Jerry Huang, founder of StepN, shared his experience and latest thoughts with 55 Web3 application ecosystem entrepreneurs, taking his own practical experience as an example. As a veteran who participated in the 3G mobile Internet for more than ten years, how did he understand the human nature and desires behind the players, and how did he view the economic cycle and corporate cycle? The review of StepN's gains and losses may bring important inspiration to the Chinese entrepreneurial route.

The following are some of the highlights:

1. Product selection and thinking, how to find the right positioning?

The main thing is to analyze and understand the demand side. The reasons behind why people play a game, why they are willing to pay for it, why they are willing to spread it to people around them, and why it can form a social discussion can actually be summed up in the word "desire".

When I made my first game, I tried to summarize what is the most important thing about a game? Technology, plot, or art? In the end, it comes down to what desires of the users we have satisfied. This is the source of happiness and the driving force for payment and sharing. So at first we listed all the desires of people and made a big desire tree. The desires of players of different ages, genders, and professions are different. After summarizing it, we will do product positioning and decide which group of people’s desires we should satisfy. Some of these desires cannot be charged, but the other party will have fun playing, and some desires can generate payment, so we believe that any game needs to understand the desires first before exploring the player’s behavior. Desire is the soul, the game system is the skeleton, and the art plot is the skin. Only in this way can a product be defined from the inside out. Desire itself has nothing to do with Web2 and Web3, but different technologies can amplify the corresponding desires, such asGold FarmingThere are also some in Web2, but only a small part. After Web3 is assetized,Gold Farmingmake moneyIt has become very important. Secondly, it is precisely because of assetization that users’ desire to show off becomes stronger.

For example, when 3G just started to become popular, I switched to developing mobile online games. Before that, they were all very simple stand-alone games. Combined with the desire tree, I thought about what the popularization of 3G technology could do at the desire level. First of all, the user base will become larger, and the player's gaming scenarios will be richer. So we wondered if we could tap into and amplify desires at the comparison and social levels. So we tried to fully incorporate this idea into the game design. Later, our game revenue accounted for 20.% of the national game market, and we ranked first in the appstore for more than half a year.

whenBlockchainWhen the technology began to become popular, I was thinking about what desires such asset chain technology could maximize.AISimilarly, it can magnify what kind of desires people have.

Therefore, our positioning of the product still returns to the demand layer. What kind of demand will make users feel happy and generate a willingness to pay? Can the pleasure of paying form a positive correlation with the amount?.

2. What should Web3 game creators pay attention to?

First, we need to make a Web3 native game.Rather than thinking about how to transform a Web2 game into a blockchain, the starting point may determine the final positioning and product form. This does not mean that Web2 games must not be transformed into blockchains, but if you start from this perspective, it may eventually becomeXiaobai NavigationIt is still a Web2 experience with Web3 elements added, which is hard to run in Web3. Just like when we think about how to make a video site that is better than YouTube, it is hard to do it from this perspective. I believe that Tiktok’s initial starting point was not to beat YouTube, but it eventually created strong competition with YouTube, so I think it still needs to be Web3 native.

For example, in the game we are going to release next, our idea is to put everything on the blockchain as long as it is technically feasible. What can it bring to users after it is on the blockchain? Back to the desire tree just now, in Web2, users spend money to buy an experience and respect, while in Web3, we have proposed a new impossible triangle of "fame, wealth, and power" in this game, because it combinesBlockchain, the roles that users can play will be richer, not only as resource creators, but also as resource managers, so they can gain fame and wealth, as well as power. As a platform, we only provide an internally circulated economic model, intervening as little as possible in the development of the game, and even players can decide the rules of this world and the direction of the game themselves.

Secondly, it is very important to manage your authenticityCommunityWhen I started my business, I often said that business should come first, rather than making the product perfect before launching it to market. My personal style is to launch the product to market when it is 65% complete, build up the market first, find people who pay for it, understand their needs, grow together with the players, and let the players participate in the construction of the game.

This was difficult in the past with Web2, because Web2 players thought they were the bosses and spent money to enjoy themselves, so how could they tolerate you giving them something imperfect? But with Web3, it is possible. Everyone should work together to create the entire economic ecosystem. stepN was launched in September 21, and in November, less than three months later, we launched it to the market. We made a running module, a GPS anti-cheating module, and a built-inwallet, built-in trading market, etc. It was really not easy to do so many things in 2 months, but it was definitely not perfect due to limited time. But I still boldly pushed it to the market. We received more than a thousand test applications from players around the world at that time. Many people complained that we fixed more than a hundred bugs on the first day. What they didn’t expect was that we would update the version twice a day, and each time we updated, a large number of feedback bugs were fixed by us. In the following days, the number of problem feedback dropped significantly, and this process lasted for a month. The changes in the product during the whole process were visible to the naked eye, so early players had a strong degree of participation and became very loyal users in the later period.

