The Go-to-Market Strategy Is Dead (Killed by Web 3.0)

We are witnessing one of the significant shifts in tech. With Web3, a whole new version of the internet is here, and many new exciting and innovative projects are taking place. But organizations are still applying old strategies rather than creating new frameworks to take advantage of its features.

The defining characteristics of the new Web3 model are decentralization, ubiquity, connectivity, permissionless, and trustless. As Web3 continues to grow in popularity and more projects and communities form, I think it’s time to analyze in-depth the methods of building and capturing value in the Web3 world.

I am addressing three key Product Marketing questions through this write-up:

1. Why traditional Go-To-Market strategy doesn’t work in the Web3 world.
2. Why do we need a Go-T0-Community strategy instead?
3. How to build a comprehensive GTC Strategy.

Why traditional GTM strategy doesn’t work in the Web3 world

Common topics emerge when you look at Web3 projects:

1. Unfortunately, many of them are not that easy to spot.
2. Projects are built around the stakeholder’s needs, and the goal is to create the most shared value between the maximum number of people.
3. Content creators/users are digital asset owners. This idea here is critical. As time goes on, users become increasingly empowered with more access to information and therefore better able to control and be in charge of future technology advances.

To better understand Web3 implications, let’s look at one particular organization: DAOs.

DAOs Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, are people organized to work towards a mutual goal without a unique leader or a central government. DAOs are similar to a company: the members are the shareholders that govern the organization through rules encoded into the blockchain. They can raise funds by selling tokens and voting on different proposals using blockchain records. Examples of DAOs are ConstitutionDAO, Uniswap, MakerDAO, DeveloperDAO, and Friends with Benefits. Packy McCormick said it best: “If blockchains, NFTs, smart contracts, DeFi protocols, and DApps are tools, DAOs are the groups that use them to create new things. If they’re the what, DAOs are the how.” DAOs are the next evolution in online communities because they let DAO members:

1. Get financial upside for creating more value for the community,
2. Have a real influence in the direction of the community through voting, and
3. Reflect the value of the community through the value of the token.

Go-to-market strategy

Because the transformation made by Web3 is so massive — it modifies the way of creating, capturing, and distributing value — a traditional go-to-market plan won’t suffice. Instead, a go-to-market (GTM) strategy attempts to detail the steps to acquire customers for a new product launch. In this approach, the user can benefit by using the product in exchange for a recurring or one-time payment. The users can provide feedback, but the company is ultimately in control of the upgrades. A GTM strategy is centralized by nature because it is defined by a group of people, typically the employees of a company. They are the ones who decide how to position themselves against competitors and the tactics to achieve their goals. A GTM Funnel focuses on how to win customers by targeting and engaging users.

Why do we need a GTC strategy instead

Bottom-up vs. top-down

The conventional way of creating value is top-down, where corporations are the “dictators” in control of value creation. Instead, an organization with a community-first mindset acts as a facilitator, creating spaces for members to create value and decide on the group’s direction. Web3 projects work bottom-up: project members decide what they want to make, and the best prevails. When decisions and ideas flow this way, the results are better. Your community will determine what’s essential for them.

Community as the driver

Communities are the primary way we have connected throughout history. And the most successful Web3 organizations and projects have a set of values and a brand that speak to people so strongly they feel the instinct to participate in the community. They have a mindset of community before profit and lead through building, maintaining, and improving the spaces where people can create and grow. Web3 is about the distribution of power and resources, not their accumulation. What drives the success of Web3 is the community because communication between its members is key for organizing themselves towards achieving a common purpose.

GTC before GTM

Building a community-first company isn’t new. What is novel is the fact that Web3 enables community-owned companies. And this goes way beyond community-led. A go-to-community (GTC) strategy is about creating, capturing, and distributing value using the community as the means to achieve these goals. Instead of building a community around a business, a company should strive to create new business models around its community. Why place community before market? Because if you focus on making an insanely good community, the profits will follow. I’m not saying you should throw away your GTM plan; on the contrary. Instead, it would be best to have a GTC that feeds into your GTM strategy. While there might be cases of successful projects created only by using a GTM strategy, it’s more likely to be a relatively small percentage that you can expect to be successful. Having a GTC plus a GTM strategy should increase your chances of success.

A GTC plan will let you:

• Generate more value and distribute it better.
• Discover your 1,000 fans faster.
• Make more efficient use of resources: you’ll have lower building costs by using your resources on building things that matter.
• Reach a larger scale by tapping into the network effects generated by the community.

