Empowering Communities and DAOs: How to Activate the “Unactivated”

Transcript

[Music] all right uh this next speaker has a very colored resume uh she was formerly a professor um also a lawyer uh worked in employed in startups uh also listed on the web 3 Advisory Board uh for Salesforce she is co-founder of cab. and I would like to welcome to the stage Angela come on okay hi everybody thank you so much for being here um what a fun location

all right well I am going to get started I will say I have not practiced this and I decided to kind of go with a more like let's just talk about it kind of scene so we're going to do that all right so the name on my talk is how to activate the unactivated empowering communities in Dallas I'm going to it's a pretty broad topic but it's really like collab just to give you a little bit of background about collab land um we started four years ago so may of 2020 this is like our fourth birthday or fourth anniversary I never know what to call it um and now we've seen a few things right like we are the creators of what's called token gating I don't know if that's you're familiar with token

gating but it really just means means you have a token and now you want to meet the other people who also have tokens the community initially it's like the community founder or the project founder will come out and say hey if you just bought my nft or if you just bought a share in my Dow then come and meet me uh it was born out of necessity we started off as a dow tooling because this was May of 2020 you remember lockdown had just happened and so now it was how do we find the people that we used to meet with in person like we're all doing here how do we now get together with people and continue this da

movement um without actually being able to be with one another and of course everyone knows okay this wall address voted for this proposal but how do you actually like come into some kind of social situation where you're getting to know each other and being able to talk about the proposals in real life well online but equivalent to what we could say was real life okay here we go so the talk is empowering communities and activating the unactivated but really the first question is what is a community and why do I care so in crypto we're still very very early as everyone says and you've probably heard a million times but what communities mean in

crypto right now are attention they are a place for people that have are giving attention to the exact same thing can meet together and that's kind of how you're finding your Niche finding your interests finding other people that are looking at the same thing you're looking at and there are so many things to look at in crypto so how do you find the people and one of those ways is through community and that's literally all it means it means I've chosen to give my attention to this particular project in this particular moment and now in order to continue learning more about that you know instead of going to Wikipedia or something and learning more or going to

Reddit and kind of Googling it you're looking for a community of other people who are also paying attention to the exact same thing so that's really all a community is so if you have gotten some attention in some way then you want to keep that attention or if you're a person who's bought attention bought something from somebody and you're giving them attention that way how do you find more people that are interested wow I'm already four minutes in all right let's see I'm pushing the button here we go okay so start with how do you even get people to come and join your community like why would they join your community who cares there's like billions of things for us to pay

attention to like how do you get people to actually care about your community or your project or be showing some interest in what you're doing and the way that it has been going at least I will tell you I started in February of 2020 and and um have been kind of at the Grassroots of what cabin was like I said we started as a dow tool however you know since the time that I've been in crypto I've seen what has engaged people and what continues to engage people just like what's engaged people for hundreds of thousands of years is storytelling so if you have a good story right now I'll give you an example uh and again never Financial advice so no not Financial advice but like Pepe token right or Doge

token or a dog with hat like it's funny it's cute people have a story about it people have a feeling about it people just think oh this is something I think is interesting and instead of it being something like uh Linguini or Spider-Man you could actually buy a little thing and join a community and meet a group of people that have also bought that little thing um mem coins actually just to divert a little bit are really really interesting cuz meme coins now what we think of as coins have a picture and if you remember like iOS before right like there was no picture no one cared about the art or the storytelling however with the nft boom from like 2021

2022 Art became more interesting and compelling for people and so now it's almost like this version of of tokens right ERC 20s or a fungible tokens right now are incorporating maybe the initial Ico kind of excitement with all the speculation but it's also including the storytelling and the art from the nft boom so now we're kind of at like a culmination of that which is pretty interesting but yeah art like I said maybe it's not like your unique picture anymore it's not like 10,000 pictures but it is um a single picture like the dog with hat picture is just a little dog with a little hat and people love that little dog with a little hat and that's just kind of what what we do as

people we want to be drawn to something we want to feel a part of something um Engage The Voices That are being listened to right now it is very very crowded in crypto right now there everyone's talking about different things you don't know what's a scam what's not a scam to be honest with you you just don't know and so one of the things that you want to do is be compelling to kol's and to project leaders like those are two separate approaches uh one of the ways to get involved with KS there's plenty of different agencies that do that you can find somebody you like online it's a whole sub industry I will tell you it is not so easy to break into anymore it's definitely developed um I was just at NFC Lisbon and I was on a panel with um two kol's who are just like now moving

