Go-to-Community

Why do crypto projects need a go-to-community strategy in addition to their GTM?

Every business has a go-to-market strategy that informs their segmentation, targeting, pricing and packaging, distribution, and more — their “go-to-market”.

AirBnb and Kickstarter are examples of community-first companies, however, as tokenisation is one of the primary innovations in crypto we are witnessing the rise of community-owned companies. But how do communities create, capture and distribute value? 

The key difference between the incentives in go-to-market vs go-to-community strategy can be summarized as the difference between value capture vs value creation where the outcomes for go-to-community strategies are measured by the growth and retention of said community.

How do you build a GTC strategy?

A framework to build a successful GTC strategy rests on six pillars:

1. People

Token incentives align participants in a network and we’ll evaluate their success as a customer acquisition and retention tool in the coming weeks. When people feel empowered and a sense of ownership in their communities it breeds success and retention. So how do we create ownership? 

Growing communities can be likened to a sales funnel that creates long-lasting users. To do so we need to fulfil three steps:

a) Creating opportunities for intrinsically motivated contributors to discover the community

If no one knows about your community, it’s difficult to grow it. With any early-stage product or network, your focus should initially be on generating ‘top of the funnel’ awareness. 

This work might include:

• Community branding and communications

• Content creation

• Retroactive token distributions and airdrops

• Collaborations and partnerships with other relevant communities

• Community events such as hackathons, panels, and community calls

• 1-on-1 external outreach to potentially relevant potential contributors

In an attention economy, you want to attract intrinsic, not extrinsically motivated participants. 

• Intrinsically motivated network participants are driven by internalized reasons. They will help form strong community members and sustain participation even when financial gain is unclear. They may join because of: 

  • alignment with the project’s ethos

  • mission

  • other personal or professional goals.

• Extrinsically motivated network participants are often driven by external rewards such as 

  • financial gain 

  • attention and often optimize for zero-sum short-term self-gain. 

We’ll share more thoughts about customer acquisition and retention soon but projects should focus less on monetary incentives and liquidity mining programs that attract extrinsically driven participants. Instead, they should look toward creating awareness for their community. 

• What differentiates the community?

• How was it, and your product built/designed?

• How can you participate?

• What is its mission? Who are the people behind it?

b) Forming minimum viable communities & opportunities to get involved

The next goal after attracting community members is to understand what they want to achieve and then guide them towards their own goals to achieve minimum viable participation.

From our last article, MVCs are important because: ‘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 becomes extremely hard for it to die due to its distribution.’

Having a MVC helps you to:

• Build authenticity and trust

• Understand member needs, wants and pains

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

The process looks like this:

1. Community member self-signalling

   • One way to surface these individuals is to enable people to self-signal their intentions.

   • Create ‘Introduce yourself’ & ‘What we need channels within discord’

     • There could be bounties to attract open-source contributions 

     • You could create structured grants programs catering to developers 

     • Specialized network contributors such as liquidity providers, stakers, governance participants, etc.

2. Relationship building and community member success

   • What are their needs?

     • What brought them to the community in the first place?

     • What does their journey into crypto look like?

     • Are they aware of different opportunities to get involved?

     • Is there anything they are particularly interested in?

     • Are they working on anything else themselves?

   • Build relationships first > then understand where they fit within the community

c) Opportunities to create further alignment

• Continuously share and create opportunities for them to contribute

• The more each contributor invests more into the community, you need to match those efforts with relevant positive feedback — whether it may be social recognition, monetary token rewards, or even more responsibility.

• Monetary rewards = acknowledge community member value rather than the direct incentive to participate. 

• Ways to get involved could include:

  • Hackathons

  • Bounties

  • Working Groups

  • Grants

2. Purpose

‍If I have a go-to-market strategy, why do I need a go-to-community strategy, too?

Go-to-Market

• Typically emphasizes value capture. 

• The primary aim is sales/revenue and/or market share and to capture as much value as possible. 

Go-to-Community

• Emphasizes value creation. 

• The primary aim is to foster engagement, trust, and loyalty. Whilst also creating value for the community members that can help reward them for their contributions.

Community Membership 

Now we are attracting people through the community-building funnel, how do we convert and retain them into long-term members? First is creating a foundational level through membership which represents value creation for communities. It determines who gets involved, in what capacity, and with what rights and responsibilities. It's the basic building block upon which communities are formed. Unlike holding tokens, membership is a form of social capital that translates into trust, collaboration, and shared purpose that drive engagement, and commitment among members. Below we will outline a framework for membership inspired by the articles here & here.

