Turning your audience into a tokenized community

Transcript

hey friends and welcome back to another episode of web3 Academy in this episode we're going to be talking about how to turn your audience into a tokenized community but this episode is a little bit different this is actually a recording of a presentation that I did at the Epic web 3 Summit so this was a digital conference for creators for businesses for entrepreneurs so perfect because that's exactly who all of you are those that listen to the web3 academy podcast and I presented there and basically told the story of how we grew our audience this year and we tokenized that audience turned them into a Dao and talked about just many other ways that you could do it not just through our story we also talked through the bankless Dao story and how that

happened since I was a part of that and just talked about the ins and outs of why you would want to tokenize your audience and what benefits that brings to your business and into your audience themselves and then just talked about ways in which you can do it and sort of like what that journey is like and just kind of gave my experience so really interesting presentation there was about 20 25 minutes of teaching and then I did a q a at the end for those that were listening in live at the conference so some great questions on how to monetize your audience in your community and many different discussions there and so I wanted to share that with you and so that's really what this episode is going to be is literally just my recording from this presentation before we get into that I just wanted to wish you all

a Happy New Year I know it's coming up uh I think this goes out on the 30th so it's coming up very soon exciting time 2022 was absolutely amazing I hope you all had an amazing holidays and took some time off to spend some time with family in that and looking forward to a big 2023 in the web 3 space going to be very exciting and I hope to go along that journey of 2023 with all of you so thanks again for listening I really appreciate all of you and I'm looking forward to learning and growing with all of you over the new year so before we get into this presentation let's take a quick second to hear from our sponsors otherwise Happy New Years everyone and enjoy this episode the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2

social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2 platforms like Facebook Tick Tock and Instagram are all essentially robbing creators of their worth creators are a new type of entrepreneur forming new types of businesses yet with web 2 platforms creators don't own their content to their profiles and that's their product in business instead they are tied to the platforms they choose to create on well just like how crypto is freeing us from Banks web3 is freeing us from these centralized platforms on lens protocol creators own their content own their profile and even their social graphing followers in the form of nfts this allows you to move freely from one social application to another with your

content profile and followers moving along with you lens protocol enables self-soverty for your social graph and interoperability across the internet at web Theory Academy we believe this is the future of Social and that's why we've partnered with lens to ensure that the path of social media is heading in the right direction visit lens.xyz to learn more today unlock protocol is the nft membership protocol for web 3. content subscriptions Community Access event tickets are all forms of memberships one of the most common business models for creators and entrepreneurs today building an nft membership opens many new possibilities for your members everything from tailored multi-platform

experiences to the ability to sell an unfinished subscription on secondary markets these are things just not possible in web 2. however in order for this business model to work creators need nfts which are time bound or have built-in recurring payments unlock protocol does this for your nfts better yet with a few simple steps you can create your own nft contract without code what WordPress has done for websites unlock protocol is doing for 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 on unlock learn more at unlock dashprotocol.com okay thanks everyone for joining today and we're going to talk about turning your audience into a tokenized community and we'll do that through talking a little bit of a story about our experience so she mentioned I run impact digital marketing I also run a media platform called web3 academy and our audience tokenize themselves organically out of nowhere and not out of nowhere but it was a very interesting scenario and so we're gonna share that and then just talk about tokenizing in general because we've had the experience with our platform and our audience but we've also done this to some of our clients as

well organizing communities has been you know one of the big unlocks I guess of the the latest Bull Run 2020 2021 whether it be with nfts or social tokens I think a lot of it though was not actually tokenizing communities we were just creating tokens and a bunch of people were speculating on them and I don't think there was real Community there and so we're going to just talk about how we can do this in a way that is actually beneficial to an existing business potentially to a new business and how you do it so that you create actual strong connections and you can turn this into something much bigger than I think what we saw in the pfp 1000 and crazed over the last couple years so just a quick background of who I am a little bit further so co-founder of impact digital marketing impact digital

marketing is a growth marketing agency which works with many of the top crypto and web3 media Platforms in in the space so some of the logos are below like bankless real Vision fintech Blueprints and and a host of others so you may have heard of some of them or you may read some of them or listen to some of them from that we spawned out our own media platform which is a newsletter and podcast called web3 Academy where we essentially teach businesses creators and entrepreneurs how to use web3 in their business which is a little bit about what we're going to do today in terms of tokenizing communities I've been in the Creator economy for 10 years building businesses there and also in crypto and web 3 since 2019.

