Interview with Tako Head of Growth: How Vitalik's Mandarin AMA Platform Navigates Crypto+Social | Base Builder Talk

The growth of social products has always been a challenging topic. Even for established platforms, they may face new challenges and unexpected situations at any time. Last month, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) saw an influx of "TikTok refugees," briefly staging a cross-cultural migration trend. However, such short-term user flows cannot truly solidify into long-term value for social products. For any social platform looking for sustainable growth, building a strong social network, improving user retention, and staying competitive in the wave of new technologies have always been a difficult task.

In this interview, we delve deep into the professional background of Julie, the Head of User Growth at Tako, her thoughts on the development of social products, and how to build a sustainably growing social network in the Web3 era. From Farcaster to Lens to Nostr, Tako has chosen a unique technological path and adopted a user growth model different from most Web3 projects. Through precise user invitations and high-quality social relationship fission, they have gradually built a solid user base.

During the interview, Julie also shared how she leverages social networks to expand user groups, how she filters out the most suitable core users from a list of 4000 people, and how she improves conversion rates through one-on-one deep communication. Her growth strategy focuses more on quality rather than mere user quantity growth. She is also constantly exploring the potential of AI in social networks, envisioning the role of AI Agents in the future social ecosystem.

As an interlude, Mable Jiang, Chief Revenue Officer of FSL, announced on her social platform that between February 19, 12pm UTC, and February 20, 12pm UTC, there will be a flash text interview with Vitalik on Tako. Specifically, before the AMA, Mable Jiang will create a new AMA Circle "Flash Interview Circle" within the Tako App to collect questions from everyone. Each of Mable Jiang's questions will be a separate post in this circle, and Vitalik will reply within that circle by quoting my question post. The audience can comment under each of his responses.

BlockBeats: First, please have Julie introduce her background and how she entered the Crypto industry?

Julie: I participated in a startup competition in college, where I met core members of blockchain associations from Tsinghua University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, and other universities. They introduced me to the crypto industry. In Hong Kong, mainstream career choices are concentrated in finance, medicine, and law, with relatively low interest in emerging technologies. However, at that time, the blockchain industry in mainland China was already booming, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem was very active.

After the entrepreneurial competition, I maintained good contact with these early members of the blockchain association. Inspired by them, I co-founded the HKU Blockchain Club at the University of Hong Kong with an Indian classmate. The main focus was to organize and promote blockchain-related learning and dissemination, such as leading everyone to read whitepapers, inviting industry leaders to speak at the school, to promote industry knowledge, and raise industry awareness.

Unfortunately, at that time, blockchain was just a hobby for me, and the blockchain association was just an extracurricular club for me. Moreover, my academic and internship experiences in finance were smooth. Therefore, I did not immediately enter the cryptocurrency industry but chose the traditional finance field and joined a hedge fund as an investment analyst.

As an investment analyst, my work often required me to communicate with entrepreneurs of publicly traded companies, evaluate the company's strategic direction, management capabilities, and make investment decisions. However, I always felt that it was very unreasonable for a recent graduate without any business management or industry experience to judge a company's strengths and weaknesses and decide whether it was worth investing in.

I preferred to take matters into my own hands rather than make judgments and conclusions from an outsider's perspective. At the same time, I was increasingly inspired by the entrepreneurs and felt that I should start my entrepreneurial journey as soon as possible. Therefore, in late 2022, I officially joined the cryptocurrency industry and embarked on this brand-new entrepreneurial journey.

BlockBeats: What you are doing now is user growth, right? Social products are difficult to build, aren't they?

Julie: That's correct, user growth. It's challenging, but we see two certainties. One is that social interaction is a perpetual human need, and the second is that the underlying framework and technological roadmap of social products will inevitably evolve with overall technological advancements. The technology we use in social products today has undergone significant changes compared to the technology on which social products relied decades ago. It can be foreseen that it will undergo profound changes in the next few decades as well.

