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Web3 Wednesdays - Investing in Community
Recorded: Jan. 17, 2024 Duration: 0:35:12Space Recording
Full Transcription
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
Hello, Juniper.
Good afternoon, good morning, good evening to all the folks.
Hey, Rather Mercurial.
Hey, and, and, yeah.
Do you want to get started right away or take a couple minutes to see if people trickle in?
Yeah, I mean, we can get started, see how much we have to chat about today.
Um, so, investing in community.
This is a pretty hot topic, in my opinion.
Um, I think that whenever you're building a business period, you are really investing in community.
I think, you know, startups, small businesses, I think everything kind of starts as a community, right?
You know, your first 10 clients, even if they're not, you know, in a discord with you, um, in some ways that's a community, right?
It's a relationship you're building, um, with people and showing them value in what you, what you're doing.
Um, so, I think in some ways, um, more, in a more abstract way, uh, community is always being built regardless of where you are in your journey.
But, um, I think building a specific space for a community is kind of the next step outside of, um, the next step outside of, like, you know, just starting a business, right?
So, when you're building out a larger community, like a public, private community, that's when you're starting to scale those relationships and having people build relationships with each other around the idea that you have.
So, I think that, you know, choosing when to start a community is a really important step in a business's life cycle, um, right?
It can be, it can be, it can be immediately, right?
It could be in a year, it could be in five years, um, it really depends on the business's goals.
So, I think there are times where building community or having a community manager could be too early.
Um, and I think that that, I think it being too early is when maybe,
excuse me, you don't have the revenue to justify a full-time role.
Um, I think potentially marketing might be a higher priority over community to start for a business.
So, you know, maybe you want to do marketing first before you start building a community.
But again, right, in Web3, um, you kind of start with a community, right?
That's kind of where you start the business in a lot of ways.
You start with kind of attracting people around a purpose, a mission, and vision.
Um, and you have your community members much more engaged in the beginning compared to, um, you know, a private business.
Um, that's just doing like an LLC, um, and, you know, building up that.
Um, so, so I think that, you know, in Web3, it's a bit different.
You have, um, community being more immediately important to invest into.
And I think in the space, in the industry, there's kind of an expectation that, you know,
the company will have some sort of community, whether that be a forum, a Discord, a Telegram,
that there will be some way for people to engage more meaningfully in the project.
Um, from a more technical frame, this could be a developer community, right?
That could be a, you know, a community that helps the node runners for the chain.
Um, or for, um, you know, RocketPool, it could be people creating, um, becoming a validator,
helping set up, um, all that stuff.
Um, and just engaging with those folks who are doing the validation.
So, you know, I think, I think that differently than many kind of corporate,
environments, um, Web3, there is an expectation that you'll have a community.
Um, now the investment might not need to be a full-time role up front.
It could just be, you know, let's say if there's a core team of three people, four people,
you know, those folks just are kind of in the Discord as well as, you know, an internal
communication method, whether it's Slack or something else.
Um, but I think as things grow in Web3, there's an expectation that there'll be more dedicated
support.
And I think in, in Web3, the community manager often acts as customer success as well.
So not only are they, um, helping out building community in terms of having events, um, engaging
users in the, in the, um, community forum, but they're also doing tickets, right?
So, you know, getting bug reports to the core team, um, product suggestions to the core team.
So I think community in Web3 off acts as a few different things.
Um, so that's support, that's practice, um, and that's potentially product as well.
So, so I think when you're growing a Web3 community, and I actually have an experience
with Web3 baddies way back when, where, you know, at that point it was just, it was a free
community, um, no one was getting paid for participating or for moderating it.
Um, but we hit an inflection point where we're getting, you know, tens of thousands of dollars
in, in, you know, prizes and, you know, um, gifts from different organizations.
Um, that it started to become more work and almost required somebody to be paid for the
labor it took to moderate the community.
Um, so there are often inflection points where even if you're starting a free community, um,
there's an inflection point where it's like, you know, maybe you'll start having to pay
somebody to, to moderate things and to, you know, keep up the discord, um, or keep up,
you know, the, the community platform you're using.
