How to Build a Lasting Community

Transcript

[Music] we're going to kick off the afternoon with Ted not lasso Ted not lasso is a power user and self-described evangelist of farcaster she's also the founder of Club Ted which is an onchain membership club experimenting at the frontier of onchain communities and decentralized social she recently organized far 2024 which was a multi-day summit to connect and celebrate the forecaster Community previously she led Biz Ops and strategy at Goldfinch which is which was one of the first real world asset protocols and is also in our portfolio she helped scale it from seed to series a and to

100 million plus in AUM so let's welcome Ted I'm here today to talk about how to build a sustainable community community is a buzzword I think everybody knows that you might be looking and you're like okay this morning learned about how to build an audience how to Market how to connect with your users and I think Community is inherently a part of that but just as a audience is different than a community a community is also different than a network and so hopefully I can demonstrate and outline the differences today and convince you the importance of really focusing and honing in on how to build your own Community I as car mentioned am a early power user of farcast asor turned

evangelist turned Community Builder so I think I'm the perfect example of what happens when a Founder focuses on community-led growth and really allows the users of their protocol or their product to feel a sense of ownership and be able to um leverage that ownership to create kind of my own Vision my own reality my own platform as well a little bit of background is before I worked in crypto and before I moved full-time into crypto I actually helped build kind of like 0er to1 new products features campaigns etc for Brands celebrities startups and family offices and something that's consistent across all of these is that they all focused at their stage on community-led growth so

Brands pretty self kind of self-explanatory Gucci huge huge brand they focus on House of Gucci all for their celebrities they focus on community and user generated content they focus on different activations that's straightforward celebrities also straightforward worked with Miley and Madonna and fandom for them is is everything right so like how are these celebrities connecting with their fans how are they making sure that their fans feel part of a community I think Taylor Swift is like the best example of this I know it's a silly to uh reference Taylor Swift but uh everything from like the little bracelets all of the friendship bracelets that she makes at her concerts to the Easter eggs that she leaves in albums like all of that is part of

building community and then startups as well especially Marketplace startups so like how do you allow all kind of facets of the marketplace to feel connected it allows you to have some stickiness and then does anyone know what this it's small but does anyone know what this place is it is the Sun Valley Conference so where all of the billionaires family offices Etc go and so you might think oh family offices they don't really need Community they're operating in their own world at the end of the day they too are looking for community and so take a step back I would say what what is community um I think a lot of people have different definitions of it and my definition would be like what are the interactions the relationships and the

value that's derived between members of the community so a really easy analogy would be um you live in an apartment complex and you know you could go in and out and not talk to anybody so even though you're in the same vicinity you're in the same network you're not necessarily part of a community whereas if you kind of like move down the street and all of a sudden interacting with everybody you're talking there's value being exchanged that to me is a community this is my background working with kind of like all these web two players in the space and so I got really excited when we think about web 3 and using tokens to continue to grow Community Chris Dixon said tokens line Network participants to work together toward a common goal so the growth of

the network and the appreciation of token this was really exciting because you could potentially turn Community into a core part of these businesses because it so intrinsically allows you to line incentives for Collective growth so tokens we thought could solve this what I think many people in crypto have learned is that how we thought it would work in theory is not how it works in practice and so what we've seen is that all of a sudden if you use a token to hopefully let's say like address the cold start problem so oh you're using a token in order to like bootstrap your community what you may end up with is what it says in this tweet is that you're left with empty discords or discords just asking one token one

airdrop and so I'd almost say look take a step back Back to Basics is give users ownership and they will help you build something important and I think crypto is so ingrained into thinking about ownership in terms of a token and meanwhile there's many many meaningful ways to give users a sense of ownership before you introduce a token and that's what I think we should all focus on today and what I will focus on also because uh that's my experience how many of you Founders are technical by raise of hands okay good how many of you have ever worked in like a formal marketing or Community role before okay very few um so I think one thing that's scary about The Word

