Referral programs have proven to be effective growth mechanics from companies ranging from Coinbase to Uber. More recently, crypto-native projects like PoolTogether and dYdX have leveraged referral mechanics for growth.
The market for index products has gotten more crowded since launch. While we are an early mover, there are many other competitors coming and it is critical that we move fast to dominate the market. Speed matters as whoever is first to dominate a market is able to create a moat around speed and distribution of the product which is essential in finance. The virtuous cycle is described in the graph below.
We have done a great job of building an enthusiastic community and many of them are already spreading the word about DPI. We should reward those who are already doing so and incentivize the ones who are not. Referral programs range from highly complex pyramid schemes to fairly simple $10/$10 bonuses. We should keep the referral competition as simple as possible for small rewards and set bonuses low enough that it does not make sense to cheat.
The Goals
Create Awareness - Create more awareness for the Index Coop.
Increase AUM - Onboard more DPI customers
Distribute INDEX - increase the numbers of INDEX holders
Referral Competition Specification
Approval stage: January 15 - 22 (~1 week)
Building stage: 2 weeks (January - February)
Campaign stage: 30 days from the official announcement - (February - March)
Rewards
6,000 INDEX (~$30,000 at current prices) based on the number of successful DPI swaps greater or equal than 0.5 DPI
1st: 2500 INDEX
2nd: 1000 INDEX
3rd: 500 INDEX
2000 INDEX allocated as 10+10 INDEX rewards for each successful $DPI swap made (100 reward pairs max, top 100 referrers and their referred users, at the end of the campaign, claimable after 30 days from campaign end date)
Costs
500 INDEX to cover for referral tool fees and running costs
Unclaimed rewards and unspent cost tokens are returned to the treasury 5 days after the 30 day waiting period has passed.
Referring User Journey
Sign up on Indexcoop.com and link email + ETH address
Get unique referral link with a share CTA
Start sharing with your network and earn rewards
At the end of the referral competition, INDEX rewards are claimable on indexcoop.com (similar to LP rewards)
Referred User Journey
Anyone who clicks a referral link can claim their own referral link on indexcoop.com and tie it to an Ethereum address.
The referral link directs people to the buy page on indexcoop.com
When a buyer hits the referral link we display a modal confirming that they are using someone’s referral link, like this:
After the referred user complete the required tasks, then the CTA changes to “share with your network” and they are allocated 10 INDEX token they can claim at the end of the competition
Rules
Anyone is eligible to enter the competition by making at least one (1) successful referral
A successful referral means that all the following conditions are met:
The referred user has used a referral link to sign up and linked an Ethereum address
The referred user has swapped crypto for a minimum 0.5 DPI in their eligible ETH wallet
For the 10 INDEX rewards, no requirement that users hold the token
For the top 3 rewards, referred users are only counted if (1) they don’t move their tokens during the thirty (30) day period (UTC) or (2) they provide liquidity and stake in the DPI/ETH farms on Uniswap or SUSHISwap (but must come from same Ethereum wallet)
Referrers should encourage people to hold for 30+ days
Referrers can encourage their network to liquidity mine on Uniswap or SushiSwap eligible pools
Index Coop reserves the right to disqualify anyone if based on cheating, including but not limited to wash buying and using bots
Next Steps
Get community feedback
Recruit community members to help run
Complete product spec
Detailed implementation of referral links
Page for participants to view progress
Pull Funds from the treasury
Build landing page, referral system integration
Post Announcement - Release an announcement on the Index Twitter and Medium, with community members helping to share and amplify the message.
Run The Contest - for 30 days after the announcement. Monitor on-chain activity and keep the community informed about progress.
What do you think about this initiative? What about the plan? Are there any points we can improve on?
L.E. Thanks for the great points and questions! Time to vote. The vote will be open until Monday, Jan 25, 5PM.
Are you in favor of launching this referral rewards program?
This looks quite interesting. Tagging @inje and @dylan to comment on the technical aspect. Doesn’t look like this will require any smart contract engineering capabilities.
Do you feel like the current reward amount is attractive enough to get the attention of youtubers? Or is the purpose currently to do a test trial run for the efficacy of the program?