Um, so I think another piece of investing community is the platform.
There are many paid community platforms like Mighty Network, Circle, and many others.
Discourse is another one, more forum-like.
Um, so investing community also looks like setting up, you know, whatever community platform
you're going to be using and the costs associated with that too.
Um, but I think that in Web3, you know, if you, if you start, I think there's some grace
period, um, in Web3 of like, okay, they don't need a discord immediately, but I think as
your project kind of, um, goes on, there is a kind of expectation among people that they
can jump into a discord or, um, at the very least, um, you have a Twitter.
And I think, you know, Twitter is not really community.
Maybe it's more audience, but I think, you know, having a social media manager, that person
can also act as a community manager, um, in terms of engaging people, connecting with
people, um, listening to people, um, and make people feel heard.
And I, and I think that, um, sometimes the CEO can act as community manager or the, um,
the person who's kind of like the maybe non-technical founder can act as a CEO, or if it's a technical
project and everyone's a technical founder, um, then engaging with, sorry, engaging with,
um, the people on technical level, I think, you know, that's required of them as well.
So, so yeah, I think, I think the time, if you're already in a community role and you're
trying to justify that role to, you know, the company, I think framing it as, you know,
we're doing support, we're doing customer success, we're doing, um, events engagement,
we're doing some growth with the community.
These are all points to hit, um, and to show the value, um, because, you know, having customer
success, that's a role, right?
So to have community tied in with customer success is actually, um, a two in one deal,
um, for the company, right?
Now you're doing tickets and you're also doing, um, community building and community building
in a lot of ways has shown to increase client retention, increase, um, clients' feelings,
positive feelings towards the company.
Um, so it, it makes people feel, and I think, you know, in a good community organization and
practice, it actually is a way to hold the company accountable to their clients, right?
You, it, unlike Twitter or some other audience platforms where you can turn off the comments,
right?
A discord, you can have more visibility for your, for your customers and your community.
Um, and I think that's why a lot of DAOs in the space kind of popped up around discord
because it's much harder to like silence people.
And it's almost like a Yelp review, right?
If you jump into someone's discord and everyone's pissed, like, you know, you probably won't want
to participate in that project.
Um, but if you join a discord community and everyone's loves the community, loves the
environment, love what they're building, that's a kind of affirmation that this is a quality
project.
So I think that community managers can, can really validate, um, people's perception of
a project.
Um, so not having one, um, can be a red flag in some ways, at least in web three, I think
for other, you know, kind of, um, non-web three industries, I think having a discord is quite
rare.
Um, I think that, you know, having Twitter or Instagram, TikTok, right?
Social media platforms, audience platforms is more common.
Um, and oftentimes these kinds of big corporations really don't want, um, genuine engagement around
their product because, you know, they want to kind of control their brand image.
Um, but I think that in web three brand image is much more elusive, um, for companies if
they are not, you know, respecting their, their community.
So if, you know, your community turns against you, your brand is kind of sunk.
So it's interesting in web three, how like there's more connection between, you know, the,
the community members and the brand compared to, you know, web two or, you know, any other
industry, but I'll, I'll pause there and Juniper see if you have anything else or anything
to add.
Um, and I will say folks listening, if you do want to jump up, if you have thoughts,
feel free to engage.
Um, I'm really curious what, what people think about the subject.
So go ahead, Juni.
Yeah.
I think the term invest is very important when like understanding what we're talking about
today and like understanding that, um, when you're actually choosing to onboard specific
roles within your, um, within your organization.
Um, if you're trying to, you know, find specific areas of interest, I think, um, really thinking
of it as an investment is going to be crucial to having longevity in like understanding the
ROI at the end.
And so I think like you said, like a lot of communities, um, or a lot of organizations
start out very early thinking that they want a community without understanding that there
is like a sunk in, there is a cost that comes with that.
And then on top of that, um, that it's going to take a lot of effort.
So I agree that like, you know, marketing, um, does come first and like trying to kind of
like hone in on that to try to bring people in.
