The skill that turns you into a magnet for airdrops and followers
You pour hours of your life into projects and content, just to get zero allocations or views.
Life seems unfair, except that it isn’t when you understand this:
Time and effort do not matter, it’s the amount of value you provide to projects or your audience.
I keep talking about ‘providing value’, so here’s what it actually means:
Value is about achieving a desirable outcome
After reading @MH3NFT’s post, I finally found an ideal way to define what value is:
Helping someone achieve a desirable outcome.
In other words, it’s solving a problem that’s stopping them from achieving this desirable outcome.
The more painful their problem is, the more valuable they will see your solution (if it works).
Each person or project has a desirable outcome, and it’s up to us to:
Identify that outcome and the problem they face
Offer a compelling solution to solve it
Value is all about results, and it can’t be measured in this way:
Value is not based on the amount of effort or time
No matter how many hours you put into a task:
It means nothing if you don’t achieve a desirable result.
I’ve learnt this the hard way too, back when I started airdrops in 2023, where I was grinding out every single task and wasting countless hours.
Because I thought that the more hours I put in, the greater results I would get.
I just had to keep with the grind and hit as many tokenless projects.
But that’s not the case at all, even in the real world:
Why are those who work the least number of hours able to build the largest amount of wealth?
It’s because they’re solving problems at scale and helping others achieve desirable outcomes.
The path to wealth is made by providing value to others, and we do that in different ways to different entities:
Value to projects is meaningful, genuine contributions
This is not true for every airdrop, because it all depends on the goal they want to achieve:
Are they here for short-term hype, or playing the long-term game?
Those who want growth at all costs would incentivise short-term behaviours like vanity metrics:
Transaction count and smart contract interactions
Number of impressions on an InfoFi post
Number of messages sent to level up on Discord
These are the projects I would skip because they value metrics that can be easily gamed by Sybils and bots.
So the distribution will likely be diluted across thousands of wallets and there’s no way of standing out.
And why judgment becomes an important filter in selecting the right airdrops.
Instead, I’d look at projects that are looking to play the long-term game:
They would value meaningful contributions and reward them accordingly, just by being part of the ecosystem.
To prove that we are ‘worthy’ of receiving the airdrop, we have to stand out by providing value to the project.
Here are some ways to do it:
Onchain: Using the project organically without farming
Social: Write insightful posts about the project with depth that impact others positively
Discord: Genuine help in the community, instead of spamming gm posts
This is the way I define organic usage of a protocol:
We use it to make profits through our interactions, instead of mindlessly spamming transactions.
If we put all our hopes on the airdrop as the end goal, we will burn out because of unrealistic expectations.
But if we’re genuinely exploring protocols that we like and getting airdrops as a bonus, it’s a more sustainable way that protects our mental health, too.
Yes, I still do some farming of tokenless protocols, but I avoid getting my hopes up too high.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to just contribute onchain:
InfoFi and Discord have been other ways to provide value.
One of the major wins that I saw was how pix got a big airdrop from Succinct because of the PFPs she designed.
But that doesn’t mean that we should create PFPs just because it worked for one project:
Based on our current skillset, how can we do certain actions that lets us stand out?
We may not get the airdrop on our first try, but we keep improving our skills, and we’ll get the result soon.
Sometimes, we show our value through our social reputation, and we build it up this way:
Value to our followers is clarity and connection
Entertainment creators will get tons of views, but it’s completely different for education creators (like me).
Our views will be much lower, but we impact our readers in another way:
Helping them gain clarity.
If we can consistently improve their life in some meaningful way (like making money), they will trust us more because of the value we provide.
There are different ways to help others gain clarity. Here are some ways I’m aiming to do this with my account:
How to spot good projects to interact with
How to make money by using tokenless protocols
How to keep your wallet secure to avoid losing your footprint
If we keep solving problems for our audience, we build up our goodwill and reputation.
So it’s all about optimising for impact, rather than spamming posts or replies.
We get to build out our own flywheel for reputation with value at its core.
I’m focusing on these 2 pillars:
Connect with our audience through relatable content by sharing our opinions
Give our audience clarity with actionable content
But no matter how amazing we think our content is, it doesn’t matter in the end:
We don’t define what is valuable
Of course, everyone would claim that their contributions are valuable.
Who wouldn’t?
But the harsh truth is, either the project or our audience is the one who decides if we’re valuable or not:
A project decides if a wallet or social account did something meaningful that hit certain goals
Our audience decides if the content we write is helpful in solving a problem that they have
I’ve seen many complaints from others:
How they put in so much time and effort into one content, but get no views
How they’ve spent so much time interacting with a project, yet get no allocation at all
But we need to dissociate time and effort from our contribution, and focus on the impact and outcomes we can achieve for our audiences or a project.
If we don’t get the results that others are looking for, we aren’t giving value.
I’m not saying that this is a guaranteed path, because the game will always be rigged.
There will be others who you think have lower value contributions than you, but receive higher allocations or followers.
But I’ve found the best way to stay sane is by not comparing with others:
The time we spend thinking about others is time wasted, not thinking about how to improve ourselves further.
Value starts with doing
We provide zero value if we’re sitting on the fence and waiting for the right moment to start.
So instead of being scared of failures, look to do things and iterate on them in public.
Even if your contributions are not recognised yet, look to experiment and find ways to increase the impact of your actions.
I’m increasing my luck surface area by saying what I did onchain, as I shared here.
If you are tired of burning out by grinding mindlessly for airdrops, there is another way. To earn rewards automatically just by being yourself, build a reputation that compounds by joining the 30-Day Signal Creator Challenge.