Seems like we will have to pen in something for the marketing of the program too.
Judging the rewards - will that have to be done manually?
Finally, would you be willing to lead this epic? Ideally, how many people would you like on your team to help?
Alright, I think the referral program is a great idea. But all of the specifics sort of go over my head and I feel like we need someone to ELI5 this whole thing on the weekly call.
This is quite important, I think. We should try to make influencers aware of this program. Youtubers, Twitter, people who run crypto telegram groups, etc.
More generally, I’d love to hear the marketing plan for this.
Yes, no smart contract action needed, just at the end setting up reward claims via the Rewards page - we’ll have the referral accounts linked to ETH addresses, so we should be able to export from the referral tool at the end of the campaign and do an email blast to the winners to claim by X date.
I’d do a test run before we increase the rewards. Agreed that this needs a seeding budget, given that we don’t necessarily have a large email database to start with.
The ideal team to run this would be: 1 copywriter / email marketer to set up the campaign messaging; 1 frontend person for the landing page & referral tool implementation; 1 social media outreach person to contact influencers & key accounts in the DeFi space.
I can manage the whole thing if we can get the team together. We should budget for the team, too.
The plan is to use the forum as the initial seed - takes a few hundred people to get the ball rolling, plus do cold outreach to youtubers/twitter accounts/telegram group admins/defi news sites etc. to announce the campaign. If we get budget, we can think of ads on CMC and/or DeFi sites, too, but I’d start organic with this stage.
That was the missing piece for me. Thanks for clarifying. Should talk about this on the weekly planning session and the growth call next week and try to get you the resources.
I’m in favor of launching this in its current implementation.
Is it perfect? Probably not?
Will it give us data points on whether referrals work at a reasonable contest? Yes
So let’s get this live in its current structure and iterate from there.
@puniaviision can you help pull in relevant product resources? I think some details here need to be fleshed out slightly more, specifically on the reward claim flow
Hey @Titus & @reganbozman - just chiming in on implementation from a data perspective. The front-end work needs to include tracking:
each referrer address and their referral link
each referred address, the referral link used (or more simply the address of the referrer), and the date of “signup”
If we have access to this data at the end of the program, it should be pretty simple to write a query or two for the 10/10 rewards as well as the holding requirements for the top 3 rewards.
One question I have:
For the top 3 rewards, referred users are only counted if (1) they don’t move their tokens during the thirty (30) day period (UTC) or (2) they provide liquidity and stake in the DPI/ETH farms on Uniswap or SUSHISwap (but must come from same Ethereum wallet)
For referrals that come in towards the end of the 30 day campaign, do referrals just need to hold til the end of the campaign or do they need to hold for 30 total days (and we will track it past the end of the campaign)?
For front-end, I’m thinking of using prefinery.com for the tracking and referral mechanics comms part, with a speechifai.tech integration for sharing messaging diversity (like I did for the Civic.com campaign), so implementation would be minimal - it’s a code drop in, and has screens that integrate with existing landing pages
Re the referrals that come in at the end of the campaign, they have to hold for min 30 days in total, tracked past the end of the campaign. Claiming of rewards will be available 30 days + 1 after the campaign has ended.
Awesome - I am all good with however it is built as long as we have that data at the end of the program. That all sounds good to me. I will keep my eye on this and plan out time to help round out the rewards towards the end of the program.
What is our plan for the list of wallet, email address combinations for after the growth referral program?
Are we going to keep these somewhere for potential email marketing in the future? Will people who participate in the growth referral program have the ability to opt-out?
the question about holding for 30 days is a good one.
maybe a simpler thing is to timebox the whole competition to 30 days but to calculate results to take into account days held in order to avoid people gaming this at the end.
So for example each participant is assigned a value of 1-30 depending on how many days they held DPI for
There’s pros and cons to adding this mechanics. It will make our calculations a bit more complex, but the campaign will take 30 days less. So someone who would get in on day 28 would only get max 2/30 * INDEX rewards? And someone who got in on day 5 would get 25/30 * INDEX reward?
@Titus Curious if this campaign has been executed. Referrals are great for customer acquisition, I was looking around if we did any referral programs and came across this.
