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Anne Ouellet Of Galxe — The Platform That Helps You Build And Grow Your Web3 Community The Authentic Way
What does it take to create a truly authentic community in Web3? The most important ingredient is the quality of your users, and our guest today shares her company’s innovative take on how to attract and retain these community members. Galxe is doing some really important stuff in connecting people and rewarding participation in a creative and authentic way. Stay tuned for today’s episode where Galxe CMO Ann Ouellet shares how the Web3 community accelerator is taking its reward-based loyalty programs to the outer edge and beyond. Plus, learn how a Ninja Alert is making the easy button for keeping up on what’s most important in Web3 trading. All of these and more in this exciting episode of the Edge of NFT!
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Anne Ouellet Of Galxe — The Platform That Helps You Build And Grow Your Web3 Community The Authentic Way
This is Anne Ouellet from Galxe, where we are all about fostering authentic Web3 communities. I’m thrilled to be here on the Edge of NFT, the truly original show that offers you an authentic deep dive into all things Web3.
Stay tuned for this episode to learn how the Web3 community accelerator Galxe is taking its reward-based loyalty programs to the outer edge and beyond.
Plus, why our guest is excited to pack up and go on a planning-free surprise vacation ASAP.
Finally, we learn how a Ninjalert is making the easy button for keeping up on what is most important in Web3 trading. Before we move on, don’t forget that our Outer Edge LA event returned to Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023. You can still catch up on all the discussions, presentations, and more by heading over to Watch.OuterEdge.live, and registering your email address. You will have access to over 60 captivating conversations and performances. Binge watchers are welcome. Netflix, watch out. We will see you inside.
This sponsored episode features Anne Ouellet from Galxe, a pioneering platform for crafting Web3 communities. She is a seasoned marketing strategist, an NFT enthusiast, and the CMO of Galxe. She champions the potential of NFTs to transform how brands engage with their audiences. Prior to her role at Galxe, she was a Cultural Strategist at The French Shop and an Experiential Specialist and Strategist at VIBRANT Marketing in Canada, where she steered cross-cultural marketing strategies and completed a specialized graduate diploma in Communication and Marketing from HEC, Montreal. Galxe is at the forefront of building Web3 communities boasting over 30 million users. It has been instrumental in the growth of Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, and more than 1,800 partners through reward-based loyalty programs. Anne, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
It is a pleasure.
It is great to have you, Anne, and excited about the opportunity to collaborate together as part of a new partnership here that was forged IRL in Austin, Texas.
It is the other way around. We had the chance to meet in real life and connect. We were pretty quick. We got things going. I’m happy that I’m here. We can announce some fun things and get this partnership on the road.
Galxe is doing some important stuff in terms of the overall goal of connecting people and rewarding participation in a creative and authentic way. You guys have been busy nurturing this vibrant Web3 community authentically. I love to go back to where it started before you joined the team. How did Galxe come about? Talk a little bit also about how you got into the mix.
Galxe started in May of 2021. It started as a credential data network. The two founders, Charles and Harry, started this Web3 startup all about data and digital identity. What we mean by that is we were calling everything digital credentials. Everything that you do on chain is there. We wanted to be able to give this data back to the users. They could use this for monetization or whatever they would like to use in the future. If we are looking at traditional Web2, let’s say Facebook and Google, brands pay and you are the product at the end of the day because they push ads. In Web3, we can ship that.
We had all these users’ credentials in one place. What we mean by credentials is, “I have swapped or traded on AWE. I have never been liquidated and scammed, or I have gotten scammed, and I’m a degen.” We were collecting this in a nice formatted way where you could connect your wallet and see all that you have done.
The first actual use case for this is task-based or campaign-based things, where we onboarded a few partners to use the Galxe platform. It started to bridge, swap, trade on any decks, and get a reward or get this credential. That is how it grew into the monster that it is now, which is the Galxe platform, which has over 2,600 partners and 10 million unique users to date. That is how where it started.
You have some unique capabilities here where users can earn tokens by putting their efforts into their favorite Web3 company. I didn’t get to dive too deep into that. How does that happen?
