In this review, I try to provide a product overview of Zealy platform. I tried to be the most neutral as possible and provide reflection on current facts in Zealy app.

You’ll probably get more value from this review if you’re a product person or a community wishing to understand or use the platform.

In the last part, I express my personal thoughts with Zealy platform based on my own experience as a user.

What’s Zealy?

Zealy is a platform designed to help web3 communities generate growth and engage their members as contributors. How does it work? Team members create quests, and users can achieve the quests and participate in a leaderboard for first places and potential rewards (depends on each project).

In other words, the proposition value of Zealy is to allow communities to create a space for their community and actives an existing users bases by tasks.

In my point of view, it’s important to mention existing users base because in crypto project communicate via Twitter first, this is where members and future members see that the projects they follow have launched a Zealy community space.

We can distinguish several types of users. The first one is communities, without projects, Zealy have users. So the first objective for Zealy is to attract and maintain team, and these teams will bring their user base. The second step is to maintain these users and provide tools to help them discover new projects in their areas of interest.

To summarize:

  1. Zealy needs to attract communities, by providing easy customization of space, several features
  2. Communities onboard their users base and attract new users. Incentives by potential rewards, interesting quests, discord roles…
  3. Zealy need to maintain communities by constantly improving the product and providing new functionality => good for zealy
    • if not: less team = fewer users => bad for Zealy
  4. communities need to maintain users base by incentives
    • if not: less and dissatisfied users = socially bad for the project

A persona is a fictional user with needs, aspirations and desires that are usually linked to objectives within their lives.

Zealy already shows potential persona by offering users the opportunity to mention their objectives with the platform: Discover new exciting projects; Contribute to projects I love; Learn new things; Add my community; Earn rewards.

I see two-way for teams to attract peoples/contributors:

  1. via an existing user’s base
  2. directly via keywords filters and Zealy highlights. I’m curious to know how many people use this functionality. Who (which persona) goes on Zealy and scroll community from a keywords filters and why?

What communities and users can do?

Firstly, the communities needs to create a community space and personalize them. They can use quests template provided by Zealy or go deeper and create their own flow.

As a communities, it’s possible to create:

  • several sections of quests (depend on the subjects)
  • a sequence of quests, “validated the first quests to access at the next one “be level x to access at these quests”. That a good functionality because team can increase the difficulty of quests, and thus provide better rewards according to the quest’s difficulty
  • a recurrence system for quests (with different timeframes), also recurrence to retry the quests (this avoids farm for quizzes, for example)
  • several types CTA of quests like claim; submit screenshot: submit link; visiting link; quiz; poll; invites; text
  • several types of rewards: xp; discord roles and more depends on the project, but that not native in Zealy platform.
  • invite teammates to help to manage the community space

To dynamite a competition, each community space has a leaderboard and the possibility to create a sprint (contest annex, that lasts an epoch).

Moreover, team attribute a number of xp for each completed quest. The leaderboard and sprint are based on the xp metrics. According to your type of accepted answer for each quest, communities admin or reviewer need to verify/review the users submitting (that involve to have a specific personnel(s))

So it’s possible to granted your team members or trusted community members with roles:

  • admins: full settings permissions (create/update/review quests; add/remove members)
  • reviewers: team members or promoted community members trustworthy, they can claim quests (persona: community manager; team herself)
  • guest (only useful for private community), can access to your community and claim quests
Zealy Communities Flow

As a user, you can do:

  • create an account
  • discover and join community
  • participate on a community leaderboard and accumulate xp by validate quests (according to your rank and the team choice, earn rewards)
  • invite friends to a specific community
  • check their rankings and validated quests in the inbox
  • join and leave community

We can distinguish two types of users contributions:

  • social engagement (like, rt) (review auto but APIs twitter is broken, so we can claim the quests without really doing any actions)
  • write and share the content on social media by the project = shill the project (manual review but with specify tags mentioned on the twitter for example, that can be auto review, but we just need to mention tags and anything else to claim the quests)
  • product testing, that means users go make action on the product and send a proof of their actions (need manual review by submitting screenshot or transactions link as proof = pain point)
Zealy Users Flow

Good and pain points

Here the idea is to show some interesting points I can collect with friends feedback.

Communities good points

  • several templates to launch their first quests
  • bot integration to rewards with discord roles
  • flexible and tools to manage the review section
  • analytics tool about the community data

Communities pain points

  • too much manually review discourages teams from providing better quality quests
  • need time to create all the quests and manage Zealy logic between sequence of task for each section (just time to get the hang of it)
  • need to have reviewer peoples. In one sense, that gives an opportunity for someone(s) to have a job, but with a big community, it’s fast to just approve review and not really see what’s sent.
  • the rewards’ possibility to provide directly in Zealy are very limited. Team need to manage that outside of the platform.

