In fact, for a product like Discord, which started with a game, quickly attracted users from various fields and reached a valuation of ten billion dollars, the content of the previous article was very limited. So Deep Chain Finance compiled an article to explain Discord more deeply and comprehensively. This article starts from the story of Discord's founder, and analyzes in detail its products, users, business development, investors, and even thinks about how Discord will respond to the Web3 opportunity, whether it will create its own crypto wallet, whether it is possible to go decentralized, and so on.

Discord: Imagine a place

For those who have never used Discord, Discord is taking a different approach in its latest campaign by asking their users to try the marketing push. What does this feel like? It's like Lucy and Edmund trying to explain Narnia to you, or Harry Potter conveying the magic of the wizarding world to you, or Neo describing The Matrix to you.

While Mark Zuckerberg thinks he's best suited to make his home in a metaverse, he may be surprised to discover that a thriving "metaverse world" has already taken hold in the marketplace: Discord, which is truly a "native metaverse" compared to other companies that have rubbed off on the concept of metaverse. Discord is the real "native metaverse" compared to other companies that rubbish the concept of metaverse, and has unknowingly built an amazing "future world". At first, Discord was designed for gamers only (games were undeniably the forerunners of the metaverse), but as time went on, more and more educational groups, investment communities, and avid fans began to rely on the Discord service for communication and conversation.

Of course, Discord is gradually becoming the platform of choice for many new entities, from protocols to NFT projects to DAOs, and more and more people are experimenting with BUIDL (building) in the Web 3 world.

However, the very fact that we are using such a rich, complex metaphor to describe Discord is also indicative of its undefined identity. Unlike any other social networking company, Discord feels fluid and biological, like an organism that has yet to fully evolve. Although the company has managed to garner a $15 billion valuation and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, it is thought that its current performance may not be up to expectations. To reach as much potential as possible.Discord CEO Jason Citron may have to embrace new technologies, consider finding different revenue streams, and tend to explore the new paradigm of Web 3.

Discord has the opportunity to become the natural social infrastructure of the "metaverse", a field with so much potential that if you try to quantify it now, you'll probably find yourself with a "tunnel vision" in the future.

To build such an important business, Discord requires more than just imagination, and in today's article we will enter the Discord story to unravel all aspects of the company, mainly including:

1.The initial startup story: Discord's startup story may have been a "beautiful mistake" compared to other businesses.

2.Dazzling products: Discord products can be difficult to understand, especially for millennials, but in this article, we try to dissect these seemingly slightly confusing products.

3.Bifurcated user base: While Discord started out as a tool for gamers, it is now used more and more widely, and we will talk about the areas it covers in this article.

4.conservative means of profitability: despite its rapid growth, Discord is conservative in terms of extracting money from its users.

5.Potential opportunities for Web 3: Discord has become the platform of choice for Web 3 entities, but it doesn't seem to have fully won hearts and minds, so they need to use their lead to build a "moat", which we will also talk about further in this article.

6.Excellent online gaming: How does Discord become the "Internet home" ,where people can learn, live and play?

The story of Discord's birth

Jason Citron may be one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, and it's clear that Discord is a product-marketing story he's built (though there may be some serendipity there as well), but Discord isn't actually Jason Citron's first venture; Jason Citron's entrepreneurial story began with Aurora Feint.

On July 10, 2008, Apple launched its app store, the APP Store, and among the first 500 apps launched was an indie puzzle game, Aurora Feint, the Beginning, developed by Jason Citron, then 23 years old, and an unknown startup incubator, YouWeb. YouWeb.

YouWeb, founded by former Webvan CTO Peter Relan, was founded around the same time as Y Combinator (another well-known U.S. startup incubator), but their incubation strategy is very different, as YouWeb only works with a small number of entrepreneurs and incubates a small number of them. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Peter Relan said, "Instead of incubating hundreds of companies, we've only incubated about thirty companies in the last fifteen years."