so from the logos you see there bankless actually had this scenario happen to them as well they tokenized Their audience into a tokenized community and then web through Academy we have done this as well so we have a couple different examples to share along our journey here as we as we discuss this I'll try to keep it rather short so we can do some q a at the end because I think that's a much better way to discuss this and hopefully answer a bunch of questions so let's dive into this a little bit further so we'll start here why would you want to tokenize your community and the clear answer is well it turns a passive audience into an active Community if you're running a business in 2022 you probably have some sort of audience and that audience could be on Twitter maybe it's podcast listeners a newsletter

could just be your customers right it could be an email list but many of us are speaking to people online and that you can see as an audience now previous to web3 that audience typically stays as just a passive audience that's consuming your content or your products or your services what web3 enables us to do with tokens is turn that audience into an active community that can actually help you build products if you look at the picture on the right we see kind of the old way here is build a product and then build a community and now with web3 what we're seeing is build a community and then you build products based on what that Community needs or that community may just help you build themselves and the reason is because tokenizing aligns incentives with you maybe that's you as the

entrepreneur as the Creator as the business and the community themselves and so if we can align incentives some amazing things can happen it makes your community feel like or actually become depending on how you set up your tokens an owner and so maybe they become an owner of your business probably that's a little bit too far but they could maybe they become an owner of your community themselves or a specific product that you're building or a service it depends on again what it is that you're actually tokenizing it allows you to tap into the skills and experiences of your community members so this is one of the the really cool unlocks I think of of web3 when you tokenize a community is that your audience or your customer base whatever that is has tons of different skills they may be marketing people they may be

designers they may be developers they may be sales people you know who knows what they may be and previous to web3 you couldn't really tap into that you couldn't really get them other than Word of Mouth to help grow your product your service whatever that is you can really get them to go out and help you build or help you grow now when you share ownership and as a result that you can share governance you can share revenues you can share whatever you can tap into those skills and basically build yourself a little army of people who can help you progress or help your mission progress or help your community progress and that is really really cool unlock I think outside of just like helping you or helping to you know activate people

to build something else it also just creates better retention and stickiness factor in your business now this is as a result of building Community not necessarily the token but this idea of owning something also adds to that effect and if you look at the picture on the right there we have audience which is sort of these one connections from one person that could be you the Creator the entrepreneur of the business to one but if you see Community you start to see this interlocking of connections and so Community really creates these like stronger networks these stronger connections which if you think of as a business it keeps people around your business more and it's some of the biggest companies in the world all Focus around Community or Focus around building Cults is another word that you can use we kind of have a negative perception of what cult means but it's

actually technically a good thing you think of Apple one of the biggest companies in the world I mean there's no bigger cult I think than people who use Apple products and that's all about building community so Community is so important for a business and the final one here is you can gamify your community to improve engagement to improve retention and again you can do that through tokenized incentives as well so lots of reasons of why you might want to tokenize a community and again this just depends on what kind of business you are if you're a Creator such as myself who has a newsletter and podcast maybe you tokenize because your community is going to help you build products if you're a business like a Nike or Adidas maybe you tokenize to create better experiences for your audience for your customers or to get to

know them better so lots of different ways that you can do it here the way that you want to start tokenizing Community is by first actually growing a community and the easiest way to do that is by growing an audience and I say this and this may seem obvious but what I saw and we had so many people reach out over the last year who wanted to launch a 10 000 collection of nfts on snowboarding or on whatever Niche it was but they had no audience and they had no Community yet and I was like well why are we starting with a token what's the purpose who's going to even take this token and it was all about trying to sell these nfts usually you can also do it with social tokens or fungible tokens but it was a lot of like let's do whitelists

and let's get a bunch of you know high profile you know influencers on Twitter to push out uh whitelists or push out spots for this nft and again that's not Community it's just a bunch of people buying these random specular tokens and it's it's not really accomplishing much when you get down to it because once you tokenize you've got to do something with that Community you got to build something or you got to create an experience and if it's a bunch of speculators and Traders well that Community is not going to go anywhere and we'll talk more about that in a second so the best way and what we decided was hey let's just start by growing an audience and so how do you do that well thankfully in 2022 it's actually fairly I don't want to say easy but it's essentially free and we have

