Web3 — Go-to or Exit-to Community?
How to build a lasting and engaged community
Both go-to and exit-to community align with the core idea of web3’s community and ownership mantra: creating a participatory and value contributing culture, with aligned incentives across stakeholders, and with the key assets being co-owned and co-governed by the community. They are complementary tactics along the progressive journey of building a lasting and engaged community. Both G2C and E2C acknowledge there is a chicken and egg dynamic at play when building communities: there is no “by and for” the community without an initial creator or core team laying the foundation and defining the (initial) playing field.
Early on in the project, there is a need to be super agile and creative, with a lot of iterative experimentation to pivot to the right initial recipe. At inception, the focus is on building and engaging an “atomic network” of contributors who will commit time and energy to define and validate the core elements of the community canvas: purpose, values and norms, audience and roles, assets and monetisation, or what drives the overall GCP (“gross community product”).
“The optimal governance structure for early-stage projects is founder dictatorship. The optimal governance structure for mature projects has large user/stakeholder involvement. ‘Exit to community’ continues to be underrated as a way to get both.”
— Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation
Very much like it’s common sense in start-up world to not build or spend too much before validating you are on the right track (aka minimum viable product), starting small in building and testing community is the right thing to do. Minimum Viable Community (MVC) is what allows creators and founders to validate the core ingredients of what will make their communities tick, without having to worry about all the tools, processes and economics from the get-go. It’s probably also the most authentic approach to organically building a bottoms-up culture where peer-level trust and participation will be the cornerstones of a thriving community.
During the “BUILD” stage, the focus is on bootstrapping a small group of like-minded and passionate members around a common purpose. Coming to a shared understanding of why the community exists, who it exists for, and what constitutes success. Defining the core proposition, both in terms of community belonging and member benefits, as well as how co-creation will end up maximising the collective value and impact. In short, installing a sense of “WAGMI” from the get-go.
Rather than spending funds on traditional funnel marketing to acquire and activate new users, creators and founder teams can leverage tokens to bring in early members. Token grants and retroactive airdrops may be used to reward the initial team for their early contributions when network effects aren’t yet self-sustaining. As with angel investors, the founding team and early stakeholders could see their efforts and risk-appetite recognised with appropriate financial and social capital.
Once a minimum healthy community has been established, the founding team can start to look at gradually opening and broadening up, while progressively decentralising governance and ownership over to the community. This is not growth hacking in the traditional sense, but more “community-hacking”, where the focus is on increasing density through belonging and participation, less so on net member growth. It’s about optimising for community health and doing right by the community, not just maximising audience reach.
The first challenge to overcome is ensuring every new member gets properly onboarded. Yes, that means it needs to be a welcoming and supportive experience, but also one where member gives-gets are clearly and transparently exposed. Shared beliefs will govern community behaviour and drive collective outcomes, so knowing what you sign up for should be part of the onboarding journey. Equally, onboarding should be progressive, especially when it comes to native web3 components. Members and fans shouldn’t be exposed to the complexity and gimmicks of crypto as part of their initial sign-up. Bridging some of the web3 community experience with centralised, custodial front-ends (e.g. signing up with email and password, token transactions, …) is probably the most effective approach to increasing adoption and ensuring inclusion. Along the way, members can be gradually educated and introduced to wallets, tokens and other crypto assets.
Proper onboarding mixed up with the right incentives will generate viral growth loops to sustain community growth, both in reach (breadth) and density (depth). With members having skin in the game and partaking in the growth benefits of the community, they will be naturally incentivised to contribute to network effects by creating and sharing community output, and by helping outside prospects to discover the community and convert into new members.
But it’s getting members to actively participate, engage and contribute, which will ultimately dictate a community’s health and prosperity in the long run. Creating the right dynamics between regular members, active contributors and the core team, with the appropriate reputation, reward and governance structure, will require continuous tuning with member tiers and token models. Not all members are equal, and getting everyone to contribute with the diversity of skills they have and skin they are willing to put in, will need a fine balancing act between carrot (value creation, attribution and distribution) and stick (permissions, governance, accountability). Inclusion and democratisation doesn’t mean all members and fans need to be treated equally, but that a community’s social and financial capital are distributed fairly based on individual contribution and impact.
In the end, it’s not just about community-first, but also about community-owned, letting the community capture the long tail value, rather than an individual creator or founding team. With the key difference between go-to-market vs. go-to-community summarised as the difference between (short term) value capture and (long term) value creation …
Feel free to backtrack my journey into the rabbit hole and check-out some of my previous posts in this multi-part series on Web3 and community empowerment.
