Jessica Watson Miller from NEAR Protocol on Building a Thriving Community
Thriving communities are one of the keys to a successful blockchain project. When starting a new project, how do you go about creating them? At Consensus 2019, we met Jess Miller, community manager for NEAR Protocol and asked her to sit down with us to talk about the tactics she is using to help build her community.
While we tried to capture her statements as accurately as possible, the following does not represent a verbatim transcript.
Background
Jess has been in crypto for about two years and has worked mostly as a product manager and as a project manager. She’s Australian and came to the US about a year and a half ago. Her current job with NEAR is her first job as a community manager.
She had a previous life as director of a circus, and as a professional body painter so we had to ask… “is being in a circus crazier than crypto?” Jess told us that in some ways crypto is more normal and in some ways crazier.
How does being in a circus help prepare you for your current role?
To be successful, it is necessary to have a sense of adaptive resourcefulness. A circus saying is that only some people are “useful in a bump in.” A “bump in” is when you move everything in and set up. Inevitably you run into problems — no money, barely enough people — and have to solve them; this helps you to learn that you can be resourceful and learn who is useful in a bump in — who you can rely on. A good team member takes the problem as a given (rather than debate whether it is a problem) and helps to solve it.
For example, NEAR protocol had a big event and had three times more people show up than we expected and, of course, a bunch of things went wrong. As a team we all had to solve problems on our feet and trust that other team members were also solving problems on their feet. This is a common aspect of community management, publicity and news. You have to be able to respond quickly. You also definitely get good at doing with limited resources. Crypto is not quite like shoestring artist territory; when I came from the arts to startups, I was like, “wow we have so many resources; we can do so much!” compared to what I was used to.
Describe NEAR
NEAR is building a base layer blockchain. NEAR is focusing very aggressively on what’s stopping more widespread use now: usability (for users and developers) and scalability.
The development team came from MemSQL They built one of the only sharded databases and are applying the sharding approach also used with databases to blockchain. We are aiming to build a broad general purpose blockchain with a focus at the moment on gaming and similar applications. The project is in testnet stage at the moment. People can go to the testnet today and, for a lot of people, this is the first blockchain project they would have encountered where they don’t have to take four hours to deploy something.
What makes NEAR protocol easier for developers to use?
- Developer tooling is straightforward. You don’t need to learn a new language. Smart contracts are written in Typescript which is familiar to web and JavaScript developers;
- We have made understanding the documentation and going through the process of deployment very easy. You can go to the online dev environment and make an app and deploy it in less than five minutes;
- From a developer point of view, we make it easier for them to onboard users. It’s easier for developers to pay transaction fees rather than having to onboard users and get them to buy crypto, go to Coinbase, install a browser wallet and come back — a cumbersome process which causes an estimate of 90% drop off for DApps on Ethereum. With NEAR Protocol, there are different options for user key management. Developers don’t need the user to immediately download a browser wallet which helps them be much gentler and more straightforward in their onboarding strategy
What is your community strategy?
At the moment, we are focused on developers. Getting closer to the mainnet launch, we will focus on validators and token holders.
To reach developers, we are focused on getting people who will build DApps. We recently had a hackathon and had a number of projects coming out of that that were really cool, including a video transcoder and a clone of Twitter. We are also doing a lot of developer education including lining up introductory workshops and onboarding people, and we have a whiteboard series on YouTube which is good for current blockchain developers as well as for new developers or web developers who want to learn more about blockchain.
Which channels do you use?
Our whiteboard series is technically on YouTube but most interaction is on Twitter. We use Discord both internally for day-to-day team communication, as well as externally to support our live events and to interact with our community. We also have a Telegram channel, but at the moment it’s not our primary focus.
How do developers hear about NEAR?
We have active meetup groups in different regions and we work with other communities within crypto and developer education more broadly. We also have our partners who run community groups and we do events with them. We have also been focused on university clubs, eg: we are running a developer workshop at Stanford Blockchain Club next week.
What pitch/rallying cry is most effective for you?
If had to have a mantra: usability and scalability. My job and those of my colleagues is working out who is this a rallying cry for and what else might be attractive (to our target developers). At the moment, we have a handful of projects that are already more established and are excited that they could actually build the first 1 million user DApp on our protocol, and others who just want to get into blockchain for the first time and see that this is the easiest way to do that.
I’m also excited about supporting entrepreneurs, particularly hacker entrepreneurs, because my interest has always been in social systems and new forms of social systems. What we’re creating is a tool box — a sandbox. The ecosystem you create is only as good as the kinds of (projects, builders) you can bring to it. (I’m interested in) business models that don’t yet exist — that will exist in the future. I’m very interested in building the community of business model hackers and helping people understand how blockchain will affect their business model. In the next few months, I would be happy to see a community of NEAR Protocol business model hackers emerging in the next few months.