Community is that a community inherently is like more operationally heavy than and product L growth right so you have to be in the weeds you have to be talking to users you have to be doing all of this what I would argue is that you can actually build community by Building Product and that at an early stage company product Le growth and Community Le growth can actually be hand inand and they work really closely together because a lot of the stuff that you're trying to figure out on the product side can actually be outsourced or leveraged by the community so first of that is build with your users not for them so I'll run through kind of like four key principles this being the first Dan who is the founder co-founder of

forecaster I've learned a ton from him he included this in his CSX presentation from LA and basically it's the idea of dog fooding I'm sure this isn't new to you guys but it's be your own first user why this is important on the product side you already know but why this is important on the community side is that it allows you to empathize and be authentic to your kind of like first core group of users so that means you have the firsthand experience of user pain points you understand like why somebody might love your your product you understand who might be the user of the product too so you can start small and make sure that you're focusing on like a really small Core group of people and then you can understand okay where where might I find these people too and

that I think is the most important question is okay once I understand all these pain points once I'm using this product every day once I'm understanding like where do they where do they GA like you ask where do they gather and that's where you should go to start building your community so I know you heard from ish this morning about like where are you building your social presence in theory it would be great if you build your social Presence at the same place that you're building your community as well also this isn't necessarily new so this is uh you guys are familiar with the uh Homebrew Computer Club is this ringing a bell yeah W and Steve ended up tinkering building their own computers figuring it all out and then they would go exactly to where their future users would go which is Homebrew Computer Club

they would go they would bring their product they would get feed back they would meet other people there and I think that is is really important cuz they're users of their own product and they're part of the community without inherently being like oh we're going to go build a community right and so this is like an example of if you're building with your users and not for them you're ultimately just doing product and community at the same time so it's not necessarily an outsourced function that you need to be thinking about you're in the weeds you're you're doing everything that you need to be doing the second principle here is Foster authentic connections I think authenticity is King I don't think that's relatively new to anybody and I think what this means in terms of building Community as an early stage founder is providing like high

touch personalized experiences for early users and and a lot of times this means like do things that don't scale so this famous Paul Graham quote the hardest thing for all of you is probably like going out and finding users and so again going back to kind of like build with your community not for them if you if you're dog fooding the product you know who where you can go find those like initial 20 25 to 50 early early users power users could be and then kind of doing things that don't scale providing High touch engagement is kind of like here's this is actually again from Dan go out and onboard them personally make time to to hold hands with them and say okay here's the product what's your feedback how are you doing this and a lot of people might be like oh this is

this is what I'm just doing this like get feedback but it's really about building a genuine relationship like a lot of work that goes into what you're what the what the product should be doing like the community does a lot of that work right so like you're sitting there you're Gathering all this feedback and then you can iterate and share it with them and so then they're they're feeling bought in by doing this like onetoone Personal Touch and this doesn't mean like sending out a mass email or kind of like oh like having somebody else on your team do it it's like personal onetoone Outreach what that looked like for me as I led up to Faron was going and spending time with a lot of the farcaster community and this isn't a lot different ways so I think something else that I love that aot Gil

says in kind of like the high growth handbook is to run many small experiments because the goal is to find scalable repeatable me methods to in his case acquire customers in my case it was to build community and so do a lot of things um kind of is the advice that would give so the first is like okay we this crazy story on the kind of right here is that for a bunch of people I was like okay I want to walk a marathon in LA from Dodger Stadium all the way to Venice Beach who wants to do it with me like crazy idea was like nobody would want to do this also definitely not scalable and like in this photo there's like 12 people who are like yes I'm totally down all internet strangers all only knew each other through

farcaster all decided to like okay let's do this let's walk a marathon and it ended up becoming a almost like the full foraster community was bought into it so the people who are walking it all strangers now all friends like two of my best friends are from that and then beyond that we basically captured the entire like mile by mile and shared it on the platform so that people felt bought in along the way as well and so that was just like a really fun moment where you're like oh this is like a silly small experiment what worked what clicked here um and so just like go out and be with the community it's also been like small dinners um you can see here I had a bunch of read write own books and was like Hey does anyone in the community want them um I'll send them to

