Community building, by design, can never be a sprint. It is always a marathon.
I recently read Get Together, a fantastic book with a 3-part framework to build communities both online and offline.
The first part of the book is that building a community starts by “sparking a flame”: figuring out the type of person you want in your community and empowering them to help build it alongside you.
The problem with most crypto communities is they skip this part entirely and/or speedrun the entire community building process.
This speedrun model is not sustainable and frequently used by projects that either have no idea what they’re doing or they have no PMF.
Questing, financial incentives, botting - all shortcuts to “build communities” that disappear the day after the airdrop happens.
On top of this, founders are pressured by both investors and exchanges to pump social metrics by any means necessary to create “hype” for their project leading up to TGE. This creates misaligned incentives in the team <> community relationship.
Pumping social metrics usually requires one of two things:
Purchasing engagement
Genuine supporters that believe in your mission and see value in mutual success (more on this in a sec)
Purchasing engagement can be financial or a promise.
Financial meaning you pay platforms like Galxe or Zealy to get bots to pump your metrics.
Promise meaning you hand out Discord roles or other qualifying tags to people for them to speculate on an airdrop down the line.
Both can have negative consequences for your brand and put your project at risk when done wrong, which is pretty easy to do.
From what I’ve seen, the typical engagement purchase agreement looks like this:
Project starts using questing platform to boost engagement
Raise announcement rolls out with questing
Team sees how much engagement they got with questing, they continue to use it to please investors/exchanges
Expectations are not set with the people (mainly bots) engaging with these quests on when a TGE might happen
Questing campaign goes on for way too long
TGE happens, the people (extractive sybil farms) expect a massive airdrop because they’ve put “time and effort” into these quests
Project turns their back on these people OR gets bullied into distributing their tokens to these extractors
Project gets fudded into the ground and dies a slow death
Purchasing engagement is like doing drugs, feels great when you do it, but when the high wears off, you have to come back to reality.
The reality is that purchasing engagement does not build communities. As much as we want to believe it does being in crypto; financial incentives do not build communities. You know what does build communities? Great products and people that listen.
In 2006 - YouTube hired their first community manager, Mia.
They just hit a million users for the first time, and saw value in figuring out how people were using their platform and how to empower them.
Financial incentives were never a part of the equation - YouTube was a fantastic product with PMF. It would only become stronger with the help of someone in the trenches with the community listening to their every need.
“I think that YouTube would have grown in spite of what we did. Honestly, I think our work was nice to have, but it would have grown and proliferated anyway. It was so innovative and it filled such a need.”
Community is a side effect of having a strong mission, product, or service that people love - not the other way around.
Crypto projects try to make up for their lack of PMF by purchasing engagement, which always falls short long term as the money and trust erode over time.
So what’s the alternative? How do you create that community base that will ride or die for your project?
Do things that don’t scale. An absolute classic by Paul Graham on building successful startups (please read it).
A story in this article that always sticks out to me the unique way Stripe onboarded their first users: they would grab the person’s laptop and onboard them themselves.
It was so successful they coined the term “Collision Installation” for it.
Obviously, this is not scalable. At the time, Stripe was only 2 people - it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that this process caps out pretty quickly.
However, today, Stripe sits at a $100b+ valuation, and it all started with onboarding their first users by hand.
Crypto projects tend to work inversely from this method - figuring out scale first and worrying about the 1:1 community relationships later (sometimes, not even at all).
And I don’t blame them!
Crypto is plagued with bots, sybils, and various other extractors that bury real contributors in an endless steaming pile of noise.
Community managers are so focused on scaling their systems to take on this massive load of extractors instead of talking to the real people that have been there since day one.
We need to do better.
“One of the things that is the death knell for a community manager is to not listen, to not to be present. That’s terrible. Even if it’s a simple “Thanks so much for your feedback,” you have to acknowledge people.”
If you are a community manager/lead in an early stage crypto project that you believe has PMF, TALK TO YOUR USERS!!!
This has been proven time after time after time to successfully build strong loyalty + help you build the best product possible for your users - thus building a community.
Do the hard work, ditch purchasing engagement, and spark the flame. I highly highly recommend you give the Get Together book a read, it taught me a lot and helped me rethink community building from the ground up.
Anyways, follow me on X dot com.