For a long time, project teams in the Web3 domain, such as those engaged in NFTs, GameFi, DeFi, and DAOs, have typically been concerned about user growth in their early stages. This is a difficult question about traffic sources.

While the industry has professional operation solutions and even outsourced operation teams, smaller projects that lack support from large institutions or key opinion leaders (KOLs) often struggle. Attracting users through the project or product itself is challenging in a market crowded with offerings, especially given the prevalence of ‘bonus hunters.’ The growth of active users is an ongoing issue.

Looking at the profile of the Web3 user group, those participating in various projects typically have the same basic need: to obtain short-term gains from the projects they participate in. Based on this feature, a valid strategy has been to quickly gather users in the early stages of a project to boost its visibility, attracting more long-term users to participate.

So, how can user growth be achieved in the early stages of a project?

In the Web3 field, setting up specific task scenarios for external users to attract them at a low cost has long been a common method. This strategy has been used by applications like the earlier Gleam and various pay-to-click (PTC) advertising traffic platforms. These applications focus on distributing user traffic within the industry, often as task platforms.

QuestN, a task platform that emerged in 2022, showed explosive growth and quickly became popular among B-end users. The reasons for this are twofold. On one hand, it’s due to the efficiency of task publishing. On the other hand, it is due to the recognition from C-end users, who find QuestN to be considerably more user-friendly compared to other similar task platforms.

What is QuestN?

In a nutshell, QuestN is a Web3 task certificate platform designed to cater to long-tail B-end users. In the same field, most mainstream task certificate platforms, such as RabbitHole and Galxe, only allow B-end customers of a certain scale to publish tasks through platform screening. However, QuestN has had no such thresholds since its launch. Entities such as KOLs, communities, and DAOs can all publish tasks. Nevertheless, to ensure the quality of B-end clients, QuestN requires clients to link official websites and social accounts. For tasks offering Token rewards, clients must deposit the reward Tokens into the vault in advance, serving as a capital verification measure.

Previously, QuestN was formally known as Quest3. Along with the name change, this project, which uses task scenarios as a market entry point, also announced its new strategic intentions.

（Image source:techflowpost.com）

In its early stages, QuestN was incubated by Hogwarts Labs and dedicated itself to Web3 traffic distribution and advertising platforms. It provided various permissionless on-chain and off-chain advertising tasks for GameFi, DAOs, communities, and projects. This benefited both B-end and C-end users and integrated the subdivided ecosystem of traffic advertising.

However, compared to many early task platforms encountered by users in the industry, QuestN released several updated versions within a few months of its launch. The application gave people a fresh feel, particularly with its innovative UI style. It deviated from the stale style of past similar applications, and the officials have added categories for different project tasks and community gathering spots within the app. Along with these, there are various activities promoted by project parties for participation, greatly enhancing the user experience for C-end users.

Simultaneously, the design for B-end users presents a more open stance. Anyone can issue tasks and create communities without barriers, integrating tasks and communities within a unified framework. Coupled with QuestN’s consideration for C-end users, this has made the application itself a broad traffic convergence point.

Long-Term Task Scenario Needs in the Web3 Industry

For users participating in Web3 projects, timely participation in the marketing activities of their investment projects is often an important condition for obtaining advanced profits, especially for those projects that use applications like Twitter, and Discord as community strongholds.

Conversely, as previously mentioned, the challenge for project teams, or B-end users, is how to mobilize user activity and attract more new users through various marketing designs to achieve the goal of reaching more users.

In this head-on rush scenario, publishing project tasks is an excellent choice. It allows users to understand the project while providing them with rewards. By doing so, the operational KPI growth is achieved at a reasonable cost, making the publication of project-related tasks on task platforms an inevitable choice.

Indeed, a user group focused on earning rewards by completing tasks has been active in the industry for a long time, even when the crypto market was dominated by cryptocurrency as the main digital asset. Therefore, operations like whitelisting and airdropping are common ways projects reward users. More recently, we have seen projects hype up entirely free minting and user scramble operations.

Some may sneer at the idea of earning rewards through task participation, considering the returns too low. However, the reality is the opposite. Due to the division of primary and secondary markets caused by human factors during the listing process of various digital assets, users can earn corresponding cryptocurrencies or NFTs by completing tasks and then sell them in the secondary market or hold them for the long term. Both strategies are effective asset investment combinations, especially for high-profile projects, which can be likened to ‘buying is earning’.

In this context, some individuals or teams have made task completion their career. They are known as ‘wool party’ members and tirelessly focus on many projects, seeking wealth opportunities within them.

