Making Discord better for your Web3 community

Transcript

GM GM welcome to another episode of web3 Academy a place for entrepreneurs business professionals and creators to learn how to use web3 to build sustainable business models and thriving communities I'm Jaybird I'm here with my co-host Kyle reidhead and today on the episode we've got Peter load the Discord Guru talking all about how to build a better Discord for your community Kai what did we break down today yeah you know what there are a lot of Discord haters out there but ultimately if you're in web 3 it is a great platform to build community on I mean we do it ourselves and there are many across the space that are doing it and uh it was great to bring Peter on because you know

we could just dive into some of the best practices it's very practical insightful discussion of how can you create a better onboarding experience inside of Discord how do you provide value in your Discord through events and through different things that he's seen and how to use gamification to create more engagement to get more activity going on in there inside of your Discord and so a lot of just different um useful tips I think if you're running a community if you're running a brand a business whatever and you want to interact with your audience your customers your your whoever it sounds nice then I think we talked a lot about security which was super important of course if you're running Discord servers something that I never really thought much about did not even realize the importance of it but of course it is extremely extremely important yeah it's

incredible that five years ago Peter decided to specialize in Discord I think that's before many web3 people got into Discord and he talks about the origins of how Discord was originally for gamers and developers and how he saw it as he started to have clients ask him to create Discord servers for them and he was like okay here's a tool I'm going to specialize in this so you know over half a decade he's just been working in Discord and building discords and he's built some great servers for communities like jump and Nifty finance and Link tree and Cloud name and many more so his experience is so vast and he really brought that to the table today so excited for you guys to hear this

episode with Peter Lowe the Discord Guru before we jump in let's just take a minute to hear from our sponsors don't trust verify that's the unlock of blockchain Technology the ability to store information in an open transparent and permissionless manner that information may be in the form of money value Access Data content and so much more regardless this Innovation is going to change the way that we use the internet and the way business and economies function forever how valuable would it be to you if you were ahead of one of the most influential technological innovations of our lifetime staying on the Forefront of web3 will teach you where and what to build if you're an entrepreneur where to focus your time and energy as a Creator

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membership nfts if you're an nft Creator you can't rely on on royalties as they are likely going to zero you need recurring Revenue you need unlocked at web3 Academy We Believe nft memberships are the future of business and community and that's why we decided to build an unlock learn more at unlock Dash protocol.com Peter welcome to the show thank you very much glad to be here we're glad to have you we're glad to have you certainly know that everybody in the web3 space has the joys and the Pains of using Discord so let's start with your rabbit hole

story what led you to fall down the route hole into web3 so essentially my rabbit hole story is I have a background in social media marketing and I chose to specialize in Discord after I had a client in the adult industry and this client wanted a decentralized community because they were like we can't be on Facebook we can't be on Instagram because the type of content that they wanted to share was obviously not compatible with the terms of service of those platforms so he wanted a Discord server and it was awesome I was like I'm happy to do a Discord server for you and I'd always wanted to build a Discord

server for a client so I jumped into it and it turned out to be an amazing project in that the community was absolutely massive and it helped his company scale as a result and not the knowledge I gained from that was essentially it led to me building a dating Discord server for him as well which was sort of like matchmaking and events and all this sort of interesting stuff but that knowledge that I gained from doing that and the decentralized nature of Discord in that way felt like a perfect segue into web3 and I was introduced to nfts about two and a half years ago by an old friend of mine and

he's like have you ever heard of nfts and I was like no I've never heard of them I don't know what that is and he told me we've got to create our own nft project and I went on open C and I tried to just upload a bunch of pictures and stuff and I was like oh my God it's cost so much money to this is doing the bull market when it was like 250 dollars to win something and yeah yeah so expensive yeah and then we ended up working with one of his friends and they create a bunch of these cryptocurrency tokens but they were like animated images of tokens and it was called huddle Collectibles and it was like animated tokens that were nfts but we worked really hard with

the his one of his friends called Joe who's this like crazy developer to have the tokens display the price of Bitcoin or price of Litecoin or price of Dogecoin actually on the nft so you could see the animation you can see the dynamic yeah and I wasn't compatible with open seed just open sea kept bugging out and couldn't cope with it so we found this Marketplace called beyond nft that was literally like unheard of no one even knew about it it was just a Marketplace for like developers to Showcase their crazy nft projects and yeah end up building a Discord server for that project and then realized oh my God

there's so many nft projects and web 3 projects that are using Discord and it was like this light bulb moment for me I was like oh my God I'm just gonna dive in and start building Discord servers for web 3 clients so I've sort of pivoted and shifted then after that I never went back I mean we're now starting to consult web 2 Brands but I didn't go back to the other stuff I was doing in web 2 I was like I'm just going to stay here this is awesome it's fully in Discord that's amazing solving a much needed a problem because there's a lot of discords out there and a lot of them not so great I'm curious it's a great story by the way but why do you think that web3 is clocking towards Discord obviously web3 is growing there's all this talk about

