Hire Your Users
Incentivize B2C community managers with vanity
Fred Cederi quit his director job at Apple as soon as VisionPro was announced. He knew that satisfying his wife's insatiable appetite for diamonds required founder-level equity in a hit company. So he made an AR fitness app for the product he’d left in the dust, starting on iPhone until the product he’d left in the dust hit mass market. Best case, he'd ignite a fitness revolution that would make David Goggin’s workouts look like child's play. Worst case, he’d get acquired like Supernatural.
Cederi, engineer savant with only boomer charm to flaunt, knew he had to rely on an army of Gen Z minions to grow his app. He launched a Discord server and pimped out his son to get a few hundred users. Scaling further proved difficult in the wild-west of the next generation’s economy. The solution to Cederi's predicament lay a mere four-hour flight to the south.
Identify Power Hungry Users (PHUs)
Meet Diego, the 15-year-old sensation just south of the border in Mexico. This kid had a sixth sense for spotting rare Roblox treasures, and wheeling and dealing with his online comrades to flip for profits. His Discord sidebar, like the state of his room, would get him yelled at by his mom if she saw it. One fateful day, amidst his spree of joining micro-servers, he stumbled upon a shiny new AR fitness app. Puberty was knocking on his door, and he had his eyes locked on Sophia, the girl across the street with the shiny waterfall of hair. All he wanted was to get fit and maybe catch her wandering gaze, not catch a new job.
When Cederi saw Diego’s D7 retention and 2 hour per day session time, he pounced. For an app that had few power users and no happy face retention, he had to retain Diego at all costs. So he didn't pull out the old, dusty sales pitch book to keep Diego around; instead, he embarked to understand Diego's world. He learned how Diego made bank flipping assets, his flamed-out love interests, what his family was like, why he thought school was a waste of time. Eventually, Diego, addicted to the AR fitness app, dropped gold in Cederi’s lap as he said: I live on discord dude. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could help run your server.
Cederi had heard that community moderators should themselves be power users and responded with an instant yes. He knew that star community moderators were born from passion, not just a paycheck, and they wouldn't nickel-and-dime him when the budget got tight. To master the elusive art of product-led growth (PLG), Cederi needed Diego to cast a wider net, shorten time to value (TTV), and sprinkle some of his hypeman magic in the Discord. Plus, that egotistical former Apple marketer he considered hiring wouldn’t be online at 3am responding to tickets in warp speed like this degen kid could. Diego was a Power Hungry User (PHU) if he ever saw one – obsessed with the product, obsessed with his potential.
Establish Power Levels
Diego hit the ground running as Cederi tapped into his PHU ego. The elder taught his trainee startup principles – how to think about product cycles, how to attribute marketing campaigns. As he realized the value of what he was learning on the job, Diego recruited some of his real-life pals to join Cederi’s PHU gang – especially those who didn’t mind being his underlings.
Cederi – emotionally aware exec who totally didn’t skip through all his HR trainings – noticed this Machievallian desire emerge in Diego. His little PHU wasn’t satisfied with reporting to Cederi his greatness. This kid wanted a slice of the power pie for himself.
Realizing that his fitness app itself was a game, Cederi started playing mobile games in his limited free time. He noticed the inundation of awards – badges, notifications, XP, roles, and more. Cederi adopted this practice to his Discord first, having learned that the best MVPs are no-code. While his ultimate goal was in-app retention, he could test his retention systems on his unpaid multi-level community (MLC, the Gen-Z MLM) first.
In a clandestine move, Cederi appointed Diego as his server manager, telling him to keep this hush-hush, and to start creating more roles for arbitrary vanity. When Diego spotted an active server member, he gave them a “Hulk” role and started chatting with them directly. He appointed “Gym Gladiators” for users who did strength workouts, “Sweat Spartans” for cardio fanatics, “Workout Wizards” for new server members.
Diego kept a close eye on the Hulks, and awarded them the TrialMod role if they were interested. This title bestowed upon them access to the private mod chats – a digital VIP lounge of sorts.
Cederi lurked in the background. He knew that in the SPACE model, all he needed to milk out of Diego was the “S” – community support. So he hoarded all the fun powers for himself, and had Diego draft a list of responsibilities for the rest of the gang, which included:
Brainstorm, post, recruit entrants, and chose winners for weekly contests
Hold weekly community voice chat events
Welcome new server members
Chat daily with the community, encouraging them to use the app in a natural way
Identify new Discord marketing managers and send them Cederi’s way
Respond to tickets
Diego promoted the TrialMods to Mod after a week if they stayed on track. Cederi patted him on the back for turning their Discord into a hit game in its own right and for keeping the MLC flywheel spinning. With their combined efforts, the Discord chain of command and capabilities became as follows:
Streamline Communication Channels
With a crew of PHUs to handle his dirty work, Cederi set out to remove the repetitive messaging weeds with his new BFF – BotGhost. Through this Discord bot creation service, he created tools to speed up the team:
FitFriend
Cederi noticed his crude crew of teenage moderators didn’t have as stringent a filter as he’d like. So he created FitFriend to auto-delete messages that crossed his PG-13 bar. But that's not all – FitFriend also doubled as a messaging janitor for his mods. Users got their messages from FitFriend in their DMs, while mods got a designated channel for streamlined communication.
Invites
Cederi set up a few commands so he could start attributing server growth:
/invites - number of members invited by a given user
/invitedList - list of members invited by a given user
/inviter - determine who invited a given user
/invitesLeaderboard - View the top inviters of your server
FitnessKing
Cederi realized the importance of abstracting his personal identity from user engagement. Some of his PHUs wandered down Internet rabbitholes and sent his acne-covered teenage boy photos in #random-chat. He had to squash that before his investors saw. Enter FitnessKing – a bot account from which he could send anonymous messages and automate repetitive tasks. He relied on FitnessKing to verify users with a /verifiedFit command and sent welcome pings encouraging new users to download the app. Occasionally, he’d send contest announcements through FitnessKing when Diego was too busy.
Levels
Because the mod power structure worked so well, Cederi also wanted to pit regular users against one another. He introduced an XP system and levels for his server, turning it into a digital battleground. Users could now climb the ranks by engaging in events and sending messages. And with the /levels command, they could size up the competition on the server's leaderboard.
Feeling like a Gen Z guru (minus the pimples), Cederi watched his Discord realm flourish under Diego's watchful eye. And as for Cederi's wife? Well, let's just say she's drowning in diamonds by now. As for Diego, he's not doing too shabby either, riding the wave of Cederi's app success into a world of degen economy opportunities.