It's no big secret that the onbording process to hive could work better and be more successful. The fact is that there are not so many new accounts created and even less people really jumping on the hive train lately. So what could we do better? In fact, we once had a solution already that worked pretty well...
In a liotes mission some time ago, we asked the people how they joined Hive in the first place. It wasn't surprising to see a lot of people who started their hive journey by creating a splinterlands account. Another quite impressive quantity of people actually joined hive through the CTP community. This was the community led by @jongolson that was promoting hive as a solution for internet marketing. You can check the post and go through the comments to see how many people actually came to hive over Click Track Profit.
Hive brings a lot of factors that can be very useful for internet marketing. It offers a free webspace where we can post content, it offers a community and above all it offers ways to monetize our content and our time.
The CTP Team was very prolific and among many other projects, they built a tool called the The Hive Guide. It was an online course that was explaining the basics of hive and introducing several hive projects. People could sign up to this course for free and then promote this course with some affiliate links. At the time, the course didn't get much support from the hive community but it was actually quite successful. When signing up, people also landed on a mailing list where the activities of the community where promoted.
The problem with this course was that at the time, things on hive were evolving very fast and it required a lot of work to keep the course up to date. Since it didn't provide a reasonable income for the team, the project was more or less abandoned.
Why was this onbording tool better than many others?
When this tool went live, there was a very active CTP community and I was part of it. The team was creating several weekly shows, there were challenges, there were rankings and regularly new stuff came out.
In my opinion, the success of the project was that it went further than just making somebody sign up to hive. After the sign up, new users were taken through the course and had most important factors explained through videos. In a second step, these new hivians were offered a very intense community life that was constantly marketed through e-mails. There were the shows, the challenges, the rankings. For new people, it was very easy to make the first steps into community and very quickly they were adopted by the other members.
It was a mixture of teaching the basics, leading people into an existing community and showing them how they could be successful on hive, that made a lot of people quite serious hive users and quite a few of them are still active today.
What is needed for a successful onboarding process?
If I had to sum it all up, to make hive onboarding successful, we don't just need to make people sign up. They need a basic instruction how things work, they need to be integrated in an active community where they can build relationships and they also need to see a way to evolve and a motivation to grow on hive.
For a successful onboarding process we need:
- An easy way to create an account
- A process that teaches people how hive works
- A working community with challenges, shows, interactions for user retention
- A process that shows people the purpose of growing their account and what goals can be achieved
This infrastructure should be in place before any type of external marketing is done. Only once this is in place, it would make sense to market this process and bring people to hive.
At the moment, most projects that aim to onboard people try to make marketing on other social networks to bring people to hive. Unfortunately, the retention rate of this is very low and very few people are still around some time down the road. I can't help feeling that we are wasting resources while doing so. Why not replicate something that worked in the past?
For the future of hive, we not only need new people that sign up to hive but we need people who want to build something in the long run, who want to build their reputation and their stake.
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We had some nice onboarding campaigns... We had some nice events where Hivians could gather, hang out, and chat... What CTP had was the closest to having an onboarding, journey, where we would have both places working together, onboarding, educating, and merging newbies into the communities...
I see some initiatives that have potential, maybe it's the moment to create a dialogue and make it happen!
In my opinion this was as close as a good a onboarding to hive could luck like.
I am one of the people Jon convinced to try out Hive (st**m at the time). It helped that some of us started around the same time and knew each other. Many are no longer with us actively, but some are still around, scattered in various communities.
Yes, Jon knew how to make things feel like a journey. What they did was not easy, it involved a lot of work and expertise (from the affiliate world). If it were easy, more people would have copied or taken over what they succeeded doing. But they had some failures too, which is what building businesses often leads too.
There was a lot of positive building vibes around CTP and I think that we started on the hive journey differently than most others. I still see a lot of 'old' CTP guys around that are doing more than the average hivian :-)
Onboarding is rough but I agree that those are some good points to keep people around after they signed up. I joined because of Splinterlands and later found Hive through that. It was a slow process but I ended up staying for the community. I remember Jongol talking about that process before and I think it was a good way to get people onto Hive.
I was one of the people that got quite motivated by this community and all the life around it.
Onboarding people on Hive is not a problem, but I think that so many people do not have people have been here before who could hold their hands for a while till they are very familiar with the chain because this happened to me when I first joined Hive. I had to run away from the platform for a year before I finally met someone who understood the platform very well and taught me how to grow my account
You are right that creating an account isn't that complicated but for hive to strive, we should aim not only that people create an account but that they want to build and grow here.
I think that is a great list of requirements for successful onboarding. And I agree that marketing without that type of approach is unlikely to succeed.
I believe that Hive is too complicated to let a newbie just try to swim in the current and learn enough without giving up first...
Absolutely! And, as you say, it's best to deal with this at the Community level. Then newbies can get the support that they need.
I actually wasted my first year on Hive. Because I didn't understand the basics of Resource Credits. And I didn't know how to ask for help.
I believe not many were as patient as you and unfortunately a lot of people are stopping their hive journey before it really started.
One community even had a DHF proposal for this and took a hefty chunk of money... and no one asked for results ...
That's my issue with the DHF. It's good that ideas are funded but without control it's a kind of self help shop where people just sell ideas and do as much as promised as they deem fit...
Looks like a pretty strong community and clear instruction were necessary to CTP's success. Would love to see something similar again.
I think there were a lot of great ingredients that were working quite well and it would be a good idea to build something similar again.
amazing brother. Just amazing !BEER !WINE
I think Splinterlands method of onboarding was one of the easiest ways. That was also how I joined HIVE in the first place. The premise was easy enough, just get an account for the game I paid for. Everything else came after if I was interested in diving deeper into the blockchain. Perhaps future onboarding projects should study this and attempt to take some lessons from Splinterlands.
What splinterlands did for hive is pretty amazing. They brought so many people to hive and quite a few started to use the platform for other things as well. I don't know whether it's possible to create such a hype again but what CTP did was in my opinion the next best thing to bring people to hive.
Hmm while I think having more people on Hive is a good thing, I think it's fine to have small and closely knitted community here too. Maybe one day when the price of Hive goes up, it gets more attention and we get more people exploring what Hive is all about. Until then, I am just happy to chit chat with Hivians about everything about the sun.
!LUV
While I believe that we don't need to attract the big masses, I think that we need at least to replace the people that are leaving just to keep hive at the same level...
True, I think if one day the price of Hive goes up, the people will come back. Haha.
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