Subscription Community
With the advent of recurring subscriptions on the blockchain, communities can utilize membership models that support new types of business structures and consumer engagement. Memberships have been a primary and healthy monetization channel for the legacy web, and when combined with the benefits that Native provides from a governance perspective, the possibilities for engagement with subscribers increase substantially.
Subscription Examples
- Magazine subscriptions — propose what content should be posted next
- Blue Apron — vote on the next meals
- Planet Fitness — determine the classes to provide members and what equipment/workout types people want
Token Use
To compliment a subscription purchase, users can get additional community tokens to spend within the community. Depending on the community type, things that could be purchased include merchandise or discounted tickets to workshops.
These tokens could also be representative of one’s weight in a token vote — such that those who are more heavily invested would have more power in decision-making processes.
Membership Benefits
In the case of subscriptions, the most important benefit is the subscription itself. However, there could be additional benefits for joining including:
- Access to the community’s services (i.e. consulting time)
- Discounts to products from companies in the organization’s network
- Access to a community’s physical space
Projects
While there could be some opportunities for projects in a subscription-oriented community, tasks and an additional revenue stream to the company seem to be the clearest use of capital brought in through the subscriptions.
Votes
It is important to get a clear sense of what customers are looking for. Voting on Native provides a direct method to assess sentiment and get feedback from the community.
Tasks
Some example tasks of a subscription community include:
- Get new people to sign up
- Show how people have benefitted from this subscription on social media
- Enlist customers to be helpers at events or in creating content
Conclusions
While subscription-based content and products have existed for quite some time, there is no integrated platform providing access to the content or product and a direct way to engage with consumers in the decision making process (like subscription value and updates to the community).
We would like to acknowledge that these subscription community examples are simply a subset of possible communities to be built on Native. We are excited to see what communities ultimately do with our platform. Please reach out to us with any interesting ideas.