some amazing platforms that enable this to happen and so really the idea here is find a niche our Niche for example at web3 Academy was creators entrepreneurs and businesses trying to understand how to use web3 it was our Niche and just start creating content in that Niche right and this is the playbook for all businesses this has nothing to do with web3 this is just how you start to build businesses in the real world regardless and right now currently the best forms of content are a newsletter the podcast and shorts now why newsletter and podcasts because long form content is great to educate to inform and it also builds trust right when people can hear you listen to you or read your your thoughts your opinions in detail it builds some serious trust and that's a

good starting point to eventually merge into build Community shorts why are those a big deal well because they grab attention they show your face and so they build trust and you can also put them across many platforms so most of our clients are all doing this almost all of them and because they can go on Tick Tock they can go on Instagram Facebook YouTube shorts they can go on Twitter they can go on LinkedIn so they literally can go everywhere and so it's a very great multi-purpose piece of content that grabs attention of whoever is in your your niche in whatever it is you're talking about and again this doesn't have to be web 3 related it can really be any topic and that's how you start so you can see us here we're almost at 10 000 Twitter followers and then we have our podcast that's just

been growing just by again putting out content and finding other people around the internet who are interested in the things that we are talking about and again no token launched at this point this is just organic growth of people who are just really interested that's the whole point The Next Step here is then you want to actually transition that audience into a community and you'd want to do this again before a token a token does not need to exist at this point right so once you build an audience now you have the attention of a group of individuals who are interested in the same niche as you think similarly to you and have shown interest in what you're creating and that's an amazing opportunity and we'll talk about why that is but that opportunity allows you to start to create products or start to create

events or start to create experiences whatever that is you want to do when you find a group of people who are all interested in the same stuff now you can do that together and that's a big opportunity and so the next step here is once you have that audience and it doesn't have to be a big audience it doesn't need to be 10 000 Twitter followers it can be much smaller and in fact as you'll see in the end starting small is actually much better here when you're trying to build a real Community online and so the recommendation is invite your audience into a community platform to discuss whatever it is that you're talking about online and allow them to do this in kind of a more private and intimate setting Discord of course is the most popular platform right now in web3 so this is where most

people use it it does have the most features so probably my recommendation it's what we use as well but slack can also work telegram there's a bunch of different platforms out there the idea here really is just to create a learning experience amongst individuals right so an audience and just to separate the difference here an audience is when one person speaks to many kind of like what we're doing right now but a community is when that many they can speak to each other or they can also speak to you and that's when real connections get formed and some Amazing Ideas can kind of perform out of that which is really really exciting and so you use this platform to learn about those people to learn about their problems about their needs and you can start to discuss what can be built and so this is a screenshot

here of our community what we did is we just invited our podcast listeners our newsletter subscribers to join into a Discord and we said we don't really know what we're going to do in here but we want to talk more about web3 we want to dive deeper into this and start to uncover whatever we can about building businesses in web 3. so we had you know a few hundred people join in we started doing weekly calls there was just chats going frequently in there and there wasn't a whole lot of structure but it was the consistency in the calls that kept bringing everyone together and we were able to ask questions to our audience and start to understand them and their needs and as a result a community started to form and we started to realize other products were things that we could build and not

even just us but the community started to realize that together and so it was an idea that they could start building things even without us at web Theory Academy and so again before you launch a token to your community to your audience the key thing here in community is determining a plan and that plan could be a mission a product an event it can be anything but this is really what communities form around which is a goal or a mission and they can form around learning right that's what web3 Academy is they conform around having fun right like games they can form around building something creating something whatever that is it's something that they can all do together and sort of achieve something that's really what communities are looking for and so it's really important to get clear on what that is

and who's interested in supporting or being involved in that community and when we think about what happens with this community what they can do they can help you build or create your own products they can go and build their own products aside from you maybe they just enjoy continuing to build community because it's a place to learn or a place to have fun they may want to host events meetups masterminds Etc so there's lots of opportunities of what this community can actually do and if we look on the right here these are actually two products that are being built from our community one is if we look at the bottom one here web3 Academy Pro this is a premium newsletter that we've created which is like on-chain analysis to look at which businesses business models and Concepts in web 3 are are winning and we

