Recently, Alexis Ohanian released an article talking about the concept of Super Fan. This peaked my interest because his rationale made a lot of sense.
What is a Super Fan?
Basically a Super Fan is someone that uses your product and loves it so much that they start to advocate for it among their friends and social media.
You can draw parallel to the active Eth Maxis on X (I am one as well). We love Ethereum so much that we build on Ethereum, fight fuds for Ethereum, and advocate for Ethereum everywhere. I personally write a lot of contents on Facebook to promote Ethereum in Vietnam because no one (in my opinion) has done a good job locally. If you converted all the views contributed by the Eth Maxis to equivalent KOL deals, it would have been in the millions of dollars (maybe even in the hundreds of millions).
Now, not every protocol is fortunate enough to have an army of maxis like Ethereum, so let’s look at how to build a Super Fan program.
How to work with a Super Fan
First, you need to find a Super Fan. Look into your user base/analytics for someone that uses your product a lot and decently active on social (your call). In the case of crypto protocols, I think setting up a section on the website for Super Fan to reach out and prove themselves (via signing a message proving wallet ownership), or implement a notification feature in the UI (based on the connected wallet address, fetch a message from the backend that shows up in the product). If you have better ideas, send me some suggestions on privacy preserving communications with just Ethereum wallets.
Unlike a traditional KOL/Ambassador deal, a Super Fan uses your product so they know about the goods and the bads. No product is perfect for everyone. So brands need to understand this and empower the Super Fans with creative freedom. Let them praise, let them complain, as long as the conversation are civil and feedbacks are constructive.
In addition, find opportunities to elevate the Super Fans to center stage, feature them in your marketing videos, invite them to your events, incorporate them in your wide market campaign, get the Super Fans in front of more audience, align your interest with their interest.
There is no strict content schedule. I think a soft agreement on what the high level content direction and cadence is enough. Don’t force the Super Fan to talk about your product all the time, it gets repetitive.
Remember to compensate your Super Fan, respect their time and effort, work out something that fits your budget and fair. It’s even better if the brand can provide the Super Fan with ways to convert the audience to referral revenue (via a dedicated frontend).
The pros
You are building up a legion of loyal power users that vouch for your product to the public. With social media, it can spread very far and wide.
This is a form of organic testimonials, great for SEO and AI search. Social media AI models can pick up on these and make recommendations. I think very suitable for early stage teams.
The cons
I think Super Fan is not very scalable. Identifying and managing the program can be challenging, takes a lot of hard work. It’s a 2-way street, they advocate for you and you have to help building them up.
Results would come in slower compared to working with large KOLs (there are trade offs in terms of cost). So this is just one tool in your marketing arsenal.
Case studies
I have been a Super Fan of Uniswap for a long time. I told people about Uniswap, explained the protocol mechanism, taught people how to LP. In the last year, @jamesdelcasa and I have been setting up educational workshops with local universities in Vietnam to teach about DeFi fundamentals and protocols like Uniswap.
During Bifrost DeFi Singularity campaign, I also wrote and showed people the LP yield + rewards yield, leading to lots of traffic from Vietnam.
I also love KyberSwap because they have a really clean aggregator API. So I recommend plenty of developers to try out or integrate Kyber products.
So…
If you are building some new products/protocols, think about this Super Fan thesis as an initial marketing strategy. Build up these power users, provide them with opportunities, compensate them fairly. Don’t treat this like an airdrop campaign, or one of those yap-to-earn program. The power users are different. They use your product because they find it useful to them. So treat them with respect, give them the mic and let their voice reaching all corners of the internet.