to Dubai and have turned it into a whole kol agency so it's definitely become um more advanced and so it's not as easy at was um however we do have platforms that give us a voice and so if that's something that's interesting for you then it doesn't mean something you can't do yourself you could totally do it but if you want a little bit of a head start you're going to want to engage with them and then project leaders it's that like no man is an island right even with collab land we work with lots of different communities and I have it later on in the slides but we have 53,000 communities but how we raise ourselves up is by raising our communities up and so making friends with the leaders of those communities um building doing collaborations with the leaders of those communities there are

other ways to get out there and one of the ways um you're seeing it happen in cryptospace is building those relationships so you get the project leaders to start talking about it and then of course incentives like you know um my co-founder and my husband James often says come for the casino stay for the revolution which is let's just be 100% real about why people are here like now like I said you know since 2020 and I've been here and it's like there's this idealism that comes with crypto like oh we want it to be a certain way we want it to be this open network we want to have opportunity for everybody it's going to be a collaboration and a global movement and like there's all these beautiful reasons that we're here blockchain right however let's be really real about the reason people are here

right now and most people are joining for financial reasons and so one of the ways to get people into your community is through incentives airdrop token points uh referral programs and um anything like that okay all right here we go so once they're in your community right once they in this isn't even the hard part once they're in your community how do do you get them to stay right so what do people want well I will tell you over the last four years what I've discovered is that more than anything more than like camaraderie and friendship and all of that people want status everybody wants status like even the person that you think is like the

most hardworking um oh like selfless you know like completely able to just keep on working and you know does things that everyone's ask and he's your best community or he or she is your best Community member or they they still want status I will tell you I've seen it over and over and over again over all the communities that um I support status is something that everybody needs and so how do you give them status well there's lots of different ways to get status and that's kind of the second thing which is like reputation building um there's onchain you really want to focus on onchain activities like tipping onchain tipping um poem like for your events like your town halls or any kind of

events that you have even special badges we even give badges to people that are like willing to take a survey for us right like if you um give them some kind of like Alpha um Alpha tester role or like early adopter role like and give them a poop for that or give them some tips and say like oh I'm giving you these tips for these reasons cuz you provided this service like giving them an opportunity to build their resume on chain is tremendous it's one of the ways that we can break through our traditional systems like one of the things that holds people back in the traditional system is you are working somewhere you're probably leaving because of some reason that maybe isn't going so well people usually don't leave

jobs because they love them so much they're leaving jobs because Something's Happened or something's gone wrong or they have trouble with the company or have trouble with their boss well then what like you're going to a new job and they're asking you for a reference from your old job and it's kind of a difficult situation there and so now with blockchain we're able to have onchain reputation where you're not going to be dependent on what somebody else has said about you and I'll say our hiring at least the last four or five employees and we only have 12 um have been through this system which is where have you worked in crypto what have you done in crypto let me see kind of what communities you're a part of what projects you're a part of um and it's been able to be you know trustless in

that way right and so that's kind of what we're all here for um and then hiring from within you've got your community members and this is a great great way to give status like I cannot tell you I I guess I'll use a really quick example but even J from axi Infiniti and Candy who works for collab land like they both started in crypto kitties and they were just community members and now she runs comms at cabin and he runs axi Infinity like you can build build up people that are in your communities that you see working hard and are interested because that having an opinion and being interested and again don't take like criticism as a way to not um raise them up when people are

criticizing your project they are engaged with your project they are excited about your project and someone having an opinion about something that you've created out of your own mind is extremely valuable and so if you have someone in your community that does show up to things and you think wait a minute you know maybe they're just a naysayer maybe they're just a criticizer like pull them in ask them about it just they're giving you their attention which is the most valuable thing we have on our planet and so um find a way to engage them and pull them in and and groom them to maybe take on more responsibilities and let them change from within I know I said hiring from within but really let them make your

project better from within and pay them for it like more than anything pay them for it it's a mistake I see happening over and over in communities where the biggest projects I will tell you I met with some people at um the last conference I was at and these are Big projects that make plenty of money and yet they depend on like volunteer admins and mods in their community and that is not the way to raise status that is the way to burn people out and make them feel really really bad so pay them for it but again that's a great way to um raise them let's see okay here we go so now you've been doing this for a while I mean there's lots of other things and if

you want to talk about it afterwards we can talk about it but creating a Content calendar um creating opportunities for people to be engaged um making sure that you do have an active mod and admin team so that way you're welcome people welcoming people that come in and giving opportunities for people to come and participate having different yeah having consistent activities that people can join um is super important and all across the world in all different time zones all different days um so that people can now let's say you've been doing this for a while and it's not working you are like I I just don't know what to do it's the exact same 10 people talking every time there's hundreds of people in my community I can't get them to engage they're just sitting around and I just see the loudest voices in the

