How We Got 5000 Web Users In 30 Days

8 min readApr 26, 2022

On the 19th of March, we launched Pyme. We did this to coincide with Buildspace Demo day. At this stage, my two co-founders, Bilal and Saleh, had been working full time on Pyme for two months, and while we learned an incredible getting to launch (which we will save for another blog), we had a working MVP. And when I say Minimum Viable Product, I mean it really was that. Things broke, looked straight up bad, and there was so much we had to change.

Looking back now, a month later, it’s comical how much we needed to change, how much I cringe at some of the designs, and how many things just weren’t ready. Yet we launched and told anyone who would listen that this was our beta. LOL. We could have stayed working in silence for many more months, yet I am so glad that we launched. Nothing truly beats honest user feedback and using your own product as a user.

A month later, we have over 5000 users, tested many of our theories, made countless mistakes, and many micro pivots. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to launch. While it may be scary, you may be worried about being laughed at, and it’s so much easier to try and perfect forever, you lose the ability to learn what will and will not work.

We are a team of founders based in Tbilisi, Georgia, with a dream to make hiring better, fairer, democratic and build a better world of work in web3. We had no outside backing, no investors, and we started from zero. I think it’s easy to get caught up in comparing your journey to others, even more so in web3, yet its incredibly important to focus on your plans for what you want to build, get it into the hands of your customers, LISTEN to the feedback and then respond accordingly. Building businesses, regardless of the company or industry, always feels like a grand experiment. You have ideas and opinions, yet the only way to find success is to test, fail lots, and then test some more.

I am sure I am missing some of the steps we took, yet I will try to be transparent about what did and did not work and the lessons we took from it.

Find communities where your customers are

We started with the belief that our first customers would be devs already in web3. Developers already immersed in the web3 space would likely be comfortable with holding crypto, signing up using a wallet, and our theory was that they would be happy to be paid in cryptocurrency too. Two of the biggest communities in the web3 space are DeveloperDAO and Buildspace. These great communities allowed us to directly reach the people we wanted to help.

Bilal, my co-founder, and CTO, really led the way here, having been connected to both communities for a while. Buildspace was an incredible resource for Bilal initially to learn web3 skills, and their education courses really are top-notch. We decided to launch at Buildspaces’ Demo Day as it would help bring hundreds of our target users to see us and hopefully chat with us. The event was a huge success, as we virtually got to meet many in the community, answer questions about Pyme, and to our surprise, we won the community vote and came first place!

We followed this up a week later by winning the SharkTank run by Buildspace. A 4am start for me here in Tbilisi and a nervous green room wait before presenting Pyme to hundreds watching online. These initial events, along with Bilal appearing on DeveloperDAO Dev’N” Tell series, allowed us to speak, listen and build relationships with our first 500 users.

Communities genuinely are the foundation of projects in web3. So invest the time building relationships with the people who need your platform. For example, from research in the ideation phase, we knew that developers needed Pyme as current marketplaces suck for many reasons (that will be a whole article in its own right). The communities we connected with allowed us to hear that firsthand and show them why Pyme is a better future.

NFT drops bring traffic. Lots of it.

When first planning our launch, we had zero following in web3. We had spent the previous two years building out a direct-to-consumer e-commerce company as a team. While it would have been nice to start with Klout, influence, and a track record in the space, it’s simply unnecessary. We knew that we had to be creative, move fast, and develop ways to get users to check us out.

We decided to launch a free NFT drop, what we called access passes. Since NFTs exploded in 2020, there has been a massive influx of new users and a considerable amount of misunderstanding about the power of NFTs. To us, NFTs represent utility and the power to show ownership and build value alongside the artwork. We originally planned to release 10,000 Candy Skull access passes free of charge to new users joining Pyme. Holders would get an exclusive Pyme NFT, exclusive Discord channels, and profile badges to show initial support, and while not announced, we plan to reward these users with tokens when the time comes to release a Pyme token.