Product usability

Zealy is not too complex app. After creating an account we can directly search community or user link provided by the project team. We can check our current community (/my-community) > select one (c/community xxx) > start to complete our first quests. The intermediate page “/my-community” is probably not really useful and add one more step to achieve my objective = complete quests (that not too much disturb). And not provide interesting information because I can see the same things on the next page “c/community xxx”.

The numbers of click as users is reasonable, but for team that probably painful with time to set up all the quests because Zealy provides several possibilities to custom it, also provide quests template.

About design, I see two issues:

  1. for quests with a limited number of submissions, when this number is reached, the quest is still visible and displays a black screen
  2. for quests with long description that out of the laptop screen, and we need to scroll to submit our contribution (honestly low issue)

Exception Twitter APIs issues, Zealy answers to this demand and provides a tool to engage community members.

Another question is: communities play the game and really go deeper with Zealy functionality? Hum, based on my own observation probably no (need real data to confirm it).

Many communities/projects seem only use the simple types of quests to animated their community.

As we go long, people are bored by simple quests and stop their engagements by lack of incentives and potentially leave the community.

Users are members of many communities. The risk for a project team is that their users are no longer engaged enough and stop contributing. So teams need to be original with the quests they propose, or risk losing users. And the originality of quests also depends on what the Zealy platform allows.

Suggestions and improvements

Zealy mention reference to web3 community, but don’t seam only focus on it. Probably, they open more and try to attract web2 community. Here I will base my suggestion for web3 community.

All incentives to uses Zealy is rest on the shoulders of the projects. Unlike others popular product as Galxe or Layer3, Zealy doesn’t have internal incentives, such as NFTs, points system at platform level. Of course, there are 3 different products, and don’t target the same things, but that possible to take inspiration from it.

  1. Directly add rewards and incentives on Zealy.

How it’s works today: team create quests > users do it > projects download the leaderboard and reward out of the platform their users (except for discord role).

–> Why not provide a tool for a project teams to create on-chain rewards directly via Zealy, like as:

  • NFTs
  • Token or Stablecoins pool

–> Also, why not monetize/use the xp collected by users

  • to buy a badge (social reputation)
  • lottery (gamify that by une roue de la fortune)
  • buy merch
  • event ticket
  1. Improve the possibility to automatize quests
  • today, a team needs to have at least 1 manager and preferably technical, or who knows how to use zealy. For large communities, this represents a significant work, so help with this aspect is welcome.
  • allow teams to save their templates
  1. Improve the retention system:
  • add a notification system (on-chain or via email) to notify users when their community launches new quests or important event.

The idea it’s to make Zealy as a central place for communities and users. Team can have a full management flow directly on Zealy by: onboard > create > create > rewards. And users can stay informed directly in Zealy platform, by automatize reviewing quests, team can create more interesting and complex quests, that improve the users’ engagement.

With rewards integrated directly into the platform, users can really see why they participate and not just trust the team with promise rewards. With these suggestions, I think that can contribute to reducing the lack of incentives and improve the contributor’s engagement.

Personal journey

I will express my personal journey with Zealy, starting with my profile persona.

  • My first reason for using Zealy it’s to earn rewards and potentially get Whitelist / Incentives from a project I follow.
  • It is not in my interest to discover new community because I already have my discover flow out of Zealy and I only focus on one type of project.
  • I’m only interested in DeFi project community, I never experiment others type of community who can exist on Zealy (like educational or artistes..)
  • My objective is to have the best incentive for a minimal time spend. If I feel the team trying to just farm the social engagement part, I will leave the community space. => So my persona approach as “reward hunter”
  • my issues are, I don’t get directly rewards with Zealy, whether via the application or via projects. So I don’t really why I will use more the platform and I don’t have any incentive to come back every day. (The only one is on community where I’m well ranked^^)

Journey steps:

  1. join my first community (already launched several months ago)
    • thought: I don’t have any chance to get a reward because the leaderboard is high and the announced reward is only for a short top x.
  2. only join fresh community project to have chance to be well ranked
    • boring to see random quests such as “invite x friends” “like & rt”…
  3. only focus on community where I’m well ranked
    • but after several months, I see it’s inutile to spend more time because of projects don’t really rewards. I realized that the projects weren’t all that interesting. The incentives <> time spent was too low to continue
  4. finally stopped participating in a major community quests where I’m the member. I only do daily quests on 2-3 community where I guess potential rewards Whether on Web2 or Web3 all community contributors except a reward. Zealy provides a tool to do a community engagement. Project use it (probably badly) because a lot of time they just farm the users bases and don’t reward it. Users are impatient for rewards, and they don’t have any, no guarantee of potential rewards.