We’re no rookies when it comes to bounty marketing campaigns. Everyone in our team at Bethereum is familiar with how token sales are preceded by extensive marketing campaigns that are financed through the distribution of so-called bounty tokens. Most of us have even participated in several bounty campaigns, not just to receive free tokens, but also to learn more about the business and to examine current trends.
What we saw did not impress us much.
Firstly, it is worth mentioning that most bounty campaigns are surprisingly low-tech. The solution for many multi-million blockchain projects comes in the form of a shared google document or online spreadsheet, either manually filled out or using simple scripts to record user activity.
Second, the low-tech nature of bounty campaigns creates a misguided incentive for users to engage in unsuitable marketing efforts. Over and over, we’ve seen bounty campaigns that see frenetic activity just days before the token sale. In such cases, the majority of bounties are unfairly distributed towards individuals who use any means necessary in the span of a few days just before the token sale, while the consistency and loyalty of the rest goes unrewarded.
Lastly, bounty campaigns are often biased in favor of programmers, developers and other IT professionals who know how to game the system. More casual users are dissuaded from bounty campaigns due to their complicated or unintuitive nature. While its nice to get so much attention from people within our field of work, it is even better to captivate a broad audience including more casual individuals who may be our future end-users.
With these thoughts in mind, we created a bold vision for a bounty marketing campaign that would break the conventional mould, programming a competitive leaderboard that would automatically register useful social media activity, rewarding points and ranking users accordingly. The final distribution of bounties will be based upon each user’s rank on the leaderboard on the eve of our token sale.
This solves the issue of inconsistency, as users are required to participate each day, with a daily cap limiting the amount of points they can gain and thus reducing the incentive to post unnecessary spam.
By programming our own bounty distribution software, we have created a very simple and easy-to-use bounty program that everyone can participate in equally. You don’t have to be a crypto-geek to gain Bether tokens in our campaign — all we ask for is consistency and moderation.
We took a leap of faith and live-tested the campaign. How did it go? Well, the numbers speak for themselves. Over the first two days of our bounty campaign’s launch, we recorded:
Actually, we’ve had too much success and have had to limit the total amount of participants, limiting registrations after we reached 45,000 in just a week after launching the campaign.
We hit practically every limit on Telegram, Facebook and Twitter. In addition to all this traffic, we were happy to see that all participants enjoyed the intuitive rules and interface:
Twitter comment
As a way of expressing gratitude to our bounty hunters, we added another 4.5 million tokens to be rewarded for our top 6,000 participants. To make it more interesting, one lucky hunter ranked in the top 6,000 will win the grand prize of 500,000 Bether tokens!
Now here’s the kicker: we achieved this with no marketing efforts on our part. Outside of delegating 14.5 million Bether tokens, we invested zero into advertising our upcoming bounty campaign. And still, people flocked to us in droves, which is reflective of the fact that bounty campaigns can be done much more effectively, with mutual benefits to us and our bounty hunters.
There’s still much to be learned from the process of making good bounty campaigns, and we hope that by leading through an example of custom-made bounty software, we’re going to inspire other projects to ditch the spreadsheet and put some work in.
Presale: presale.bethereum.com