Slise.xyz Q2 2024 Investor Updates: Telegram mini-apps and new meta in Web3 marketing
Let's make ads great again
Summary
This quarter we strengthened our position as a revenue-generating business on the web3-native ad market and scaled our operations to the new markets. One such development that has already started generating cash flow is advertising in Telegram mini-apps, an emerging platform with a high volume of undervalued user attention. We were also able to double the ad volume in our home market—display ads in dApps—thanks to the efforts of our technical and BD teams.
If I were to characterize this period in our company's history, it would be a period of growth and experimentation. Some of the experiments will turn out successful, and some will die, only through taking risks can we achieve new heights.
Unique users reached: 3.7M
Annualized revenue: $0.6M (including $25k/mo from new channels)
Runway: Inf
Opportunities to connect: our BD team did a great job at EthCC this year and met lots of friends of Slise. We’re also increasing our Asian presence, starting from GM Vietnam, and now coming to EdCon in Japan and KBW in Korea.
Opportunities to help: no asks! We want to use this opportunity to thank everyone who made intros for our tokenized ads idea. We appreciate your support!
Are Telegram mini-apps the new quests?
As you might’ve heard, a whole segment of Telegram mini-apps (play2earn games basically, built in Telegram interface) recently grew to tens of millions MAU, mostly new to crypto and attracted by airdrops. The main source of monetization for such apps is selling their traffic via incentivized quests rewarded by internal points.
The main interest point for web3 marketers is that because of the semi-unlimited supply these users are cheap, and it allows growing Telegram products / social channels to big numbers at low cost. While this market is still early and there are not so many buyers who would bid for it, it presents a really good opportunity at a below-the-market price.
The structure of the offers usually presents rewarded tasks with 3-4 steps mostly directed to simple actions like sign up and follow. While there could be potential in developing more complex onchain sequences for a higher reward, for now, it mostly serves as a fast way of growing the vanity metrics which while not ideal can do a good service for crypto projects, especially at the pre-launch stage.
We, as a team, have a strong standing in the Telegram ecosystem and warm connections to the biggest projects like Notcoin that allowed us to roll out a dozen of partnerships with mini-apps in a matter of days. We are yet to see how this market develops, but even today it presents a lucrative business opportunity due to the high check sizes which are comparable to our largest deals in performance marketing.
Lowlights: tokenized ads idea invalidated
(Un)fortunately, our new idea of tokenized ad campaigns, while being noted as “curious” and “very interesting” did not resonate with investors enough to bet on it with their money, which provides us very helpful early feedback on the viability and future investment potential of the whole project.
Since a big decentralized project like this requires a lot of upfront capital on development and marketing before it can even launch, we had no practical ability to pursue it further and have shifted focus to more down-to-earth experiments that we can pull off to the first traction with our resources (like we did with Tg ads). Luckily, we didn’t spend anything apart from our time testing the demand for tokenized ads and still have a lot of room to build cheap prototypes and test ideas.
Our experience in this industry does us an invaluable service by providing insights into user pain points and market inefficiencies, and soon we’ll uncover a new iteration of Slise's vision, this time for the B2B segment, that may improve even your life. Stay tuned.
In the arena, trying stuff,
Oleksii, CEO