Amid the transformative rise of digital currencies and blockchain technology, one project has attracted global attention for its simplicity and ingenuity: Notcoin. Designed by Sasha Plotvinov and his team at Open Builders, what started as a simple clicking game turned into a viral phenomenon, attracting over 35 million users on Telegram in record time.
As the creative mind behind Notcoin, a wildly popular Telegram-based clicking game, Sasha and his team have redefined the way people interact with blockchain.
In an exclusive interview with BenzingaSasha shares her goal on how to transform Notcoin into a vibrant, community-powered gaming ecosystem capable of bridging the gap between entertainment and blockchain technology.
How was your journey with Notcoin from 70,000 users to 35 million users. Share with us the success story so far.
The journey is interesting. There’s a saying that it’s not the station, it’s a journey, but maybe that’s what you become on that journey, right? So the team is transforming a lot right now, and I really like seeing a lot of things that are happening right now that didn’t happen back then. And I mean, every time a person creates something great, it changes them too. So imagine yourself as a developer, you always worked with applications that would have 100,000 users, that’s it, then 10 million and it continued.
From my point of view, I not only want to build it, but also shape the mood. I still manage all my Notcoin social networks myself, just for fun. It’s just the kind of thing I don’t want to delegate to anyone. Regarding the new games, all the new projects that we are working on, we are helping the documents, for example, to basically, the central idea of mining through your age in Telegram is something that we have also contributed in a part of the product.
You have to make sure that the games are new and authentic enough, so that people don’t get bored before, because right now it’s difficult to attract people to the high level.
Share something about Tap to Earn and why do you think this Tap to Earn model resonates so strongly with users?
In the Tap to Win model, you just tap something, a button, a coin or something, then you see how more and more coins are added to your balance. Then you can, let’s say, spend those coins on in-app boosts, etc., and then you can compete with others. Basically, it’s more like, again, a simple mechanism that allows people to mine coins. You can do this in several ways. You cannot ask to exploit. You can ask to open it.
So, I mean, they’re just different ways of doing the same thing. Carry out coin distribution among millions of users while they perform certain actions for this purpose.
What marketing strategies were most effective in building Not’s user base?
I think if you’re talking about real practical advice and so on, I don’t see buying traffic as a way, because you know, you’ll spend too much. And usually if you have to spend too much money on traffic, it’s the smallest thing and it doesn’t really engage you with your product. This doesn’t make any sense. It’s just wasting your money. So in my opinion Notcoin and all other successful apps are just a mechanic in the game or app that basically uses user motivation.
And then the horizontal layer widens and that’s where it starts. This means that you simply create a system when people are motivated enough to invite others. Basically, it’s pure advice, how to build apps for 10, 50 million users.
How is Notcoin handling technical challenges with such rapid user growth?
We learned a lot. At first it was hard. Then we figured out how to do things. And then, within a few months, we became professionals, we started advising other applications on how to do this, because we already knew about so many limitations, so many ways to optimize it, etc. So basically there are two difficulties. The first one is just the data server and the database and all that. So you can work with different languages and backend stacks. You can work with different databases.
You can work with different approaches on how to build these things. And because of that, spikes could occur. So you have to be smart about integrating this into the remaining components. Another thing is the Telegram API, which obviously relies on Telegram. Telegram therefore has its own limitations. So, for example, you can’t send more than two million notifications per day. If you’re building an app that gives access to 50 million people, it’s hard to engage them without any notification experience.
You have to learn to navigate through all these limitations. And the better you adapt, in general, the better you survive.
What strategies are in place to retain users over the long term?
This is the same way games work in general. You see, what kind of games do people usually play for a long time? I think there are two types. The first is that when you have cycles, say Tetris, you have a cycle. You start, the speed increases, then you get a score, you start again from zero. Fortnite is the same. You’re deployed with 100 people, the circle gets smaller and smaller, then you repeat again, if you win or lose, it doesn’t matter.
So those kind of cycles, Counterstrike, everything. I mean, these are the kinds of games that people have been playing for many, many years. I think that’s one of the ways. Another way is to go at length, you know, sort of building a character, building a profile. Let’s say that World of Warcraft, people have been playing it for many, many years. EVE Online, like EVE Online, is crazy.
That’s like 16% of the people who played EVE Online in the first year, 10 years ago, are still playing the game, that’s pretty huge. People are so loyal to this game and all the new users are coming too.
How does Notcoin plan to differentiate itself as more projects adopt similar models?
I think the only way is to simply be ready for change. So it’s true. Everything that worked in April no longer works now. Everything that worked this summer no longer works now.
Your advertising model no longer works because everyone can lower their price. Their community is nicer, how can I put it, not so loyal, not so cool, not so rich. And they will always have a lower price. You can’t fight and compete with them, can you? So we need to learn and see which model we can use right now. Right now, we think our advantage is building things with a soul inside. Let’s say we help projects create really touching, cool games, that it doesn’t just make people addictive or something like that.
It’s more of a real emotional experience that you’ve been having for a while. Again, Pixel Battle is a great example of this. Another, Lost Dogs. I don’t see a big difference between a TV show, a game, a book, because it’s all imagined, certain worlds that sort of exist in the imagination and people, they can play and believe in that world. You literally start to believe that this in-game economy is real, because people can trade certain things, items, goods, etc. with each other. It’s as if it’s really all of the markets that exist in the game.
What’s next for Notcoin as it continues to grow?
Two things. First, we learn to do these experiments, these games, all these things. We just want to replicate it. We have teams currently working on different topics. We help them, we build together. We make sure that it’s not just a random click or something like that. It’s just interesting. Emotionally, the game creates an emotional connection. That’s the only thing; It’s a very good team because we have learned a lot from our experience at the moment. And we can really use this expertise to launch projects for 10, 20, 50 million people. This is not obvious.
On the other hand, we also understood the business part. So now we know how to build a business from this. And also on our community side, what we’re doing right now, we’re trying to put the holders of the Notcoin community at the center of everything that we’ve built. Let’s say we help the game get released and published through Notcoin. And we agree that 20% of the stock of this game goes to the Notcoin community.
This is how we attract more and more value into the ecosystem. We do what we know how to do and we just continue to grow the ecosystem. Sometimes I think we change our tactical plans, but the strategy is the same.
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