Galxe is the infrastructure and the tool. It is a plug-and-play, easy-to-use dashboard. I will walk you through it as a partner and user because I’m visual. I know I can’t show everything, but this might make more sense. As a partner, let’s say you had a Dex, and you said, “I want to engage my community. I want to make sure they are doing certain actions,” you would open a space on Galxe. Think of it as your Facebook page or your Facebook group where all of your different campaigns are held there. You could have multiple campaigns. You could have one on a weekly basis or monthly, whatever you like to do. You get to reward users for doing specific tasks.
Web3 Community: Galxe is very much the infrastructure and the tool. It’s a plug and play, easy to use dashboard.
We can do anything that is on-chain through API subgraphs. Anything like swap, trade, buy an NFT, own an NFT, play it on a Web3 game, or anything on-chain, we can do. We have a lot of off-chain stuff. What we mean by off-chain could be like or follow a Twitter post or follow someone’s Twitter, be on Discord, attend a Twitter space, attend a Discord or AMA, watch a YouTube video, visit a webpage, and all these different things that are off-chain that we can also do. They create and customize their campaigns for whatever their goal is. They can reward their user with all kinds of different things we have. We have OAT, which is our On-chain Achievement Token, and we have NFTs if the partner wants to generate their own smart contract and create an NFT.
We have launched nine EVM chains that offer tokens through Galxe. A project could say, “I have a budget of $1,000 for marketing.” It is a bear market. Maybe your budget is smaller. You will decide to put in that $1,000 on Galxe and raffle it up to winners. You can decide, “One winner gets a $1,000 or maybe 10 to 20 raffle out first come, first serve or get that token.” That is what we mean by the token rewards. It is a fun one, and users get into it.
In the process of doing all this pioneering work, you have encountered firsthand the challenges and opportunities around digital credentialing. To broaden the conversation a little bit, it would be great to understand what we are dealing with there. Where are we in the process of handling that aspect of Web3 that is both an opportunity and a challenge?
I will try to give a concrete example or an issue that we are working on at Galxe, where our huge thing is we want to reward users and engage communities. You are using this platform, but Web3 and Twitter are something that is largely bought it. It is the nature of giveaways and potential airdrops. How do we make sure that we are rewarding the right users, the people like you and me who are there and doing those daily tasks and working hard to get those NFTs or projects to their OAT and making sure that we are looking at the right people?
Our thing is, “How can we make sure that we are true to Web3, being on-chain and anonymous, but also rewarding real users?” One thing that we are doing at Galxe is adding a lot of cyber prevention credentials. We are making sure that when a user is doing this task, getting engaged, and getting the reward, he, she, or they is a real user.
We are trying to add credentials such as having minimum transactions on the Ethereum network. We have a few different Galxe Passport. There are another few companies where it is a KYC. We don’t know who the user is, but we know it is a user. That is going to give more flexibility to the partners to play with that digital identity without knowing who that person is. Hopefully, we will solve this issue.
It is an important one. We are all making progress in this area. We have talked about this analogy before. You go to a bar and you have to show the doorman your ID. You are revealing a lot more information than he or she needs to know in order to let you in the bar and acknowledge that you are 21.
How do we get to a world of the right information at the right time, and that information not being permanent? He doesn’t need to know that information forever. He needs to know at one time to get you in the door. It sounds like you are tapping that in a creative way. We had Brenden from PREMINT on with their new program Vulcan. You only have to connect your wallet at once. You can connect the dots around digital identity. It sounds like you guys are also pioneering in this way.
It is a fine line where you want to stay true to the nature of anonymous and degens while respecting the hardcore users that are there and working for these rewards. I like that idea from PREMINT, connecting once and being able to interact. I was playing on Lens. They have a great thing where, on Lens, where you connect once, and you give access. You say yes to like and interact with the content there without having to sign every time. I know that is not necessarily on digital identity, but those little things are going to help the whole process be a little bit more interesting and more user-friendly. It is a little bit off-topic, but it all merges together.
Check out Vulcan. That is the program they are rolling out.