Community et cetera why Discord though why didn't we use I don't know slack or what else is other I mean I guess we still use telegram but Discord seems to be the clear winner any idea why you think that is there's multiple factors a first factor I think is that Discord has been a community platform for about seven years and then I also think the fact that it doesn't have advertising on there it's not like Facebook where you're being bombarded with advertisements traditionally I think for a lot of web 3 native people like developers have always been using Discord as a way to communicate like people used to use IRC and TeamSpeak and then people swap to Discord and I came from that group of

people who went from TeamSpeak to Discord in the gaming context and I'm aware that there was a lot of developers who are also a part of that and then in addition to that there's also the fact that it is called API can do anything and it has ability to blockchain integration and you can build on top of the Discord API and pretty much build anything and so the ability for it to be so versatile is also a factor there are other platforms out there people might be using like Circle and there's a few others but they don't have anywhere near as much functionality or market share or demand over the market it's literally years and years and years ahead of

everybody else in the space for this particular type of platform so that would be my answer I didn't realize that it was the devs that brought it on but it makes complete sense what's interesting is we all start using it when the mainstream people started off flocking into crypto and especially into nfts they're all like I hate this Discord thing what are we doing here and it's because there's so much you can do with it I remember for me I also hated it when I first got in there and then after I was like I got to figure this thing out and I spent a good week two weeks like really digging into what was possible and like setting it up to work for me and I was like oh actually this thing is amazing like it's so much better than slack and I think a lot of

people just have not have been have yet to realize that but it makes sense it was the dev community that brought in there I never realized that before that's pretty interesting and The Gaming Community too that was where I first heard about Discord was from The Gaming Community actually my first Discord was when I was living abroad in Bali and I wanted to stream NBA games and there was an NBA Discord server where they would share illegal streaming I hope that nobody the government's not listening to this or they would share illegal streaming link so you could stream NBA games that was my first Discord server amazing so do you think it will always be Discord like for web3 will communities always be built in Discord

I think that discord's got such a massive head start and that it's that maybe in the future something else might come along but I don't see it happening anytime soon who knows where things are going to be five years from now with the way AI is going I'm pretty Blown Away by that chat GPT so I don't know because something else could happen that we can't foresee right now yeah there's definitely a lot of web3 native copycats of Discord that are being built which make it much easier to use if your community or whatever you're building revolves around tokens in Access and things so it definitely does make it an easier experience so we'll see if that wins out I don't know it's hard to say but so this podcast I think just to set the tone we're here to talk

the Builder side of things so for those that have nft communities that have businesses that have Brands Etc that want to build community Discord we're saying is a great platform for that and we want to start to give I think a bit of a framework on on how we do that how do we build these things so that it actually sets up for a good experience for community and so I guess to start things off if we're thinking about building a Discord for our communities or Our Brands you know what would your thoughts be on how we set that up do you have a framework do you think about Simplicity first do you worry about the onboarding experience is it all about the events that are happening like what are the most important things when using Discord to build community I think that first of all know who your target

audience is no what they like who they are what sort of experiences they enjoy before you even start building a community because you want to make sure that the community is tailored toward the needs of your audience and if there's a mismatch it's just not going to gel and it might not really work so you want to make sure that the community you're building is very streamlined then when you jump into building the community I would never build a Discord server that has more than say five front-end channels and when I say front-end I mean channels that people can see I would never start with more than five channels because I've seen Discord servers with like 20 or 30 channels and I'm like most new people who join this are just going to leave because they're going to be confused and there's going to be no way to follow

what's going on you're not going to be able to find the information they're looking for so I think to start with five channels and then create an onboarding experience which is when people join the Discord server it's the experience they have when they'd get there that is really informative and you've got to do a bit of hand holding with Discord because some people are new to it having a complex procedure as well that's not simple is going to also deter people so I think that Simplicity is key in that process and also prioritize security there's moderation and security Bots out there such as WIC and Discord even has inbuilt like moderation feature now so you need to be able to prioritize that as well because if you don't have the security then if something goes wrong

