Speaker 1: 0:00

It's not a browser, it's not an app. It's a messaging app and it's peer-to-peer messaging. How do you leverage that? And that's the challenge that you've got to constantly ask yourself how can you use the tools at your disposal to get awareness and distribute your game?

Speaker 2: 0:15

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Juri Bilas and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm really happy to be joined by Coco. Hello Coco, how are you?

Speaker 1: 0:28

Hi Yuri. Yeah, I'm very well, thank you, and thank you so much for having me on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here today.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Yeah, totally excited, guys. If you don't know Coco, her real name is Komal Amin, but I will say Coco, as everyone knows you. As Coco, she's the head of growth and marketing at Goat Gaming, and Goat Gaming is, if I have it right, it's a rewards-driven gaming platform developed by Mighty Pair Games. It launched in 2024 to pioneer a new model of accessible, ai-powered Web3 games, builds around fast, competitive gameplay, especially on Telegram, where users can play, win prizes and earn crypto. So, yeah, actually a few people I've met that want to come on a podcast that are in Telegram tone and gaming. So welcome to the show, coco. Yeah, I look at your your bio. You have a fascinating journey from merrill lynch to png to ai native gaming, so I'm curious to see how this all connects with what you're doing today my career journey has always been driven by curiosity.

Speaker 1: 1:40

I've always always taught to follow what my curiosity leads me and I'm naturally quite a competitive person. So when I first got into Merrill Lynch and started working there, it was, to be honest, driven by my peer group at the time, and it was the thing to be an investment banker. But I quickly realized when I jumped in that's not quite my vibe and as a youngster at that time you're kind of figuring out who you are and what you're interested in. And then I did my next role at P&G and again a big corporation similar in many ways to Merrill Lynch, but very different industry. But again, I feel like I have a desire to be creative as well. So that's why I jumped into being an actor, and I ended up being an actor for about 10, 15 years and then moved into, well, I guess in 2020, when the pandemic hit.

Speaker 1: 2:30

I explored other things, because acting just completely stopped overnight. I found crypto. I fell down the rabbit hole and have been in love ever since and I realized in that moment, as I started getting deeper and deeper into it, that it has a really amazing and exciting space, that you can be curious, you can constantly be learning. The learning curve is very steep, but I think I thrive off that. And then I got into this role at Mighty Bear Games because it brings together a lot of what I did back in my earlier part of my career and blends together creativity and trying new things. And yeah, that's how I came to be here nice.

Speaker 2: 3:08

Actually, it's always interesting to hear from people how things come together, because now I'm also in web3 ai, but before that I had a business analytics company and investment club and social media marketing and all of that came together like everyone has his story really interesting. And now, of course, you're with code, with CodeGaming, doing a lot on Telegram, so I'm curious to talk a bit about that. What is why Telegram? Why is it misunderstood as a channel for gaming consumer products? I'm curious to hear it.

Speaker 1: 3:41

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space, telegram, and when we came across the opportunity for gaming, which was this time last year, I think there were a lot of different stories being told around Telegram that it was a tap to earn place to play games. It was a messaging app and there was a lot of people who, I think, dismissed it because it felt like just another meta, just another boom and bust cycle. That often happens in crypto space and Web3 space. But we actually took a step back and really kind of dug into really what the signal that it was trying to tell us. Right, because if you think about what Telegram is, it's a much grander ecosystem than just deploying a game and it's been around for much longer and it has well at that time, almost a billion users, but it's crossed the billion user mark.

Speaker 1: 4:29

And so we thought, okay, this is the type of game that's launching this tap to earn that people, some people like, but many people who consider themselves gamers don't find it as an interesting prospect. But why can't we take this meta, take this idea and build on top of it? Because clearly there is a distribution opportunity there for anybody who wants to build and our journey from throwing ourselves into it, for the last year has been quite an interesting one, which I'm quite excited to talk about today, because you learn a lot, right. You learn a lot from exploring space that nobody else has done before not many people and you're kind of building as you go and you're building while the ecosystem itself is building. The infrastructure of Telegram is rapidly evolving day to day, and so you're jumping from thing to thing trying different experiments, and so far it's yielded really interesting results, and I think it's just going to get better from here, so I think we're in a good position.

