Meet Zealy, a French startup that you may already know by the name Crew3. Zealy helps web3 (and web2) companies engage with their communities by giving them tasks that they can achieve in exchange for various rewards.
The company just changed its name to Zealy, which indicates a larger focus beyond web3 companies. Last year, the startup raised $3.5 million in a funding round led by Redalpine. Other investors included Connect Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, Kima Ventures, Purple, STATION F, Founders Future, Pareto Holdings and several business angels from The Sandbox, POAP, DFNS, Starton and Pianity.
“Zealy is an action layer on top of every application,” co-founder and CEO Mathis Grosjean told me. Companies use Zealy in combination with a Discord server, a subreddit, or any kind of community hub to create gamified tasks for the most enthusiastic community members. Tasks include creating user-generated content, boosting something on social networks or coding a web page.
They relay those tasks to their community so that they can complete them before, during or after a product launch, for instance. Companies can use it for a new NFT drop, a physical event or a major product release.
The reason why a product like Zealy exists is that many companies are already implementing gamified tasks for their communities. But they use products like Google Forms and relay those tasks in a Discord channel. It’s a manual process, and Zealy wants to automate those use cases.
“We help companies onboard, educate, entertain and grow their communities without spending too much money, and in a scalable manner,” Grosjean said. Fredrika Lindh and Louis Demeslay are the two other co-founders of the company.
But why would users want to complete those tasks? Zealy customers can grant rewards for certain tasks. For instance, users could get a special status on a Discord server, get digital assets, merch and more.
If these competitions work well, community members might want to complete as many tasks as possible to climb the leaderboards. Companies using Zealy can even leverage this data to identify the most engaged users in their communities.
Clients can create community sprints with a leaderboard that resets after a few weeks. In many ways, Zealy works a lot like video game achievements and online ladder ranking systems.
When it comes to bringing new users to the platform, Zealy clients mostly bring their own communities to the service. That’s why the startup already has quite a few users: its 700,000 monthly active users have completed 100 million tasks so far.
While Zealy originally focused on web3 projects, the startup realized that more traditional companies could use a community tool like Zealy to improve their community strategy. For instance, Renault and PMU have been using the service. Overall, 2,000 companies are using the platform.
“In the current market, every company in the world will potentially try to become a community-led company,” Grosjean said. The Zealy team hopes that their startup has a shot at becoming the operating system for community-led companies.