you personally and so that's another thing is all of a sudden I just wrote a nice handwritten note I think I sent out like 40 books I actually ended up having to buy them in order to uh make sure that everyone got one um I offered poker we did live streams we just did a ton of different experiments to be like okay how can users contribute to each other so learning like oh I'm I'm listening to them and creating an interactive space for them to engage with each other and so it's a lot easier for me to understand okay like what value do I add as a community member what value are they adding adding to each other and like what does a sense of ownership actually mean for this community so from there like once a you've dog you kind of have used your own product gone to where

they are and then engaged directly with them to build authentic relationships the next step is to create like genuine Collective ownership again give users ownership and they will help you build something important there's lots of ways you can go about this I'll show two um one of them is the concept of like psychological ownership right and so I think Dan a forecaster does a really phenomenal job with this and that like every 2 weeks or every month he'll ask if you were like benevolent dictator of warcast what would you do differently what would you have us focus on what features would you add and so this is a way of kind of like allowing users to have a say or influence in the in the direction of the product I think this is really powerful because a you're getting kind of like direct feedback no one's

going to BS that right like if they don't care then they won't comment otherwise people who care will comment so get to collect that data then you can iterate or you can build out some of those features and then you can launch and like close the loop back so a it's like a really great product feedback loop but B they all feel a sense of ownership because they're like oh wow like he listened to me and like oh I have a good idea for the product and oh they implemented it like I I am have skin in the game now I want to keep participating um fun story about me is that actually I was I reported all of the bugs I was like screenshots and the the bug screenshot send the bug this is when there was like only 200 users on the platform so there was like I was

like oh who liked my post and like every time it was just Dan and once they decided to get into the App Store and get out of like flight test my he like used my profile in the App Store kind of like little Carousel wheel and I can't tell you like how special that made me feel I was like wow I I can't believe he like noticed that I send all these bugs he said thank you for doing the bug reports and for me that kind of turned me into the evangelist because I was like oh they care about the community and it's not just like entirely self- serving like they they care kind of we did the same or I did the same thing with farcon saying okay as soon as we announced and we started getting applications we were like who wants to

be involved how do you want to be involved just comment and reply here again I would say like this isn't scalable because for both Dan and for farcon like you get hundreds of responses and so you can't keep doing that over and over and over again but it is one of the things where it's like if you ask for feedback you're engaging with your users again this is this is good for the product it's also building community at the same time so hopefully like I I think one thing we'll say over and over and over again is what is good for the product is also good for the community and so I don't want Community to be this like big scary like woo woo thing it's like oh no no if you're doing what is good for the product and product

development you should also kind of like this isn't inherently part of it as well so one other thing is again I think I mentioned earlier if you are leaning into Community another way to make people feel like a collective sense of ownership is to highlight or create opportunities for them to fully contribute so for farcon I guess the best way to say it is like obviously there's so many aspects of running an event there's like applications ticketing uh onboarding the programming itself um kind of like what activities there are going to be uh social Etc marketing and what we tried to do was like fully Outsource it to the community and so every single stakeholder who was providing some sort of service or

helping with the programming felt completely bought in and so they also wanted to make it the best event ever because they had some sort of responsibility also the way that I thought about it was like we're hosting an event of 500 of very onchain people who could Pro probably provide each of these Founders who kind of helped participate whether it was form hypers sub um um there's ice breaker there's events XYZ there's friends there's bracket so you can see all of these it's like okay you're going to get kind of like really high fidelity high quality feedback from all 500 of these users if you kind of like help and participate and become part of the fabric of farcon as well and so thinking about he how can

I provide value to them allows them to enter in and then feels like okay again I have skin in the game I want to be have like a meaningful contribution again builds community so that is one and then the last principle I would include here is scaling through community-led experiences how many of you guys use notion a lot I don't know if how many of you are actually familiar with like the lore of notion but they Jason I think his name is Jason Lem he was actually kind of the same exact story of me power user of notion created all these templates decided he wanted to include them in his newsletter all of a sudden someone from notion realized he was

doing this and was like oh my gosh do you just want to join the team and be like head of our community or head of growth and what he was really focused on was kind of like this template Gallery because that's how he started to gain traction and so in terms of like create community-led experiences this can be as simple as user generated content like not everyone here can be like Oh I'm going to host like a 5day 500 person Summit and like drop everything else that I'm doing in order to bring the community together so there's kind of like easier more remote and more scalable ways and number one is user generated content so here's their template Gallery I think they did the template Gallery they also did kind of an ambassador program so they went and identified let's say community of Angeles like Jason or others kind of all