Speaker 2: 5:25

Yeah, amazing. You mentioned there's so many users already on Telegram and, of course, now Goat Gaming, so I'm trying to couple the things. What is actually the insight that you got? Okay, there is so many people already on Telegram, but they are not doing games, not in Web3. How do you get them?

Speaker 1: 5:44

I would say into gaming and into Goat Gaming. So the first I guess the first wave of users that came onto gaming is a very small section of Telegram's overall user base who discovered and know about the concept of mini apps, right, and that's a whole learning process in of itself, and so we were able to catch that wave and onboard you know, over 5 million users quite quickly with the mechanics that you can use. And you've got to step back and think okay, telegram, it's not just a standard distribution platform. You know, it's not a browser, it's not an app, it's a messaging app and it's peer-to-peer messaging. How do you leverage that? And that's the challenge that you've got to constantly ask yourself how can you use the tools at your disposal to get awareness and distribute your game? And so we leaned into the options at the time. And that's the messaging, that's the connection, the social connection, and that deep social connection is a really good way of growing. So we had really strong organic feedback loops, referral loops, that people just basically send messages to their friends and instantly they can jump into our game without having to leave the platform at all. And knowing that and leveraging it is one of the ways in which we managed to capture a lot of users and a lot of attention right at the beginning.

Speaker 1: 7:01

But as the ecosystem has grown, there is a lot of other ways in which you can grow your app and I think the key to it is understanding the different activations that go on side of the Telegram ecosystem, staying on top of the feature releases and also understanding that it is like a separate cloud. It's like a separate bubble in of itself. It doesn't operate with a set playbook and it doesn't operate with the same sort of rails that we're used to. You know you don't have the same sort of ad networks and so really accepting that and then leaning into this new way of working and so I can give you an example right, normally I've been a Telegram users for many years, right, and often you get random DMs from people wanting to do business with you and 90% of the time you're just ignoring them because you never know what they could be spam or whatever.

Speaker 1: 7:51

But actually I realized after quickly into building the app that there's a lot of gems in and amongst the people that come in and outreach to you and you've really got to explore and dig and see how the opportunity could play out, because actually there's a lot of opportunity and that's just the way business is done.

Speaker 1: 8:10

It's very quick and dirty, it's very one-to-one, you jump into group chats with businesses that are really starting up and quite messy, and as long as you have certain guardrails in place to protect yourself, I think that you can find some really interesting source of users. And it's a grunt game, I think. Like I said, the whole app is growing so rapidly. Every week there's a whole set of new channels, new users, new people coming together, and even knowing the existence of those channels is an opportunity to tap into a new user base. But you need to do the work to actually find those users, know who they are and how, to say, approach the owner of the channel or have an ad network to push ads into those networks. It's different strategies trying and testing and then moving on to whatever's hot right now yeah, it's, indeed it's a new world, an untapped world, maybe.

Speaker 2: 9:03

That I I heard. I was actually speaking at mimcon in in um in lisbon and it was also the telegram stage telegram event we are talking about. That is so. You know, it's so new, so fresh. You mentioned that 2024. It's, it's last year and also, yeah, it's, it's within telegram. You don't need to go to the App Store, you don't need to go. You know that makes things much easier. Of course, it's changing all the time, so for your marketing strategy, it can be a challenge. As you just mentioned, you recently launched AlphaGoats, if I'm correct, which is called the chat GPT moment for gaming. Can you talk a bit about that?

Speaker 1: 9:42

Yeah, absolutely. Moment for gaming. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, absolutely so. I think, um, people sometimes think that, uh, new tech is complicated, and I think we're used to that.

Speaker 1: 9:50

In terms of web3, right, whenever you had a project or a product launch, there was a huge education element to it how it works, how the blockchain is very important to this product and all that kind of stuff. What I absolutely love about AI is that it speaks for itself. You don't need to really do an explanation. If you're over explaining, you're doing it wrong, in my opinion. Right, I've seen so many products come out in AI and you quite quickly understand what the magical moment is, whether it's instantly generating a photo or image, or being able to control specific things around writing or images or anything really right, even productivity tools.