it's going to look really bad and you could potentially destroy your whole project through a security breach it's a great point you make about onboarding experiences you meet a few really great tips there and be cool to just dive into each one of those on the onboarding experience I really love that idea of only five channels I've come into so many discords where like you said there's 20 30 channels and it's overwhelming I don't know where to go I don't know where I belong you feel like you're not sure where to say anything there's always this feeling of I think imposter syndrome when you come into a new Discord because often the way that we onboard people into Discord is through some sort of digital manner it's

not like a friend invited you out to a party and you had a friend like you might come into a Discord and you know nobody right and you're looking for somebody to welcome you and bring you in so I'm just curious you say five channels when you first come in then you go through an onboarding experience and then would you recommend opening up more channels and what would typically be the trigger that you would look to open up more channels there's a really great way to do it and it is a bit more technical but I would highly recommend doing this if people felt like they could dive in and learn about it the best way or they can decide are you yes oh that's fine that's right they could hire me too that's a good point so yeah yeah so you might say like their onboarding process

might be one or two channels once they've gone through that it opens up three or four more channels and then there'll be this system that'll be operating in the background which is a it detects like in user engagement so it can see when people are sending messages how frequently how active The Voice channels are and it'll reward people experience points for their action in the community and then when they reach a certain number of experience points they level up and as they level up gradually they unlock more of the Discord server so it's like the Discord server kind of expands as people engage with it rather than it all being open there's a Discord server called furlough founded by a guy called Joe Casanova I love furlough I use it pretty much every day and he's his server is

very much like that and follows a server for entrepreneurs so it's good the other thing I think a lot about with onboarding is the mix of onboarding in Discord with Bots and an introduction Channel or something that we commonly see in every Discord that mixed with some sort of more web 2 or even more in-person onboarding do you recommend that people also do like a weekly new members call or that they have something else to onboard other than just the Discord and what are your suggestions there I'm definitely in favor of weekly introduction calls jump

Discord server does a really good job at that and it's a good example of a community where they have that system and I touched on this in that web3 Mastermind on Discord this sort of like creating events running events in the Discord server and I think that events are like a really core part about the well-functioning and highly engaging and exciting Community to be a part of you know if there's nothing happen there's no Advance there's just a chat room what's the point of that and so having new members who join and creating an event on boards them into the community and also it helps them build rapport with the people who are in the community and even start to develop friendships and connections I think it's really valuable to do those sorts of things I'm curious what are the best events

that you have seen I'm going to refer to furlough again because furlough is absolutely phenomenal at this and if you are looking to learn from an example I would say go to furlough's Discord server they do things like obviously the community onboarding calls like when someone joins the community everybody who's new can come to this event and they do meet and greets they do these things called build in public events and they do Mastermind groups for you know all of these entrepreneurs they have people who do coaching where they actually have people jump on and do like group coaching calls and that's obviously events that are targeted towards entrepreneurs but you know different in other servers there's a music Discord server that I was involved with where they would run weekly Jam

sessions where everybody could jump on and play music together or do like band competitions where they'd have people who'd perform together and the community would vote who they liked I think that creating experiences that bring people together is key and that are relevant to the reason that people are there and that people are going to be interested in I also say the web 3 Academy what you guys are doing with the Mastermind is another great example when I listen to you and I think of your framework it's like when someone joins a Discord or a community let's call it one keep it simple in the beginning right so they can learn and figure out what to do and then as they interact more and engage more it starts to unlock more things then the other big part of it is give

value right and these could be masterminds these can be like all the different events and things that you talked about which create connections so that's kind of the purpose of a Discord right is to give people a platform to do all those things so once you have that once you have a great onboarding experience it's nice and simple and it starts to open up more for people are there tools or things in Discord that you've noticed that either maybe amplify those things or make those better or that can do something else that we're not even thinking of the idea of opening up channels is pretty cool I assume there's a bot or something that does that kind of thing but that's really interesting to me based off their engagement but are there other things that you're like yeah Discord is amazing and it you can only really do this in

Discord and people need to do this to level up their server at some point I think when it comes to things like mechanics maybe for dowels you can see the number of tokens that people are holding in their blockchain wallets and then you can use that information to create roles in the Discord server and roles are what enable people to see particular sections of the Discord server they're also used as a way to almost like self-identify you know you can assign someone a role and make it visible and everybody can see that that person has that role so what you can do with roles and blockchain integration is you can assign roles based on the number of tokens that someone's holding in their wallet or the number of nfts they have or just for the fact of actually

holding the token and then by doing that you can then enable it so that only people are holding a specific nft can go to a specific event so you can token gate access to experiences access to channels access to using specific features you can tokengate anything with Discord and it's just your imagination is really the limit so one thing that you did that I really love in the jump Discord is the upvote so jump Discord is all about news and so this is particular too and it would this would work for any any Discord where it was sharing of content basically right it doesn't have to be news related it could be any