How to build a comprehensive GTC Strategy

By now, the above should have convinced you that community is the most valuable currency of Web3.

A framework to build a successful GTC strategy rests on six pillars:

1. People
2. Purpose
3. Goals
4. Communication
5. Inputs
6. Outputs

1. People

It would be best to first think about finding, understanding, and connecting with people who may be interested in the community you are planning to build. Here are some key questions to guide you through this process: — Who is essential to us? Who shares our beliefs? Why are they important to us? — Where will we find them? Where do they hang out? Who are they connected to? — What do they care for? What are their interests? What are they talking about? — How can you help them? How can you contribute to their purpose? How can you help them create more value for their group?

You must also identify the members’ roles by considering the different ways they can contribute: clean and organize content, start conversations, host discussions, organize events, create content, or mentor other group members.

2. Purpose

A community is nothing but a people with a shared sense of purpose. We are all looking for a tribe, and shared beliefs around a common goal genuinely help with that. After identifying the people we want to invite to our community, we should determine what moves them. Here are some examples:

• Growth: self-development such as learning building a skill. Professionals share knowledge and skills and learn together.
• Empathy: affinity, understanding same circumstances and characteristics. People living or working in the same geographical place or age work in the same area or have similar roles. They seek to be understood and to share everyday experiences. Examples: parents, neighbors, students, teachers. People in the same life stage or circumstance share tips & support.
• Helping others: mobilizing volunteers as a movement to make a change in the world jointly
• Entertainment: shared subject matter interests people share the same interest or passion, continuously comprising a passion, hobby, or interest shared by participants.
• Accountability and support: people helping each other, usually non-professional and non-material, with a particular shared question or problem.

3. Goals

Where community becomes powerful is when there are clear and well-defined goals. Each plan should be tied with a metric to measure the impact on the community. First, you should ask yourself what is valuable to measure. Avoid vanity metrics like the number of members: it doesn’t matter how many people are in your community if no one is interacting. Instead, as time passes, you should understand the goals people wish to achieve and help them define and make plans to reach them.

Here are some objectives and questions to guide your efforts towards building your community:

• Impact: community provides value in more ways than just revenue. The value of the community goes beyond the LTV of the individual members.
• Are members contributing content or something of value?
• What is the most common type of contribution?
• What’s the number of unique contributors? What’s their impact?
• Revenue-per-member
• Number of members/member growth
• Belonging: this comes after someone has been a part of a community and formed relationships.
• Do your members feel connected?
• Do your members feel safe and included?
• What is the overall sentiment?
• Can you find words of encouragement?
• Connect customers around their shared interests to increase customer retention.
• Commitment and engagement
• How can we measure commitment?
• What are there different levels of commitment?
• How many members are regularly participating?
• What are the most common activities and interactions? e.g., likes, posts, comments, etc.
• Growth: enable customers to teach each other how to use your product better and succeed in their careers.
• Are your members getting the benefits that they came for?
• Support: create spaces for customers to answer questions and solve problems for each other.
• Relationship with business goals
• Product: Create spaces for customers to share product feedback and ideas with your team.
• Acquisition: Build programs that help you grow your pipeline and customer base. community-qualified leads

4. Communication

Even though communities should be platform agnostic, you should have a list of tools and channels you’ll use to facilitate the discussion and promote your community. Your community should be a place for people to meet and speak. Conversations are what community content is built upon. If you communicate with your members-only when you have updates, you don’t have a community; you have an announcement board.

Founders who can communicate the purpose of their project will enable communities to form around a shared goal and move the project forward. Think about what and how the community members could gain from participating. What are how you will encourage your members to interact with each other? What are how you will promote your community? How can you encourage its members to promote it too?

5. Inputs

First, you must determine how much you will invest and how many people can be involved full-time in your community.

Then it would help if you decided what the leading platforms where members will come together (forums, chats, social media groups/accounts) and the operations software to facilitate the organization and understand your community (document/data management, analytics tools, helpdesk, bots) are. Even though no tool will make a community, choosing the right tool can make a difference.

6. Outputs

Communities are built through everyday activities, and the products and content created. These outputs are how value is created.

Think of community-generated instead of user-generated content and products.

The big mindset shift

GTC takes a massive difference in perspective. But you can begin in small mindset shifts: think community facilitators instead of community builders, shared opportunities instead of individual compensation, members above users, and start focusing on creating value before capturing value. A successful GTC supports the direction in which the community wants to go, not the other way around.