didn't know how to do on-chain analysis I just knew that this was something that was needed and we wanted to we wanted to launch well the community said hey we can help you build that right so this is what they did we had a bunch of people who learned how to do this and and we had some writers and a bunch of people band around and help us create this product out of nowhere it was really cool the other one up here is called web3pedia and it's basically a way to discover which tools web3 tools are good which ones are bad and get some reviews and things on them so you can kind of find whatever you're building in the space which tools are available to you across different blockchains Etc and this came out of a need that everyone was like I want to build X business but

I don't know what tools to use and the community said well why don't we all just create it together for the broader web3 community so two different products in two different ways that sort of came out of this idea now how could we manage that how could we govern that how could people get paid how could we structure that well that's where the token comes from right so that's why you tokenize the community and if we think about why we do that it's one to share revenues with those who contribute so in our instance with web3 Academy Pro those who help build that product they get a certain amount of tokens and we can share revenues that come in with those individuals okay but it can also have nothing to do with sharing members it could be giving ownership or Equity over the potential of the community and what it creates and

that's another way that web3 Academy Dow did it as well and so again if you have a community you're going to build things you're going to create events there's value that can come from that and we don't know what that value is but that's what makes a token so interesting is that if value Endeavor does come to that now you can stamp who was a part of it and you can actually easily program in who's going to get revenues from that who's going to get Equity from that and you can then generate some some wealth from that which is really cool it may also just be around governance and voting rights right to certain members or early adopters if you think about many platforms that we use even today think Twitter we all use Twitter and web3 if you have the ability to vote on

where Twitter was going to go what new features they were going to launch you'd probably like that right and so there's no equity there there is no value from that but to you as a Twitter user or maybe you run your business on Twitter there is value to that to you and so that's another idea of what tokens can do for you and for your community the other thing is just tracking who is a part of the community from the beginning right if you have people who are core contributors that you know maybe the first person to to attend a meeting it's really cool to be able to come back years later and say hey I was number one there or I was number 10. right so it's just a great tracking feature as well and finally organization structure and access so when you think

about Community communities can get quite large they can be very hectic and we'll talk about that in a second because they actually generally do in the very beginning and what tokens Can Do and this can be via nfts or through social tokens again it can allow for some structure to show hierarchy it can show access to certain channels inside of Discord right it can differentiate between the core people the ones that were there first or the ones that came later on right so depending on the token you give they can have different access and so if we look at the picture here this is just a way that we distributed tokens it's called a doer token these are valueless tokens by the way we really wanted to get away from any of the speculation that happens in web3 and so it was less about the value creation

right off the bat and more about voting and structure and governance and some sort of ownership in the future is the way that we all distributed it and so again you can see that there was a core team so those individuals got a certain amount of tokens then we had a certain amount that stays in the treasury and a certain amount that gets distributed to those who are contributing within the in this instance we called it Dao really any tokenized Community is essentially Dao but it just depends on how you want to call it but so that's kind of why you would do it and how we set it up as well and so when you go to tokenize a community what happens I've seen this happen firsthand twice one with bankless style one with web3 Academy Dao and the clear answer here is absolute Mayhem but a but

it's some beautiful magic and the reason I say that is Imagine hundreds to thousands of people trying to organize into essentially what's a business all in one moment and it might not be an actual business you might not be building products but whatever it is you're doing it's a lot of people who are going to try to get organized to do something and accomplish something together and so this is also why if you launch a 10 000 nft collection to people who are not yet you know a real Community they don't know each other because you did it all through you know white lists and influencer marketing and all that good luck getting organized because that is going to be absolute Mayhem I think most people underestimate how hard it is to build something with many strangers from around the world you know

it's the opposite of how a startup Works a startup is typically hey it's me I got an idea I'm going to start building it when I'm ready because I need a little bit of help I hire a next person and someone who's really into it and really specialize and we start working together and we get on the same page and then we go the next one this is the complete opposite now it's a wonderful thing and some amazing opportunities can come from it we've already seen that happen with many Dows across the industry but I think people need to wrap their head around what this really means to bring hundreds to thousands of people all together at one time so bankers at the time had about 50 000 newsletter subscribers hundreds of thousands of podcast listeners and the way that they did it is they just airdropped a token

