1. Foundations of Community Building: Minimum Viable Communities

From MVP to minimum viable community

MVPs defined web2, which allowed teams to deliver minimum viable functionality to verify viability to get real-world feedback and refine their product based on what users truly need. Tokenisation is one of crypto’s primary innovations and flips your go-to-market from a top-down approach to generating leads and converting them to customers via your acquisition funnel to something that’s bottom-up. 

What’s a Minimal Viable Community?

In crypto, your stakeholders are almost certainly investors too, and are firmly entrenched in the development process. If you can build and foster your community from the beginning it it encourages anti-fragility.

Having an MVC helps you to:

• Build authenticity and trust

• Understand member needs, wants, and pains

• Help establish learnings, purpose values, and culture as you grow.

But how do we get there?

2. Key Roles Within Community Building

Community building is the process of bringing a group of people together to achieve a set of collective goals. To do so requires harnessing complementary skills within the community-building process. 

Roles within community building

The Settlers (operators, focused on steady-state growth and maintenance)

• Settlers are similar to the community manager - a job designed to continue steady and organic community growth. 

• Typical responsibilities include: 

  • running community calls

  • moderating discord and telegram groups

  • engaging existing community stakeholders

  • onboarding new community members working on documentation to anything that enables existing community members. 

The Explorers 

• The role of explorers differs in that rather than growing the existing community, they need to discover and create new opportunities to drive growth for the community. 

• Explorers typically oversee:

  • building up new community distribution channels

  • content creation

  • fostering partnerships

  • relationship building

  • conducting customer interviews to analyse greenfield market opportunities.

The Town planners 

• Drive the strategy behind how a community should grow and where community-building efforts are best allocated. 

• A town planner’s role is to understand how to allocate community-building efforts and resources to areas of greatest leverage.

• 20% of your efforts will drive 80% of your results

Misunderstanding between these roles:

• Settle before exploring. 

  • You need your minimum viable community first before growing, this helps to ensure the meaningful participation needed to achieve growth. 

  • Build participation first before growing. Most projects fail because they try to grow before gathering meaningful participation. 

  • Take care of the needs and priorities of the current community before growing more aggressively, otherwise, you will not be able to retain participation. 

  • Without a community that can retain participation, further efforts to bring in new participants will be a wasted effort.

• Community is a creative process. 

  • Community = relationship building = something that can’t be forced

  • Different approaches are needed for settlers and explorers as such, there is a need to leverage creative freedom to experiment to maximise your community’s time and energy. 

• Town planning requires operational experience.

  • Project founders without community building experience often fail to recognize their inexperience in community building, despite attempting to play the role of Town planner. 

  • If either settler or explorer roles on the team are unable to fill the town planner role, try to find advisors or more experienced third parties to assist and help. Town planning requires clarity and coherence.

3. Hiring for Community Building

So now you understand what’s required to build communities, how do you hire for them? There are three avenues to consider:

• Value alignment - are they aligned with the values and overall mission of the community?

  • Ideally, you would hire people already involved with your community. Prior involvement helps to signify some level of investment already in your community’s success.

  • If you’re hiring from outside the community, assess the desire to learn and improve and the level of immersion into the community’s mission. This is easier to gauge with time and speaking with multiple people. 

• Track record - do they have any past crypto community-building experience? Or if not, do they have the potential to become a great community operator?

  • What was the outcome of their prior work?

  • What was their direct impact on the work they said they’ve done?

  • When working in tech recruitment, an inability to articulate their role and impact within a team was an immediate red flag.

• Assessing past experience

  • Self-awareness, humility and the ability to learn are crucial in making hires that can adapt to the changing needs of a community. 

  • Experience =/= success. Future leaders may not have much experience but will have almost certainly participated and helped grow some of the most vibrant communities to have emerged. 

Running trial periods

• Somewhat like probationary periods, you can also run trial periods to find candidates to gauge how you will work with them. 

• For trial tasks, allow candidates to estimate the time they’ll need and provide compensation for 2-4 weeks of work. 

4. Engagement

By making community engagement a key part of your go-to-market strategy, you can:

• Get early feedback and validation from potential users

• Build trust and credibility with early adopters

• Create a sense of ownership and investment in the project and product among community members

• Drive user acquisition, engagement, and retention through community network effects and virality

It acts as a self-reinforcing flywheel: active community > social product proof > increases attractiveness to outsiders > community grows > becomes a marketing tool > further iterate based on your community’s feedback > foster evangelism > becomes cult-like. 

Any thoughts on how to foster engagement in communities? Through incentive design but this is a whole area to explore, here are some ideas though:

• Reputation and accountability systems

• Carefully thought out compensation mechanisms

• Voting frequency

• Processes to facilitate conversation and share information between working groups/subDAOs

• Having a set of values for engagement is a useful coordination tool

• Moloch’s rage-quit mechanism

5. Final Tips

Build first. Strategize second.

• Build before planning. Examples include CabinDAO building cabins before they knew what to do with them.

• ConstitutionDAO that was created within a week ot buy a copy of the U.S Constitution.

• To some extent Loot created NFTs with just words on them, with the idea that others could plan projects to build on top of it, for instance, $Magic came out of this. 

Decentralising work 

• Ensure documentation is transparent and easily accessible

• Give your community a voice away from the core team.

• Incomplete builds.

  • Loot bags dropping as an NFT collection inspired side projects to build on top of the player’s deck, with the most successful being TreasureDAO - an entire gaming ecosystem. 

  • Milady, whilst not technically incomplete the sense of community helped build other projects on top of it such as Sanko and Coco.

Next week, we’ll look at strategies for growing communities!