In early April, five WOO staff and nine WOO celebrity partners traveled to Philadelphia for WrestleCon 2024. It was a rare test of putting a Hive-based project into a niche fan conference outside the web3 and crypto space.
Photo-drop at the end of the post!
Highlights
1️⃣ A big mission was to further the brand. And we were quite happily surprised to discover that “WOO Games” was on a lot of people's lips. We spent time prior to WrestleCon promoting our presence on X and seeding the fanbase with video partnerships with niche wrestling platforms like WSI on YouTube. Folks knew who we were and recognized WOO, from the wrestlers themselves to the fans.
2️⃣ We were also there to make some money. Our partners have pull, and they can sell photos of them or signed prints at a premium. We came away from WrestleCon with a nice profit that will be used to continue to support the development and marketing of WOO.
3️⃣ Relationships were another big goal. We of course connected with dozens of new potential wrestling partners. We also met some established game developers that are interested in talking about how to implement Hive web3 elements into their games both old and new.
4️⃣ Our partnership with the WSI folks deepened: they were there in person to do exclusive interviews with some of our partners. Each video segment WSI produces on YouTube comes with WOO and Hive branding plus calls to action. To date, we’ve clocked over half a million views, with 165K of those views from the Perry Saturn WrestleCon segments alone (over the past 6 days). We’ve started to see wrestling fans join the WOO Discord because of this.
5️⃣ Speaking of elevating Hive, we’ve confirmed that two more of our partners (Perry Saturn and Tajiri) will plan to start blogging on Hive. Tajiri will be writing in both English and Japanese. Partner @mikeywhipwreck has already led the charge (he loves writing on Hive!), and we’re optimistic that this will continue to bring Hive’s ecosystem and possibilities closer to a major market.
6️⃣ Finally, we made a great impression on the WrestleCon organizers, and we will continue to stay in touch with them to facilitate more opportunities (and of course, plan for another awesome showing at WrestleCon 2025!)
Things to Improve
There’s always lessons to be learned, and it’s been part of WOO philosophy to own up to mistakes, eat crow when we screw up, and strive to be better. Here are some points we took from the event where things could have gone smoother or better.
👉 Staffing. Five people from WOO and nine partners was not the ideal ratio. We needed way more people on staff to help manage the crowds, keep things moving, and help our partners do their thing. Due to the staffing shortages, we fell short on getting many high-quality shots, we had to abandon our livestream idea, and we likely left some money on the table just in terms of efficiency. Next event of this nature, we will be being more selective about our staff to talent ratio.
👉 Hive signups. We wanted to get users onto Hive at WrestleCon, but we all know that the learning curve and pitch is tough to non-web3 people (which is very much the wrestling community). We got a few sign ups, but learned that in-the-moment, people do not want to download or manage keys. Especially not on their smartphones. We built a “better” funnel and even mobile-optimized it but there still was too much friction in the process. Our short-staffing contributed (hardly any time for anyone to guide people through the sign up), but it was mostly another lesson in how we must vastly improve the onboarding experience across the whole chain. Custodial aka Lite accounts are almost certainly key here (and both core devs and projects like VSC are working on this!)
Photo gallery
Enough words! Here are a selection of some of pictures we managed to capture when not being swarmed by crowds.
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