Building in Public: Pixels' Key to Community Engagement with Heidi Christine | S4 E12

Heidi: 0:00

We implemented these things called energy parties, and so during our Twitter spaces and our live stream AMAs, you go to the theater in Terra Villa and if you're in the theater, there's popcorn flying everywhere, and just by being in there, you passively get more energy than you do usually.

Joeri: 0:20

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm honored to be joined by Heidi. Heidi, how are you?

Heidi: 0:33

I'm wonderful. Thank you so much.

Joeri: 0:36

So, guys, if you don't know Heidi Christine, she's the CMO of Pixels, the largest Web3 game by daily active users, with over 5 million total players. Pixels is a social casual Web3 game powered by the Roni network, focusing on farming, exploration and creation in an open world. As CMO, Heidi is responsible for community culture and crowd content creation and release management. Heidi has a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Calgary. Heidi, yeah, welcome. Tell me about, yeah. To kick things off, can you share a bit about your background and what inspired you to transition from electrical engineering?

Heidi: 1:24

Yeah, there was a long journey in between those two periods of my life. When I talk about my career path, it's usually met with some shock and awe because I've done a lot of different things. So we start way back when I was in high school. I loved math and sciences. I hated doing English and all of those sorts of things which is funny because I'm in a heavily communications-based role now but back then I knew I wanted to do something in STEM and so I decided to go into engineering and university ended up specializing in electrical engineering, which was absolutely fantastic. It was so relatable. Everything I learned were things that I was relying on every single day in my daily life. So it was a very interesting experience, but incredibly hard. It was very hard and when I graduated I moved back to Vancouver and I actually couldn't find an engineering job because it was an odd time of year for companies to be hiring new graduates. So I ended up working for a software company doing project management release management. Actually, I would train new users on our products and I would be flying down to distribution centers and training a lot of people on our software. I did a little bit of software development, mostly in SQL. Any developer is going to say that's not software development, but that's fine Database management. But I learned a skill set there of being that in between the client and the product teams and the developers, being that in between the client and the product teams and the developers, which is where I stand now.

Heidi: 3:08

After that job I'd been there for about two and a half years I felt very robbed of creativity. I wasn't doing anything creative and I always grew up doing a lot of different creative ventures. So I quit my job February 2020. Terrible time to quit your job, but I did. And then I downloaded the Adobe Suite and I just started teaching myself digital marketing. I bought an iPad and I started illustrating. I started working social media accounts. I was doing any kind of digital marketing you can imagine and the founder of that company actually met Luke and Luke said hey, I really need help in marketing. I just pivoted my company towards a game called Pixels in Web3.

Heidi: 3:58

And so she connected me with Luke and originally it was a week before Christmas and I told Luke okay, I can start next week, I can give you 20 hours a week. And he said great, because I was freelancing, right, I didn't see this as a full time job. I saw it as one of my you know gigs, and so the first week was 10 hours, because it was like Christmas time. The second week, I did the 20 hours. The third week it was 30. The fourth week, I don't even know.

Heidi: 4:26

I was in Miami with Luke doing like a full-time job and we sat down and had a conversation. I was like this is not a freelancing gig, this is a full-time job. And he was like yes, can you come on full-time? And the rest is history. That was two and a half years ago now and I look back on that moment. Luke and I sitting in like a smoothie shop in Miami was pouring with rain and we're just trying to game plan like what we need to do. We had 8,000 followers on Twitter and we were just about to do our NFT land mint. That was my introduction to Web3. I didn't know anything about it. So, yeah, that was my long-winded journey from engineering into what is now, yeah, CMO of Pixel.

Joeri: 5:06

Oh yeah, life can happen in that way. So it was not specifically that you were attracted to Web3, but just it came on your part. And then now you're in this space. What's important in Web3, also Web2 and more and more in Web3, is, yeah, community building. More and more in Web3 is community building. And then I'm wondering a game like Pixels, a Web3 game with a lot of success, how critical was community building? And then maybe comparing to traditional gaming communities?

Heidi: 5:39

Community is everything. Our community is the reason that we have been as successful as we are and, yeah, we would not be here without our community and the strength of our culture. And I think when you compare that to Web2, it really comes down to how the team is building. So traditional gaming studios in Web2 will build a product. They'll spend sometimes years building out a game and then they release it and then they do your traditional marketing or paid marketing, and sure they'll do modern marketing, they'll work with influencers or do all of the things, but it leads to community forming. After the fact, if that makes sense versus how we build and how a lot of other projects in Web3 build, is that we build in public and that's actually something that we've become known for, in that we're working alongside our community. We take their feedback, their opinions and whatnot, and we are constantly releasing new updates. And it means that the polish might not be as high as a Web2 game, but it's passion. It creates passion in our community, which means that there are people that have been involved in Pixel since day one for two and a half years and they would die for us. They are there with us the whole time. They're so passionate. This is their family, their culture, their community, and that trickles out to the next crowd of people.