Frankly, many projects do not welcome these ‘wool party’ participants, especially teams with long-term roadmaps, such as GameFi, SocialFi, and DAO. They prefer users who can hold digital assets issued by the project for the long term and participate in the ecosystem, as more valid users can sustain and grow the project.

However, reality often contradicts this. For ordinary project teams lacking large capital and support from investment institutions or KOLs, creative and characteristic products, and excellent architectural design often struggle to attract user attention in the complex Web3 field. After all, the number of projects is vast, and user time is relatively precious. Naturally, attention to projects lacking endorsement won’t be great.

Thus, the activity and attention brought by ‘wool party’ users seeking short-term returns become the early-needed traffic sources for such projects.

Not just for initial projects, many large platforms and projects also conduct corresponding activities by publishing tasks, stimulating user enthusiasm and activity in daily operations, thereby interacting with users themselves. Whether it’s project contracts, exchange deposits, or even user information KYC, often, a certain cost needs to be paid by publishing tasks.

Overall, there is a constant demand for long-term task publishing scenarios in the Web3 field. Some mainstream platforms release themed task pages through their applications or websites for user participation, hence, they don’t fret over traffic sources.

However, more project parties hope to use task publishing as a marketing method to achieve user growth and activity, so buying traffic or publishing activities on specialized task platforms becomes one of the few options.

When task publishing becomes a must-have marketing method for Web3 projects, for both B&C users, a better experience and higher efficiency become the top considerations in task completion. In other words, product strength becomes one of the most important competitive abilities for task platforms. QuestN has risen quickly to a superior user experience compared to similar products.

To B and To C

In the Web3 field, Opensea has established an NFT trading platform, providing services for buyers and sellers, while Uniswap aggregates the liquidity of digital assets. Projects can independently add or incentivize liquidity pools, and investors can trade on DEX through their wallets. Both are born to meet and connect market trading needs.

With many retained users, digital assets present a considerable liquidity situation accompanied by a vast user base. They satisfy the needs of both B&C parties in their respective niche markets.

So how does a task platform, represented by QuestN, handle these relationships?

Take Gleam, one of the earliest widely used examples. Its platform itself did not form a traffic aggregation. Once an individual task was generated, it needed to be disseminated through a complex traffic channel. For B-end users, Gleam is a simple application tool. It doesn’t possess advanced expansions.

On the C-end side, if project parties want to spread the task link to more visible places, they need to spend time and costs on promotion, such as PTC, KOL, other communities, etc. Although tasks can further be set to guide participants in secondary dissemination, the dissemination effect of individual users is indeed limited.

As for C-end users, obtaining a task link is straightforward for users who are already following a certain project, but quite blind for new users.

In essence, past task platforms benefited projects through traffic aggregation to achieve quantitative change to qualitative change. However, in most cases, the resources of most project parties were insufficient to support the qualitative change stage.

The emergence of QuestN has changed this status quo. In logical design, it introduces the variable element of advertising orders in addition to the B&C user groups.

Like Uniswap and Opensea connecting bilateral markets, QuestN positions itself as a task platform that matches needs, simultaneously connecting B-end and C-end. It incentivizes users at the C-end to attract traffic and collects user behavior data. At the B-end, it provides user portraits and accepts advertising orders.

Under this mechanism’s guidance, a logical loop is formed where users can profit by doing advertising tasks, and project parties can gain increased traffic by paying fees. Due to the excellent user experience and task classification design, QuestN has quickly gained favor from users on both B&C ends, rapidly forming a traffic aggregation site and establishing positive interactions with other elements within the platform.

However, as is well known, the mechanism proposed by QuestN is simple. The barrier to this model does not lie in the product itself, but in the scale effect, namely market acceptance.

The key to QuestN’s standout performance lies in its product characteristics, which is also the key to gaining market and user acceptance, as can be perceived from several version iterations and efficient dAPP development and launch.

Product features of QuestN

The initial name of QuestN was Quest3, which, as the name implies, refers to the ability to complete task creation and release in three minutes. Simplicity and speed were the main features of the product initially.

Many B-end users who have used task platforms may have noticed that, in the past, only project parties were eligible to publish task forms. Platforms such as Project Galaxy, Rabbithole, and Gleam required cooperation with project parties of a certain scale and did not support collaboration with medium and small long-tail projects. Moreover, the communication and procedures required during the project party qualification certification stage were somewhat troublesome. In contrast, QuestN is entirely permissionless and has no threshold restrictions.

This means that anyone can publish related tasks on the QuestN platform. As a way and means to verify authenticity, task publishers need to link more of the project’s social media and social accounts to the tasks they create.