content like a developer Discord where they're sharing great developer resources news anything so most communities probably which is most communities right and so I don't know how you built this but there's this upvote feature now where I don't have to go through every channel to see what the most popular posts of the week is I can just go to the upvote channel and it'll show me what the most popular posts are currently like I just love that that is such a great feature every Discord should have that yeah it's a really cool system if anybody is not in the Discord I can just describe how it works it's essentially when people post either a link an image there's upvoting bot automatically posts a little upvote

emoji on the content and then anytime people click on it it automatically gives them points which are like in the form of art votes there's actually a leaderboard for the number of upvotes that people have in the server and you can also track how many people are giving out our votes as well there's so many ways to track the information as well like the data but then what happens is when those posts reach a certain threshold of upvotes they get streamed into the uploaded Channel and you can even when you're gamifying it yeah and then there's the ability for me to even assign roles to People based on the number of upvotes they get so there could be some club for if you get more than 100 upvotes then you're in the

influencers club or something like right you could do it you can do anything with that this is I think an area that is still not untapped because people are doing it but gamifying communities I think it is a big thing and I know I actually used to have a course and a membership around weight loss back when I was a health coach and in the subscription it was a membership spot where it was a bit of a community and I had gamified it where you like start to do certain things you would achieve these points and these points would give you like certain discounts and things it was kind of cool I was using buddy boss it was not on Discord at the time but it's like a WordPress plug-in I think a lot of people actually don't even know what gamification is if you can kind of touch

on that and then just dive into what's possible or what you've seen yes okay cool yeah right in the context of Discord at least from my experience gamification is being able to take say information or actions such as posting a message posting it in image you know taking actions and then creating a game about it so in the context of the operating system you know the more art boats you get the more points you get and then you can unlock something as a result of participating in that system and there's usually a competitive element if you introduce reward awards that are highly valuable that people can see that it's worth it for them to invest their time in this system then it really it creates a pretty exciting

experience for everyone involved it suddenly becomes like a game like you're playing a game with everybody so it's essentially creating a game out of everyday actions that may not be related to gaming so I just had this one that flashed into my mind as an example when I was going through some of the most popular Discord servers in the world ones that have millions of members Discord servers can have up to 10 million members in them so yes so I was looking at some of the most popular ones that have millions of people in them and there was this one which was some kind of gamer girl it's like for women who love playing video games but like streaming it and they had this leaderboard inside the Discord server that would automatically update

which would keep track of the amount of time that these women were streaming in the server and it was almost to the extent that there was like advertising rewards available for the most popular streamers at least in terms of the time that they were committing and some of them were like 12 to 16 hour days or something just because of the system you know they're creating some kind of crazy system with the data you can do anything with with tracking it when I launched art punks we had this one which was called the art punks Visionary Rewards program and this was during the bull market and it took off like wildfire it really went insane and we had it so that

once you reach level 10 in the Discord you're automatically entered into a giveaway for a thousand dollars and a lot of people really liked that and we had like 10 000 people who wanted to get to level 10 so yeah it worked it worked yeah it worked really well so gamification sounds super cool I think there's so much possibility that I can't even wrap my head around all the things that you can do when it comes to game vacation but I think an important subject to touch on for anyone playing on a Discord especially if you're building Discord especially in web 3 is security and you touched on it earlier on how important it was and I'm just wondering if you can give us like some high level tips or if you have a framework how you think about security with Discord that you could share but

something that would help us make sure that our discords are secure so someone who's listening right now that has a Discord and has a bunch of people in there what do they need to know what should they be aware of yeah okay so there's several points that I'll cover in this the first one that comes to mind is if you haven't done this already go through your roles and permissions so in the back end of Discord every role has a permission associated with it permissions enable people to do specific things go through and do a bit of an audit and make sure that none of your average users such as the at everyone role or verif maybe just like a user who's just joined make sure that they don't have any dangerous permissions

such as the ability to delete channels or you know do anything that that you don't want them to do and then the next thing is if you're working by yourself then make sure you have two-factor authentication on your Discord account and you have a strong password and if you have a team make sure everybody in the team has a two-factor authentication on their account and strong passwords because the other thing with Discord is that generally the hacks mostly happen when team members have their accounts compromised more likely than like a bot becoming hacked and then going crazy that happens less often there's Discord Bots out there such as wikbot and wikbot I would highly recommend wickbot is