 Below we use the following funnel:

• Access as discovery

• Permissions for responsibility

• Status as weight

1. Access as Discovery

• Access introduces the initial step of letting someone into the community. The gateway to dictating who is part of the community. 

• Access should be flexible and requirements can change based on community needs. 

• Access is predominantly served via ERC20 tokens, though there should be no barriers to entry for initial access

• Based on roles and permissions (below)

2. Permissions for Responsibility

• Once inside the community, members need specific permissions to act. This determines the actions members can take, based on their investment, commitment, and role in the community.

• Roles and permissions should be designed to dictate what actions a member can take where roles with high responsibility require more commitment, often backed by staking, financial ties or time/effort. Permission-based roles could include:

  • Casual - sporadic contribution when they see something that directly interests them. They might not be deeply engaged in daily activities or planning.

  • Core - regular, active members that contribute to the growth of the community, take part in discussions. For instance, they could head up subDAOs.  

  • Staff - critical for the operation and direction of the community. They make major decisions and ensure the community's objectives are met.

• It’s important to make sure that contributors can flow between their needs and those of the community. 

3. Status as weight 

• As members contribute, engage, and invest in the community, they gain status. This status isn't just about prestige; it's about the weight and influence a member has within the community.

• This should be something that is dynamic and shaped by their contribution, impact and ultimately, reputation. 

• Recognition should include both financial and non-financial incentives. 

• Systems should be incorporated to reward members based on their history, reputation, and contributions. This ensures long-term contributors gain recognition.

• Incentives can be

  • Reputation - can inform roles and incentives

  • Financial - for reputation and contribution

Community ownership

Time and energy are required for community members to truly develop an ownership mentality. Whilst this is touched upon in the above, creating psychologically safe spaces to express their voice and ownership can help create this ownership mentality. Potential ideas include:

• Give ops to influence/participate in community discussions, creating empowerment  and a say in the direction of the community 

• Being able to earn opportunities to take on increasingly more responsibility via community leadership roles such as running working groups or subDAOs. 

• Being rewarded with vested tokens/network ownership for their work, commitment and value they bring to the community.

There should always be some level of progression on these levels.

3. Goals

Each stage of your GTC plan should be tied with a metric to measure the impact on the community

a) Creating opportunities for people to discover the community/project:

• Community Growth Metrics: Number of new members per month/quarter/year.

• Engagement from Outreach Activities: Number of attendees in community events like hackathons, panels, webinars, etc.

b) Creating ways for people to get involved meaningfully:

• Activity Metrics: DAU/WAUs, posts, comments, likes, shares, etc.

• Retention Metrics: Percentage of members continuing active participation over a specified period

• Participation Rate: Percentage of total members actively participating in discussions, creating posts, or engaging in other community activities.

c) Creating opportunities for participants to build a sense of ownership:

• Contribution Metrics: Number of members contributing to projects, initiatives, or community governance.

• Ownership Indicators: Number of members holding and actively using the community's tokens or other ownership markers.

• Token Engagement: Percentage of members actively participating in token-based voting, governance, or other ownership-driven activities.

4. Communication

Whilst online communities are generally platform agnostic, you should have a list of tools and channels you’ll use to facilitate the discussion and promote your community. Conversation and interaction are fundamental pillars for creating cult-like communities. Your community should be a place for people to meet and speak. Conversations are what community content is built upon. If you communicate with your members only when you have updates, you don’t have a community; you have an announcement board.

Support

Having spent some time working in TechOps, one of the most important stakeholders in your community are developers building on top of your protocol so it is vital to make sure they’re happy by troubleshooting their technical problems. As such, it is worthwhile having at least a full-time developer relations person and one handling customer support. 

5. Inputs

Creating and growing communities are simply a function of inputs and outputs

Time

• Developing community awareness

  • Time is an initial investment in activities like branding, and the activities involved in creating and defining the community's purpose.

• Engagement

  • And creating meaningful interactions through discussions, feedback, and projects that move the community along. 

• Retention

  • Sustained engagement and time help to create a deeper connection with the community and over time, this translates into trust, loyalty, and a robust community.

Opportunity to attract potential participants

• Branding

  • The strongest communities resonate with potential members who can associate themselves with what it stands for. 

  • Some join for the values and the mission, whilst others join purely because of the vibes. 

• Events

  • Hackathons, grants, working groups. These provide value and encourage interactions that encourage involvement at a deeper level. 

6. Outputs

Ownership & retention

• Fundamentally, encouraging progression between contribution zones and the ability to gain reputation, financial incentives attract contributors based on their available time and creates stickier community members. 

• As they climb this ladder, their ownership in the community's trajectory intensifies, ensuring they remain invested in its long-term success.

The result, can be summed up in this amazing diagram by @pet3rpan