I woke up this morning and opened up my Starbucks App. I was offered 200 bonus stars for trying the Oleato beverage, which got me to think about loyalty and rewards points. I did not order it. I have no idea what that thing is, but you guys are doing some interesting things.
I got it once. It is an olive oil-infused latte. It is not bad.
It is such a fascinating topic. It permeates what we do these days, but as we are talking about Web3, is different loyalty and rewards still appealing to them? It is going to be approached differently in Web3. You guys are doing some interesting stuff there. Can you tell us a little bit about your thoughts and actions?
In 2022, we were very much in the NFT space because NFT was the cool buzzword of the summer. All of our partners are like, “We are going to launch an NFT collection. We are going to have an NFT badge. That is what people wanted.” We, at Galxe are trying to always innovate and stay on top of the market. We launched our loyalty points. This one is cool because you can have five tasks, swap trade, own an NFT, like a tweet and claim a badge, but you can attribute different points to these five actions.
Galaxy is always trying to innovate and stay on top of the market. Click To Tweet
That is interesting because you can do more points for bigger actions. If someone is trading, swapping, and using my product, that is a much more engaging action. I’m going to put a lot more points to that. On Galxe, a fun thing you can do is you can do and/or for the claiming of NFTs. You could do this list and/or this list of tasks.
What is fun is you could say, “I want everyone to be able to claim some OATs.” They can do some easy social tasks. Those will collect five points. If they are using my product coming every day, they will get a lot more points. We launched this other thing, which is the recurring campaign. You can have a daily, monthly, or weekly recurring campaign. That could be like, “Come to my website. Come to my DAP. Do an action there.” It could be a login or sending a GM on my social platform. That is a fun thing for the loyalty points.
Because we are B2B to C, we never forget about our partners. We also launched the Space Tier Program, which is a loyalty program for the partners. It means that the more that they use the platform and the more that they utilize and optimize with Galxe, the more they unlock and the more they get access to things.
It is a win-win because our number one advice is if you are coming to do a one-off campaign, you are not going to keep anyone on. It is like if Starbucks sends you that point once, but if every time you go to Starbucks and you get points, you are going to get that olive oil-infused matcha latte, whatever that was. Our advice here is to come and use it. You are going to see that your community is going to be much more engaged and active.
It goes to a broader conversation. You are going to have to call yourselves universe, not Galxe, but you have built this vibrant community in Web3. This is what everyone is seeking and going after. It is not easy to not only build it but to maintain it. A lot of projects struggle when they get to maintenance mode because there is this exciting, shiny object type of syndrome in our space. What is the secret, Anne, to building a real community in Web3?
My personal opinion is quality users. I personally would rather have a smaller community that is much more engaged and active than having a large community of inactive members. Fleshing out those people who are there for that potential airdrop is something we see. When projects come in and don’t have a token, they have a huge spike in participation because there is a lot of speculation there.
When you are talking about a smaller, more vibrant community, it begs the question, why yours? There are thousands of Web3 communities. What is going to make someone stick to your community versus another community that might be offering them all this upfront bribery?
I’m part of a few communities. They link to my values and what I like. They open discussions. That is the wonder of Web3. There are many communities, and you can’t be part of everything. You got to look at what makes sense for you. As a founder or community manager, I would focus on finding those people who share the same values as your project.
Web3 Community: There are so many communities and you can’t be part of everything. You need to look at what makes sense for you.
Something we are doing at Galxe is participating in Discord or Twitter spaces which you can put a link to have someone participate for more than 15 to 30 minutes. We also have quiz credentials. Doing things like that in terms of loyalty is interesting, but also making sure that we do this thing where we call them the Galxe Missions.
People who are part of our community have different weekly missions that they do. That is led by the community space, where they feel highly engaged. Sometimes they also write content. They feel like they are part of the growth and success of Galxe. I’m talking from personal experience and what I’m seeing. I don’t think there is one magic recipe for it, but having a good community manager is key. They are hard to find. We at Galxe are happy with our team. They are on Discord nearly 24/7. We have a lot of events with our community.
That is helpful to appreciate the nuances there. It sounds like you have put together an internal team, which is an extension of the community with similar values. Are there 1 or 2 values that you would call out that you see universal alignment around at Galxe that creates that magnetic pull?
