Don’t Let These Three Discord Problems Wreck Your Go-to-Market Strategy

For some businesses and brands, their long-term goal is to expand into the Web 3 space and provide value to an audience. If that is you, then the first step in the roadmap is to become active on Twitter, providing content and value in your niche space. As your followers increase, you want to provide a way for the more active/committed people to build a larger community, so creating and maintaining a Discord is the next logical step.

In a previous article, I pointed out the importance of including Discord in your go-to-market strategy.

Discord has its strengths and weaknesses, but it is a common place for community to develop and grow in Web 3 and critical for your go-to-market launch.

Knowing this, there are three things that can wreck both your community and your go-to-market launch within Discord.

1. Confusion

When a person joins the Discord, it can be a user experience nightmare unless your onboarding is laid out well. General channels can be a fire hydrant of conversations that overlap and can make a new person feel alone and confused.

Having a clear journey for new people to learn the key channels and information is critical. Beyond a plan, having easy-to-access tutorials or FAQs can be very helpful. One example of a group doing this well is The Lazy Lions community. They have a great Discord channel that they call “lions-teach-cubs”. It works like a FAQ where people have asked questions about the community and the project and the community provide answers. You can read through the list or search it, and it is a great way to provide an archive of details.

Providing a clear roadmap can reduce confusion. Listing and repeating simple, easy steps for future launches is important too.

Sometimes you may think you are communicating too much or too often, however, you can’t overcommunicate to your audience. Remember that people frequently don’t read the information or watch the videos or search the feed, so repetition of key information is crucial.

2. Lack of Moderators

Discord channels can unintentionally get out of control without adequate moderators. Moderators are critical to a healthy and productive Discord experience by providing the guide rails for conversation and information within the channels. These are some important functions they serve:

• Provide answers to questions that people have in the channels
• Ensure the conversations are positive and diffuse any unhealthy dialog
• Redirect conversations to the appropriate channels if topics get off track
• Identify and remove bots that sneak into the Discord

For moderators to do their job well, they need to have information to answer questions, or if they don’t know the answer, they need to be able to contact those who do. Ideally, communities have a moderator on the Discord around the clock with multiple moderators during peak times or during mints and promotions. That is not always possible or practical, but making it easy for people to identify moderators and tag them in the channel is helpful.

3. Ghosting Founders

If founders are absent from the community conversation, projects fall apart quickly. This may seem obvious, but it does not always happen. In the early stages especially, the voice of the founders in the Discord and on Twitter shows there is someone with a vested interest in the project’s success. They also set the tone for the community. By looking at how founders talk with the community and about those outside the community, you can get a good measure for how the group will interact and what the group values.

Once a community grows to a certain size, frequent or daily founder interaction within the Discord is not as necessary, however, having founders provide comments, videos, or announcements continues to provide value to the community. While long term, most healthy communities are promoted and grown through grass-roots involvement, founders still play their part.

Conclusion

If you are considering adding Web 3 functionality or products to your business or brand, or if you are a content creator and thinking about creating a roadmap for your community, make sure to plan out the use Discord carefully. Discord may not ensure the success of the project, but it can definitely cause lots of problems if not managed well.