In fact, the YouWeb incubation model was popular in the market at the time, where they typically took 50% of the startup and then helped the founders with business ideation, marketing and recruiting. At the time, Jason Citron was a recent college graduate looking to make a career in the game industry but hadn't found a clear direction, so YouWeb helped him find another co-founder and resident YouWeb entrepreneur, Danielle Cassley, and the two teamed up to launch <Aurora Feint, the Beginning>.

The success of <Aurora Feint, the Beginning> was significant, as the game borrowed player mechanics from both and games and the aesthetics of World of Warcraft, and was considered one of the most thoughtful new games in the APP Store, Apple's app store.

One industry critic called <Aurora Feint, the Beginning> "the most fun and addictive of the early iPhone games," comparing it to more well-known hits like (Super Monkey Ball).

The problem is that industry acclaim doesn't always translate into revenue. Although a series of updates and upgrades were released to <Aurora Feint, the Beginning> in the months following the game's launch, there was no major explosion on a commercial level, and even Jason Citron's reduction of the game's price from $8 to $1 didn't help, with little difference in revenue.

While Jason Citron's initial venture was not a smooth one, many of the features of <Aurora Feint, the Beginning> are actually very forward-thinking, especially the social elements Jason Citron has incorporated into the game, including chat rooms, profiles, asynchronous multiplayer and leaderboards, which provide Aurora Feint, the Beginning provides a sense of community that other big games lack.

With this, Jason Citron completed the first pivot of his life.

Talking about the future of <Aurora Feint, the Beginning> at the time, the young entrepreneur made an impromptu comment.

"No one was building something like Xbox Live on games at the time, and I wondered if I could add some chat and video content elements to the game, and we wanted to be Xbox Live on the iPhone ...... so we released the game to see if people whether or not they really wanted that type of game."

One thing Jason Citron foresaw was that in the future, almost all game developers would want to incorporate more robust social elements into their products, and that these game developers would have the option of paying directly for social tools and then integrating them into their products, rather than building them from the ground up.

As it turns out, Jason Citron was prescient, and game developers do want to include social tools. After being featured on TechCrunch, Aurora Feint (now renamed OpenFeint) immediately attracted a lot of attention, with a number of customers coming forward looking to work with the company.

Jason Citron says confidently, "Crap, our idea has a lot of potential for the future."

After that, everything seemed to be happening at an extremely fast pace:

1.the growing number of customers and the size of inflows to OpenFeint.

2.OpenFeint added a separate mobile application to manage social interactions across games.

3.OpenFeint reached an agreement with AT&T to pre-install their application in cell phones issued by the mobile operator.

Soon, OpenFeint attracted M&A interest from large corporations. In 2011, Japanese social network and game maker GREE made an offer too good to refuse, and OpenFeint was eventually acquired for $104 million, his investors, and of course, incubator YouWeb. Jason Citron, his investors, and of course, the incubator YouWeb, all received significant returns.

Perhaps unaccustomed to the culture of big business, after a few months at GREE, Jason Citron sent an email to YouWeb founder Peter Relan with the simple words, "I'm back."

Discord

Discord's story may also sound familiar.

Discord's story may also sound familiar.
A young founder was accepted into a startup incubator with no set business plan and only a seemingly simple goal: to make a mark in the gaming space. The founder built a beautiful multiplayer game that was also loved by industry critics, but never managed to win a large enough audience. Looking for a product that fit the market, he uncovered another infrastructure feature that eventually turned it into a standalone hit.

You could say that Discord's story is a carbon copy of OpenFeint's story, almost on the same beat and hitting every note exactly the same. When you first hear this startup story, it feels like a drunken man talking nonsense, but after you hear the story again the second time, you might think that this thing might really have great potential in the future.

Unlike their first venture, Jason Citron and Peter Relan were in a much better position to start their own business, teaming up to create the game company Phoenix Guild for gamers, which quickly changed its name to Hammer & Chisel. Jason Citron attended and spoke at the Demo Day at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013, which attracted the attention of Benchmark Ventures partner Jason Citron attended and presented at the Demo Day at TechCrunch Disrupt 2013, which caught the attention of Benchmark Venture Partner Mitchell Lasky, and Benchmark led a second round of funding for Hammer & Chisel.