and they would kind of regret the way they did this but it is what it is it was a great learning experience is they just airdropped about I think it was to 5 000 or so 5 000 people all receive tokens to join this doubt all at once and so literally one day no one even knew that this was going to be a thing they just airdropped to all their paid subscribers so it was a more committed group of individuals but we just dropped the tokens to them all everyone joined a Discord and we said all right what are we gonna do here and it was pure Mayhem and it took months to get organized to separate into groups to get structured to get the leaders and figure out who they were to get roles in place and to start building now it started working we started generating

Revenue launching different things there's now a Consulting arm there's courses so much was created from it and that's the magic right when people own something and they feel that they have equity in something and we're going to create something together some amazing experience happens some really cool connections between people happen even though you've never met them or even seen their face but it's all because they they felt that ownership right that responsibility when you own something if you think about the difference between when you own a home how you treat that home versus when you're in a hotel or an Airbnb it's a very big difference there and how you're going to react and how you're going to treat those spaces and that's what you see when you start to tokenize your community versus having it not tokenized so any Bank list out I would say it was

a great success but it was a lot of Mayhem in the beginning web Theory Academy we we learn from the bank list story and they said keep it small whatever you do go small and so we did hundreds well that was not small enough we had the same scenario Mayhem you don't know who can go where you don't know who the leaders are you don't know who's doing what so we had a very similar experience but again it took a few months and all of a sudden we kind of got organized we actually had to close it down not let new people in let people kind of leave to get rid of a lot of the noise and once things settle down it's now maybe about 30 40 people but we were able to get organized at that size but that's when we really realized like

this is the opposite of a startup so very very interesting what happens when you start to tokenize a lot of Mayhem a lot of magic so when I think about if you're ever looking to tokenize your community or your audience because most people right now have audiences not necessarily communities I think some of the big takeaways that we learn from our experiences here was start small and get organized before growing don't do a big air drop to 10 000 people jump actually had one of the cool so jump Jeff Kaufman who we've had on our podcast a lot and we speak to a lot they've recently tokenized their community and they've been building their Community for about a year and a half now it's a community for marketers a lot of Fortune 500 marketers and Executives that are trying to learn about web3 but a year and a

half of them just building Community Learning together growing together finally they said okay we're going to create these products we need to tokenize again so we can share revenues and all the kind of things I talked about and what they did is instead of launching a thousand tokens at once they launched about 50 and they did a cohort base and so they actually said okay we'll take 50 people you guys can mint your tokens it was very private it was only two community members not this like big public launch and they could get their tokens get in there get structured get the ball rolling and then they did another cohort of another 50. and so on and so forth and so they were slowly building up their treasury from doing this and slowly kind of building their structure and their organization inside of this inside of this tokenized

community and so they're still cohorting I think they have about 400 that have been minted at this point but it has been a really cool experience to watch and much cleaner much more organized than anything that we saw previously so I do recommend that the next one is get clear on that mission or that plan when people come in people are going to be excited and especially when that token first enters their wallet they're going to want to work and they're just like they're excited to to activate and to do things and so you've got to get clear on what that mission that plan is first so that people can start you know building and start creating or start whatever that is right off the bat if you're still in that phase of figuring that out I would not launch at that point number three get to know the community

to understand their strengths and their weaknesses and create clear roles and locate the leaders the leaders is so key just like any business you need people to lead departments to lead projects whatever that is and it's the same in a doubt it's the same in a tokenized community you need to find those people and what what Jeff always talks about a jump is he actually did a one-on-one call with every single person that joined his community hundreds and hundreds of people over the last year and a half and he said that was the most important best thing that he ever did because he could really build strong community that way and understand who can do what and get people in the right positions and so that's really key when you're building such a large organization from scratch so key point there next thing is build a strong and