across the world and said okay how can we help you what do you need um how can we help you kind of like basically reach your audience or increase the audience what this looks like for forecast is on the product side this is where I think product and Community Le growth go hand inand on the product side in warcast they launched an explore page which is ultimately like an App Store so here's all of what kind of like developer tools developer apps that people have made directly within the warcast app and developers were so excited they were like this is incredible how do we keep iterating on this they felt like okay we're getting distribution we're getting to see kind of like more users are using our apps but they couldn't be happier on the community side kind of as we decided to

lean into developers it also meant like hosting forecaster developer day and bringing everyone together to continue to get kind of like straight feedback with the developers and the core meracle team also on the community side is okay we have these apps in the store um or in in the Explorer page how do we actually get users to use them and so I launched this thing called forecaster Fridays where the first Friday of every month you just do a casual Meetup in your city with other forecasters and we encourage everyone to use some of the apps that are included in the explore page as well so not only are you bringing developers together on the community side which is informing the product you're also bringing users together which then inform kind of like all of the the

developer applications and then also kind of the core team as well I would say like this is where the feedback loop gets really helpful is again like once you I think at any early stage product lead growth and Community lead growth they are two different things but they should be working hand inand or in parallel moving from these four key principles into some more concrete tactics build with your users not for them so I would say a use your product every single day um be your own first user be able to focus on user needs so that you can lead with empathy and authenticity so when I worked at Goldfinch for instance we were focusing on kind of like investors right and I wasn't the type of person to be investing every day that's just not me

so what is something else that I was I was doing I was finding a friend who could be that who was that type of person who did want to invest who knew the private credit or the traditional Finance space and I basically checked in with them kind of like at least weekly to be like oh do you want to walk through this with me again what are some pain points you have and tried to be as okay if I'm not using it every day or I I would use it and then i' go to them and be like oh this was weird what do you think about this so if you aren't using it every day I would just encourage you to find a proxy to to use it every day but you should be using it every day again to identify a small group of Target users and go where they

already are so in much the same way that is said okay like focus on one platform because that's easy I think there's so many platforms out there there's Discord there's Twitter there's telegram there's kind of like infinite options available obviously there's worldcast or forecaster um I'm biased in where I prefer to spend my time but for everybody else just go where your users already are like you don't want to have to ask somebody to download an a whole new app and like Port them over just to use your product unless and they they probably won't do that unless your product is solving like a dying need for them that's number two and then three ask for feedback constantly and then iterate quickly and then ask for feedback again and so I think as

Founders everybody trusts their own intuition right like you probably know what the product needs you know what your priorities are but just because you already have those answers internally doesn't mean that you shouldn't be continuously asking for feedback um it's your job as a to be able to like look at a whole list of comments and be like okay this is high priority this is not high priority or like understand the second or third order effects of what some of the feedback May entail but you should constantly be asking for feedback I think that there's a report that just came out that said that the founder of pump. fund ended up dming like 500 or 5,000 people before it started getting traction like literally went and was like hey are you using my product why

aren't you using my product what's wrong with it and that's kind of like do things that don't scale like go out and and be continuously asking for feedback and also just like develop thick skin too because some of the feedback like you might not want to hear uh and it's good to get that um because the worst thing that can happen is you do a huge product launch and then you end up delivering a product that a ton of people don't really love or don't want and then you you wish that you had asked kind of for smaller bites of feedback along the way number two some tactical ideas for foster authentic connection so first one I've mentioned multiple times like start with high touch send personal DMS and replies if you guys are building a social presence and you're uncomfortable building a personal brand

and like putting a bunch of stuff out there the best way that you can approach building a social presence and building Community is by actually acting as like customer support for people who have questions about your product so that's part of your job as a Founder is to kind of like service all of your users and to provide them support and so if you think about it and you're like oh somebody kind of mentioned this topic or somebody mentioned our company like you should be responding to that as the founder again I think Jason Leven says it's a product hunt he's like I send personal DMS all the time if I'm sending it from the brand account I even say like hi it's Jason like I would love to talk to you about this and so again like anything you can do to provide personal Outreach