Advanced and it's complicated to use but there's videos on YouTube that can explain how to use it in under 40 minutes and it's very worth looking at if you want to secure your community with Bots like a layer of authentication that you put on top of your Discord server which means that only people that you as the owner decide to give a trusted admin permission or as a server owner permission can actually make changes to the Discord server in any way the bot will be able to pick up if say I give an example I'm working with a client right now and they're a triple A game company and they have a Discord server with over 50 000 members and they've got extremely tight security because that would be just a disastrous if it somehow got compromised and when I

was first getting it set up because the security settings weren't configured so that I could actually gain access to it I was going and I tried to delete like five channels and then I instantly got put into quarantine also I posted a link in a channel and the link instantly got removed because the link wasn't a verified link fired for staff they have these like systems in place and that's WIC and there's other one called good night good night is like a bot that instantly detects when links are posted in the server and then it's up to the staff to review the links before they actually get posted in the chat so there's just security Bots Galore but yeah they help really help to protect the server and then there's one last

thing that I would say is there's something I found out about recently when you think about cold wallets in crypto where you have a ledger wallet and you have it on that cold wallet well in this context we call it there's like a cold admin system where maybe you have an old device that has nothing on it that you don't use anymore that you completely wipe clean you transfer the ownership of the server to a brand new Discord account that you then install on that device and then you assign that particular account to be the owner of the server through WIC and then you keep that as the highest permission account that's only able to access week no one else can access WIC so then it almost looks like operating under the rules of WIC and then it's kind of impenetrable

if you have it set up like that it would be impossible for anybody to hack it unless they somehow stole that device or Hack That device so some of our listeners do want more information about that or maybe they're not as technical as you are and they need help leveling up their Discord server how can they find you how can they reach out to you currently the best way to reach out to me is first of all my Discord username is just it's the Discord Guru and then the tag at the end is just hash zero zero zero one then you can also email me on Peter at the discordguru.com you can follow me on Twitter which is just the Discord

Guru and you could message me on there you can obviously go to the website although we're currently working on upgrading the website so it's not really in its best state but the Discord guru.com and also LinkedIn is where I'm very active which is just the Discord Guru again awesome we'll include a lot of examples we'll put links to all those in the show notes for all listeners okay before we wrap here we'd love to have a little fun ask you a few speed round question first question what's an nft you'll never sell it's not an nft that's worth anything but it's the nft for the very first nafti project that I created which is this one called the Bitcoin slot machine which is like this

crazy kind of animation of this cat that throws a coin into like a slot machine and then it kind of like spins and then it just starts shooting out coins and raiding Bitcoin and that was the Bitcoin nft we created with the live price on it it's not worth anything but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna get I'm not gonna throw it away okay favorite web3 or AI tool to increase productivity and it could be a Discord tool if you want to pick one although you've said a bunch some you might not have another one I'm going to say chasm.xyz I think that Kyle introduced me and Dan actually went to hang out with with Ben at Art basil

and I just love it like it's so powerful it's just helping me create amazing solutions to problems that never would have been possible before um and for people who don't know what Chasm does chasms like this web 3 CRM tool where you can track people across multiple platforms if you have data on a user such as their Twitter Discord email wallet address Etc you can then pull all that data into the one place and then say a user joins your Discord server who maybe they're like a whale they're holding a large amount of your token and a few of your nfts and they joined the Discord server but they don't actually get the verified role

then you can be like well why is this highly invested user why haven't they moved through the Discord onboarding process and then if you had their email you could send them an email and you could follow them up you know or there's other ways you could follow them up but you can do things like that like automated follow-up sequences and things for people who are meeting certain criteria it's incredible it's like active campaign but for web3 yeah yeah okay last question one thing you've bought recently for under 100 that brings you Joy does not have to be digital I don't tend to buy very many things I'm quite like

minimalistic nice so it's really hard to think about what I bought I would say I could the first thing that came to mind well it wasn't recently is I spent it might have been a little over a hundred dollars but I bought a meditation cushion which is like this like combination and it makes it so easy to sit for long periods of time without having a problem with my back so yeah that's a that's an example I'm actually in the market for one of those so that's a good one I've got one of those as well and I absolutely I actually have a meditation bench I prefer the bench over the cushion because I've got super long legs since I'm six foot five and my legs don't flex like most people so sitting on the floor like the pain is real after

a long meditation yeah Peter this has been fantastic thank you so much for the time I learned so much I'm sure our listeners learned so much really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us and helping so many people in the space improve their discords yeah no worries happy to be here and would love to help you all out if you need any help with your Discord server awesome thanks so much Peter take care no worries thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey and if it does please share this episode And subscribe so you don't miss the next one nothing in this podcast was Financial advice crypto and web 3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you

invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one