The Disco Ball Announcement - By The Numbers

Every founder knows that major milestones are both victories to celebrate and invaluable chances to increase growth and create brand recognition. However, there's a big difference between being praiseworthy and newsworthy, especially if you're still in the early stages and not yet well-known. You must have a reliable communications plan that uses all the company's resources and execute it almost perfectly.

We recently had such an occasion and we are very pleased with the outcome. We also avoided some potential pitfalls. As a team, we discussed what went well, where we got lucky, and what we need to improve upon for our next major milestone - the release of Chapter 1 of The Disco Ball.

We are sharing this summary in the hope that it will be useful to others and maybe spark some comments and ideas that we can use in the future.

Growth KPI’s

StoryCo is an open storytelling platform where creators and passionate fans collaborate and co-create the next generation of story franchises, and jointly participate in their success. A successful announcement for us was all about increasing awareness and fostering an engaged community. Here are our KPI’s for the two weeks following our January 26th announcement:

The Multi-pronged Milestone: Narrowing Our PR Focus

In January, we achieved four major milestones: our $6M seed funding round, a rebrand from Story DAO to StoryCo, the launch of the Story.co website, and the announcement of our first story franchise, The Disco Ball. Visitors who register receive a free commemorative digital artwork (a soulbound NFT) called a StoryPass, that also allows them to collect additional images and rewards, based on their participation in the story.

We discussed the best way to communicate this news to gain PR coverage, attract a wider audience, and increase enthusiasm among our active community. We decided to lead with the fundraise news to get the necessary press coverage, then focus our communications on The Disco Ball release to drive traffic and engagement. Many business outlets will automatically pick up funding announcements, and referencing our all-star roster of tech, web3, and entertainment focused investors also helped generate media interest and views.

We focused the bulk of our press release and other communications on what mattered to us: the launch of The Disco Ball. We're fortunate that our service sits at the intersection of Hollywood, fan fiction, the creator economy, and Web3. Combined, that's a big, global audience.

Securing an exclusive with Insider.com was instrumental in helping us reach our key target audience, increase shareability and interest in our extended community, and likely contributed to other high-profile outlets picking up the story. To secure the exclusive, we were willing to share our investor pitch deck, which Insider covered in a separate article (we'll be discussing our deck and the strategy behind it in a separate post).

Funding drove most of the press coverage, but it was the news about The Disco Ball and our all-star production team that really drove interest and engagement. We created separate blog posts and Twitter posts to cover different aspects of the launch and the upcoming franchise, such as the backstory of our relationship with Kyle Killen and shelby and sandy.

Community Amplification

We knew from the start that getting our 300 Producer Token holders and broader community excited and involved was critical. So, on Discord we let them know ahead of time and we were very engaged—posting, responding, and encouraging sharing—on the day of the release. We also hired several new moderators prior to the announcement, which was essential for maintaining high engagement.

We had several posts on social media, including a pinned Tweet thread that covered all the points of the release and thanked our investors and supporters (see learnings below). Additionally, we reached out individually and via DM’s from our @StorycoHQ account, sharing the news and asking them to amplify it. This announcement Tweet got over 60k views, far surpassing any previous company post and helping to more than double our Twitter followers.

What Didn’t Go So Well

This wasn't just an announcement of an upcoming release and some amazing corporate milestones; it was the unveiling of a brand new site. We wanted to give visitors a sense of how amazing and different The Disco Ball story experience would be.

One of the unforeseen impacts was that a surge of visitors and registrants, including bots, brought down our Discord API and disrupted our member onboarding process. Additionally, we had a large content portfolio – posts, Tweets, podcasts, etc. – but didn't thoroughly QA our drafts. As a result, we mistakenly used the handle of a tequila brand instead of that of one of our major investors (oops). Fixing this mistake broke our Tweet thread and is still very embarrassing.

We didn't expect the surge of interest, so our Discord wasn't prepared for the influx of new members. We've finally figured out how to best engage the community and have some exciting plans in the works.

Summary

The reality is that we'll always be moving quickly with a small but highly talented team. We'll always be balancing speed and risk. With the release of The Disco Ball, the user experience and story quality can't be compromised. That's why we've expanded our team with more devs to ensure our platform delivers a great experience and integrates Web3 components for collaboration and co-ownership. We're now also focused on scaling our community, which has grown from hundreds to tens of thousands of members. Stay tuned!