ON-Sight: How Early-Stage Web3 Projects Get Their First Users When the Market Doesn’t Care
TaskOn3 min read·Just now--
You’ve found your first users. Now it’s time to scale without wasting everything you’ve built.
In Part 1, we covered why your first 100 users are a product-market fit problem, not a distribution problem, and how to find them by going deep into specific communities rather than broadcasting wide.
ON-Sight: How Early-Stage Web3 Projects Get Their First Wave of Users When the Market Doesn’t Care
Bear markets are when the real work gets done. Here’s where to start.
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Part 2 picks up from there: once you have a foundation, how do you grow it efficiently? Three things matter most, and most projects get at least one of them wrong.
3. Use ecosystem partnerships to borrow distribution
One of the most underused growth levers for early-stage projects is co-distribution with complementary protocols. If your project sits within an ecosystem, there are other projects in that ecosystem whose users overlap with yours. A trading tool and a DEX aggregator share users. A lending protocol and a portfolio tracker share users. An NFT marketplace and a wallet share users.
Ecosystem partnerships work because they let you reach an audience that’s already self-selected as relevant, without the cost of cold acquisition. The partner protocol gets to offer their users something additional. You get warm introductions to people who are already active in your space.
The key is making these partnerships genuinely reciprocal and making it easy for partner communities to engage with your product without leaving their existing context. If users have to switch platforms, create new accounts, or go through a complex onboarding flow to participate, most won’t. The integration friction has to be near zero.
Ecosystem collaboration becomes a user acquisition engine when it runs inside your product, not alongside it.
4. Design your early campaigns around behavior, not completion
Most quest campaigns are designed to maximize one thing: the number of people who complete the quest. This produces large participation numbers and very little actual engagement, because the tasks are designed to be easy, not meaningful.
A different approach: design tasks that require users to actually use your product in the way it was built to be used. If you’re a DEX, the task should involve making a real trade, not just connecting a wallet. If you’re a lending protocol, the task should involve an actual deposit, not just visiting the homepage.
Yes, this produces smaller participation numbers. It also produces users who know how your product works, have made at least one real transaction, and have a higher baseline probability of returning. In a bear market, filtering for behavioral intent early is the more efficient use of your acquisition budget.
Some things that help with this:
- Use multi-step tasks that require sustained engagement over several days, not just one action
- Tie rewards to product usage milestones, not just task completion
- Build a points system that accumulates over time, giving users a reason to return after the initial campaign
- Use on-chain verification for tasks where possible, so completion requires real product interaction
5. Build the retention mechanism before you run the acquisition campaign
This is the mistake most projects make in the wrong order. They run a campaign, acquire users, and then try to figure out how to retain them. By the time the retention mechanism is in place, the users are gone.
The retention question to answer before any campaign launches: why would a user come back tomorrow? Not because they’re waiting for a reward, but because the product has given them a reason to return. A progress bar they want to fill. A streak they don’t want to break. A qualification threshold they’re close to hitting. A community they’ve become part of.
These mechanics need to be live and tested before the first acquisition dollar is spent. Otherwise you’re filling a bucket with a hole in it.
Build the retention mechanism before you run the acquisition campaign. Otherwise you’re filling a bucket with a hole in it.
Next: the two things most projects get completely wrong after a campaign closes, and why the projects that survive bear markets are the ones that own something the others don’t. Part 3 wraps up the series.
TaskOn helps Web3 projects grow from cold start to loyal community.
