Blog Article
Looking Back on the Stellar Community Fund with Litemint
Author
Caroline Young
Publishing date
SCF
Litemint
The latest round of the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) is well underway, and we can’t wait to see all the submissions. Some of SCF’s previous winners are back to share their words of wisdom when applying and what they’ve been working on since the previous round.
For the first winner, we are covering Litemint – a true exemplar of all the different types of innovations someone can build on Stellar.
As a “tech company that creates innovative products to connect crypto enthusiasts and gamers to unique experiences,” Litemint started off with Litemint.io, a competitive tradable card game, and its complementary Stellar-powered wallet. More recently, Litemint launched a beta version of its NFT marketplace, enabling creators to mint NFTs on Stellar in less than two minutes.
Founder and developer Frederic Rezeau sheds light on his experiences applying to SCF, what winning SCF has enabled him to do, and future plans for Litemint.
Identify collaborators based on potential opportunities and gaps
The first time Litemint applied for SCF back in 2019, it was not selected as a project winner. At the time though, winning wasn’t necessarily the objective. Rather, it was an opportunity for Litemint to present its project to the Stellar community and get more involved with the ecosystem.
Realizing there was still a gap between Litemint’s product and users who were not immersed in crypto but wanted to get more involved, Frederic thought of how to better connect with this audience. After traveling to Mexico for Stellar’s first Meridian conference and meeting other ecosystem participants, Frederic then partnered with Stellarport – an already established ecosystem partner – who had ties to the audience that Litemint wanted to engage.
By identifying the gap and solution to said gap, Litemint was able to establish a Discord server of 1,400 players, receiving valuable feedback that they were able to incorporate into improving the product. Come next round, Litemint was selected as a project winner and has continued its upward trajectory since.
Engage with the community
Since a huge component of winner selection in SCF relies on community feedback and voting, it is vital to engage with the community.
Looking back, Frederic speaks to the first time Litemint had applied and the lessons learned from that experience. By missing engagement in the first round, the Stellar community couldn’t see what Litemint was doing, much less have the opportunity to ask questions and learn more about its products.
Frederic recommends getting to know the Stellar community as much as possible and establishing long-lasting relationships. The Stellar community is active on many social media channels, including Reddit, Discord, Twitter, and more, meaning there are plenty of ways to engage and interact with members.
By building up trust with the community, SCF participants receive the collective knowledge of what works – and doesn’t – on Stellar.
Launch the product, listen to users, and fix – then you can scale
One benefit of setting up their own community hub was the type of feedback a product can only receive from devoted users. Frederic soon discovered that users had difficulty trading cards or gaming items that they unlocked – affecting a large part of the gaming experience. That’s when the idea of an NFT marketplace came to life.
The NFT marketplace is currently in beta while Litemint gathers quality-of-life feedback from its users. Litemint’s most pressing issue is to reach feature parity with other marketplaces on other chains, which is why it is focusing on releasing new features such as collaborative minting and the ability to mint videos – all features that their users want. Additionally, Litemint is currently working to integrate card, ACH and wire payments with USDC.
So far, growth on the NFT marketplace has been organic. More than 1,400 NFTs have been created in the months since launch, with 30+ hosted artists and 65,000+ tradable units on the Stellar Decentralized Exchange.
By winning funding from SCF, Litemint is now positioned to succeed and scale – marketing-wise, team-size, and product-wise.
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If you have an idea , we highly encourage you to apply to SCF’s current round. SCF is currently accepting project submissions until August 22, 2021. We also have some tips and tricks to prepare you for success when applying this time around!