Based on these two certainties, our goal is not to build a Super App because it is not something that can be achieved solely by a team investing a significant amount of resources. Its birth often requires the right timing, favorable conditions, numerous innovations, and unexpected inspiration. We choose to focus on the core elements of these two certainties—the underlying technology and the social network.

BlockBeats: This is very similar to the concept of Farcaster

Julie: Yes, before starting this project, we spent over a year conducting in-depth research on the entire social industry and various Web3-integrated social products. We found that the ones truly outlining the future of social were mainly Farcaster, Lens, and Nostr. Among them, Farcaster's technical roadmap was considered the optimal solution at that time (and even now) by us. Therefore, we drew inspiration from their technical framework in our architectural design, while also learning from their growth strategy.

Our development sequence also began by building the infrastructure from the ground up. However, having only the infrastructure is not enough, so we also launched a core application as a user entry point to first establish a sufficiently large user base. In the future, this user base will support other developers within the ecosystem, enabling them to freely build social products on our network.

Currently, our social network's foundation is built on Farcaster V1. We are also developing our own framework, which is more scalable and composable than Farcaster, further enhancing the flexibility of the entire network.

How to Achieve User Growth for Social Products in the Crypto Space?

BlockBeats: What was the process from zero to one in terms of launching and scaling?

Julie: The most direct way of growth is, of course, starting with friends and acquaintances around you. So we rallied the entire team, including the founders, to invite their friends. Our idea was simple: if even the people most familiar with us were unwilling to use this product, it would be even harder to convince broader second and third-degree contacts.

Initially starting from scratch, the only reliance was on sincerity, vision, and a unique understanding of the industry. Convincing users through sincere communication, deep contemplation of social dynamics, a clear vision, and the ability to deliver actual products. A 15-20 minute phone call often converted a core user. Once the initial 10, 20, 50, 100 people who believed in our vision joined, they began spontaneously inviting more users, achieving natural virality.

This growth strategy was somewhat inspired by Farcaster's early development model—founder Dan personally calling friends to join. I did the same in the early stages. Starting around May or June last year, I made ten to twenty calls almost every day, inviting creators and entrepreneurs in line with our cultural atmosphere to join the platform. At that time, I compiled a list of 4000 Chinese-speaking CT users and ranked them based on their activity and content quality, prioritizing the top 1000 for invitations. In the end, I successfully converted several hundred high-quality users.

The advantage of starting from friends, high-quality users, sincerity, and a shared vision is that our social network is now very robust. Many of them are friends of the founders, and many are OG-level users who are already semi-retired. Their focus is not only on assets or wealth effects, but more on thinking about cutting-edge, long-term, and sustainable issues, such as the form of the next-generation social product, brain-machine science, longevity, sovereign individuals, and more. On the other hand, the social circle I invited consists mainly of my post-2000 friends who are very curious about new things like Burning Man, music festivals, and other fun activities. Therefore, the discussions on the platform revolve not only around making money but also involve interesting, long-term valuable content, which also gives the entire ecosystem a more sustainable vitality.

One thing we would like to highlight is that we are delighted to find that the proportion of female users on our platform is very high, which fills our platform with gentleness, warmth, and care, and I think this is a very good thing.

So far, we still adhere to an invitation system. Although we have built a group of highly aligned users, the overall atmosphere of the platform has not yet matured completely, so it is not the best time for large-scale growth. It is expected that from Q1 to early Q2 of this year, we will continue to operate on an invitation basis to ensure the tone of the platform and the quality of users. We are not eager to pursue rapid growth in user numbers but rather hope to lay a solid foundation at a steady pace to build a social network that truly holds long-term value.

BlockBeats: So in this process, have you established any key performance indicators or some structured frameworks for yourself?