Speaker 1: 10:28

And so when we came up with the concept of AlphaGoats, we knew that the way to people's, I guess, wallets and hearts, which are two very important things, is to just showcase it. But of course, we sold them before we actually built them. So we, we did the whole hype cycle thing, as you mentioned before. Was we? Uh, there was a, we generated the excitement, built a whole campaign and sold the alpha goes, but then the way in which we have now launched this product is to have this proof of concept and actually have it do all the exciting things that people are expecting of it.

Speaker 1: 11:05

Right, we have this we call it an AI community manager and KOL or influencer that is sitting inside of our community channels and on social media, that is connecting with our audience and has context between X and the game and Telegram, and so this kind of interaction, which is highly human, highly personal, has really kind of elevated the community cohesion that we have. And I can talk a lot about the different campaigns and activations that we've trialed with this AI character, but I think it's definitely show don't tell with delivering AI products, and so the AlphaGoats, in answer to your question, is essentially what we're creating with our AI character, but eventually the people who bought an AlphaGoat will be able to get their hands on their own one.

Speaker 2: 11:56

Yeah, it's interesting, I would say this Web3 aspect of it and the ownership aspect of it. Telegram has a lot of users. Most of them are not into Web3 aspect of that and the ownership aspect of it. Telegram has a lot of users. Most of them are not into Web3. You mentioned community education. Are there indeed specific campaigns to explain to people what it is owning something on the blockchain, on Telegram?

Speaker 1: 12:18

So with the AI character. So an AlphaGo, essentially for your listeners. An AlphaGo is essentially an AI character. So an alpha goat, essentially for your listeners. An alpha goat is essentially an AI character that you own that will create content for you, will play games inside of Goat Gaming for you and essentially is like a revenue generator and a mouthpiece that kind of promotes whatever you want it to promote. Really, you custom build it and so right now, the proof of concept is called Amy and she's basically promoting us, because that's what we want her for.

Speaker 1: 12:46

She's a spokesperson for Goat Gaming and so she has her LLM and that's like her database, in layman's terms, has all the information that is in existence about Goat Gaming, and then we feed her daily with updates and things like that, so she can then interact with users. At a basic level, she's like player support, but at a more advanced level, she can do community activations, run campaigns, outreach to partners and do partner campaigns. And she also the next rollout for currently she can't do this, but she will have the next rollout which will be actually activating and connecting things on the blockchain so she can distribute rewards or set up things for people on the blockchain, similar to if anybody's heard of like banker bot on base right, but it's more of like a personalized experience as opposed to a bot experience yeah, I love that.

Speaker 2: 13:40

Personalized that's what people want these days, of course. You get so many messages, many spam, so many things that look the same. Actually, I gave a talk about AI and about you know. You get all these AI messages every day and it all looks the same, so personalized is really the way to go. For me means also you have different cultures, different geographies, different people that are actually into good gaming. How do you adapt your playbook to grow, maybe in certain countries or certain areas? Is this specific or are you focusing on this global growth?

Speaker 1: 14:22

No, currently we're focusing on people who really want to play games and have a competitive edge and enjoy casual competitive games. Right, because still we think that even though the crypto industry is growing, I think it still has that kind of barrier to entry Because actually a lot of what we do, the crypto side of it is quite hidden, it's abstracted away from the players. So really we want players who really enjoy the experience of talking to Amy, playing games, being in a community and connecting via all the different activations that we have and the different online experiences that we provide. So, in terms of geography, I wouldn't say that we're targeting anything in any country specifically, but some of our geographies I'd say that we are doubling down on that. Our kind of bring areas are USA, brazil, united Kingdom, france and Indonesia.

Speaker 2: 15:17

Yeah, Okay, interesting.

Speaker 1: 15:19

So it's quite global.

Speaker 2: 15:21

Yeah, it's quite global because, as a marketer, you know you want to have your strategy, you want to have your persona. But I guess, like the Web3 space, if you want to have those people, they are like. You know, you find them everywhere, actually, and they have a specific mindset. Ai, too. I love what you can do with AI for content creation In general. Are there you mentioned already personalized experiences? Are there other ways or things you can say AI is working well for us for this, or it's really still experimental or not working for other things?