is so so valuable two Embrace building in public and share the behind the scenes so this is the part that I think any body who's ambition or driven doesn't necessarily like to do you want to share all of your wins um I think it's really helpful to share any part of the as of kind of like of the journey so it builds trust it makes kind of like it's very transparent it builds authenticity as well so what this looks like I think for farcon there was a time I was like working full-time job trying to host this event and I fell super behind on kind of replying to DMS and uh people were upset and I just had to straight up come out and be like hey guys I'm really sorry I'm super behind on getting back to everyone I promise

I'll take the time over the weekend to do it here's a little bit more visibility into what next steps are we haven't figured out the answer but kind of here's where our focus is right now and after that kind of all of the anger or tension or just like frustration from users dissipated because I gave them a look into okay here's what's going on behind the scenes and I always feel like it's better to be proactive especially early and when there isn't a major crisis than to just like sit back and and wait and then three create space for casual interactions so um a good example of this is informal amas I was hosting like online poker games you could host like a casual live stream or a Twitter space what I also like to call is is office hours just create a space for

users to interact with each other so obviously it's different if you're building a social platform where kind of like the product inherently is social but even if you're building an infrastructure platform uh kind of like dii anything like that just creating a space where your power users can come and interact with you live is highly valuable and get somebody on your team if like if you're not feeling particularly extroverted get someone on your team to kind of just like encourage and and welcome people and bring kind of like positive energy because it could be that the first time you host it only one person decides to talk but there will be other people listening in and that's still a win and then the second time you host it kind of maybe three people will decide to talk and then the four or third or fourth time more and more

people will get involved especially if you create a like positive interaction where they're like oh I did learn from that or oh I met somebody who is worth connecting with and I want to connect with them again create genuine Collective ownership so some tactics is to create clear paths for users to shape the Network's future this is very obvious if you think about kind of some of the questions or polls is like hey what would you do if you were kind of benevolent dictator forecaster or oh hey what do you guys want to see um on the farcon side we basically pulled and said what types of activities would you guys want to have at a 5-day conference and it came down to Art music pickle ball and uh hackathon uh closing ceremony so just constantly think okay when you're

let's say releasing a new product or thinking about different things what are ways in which your power users can contribute it could be content it could be code it could be uh support um so kind of like on that line it's like create spaces for users to help solve each other's problems so again probably one of the high operational effort things that you will do is provide personalized customer support which a is great because you're getting product feedback but B is definitely taxing and may not be kind of like your favorite way to spend your time if you build a community and allow them to have like open Q&A whether you're using a forum whether you're using Twitter spaces whether you're seeing other people do this this is kind of like where you end up getting to open

up your bandwidth and then you can focus on higher leverage things but make sure that there's somehow like users can be answering each other's questions and then I think really importantly is build a system for recognizing the community's contributions so again the same way that I was featured in the little app store preview or we used a lot of the farters artists artwork in farcon you need to be recognizing when your community does something it can be something so small and even like a retweet or a reply anything like that goes a very long way especially today where I think you can be so focused on your product and forget that oh there are people who are super passionate and excited about what you're building and by engaging with them and recognizing that they then feel a sense of ownership and want to continue being

part of the community and then last scale through Community Le experiences is establish a culture and identity for early users someone once's told me that the best thing product that forecaster has made is actually a strong cultural identity and that everyone is kind of a techno Optimist collaborative um kind of like high integrity wants to help each other that actually is what has attracted and retained most of the users more so than the product itself and so by creating this like strong culture and identity and I think this kind of lends itself really nicely to what ish discussed this morning you actually then can allow people to build community because it's kind of almost like religion in a way it's like oh you and I

are similar let's go find other similar people and bring them into the fold as well something else identify any emerging evangelists and engage them directly so this is key um as you start to recruit those like first 25 to 50 users it'll become pretty apparent like who is High Fidelity and highly engaged and make sure you continue engaging them because that person can then go out and recruit let's say like 5 to 10 more users if they love the experience you're going to share it and I think we unell that a lot in crypto we think oh okay if if they build it they will come they likely won't you need to have like let's say five evangelists to go out and convince others to come into the fold as well and then I think three is in order to scale some of the community you need

