Web3 community building: why community is the moat

Transcript

gmgm Welcome Friends back to another episode of The web3 Academy podcast I'm Kyle reedhead you can find me on Twitter at Kyle reedhead that's r-e-i-d-h-e-a-d hit me up on Twitter I'd love to hear from you on there but today we are talking about why Community is the secret to web 3 success and to be completely honest it's not just about web3 Community is the secret to success in all business as the founder of a marketing agency who has helped many web 2 and web 3 businesses grow Community really should be at the focal point of everything you do and this uh podcast episode is going to explain why that is it's going to help you gain the conviction to go all in on community

whether that means resources whether that means human capital uh it means you know going and talking to your boss and tell them we need to go and focus on community whatever that is you need that conviction because this is what's going to bring success to just about any business okay so that's what we're going to dive into but before we do I just want to mention that we are also currently running an eight-week community-led Mastermind on how to build and scale Community online and in fact this episode is coming out of the first um session that we had inside of this Mastermind and if you'd like to join uh it's very easy just go to the Forum Below in the show notes click it click on the link and there's a couple questions and

you'll join into our Discord which is where we're hosting these sessions on a weekly basis what we're doing here is we have a massive community of those Founders and marketers and Community Builders in the web 3 space who are coming together in the first session we talked about what are the most important parts of building community that we need to uncover and and really understand and that built out our outline and now over the next eight weeks we are covering all things about how to architect your Discord to create community experiences how to track and and uh create you know key metrics for Community Building how to inspire engagement how to use social media to help you with building community and so much more so it's free don't worry about it just fill out the

form it'll push you into the Discord and you can join in the next section session sorry they are Tuesdays at 4 pm Eastern Standard time we have some incredible guests that are speaking in that in these Mastermind sessions so make sure to check that out but let's first dive into community and really understand why this is so important to our businesses before we do that let's take a second to hear from our sponsors 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 the 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 is 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 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

okay welcome back everyone you've no doubt heard people championing that Community is everything if you follow me on Twitter you see that I tweet that out all the time but many do on Twitter and while we definitely agree I think that we need to understand the why before we can consciously build our communities otherwise it just becomes something we say but never realize the benefits of Community First thinking isn't unique to web3 as I mentioned top companies such as Apple Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway all have their evangelists who'd rather die than support a competitor even if it made logical sense to choose another option yes I'm looking at you Apple Fans and you know what I'm actually one of

those fans as well but in all seriousness uh Community First thinking will become the norm and Venture Capital firm besmer agrees they predict that in the next few years more than half of startups will have Community focused employees before they cross five million dollars in Revenue now in this deep dive in this episode here I'll be covering what's wrong with the current Community Dynamic and all the ways and engaged Community benefits your organization for example number one solidifying your competitive Advantage number two lowering your marketing costs in number three creating sustainable product demand so let's dive into this what's wrong with the current Community

Dynamic well when most people think of communities they're actually thinking about audiences audiences dominate web 2 and are still noticeable in web 3 as well and no just because a web through organization has a Discord Server doesn't mean that they have a community you can think of an audience as a one-to-many relationship this means a Creator or business is the sole contributor well audience members are consumers for example many audience focused products revolve around paid subscriptions such as premium newsletters private communities communities is in quotations if you're not watching et cetera however the value proposition of these products is often about access to the Creator or the content that that