In 2014, Hammer & Chisel released its first product, Fates Forever, an arena game designed for tablets, but, slightly disappointingly, Fates Forever was not the success Jason Citron and his investors had hoped for, but Jason Citron was not disappointed because He explored another powerful addition to the game: communication.

Jason Citron notes, "We had a hunch that there was a very big opportunity in this space for people to build services for before, during, and after playing the game, but we didn't know yet how this idea would change the industry."

Now, it's time for Jason Citron to make another transition.

As he considered the company's next move, Stan Vishnevskiy, then chief technology officer at Hammer & Chisel, spoke out:

"I don't want to do mobile games anymore, we've been talking about building a chat service, and I've got a pretty good idea of how to make that happen."

Over the next few months, the Hammer & Chisel team designed a chat service designed for gamers, and the idea didn't seem too difficult to them - to build something like an "always-on conference call" or a "private user gaming online coffee bar "Something like that.

In 2015, Jason Citron officially launched Discord.

However, when the product was first released it didn't make much of a splash in the market, with basically only a few dozen people visiting Discord's server a day, and it didn't really seem to be rallying gamer users. This was probably due to the fact that gamers were choosing more other communication channels such as Teamspeak and Skype, but Discord started to increase its promotional efforts and try to win more trust from early customers.

In fact, the "spark" for Discord came from the Reddit forums.

By chance, Discord connected with a member of the Final Fantasy games subforum on Reddit and asked them to try using Discord in their communications and to make some posts that mentioned Discord. According to Jason Citron, they did post something like, "Has anyone heard of this new communication IP app called Discord?"

Soon after, a number of Reddit community users joined Discord, not only trying out the product but also talking to the development team through the platform, with one user replying, "I just talked to the developers and they responded, it's a really cool product, people can check it out."

The comment blew up in the community.

More Final Fantasy gamers flocked to Discord, and as you'll see, Discord chose a "grassroots" based model of advocacy that worked very well.

Over the next few years, Discord grew at an increasing rate, amassing hundreds of millions of users and close to $1 billion in funding. Perhaps more impressively, Discord managed to capture the culture of gaming and helped immensely to spread it.

Products

The great thing about Discord is that it's a product built by gamers for gamers. While the company has opened its arms to a variety of new user groups, the product still hasn't abandoned some of the basics, such as game speed and gamer enthusiasm, but at the same time, it may not feel very good to those less familiar with Discord.

Today Discord lets us do many things, and all for free, such as:

1.talking to as many friends as possible in high quality, with almost zero latency and unlimited time.

2.bringing live gameplay to anyone on the server with just two clicks and no latency (up to a point).

3.the use of a separate volume slider to watch multiple streams at once (and, again, without lag).

4.the possibility of creating an almost unlimited number of text chat rooms, even going back to archives dating back several years.

5.sharing small files with friends.

6.the incorporation of bots that can broadcast music to everyone.

7.and one more thing, Discord supports adaptive cell phones, including features such as video streaming and screenshots.

However, Discord had higher expectations for themselves and they didn't want to tie themselves to these aforementioned features, let alone be something similar to other apps.

Therefore, Discord wants current users and future users to imagine a space......

Since COVID-19, users from all walks of life have flocked to Discord, attracted by its chat features, high-quality audio and video chat, privacy, and the ability to connect quickly and directly, as well as the free service (Slack is paid).

There is no doubt that COVID-19 seems to offer a "better time" for Discord to open its arms to non-gamers, who will be faced with two choices as different types of communities move online.

1.pay $6.67 per user per month for access to Slack, a service with which you may be more familiar.

2.Set up a Discord server and invite an unlimited number of members to join for free.

For most people, the choice between these two options is a simple one - after all, who doesn't like free? Of course, Discord has its own advantages, and more and more people are discovering that Discord is not just a chat tool for gamers, but that they can find their own place in it and take root in it.

In 2019, Taylor Lorenz wrote an article on The Atlantic about the big move of "internet celebrities" to Discord, which mentions that Discord does not maintain relationships between "internet celebrities" and fans through algorithms like Facebook and Twitter. "As a result, users on Discord are more connected, which is attracting more and more people to use it. This article, and the subsequent growing size of Discord's non-gaming user base, surprised both Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, according to Forbes.