Heidi: 6:59

Right, I was on a podcast several months ago and he broke it up to the top 5% players, and then 10% and then 85%, and it was like that 5% of those people that are hyper passionate, obsessive, love, pixels, the grinders of the game, they set the culture. And then that trickles out to the next 10%, which are those ones that are all of those things, but just less, and then the 85% would be the bulk of our players. And you need this. I don't want to call it hierarchy, it's more just amount of passion or whatnot, to set a proper culture and whatnot. So that's my long-winded response in that, yeah, community is everything, because it's not a long answer.

Joeri: 7:41

It's a good answer because it shows how important that it is. But across the community, you need to grow it, you need to nurture it. That's also a challenge, I would think. What are maybe some strategies that you have employed to grow the community and maybe what lessons that you've learned along the way?

Heidi: 7:58

Yeah. So number one is building in public right. Creating those relationships with your top users is absolutely key, and that means showing up in the fun and the good times and the bad times. So when Luke and I were in Miami two and a half years ago, the team was basically just Luke and I at that point, and I remember the community getting upset with us because this was during the bull market also. So people just wanted everything right now, like right now, and if you're not communicating with them all the time, they think you're rugging them. You'll get all of that kind of stuff. And so they were upset with us because we hadn't publicly announced anything for two weeks. And yeah, I know. And so I said, ok, Luke, let's do a Twitter space. We're going to do a Twitter space maybe every two weeks or something like that. And so we did a Twitter space and right then and there, that was a key moment in pixels history, because that Twitter space led us to doing them every single week.

Heidi: 9:01

And then, a few months later, I was like Luke, I want to stop doing Twitter spaces, I want to live stream. I want our faces on camera, because back then, in crypto and still today, people like to remain. That's great, trust me, we get hacked all the time because our identities are public, but that's like a way that you can really show up and show your face, and so, when things are not going as well, I'm still here, I'm still sitting here, and so, anyways, luke and I started live streaming on YouTube every single week and we've done it for two and a half years every single week, through the good and the bad, even right now on track to releasing chapter two, and it's gotten a bit delayed, which means that when we hop on our AMAs every week, we're like, yeah, there's something big coming. You guys just wait, believe us, we're working really hard. And people are like, oh, you're saying the same thing every single week and it can be hard to show up in those times, but it doesn't matter, we're there every single week. So that has been like my number one advice for people starting out in a project.

Heidi: 10:06

I would straight up say just live stream every week, just do an AMA every week, and I would say it's as simple as that. But it's not easy, and I actually found a video of us when Luke and I were together in LA two years ago and we hopped on the live stream and the first thing I said was oh, that's amazing, there's already eight people. We cared, we still did it. We had back then we had a rule that we would answer every single question that we got. It didn't matter what the question was, we would answer it.

Heidi: 10:34

Obviously, we can't do that now, and it went from eight people to 8,000. So it's a bit different. But when I hear companies now saying, oh, we can't do AMAs because they're a waste of time or no one will show up, and all of those sorts of things, I just think that that is not the right way to go about it. You need to set a standard. Also, luke and I have gotten really good at it because we practice so much. So that in itself has been a huge part of creating relationships.

Joeri: 11:00

Yeah, and showing up authentically as yourself answering questions a bit vulnerable, of course, because you get questions on the live stream. You don't know what you will get, because compare this to my podcast I also started from zero. I could say I speak with a Dutch, a Belgian accent. Nobody would listen. Of course, you start from zero, but just by showing up every time you're getting there. So that's a really good, a nice lesson. And so YouTube, the main channel for your contact with your audience. You mentioned also Twitter spaces. Is that also something that you're regularly doing?

Heidi: 11:33

Yeah, so it's grown. First of all, our live streams, our AMA live streams we start out giving updates and then we move into questions. That's the format. We live stream using a system called StreamYard which allows us to stream directly on YouTube as well as Twitter, and then we've also implemented in-game. So this has also been a huge part of it.