Speaker 1: 15:57

So, when it really comes to AI in your business or in your job, Actually, the AI side of our business has been growing rapidly into more than just what it has been for the last few years. So we actually started tinkering around with AI back in 2022. And this was, you know, quite early before the whole wave of mass adoption of AI. And it was really around this idea of how can we iterate, bring ideas to life and fail them as quickly as possible if they're not working. And doing that in the gaming industry historically has been quite hard right, because games take time and production cycles can last anywhere from months to years. And so we decided, okay, we need to start finding ways in which to condense this. And AI started to really look and we were lucky we had some really like AI forward people in the team who really kind of knew what they were doing, and so we condensed these cycles down to like weeks and days in some cases, right, and so we were testing and iterating, testing and iterating so it allowed us to find product market fit quicker, and now we're kind of seeing that push into. The tools that we've used are kind of pushing into and the mindset are pushing into like our growth side and our community side.

Speaker 1: 17:10

So we recently ran this activation with our Amy AI character where she owned some of the gifts, which is kind of a big trending activation currently on Ton, where they're essentially Ton NFTs and these NFfts the ai agent called amy. She decided to just run a campaign and say, okay, there's this game I want to run. It's called last chance showdown and what you do is you basically steal the nft through a button inside the app, inside telegram chat. You steal it off another player and you have to hold on to it for five minutes and if you hold on to it for five minutes and if you hold on to it for five minutes, you get to keep it, but someone anyone is allowed to steal it from you within five minutes. It's a highly social game and we just ran a test of it last week just to see because obviously it's new tech and the whole system is is new.

Speaker 1: 17:58

We wanted to see if it worked and that just exploded straight away because I guess all the things, all the kind of highly viral mechanics kind of came together all in one place where you could share about it. You could promote it as something that was trending quite strongly at the time, which is Telegram GIFs, and on top of that just, our community is highly competitive, right. So as soon as someone had it, there were people who just refused to give up the bear that they could get. So every time they kept stealing it. It costs money, mind you, to steal, but people just wanted to win and that's something that I know is a very strong characteristic of our community they're highly, highly competitive and it did really well.

Speaker 1: 18:39

Some of the stats I would say from that is like we had over 4x the average engagement inside of our app, and that excludes the messages sent by Amy. And where AI really kind of excels in this is that we've kind of made her character a little bit off the wall. She's a bit she's sharp, she kind of responds to almost everything and she really kind of makes people laugh in the community, even when you have certain people who may be coming into the community and maybe don't have good things to say or are upset by something. We've created her in a way where she remains respectful but able to address the queries and concerns of people. So then, in this kind of highly active and competitive engagement, she was kind of fun and silly and grew that whole persona for her, because she was the one sort of leading the whole game.

Speaker 2: 19:31

I love that. You make me really sound like a friend, you know, like you're part of the community. You mentioned the experiments that you mentioned already. Uh, some results. Is there maybe one lesson that really fundamentally changed the way you approach marketing in this space, based on all the growth experiments that you did?

Speaker 1: 19:50

yeah, I think that one thing that I've really learned is that if you want to succeed in these sorts of spaces, being able to test, capture data and then iterate really quickly is really important, and I think now is honestly an amazing time to do that. I've always had a blocker internally as a marketer as to when we have these growth ideas. So many growth ideas have been left on the table because there's priorities that the engineers have to prioritize. It's just a problem that everyone has, and now we're able to take the load off the engineers more and more and more Like we're coding our own productivity tools. We're coding our own content, ideas and shipping them without asking a single engineer for any help, and what that means is it unlocks a level of creativity that we've just never seen before. We're creating TikTok channels where you trial different messaging, different characters, and I don't need to sit there and prompt or talk to somebody in the art team to say, hey, should we try this and then wait a few days? Should we try that or wait a few days? It's a very slow process.

Speaker 1: 21:01

I remember I was in another company I worked for. We had a TikTok channel, two TikTok channels with over several million followers and the way in which we generated this following was these 3D cute characters. And the whole cycle was like this You'd capture the trends on TikTok and you'd see what's trending, what people are liking, what's capturing the attention of people. You'd feed that back. You'd get the art team to then choose one, create a video, test the video and then send it you know, publish it, and that whole cycle could take three, four weeks and sometimes they landed flat on their face because the trend is done and dusted within one to two weeks. Right, you can't be shipping a video two weeks after the trend has finished. And now I can see a trend and I can pick up on that trend all within 24 hours.