The idea of letting user behavior dictate its own direction is not new, but Discord dug a little deeper.

Discord then launched a community research campaign with 23 questions and found that more than 30% of its users were not using the product for gaming, but were hosting book clubs, friend chats, fan communities, and even starting companies on Discord. Discord has become the "third space" of the Internet. As Jason Citron said in an interview with renowned podcaster Patrick O'Shaughnessy.

"I read Ray Oldenburg's famous book The Great Good Place, which he did in the '80s, and he actually talked about the concept of third spaces in that book and started labeling it and putting words on it to describe how these third spaces work. When I read the book, I was like, "Oh my God, this is what we're building, except we're building it in the digital world, and it's incredible."

To their credit, Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy are not conservative people, and after hearing from their users, they moved quickly to begin experimenting with the transformation, which soon turned out to be "on the right track" and further developed the company's mission......

Next, they redesigned the brand and homepage.

The image above, left, shows the 2019 page, while the image, right, shows the current main page.

Last May, they launched another campaign called " Imagine a Place ," the company's first-ever brand marketing campaign, accompanied by a six-minute video starring (Danny DeVito) and (Awkwafina).

Although this video is fast-paced and slightly confusing ...... captures the essence of Discord perfectly.

On the surface, Discord looks a lot like a Slack rip-off, but Discord is better organized into servers - each community has its own space - and can be contained within a server where you can channels (including voice channels), users can also choose to share videos with multiple people (currently up to 25), and voice channels can always be open, allowing users to come and go as they please, just as easily as jumping on the couch with friends.

As you can see above, on the sidebar, users can see and easily click through to all the servers they belong to. In the screenshot above, you can see the number of unread message icons displayed for the user Packy, from which you can see that he has joined many servers and it might be a bit difficult to keep up with all of them.

Discord is actually quite easy to get started, it's easy to start a server and even easier to invite friends to join it. These links are scattered across the Internet, Twitter profiles, Reddit forums and Telegram chats, and "Join Discord" is becoming a new trend compared to the "subscribe button" of the past.

It's also very easy for users to join Discord: you only need to set up a Discord account to join the server (there's no limit to the number), which is one of the biggest differences from Slack, which is clearly more suited to business users, as it's like a well-designed "Internet home" for businesses and employees. But joining Slack is cumbersome - every time you're invited to a new Slack workspace, you have to re-enter your email and complete the registration process - Discord is built for "light Discord is built for "light social" where users can hop from server to server and send private messages directly to any other Discord user.

Another major difference between Discord and Slack is worth mentioning, namely the architectural differences. In Slack, employees can send messages to each other within the company's workspace; in Discord, users can send messages to anyone, as long as they know their username (and as long as that user accepts messages from others). In this feature, while it may not seem like a big difference between Slack and Discord, there is a fundamental difference, because Discord adds a "social layer" on top of allowing socialization within groups. As a user, you can communicate in your own small circle, have ongoing conversations with your best friends, and go outside your comfort zone to communicate with others (even strangers you're "meeting for the first time").

It is important to note that although Discord adds a social element, it also gives up many other elements; Discord is not a traditional social network, there is no "number of followers" and no algorithmically determined push recommendations. Users can show off their avatars and "boost" the server by paying or not, but beyond that, there are few other ways to gain influence. In other words, if you want to make a name for yourself on Discord, you have to do it on your own.

Beyond the chat feature and social architecture, perhaps the most compelling part of the Discord platform is its thriving bot ecosystem. In a 2020 blog post, Discord announced that it had created more than 3 million bots, some of which are already in use on millions of server-side sites. By comparison, Slack only has about 2,400 registered apps. (Of course, that's not a fair comparison, as many bots are also abandoned on Discord, but it's still an interesting comparison in terms of orders of magnitude.)

As I'm sure you can imagine, the types of bots used on Discord vary widely. Some focus on providing meme terrier charts, some can easily play music from Soundcloud and YouTube, others focus on easing emotions, and so on.