room constantly are um doing all the talking okay so number one is did you try hiring professional mods and I know I harped on that a little bit earlier but you have to hire professional mods like and I can help you with that if you need it not a shell but it's just true um so that's number one because you need to have programming a community is not something that you can just say oh everyone come into this park and now I'm leaving like maybe it's not even a park come to my empty parking lot right there's nothing built yet come to my empty parking lot at 10:00 a.m. and let's all just be there and then I'm going to go somewhere else and then you're like wait a minute it it's okay chaos they're beating up on each other they're starting fires in the

neighborhood I don't know all the things that people do and so hiring a professional mod team is huge you have to show a commitment to your Community First in order for them to start growing with you uh so that's first second switch from Discord to telegram so we're on Telegram and Discord we started on telegram it was most Community should never have moved out of telegram you only need one channel now they've got different topics you can do it's small enough that you can manage it everyone moved to Discord and now you've got infinite number of channels people are doing all kinds of things adding games doing this it's insane and for a lot of projects they get completely overwhelmed with the amount of activity

that happens in terms of like it's just they can't control it they they don't know how to control it and so one of the things you can do is switch from Discord and tgram it's okay to slim it down it's okay if you've only got 10 active people and 100 members you don't need a Discord server that's entirely possible and you don't have plans to continue to grow it don't move to telegram people will respect you for it second try Seasons like you can have okay well this is the end of our fall season or end of season 2 now we're taking a short break it's okay to take a short break it's okay to hibernate your community and what I wrote here is Embrace a Fresh Approach you don't have to be in a situation where you start start this community and

you're like it's going to be all these things and I'm expecting it to be wonderful and everyone to hang out and all these people to be best friends and everyone to be pumping my coin and um creating memes all the time about um what I'm doing and what we're all doing here together if it's not working try a Fresh Approach come back with a different structure it's okay to do that there doesn't have to be fear around that and often times I talk to communities and they're like oh people will get mad like people will get mad if I um take a break people will get mad if I switch if I shut down my Discord and I move to telegram people will get mad at me and they're going to FUD my project and they're going to um completely lose whatever attention I have I'm going to

lose so I will say it's not true we're all really busy if anything people might even appreciate the little break because often times we're in I don't know how many Community guys are you guys more than like 10 chats or 10 discords what you say yeah most people are right that's still a lot and so if you come out as a project owner and you say I you know this worked last cycle it's not really working anymore or we're pivoting or we're trying a Fresh Approach here people are going to respect you one of the things that's the most important which I don't feel like communities do enough but I I want to um behoove you all to do it which is to be

honest and lead with honesty so if people are number one complaining about something listen to them and say okay I hear that it's not working and engage them for feedback so you can get that feedback but also be honest about the fact that you've only got 10 loud people in your Discord server like be honest is that really bringing more people into your project or is it pushing more people away if it's not serving you then you can pivot at that point so yeah hibernate and then this is building in public like I don't know why we all forget about that and I will tell you about cabin we launched a social fight app um in December called T friends it did not work it did not work people were

and now social fight is back but anyway um people were kind of burned out on front tech one um people you know there were lots of other social fight apps coming out we're like no no ours is going to be different people are going to be into it because it's going to be social fly on telegram that's why we called it tele friends and everyone's going to be into it nobody was into it and it's hard so what we did at that point after it not working out is we started asking the people number one the people that did use it and left and the people that had stayed and were trying to use it but having a really hard time with it we did surveys and we had oneon-one interviews with them and we talked to them what is it about tell a friends that you like

and what is it that you don't like and what is it about social F that you like and what is it that you don't like and what would you like to see that we're doing here continue well we did that and it worked because what we realized is that in an already flooded Market people weren't interested in what we were proposing which was a many to many model compared to the one to many model that you see in Social f for us we're like we're going to take a chance on this maybe people want to build communities where everyone can talk to one another they don't they're not looking for that however there was um group trading that we were doing within our communities where could get trading links from other people in the community and then you

could get a percentage of that trading link if someone used your trading link so we did learn from that from that you know from that launch that we did there were some things that people liked and now we're going to take those things and we're going to incorporate it into the collab land bot so is it embarrassing yes is it okay to be embarrassed yes like it's okay be embarrassed say this didn't work and it sucks and I'm I'm I'm not sorry that we tried it but that's how you kind of get to something better and so in the same way with your community yes you tried it you have the best intentions you're like this is going to be awesome I'm going to get all these people together they're

all going to pump my token together and we're all going to work on this and everyone's going to make friends and innovate and build all these new connections and it's going to be amazing and then that doesn't happen it's okay to say we tried it this way it didn't work work these are the things I learned from it and I would say that's key even those 10 angry people that are in your server talk to them learn from them do deep interviews with them to kind of understand what was right and what was wrong and then take that and move it into that next phase like really the key is survival the key is don't leave this is a meaningful Endeavor right now even though it doesn't feel like that all the time um so yeah I guess that's my