Julie: Absolutely. I am a very results-oriented person. Moreover, the guiding principle of our team's work is "focus," striving to do every little thing and every link to the best of our ability. Therefore, in our growth, we did not choose to simultaneously enter multiple markets but rather divided it into different stages to focus on different markets. In the first stage of growth, our goal was to "break into the Chinese-speaking market."

The first step in growth is to find users who resonate with our tone, create a good target list, which is also the first indicator. However, creating this list is not easy; it requires a deep understanding of each person to assess if they fit our cultural atmosphere. Ultimately, I compiled a list of 4000 people.

Next, I prioritized these 4000 people. Since it is not possible to reach out to everyone at once, the priority of invitations must be considered. The main decision was whether to start with influential users or those who are easy to reach. I chose the former, even though it would be more challenging, but once converted, they can help attract more people to join.

The second core metric is the engagement and conversion rate. I gradually reach out to users on the list—either directly messaging them or through friend referrals. The interaction after reaching out includes text conversations, phone calls, etc. Some people understand and join with a simple text introduction, while others need further phone calls to convert.

Overall, due to the early target users being very precise, the conversion rate is high. However, in the DM outreach stage, due to a lack of trust, the reply rate is relatively low. But once a connection is established, the subsequent conversion rate basically reaches 80%-90%. This process lasted for about three to four months, with me constantly making calls and communicating every day, eventually successfully onboarding hundreds of people, establishing a stable early user base.

During the initial growth stage, I was almost solely responsible, and all users were invited in by me through direct communication. However, as the user base grew, it became challenging for me to maintain user relationships or guide them to be active on the product. At the same time, the product gradually improved, requiring deeper user engagement. Therefore, we began building an operational system, including content operations and user operations, to enhance user retention and activity. Three months later, as the foundational user base stabilized, our team also expanded. We began planning operational activities to drive users to participate more deeply on the platform.

The metrics also evolved to be more refined. Initially, we focused on user registration conversion rates, later expanding to account activity, including content quality, posting frequency, etc. Now we have developed a complete growth system, with dedicated individuals for each key metric.

Tako's underlying protocol has also made significant progress, with the API now open, and we aim to attract more developers to join the ecosystem. Therefore, my focus has now shifted to ecosystem growth. In the future, we will also incorporate developer growth metrics into the overall system.

BlockBeats: As social networks become increasingly open, these product insights into social products need to change.

Julie: Exactly.

BlockBeats: So, in this almost one-year process, which of your user acquisition channels do you find valuable, and which ones do you feel have been a bit of a waste of effort?

Julie: Once again, our guiding principle is 'focus.' We are in the early stages and have not yet reached the stage of scaling growth, so we have not expanded into too many growth channels. Because our goals are very clear, we aim to build a solid social relationship network, so our growth primarily relies on the natural expansion of the core user social network.

If a user has no social connections and only comes in through external channels, then this social product is likely to lack a sense of belonging, leading to a decrease in retention rates. Therefore, at this stage, we still insist on onboarding users in a social network manner rather than through traditional channel deployment. It can be said that our growth path is essentially a viral pattern based on social relationships.

When talking to many VCs or other industry professionals, the most frequently asked question is "How many DAUs do you have?" However, I believe that the premise of this question does not fully apply to our model and stage. After all, we are trying a new way of growth, and the entire industry is still exploring sustainable growth paths. Perhaps in the future, the way early growth of social products is measured will change, and people will no longer simply focus on DAUs but will ask how many phone calls you made in the early days? What is the user conversion rate? How many core social user nodes are currently in the community? How efficient is the spread of these nodes? These are the core metrics that better reflect the true growth quality of a social network.

BlockBeats: When you are making phone calls to screen users, contacting VCs, and dealing with various growth-related matters, what drives you to do these? Is it based on data, or do you rely more on your past experience? Additionally, the volatility of the crypto market has a significant impact on the product lifecycle. How do you balance these factors when devising a growth strategy?