to create consistent rituals um so what this looks like is for foraster they do something called like forecaster Friday it's kind of like a thing is like oh if we're going to launch a new feature we're going to do it on Friday I think that's against most conventional wisdom is like don't launch something on Friday because you'll be busy all weekend but it's become this fun thing where all of the users now are like oh is there like a forecaster Friday is there going to be a feature and then we played off of thought into making forecaster Friday actually like an in-person Community experience as well so some of these rituals are very kind of like just baked in infrastructure for people and users to plug in and connect with each other and feel a sense of stickiness that they wouldn't get elsewhere so I always like

leaving with like kind of exact tactics so that you don't necessarily like walk away with with nothing or no ideas those are kind of the four key principles and three tactics for for each of them I feel one thing before we dive into any questions is that a lot of people ask me for like a community Playbook or like oh what's like community in a box look like and it completely it's different for every single product right so every product needs a different type of community every Community has different types of needs as well um and so it's kind of the best way to think about this is to say like okay who are who are my target users who are those core users what do they need how are they connecting and then the third question

is like okay how do I spend as much time with them as possible and then from there you'll be able to apply these four principles and hopefully these are things that you're doing anyways in order to build your product so I guess in summary is I hope now you see that building community and Building Product actually do work hand inand you don't necessarily need to Outsource or hire a community manager or a community moderator any of that in my opinion it is ultimately the Founder's job to build community um and then once you build community I think the best signal for okay kind of community growth is is kind of like managing itself is if you remove yourself from the community will the

community continue to persist does it still exist our community leaders kind of like doing their own initiatives and activities and and campaigns and bringing together the rest of the users and if the answer is yes then congratulations you've done a good job on community and you can likely Focus a little bit more of your effort on the product Le growth aspect side of things I'm gonna ask the super obvious question here which is for like a lot of us who are uh you know building these like web 3 startups online um you deal with like the farmers coming in right yeah and uh so we had a really interesting experience over the weekend where we had someone make a really great story on our platform or a storytelling platform um and we emailed them and they sent us a

pretty canned response back and then they had said they composed a song for us and we were like okay wow this is this guy's like really loves us and then we like learned that this guy is just like automated like making like songs for like all these different web 3 companies and he's like forgot to he like we change out the name in the song right and so I think there's like obviously a lot of noise here right and so I think one of the big challenges for us as you know we're trying to focus on you know this community-led building um is how do we like really find the users navigate the users especially since you know on the surface a lot of these users they want you to like them too because they want airdrops MH yeah that I I think in an age where Supply is infinite

this is where Community really becomes your remote and it's like okay how do you find Community one thing I learned and I applied to building my community and foraster is actually something I learned from Dina and Natasha voice Club was when I asked them I was like why do you think your community is so strong they answer was like oh because we meet we meet them in person you get to know them you know that they're not just kind of like if you're putting in the time and effort to show up to something in person like you can't necessarily farm that you can't fake that um and so what I would say is like hey if you're are your target users storytellers broad speaking yes yeah so you're going to get tons of inbound and

I think it's your job as a Founder to be able to identify like okay like you did you you asked a question back and you got something and you're like okay I see what this user is there's still a way to have them be engaged which is kind of like retweet or say thank you or kind of at least like what they send you and um but on the other hand you're like okay we inbound at this point unless you can tell it's a real kind of like fully engaged user that's super passionate about specifically what you're building not generally I would just say you should go out and find like okay who are 10 people like who are 10 users problems you solve with your product and go talk to them and then when you're having that conversation be like oh is there anybody else you may know that you

could introduce me to who might have good feedback on this and from there that's how you'll start to understand kind of more of the archetype and more of who your power user and evangelist could be but I've noticed this a lot and again I think crypto has a unique issue because you're realizing that a lot of people I think this is like one of my first slides is like oh you think that you have real users and I I remember this with Goldfinch too is like oh there's tvl is skyrocketing like everybody there's such strong appetite for this and then all of a sudden um kind of we as it went on and kind of okay the token was distributed Etc you realize who who's really there or not and so my other advice is like make sure

