September 2022: Genesis

Two roads (probably more) diverged in yellow wood, and I’m glad I took the one that I did. At the time, my knowledge of the gaming industry and proof of work in community building was inversely proportional to my understanding, and awareness of crypto and web3. This is when I joined KGeN (then IndiGG) as a founding member. The vision was simple, to organically build the world’s largest grassroots gaming community.

This is when our ‘Clan Chief Program’ was ideated, and execution began imminently. I was leading the charge, and at the time there was no team. It was apparent to us that success would come if we attacked gamers at the grassroot level (college students, cafe frequenters and such), for the simple reason that the older you become, the more resistant you are to change, and “new” things. In short, Clans are basically micro communities within the KGeN ecosystem, and all these micro communities make up the larger KGeN community. We used a couple of agencies to help us solve the cold start problem, and the first two cities where we saw success was Bangalore and Pune.

Proof of concept was established, and our 0 to 1 journey was underway. Slowly we spread to Kolkata, Mumbai, Nagpur, and most places in East and West India. Brick by brick, and college by college we were painting the country green: 50 Clan Chiefs, and 5,000 gamers strong. In a couple of months, we were able to remove agency dependancy because the self fulfilling flywheel was in motion. Organic traction.

There was no real product at the time, and most of what we did in terms of quests, campaigns and activations was on excel sheets. 

2022 was chaos, hustle, grit, and an insatiable need to get shit done. That is exactly what we did, we got shit done.

Axie Tournament: Kolkata

Onboarding Disillusioned Gamers (Yes that's me, I am sorry if you had earphones in)

                         Onboarding (Pune)

2023: Lift // Off

We established the core offerings for Clan Chiefs: Power, Fame and Money. This trifecta created a community which felt like they belonged, and nurtured them into being non extractive residents of the KGeN ecosystem, not tourists and farmers. At the time, and probably still, web3 was not something “real” gamers had an affinity towards and that’s the mountain we chose to climb. By the end of 2023 we had micro communities set up all across East and West India.

Old guard > Kids

Community movie night turned into dance night?

2023 was product, process and data. Our north star metrics were growth, and retention. 5000 Active Clan Chiefs, 100,000 active gamers. Clan Chief MoM retention: >70%, Gamer MoM retention: >50%.

I was in the trenches and the heart of the action, while overseeing strategy + operations end to end. This provided us with invaluable user insights that helped shape our product and set up our data pipelines. We’d come a long way from google sheets, and our tech and product folks had nailed the onboarding flow and first time user journey (which is arguably the most important lever for a consumer facing product). Some other notable 0 to 1 projects, and experiments that were ideated and executed by me:

[1] Cafe Clan Program: Cafes are a breeding ground for competitive, and PC native gamers. We onboarded cafe owners as Clan Chiefs and hosted multiple tournaments for S tier brands. Within 6 months, we had successfully onboarded 100 of them. Cafes saw a major bump in occupancy, ballparking around 60% on weekdays and over 90% on weekends.

[2] Game/Product Testing Program: Web3's and building with community go hand-in-hand. We setup a testing program to help early alpha and beta products gain valuable community feedback,  and re-iterate. Our testers were vetted, and certified through our in-house training program. By the end of 2023 we had 1200 active testers, who had successfully contributed to building over 200 products, and games. 

[3] Web3 Championship: We hosted the largest ever (at the time) Lan championship, in Kolkata and Bangalore for Thetan Arena and evio. The preliminary rounds saw participation from a staggering 300 colleges and marked India's ascent into web3 gaming.

Bangalore Web3 Championship

2024: Largest Decentralized Gamer Network

Growth beckoned expansion. I was now managing a team of 10 community leaders, from different regions in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Each of them had 2 community managers working under them to help with ops and growth in their native regions.

Felicitating one of our top Clan Chiefs (Indore)

Fun fact: Each member of the community team was once a community member. The general trajectory for most of them has been: Gamer > Clan Chief > Operator > Full time. If there was ever a blanket indicator for what defined a real community, this would be a pretty solid contender.

We conquered (excuse the aggression) the entirety of India, all 36 states and union territories. There wasn’t a road that didn’t house a KGeN Clan Chief. 2024 was rife with a lot of offline activity, and campaigns alongside our BAU of quests and tournaments.

[1] HP Activation: We helped HP (Hewlett Packard) set up stalls in 200 colleges in India as part of their marketing drive. We helped with permissions, and ops.

My team was delivering over 250k in revenue per month through our various partners and spending close to nothing to exponentially grow the size of community MoM. We had about 250k active gamers, and we were delivering an average of 350k quest slots a month. Mind you, these weren’t social quests, these were real gameplay quests that took time, effort and skill to successfully complete. Community now had a voice to suggest and implement changes in product and process, we truly embodied building with our users. Monthly townhalls with set agendas to create an open feedback loop. Empower people, and in turn they'll empower others: some of our Chiefs took it upon themselves to do good for society, feeding the less fortunate with the gains they made at KGeN.

Farcana: Clan Chief hosted lan (1/300)

A Clan feeding the poor

I set up some of our most important growth levers in mid 2024, and also became a part of the top leadership team.

[1] Fellowship: Empowering existing clan chiefs to become “fellows”, essentially work as interns to onboard more believers into the community. Their roadmap included a growth path and a route to becoming full time builders of KGeN. Today we have over 100 active fellows, who have onboarded over 1500 qualified Clan Chiefs.

[2] Kollective: Our novel college club program where we partner with gaming, AI and blockchain clubs in colleges to run hackathons and host tournaments for popular web2 games like BGMI, and VALORANT.

Towards the end of 2024, I was also working on several other projects at KGeN, including GTM and partnerships for our LLM specialized for gaming and trained on our proprietary data of 300M attributes.

2024 was people. Building my own clan in a way, hiring and training the most energetic and passionate people to build the community from the ground up. No fancy degrees needed, just proof of work and a deep desire to be part of something larger. 3000 colleges partnered, 20,000 Active Clan Chiefs, 500k Active Gamers.

[2] Web2 and Web3 Tournaments: Official RIOT funded tournaments for VALORANT, and KRAFTON funded tournaments for BGMI. Our Clan Chiefs hosted over 2,000 micro tournaments across India, Bangladesh and Nepal. 

Monthly Clan Chief Townhall

IIT Bombay's HP event

2025

I'm still heading community and operations while leading GTM, and partnerships for our AI x gaming vertical. In the process of transitioning into an advisory role.