Backpack: Creating Culture & Community - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

uh my talk was going to be about product it was going to be about backpack it was going to be about mad Lads but over several conversations I've had in the last few days I realized that you know we're all we're all listening to product all the time we're listening to what people are building but one of the core things that we need more in this space is sadly lacking and and I want to share our experience on how we built Community how we built culture and I'll do it through somewhat of a storytelling Manner and I hope there are some insights here that people will be able to pull from I was going to show this a little bit later in the presentation but this is the Mad Lads Community uh they wanted to say hi they asked if they could be present with us on this presentation they are very excited that this event is going on and in general they are just a wonderful group of people I'm going to send them a little message here say thank you before I go to the presentation itself yeah they they are they are a killer group of people and I think any project that can bring together a coalition of people in that nature is going to have a huge Head Start a huge Advantage for everything that they do so my name is Tristan Iver I am the co-founder of backpack wallet backpack exchange and madlads and as I said I've changed my presentation it's simply going to be one slide and it's simply going to be about community and how Community comes together to create culture and how that culture can bring your project forward so a lot of us in crypto as I was saying earlier focus on product focus on technology we focus on tokens on price but we don't realize that the underlying aspect of everything that we're building are the people that are using our project that are buying these tokens that care enough about what we're doing to talk about it to other people and hopefully grow the pie right if enough of these people talk about what we're doing to their friends over time we'll have enough new people in the space that we can create something more meaningful and again this is like something super world it's crucial to care about the people because everything happens on crypto Twitter and if people don't care about you they won't talk about you on crypto Twitter they won't amplify the things that you're doing and it's really really hard to get distribution and to grow whatever it is that you're building and that's unique to crypto because in most other Industries especially web 2 you build in silence you're in stealth you start getting some customers here and there you start expanding your user base and then slowly once the product is matur and ready you go out into the world and you you sell it or you have users come and use your product but in crypto you're building in the open everything that you do is under the scrutiny of thousands of people and you need to actually care about those thousands of people if you want the feedback Cycles to be positive rather than negative so I'm going to tell a story about how our community was built how our culture was built and I hope there are some insights that can be pulled from that for all of you as well and then if I have time I'll take a couple of questions at the and I don't have a timer so stop me if I'm going over when we started backpack at the very beginning it was with this idea of X nfts which were decentralized applications that you could run in the wallet it was this idea of wallet which is similar to WeChat where you have one app that you can do everything you want to do in crypto but pretty quickly we realized that just doing a product wasn't going to be enough and we started thinking about how we could create a group of people that would be there for us throughout the entire journey of this company that we were building of this thing that we were bringing forward to the world and the way that we did it I think at that time was pretty unique now it's actually been used a few other times quite successfully I think uh monad is probably the best other example I've seen doing a similar approach but at the very very start we created mystery we created so much mystery around this concept of X nfts and everyone was saying what the [ __ ] are xnf excuse my language but WTF are X nfts that was the tagline at the beginning WTF our X nfts and a lot of people in the ecosystem put xnf in their username for Twitter growing this mystery growing this attention we launched the Twitter and I I think people probably thought we were a stealth nft project or something but everyone wanted to know what these X nfts were and so all this energy was channeling into our only public Channel which was our Twitter and we hadn't announced anything we didn't say a single thing about what we were building and we started posting memes which I know sounds funny but now with this recent meme cycle I think people are realizing the power behind memes behind mimetics behind things that people can get together behind and push forward to the world and while we were posting these memes we started realizing that some people that were engaging with us were higher quality than other people and by that I mean some of these people created wonderful videos some of these people made hilarious memes and they started posting these things to the initial memes that we were posting and I pretty quickly realized how do I Channel this energy and bring those people together into a space so we could get to know them and get to have them be in some form Representatives or users of what we were building and I did that through a private Discord and so essentially I had this private Discord it was invite only and I would look at the replies to the posts that we were doing and if somebody posted a really good meme if somebody posted a piece of video content if somebody posted a genuine message that seemed heartfelt then I would reply