Creator is creating now private communities are a step in the right direction but most of them don't leverage the real power of community these groups often host weekly calls and have moderators to Spur conversation but besides the few participants that ask questions Community engagement flat lines instead the right Community Dynamic involves members actively contributing to discussions maybe even leading them hopefully established community members helping and interacting with new ones and members who are involved in shaping products events experiences and more a Community Focus is all about empowering members to share opinions and enable deeper involvement in an organization

let's talk about ways and engage Community can benefit your organization and these don't have to be when I say the word organization it sounds like a really big company it can be very very small whether you are an influencer you write newsletters or your Apple and you build big massive companies an Engaged Community is one of the most powerful business tools you could ever come across members can help you shape your products and services alert you to do business opportunities and act as human Billboards for your organization in web 3 your community can help you create the yet to be written playbooks for Success all you have to do is listen to them and by the way that's exactly what we're doing with web3 Academy we are not experts at web3 no one is but our community is helping us and we are all

together building some amazing resources just like The Mastermind that I mentioned at the beginning so in particular I believe there are four major ways an Engaged Community can support your organization one Community becomes your new moat two members help you scale by engaging with new members three engage community members are effective social Sellers and four Community stays with organizations through thick and thin you're seeing that happen right now in this current bear Market in web 3. so let's explore how these can benefit your business let's break down each one let's start with Community is remote in a world where open source technology is becoming ubiquitous any sort of technological advantage there once was

between organizations is slowly dying on top of this web 3 interoperability lowers switching costs drastically since users don't have to lose their data if they want to move to another platform that means your competitive Advantage must come from something that a competitor can't easily copy your community when you have a group of people who won share a common interest in Your Vision two enjoy interacting with your organization other members and three are empowered to meaningfully shape your organization's path well then you're well on your way to increasing the stickiness of your community basically the stickier your community is the easier it is to retain current members making it easier to then acquire new members through that Network effect

the battle between Apple and Samsung is the perfect example of stickiness based on the specs of each company's Flagship product alone Samsung is arguably the winner by a small margin but to be fair Samsung's price are about a hundred dollars more per device across the board now regardless based on logic you'd expect sales for each company smartphones to be somewhat evenly matched but in the US Apple accounts for a whopping 48 of the total market share while Samsung comes in at about 30 percent this is the power of community as a moat if a competitor offers a similar product engaged community members won't bat an island communities are also appealed to Consumers emotions meaning they'd be more inclined to buy a

product that gives them a sense of belonging or an ego boost engaged community members can function as part-time employees this is number two in our list here that we're going to break down the level of contribution will vary depending on each member's engagement and attachment to your organization however even the smallest of member contributions can give your actual employees more time for other tasks community members can help across all facets of your organization including product development marketing customer service research etc for example you can pull your community to get their feedback on product design features price points and more some community members may even help you build these products if they're big fans of your

vision or if you can incentivize them correctly hence the use of bounties and tokens in web 3. a real world example of community contribution comes from Jason Keith who is a recent guest on our weekly roll-up he was also on our podcast a few months ago as well in the doer Spotlight now Jason who is part of the jump Dao was inspired by Jump's branding vision and Community leading him to work in a side project of character illustrations now called swoopas he wasn't asked or incentivized up front to create these characters instead the product the project story was all about adding value to the jump community on top of this halfway through the project he asked the Dow if they wanted to get involved the answer a resounding yes the Dow took charge helping to better align the nft

traits and stories with the community culminating in an ongoing mint while Jason doesn't have grand plans for the collection just yet it's now an asset that the jump Dow can leverage to build its Community when your community members begin contributing to your organization they automatically become more invested in its long-term success engage communities this is number three engaged communities stay through thick and thin sure if someone contributes to your organization they obviously want to see the long-term result of their of their effort however helpful welcoming communities are simply good for Humanity everyone wants to feel like they belong somewhere right and that's why we have so many communities around the world for

things like sports Hobbies careers religion and almost anything you can think of people need a place where they can talk about their interests and engage with like-minded people so if you can provide that place for them whether in Discord or another platform people will happily stay around for example web3 Academy social poster and football fanatic Raul loves Arsenal okay but over the last few years Arsenal wasn't doing so great in the English Football League so why didn't he decide to support another club instead it all comes down to Arsenal's engaged Community he even went to a local Meetup in his Meetup in his City a few weeks ago which by the way that was in uh Romania so that's how big this community

has grown out is that there's local meetups happening in Romania for an English football team and like Arsenal if you can build an Engaged Community it becomes self-sustaining even if your organization is going through tough times like many web3 companies are right now not only does this keep your company afloat When the tide is against you but it also lowers retention costs since engagement isn't purely based on monetary incentives now enabling effective social selling this is number four the current way of social selling is broken it relies on sales people and cold Outreach forcing people to pay attention instead I believe an Engaged Community is the true secret to effective social selling and no Shilling random tokens on Twitter isn't what we're talking about here that's affiliate marketing or