real Community before you tokenize I can't stress this one enough my favorite quote is communities create tokens tokens don't create communities and I think in 2020 and 2021 that was that was the Playbook was let's launch a token and hope a community comes from that and when we look at floor prices now of most of those pfp projects not many of them are actually working out and so those that had strong community and built that Community First those are the ones that are that are really succeeding here and I think that's really the future of tokenized communities is Community First and then use token as a piece of utility something to help you amplify your business right that's the key thing about these tokens here and finally two other things here just as as I wrap up so one is be open and transparent about

that token structure so we did ours with a fungible token which is to be honest a lot more complex and so below that I say nfts over social tokens and the reason is there's just so much that goes into the tokenomic structure of a fungible token and trying to get liquidity there and figure out how you're going to distribute that and make that maintain value over time it's a very very complex structure and many companies across web3 have not really figured this out it's very difficult I think the best one so far in terms of tokenomics would be eth but this is the devs there have been working on the tokenomics of eth for seven years now and they still haven't nailed it though they made some big changes over the last year with with the merge so it's very difficult and so you

want to be open transparent and actually figure out that structure with your community that's actually what I recommend is is build that one with the community themselves and then finally I say nfts or social tokens because it's just so easy one token to one person you can make different nfts mean different things and do different things and so it makes tokenizing that Community just so much easier and so that's one of the things I wish we would have done with Webster Academy Dao and we still might because you know what our token is still valueless we haven't added liquidity so we can always switch that up at any point but I think just nfts is much easier at least in the beginning social tokens can come in later for many different reasons which I'm not going to get into right now but I would recommend

you start with the nft route mainly because we have a better Playbook with nfts than we do social tokens so those would be my recommendations there around how you tokenize your community I hope that was helpful to all of you if any of you guys are looking to do that and I would love to answer some questions here as well thank you so much Kyle for that presentation and so we have a question from the audience do you monetize your community yeah it's a great question there it depends on what your community is so there's a great picture I wish I could show it right now but where it breaks down community in three ways so either the community is your product the community buys your product or the community builds your product right so it kind of depends on on what that Community is in web3 Academy Dao's

example the community was building the product so we don't necessarily have to monetize that Community because they're actually generating value by the products that they're creating so they're monetizing through through what they make so that's an interesting way to do it and the other ways you could monetize a community is through Partnerships sponsorships right so there's a lot of businesses that are going to want if your community is you know focused on a niche about I don't know let's say us web3 Academy focused on a niche about creators building in in web 3 there's a lot of companies out there that have tools to enable creators so they're probably going to want to say hey we want to get our brand and our Tools in front of your community that's a way you could monetize it the other part of it actually is when you launch

that nft I mean we did ours in a freeway so we just airdropped fabulous tokens so there was no monetization no building of a treasury but if you launch an nft that actually costs and you say hey to join this community you need to you know pay I don't know point one ether whatever you actually build a bit of a treasury there and now you can start to use that to hire people or to do whatever you want with it so there's a lot of different ways to do it it depends on who your community is and what they what they are and what you're going to do with them so it's a difficult one to answer clearly yes I think it depends on what your what your actual like offer is I know for us it's like our our community our co-creators our supporters and then we

have actual customers because people book in stays and so it's a clear distinction and so but not all product projects have that in their distinction and to be honest the if you create a community of people who are going to help you build for example like we did those are also our customers they're actually our best customers right because they see and speak with me every single day and so anything I launched they're like yeah I want to be a part of that I want to buy that because we've created these strong connections right it's like when you launch a product your family is probably the first ones to buy it well your community is going to be that as well so there's they're kind of both they're kind of and then tokenization allows for the reward and more reward versus transactional experience exactly the next question we

have is do you monetize the web 3 Academy newsletter and if yes what proven methods could you recommend yeah it's a great question so newsletters are probably one of the greatest business models I think right now there's just there's they're so scalable and yes we do monetize a few ways you can do it one is through sponsorships right so we just talked about that one finding Brands products services that want to get in front of your users or your readers sorry so that's a great way to to generate some revenue and the other way is through a premium service so you know what we've done is we've created kind of a paywall newsletter of some additional content that is very actionable you know it's charts and a lot of like on-chain analysis and so there's a great way to to monetize there it's an easy