Speaker 2: 22:04

And so the data and the feedback loop is so fast that it's actually just making this job so much more fun and exciting to do. Actually, I love that you mentioned TikTok because I as a marketer, you know, as a content creator, I also suggested this to a few web treatments. We can do stuff on TikTok if you want to reach the masses and not only the web. Three people you know because they are not into TikTok app, but there is still a lot of if, if you are on TikTok.

Speaker 2: 22:23

I'm on TikTok now, created my new channel, actually AI, with Yuri talking alone only about AI. Uh, and see what is resonating with people, like you say, and the algorithm is really good. So you, you know, you get the right people to follow you, you get the right content and it can really help you. Like you said, you have direct feedback, it can go, you can reach the audience algorithm. Make sure that it does or it doesn't. So, yeah, I love that that you mentioned that. And now, in general, um poco, what I always love to ask is uh, yeah, you know, you obviously, obviously are very passionate about everything that you're doing. What are you now the most excited about? What makes you the most happy, you know, with everything that you are doing with Goat Gaming and Web3 Gaming.

Speaker 1: 23:06

I mean, I think I mentioned it a little bit already, but I think what really excites me is just the path of what AI can unlock with gaming, with Web3 and with Web3 gaming.

Speaker 1: 23:19

I think what we've seen in the last few years is Web3 gaming has had very different chapters of its growth and there's been a lot of experiments and, to be honest, I don't think we've yet seen anything break out and really hit mainstream success in the Web3 gaming space.

Speaker 1: 23:37

But I think now with AI it's almost like an engagement layer, as an abstraction layer to again further abstract the kind of Web3 side of things that always seem to trip up new users, always seem to trip up new users but also to keep people entertained, to allow people to have tools in their hands to kind of meaningfully contribute to ecosystems.

Speaker 1: 24:02

I think it's going to come together in ways that I just don't think we possibly can imagine at this moment in time, because if I'm talking about this and I can do this as an individual team member, then anybody in our community can in theory, as a team, individual team member, then anybody in our community can in theory come up with so many creative ideas and grow communities and entire companies out of other companies from this. So I think we're we're always trying to experiment, we're always trying to find new ways in which to not only grow but delight our community with, with the tools and the games and the experiences that we make. I'm really excited about, like, how this is going to play out, because nobody knows how it's going to play out at the moment.

Speaker 2: 24:42

Absolutely, and it's interesting because experiments indeed, you don't know what is going to work if you do new things, not what everyone has done before. This makes it also interesting to follow the space to join. So if people now Coco, they indeed are now really curious to know about Goat Gaming and everything that you are doing, where would you like me to send them?

Speaker 1: 25:06

I'd say the first place is to check out our ex-account. So PlayGoatGaming that's where we share the majority of everything that we're doing. You can keep up to date with our sort of milestones and fun and exciting activations and then join our community. So we have a Discord channel, but we also have a Telegram channel which I think definitely should jump into, because it's much more frictionless to jump between the product and the community, and that would be the Goat Gaming Tribe on Telegram. So please do head over there. You can talk directly with us and learn so much more about Goat Gaming and what we're doing.

Speaker 2: 25:42

Absolutely. Actually, I will directly join there after the podcast recording. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I didn't ask a question about Discord. Of course Discord Gaming it's also something that people put together, but but yeah, it makes sense to be on telegram. You know, it makes life just easier. As my listeners know, coco, they are always show notes. In those show notes there is a blog article, there are the links. The telegram channel will be mentioned in there, also the the x account. So yeah, it was a real pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 1: 26:15

Thank you so much. I mean it's really nice talking about things I'm passionate about, so appreciate you having me on.

Speaker 2: 26:20

Yes, indeed, coco is very passionate about this. I'm also passionate about this podcast, about you listening to this, so if you have feedback for me, yeah, please reach out to me Also, you know people around you might also be interested in this podcast episode, so be sure to share this podcast episode with them. If you haven't clicked on the subscribe button yet, this is a really good moment to do this. This is also a really good moment to give me a review. If you haven't given me these five stars yet, it would help me reach an even bigger audience and, of course, I would like to see you back next time, take care.