#368: Leveraging Playbooks for Growth
📖 From ecosystems to apps, it seems like everyone's publishing a playbook
Happy $100k Bitcoin…again! The milestone may have lost some luster compared to the first time back in December 2024, but it still brings a sense of joy and excitement. Sorta like how your favorite holiday comes around every year. Anywho…
Playbooks
One trend that’s been popping up on my radar has been publicly published playbooks that share best practices from ecosystems, platforms, and apps for various audiences they’re trying to attract.
Ronin’s Growth Playbook
Ronin (a gaming-focused blockchain from the team behind Axie Infinity) recently published the Ronin Growth Playbook, covering topics ranging from Pre-Product Launch all the way to Post-TGE strategy.
Naturally, this caught my eye since this is a growth-focused playbook, but there were several other elements that made it notable.
Ronin Wallet CTA
When visiting the playbook page, the CTA at the top right is ‘Install Ronin Wallet’. Although that’s not the primary goal of the Playbook itself, it’s a great entry point for curious builders to explore the Ronin ecosystem and use its products.
The playbook also serves as an initial touchpoint that leads to other common resources like documentation and grant info.
Playbook Sneak-Peeks
2 of the 15 chapters are free:
Despite being free, they go in-depth and have insights that are at minimum helpful reminders for experienced folks.
And if you want the other 13 chapters, what do you have to do? Pay a flat fee? Subscribe to a newsletter?
Nope. You gotta DM Ronin’s BD team. The playbook isn’t just a helpful resource, it’s a lead magnet 😉
Co-created by an agency
If you scroll to the bottom of the playbook, you see a section focusing on Crescendo, the web3 growth agency that worked with Ronin to create the playbook.
Shoutout to Crescendo for negotiating with Ronin to have a big plug for their company at the bottom of the playbook. It’s rare to see a vendor to have the opportunity to promote themselves directly on the work they’ve done for a client.
The Base Launch Playbook
Base also recently launched their own playbook, providing resources for two types of builders: Apps and Tokens
Each track is broken out into Pre-launch, Launch, and Post-launch sections with various topics and associated links to other resources.
My immediate thought after seeing this was ‘this should be an AI Agent”. Only a matter of time…
Believe’s Builder Playbook
Last week Believe (previously Clout), a project launchpad for users to fund builders and their projects, published their Builder Playbook. Believe is more an app vs. an ecosystem, but still applies the playbook around playbooks. This is likely in response to baggage that comes with launching a token: angry degens demanding price go up.
This playbook is simpler than the previous two, but helps answer important questions and provide high-level guidance around topics such as community management, token launch best practices, and legal considerations.
Manifold’s blog highlighting their community
Manifold launched their blog this week, and one of the tags is ‘Community’, highlighting notable creators who have launched on their creator platform and incorporated unique mechanics and features.
Although they don’t explicitly position these blog posts in this way, the community posts are effectively individual playbooks and case studies providing more insight on what the creator did, how they did it, why, and the results.
Themes around playbooks
With this sample of playbooks that I’ve organically come across in the past couple months, it feels like playbooks are becoming a more popular tactic. So with that said, what are some themes on playbooks specific to this space?
They aren’t new
No shit TPan. Ya I know lol, but it’s worth bringing this point up in the sense that playbooks aren’t exactly an early-stage tactic for growth and marketing. We’re now seeing more of these types of playbooks pop up which suggest that:
This space is maturing
Which is generally a good thing! Unless you want to buy Bitcoin at $10k which…sorry, can’t help with that and even if I could I’d be ahead of you in that line.
On the other hand, we’re still early enough where we aren’t using the terms ‘customer success stories’ or ‘case studies’ like our Salesforce friends here cheesin’ so damn hard at the customer success they’ve enabled.
Playbooks can serve different purposes
With the above examples I’ve shared around playbooks, we see each of them serve a different purpose. Playbooks can be a:
set of best practices, guides, and case studies (Ronin)
richer version of a resource library (Base)
richer version of do’s and don’ts (Believe)
category of content under a blog as short case studies (Manifold)
There isn’t a right or wrong with this, it’s more about how you want playbooks to fit into your overall strategy and what makes sense for you. If we were to compare the them again by how long it took to create the playbooks, which provides a rough idea of what the purpose each playbook is:
Months (Ronin, literally) - Valuable resource that elevates Ronin’s brand perception to builders and ideally create a business relationship
Weeks (Base, maybe even days?) - Self-serve directory that leads Base ecosystem builders to the right resource
Days (Believe, maybe even hours?) - Action-oriented FAQ for builders
Evergreen with new posts periodically (Manifold) - Source of inspiration for other creators
Why the sudden influx of playbooks?
Maybe it’s just me, but it does seems like they’re more playbooks being shared or popping up. Why is that?
The space is maturing
As mentioned earlier, the space is maturing and as a result teams implement more boring mature tactics. However, boring ≠ ineffective or useless. It’s just that you won’t get the average Gen-Z growth/marketing person enthusiastically suggesting ‘we should create a playbook!’
Buzzword
The term ‘playbook’ are certainly an engagement bait-ish buzzword. Fortunately the one’s I’ve come across are generally helpful and the term isn’t saturated to the point of cringe (hopefully not anytime soon!).
It’s worth noting that Manifold’s approach of positioning their version of playbooks/case studies into community-oriented content is a great way to avoid the buzzword baggage along with the fact that it’s more aligned with their creator audience.
Other channels are prioritized
Let’s be real, we don’t read anymore. And if we do, we’re probably skimming. So a playbook regardless of the form? That’s a lot of words, and a good number would probably throw it all into ChatGPT to extract the juiciest of details.
Combine that with the preferred marketing channels of short-form written (Discord, Twitter, Telegram), voice (Spaces), and video (Twitter Live, YouTube) which are either more engaging or require less dedicated attention, and long-form written playbooks sink to the bottom of the barrel. And because they’re at the bottom of the barrel, they become an effort worth pursuing when all the lower hanging fruit has been picked, or if there’s a specific use case for one.
And despite all this, there are still advantages to playbooks:
These playbooks live in owned and operated formats on your own website, so you can edit them at will
Content can be repurposed into other formats of varying lengths. It’s easier to go long —> short vs. the other way around
Playbooks could serve as a screening mechanic helping candidates stand out, eg: bringing up specific details of Ronin’s Growth Playbook to the BD team
The ‘shelf life’ of the content typically lasts longer and remains relevant over time
Because playbooks are a lower-priority tactic, they are more effective if executed well
So with all that, long live playbooks. Just the good and creative ones though 😉
See you next week!
Informative and a fun read!
Informative yet engaging