Heidi: 11:54

It's like, how do you keep the retention high for these events, and so what we do is in the Pixels game, you need energy to participate in gameplay, and so everyone wants energy. So we implemented these things called energy parties, and so during our Twitter spaces and our live stream AMAs, you go to the theater in Terra Villa and if you're in the theater, there's popcorn flying everywhere, and just by being in there, you passively get more energy than you do usually. And you can also directly stream our video from in-game by clicking on the microphone on the stage, and then we have an iframe pop-up so you can just sit there and watch us and get energy. So that's a part of the retention metric that we've done for gamers. So that's been really fun.

Heidi: 12:42

I love it and people love it. They always beg like when energy party, I need more energy and all of that. This is a bit of a tangent, but we have bigger energy parties where you get a lot of energy, and those are thrown all over the place in Pixels. We'll have them on the beach or in the bar, or in the field or in all these different places, and those are really fun. When you hear oh, we had 148,000 users in the game at the same time, it's during those energy parties.

Joeri: 13:09

I also feel your energy speaking like the energy, a positive energy. It's really good to have a vibrant community. I imagine you also get a lot of feedback or people give about the game. How do you handle that? How do you keep the balance between maintaining the vision of the game and all the feedback that you get?

Heidi: 13:29

keep the balance between maintaining the vision of the game and all the feedback that you get? Yeah, we get this question often and there's not really a direct answer. I would say we take feedback in a lot of different ways and one is so. We have official systems. We use this system called Kenny. It's a feature request system. Users can go and add their feature request and then they can upvote and whatnot, and we get pinged on Slack when it hits a certain amount of upvotes and I know Luke is constantly looking at it.

Heidi: 13:58

I'm hiring someone soon and I'm going to tell them to be extremely involved in that. And then we also have we call them the farmhands, so I guess their base level role. You could call them a moderator on Discord. But there's our top gamers most of the time, so they're playing the game all the time. They're really deep in it, so they know what's going on. So having direct contact with them is just it's fabulous, it's been incredible.

Heidi: 14:42

And then just staying active, like I try to hop in discord as much as I can and just have those conversations, because the minute I hop in discord there's 20 people responding to me with 20 different things. One of them is saying something weird. One of them is telling me they got banned. One of them is telling me this thing is broken. One is asking for this feature request, this NFT integration, all of that. So it's a really good source of, okay, what are people thinking. It's second, so that's really fun. And then there's Twitter, right. So Luke and I are super active on Twitter and people are constantly commenting I want this, I want that, and we get some really good ideas, and all of this is useful and important, but it's not useful and important if you're not actually implementing what they're asking for.

Heidi: 15:27

So that's going back to your question of how do you maintain the vision of the product while taking feedback? And that's this weird balance of building in public. And what makes building in public so difficult is that we're working with our designers, our internal team, our developers to create something that we think everyone wants as an incredible project. But is it actually what people want? And that's where building in public comes into play.

Heidi: 15:53

Of us, we have to leak a certain amount of what is coming so that we can get that feedback, to get this sense of what people are thinking. And it comes also back to community sentiment, and sentiment is something that we talk about constantly and that's how we measure kind of everything like how are people going to or enjoy this new update or is it something that we shouldn't bother wasting our time building because it's not going to be taken well, if that makes sense. So yeah, like I said at the start of this rant, there isn't really a direct answer. It's just a lot of work and it's this fine balance of what do you think is right, what do we think is right, what is also technologically possible. It's which a lot of our users do not understand, unfortunately, and that's where I fight battles with our developers.

Joeri: 16:49

I imagine and so measuring the sentiment see how people react to that, of course, also important. How do you measure the sentiment again?

Heidi: 16:51

Not usually there's. If you're looking for a data point, it's not that simple. It's more being there and active and seeing the responses and listening, having the conversation. Are people getting mad at me? Are people FUD funding these things? But is that? Fud can be good sometimes if they're doing it in the right way and they're providing feedback. All of this kind of goes back to if they're talking about us positively, negatively, whatever it may be, that means that they're passionate and they're here and they're excited about something and that's what matters. The minute they stop talking about us and pixels and the project, that's when it's sad and things are not going well right. Maintaining high sentiment is always the goal, but it's not always that way.

Joeri: 17:41

And what you mentioned. It's better that they talk about it, they give their opinion, because then they care, Then you have a community that is vibrant. If they don't react anymore, they are not caring anymore. But I also like that you're present on all these different platforms and, of course, YouTube and X, but certainly YouTube. Even outside of the three world people see this. You're building openly. So I guess there are some hurdles, of course, to get mass adoption, as we call it, getting more people into the space. I think YouTube can maybe be a solution because there you find, those people are there. Is there anything else you want to say about that, about the mass adoption for Web3 gaming?