In addition, asset verification is required for task publishing. After publishing a task, the reward setting must be ensured. QuestN requires publishers to deposit a certain number of Tokens into the vault to enable users to claim rewards upon task completion.

At the same time, to facilitate B-end users to deploy task forms and publish quickly, QuestN has considered more task application scenarios, providing users with enough task templates for creation, such as common ones like Twitter, Discord, ENS, Telegram, and even on-chain contract interactions.

Even applications belonging to game platforms like PS5 and Xbox are included, covering applications from on-chain to off-chain, common and uncommon, usable and unusable, all included. This is one of QuestN’s great advantages. The number of task templates is considerable, covering a wide range of types, and the degree of involvement in the task chain is also quite deep.

These characteristics make QuestN’s task template setting resemble PGC. The platform realizes the maximum degree of freedom for users during use by providing more available choices, allowing them to customize the task menu as much as possible.

（Image source:questn.com）

In summary, QuestN, through task templates and custom tools, has created numerous task scenarios, basically covering the needs involved in standard Web3 projects. These include marketing activities, whitelist gifts, anniversary events, governance, holder exclusive activities, bounty tasks, event attendance verification, quiz competitions, membership systems, ambassador programs, etc.

Notably, it’s not only incredibly convenient and quick for B-end users, but completing tasks for C-end users is also smooth.

In the past common task platforms, as task publishers often require C-end users to complete multiple different category tasks, such as joining project communities, following the official Twitter of the project, etc., the corresponding checks needed for different platforms require task forms to be checked one by one, which is very cumbersome.

For instance, after individually checking tasks in Gleam, other on-chain interactive tasks have to be completed elsewhere. Especially when users encounter certain unspeakable browser or network problems, the user experience can be described as terrible.

On this issue, QuestN has adopted a more humane solution by integrating on-chain and off-chain tasks. Users only need to automatically validate all types of task progress on the QuestN platform, and they don’t need to frequently switch web pages to check completion.

But what truly reflects the characteristics of the QuestN platform is the activity recommendation page provided by the official for C-end users. This includes recommended tasks, recommended activities, NFT rewards, token rewards, whitelist rewards, recommended communities, and different on-chain activity tasks. It also supports search and community display, which is convenient for professional wool parties or short-term investment users.

QuestN even supports users in establishing a personal account center by linking wallets to record and trace participated tasks and activities. From a user experience perspective, this product has advanced the form of task publishing platforms to a new height, and users from both B&C ends can have a great experience to meet their needs.

However, QuestN is still in continuous iteration, and the platform has also announced its roadmap for 2023, focusing more on the subdivision of user portraits. Undoubtedly, there will be new versions coming out subsequently.

The Layout of QuestN’s Toolkit

QuestN has been committed to easing the transition for Web2 users into Web3 projects since its birth. As a result, the evolution of the product has been primarily focused on mitigating the challenges faced by conventional internet users when transitioning.

The goal is to make it simple for Web2 users and user-friendly for Web3 users.

Consequently, in 2023, QuestN began enhancing the platform’s integration and support for various public blockchain ecosystems, enabling users to engage in more on-chain interactions. This development was soon followed by the roll-out of more comprehensive task templates, with the dApp launched in April. During this time, the platform officially changed its name from Quest3 to QuestN, symbolizing the team’s exploration of a broader spectrum of possibilities.

（Image source:nodereal.io）

While it may be a deliberate move, the name QuestN did indeed clash with the name of a VR smart wearable device launched in the same year. This has caused some confusion among users who are unfamiliar with the Web3 space when they try to search for information.

As QuestN expands its business, the platform uses its task tools as an entry point to connect more Web2 and Web3 users and advertisers. This further consolidates its existing user base and market recognition. As a result, QuestN has shifted its focus to expanding into the African and Southeast Asian markets.

To date, the QuestN platform has amassed over 60 million registered accounts, minted more than 1.5 million NFTs through the platform, and brought together more than 20,000 project communities. These remarkable achievements have been made in less than a year.

QuestN has integrated the three key players of traffic, channels, and projects. The platform also offers benefits like taking care of the Gas fees on partnered blockchains and providing incentives for task participation. It suggests that the task release and traffic collection and distribution model based on both B & C end users and the advertising ecosystem could have more potential for expansion in the long term.

In the future, QuestN’s mission may be more than just a simple task tool. Instead, it could serve as a traffic center, storing user behavior data collected from continuous interactions in the SBT container. This corresponds to the various data in the user’s personal center, representing a user’s past behavior data. This scenario is reminiscent of the use of big data in traditional internet for individual user tagging.

