Meet Zealy, a French startup you may already know under the name Crew3. Zealy helps web3 (and web2) companies engage with their communities by offering tasks that can be accomplished in exchange for various rewards.
The company just changed its name to Zealy, demonstrating a greater focus beyond the web3 company. Last year, the startup raised $3.5 million in a funding round led by Redalpine. Other investors include Connect Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, Kima Ventures, Purple, STATION F, Founders Future, Pareto Holdings and multiple business angels from The Sandbox, POAP, DFNS, Starton and Pianity.
“Zealy is the action layer on top of all your applications,” co-founder and CEO Mathis Grosjean told me. Companies use Zealy in conjunction with their Discord server, subreddit, or any kind of community home to create gamified tasks for their most enthusiastic community members. Tasks include creating user-generated content, promoting on social networks, and coding web pages.
For example, relay these tasks to the community so that they can be completed before, during, and after the product launch. Companies can use it for new NFT drops, physical events, or major product releases.
The reason products like Zealy exist is because many companies have already implemented gamified tasks for their communities. But they use products like Google Forms and relay those tasks on Discord channels. This is a manual process and Zealy wants to automate these use cases.
“We help companies engage, educate, entertain and grow their communities in a scalable way without spending a lot of money,” said Grosjean. Fredrika Lindh and Alexis Aftalion are her two other co-founders of the company.
But why would users want to complete those tasks? Zealy customers can reward specific tasks. For example, a user can get special status on her Discord server, get digital assets, collectibles, and more.
If these contests work well, community members may want to complete as many tasks as possible to climb the leaderboard. Companies using Zealy can also leverage this data to identify the most engaged users in their community.
Clients can create community sprints with leaderboards resetting after a few weeks. In many ways, Zealy is very similar to 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. So this startup already has quite a few users. 700,000 monthly active users have completed his 100 million tasks so far.
Zealy was originally focused on web3 projects, but the startup realized that more traditional companies could use community tools like Zealy to improve their community strategy. For example, Renault and PMU use this service. Overall, 2,000 companies are testing the platform.
“In today’s market, every company in the world has the potential to become a community-driven company,” says Grosjean. And the Zealy team hopes to seize the opportunity for their startup to become a community-driven enterprise operating system.
