How Jeff Kauffman Jr. Left His Job To Build In 11 Months One Of The Most Thriving Web3 Communities

Daopedia is building Wikipedia for DAOs. This article has been written in collaboration with Eliot Couvat, Head of Community at Coinvise. If you find this essay interesting, make sure to follow Daopedia and Eliot on Twitter. Enjoy!

When Jeff Kauffman Jr. decided to create the first Web3 community for Marketers, the reactions were NOT positive. Industry veterans told him, “Jeff you’re right, this is the future, but you’re 10yrs too early.”

Today, after 11 months of existence, the JUMP community is thriving. Here’s his story.

Jeff came across the concept of Social Tokens in early 2020, a few months after the term had started to gain some momentum. He was reading more and more essays about this subject for his work and decided to make a Web3 trends presentation. After a few days of hard work, he started sharing it with strategists, creatives, and senior people in his network.

This was the fall of 2020, and everyone had the same response.

Through emails, Direct Messages, or even over the phone, everyone had the same answer “Wo Jeff, your presentation is awesome, and this future looks incredible, but I have no idea where to start.” His network was mainly composed of people working with brands and agencies, and they weren’t quite ready for it… Yet.

After some time, Jeff came up with a new idea that was about to change his life. He thought out loud: “What if I could create a tokenized community of agency peoples, marketers from Fortune 500, Web3 startups, and help move this trend along faster?” He did some research on the internet and decided to join the 2nd cohort of Seed Club, a Web3 incubator, and created the first-ever Web3 Marketers community: JUMP.

The main idea behind this ambitious project was to create a community and have people learn by experiencing the tokens. Instead of selling products & services to agencies, he realized it would be best to build a community, use a Social Token, and let people experience what that’s like.

With the help of Seed Club, de decided to create JUMP around five core values that would give him a North Star for his project:

• Use Web3 fundamentals to build a community
• Educate people around Web3
• Build a strong network
• Explore best practices for building brands in Web3
• Fund projects

To attract only the best talents and create a valuable community, Jeff also decided to build a screening process. This way, he could grow a healthy community at his own pace and gather information about members to understand their needs better.

With some core values and a screening process, Jeff was ready to kick things off. It was time for him to create a Token. He quickly introduced $JUMP, a social token created through Coinvise, which would have several utilities in the community.

• Utility # 1 — Let people experiment with tokens
Through a tipping system, members can send tokens to each other when they bring value to the community.

• Utility # 2 — Incentivize collaboration
Members worldwide can curate the latest news daily and receive tips in token for their good work. The more members contribute, the more tokens they earn.

• Utility # 3 — Attract core contributors
With companies soon putting millions into Web3, JUMP will be ideally positioned to attract those brands and partner with them.
Brands > Community value ⬈ > Token value ⬈ > members wanting to join ⬈

The weeks went by, and the community was growing steadily. Jeff was attracting more contributors and members in the community and decided that it was time to structure the community more. He created three main teams that would run different aspects of the community:

• Newsfeed — To keep people up to date
• Research — To explore the Web3 space
• Events — To gather people together

From those three teams, several projects came to life. They first created a newsletter gathering the top news for web3 marketing pro’s and quickly introduced a Member Roundtable, where Best Web3 marketers come to speak on stage. Finally, some members started to build their own product and came up with a newsfeed curation bot — simply outstanding 😎

After roughly a year and what started as a crazy idea in Jeff’s mind, the JUMP community is kicking off its third season & has already gathered 2000+ marketers.

Many possibilities are ahead for the community:

• Turn into a Service DAO
• Do consulting for Web2 brands
• Connect best Web3 marketers w/ promising companies

From knowing almost nothing about crypto, to making a Web3 trend presentation and finally building one of the most thriving Web3 communities, what Jeff has accomplished in roughly a year truly been remarkable.

The JUMP community is here to stay. Jump into the revolution.

If you liked this essay, make sure to join the JUMP Community here and follow Eliot and Daopedia on Twitter! 🚀