More importantly, Discord's bot ecosystem has expanded into the crypto space. the Generalist recently published an article on DAO, which outlines some of the more popular applications in the Web 3 space, especially where products like Collab. Land - which allows holders of unique tokens or NFTs to access private channels - has become an essential product. In fact, Discord has more interesting bot apps in the crypto vertical, such as Tip (which accepts cryptocurrency tips), and Piggy (a role-playing game that offers cryptocurrency rewards).

From a user perspective, Discord's bot ecosystem is actually very important because of the ability to extend functionality and add a sense of play, while from an enterprise perspective, the bot ecosystem can provide support from a business level because it allows developers to build on its application programming interface (API) - clearly Discord has again targeted a new audience.

Let's look at another example: If you are ready to start a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), Discord may be a good choice because you can leverage bots like Collab. Land, MEE6, Tip, etc., which can provide your community with "superpowers" not available elsewhere.

So Discord began to focus on robotics. in 2020, the company announced that it would get serious about building robotics capabilities, validating established projects and expanding possible uses. It's a good start, but it's not clear that these plans have actually come to fruition. Next, Discord needs to work on "service discovery," "monetization," and "usage.

So how does Discord do this? The answer is by creating a Discord bot store: the Discord Bot Store.

In the past, if you wanted to find a suitable bot app for your server, you either had to go to Google and search aimlessly or visit a third-party platform like Top.gg. But now, the Bot Store allows Discord to catch up and become the starting point for "discovering" bots.

In turn, the Discord Bot Store will bring more benefits to bot developers, as Discord provides them with a trusted place to showcase their work and earn new business revenue. Like other app store owners, Discord has a platform to promote the most promising bot products and eventually become the "king" of the space.

Over time, Discord could also offer a "smart bot recommendation" service to help users quickly find the bots they need. For example, if Discord notices that more people are joining the "Crypto" server, it could recommend Collab. Mudae, a manga robot.

As developers earn revenue from Discord, more people will undoubtedly be attracted to the platform and more people will realize that Discord has the potential to create wealth. In this case, Discord creates a virtuous revenue loop:

1.Discord gives outstanding bots a chance to be highlighted.

2.customers see the bots and start using them.

3.bot developers can earn more money as a result.

4.the success of robot developers on the Discord platform can attract more developers to the platform.

5.the more developers the Discord platform has, the more powerful the platform itself will become.

6.the more powerful the Discord platform is, the more users it will attract.

7.the more users there are, the more demand there will be for bots, which will also stimulate a significant increase in bot usage.

On the other hand, for Discord, bots may just be the beginning of bringing Discord closer to its original vision of profiting from its game store. You'll see that now that Discord's entire product line has been built internally through Discord, it's also starting to look at Discord as an infrastructure on top of which to BUIDL. Discord bot services are perfectly suited to expand beyond gaming, and as another example, Stir's newsroom bot (coming soon) doesn't seem to take Discord's complex interface for granted, so they're trying to build on it. For example, Stir's newsroom bot (coming soon) doesn't seem to take Discord's complex interface for granted, so they've tried to build a neat and organized collaborative interface on top of Discord's conversation pipeline (shown below).

Rather than trying to replace Discord, Stir improves on it and provides users with an easy way to take advantage of the product's strengths while minimizing its weaknesses.

When entrepreneurs start evaluating strengths and weaknesses and decide to build complementary tools to compensate for weaknesses instead of using competing tools to replace it - perhaps, that's what a quality platform should look like.

There's no doubt that Discord's trend is just beginning. A new wave of entrepreneurs have already started building tools on top to help decentralized autonomous organizations run more smoothly by improving features like user guidance, project coordination, and contribution tracking. Many agree that Discord has a case for success, and while many of these tools are aimed at decentralized autonomies, they can also be used by the broader community, and anyone who wants to create groups and communicate in Discord can use these tools. And for Discord, these tools can be supported by seamlessly integrating and extending the Bot Store to accommodate more Discord-based applications.

The Discord team is focused on making its core product more robust and reliable, which is fine, but creating a developer ecosystem will allow Discord to adapt to the needs of all types of users.