Um, cause what you'll usually want to start with as an audience, um, and also, especially
when you're starting out, you're really figuring out your brand voice.
You're like identifying your mission and like, um, with a community, typically what you want
is for folks to offer feedback, to actually be a part of the building process.
And like, when you do that too early, it's like, um, too many cooks in the kitchen type
of, um, issue that we've seen, especially, I think it's very prevalent with DAOs that really,
um, um, um, I think.
Obviously a lot of DAOs chose to progressively decentralize, whereas like, um, some DAOs like
immediately took on the idea of decentralization and wanted to like adopt a lot of folks' opinions
early on.
And it's just, it becomes like very much, um, an echo chamber, well not echo chamber, it's
more like a lot of noise happens and it becomes hard to direct, um, let's say like the ship of
your organization.
Um, so I think like, um, when it comes to investing in community, you really have to
be, um, conscientious of the timeline and know that like an immediate forming community is
going to be a lot more like, uh, unwieldy to deal with than one that's like slowly built
Um, go ahead.
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the big important pieces of before investing in community is
having community mission, vision, and purpose, right?
And if you don't have a clear product market fit, building a community is going to be very,
very challenging.
Um, so I think, um, you know, it's so, so important that you find the community market fit before
you start investing in community.
Because once you get the community market fit, that means like you have a group of people
who are excited about, you know, the vision of the company and, you know, whatever the
building, whether it's a product or service, whatever it is.
And then once you have that fit, then it might start making sense to invest in community.
Um, I think that as time goes on, um, I think Web3 is actually a really early adopter of
this digital community model that I think will actually spread throughout, um, other industries
too, because people, especially modern consumers, I think young consumers, um, like Gen Z, younger
millennials, as well as, um, digital native consumers want more authenticity.
And I think, you know, with marketing, it's very clear to people that it's not authentic
media, even when, you know, they buy influencers, it's clear that it's not authentic media.
People want a place where they're giving honest reviews.
So personally, a good example of this is this isn't a community per se, but on Amazon, when
people have their user reviews and it's like, this broke immediately after I brought, bought
it, like, you know, just kind of, um, people take pictures of things, recording things.
That's not community per se, but I think it's an example of authentic, um, media.
So, oh, bye, bye Raven.
My things are kind of jumping in.
Oh my God.
Um, so for me, I think that a discord, while kind of a clunky tool allows people to be authentic,
right, you can mute people, you can ban people, but it's much harder to control the narrative
in the community, right?
Um, you can see what people said historically about the product.
You can see how people feel about the product.
Um, and, you know, it's live.
So you can immediately talk to somebody who's at the company, whereas in a lot of other kind
of media interactions, it's one to many, but it's, but it's not many to one, right?
It's like, you can't interact immediately.
It's kind of a one-way street.
Communities are two-way streets, and I think that fosters a different relationship with
the clients, um, and, and the product they're consuming.
And I think that's what people really want, um, which is why you see, you know, lots of
communities jump up about, you know, everything under the sun, because people want that, you
know, two-way street, um, with what they're doing, or at least a two-way street with other
people doing the same thing they're doing.
Whether it's a product, um, or a profession, um, people want to engage and, um, ask questions
and understand the product, um, get tips and tricks, and that's just more engaging in a
forum that's a two-way street rather than just, like, watching a video.
Um, again, some people will prefer, you know, an async watching a video, but I think there's
a pretty big desire for, um, the alternative, which is a kind of two-way street community.
So, anyway, I think that that's kind of, um, a big piece of the future of digital community.
Also, digital community is much cheaper, um, than any other kind of IRL community holding
events.
Um, it's much cheaper to just, you know, you know, spin up a Discord or use a community
platform service that's paid.
Um, that's super, it's super easy.
And then hire one person, you know, that's cheaper than hiring a whole customer success
team and cheaper than, um, you know, running these IRL communities, especially if the company
is global in nature, which Web3 is.
So, yeah.
Um, do you have any additional thoughts, Jeannie?
Yeah, I actually think that you really hit the nail on the head with this.