that your product is solving a user's needs like in the absence of a token and then be as crystal clear as possible about that as well so it's the hardest I think it's like one of the hardest problems to solve and it will take a lot of like upfront effort of like do things that don't scale but go find people who could be evangelists and they will hopefully that's helpful hi Ted good to meet you you said you were part of the foraster product and Community early days right uh when it was like I don't know 200 300 users a question for you is if you look at Dune dashboard post dgen coin and tipping and all of that the numbers has certainly skyrocketed because you've been there since predd

and post DG like what is your perspective of the community Dynamics shifting and how much of it is like based on receiving this meme coin Thing versus like you're here because it's cool yeah uh good question so funny story is that when Deen and I think when Deen was first introduced I actually threw a little bit of a tantrum and was publicly boycotted forecaster it lasted like 4 days but I was like I can't stand the hyperf financialization this is just like not my vibe it's not my culture I want to be able to mute this I don't want to see it and so I left and I was like I'm deleting it from my phone until you guys introduced the

mute feature and then Dan and Veron were like okay well we're stubborn too and now we're not going to do it like just despite you um so I don't I personally didn't love it like that wasn't the community that I found but I think for a protocol and a product to thrive is actually like that's so kind of I took a step back after I was like done with my tantrum and thought like oh this is actually like net positive for forecaster this is really good the fact that there's multiple communities that can exist on this platform and so while D gen or kind of like the mem coin culture might not be for me I'm if I'm a power user an evangelist I should reframe and be like

this is great for the protocol and I think what that means for um Dan and verun and the team building warp cast is that they should think like okay how do we allow this place like for this product to really Thrive we need to allow for multiple communities and ecosystems to be engaging here without one alienating the other and so I think it was great in terms of giving like okay this is like a huge pain point it went from feeling like a tiny friendly group chat full of Founders and Builders to oh shoot we have like all of this activity people who aren't don't necessarily care about the platform they care about the money Etc but I think that's something that you guys all have to deal with right like that goes back to the first question it's

like who's here for the right reasons which is why I think it's really important to be as close to your users as possible because when you are like pretty much all of the early users who were part of that Core Group before D gen and all of that are still there and so again like if we were only there whereas like most of the djen community or like all those like if you're looking at the Dune dashboard you've seen it go up and you've seen it go down so you know that oh a lot of those people left um which is again why I like reemphasize like there's a form of ownership that's outside of tokens that's actually like very very sticky and it's kind of ownership of a community it's like oh how do I feel bought into a community and that is really important for I think

user retention in the absence of a token or just like in the absence if you're like pivoting or oh what outside effects may happen there were a lot of really good principles here about how to build a community uh especially for Consumer products and things like that but I wonder like if you're going after a B2B like say infra audience like other users how would you like rework some of these principles for that audience specifically in mind it's a good question and I thought about that as I was making this and I think the key difference is with B Toc your community and your product are combined right and the difference with B2B is that what your community means is a little

bit different right and so the question then becomes I think all of the principles still remain but the question is like okay what value are you adding to the community verse and so again if you're going infra uh let's say your target users are different apps in the ecosystem it's kind of like okay what value can we add to them and what value can they add to each other uh so it's still the same principles cuz you have to go and talk to them then you have to build an authentic relationship with them so that you're a good partner to them and then you have to a bring them together as well so it's still I would say the principles still apply it's the tactics that are a little bit different and the spaces that you're creating may not be so integrated with the product

itself it may look more like okay like what events are we doing uh how do we bring them together it takes a little bit more intentionality but I would say like from a B2B perspective some of the family offices that we worked with or some of the startups that we worked with were also B2B and what they end like uh Salesforce for instance B2B they still have dreamforce as well so they have like an experiential event where they bring everybody together as well so I think again just go back to like the two questions is like what value would you add if you brought your users together and what value would they add to each other and then kind of like what what community means for you I think the the other important thing to think about is that building a community is actually

really helpful for go to market and so always think about that like even pre-product Market fit it's like okay your community can help you figure out how you might want to go to market and so use that as part of kind of how you're orienting around it as well does that answer your question yep that's very helpful thank you all right thank you T [Music]