We also did a lot of operational activities in Discord at that time, and many projects are still referring to these activities until now. After winning the third place in the Solana Hackathon, Discord immediately attracted more than 10,000 users, but we found that 95% were all invalid users who came to the whitelist. I did something very bold at that time and cleared all the users who were suspected of being robots. If they didn't talk for a few days, they would be deleted. The ultimate goal of game development is to have a clean, pure and motivated early stage.Community, rather than just looking at the number of people. It happened to be the Chinese New Year when sending red envelopes on WeChat was very popular. We were also thinking about whether we could send red envelopes to users in Discord, but there were so many people trying to take advantage of the situation that we didn’t dare to do it easily, so we came up with a way to let everyone answer the questions in the white paper. We made a lot of questions for everyone to answer. If they answered correctly, I would give them a pair of Genesis shoes. According to the rules, we required them to invite 3 friends to participate in the questions, so we had a lot of real users. Because of this event, our Discord has grown very organically from a few hundred people who were cleared by me to 100,000 users. And this is when I was constantly deleting suspected robots, so almost all the users who stayed were real users. As the event became more and more popular, from only needing to answer one question correctly at the beginning, to answering 10 questions in a row to get rewards, users had to continue to read our white paper carefully. This event helped us gain tens of thousands of high-quality loyal users who read more white papers than me, which played a very important role in our subsequent explosive development and allowed us to quickly grow to five million users. All of this came from usCommunityThere are users who have read the white paper dozens of times. They will recognize our products from the bottom of their hearts and even take the initiative to help us spread them.

Finally, I want to talk about the globalization of the marketAt that time, we spent a lot of time considering which market to enter first. In the end, we just decided to go for both. We would focus on the one that was running well. In the end, the facts proved that our original conclusion was correct. Our largest market is Japan, and the second largest is France and other European countries. Now we have one to two thousand new users every day. So our initial globalization was to let the market screen itself, and then we would help the fast-growing markets develop faster.

3. How do founders face the ups and downs of economic cycles?

In Web3 games, I think market cycles are not that important because games and otherdefiThe applications are different.defiIt does depend on the economic cycle, because in a recession, there will be no users and funds. However, games can form their own system, with their own pricing, tokens, and ecosystem, and are not so dependent on external cycles..

In addition, I would like to say that there are indeed more users and funds in the bull market, but there are also many competitors. StepN should be at the end of the bull market. We had a large number of competitors at the beginning, but if you can form your own ecosystem in the bear market, there will be fewer competitors, and the market's attention will not be easily distracted from you.

4. When is it appropriate for a project to hire a PR team?

To be honest, we didn’t do it very well later. The first thing a Web3 game project should do is to make players feel that we are real and together with the players, so we did AMA every week in the early days. At that time, the product was not online, and there were only a dozen people doing it for the first time, but we insisted on doing it every week until more and more people came and everyone could feel our sincerity. In the end, we hired a PR team because we were too busy, but later we found that we should still do it ourselves. The most a PR team can do is crisis public relations, but daily brand and influence still need to be done by ourselves. Our communication with users is the best PR.

5. Should blockchain gaming startups focus first on the needs of new Web2 users or native Web3 users?

When we were doing user positioning internally, we all agreed that we needed to convert a large number of Web2 users, including a large number of functions provided by stepN, such aswallet, the trading platform is built-in to lower the threshold to allow more Web2 users to come in, so that players can experience the technology behind it without feeling. This is what we have done before and will continue to do in the future. Our future games will also achieve login, transfer, free gas, etc. in a decentralized way, the purpose is to convert more Web2 users into Web3. At least half of our entire stepN users have never been exposed to it before playing.Blockchain.

6. How to treatmake moneyAnd the users who come to play games?

首先要判断是纯来撸毛的，还是打金公会，如果是第一类的话我们一定要去除掉的，第二类背后可能是真人，每家有不同的看法，有的游戏对打金公会很友好，甚至邀请他们入驻，因为很快带来流量。但stepN当时是也比较抵触打金公会，我们也拒绝了打金公会的合作。

7. How to make Web3 games continue to generate value?

The core is to make games to bring happiness to users, so if your users feel happy while playing games, this value is enough. Don't worry too much about the definition of value itself and other people's judgment. Games are essentially an experience economy. They spend money to buy the experience they want. As for how others define this process and whether it is valuable, every user has different opinions.

The article comes from the Internet:Interview with StepN founder Jerry: What should Web3 game creators pay attention to?

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