And especially, like, with, you know, startups especially, too, I want to talk about, like,
beyond Web3 as well, that, um, a lot of, um, companies now are looking for, like, more
hybridized models of building community, um, you know, both within Web3 as well as, like,
with, uh, traditional companies.
So there does have to be, like, a kind of multi-faceted, um, viewpoint when coming to,
um, the conclusion that you need to build out these, like, tools.
I also think it really depends on, like, identifying what your community or audience actually looks
like, um, like, the ideal one that you want.
Um, because I also think that when folks, um, aren't intentional about that, they end up
with a community that actually doesn't serve, um, building on the mission that you actually
set forth.
And I think, again, boiling it down back to when creating your organization, um, the
first steps are to create, you know, those mission statements to create, um, you know,
your values and, um, you know, holding onto those as you're, like, um, curating who you
bring in to have, like, at the table.
Yeah, totally.
I, the mission and vision is so important.
Um, and, and again, something you mentioned earlier that I want to, to, um, expand on
is the, the kind of in long-term investment nature of community, right?
Unlike marketing, um, or sales, community is a much longer term, right?
A community doesn't immediately isn't, a community isn't a viral mechanic.
Let me say that, right?
A community is not going to give you, you know, a million people viewing your community.
It's just not that type of environment.
Community tends to be bottom of the funnel.
It tends to be lower scaling in nature.
Um, and it tends to be more intimate.
That's its strength.
But also from an investment perspective, it's also kind of a weakness, right?
For marketing, I think you can get much more return on your investment immediately.
Same with sales, right?
If you have someone, you know, doing sales, immediately they might be able to close a deal.
Or if you have somebody doing marketing, they might be immediately, immediately be able
to get, um, traffic to your website or whatever.
That's all well and good.
I think those are needed.
But community serves a different purpose.
It serves a longer term play of building brand loyalty, right?
Um, I've heard a lot of marketers on TikTok specifically talk about how elusive brand loyalty
is becoming.
And it's because there's no community investment, right?
There's no investment in their, their super users of the product or of the platform or
whatever.
So community is actually a way to, uh, to get that brand loyalty.
Um, that's weakening, um, through marketing and sales.
People aren't really loyal to brands anymore.
But if you have a community, that's a way to get a loyal, um, base of people, um, who
are excited, passionate, engaged with your product and will come back again and again.
And that's kind of what earlier I mentioned that a lot of communities show that having
a community increases customer retention, right?
Decreases churn.
Um, and that's because there's more loyalty, right?
They feel like there's more of a relationship between the, the business and the person.
Whereas if you don't have a community, it's just, well, they're a member of your audience,
right?
And all you care about is just, you know, getting their money, giving them their service
and then moving on with it.
Um, I think community in a lot of ways feels like a luxury premium experience.
Um, maybe in the same way, like, I don't think companies really even do this anymore,
but I'm not sure if people remember in early 2000s and late nineties, and this is something
that had existed for a long time before that, but it's just when I remember it was like
sweepstakes, right?
I think sweepstakes were a kind of analog version of digital community, right?
Where it's like, oh, like, you know, there's this fun thing you can do to interact with
the company.
And, you know, if you interact and buy enough product, they'll, you know, maybe reward you.
I think actually blockchain technology makes the sweepstake model really compelling because
now you can actually micro reward people for an action using our product specifically, but
you can micro reward people, um, instead of doing like a huge one max giveaway where it's
like a thousand dollars, you can spread that a thousand dollars over individual users in
your community in a much more equitable way that shows you value people, um, for, for
doing smaller actions.
So I think that digital communities, at least for me, they show that, you know, a client,
a company really cares about the people who are participating in their, um, in their revenue,
right?
It's almost a way not to give back.
I don't want to say that community is like, you know, charitable endeavor, but it's an
endeavor that, that builds that brand loyalty and that builds that engagement, um, that's
a little bit more intimate than marketing or sales can do.
So I think that is really the crux of, of what's going on here is that like community just is a
different function, um, compared to, um, marketing or sales.
