bring this idea to life, which included generating enough community and investor interest to raise funds for the project’s developments before we can think about further scaling.

To achieve this ambitious goal we decided to develop and implement a marketing ecosystem that would give PembRock a quick start and help to distribute knowledge about the project's idea within the community, as well as acquire relevant customers and retain them both within and beyond the NEAR community after the product is successfully launched.

We divided our activities into 3 stages - prelaunch, launch, and next steps, where we currently are. Let’s examine all of them in detail.

Growth marketing approach for a quick launch and IDO

For our pre-launch activities, the goal was to generate as much interest as possible in the idea of future product development to prepare for a successful IDO.

Step 1: Generating initial awareness

The goal for the initial awareness stage was to build an initial community of early supporters through omnichannel and consistent brand and product-related communication on NEAR and as well to build lasting relations with NEAR ecosystem leaders.

PembRock’s mission is “We are here for good & for long.” Their initial brand identity was not designed to speak this, so we decided to update the brand strategy and align it with product mission, NEAR vision, and DeFi audience taste. With a highly appealing brand, we started to build consistent omnichannel communication and share the project’s goals and the community role by using:

• PR
• Partnerships
• AMAs
• SMM

As a result, in the first two months, we got 10 media article publications, a first thousand Twitter followers, and 35 posts on NEAR community social media channels. Such a boost in awareness allowed PembRock to attract people who are already interested in the idea and excited to see it brought to life.

Step 2: IDO (initial DEX offering)

The initial buzz around the product allowed us to focus on successfully closing 2 IDO campaigns. In times of total uncertainty for the DeFi market caused by Luna's collapse, we needed to convey to the NEAR community that we are the right project to believe in and contribute to.

In times of uncertainty, people rely on trustworthiness. It is all about the team, achievements, and transparent communication on what is happening right now. We’ve built communication streams in all the relevant channels to showcase who we are and why people should trust us even in challenging markets. We shared this message on:

• IDO launchpads: MetaYield, Skyward
• AMAs
• NEAR-related channels & groups
• Social media
• Listings & PR

In addition to successfully completing 2 IDO sales, we also received additional 600+ Twitter followers and 20 posts in NEAR community socials with “0” for promotion.

Launching product on NEAR ecosystem

During the product launch, we focused on building awareness about the product in the crypto market within and outside the NEAR community, attracting landers and farmers, and reaching a TVL of 2 mln in 3 months.

Step 3: The Launch

If you want to be a leader you need to think and act as you already are. We’ve decided to launch massively but to avoid overspends, we’ve divided the launch campaign into stages:

1. soft launch within the NEAR community - to test the product,
2. soft launch beyond the NEAR community - to try different channels for customers acquisition
3. Extensive push in and out - to drive users acquisition

As a result, within four weeks, we got 4000+ total traffic, 2000+ initial wallet connections, and 179% above the TVL goal.

To acquire customers beyond NEAR on the scale, grow LTV for farmers, and save farmers from massive burnout (liquidation) in unpredictable times, we also focused on creating hyper-relevant educational content for our community.

Step 4: School

PembRock’s mission is to be in DeFi for good and for long. To make this mission possible, we needed happy customers - both farmers and lenders. Farmers were suffering from massive liquidations on highly volatile markets. To help them be a better farmer, we decided to launch an educational platform - the school of PembRock.

The goal of the school of PembRock was to help ease the adoption of our technology and allow newcomers a more accessible intro to the market. We used a content-based approach focusing on education in the most complex topics in the DeFi market and promoted this content. With these efforts, we reached 77k Twitter users in the 1st weeks of our campaign.

Scaling project on NEAR ecosystem

Having successfully launched the project on NEAR protocol, we are not ready to stop. We plan to grow the number of new users and retain the current ones; grow and stabilize the community both inside and beyond NEAR and continue building community trust & loyalty through education for successful product usage.

Focus on user & community growth and adoption of your new solution is valuable for any new project, seeking to find its unique audience. If you are curious about our other successful crypto & blockchain case studies, check them out here.