EARN'M - Leading Innovation with Mode Mobile & The EARN'M Loyalty Ecosystem

Mode Mobile, a leading name in the reward app scene, had already previously embarked on the journey of entering the crypto world by creating its own cryptocurrency ($EARNM). The next step for giving it a real-life purpose was to make it accessible for its users. For this, I was entrusted with the responsibility of first, launching an MVP of a dApp to reveal web3 rewards, and second, spearheading $EARNM's journey to a successful launch and market-product-fit. By this time, I had already worked with Mode for 2+ years as one of their leading product managers and they had given me the project due to my knack for getting things out on time, with a great eye for detail and my previous knowledge in the crypto space.

The Goal: Unlocking Crypto Rewards - A User-Centric Vision

The concrete goals of the EARN'M project included:

• Developing a responsive, user-friendly dApp that allows users to automatically link or create web3 wallets and claim Mystery Boxes that had previously been given out as a reward in the separate Mode Earn App.

• Ensuring the intuitive onboarding process for users, especially those new to the crypto space.

• Implementing a robust system that complies with legal, security and marketing requirements.

• Build the dApp in a scalable way so that future 3rd parties would be able to integrate easily and spread Mode’s cryptocurrency adoption.

• Ensuring high user adoption and thus blockchain activity to facilitate business development and guarantee a successful cryptocurrency coin launch on several tier 1 exchanges.

The Challenge: Navigating Complexity - A Balancing Act

The project posed several challenges:

• Ensuring swift delivery while empowering the only frontend developer to not only learn the ins and outs of blockchain but also a new coding language.

• Balancing user experience with legal and marketing alignment.

• Finding a user-friendly way of onboarding users both totally new and experienced in the crypto area.

• Designing an experience that is able to keep users engaged for a period of over a year due to crypto vesting schedules.

• Ensuring quality assurance, including writing and finding edge cases for crypto/ENFT-specific issues that also takes into account community-based crypto voting.

The Project Phases Pre-MVP-Launch

• Research: Conducted competitor research and user testing with interactive mock-ups to understand user needs and preferences.

• Concept: Developed a clear and innovative concept based on already previous work from crypto and technology leaders of the company that aligned with the company's vision and user expectations.

• Planning: Created detailed project plans, including SMART OKRs, milestones, and checklists to ensure alignment across different areas.

• Integration: Worked closely with crypto experts, internal development team and external smart contract contractors, ensuring highest development quality in a new tech stack.

• Testing: Led various rigorous testing phases, including initial usability and indepth interview user research, QA, internal testing, as well as various independent auditors to ensure the product met quality standards.

• Analysis: Utilized tools like Dune for on-chain data analysis and MixPanel for front-end analysis, ensuring data-driven decision-making.

• Alpha-Test: Brought together an alpha tester group to observe product interaction and issues, as well as improve on UI/UX based on concrete user feedback.

Current Status: Optimizing for Coin Launch

After the on-time delivery of the MVP in late December '23, the next goal was to increase user adoption to gain the interest of tier 1 exchanges.

Through quantitative analysis, it was clear that our biggest leverage lay in the Mode Mobile app with 85k DAUs. However, our first implementation was too difficult for our non-crypto-native users to truly engage in a meaningful way.

Due to limited resources - both from a developer and time perspective - we decided not to focus on increased user education, but rather on journey automation with the goal of delivering user value with as little interaction as possible to decrease friction and increase engagement.
Considering revenue implications, we additionally decided, to focus the main interaction flow on international users instead of US users - enhancing the value provided to our otherwise generally underserved international users and not risking any revenue loss due to possible user alienation on the US side.

This approach paid off very well, increasing our user engagement by 21x and generating us a 650k USD profit within 6 months, with 85% of this user engagement stemming from Mode Mobile interactions. This generated us the engagement needed to gain the attention from important exchanges and negotiate our coin launch later in 2024.