So to put them in the same bucket is just to not understand community, right?
It's not to understand why community is valuable and what the function of the community delivers.
Um, and I'll say that community is closest to customer success, but I think it's more scalable
than customer success, um, because it's a little bit more one-to-many than customer success can be,
which is why you have a lot of community, um, communities of, uh, support because, you know,
it's like, you know, another way of our customer success that's a little bit more, um, immediate.
And, you know, I think that too, like, you know, customer success, I think jumping on a call,
um, with a robot or, you know, going into customer success through kind of like a self-serve pathway
like Amazon has doesn't really inspire much, you know, oh, this company's here for me or this
company cares about what I think.
Like it inspires maybe an apathy, which community helps combat.
Um, so, so yeah, I think that's, um, an important thing to highlight is the ROI of community,
the investment in community is just a different vehicle.
And that's why I think companies investing too early in community is a mistake.
I think that if you're just starting your startup, um, if you're just in the beginning of your journey,
community doesn't make as much sense as, uh, as thing to invest in.
Um, I would say that once you have a revenue, once you have revenue, once you have, you know,
a model of success and product market fit, then that's when you want to start thinking
about community.
And I see a lot of companies do community too early and not understand why they're investing
in it.
Um, and that leads to, to issues between the product, the community manager and the company,
um, because, you know, community is very entrepreneurial.
It takes a lot of work to even get one person in the room.
So, you know, if that is not viewed as success, um, you know, just getting the first 10 people
to be in the community.
Um, and that's like, you know, demeaned as why isn't this a viral moment, you know, then
they should have just hired a marketer, right?
They should have just hired a social media manager and not a community manager.
Um, and the other thing too, I think is, can be challenging is expecting a social media
manager to be a community manager.
Again, this is kind of overlapping, um, marketing and, uh, community a bit too much for my liking.
Um, I'm curious, Juniper, since you have more experience with social media management, like
what's the perception there of like, oh, also I have to run a discord if you have thoughts.
Apologies, I was sneezing.
Um, yes, I think like, you know, the matrixing between, um, web to social media, as well as
like web three community, um, building is so interesting.
I think it's a very new thing.
And I think there are companies actually that do, um, or is it, there are companies
that do have discord that are on web too, like, but they tend to be more for like, you
know, customer service or like actually just like answering questions, things like that.
Um, though they do like kind of, um, market them almost as communities, but, um, coming from
a background of like, you know, marketing, social media, um, you know, doing social media
pushes, I think the biggest thing that I've noticed is where conversations happen has become
a lot more important within web three.
So like, I think there's, I think in web two, like with platforms like Tik Tok or like YouTube,
it's like more like people create content and they respond to each other.
They're a little bit more bubbled.
Whereas like, um, it reminds me more of the days of like pushing people towards forums,
um, for building community, um, with web three.
And then on top of that, when matrixing it, like you have things like, you know, like Twitter
spaces or things like, um, uh, like a discord stage where it's like a little bit more curated,
I've noticed.
Um, but also a bit more impromptu.
I think, um, it's a bit more soap boxing, which is like totally fine.
Um, but with social media prior to, it felt like, um, you had to create content to respond
to things like, yes, you could like go into the comments on Facebook.
You could go into the comments on like a Twitter thread, but that wasn't really necessarily
community.
That was more like a discourse.
Whereas now, like, you know, people are more in conversation with each other, building
together, things like that.
Um, whether or not I think this is sustainable, I'm not sure.
Um, I, I also do think that there needs to be a dispensation between like marketing and
social media versus like building a community.
Um, but I think, um, with smaller companies, of course, they're going to have people wear
many hats.
That's interesting.
So what you're saying is, is that like, there's kind of a blur effect between, could you expand
more and I'm interested in that point?
Cause it's your, cause it's like, sorry, I'm trying to like ground myself in what you're
saying.
Yeah.
Just, just expand more.
I'm really curious about, um, the kind of train of thought you're on.
Yeah.
I think like, um, I think the biggest issue I've noticed with Web3 companies is that not
to say, I don't know a nicer way to put it, but like, it's hard to stay in one's lane.