transition right from free newsletter over to paid and this is what almost all of our clients do if you listen to bank lists they have the same thing and so definitely potential there as well I think eventually those become nft subscriptions right so the subscription models is probably the most popular business model right now on the internet everyone has it from Apple to Amazon with Prime and Netflix Etc and so a newsletter is essentially just that eventually those will become nfts I think so people can sell their subscriptions rather than just cancel them so those are kind of the two main ways that you would monetize a newsletter yeah but there's also I'm just going to add one more thing you can build products for those for your readers and now you can also use it as a pool of potential customers in the future so a lot of our clients are

building products for those newsletter readers and now you have a pool of people who are ready to go and buy that product right away so it's also just a great way to build a a an audience absolutely and I was just going to say unlock protocol they they make easy integration to token get your communities or your content but they're also creating up systems so that you can still sell nfts but it still be like a subscription-based pay if if you haven't quite figured out the budgeting aspect of selling one nft but then budgeting forever so that's always a good uh protocol to look into speaking of sponsors unlock protocols the sponsor of our newsletter so that was very relevant and yes their product is absolutely amazing and we use them as well I love them I've done built-in projects with

them and so the next question we've got is what advice would you give yourself when you just started the community oh I think the best advice for starting Community is do the non-scalable things first for me I'm a marketer I'm a growth marketer so I love scale right I'm like okay we're spending a thousand dollars on ads let's go spend you know a hundred thousand dollars in ads we I want to build automation I want to do all these things that are scalable because that's just the way that I've always worked as a marketer but as I've become a community Builder that stuff doesn't work it's it's the complete opposite it's what I said earlier of get on those one-on-one calls when they first enter your community have those meetings get to know those people it's when you do those non-scalable things it sets the

foundation for the community if you try to automate everything in community the connections don't happen and that's what community is all about Community is not about more people and more reach like getting I always got people going how do I get more people into my Discord more people into my community and I was like they're like we already have like 10 a day how do I get more and I'm like 10 a day imagine trying to meet and connect with 10 people every single day that's impossible like you don't need more people you need to slow down and maybe get less people and really focus on building those connections and then not just connections with you and those people but then connecting those people together because the more those happen again that foundation of the community starts to build and becomes much stronger and starts to work without you

that's the key part of community is eventually you get to move out of it and now they run events build products and do things and you don't have to be the center of it all the time that's when when you know your community is really starting to form and that doesn't happen through Automation and that kind of goes to what you're saying with with what bankless the little lesson learned there it's like quality over quantity and then as your community grows you're able to support the quantity because the quality is already there yeah exactly and then the last question we've got for you is how many people are on your team in the Webster Academy that's a great question it's actually quite small so wealthy Academy is actually born out of our marketing agency so the team that's on our marketing agency just helped us build it

now we have a small team there's there's five of us in there we have a media person so some that handles all of our content we have a social media person the person that's actually creating the content and putting it out and scheduling it we have a writer and then we have Jay and I who are the co-hosts of that host podcast and also do some of the writing so we've kept it pretty small but what's been great is our community has basically Amplified that right so our community has now helped us every week we do like a roll up and we kind of look through all the news for the week and we share like a podcast on it but who brings us that news the community does and so we don't need to hire someone for that because the community is like we'll help you get

that news and cultivate that news and we're like great and now we have these other products that again we haven't had to hire a developer for because we have devs in our community we haven't had to hire a designer for because we have designers in our community and so they've been able to allow us to grow at such a fast rate and start to produce products that we weren't even ready to start making yet because we we didn't you know we didn't have the team for it but we don't need it now because our community is really you know lifting us up and helping us so it's helped us and allowed us to have such a small team yeah so it's like you've got your like core team and then your community is able to supplement it so it's as if you actually have a large Team without

having to have all of the overhead of the large team because of how the community builds and supports itself exactly oh well thank you so much Kyle for for your time and your wisdom I really really enjoyed your presentation and just to wrap it up quickly what would be just one parting piece of wisdom you want to give to people my parting piece of wisdom is to forget about a lot of what happened in 2020 and 2021 and ask a lot of questions about that and go was that really the right way to do it and instead look at what's possible in the future a lot of what happened in that bull market was just speculation and Traders and just things that didn't really work out so I think be particular in what you do moving forward and look at what's being what's being launched

and Happening Now rather than what happened back then those were not the playbooks that we should use moving forward thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey 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 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