In the initial events we did, we saw how much people love free NFTs, and it really helped to be able to direct traffic to the Pyme website. We built our mint function on the homepage to give every user the ability to get a free access pass by joining the platform. We slightly underestimated how successful this would be. We expected it to take months for them all to be claimed. We underestimated how fast things would grow once people started referring their friends to the platform. In a day, we went from 1000 to 2000, and a few days later, we decided to limit the initial access pass to 3500.

While the goal was to hit 10,000 users with the access pass, and we could have done that comfortably, we wanted to make sure we didn’t lose sight of why we were building Pyme and make sure we were building a network that would help build a better world of work in web3. Because things were snowballing, we noticed that people were coming to Pyme simply because they wanted the NFT. This helped us grow our platform, raise awareness and get the word out there. It also taught us a lot about what we needed to change for the next access pass, which is coming very soon, along with v2 of Pyme profiles.

One step we did take fast was to introduce referral tracking and introduce a new set of NFTs so we can reward the most active members of the community in the future with exclusive access, unique experiences, and some incredible to-be-announced rewards. We believe that it’s vital for web3 projects to be able to reward early adopters, incentivize network growth and celebrate those that have contributed. Our refer-a-friend NFTs allow those holders to show off their contribution today and be thanked tomorrow.

Use your product

Oh, how naive we were before we launched. The time we spent mapping out what we thought and believed people needed and how we debated what people would do. We were wrong, and we realized this very quickly. With our desire to build out the future of work in web3, I knew we had to start hiring on the platform ourselves. I could probably write an article just about this, so I’ll try and be concise in the lessons.

Firstly, we learned that many people wanted to get a job in web3. We had hundreds of applications for the first role we advertised (dev intern). This helped us prove that workers are looking to enter web3. We had people with a wide range of skills and experience applying for roles, allowing us to speak directly to our initial users, what brought them to Pyme, why web3 for them, and what journey they had gone on.

Secondly, we realized how much the flow of both applications and hiring sucked on the platform. Only by using the product live, to hire rather than test, did we see how the flow sucks and that we needed to rebuild and introduce new features to allow this process to be smoother. Understanding this ourselves made communication with our community better. We get the initial feedback (as we feel it), and we can share our roadmap on how we are improving it.

Thirdly, we realized how much we didn’t understand both sides of the market in-depth enough by using the product. We had workers who wanted a small side gig, all the way to people looking for full-time roles. While we thought our marketplace was clear to us before we launched, we soon realized that one jobs board will never serve people looking for work, nor is it helpful for companies/DAOs hiring a wide range of applicants. So, soon, we will be launching a fully redeveloped hiring platform with unique places for bounties, internships, contract jobs, and full-time roles.

We can map our product roadmap with far more clarity by using the product to hire. I see many people launch products, get feedback and then argue against the feedback purely because they are not immersed in the product from a user perspective. To date, we have hired three dev interns and two community interns on the platform, which has helped us fully understand the pain of applicants and hirers and has greatly shaped the updates we have coming.

One of the biggest lessons we have learned is that it is okay to not have it all figured out; it’s better to be transparent with a community when you see problems. People will be far more supportive by sharing the lessons and what you are working on together. We are committed to building and growing Pyme for the long term, and we know that the journey ahead will have many lessons, many ups, and downs, with many successes too. Our mission is to make hiring better, and we want to make sure we never lose sight of that as we help the next 1 million people work in web3. Web3 really is the future of a better, fairer, and more democratic world of work. It is a world where workers can prove their skills and experience regardless of background and where hirers can find the best person for the job in a fraction of the time (and cost) it takes now.

I can’t wait till I get to write the 50,000-user blog and the lessons we will have learned by then. If I can ever help you with your journey in web3, please do reach out to me on Twitter.

Originally published at https://pyme.team.

Join Coinmonks Telegram Channel and Youtube Channel learn about crypto trading and investing

How We Got 5000 Web Users In 30 Days

Find communities where your customers are

NFT drops bring traffic. Lots of it.

Use your product

Also, Read

Written by Simon Mitchell