Introducing the IOTA Community Study
I conducted a little study on the IOTA Community. I would like to share my findings today.
This medium post only is a brief overview over the study. You can download the findings here.
IOTA is a global not-for-profit foundation incorporated and headquartered in Germany. The IOTA Foundation’s mission is to support the research and development of new distributed ledger technologies (DLT). The IOTA Tangle moves beyond blockchain by providing the world’s first scalable, feeless and fully-decentralized distributed ledger technology. The Tangle uses its own unique technology to solve three fundamental problems with blockchain technology: high fees, scaling and centralization. It is an open-source protocol connecting the human economy with the machine economy by facilitating novel Machine-to-Machine (M2M) interactions, including secure data transfer, fee-less micropayments, and secure access control for devices.
Some months ago, I had a discussion with members of the IOTA Foundation and other community members about how we can attract new people into the IOTA Community as one user was frustrated that there were not enough people working on the core protocol. One person suggested to focus on marketing while others pointed out that the protocol was far from marketable. This was discussed broadly, and someone noted that other projects were way more successful in attracting developers even though their fundamentals were way worse. Overall, projects like Tron (and others) do not really have a lot to show so far and yet a mind-blowing amount of people support it anyway.
What stuck with me was that everyone had a concrete idea on how we should tackle the problem. Despite, nobody had a clear picture on ‘who’ exactly is part of the IOTA Community and why people joined in the first place.
In my opinion this is an actual problem. As IOTA is a decentralized open source project it is highly important to grow the number of people who contribute. I believe that it needs actionable data to achieve that! Therefore, I decided to create a little study which aims to provide this data. The main goal of this study is to get a better picture of the IOTA community and to clearly understand what drives their members.
The generated data is meant as one helpful building block for the development of a growth strategy for the IOTA community. (Please note, this study is not affiliated with the IOTA Foundation.) In brief, here is what I found:
Commitment
A large amount of the community contributes to the project because of the vison behind IOTA. 75 % of all participants claimed that they support IOTA because of it. An overwhelming majority of all participants also deeply believes in the success of the IOTA protocol. 82,5 % of all participants are at least “overall optimistic” that the IOTA protocol will be widely adopted within the next 5 years.
Participation
While many believe in the future of IOTA, only half of the IOTA community actively works on something related to IOTA. 5 % of all participants currently uses the IOTA technology in their full-time job. Noteably, only about 10% of all participants are software developers. Interestingly, there are twice as many engineers which makes them the biggest job-group in the survey. This somewhat makes sense, as IOTA is thought to be a protocol for Machine-to-Machine communication.
Growth Needs
As I point out in the study, there is an overall urgent need to grow the IOTA community — not only to accelerate adoption but also to prevent impending lock-in effects: IOTA might not compete with Bitcoin on use-cases but it certainly does in terms of talent as there only is a limited amount of people who are able to contribute. As network effects influence the attractivity of these projects larger ecosystems do have a strategic advantage in attracting new people. At the moment, Bitcoin has by far the largest community. Comparably, IOTA is relatively small. Also, the data indicates only a slow growth of the community.
To achieve growth, I believe three fields of action should be addressed.
Ownership in the Organisation
It should be a high-priority goal for the IOTA Foundation to rapidly scale up the IOTA community. To accelerate this process, I recommend creating the role of a Senior Growth Strategist. Different to a Marketing Manager his responsibilities do not include marketing a finished product but to develop concrete strategies on how to attract talent into the IOTA Community based on the IOTA vision. A Senior Growth Strategist should report to the board directly.
Vision-driven-Marketing
As the data shows, most current community members joined IOTA because of the vision behind it. Even as the protocol is not finished yet, communicating the IOTA vision more clearly and, even more important, more broadly can lead to community growth. This effect should be considered for all future marketing activities.
Growth Ambassadors
The findings indicate that the main portion of the previous community growth was organic. One way to accelerate this organic growth is to empower so called Growth Ambassadors. On a corporate level this can be done by targeting consultancies and IoT integrators. On a community-level what I call ‘Active Observers’ can play a vital role. ‘Active Observers’ do not participate to the project as developers but by distributing IOTA-related content online (see personas in the study). They should not be seen as bystanders but as active distributers of the IOTA vision.
To download the full study, please click here. I hope you find these findings helpful to better understand the IOTA Community and how we can improve. Let me know your thoughts!