Shilling it's about the power of well thought out Community content think about if you see a company talking about how great their product is how do you feel even if their product is great it's easy to feel put off by a company's claims so businesses have to be more subtle about their promotions this is why influencer marking has exploded in popularity over the last few years but now especially in web 3 people are becoming more aware of paid influencers preferring unpaid recommendations and content outside of this the real social selling happens in community potentially even in community Discord servers when you join a company server helpful community members can quickly make you feel comfortable and answer any questions regarding the the company and just like content creation

these interactions are much more meaningful since they come from someone that doesn't have to help other members if they don't want to but no matter where your community members are promoting your organization these actions result in lower customer acquisition costs which is perfect considering that advertising costs are actually Rising building communities the right way an open source future is coming in the last defense against competitors is your community so it should be at the Forefront of your organizational strategy in saying that the Community First mentality that we've talked about in this deep dive is relatively new Focus for organizations so we won't try to brag and say we know everything about building sustainable engaged communities because we don't I definitely do not but

we do know a handful of web3 experts that are pioneering and practicing this mentality in their own organizations and that's why we're running this eight-week community cultivated Mastermind how to build and scale online communities what's the goal of it well it's to learn about Community Building best practices alongside you our web 3 Academy Community the listeners of the podcast the readers of the newsletter so some of the things we're going to be learning about is the foundations of building healthy community that one we've actually already done social media and the role it plays engage communities how to build and grow past the startup phase of your community I don't think that people understand how difficult this is startup phase is the tough part of your community uh and that's just basically when it's all you once you start to get the members to contribute as well things

change that's what pulls you out of your startup phase we want to talk about how to get through that how to measure Community success in key metrics in designing your community platforms I.E Discord to support community building and honestly so much more but the best part is that we'll be taking what we learn in creating the community building Playbook together while The Mastermind has already started the good news is that we've created some resources in our Discord for you to catch up so if community building is your priority for 2023 don't miss out on this week's session uh we're actually we're going to be talking about the startup phase assuming you're listening to this on Monday when this comes out so all you have to do is go to the link below and click the link to join into the community Mastermind I'll take you

to the Discord you'll see in The Mastermind section of the Discord there are multiple channels there's a welcome Channel check that one out it'll just kind of give you the insights of what's going on then there is a weekly discussion Channel where everyone in the community can chat about the things we learned and what we want to learn next there's a weekly resources Channel which is where you can go and check out the previous sessions that you have missed there's audio recordings and notes taken that you can just scroll through and check out the slides and that'll get you up to speed on where we are at and then you will see the events are hosted inside there at 4 pm Eastern Standard Time on Tuesdays so do not miss that but thank you friends for listening to this episode on why Community sorry on my

community is so important we will continue to write about community and continue to share these on the podcast of course but I do recommend if you want to learn about community now I mean this is where I'm learning to be honest I'm learning inside of the Discord inside of this Mastermind it is incredible experience and so if you want to learn about Community this is the place to be in web 3 right now but thank you again so much for listening if you enjoyed this content if you enjoyed learning about Community please share our podcast episode give us a follow on Spotify on YouTube on Apple podcast wherever you can uh it's no cost to you to do these things but it does really help us to grow and get our content out to more people so I thank

you so so much for doing so I thank you so much for listening and I hope you have a wonderful week thank you for listening to web3 Academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 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 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 and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as Financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one