This is my first time working in the tech world. I’m going to talk about my experience. I am amazed at how many products and features we launch on a weekly basis. I wake up on a Monday morning. There are already three new features that are huge. Our community likes that. They are eager to innovate and push. They give a lot of feedback. They are part of growth and that innovation. When we do launch a new product, we always better test it in our community. We will have a mini-campaign for them.
It is this mix of openness and innovation at a rapid pace that catalyzes things.
We got to test it out. One of our rewards that we didn’t touch on is a Discord role reward. You can reward users for doing specific tasks and automatically reward them with a Discord rule or vice versa. We have 4 or 5 people on the community team. We are in tune in, listening to them all the time. We have a focus group of 500,000 people who give you direct feedback.
We admire folks focused on community and listening as you guys are. We have thought about partnering with you guys, and that is happening. Can you tell us your thoughts on us collaborating and give the readers a little bit of a teaser of how we think we are going to bring some fun stuff based on all of that community knowledge about what works and what doesn’t?
I met your colleague at NFT NYC. Our first dates are much more before consensus. They were talking about the contests that you hold, which I thought were great, but no shade. I thought you should do them on chain. I don’t want to name-drop who or what platform you were using, but it wasn’t on-chain. You guys are pioneers and innovators in the Web3 space. I thought there was a direct connection here.
That is how the conversation got started. I know that we will be holding a few of your contests on the Galxe platform. That is a fun one. We were also talking about the other things you do at Edge of NFT and how Galxe was looking forward to going into the developer community, which I know you guys do. We are hoping for some future sponsorships on our end for your dev-focused events. Josh, if you have some stuff there to say.
We are still figuring it out. Part of the innovation agility of Web3 is you don’t have to have all the answers on day one, but you could have a playbook. In the case of Azuki, they had a Mindmap. That is our mindmap for this relationship. We piloted a hackathon in Outer Edge LA. We had over 100 participants and 21 teams. What was interesting about it was one, a high percentage of women participating, but two, half of it was creators, and half of it was developers. That is a fun combination if we can keep that going, which is our hope.
A tool like Galxe fits in as an almost essential infrastructure because, at the end of the day, it can get noisy out there in the world of marketing. Even if you get on podcasts, you build a community through Twitter spaces, and you invite people to your Discord, fundamentally, rewards are a proven mechanism to make things stickier. You guys do that. Hopefully, some of these products can take advantage of your unique technology.
We are excited. The developments remain to grow, change and build upon one another. It will be fun.
Besides our partnership, what is on your roadmap? Any collaborations or features that we should look out for or any recent collaborations that you should also mention?
There are a lot of fun things that are coming. A lot of them are on NDA. I’m not going to mention them yet, but stay tuned. However, we had a lot of fun things in the past few months. We were the platform behind the Linea Voyage. The consensus is EVM Testnet that they are building. We had a six-week campaign with them where each week had a different theme, bridge, staking, and DeFi actions. They had all these different partners join them. Per week, we had about 1.5 million participations. I’m not going to state that those were all unique participation. There might be some duplicate wallets there, but overall that is about 12 million or 11.5 million participations in that campaign.
I don’t think so.
What is their Twitter or website?
BOTTO.
It is emitting life in some capacity.
I’m wrapping the shirt here.
Thank you, guys, so much. Cheers.
I’m ready.
Multiple lemonades at a lemonade stand.
Are we talking about strawberry lemonade?
Tickets for Disneyland.
What is the most recent thing you sold?
Only one.
You can pick multiple.
I walked that dog that was barking earlier.
What kind of dog?
It is not my dog. It is my sister’s dog.
What are you going to do next step for the show?
Important Links
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Hennessy’s Head of Web3 - Past Episode
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Twitter - Ninjalerts
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@TO - Twitter
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Run With It Episode with Lilian - Run With It Past Episode
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@AnneWell_ETH - Twitter
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Spotify - Edge Of NFT
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iTunes - Edge Of NFT
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EdgeOfNFT - Twitter