message from that which is like it's messy everything is messy everything is messy and I think it's really hard when you're a project leader to know that because all the stories that you hear are so glossy and people are announcing their Partnerships and um their fundrais and it's always good news from projects everything's going well everyone's telling you everything's going well and when you're a founder or and you're starting a project it feels extremely lonely but I will tell you after four years of doing this I've met so many different Founders talked to so many different projects every single thing is messy and so if you can accept that then you'll understand like people don't talk about it but let's be different like

let's just be honest like what if we try that you know a lot of what we're doing with crypto is building a new world right like I think that's probably why you're all here it's why I'm here we're maybe age doesn't matter and race doesn't matter and gender doesn't matter and all of that we're trying to break through through a lot of that and this is another opportunity which is like mistakes they're not mistakes if you're learning from them so yeah that's that uh okay where am I sorry I don't know how to use this really well okay all this to say and I've got 2 minutes and 35 seconds left um all this to say is communities again it's overwhelming you hear that word you don't know why you should care like you're just trying to

do your little thing now you have to listen to everyone in the peanut gallery like what why do we have to do that but I'll tell you communities continue to grow um more cre communities are created now have been created at a faster Pace since January of 2024 than all of the last bull run like the pace and mostly and I wrote here hey hey gaming and hey hey APAC because it might not be what we've been seeing in previous Cycles which was like more Western European Canadian USA uh communities forming but now and around nfts and before that it was STS at a much smaller percentage um but now we're seeing more gaming gaming servers are huge i' say in our top our top 10 servers are mostly gaming servers

and also APAC region and so it's almost like in the same way Bitcoin ordinals have seen the uh dumpster fire that we created during 2021 and 2022 and nft eth or eth nfts in the same way APAC has watched us what we've been doing and the mistakes that were made with eth communities um back in 2021 2022 and they've taken them and they're building something so much stronger and so APAC communities are growing like crazy our last four chains that we have um integrated have been uh APAC communities or APAC chains so just to um share that that's just a little bit of alpha uh we have over 13 million wallets connected and growing still to this day we had our

most our all-time high which was like uh 12,500 wallets um joining in one day and that was in uh the end of January 2024 so like I said there are more people here than ever before you may not feel it in your particular Niche um but I can tell you across cab land we have 36 different blockchains right now and we've had all-time high in terms of the number of Walls connected so people are joining and maybe it feels a little splintered right now and you know let's see what happens with that but in terms of community community is a message that has continued to like purify proliferate sorry about that word um throughout all the chains and and through crypto um yeah so I guess the

leaving thought with that is think about it and take a very thoughtful approach Community is not just a buzzword it's actually work it's actually something you have to plan out yourself and you have to strategize yourself it's not something you can just leave in an empty parking lot and here I am so I'm Angelie young um there I am on LinkedIn I'm dama DEA on Twitter and really all the socials farcaster Instagram wherever um favor yeah any of the new ones uh you can find collab cab. land it's in our name uh and then our Twitter is collabor landore and the links are at cabin so thank you you want to answer some questions oh

yeah happy to so do we have any questions from the audience uh if there are any questions I'm happy to answer them thank you so much uh one small question um because there is this informational tsunami which is happening in these years and it's increasing what I'm witnessing is the that people of my age and around they're declining the amount of information that they're consuming so are there any suggestions from your side and recipes about the volume and frequency of the information oh boy that's a really good question I mean I can only tell you at the community level like we used to have weekly town halls

and we let those go so now we do like once a month town halls and so I think you are seeing more communities responding to that because you're right it is too much information if you go on Twitter we do a weekly Twitter spaces but it really es and flows on how many people can handle that but if you go on Twitter any time of the day there's like five different Twitter spaces going on like what are you supposed to do I mean trust is important find people you trust and follow them follow who they're following and you really have to learn to curate I think having a thesis helps like I have a thesis for what I'm interested in and I try to stay in that lane it's so difficult because a fomo like fomo is intense and every time I hear something and I'm like oh I don't I

don't know about that let me listen to that Twitter spaces again like we want to kind of stay on top of everything but it's too overwhelming and we can't do it so I say the strategy to that is have a thesis decide what you're going to be interested in and then Focus your attention in there and then do your best to have restrictions in terms of like everything else that people are talking about and it's hard with crypto I get it but once you have like a dedicated interest then it makes it a little bit easier yeah okay uh any other questions otherwise I'll be around so if you want to approach me individually I'm good okay cool well thank thank you [Applause]