Grill.chat In Web2: A Case Study On ITC.ua

Within the industry, there is always talk about how to onboard a billion users, and whether Web3 products actually matter to anyone outside of Web3. Who is going to use all of these apps?

When we set out to build Grill.chat, we were focused primarily on a smooth UX, without any barriers that would prevent your average person from using it. That means no wallets, no tokens, no seed phrases, and no transaction confirmations.

However, we wanted to take this further, to really put our money where our mouth is, and onboard real Web2 users to Grill.chat!

We partnered with ITC.ua, an IT news site that receives ~7 million views per month, and on September 21st they integrated Grill.chat as a side panel. However, due to some members of the ITC community posting obscene things in the chat, it was disabled after just five hours. While these Web2 users were able to use Grill seamlessly, it looks like our moderation tools need some upgrades, and we may have actually made the onboarding process too easy — if you ban someone, they can just come right back.

However, during the integration, the Grill window received around 12,000 views, and more than 250 messages were sent from ITC’s site. To put that into perspective, this was a ~10x increase in daily views, within just a five hour window!

Ultimately, we have considered this a massive success, as it helped highlight the weaknesses of our existing product offering, and proved that your average internet user can easily get started on Grill! On top of that, some members of the ITC community have asked for the chat to be added again (along with proposing some solutions to the obscenity problem), showing real demand from real Web2 users.

Vera from the ITC team said:

“Grill.chat offers the opportunity for our community of 100,000+ tech geeks to communicate in real time on our website. When we ran an experiment, the community got interested in the chat and started communicating there. Still, our editors have asked the Subsocial team to improve the moderation options to make the discussion more controllable. After the problem is fixed, we will consider installing Grill.chat as a constant feature on our website.”

We’re looking forward to improving Grill.chat to meet the needs of our partners, and commencing a huge business development push, resulting in a large amount of integrations, users, and traffic, showing that Web2 users can in fact use Web3 tech, even if they don’t know it. This will serve as a great onboarding route, as they become curious about the extra Web3 features that Grill offers.

Rather than compete with other ecosystems in Web3, we can venture out into the world, where there are millions upon millions of users ready to interact with each other. If you run a website of any kind and want to incorporate social features for your users, get in touch with us, and in the meantime, we’ll see you on-chain!