From Bello to Blueprint: 2024 in Review
The last 12 months have been a period of experimentation.
Bello was our first attempt at solving a problem we deeply believed in: giving creators and brands the tools to understand their onchain audience.
For over two years, we built a marketing analytics solution to help unlock the power of blockchain data.
Despite working with customers like Yuga Labs, Doodles, Base, Lens, XMTP, Thirdweb, ConsenSys, 9dcc, Bankless, and many others, we found ourselves less excited about building SaaS products in crypto.
What truly energized us was the opportunity to bring our business model onchain.
The idea of marketing analytics was solid, but the execution didn’t land where it needed to.
Letting go of Bello was tough.
It was an extension of our team’s story, like helping us win the ETH Global hackathon and getting us into a16z's Crypto Startup Accelerator.
But holding onto Bello meant holding back progress, and we had to face the reality that it wasn’t working and move forward.
That’s what brought us to Blueprint.
The Transition to Blueprint
Blueprint wasn’t an instant pivot.
It took months of testing and learning through my podcast, Mint, to figure out how to create something that truly resonated.
We experimented with engaging audiences, structuring token incentives, and aligning goals between creators and collectors.
Gradually, it all clicked.
What emerged was Blueprint: a structured program and framework that connects token projects and creators.
We match token projects with the best crypto-native creators, using grants to incentivize content creation and our proven framework to teach creators how to go viral onchain.
It’s the culmination of everything we’ve learned and everything we want to build, designed to help creators grow their audiences, monetize their content, and bring their traditional followers onchain.
Bello was the first chapter, but Blueprint is the way forward.
It’s where all our focus is now, and it’s the path we’re committed to for building.
Insights vs. Measurable Results
Analytics provided value, but it stopped at insights.
It didn’t drive the actual engagement creators or brands needed to grow their audience or get them paid doing what they love.
While we had compelling case studies, transitioning to a self-service platform made it harder to track success stories and quantify the value Bello provided in driving results.
This gap highlighted a key issue: insights alone weren’t enough to create meaningful outcomes for customers.
Blueprint addresses this challenge by going beyond insights and actively driving top-line participation.
By combining incentives, onboarding tools, and community-building strategies, we enable creators to directly connect with collectors and build sustainable careers.
Instead of offering a static product, we’re creating a dynamic ecosystem that grows with the creators and collectors we support.
Through this process, we identified a new north star metric (NSM) to focus on: monthly active collectors.
Why Monthly Active Collectors Matter
Focusing on monthly active collectors keeps us aligned with our goal: helping creators grow their audience and sustain their work.
It’s a simple, clear metric that shows the brand we’re building is expanding and thriving.
Monthly active collectors reflect the number of people consistently engaging with our content.
This engagement isn’t passive; it represents creators onboarding their audiences and new collectors discovering the value of participating onchain through our campaigns.
By rewarding collectors through structured incentives, we make sure that creators’ work reaches a broader audience while sustaining their efforts.
Creators need collectors to thrive, and collectors need compelling, incentivized content to stay engaged.
Monthly active collectors tie these two parties together, showing us the health and growth of our network in real terms.
In addition to monthly active collectors, we track newly funded wallets as a secondary key metric.
These are wallets making their first-ever transaction by minting our content, a clear sign of how effectively we’re onboarding entirely new users onchain.
By the Numbers
456 creators applied to work with Blueprint, but only 20 got accepted.
In the last eight months, we saw the following growth between Blueprint and Mint Podcast:
Generated more than $1.45 million in gross revenue, or 418.42 ETH.
Minted over 1,031,429 pieces of content.
Onboarded 132,573 unique collectors.
Supported an average of 1,754 daily and 18,955 monthly active collectors minting content.
Facilitated 885,042 total transactions, primarily on Base and, more recently, ZERO Network.
December 2024 was Blueprint’s biggest month, with 36,155 unique collectors minting and 249,484 pieces of content, marking a strong finish to the year.
We onboarded 63,644 newly funded wallets collecting content, using a mix of crypto-native and traditional creator audiences to bring new users onchain.
It's impossible to tell if these are new humans or the same crypto native users opening and managing multiple wallets, though it's fair to assume it's a mix of both.
Month-over-Month Growth
Our NSM for month-over-month growth in 2024 started with non-linear trends during our experimentation phase from April to July.
These months were focused on testing ideas and learning through the Mint Podcast.
Once we applied those lessons to Blueprint with the launch of Cohort 1 in August, growth became more consistent.
Over the past five months, we’ve seen an increase, averaging a 24% monthly growth rate in unique collectors.
Of the 132,573 unique collectors we welcomed this year, 83,635 returned to collect more than one piece of content—reflecting a 63% retention rate and strong engagement from our community.
Supporting Collectors and Creators
Every grant we received this year went straight back to rewarding our collectors.
We distributed $985,334.13 in incentives through Blueprint and Mint Podcast campaigns.
These campaigns allowed creators to reward collectors for minting their work, helping them generate revenue and grow their onchain audience.
Blueprint Cohort 1 creators earned an average of $64,425.83.
Culture and Community
A big part of our focus in 2024 was dedicating time to building culture and community—both for creators and collectors.
To support our creators, we launched the ETH Club to recognize those who are finding success publishing their content onchain.
The ETH Club includes three milestones: 10 ETH, 100 ETH, and 1,000 ETH.
All 10 creators from Cohort 1 reached the 10 ETH milestone, and we celebrated their achievement with physical, custom plaques.
Creators from Cohort 2 are already well on their way to surpassing the same milestone.
On the collector front, our Discord grew to 19,341 members.
We see members actively participate by reacting to posts, sharing feature requests, and providing critical feedback on refining our product, incentives, and campaigns.
BP.fun: A Curated Content Marketplace
In November 2024, we launched BP.fun, a curated content marketplace that:
Helps Blueprint alumni sell their content.
Enables collectors to discover and collect media in one streamlined platform.
Drives engagement on new networks through incentives and rewards.
We debuted the site with Zerion on their new layer 2, ZERO Network, and within the first two weeks, over $100k worth of content from Cohort 1 alumni was sold.
Looking ahead to Q1 2025, we have a suite of new features ready to roll out on BP.fun, further enhancing the collector and creator experience.
Our Supporters
Special thanks to Base, Zora, Pods, Drakula, Layer3, Guild, Manifold, LunarCrush, Cyber, Higher, Degen, Bonsai, Zerion, and Not a Cartel for providing the infrastructure, funding, and tools that power our work, as well as the 50+ mentors between Cohort 1 and 2 who taught our creators the foundation for onchain virality.
We couldn’t do it without you.
Follow Along
Here’s how you can get involved:
Join our Discord to find the latest drops.
Apply for the next Blueprint cohort if you’re serious about publishing onchain and growing your audience.
Follow us on X and Warpcast for updates, new features, and campaign news.
Shout out to Will and Brock for helping lead Blueprint and bringing life to our new chapter.
Onchain Data Sources: Curated by Adam Levy, Blueprint x ZERO Network, Blueprint Cohort 1, Blueprint Cohort 2