with with this gift of a girl throwing a blue dodgeball at a little boy and if you got that gift you were now in the Discord and what happened really quickly from that is I realized you can train public behavior on Twitter it's a you know like like you know like pavo's dogs or whatever but people started realizing who was receiving that gift and what Behavior they had done to receive the invitation into the Discord and all of a sudden everyone was posting memes everyone was posting videos and over the next few months we were able to curate this community of five or 600 people in this private Discord and we spent infinite hours with them it it wasn't just the act of bringing them together it was the act of genuinely caring about each of these people that we had in this Discord and imparting our culture our thought process our vision for this company to these people we spent so many hours in conversation and joy and laughter and you know fud with these people and over time they became the backbone they absorbed the culture that we wanted to have for our company the vision we wanted to have for our company and as we continue to expand everything that we are doing at this point our community that like that Discord has 35,000 people or something but that core 500 people have still been the backbone of the community of everything that we have done until today and the the moral of this story isn't stuff people into a private Discord and if they're early they're going to love you forever because that's not how it goes but is that if you can get the right people together and you actually genuinely care about these people regardless of who they are of what country they're from of how much crypto they own you will have a DieHard Community who will bat for you no matter what it is that you do and after forming this community we pretty quickly realized that it wasn't just going to be enough to have them in the disc we needed to do something that brought them together and gave them a social expression to go forth into the world and represent themselves as our community not as any Community but as our community and that's where mad Lads came from that's where this nft idea this nft project came from as a way for this community to have a social identity that represented us out in the world and as you guys may know or may not know madlads is by far the top collection on salana it's one of the top 10 collections in the world and a big reason for that is because this Core group of people are the most active community on Twitter and going back to the beginning of the talk the more active you are on Twitter the more people you have batting for you on Twitter retweeting your posts talking to other people about what you're doing the more distribution you get for your products the more people that discover your products the more people that use your products the more Revenue the more whatever your metrics are that you start achieving and so that was that was the feedback cycle and one other underestimated aspect from our regard like we weren't consider considering this was that if you have these super fans if you have these super users your product feedback Cycles shorten and shorten and shorten because anytime you build something new you throw these few thousand people into a telegram Channel or you make a special channel for it on Discord and they're your beta testers and not only do you have to not give them anything to beta test they are over the moon excited to try things that no one else has tried and then you get this feedback instantly and you can iterate the product at such a degree that you don't have to go through the whole public release of people having negative experiences before they get to try the product and so that was another very very valuable aspect of all of this at the moment as I was saying madlads is doing tremendously well backpack exchange is growing at a tremendous Pace the backpack wallet is also growing at a tremendous space and obviously we have a top tier engineering product team we have some of the best people in the world on our team but a lot of this as well is the distribution that we get through this community that we've built and I think I have a few minutes I'd love to take a question or two if anyone has it so there's one here in the front y coming hi quick question uh how do you fight scam or malicious users in your community how do I think about them now how do you fight a scam you know enjoying community and then you got five DMS asking you for private keys or something like that yeah I it's it's it's hard because both Telegram and Discord are actually terrible in that regard it's it's hard to have these open communities without giving access to people with malicious intent but if you educate your community properly they are unlikely to get scammed so you need to tell people to use ledgers you need to tell people that we will never DM them first and you need to tell people that if anything ever sounds too good to be true on the internet it is too good to be true and anyone here that played RuneScape knows that's true so yeah how do you take a existing web 2 community and then move them over that's really good question I think it can't be through just giving them a token it can't be through just talking to them about crypto it has to happen because they actually care about you and your team and what you're doing and that's why I was saying the genuine part earlier I think a mistake a lot of teams make in crypto is they think that just throwing a bunch of people together in a community creates a community and a culture you actually have to genuinely care about these people and and maybe I was programmed correctly spending my whole life on Anonymous internet chat channels that I like talking to random St but if you don't have that element it's not going to work because people realize when things are not genuine okay is that all right thank you so much guys appreciate it