Um, I think like everyone does everything, like even like, you know, within Wonder, like,
um, we have folks that are working on engineering, but they're also doing partnerships and they're
also like, you know, doing social media.
It's just like, I think in more traditional companies, once you're hired for a role, you
really stick to that role and you specialize in it.
Um, and I think I've noticed in Web3, there's a lot more, um, I would say blurring of lines
between what roles can do what.
And I think that could be good for cross-pollination and hybridization, but I also don't know if
like, that allows for a good return in investment in particular.
It's like, I think it like lowers your outcomes, but it might build a stronger foundation.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
Um, cause like if I'm focusing on social media, like if I'm focusing on content, but then
suddenly I'm also responsible for having to like do community outreach, community building,
like that's very different skill sets and like, they should have different kind of, um,
like it'd be different if I was like working with you alongside of that, but I've seen often
where folks are like tasked with both and it's, it's a bit of a puzzle in many ways.
Um, yeah.
Yeah.
And, and I think there is kind of crossover between like community and social media.
Cause like Twitter space is a great example of that, but I think fundamentally content
creation and, uh, you know, content schedule for social media looks very different than
a content schedule for community.
Right.
Um, and I think tasking one person with all of these channels, right.
Discord, Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, just makes not much sense.
Um, and I think the, you know, the kind of delineation between marketing and social media
management is also interesting too.
So the fact that like, you know, social media management might not be, might not be like,
you know, the scale of marketing, um, that other things might be, I don't know.
I think I find that interesting.
Um, but I think community is very marketing adjacent.
It's just lower down the funnel.
Um, and again, like you said, if someone's specializing in the social media management
side of marketing, if someone's specializing in the community side of marketing,
if someone's specializing in the, you know, kind of like the big scale, like ad marketing,
right.
Where they're like, you know, making commercials and it's like this, you know, large scale effort.
I think specializing in one of these parts of the funnel is so, so important because
they all take different skills and they all take, um, skills that, you know, are not,
are not the same.
Um, and, you know, tasking someone with all of them, I think, like you said, makes the,
each individual product worse or outcome worse, um, compared to if you have a special, if you
have someone specialized in it.
Um, but I think specialization takes more, you know, money, um, right.
To have three people instead of one person.
And so I think in web three, there's also, um, a revenue issue with many, with many companies,
right.
It's a very early space.
Most companies are still startups.
Um, there's not many established players except maybe the main chains and some other,
you know, providers like Alchemy and a few others.
So I think, you know, especially on the consumer side of crypto, there's, it's much harder to
have that specialized talent move in, um, on the non-technical side.
So I think that we're starting to see it, um, over the last few years, we started to see
it more and more.
Um, and maybe in this new, you know, bull cycle, we'll see even more of that specialization.
But I think that there is a consumer, there is a user demand for a community space, um,
if not for support, um, because one thing I've noticed as well, even in my own outreach
for Wonderverse is that people don't respond to emails.
They respond to the discord.
So like, you know, you'll, you'll email a company, no response, jump into discord, you'll
get an immediate response.
And I think that highlights the power of community compared to, um, you know, having a
an email form that, you know, people fill out that you're never going to check.
You miss opportunities that way.
Um, you know, maybe there's some limiting of spam, but you can pretty easily limit spam
in communities as well with, if you have a good community manager.
So, so anyway, um, I'm not sure if we have much else for, for today.
Um, Juniper, anything else in your mind for this topic?
No, I think we covered all the main bullet points.
So I think, um, for folks who are listening in async, um, you can always, uh, drop a comment
below with any questions or further thoughts.
And I think with these types of conversations, it's like never really complete as technology
grows.
Yeah, totally.
Um, thank you, um, uh, Vontarius for, for jumping into the conversation live for folks
listening async again, like Juniper said, we appreciate you for listening in and until
next time, we'll see you in the wonderverse.
Um, and that, you know, the daily events will continue.
Um, so see you, see you tomorrow.
Bye.
See you everyone.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