However, this is purely speculative at the moment, because QuestN has yet to become the largest platform of its kind in the Web3 domain. Since its launch, it has mostly been welcomed by project parties. QuestN is not widely popular among groups represented by various exchanges, which may be related to its centralized strategy and the collection of user information.

However, the task platform model provided by QuestN is indeed a good and feasible solution for the current time. This model has also been a proven effective path in the Web2 domain.

Classification and Explanation of Similar Products

As mentioned above, the most significant feature of QuestN compared to similar products lies in the different user adoption barriers. Essentially, there are certain differences between different products.

In the Web3 domain, earlier task platforms like RabbitHole and Project Galaxy are the same as QuestN. They are all marketing platforms for task publication where users can complete tasks and earn rewards.

Gleam, however, is slightly different as it is mostly used for off-chain task publication. The earlier such a platform appears, the stronger the network effect. To change user habits and have them use another platform, there must be certain competitive advantages. This is also the importance of product competitiveness mentioned earlier.

Regarding task publishing type, both Project Galaxy and QuestN support on-chain and off-chain task publication. However, off-chain tasks in Project Galaxy cannot be automatically validated on the platform and to a certain extent, require Gleam’s results and other credential data for reference. QuestN, on the other hand, can automatically validate off-chain tasks, which is slightly better from the perspective of enhancing marketing efficiency.

Regarding the threshold for task publication, Project Galaxy, RabbitHole, and Gleam all need to collaborate with projects of a certain scale and can’t fully support a project’s entire development process from 0 to 1. This low barrier has become QuestN’s biggest source of competitiveness.

（Image source:beincrypto.com）

In general, the automatic verification of on-chain and off-chain tasks combined with barrier-free access is the overall competitive advantage of QuestN. It is the secret to its rapid growth in a short time. It has an edge over similar products in terms of task publication and participation experience as well as its attractiveness to potential users.

By accumulating B&C-end users, QuestN will have strong advertising bargaining power in the future, enabling the platform to achieve long-term profitability.

By providing users with task publishing and participation as the main application scenarios, and quickly capturing the market with comprehensive product competitiveness, the platform will serve as a mainstream advertising channel. This model is quite common in many Web2 fields, whether it’s various news portals, streaming videos, e-commerce shopping, or other internet sub-tracks.

But for internet advertisers, the criteria for determining whether a platform is worth advertising on include the diversity and uniqueness of the user group. The former determines the breadth of ad coverage, while the latter determines the depth of effective ad placement.

Traditional internet giants’ advertising platforms all adopt the method of opening up to advertisers after accumulating a large amount of user data to achieve profits. In this process, users themselves have no autonomy over their data, nor do they benefit from the opening of their data.

Under the Web2 model, the traffic concentration only leads to the monopoly of advertising revenues.

By contrast, the biggest difference in the Web3 field is data ownership. From the source, on-chain data belongs to the users themselves. Although QuestN is trying to build a complete business model through centralized task publishing and traffic distribution, the SBT it designed for users is also a kind of digital asset owned by users. This allows users to obtain a share of the revenue from advertisers and even serves as a technical safeguard for users on the issue of whether to accept advertising and open on-chain data.

However, QuestN’s design of SBT is still in the initial stage, and it is exciting to see how it will unfold. It might adopt a form similar to Project Galaxy’s OAT to construct project equity tokens to extend further, although this is speculation.

Relatively speaking, QuestN’s effort in the advertising track has chosen a naturally fitting path. Even if the platform does not collect user data and merely attracts C-end users through task scenario publishing, under the premise of good product performance, Web3 projects naturally have marketing needs. Therefore, a win-win situation will still emerge. However, if this is the case, QuestN will not be able to expand more possibilities.

Conclusion

The different applications that have emerged in the Web3 field in the past two years are truly dazzling. It’s hard to imagine in traditional industries that products in different sub-tracks could have so many unique features, even the differences between the same type of products are still significant.

As a platform based on task tools, what kind of novel tool forms and application scenarios might QuestN evolve into in the future? This is still a question waiting to be verified over time. However, it can be foreseen that QuestN will continue to drive innovation, break traditional boundaries, and constantly explore new possibilities.

With its solid foundation and continuous development, QuestN is a product worth attention. In the rapidly changing Web3 field, it provides project marketing solutions, continuously focuses on user experience, and maintains rapid iterations and optimizations. Whether you’re a project promoter or a participant, QuestN works to enhance and streamline your Web3 journey.