Heidi: 18:21

you want to say about that, about the mass adoption for Web3 gaming. When I talk about mass adoption of Web3 gaming, I personally always go back to the culture of Web3, and the obvious things that I can bring up are what's it like being a woman in Web3? Not great. What's it like for minorities to come into Web3? Not great. Those are the obvious culture things that I think really need to be worked on and fixed and, in a way, I'm very proud to have such a public presence in Web3 as a woman, because I can really show other women that this is a fun, exciting place and it's safe for you to be here.

Heidi: 18:59

Nothing melts my heart more than actually. I have an example one specific woman recently told me that she saw me on a live stream and that's the reason she got involved with pixels was because she saw a woman. She saw my face, she saw me there and that just oh my gosh, that was incredible. The other side of web3 culture that needs work is the ux, the user experience. It's terrifying, right. It's so easy to get hacked, to get scammed trying to use exchanges, trying to set up a ledger, trying to do all of these different things. It's scary because if you're dealing with assets that are worth thousands of dollars, you one misclick and it's gone right, and so I think the user experience needs a lot of work for mass adoption to happen.

Joeri: 19:52

Feel that you are there, proud, shining, and I think it's great to see everything's. You're moving so fast for Pixels, a question that I always like to ask. It's an open question. So, at this moment, what are you now the most excited about for yourself, for Pixels, for things that are moving in the space?

Heidi: 20:14

We're at a stage where we're very privileged in that we have a huge user base and with that comes so many different opportunities and different directions that we can take a project that we can take pixels. We're in an interesting spot right now where we're an early stage startup but we're moving into that next stage and a lot of that is because of yeah, the pressure of we have a million daily active wallets. We have this stage that we're standing on, so where are we going to take this? There's so many different directions and we've talked about potentially acquiring other games and expanding the Pixels universe horizontally. We've talked about building out brand new game loops that still utilize the pixel token, which is super interesting. So there's just so many different avenues. So I'm so excited to see what works and what doesn't right. We're really proud of not being afraid to make mistakes and pull back and whatnot. So it's going to be. I feel like we're just at the start of a new adventure. I'm really excited.

Joeri: 21:24

Yeah, it's more of what works and yeah, I would say the mindset and the atmosphere in the Web3 space. I still feel like everyone is more happy or is more positive about everything that is going on. Heidi, I guess I have an audience which is mixed. It's Web3 people, web2 people interested in Web3 gamers, people that are maybe interested in knowing how this looks like a Web3 game. Where would you like to send those people?

Heidi: 21:55

Oh, I should say, head straight to our website and play, but I actually think one of the best places to start is by joining our Discord, joining our discord, joining our community, hopping in and just asking. Our community has a reputation for being incredibly helpful with new users. So if you just come in, you say, hey, I've heard about Pixels, I listened to this podcast and I want to get involved. I want to start playing. Where do I start? People will just immediately jump on it and say here's what you should do, here's where you should go. Let me help you out and it'll be really fun.

Heidi: 22:28

We are famous for our community and our culture and our community building and whatnot. So start there. Our website playpixelsxyz. You can head over there, make an account, chat with Barney, have a good time. We're also releasing Chapter 2 very soon, which is going to completely revamp gameplay. Honestly, it is so much fun. It's so much more fun than how the game is right now. So I cannot wait to have that in the hands of all of our users and just watch them play these new game loops and whatnot. Stay tuned for that.

Joeri: 23:01

That should be really fun. So, first thing, and then, of course, youtube and Twitter, or X we call it these days.

Heidi: 23:08

Yes, yeah, watch our AMAs, especially if you're English speaking. Luke and I speak in English every Wednesday at 12 pm Pacific, or I think it's 8 pm UTC. Yeah, wednesdays every week, and we give all of the updates there so you can get a sense of what's going on with the project. After the fact, we also add subtitles in about 16 different languages, so you can wait a day after and watch with subtitles in your own language. So, yeah, that's a good source of truth.

Joeri: 23:40

As my listeners know, there are always show notes. There is always a blog article. I will mention all your links in there so that people can maybe are now in the car listening and they want to check it out. They can do this when they are at ease. So, yeah, thank you, heidi, it was such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Heidi: 23:58

Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

Joeri: 24:01

Again, a really interesting episode with a lot of energy. Energy is really important, so if you think this episode is useful for people around you other entrepreneurs, Web2 gamers, Web3 gamers, just people that want to learn about Web3 gaming be sure to share this episode with them. If you're not yet following our show, this is a really good moment to do this. If you haven't given me a review yet, I would really be grateful for you, because it helps me to reach even more people and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.