Julie: First of all, the cycle of social and assets is not consistent. The asset market is volatile, but social networks have their own development rhythm. After team discussions, we believe that we are currently at a new starting point of a social cycle, and this trend may last for five years or even longer. We will not blindly follow market sentiment but will always be clear about what we want to do, focus on building and shipping, and try to shield ourselves from external noise.

The outside world may think that our growth rate is too slow. After half a year, there are only a few thousand users. But we are very satisfied with the current state because these thousands of people are highly stable core users. As long as we introduce new gameplay and mechanisms at the right time, we can quickly go viral. However, this type of growth should not be used too early or too much but should be pushed rhythmically at key points to ensure long-term sustainability.

The Broad Prospects of AI + Social

BlockBeats: How do you view the impact of AI on social networks?

Julie: I have a core belief that AI's role in a social network will become increasingly important, and in the future, the number of AI participants may far exceed human users. At an offline event, I heard the Godfish mention that within the next five years, over 95% of on-chain participants could be AI Agents. I think a similar situation will also occur in social networks. We need to think deeply about how AI and humans can coexist.

Based on this judgment, we are exploring the various roles and application methods of AI in social networks. On Tako, we are conducting many social experiments and always standing at the forefront of the industry for exploration.

Currently, the industry's attention to AI Agents has cooled down, entering a period of version iteration. The AI craze of the past period has cooled, and everyone has begun to truly consider the practical value of AI in the industry. Is AI just a chatbot or a simple reply guy? I don't think so. If AI can be combined with on-chain data and on-chain identity to achieve free on-chain economic circulation, this will open up greater possibilities.

BlockBeats: What about content?

Julie: I have also been thinking recently whether the content distribution mechanism of social networks will usher in a new AI-empowered model. Currently, the world's most advanced recommendation system is undoubtedly TikTok, but that does not mean it will be the ultimate form of social distribution. In the future, there may well be AI Agent-driven recommendation mechanisms that allow AI to provide more intelligent content distribution and interaction based on individual behavior patterns, on-chain data, and social network relationships.

To elaborate further, we browse content on centralized platforms, and the platform analyzes our preferences through algorithms, continuously recommending information that matches our interests, thereby creating an information cocoon and stimulating dopamine secretion in the brain to keep us immersed.

Another way is for everyone to have their own AI Agent, similar to your personal social proxy. This AI fully understands your interests, needs, and the direction of your future development. It does not simply cater to your short-term preferences but adjusts the way information is obtained based on your pace and needs. For example, do you want to continuously receive stimulation, or do you prefer to periodically explore new things? Your AI can autonomously collect, filter, and push content suitable for you.

In this mode, AI acts as your personalized hub, rather than relying on centralized platforms to maximize ad revenue. It is no longer a tool that passively accepts information but actively filters and recommends truly valuable content for you, shifting the content distribution mechanism from platform-driven to user-driven, achieving a more autonomous, more personalized information acquisition experience.

BlockBeats: Besides Tako in the past year, which growth strategy impressed you the most?

Julie: Of course, I have to mention Infini. First of all, their product itself is very solid and can meet user needs. From a product perspective alone, their competitiveness is already very strong.

As for growth, several of their growth strategies have been both rapid and effective. For example, infini has collaborated with major communities, KOLs, and project teams through custom-designed cards. I have learned that they have partnered with nearly a hundred communities, each with dozens or even hundreds of participating users, who are genuine trading users rather than just driving vanity metrics.

Moreover, through event marketing, infini conducted a highly impactful promotion during the New Year period using the "Core User Red Envelope Group," which successfully drove adoption of the new red envelope feature. The team distributed red envelopes, and key opinion leaders and group members grabbed them, creating a continuous interactive loop. In addition to the team's own red envelope distributions, many project partners in the group also participated in the "red envelope chain reaction." I myself also distributed numerous red envelopes, and the atmosphere of the red envelope event was truly fantastic! It can be said that this marketing campaign was not only precise and yielded a very significant ROI but was also enjoyable.

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