Rituals
How we keep customers engaged throughout a bear market
If you’ve ever stayed at a great hotel, you might not immediately notice what makes the experience so special. The chocolates on the pillow. The fact the receptionist greets you with your name and ‘remembers’ the last room you stayed in, the glass of champagne on arrival, the way the bedsheets are folded just so.
These little elements add up. The high-end hotel industry is a master of creating rituals. Rituals are small surprising and delightful elements of your experience that incentivise you to come back and back.
Software companies can also utilise rituals. If you’ve ever used Monzo bank, you’ll notice that if you want to get paid a day early, you’ll need to log into the app and drag the little cash icon into the wallet. There’s no functional need for this requirement. Indeed the experience is arguably better if I just click a checkbox once that automatically pays me a day early every time. But that’s not the point. Monzo wants you to come back to their app every month, they want you to experience the feeling of delight as you pay yourself a day early, and to think ‘Thank you Monzo, what a truly wonderful team you are.’
During the bear market, we need to make sure at Lithium that we create rituals throughout our app that customers keep coming back for and rituals that delight and keep people engaged with what we are building. In this article I’ll share a few ways in which we are using rituals at Lithium.
Community Rewards Mondays
We want to incentivise our members to be part of an engaged and helpful community. Recently we implemented a reputation system into our Telegram. Every month we pick a handful of community members who’ve contributed the most to the community discussions and reward them with $IONs tokens.
Tuesdays — Taco Tuesday
On Taco Tuesdays we publish our weekly investor update. This update is delivered by email, blog post and as a video on our Twitter. The update makes visible the hard graft we are putting in behind the scenes, from product updates to though-leadership pieces and everything in between.
Tuesdays are also our go-to days for starting raises. We think it's important to initiate raises on the same day of the week, so investors who are only interested in this aspect of the product know exactly when to check in.
AMA Wednesday
We love communicating directly with our community, talking to other founding teams, and sharing ideas and tactics. Our Wednesday AMA series, currently titled ‘Building in a Bear Market’ is our chance to interview some of the most exciting startups in the space, and for our community to listen in. This is an important ritual, every Wednesday our community knows they can tune into Twitter spaces, and hear the soothing tones of one of the Lithium founding team (if Jake’s microphone actually happens to work).
Product Update Thursdays
New shiny things are the easiest to get excited about. Every Thursday Tom puts out an update on what the product team has delivered the previous week. These updates are stored in immortality on our Future Venture publication.
Freaky Friday
Fridays are when we drop project rewards or any other giveaway rewards that we’ve been running. These rewards are claimable through our new project rewards feature on your dashboard. This is much preferable to airdrops. Having customers go to our site to actively claim rewards means they interact with the product, see the value and get the ‘a-ha’ moment on why Lithium is such a great investment.
Rewards — Trickle & Supercharge
When building addictive products, you want to provide a certain level of certainty, but you also want to distribute ‘hits’ at indeterminate levels. This is how we designed trickle and supercharge rewards.
Tricklecharge rewards are steady, predictable — your weekly payslip. Every 8 hours these rewards will be distributed to your dashboard, claim them or let them stack — it's up to you.
Supercharge rewards on the other hand are a bit less predictable, more akin to the quarterly bonus. These rewards are distributed based on trading volume and are designed to be released every month or so.
In summary, we are committed to building a best-in-class product that keeps users engaged throughout the bear market. By providing delightful ways for customers to interact with our product and content, we are going to hold ourselves completely accountable for delivering improvement to Lithium every single week.
