Launching the biggest SocialFi campaign…EVER

That’s not an exaggeration.

We were the design & build partner for Lingo’s airdrop launch.

A campaign that attracted 150,000 verified email subscribers in the first two weeks.

All on the back of a SocialFi gaming experience.

Our work with Lingo started back in November 2023.

But their idea for the business came earlier

They call it loyalty rewards on steroids with the community at its core.

Lingo’s plan is to invest transaction fees into yield generating real estate and then tokenise 100% of the profits every single month.

These tokens are distributed to the community, who can then use them to redeem real life rewards. Hotel stays, Netflix subscriptions, Nike trainers, etc.

They started the business at the tail end of the last bear market – the wrong time to launch a Web3 product.

So they held off, but in the background, they started building their community, and in the meantime, a Go-To-Market strategy is brewing in the back of their minds…

SocialFi

They see what Portal does to launch their token: a gamified, SocialFi experience to build hype. A community incentivised to engage with the platform and create content about the brand on social.

Airdrop farming.

Users collect rewards by engaging with a brand or product, and those rewards earn them a piece of the airdrop.

In the process of building their community, Lingo had already formed relationships with a group of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs).

They knew that if they could introduce some form of gamified announcement, a campaign that incentivised people to play and share in public, they’d pave the way for a successful token launch, creating a runway to sustain the ecosystem and build the product. Initiate brand momentum.

At Avark, we call it The Lobby

The lobby phase is the period between announcing your product and launching it.

Instead of sending everyone to buy the product on day one, you host them in a pre-party.

That period in between – that’s where you create buzz and hype. You want a whole group of people excited and ready to buy as soon as the product lands, building anticipation and perceived value in the token.

The lobby is where you host those people between announcement and launch.

For Lingo, the lobby was Discord, but the buzz would be generated through an interactive game.

Trouble is…they didn’t have an existing partner who can build this type of experience

And they can’t afford to mess up execution.

They know that timing is everything in Web3. The market moves so fast that timing is the difference between a token launch falling flat and a token doing 20x

They needed a product design agency that knew not only Web3 but also gaming and SocialFi.

That’s when they got in touch with us

Another client of ours, Spaace, recommended us to the guys at Lingo.

We were already working on a gaming platform with Spaace.

They had ideas, but they wanted someone to turn them into a reality. Someone who understood gamification and knew how to create a platform that would keep users coming back daily.

Lingo wanted us to design and build a gaming island that would fit their narrative. They wanted a lot of Web3 meme culture that would appeal to degens in the market.

And it’s easy for us to build something that resonates with this particular market because…

We’re degens

The team at Avark, we are the target market for a lot of the Web3 brands we work with.

And we’ve been here through previous bull and bear markets.

That’s why Lingo chose to work with us.

We know how to create this ecosystem with built-in gamification.

And we saw, during the last run, what everyone was doing with staking dashboards.

They caught on, but there was so much missed potential

There was no mini game or story that users could engage with and interact with.

That’s what Lingo wanted from us. To build a game that would make users want more.

More of the airdrop, more spins, more airmiles.

We got straight to work

Their team gave us a loose brief. They wanted a few islands, a challenge, and meme culture elements for each.

Based on that brief, we fleshed out the concept, putting together wireframes, demonstrating the mechanics of how the loading screen would shift to each island, and then the games and themes for each.

We were already aware of the types of quests and rewards that were popular – encouraging people to share, retweet, and post about the game.

For example, to earn their first airmiles, users need to retweet the Lingo tweet launching the game.

Once the wireframes were signed off, we started designing…

And iterating

Lingo already had a big Discord community, so as we created new designs, Lingo shared them with the community, collected feedback, and then iterated a little based on that feedback.

So, how exactly does the platform work?

Users complete tasks to collect airmiles.

With each island, there’s an airmile target number. When the user hits that number, they get a spin.

Spin it, and you’ll get a card for each one. The cards all count toward earning a slice of the airdrop.

None of that is left to happen on its own

If a user creates good, unique content covering Lingo and the Islands, Lingo selects 10 of those users each day in the Discord Community and sends them airmiles. So, users are getting creative with the content they create.

Someone made a whole song about it!

We’ve created a little micro economy with people actually promoting Lingo airmiles

A gamified system that people actually want to be a part of because they can use the airmiles to spin and get a greater allocation of the airdrop, which gets them tokens.

And that’s essentially what an airdrop is. A token launch.

But airdrops only work when people perceive value.

And the perceived value of an airdrop and token comes from all the hard work people put in to earn the points.

This brings us back full circle to the purpose of SocialFi

The reward system is deemed valuable because you see that other people want the airmiles, and because other people have worked hard to get them, in public.

That attracts new users who invest their own time to earn airmiles and the cycle continues.

The time people have put into making all this content, playing the game, sharing on social, etc. means they place greater value on them and double down on hyping them when the token launches.

That vibe spreads because other people see the excitement and want a piece of it.

But our work doesn’t end there

The game is evolving.

Essentially, with the airmiles Lingo created, the game never ends. Users want more challenges and to earn more airmiles.

So Lingo continues to launch new islands to maintain and ramp up engagement.

And the islands get more elaborate with each higher level, making them more ‘magical’.

And all of this feeds into the investment cycle

Because Lingo is bootstrapping this as we make it, looking for investors along the way.

In addition to the Lingo Islands, we produced a pitch deck-style website that shared details about the product and this Airdrop Go-To-Market strategy.

So, when investors discover Lingo has attracted 600,000+ engaged community members in six weeks, plus ongoing social coverage with fresh posts made every second of the day, do you think investors are interested?

In fact, this SocialFi strategy could be the difference between an investor taking or not taking the call.

Because this level of buzz before a token launch isn’t normal. It’s special. And investors want a part of ‘special’.

Wrapping this up, here are some numbers on what the Lingo Islands have contributed to so far:

• 150,000+ users have connected and verified their email to play
• 10M+ user tweets shared in relation to the game
• Over 200,000 users have joined the Lingo Discord Channel since launch
• 5,500+ investors on a pre-public sale