DRiP is a brand that offers free collectibles and art every week to anyone* in the world who signs up.
*You need an invite code, there’s about 20 of those at the end of this essay.
Background
DRiP started as an NFT list to bootstrap a loyalty program and on-chain distribution channel for Solana Spaces.
But it took a life of its own, well beyond what the team had expected. It became evident to them that DRiP was the right model for onboarding new users to Solana.
They’ve achieved explosive growth.
Looking beyond Free NFTs
In a previous essay, Stop Building for Crypto Twitter, we wrote about principles for building a great crypto consumer app. We think DRiP embodies all of that & more.
Everyone loves free NFTs, especially when they celebrate & empower crypto-native artists like Degen Poet. But there’s a lot of product innovation under the hood at DRiP that we think doesn’t get as much of a spotlight.
So, in the rest of this essay, we will highlight our key product lessons from DRiP that we hope will help other founders, projects and contributors in the ecosystem.
Keep it Simple
When building for large scale adoption, the most powerful and difficult thing to do is keeping the product and messaging simple.
Here’s 4 ways the team at DRiP does it -
1. Clear value proposition.
“Sign up to get free collectibles every week”
There are so many other features DRiP has like specific artists, a daily game, season rewards - but they don’t talk about any of them upfront. In a world of endless feeds & noise, a simple message spreads and compounds way faster.
2. Gasless.
This is true to their mission of onboarding new users to crypto. You currently need a Solana wallet to sign up for DRiP but you don’t need any SOL to pay for gas. This might not seem like a big deal financially but it massively reduces friction for anyone wanting to sign their friends up.
3. Cohesive messaging
Every single feature is communicated and explained on their twitter account with videos, pictures & GIFs.
For e.g. in the early days sending out a drop would take 12 hours. To manage expectations, they built a utility that communicates eligibility for the drop to each account. And then, distributed it aggressively via their Twitter.
4. Legendary Lock-in
This is a great example of an MVP game designed to increase product stickiness.
- You can only play once a day
- All you need to do is click a button
- You stand a chance to win a rare collectible in the next showcase drop
It offers clear value to customers with minimum feature bloat and complexity.
Make the wallet work for your app, not the other way around
We’ve been saying for a while that wallets are features, not apps. This means that consumer apps will weave wallet features (like holding and sending assets) into their product flow.
So the future holds more of Dialect style “buy on ME” & less Phantom dApp browser experience. The implementation on drip.haus is a great example of wallets as a feature.
They have prioritised,
- A gallery: You can see all the DRiP collectibles you hold, presented like art and not a speculative asset.
- Downloads: An option to download your favourite art and use it as a PFP or wallpaper.
- Channels & Rarity: Option to browse by artists, channel and view how special your DRiP is right within the gallery.
And they’ve eliminated,
- Spam: You don’t see any other tokens or jpegs apart from DRiP collectibles.
- Price: A product centred on collectibles and art, they don’t display the price of their art.
- Swaps: There’s no option to send your art to another address from the vault.
The logical next step is that they launch a DRiP wallet that is one-click to sign up, abstracts out the seed phrase, has social recovery, etc. It makes sense to trade-off in favour of user experience over security because the sole purpose of this wallet is to hold your free DRiP collectibles & onboard new users. Vibhu may or may not have confirmed our thesis in the live call where we premiered this content.
Growth tactics
Here are 3 of their many growth tactics. Worth observing that each is targeted towards a specific objective,
- Invite Codes to add new users.One invite code per user, refreshed weekly. Invite codes is a pretty standard referral tool but a small tweak communicating that codes expire each week creates a sense of scarcity.
- Season rewards for power users (0.6% of all sign ups). Users who managed to collect at-least one edition from each drop were rewarded with upgrades to their collectibles. This engages & rewards power users (1450 out of 250k), only 0.6% but those who do it become super fans and derive immense joy from it.
- Legendary Lock-in to create more power users. Once a day, push a button to secure a rare or legendary collectible in the next drop. Designed to create a daily ritual around checking in to the DRiP vault with the simple yet effective carrot. They reported that around 10k users play the game daily. That’s already a 6x increase to power users.
On-chain Reachability
At the core of the product is a robust identity and verification system which can be used to send any art, collectibles, marketing or messaging on-chain.
DRiP is probably the only product out there which has a list of wallets with each one having
- a verified email address
- social graph via referrals
- an engagement score via legendary lock-in
- spam & bot detection for addresses that burn or instantly sell
- taste & affinity towards art & artists based on hold, sell, download, etc
Over time this will allow them to create better products for mass-marketing, artists launchpads, NFT marketplaces, etc. It is already more cost-effective to send large scale messaging via cNFTs over email, this just plugs in the required filters and targeting so businesses can estimate an RoI just like they do with digital marketing.
Future Outlook
In the short term, DRiP will continue to launch new channels for new artists along with new types of collectibles, engagement hooks, etc.
But here are 3 longer term trends we’re bullish on,
- A consumer app Why does DRiP need an app? Well, for starters - their customers are already asking for one. As they layer on more use cases, they’ll push the limit of what a browser can do and the most logical option will be an app with an embedded wallet. This will be a richer medium to showcase their many artists, consume music & video NFTs, unlock messaging for brands etc.
- AdvertisingIrrespective of the medium, we’ll see channels for brands to airdrop coupons, discounts and exclusive experiences to the DRiP audience. Might start with crypto-native brands and eventually extend more broadly.
- EcosystemThey’ve aggregated enough user-attention to incentivise others to build products on top of DRiP. For e.g. Kirly.sol built a tracker that allows anyone to see the net worth of their collection, whether they’re eligible for rewards, etc. We expect to see a lot more of these products as DRiP grows.
Invite Codes
Thanks for making it this far (or scrolling ahead), here is a list of codes as promised.
Disclaimer: These are exclusively shared here but single use. They may or may not work depending on when you’re reading this. I’ll come back and update this section once all of them are used.
You’re welcome to use these to onboard other friends, but please don’t use multiple codes to get DRiPs on your 5 different wallets. Finally, if none of the codes in the list work, reply here or DM a DRiP ambassador for more codes.
Disclaimer: This is a community blog and is not formally affiliated with any of the projects we mentioned. That said, we love projects that push the envelope on product experiences and crypto adoption.
Everything mentioned here is for information & educational purposes only, none of this is financial advice to trade & speculate on any tokens or NFTs.
All Comments