Meet Zealy, a French startup you may already know as Crew3. Zealy helps web3 (and web2) companies get involved in their communities by giving them tasks to complete in exchange for various rewards.
The company has just changed its name to Zealy, indicating a greater focus outside of 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 any application,” co-founder and CEO Mathis Grosjean told me. Companies use Zealy in conjunction with a Discord server, subreddit, or other kind of community home to create gamified tasks for the most enthusiastic community members. Duties include creating user-generated content, promoting something on social networks, or coding a web page.
They pass those tasks on to their community so that they can perform them before, during or after a product launch, for example. Businesses 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 pass those tasks in a Discord channel. It’s a manual process and Zealy wants to automate those use cases.
“We help businesses onboard, educate, entertain and grow their communities without breaking the bank, and in a scalable way,” said Grosjean. Fredrika Lindh and Alexis Aftalion are the two other co-founders of the company.
But why would users want to perform those tasks? Zealy customers can award rewards for certain tasks. For example, users can get special status on a Discord server, get digital assets, merchandise, and more.
If these competitions work well, community members may want to complete as many tasks as possible to climb the leaderboards. Companies using Zealy can even use this data to identify the most engaged users in their communities.
Customers can complete community sprints with a leaderboard that resets after a few weeks. In many ways, Zealy is very similar to video game achievements and online ladder ranking systems.
When it comes to attracting new users to the platform, Zealy customers usually 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 example, Renault and PMU are already using the service. A total of 2,000 companies have tried the platform.
“In today’s market, every company in the world will potentially try to become a community-led company,” said Grosjean. And the Zealy team hopes their startup has a shot at becoming the operating system for community-led businesses.