Shipping Yerba / Dive into Web3 / Onboarding Best Practices with Jonathan White

hi everyone uh do we have like any Community managers in the in the audience today uh what are we here for I just it's such a small group I figure we can just welcome people what are you here for and at East Denver uh it's just learning a little bit more about the web 3 space and Community very cool um how about you same thing all right well we're all about community at Yerba we uh we started as actually a biddle-athon project last year this is uh this is the Inception of Yoruba that sporked out that's their logo and uh we started as a biddle-a-thon project addressing the need of like just how scary it is to join these web 3 communities and I'm going to show you exactly how we do that but I want to talk about how we started so I joined I joined a couple Dows last year about 18 months ago and uh it's just terrifying you know I think web3 ux is hard enough when you join these communities we should make it easier it should be easier to join the Discord it shouldn't be so overwhelming you shouldn't be hit with walls of text you shouldn't be hit with a ton of channels and I just I wanted to make it easy to get bring people in to start learning right because with where we're at right now we're all learning together so I ended up getting through the filter of bankless Dao and I had to make kind of a fool of myself I remember when I showed up at the first meeting and I was like okay I'm gonna show up for the first meeting and I remember it was like scary for me because I'd never done that before and I was going to go to the developers Guild meeting and I got there on time and I tried to click into the channel and I didn't have the correct role so I couldn't even get into the meeting and I had to wait until the next week and figure it out and like asking people questions how do I get in there and it was just it was just tough and I just remember thinking how many people don't get past just that filter right how many people open up the Discord and see the wall of text the channels see the you know see all the cool the people with their cool names and their cool avatars and they're just totally overwhelmed and like uh I'm out of here right so we we created Yerba to try and make a much more welcoming experience for people as they join the community like how do we open up that top of the funnel and bring people in further and further into to the community so right now Yerba is uh we are on the sporked out Discord which is the East Denver Discord and Discord is a Community Management it's a it's a community platform right if you don't know what Discord is and what we do is we welcome people one message you know digestible the size of a tweet one button so you don't there's no wall of text you can't even see all the fancy members to scare you off you can't see the channels there's just one button that says hey welcome to sportdow and it tells the new members exactly what the community managers want you to know it tells you when East Denver is that's one of their business goals bring people to East Denver get them building right so it tells them when it is and it tells them uh it tells them like a little bit about the origin stories and it has all their own branding so people can start identifying with the symbols of sportdown so when we think about when we think about onboarding is we want people to take baby steps right and then we want to validate them for taking those baby steps right so they start building identity and they start building a sense of belonging within the community so this is like commonly known in community science theory as like the commitment curve right so what you want to do is ask people small asks at first go to this channel say GM react with one of our symbols like the sporky symbol or the sporked out symbol get them and then when they do give them a little reward and that can just be saying thanks or moving them on to the next step in their onboarding flow so just where Europe is at right now we're in about seven communities and we've onboarded eight and a half thousand people into those communities so we're still pretty young a lot of these Bots have millions of communities we started in August but I want to show you just kind of what it actually looks like when you join the sportdow server and then we're going to talk about how we can set this up and just kind of the thinking about setting it up on your own server so did anyone go through the onboarding here I know Austin did Cam did and my new friend there did as well yeah Austin there's a bot trap in it that says are you a bot and Austin clicked click the Bob button to see he was a bot and then he had to figure out his way out of it but he got out of there so when you joined this worked out Discord server what you're met with is just one message right welcome to sportdow and it's exactly what the community managers wanted you to know when you enter when you enter the community it tells you a little bit about the Genesis of sporked out the origin story right and it tells you what it is it's the largest and longest running eth event in the world welcome to the Discord server and then we've got their custom branding which um which is something we want to as Community managers right we're talking in the language that humans understand which is stories symbols rituals belonging right that's how we really get people to identify with our communities so when you push the button begin your journey you're going to see small digestible little bits of information that you know I don't know if everyone actually reads the whole thing but we want to give it you know we want to give them this information over and over again because as a community manager as I as I used to be a community manager people always read the docs you know people come in they ask the same questions a lot and so we want to give them little bits of information over and over again to try and stop them from not engaging with the community but asking the same questions right like be empowered to join the community this is what we want you to do we want you to go to East Denver we want you to be in the biddle-a-thon and we want to empower you to do that and so as they click through these little messages and you can make them as long or as short as possible as many messages you can really build it however you want we can also ask them questions about themselves and so this is an example of a survey question and if it's saying are you interested in participating in the middle of Thon if you are then we can give you follow-on information that you can access asynchronously you'll get a little notification and you'll get an access to another one of these we call them flows or quests I was talking with Lauren and the hardest part is the words with uh how we name these things so I think we're going with flows now we work quests another thing I like to do when we are introducing new members to communities is introduce them to their new allies in the communities a lot of times we ask people to introduce themselves before we introduce ourselves and as established members of the community we should be introducing ourselves first right and we can do it asynchronously so we can do it through these flows so this is Russell cassignaro and I've learned to pronounce his name correctly and he's the buffacor adventure Steward and he's one of my allies in the sport sporked out community and so now when I enter the community not only do I know about the community I know how to take the small actions to get involved in the community but I also have some new allies and I can you know connect with them on different levels and learn about what they're passionate about and uh just feel a little more confident as I enter so this next slide you know hey we're a platform we've got to have an analytics dashboard as a community manager if you set up Yerba you're going to get some analytics you can see we've had uh you know 5100 of these flows uh take gone through by sport down members alone a lot of people go through just the the welcome flow and then they might not come back but you can see we've had hundreds of people go through actually thousands of people go through the additional flows who want to learn more about the community and maybe they're a little newer to the community and they or maybe they're a little a little more timid but we want to give them thank you very much all right this is a good mic by the way I had a bad mic experience the other day foreign but this this is pretty good so as a community manager you know everyone wants a little bit of analytics at least uh I was a community manager and some of the deep analytics things seemed way too heavy for me the tools I never really used them so we just want to make sure people are going through these quests you can see that it's still working you can see the answers to the survey questions you can ask people about themselves get their email addresses integrate with other other services and get them going into the community so setting this up this is some screenshots kind of of our front end and then we're going to kind of go into the demo I might actually take a few questions before we go into the demo if anyone's got any but this is our this is our website so we can set up these virtual agents on the website um these look like the Discord messages and they are the Discord messages that I showed you before and anyone can set up with their own their own symbols right we call these little sporky guys in the corner those are the authors right so it's kind of like the the mascots of the community are talking to you it's the year of the spork for ethereum Denver right now and uh you can just kind of click in there and add uh add whatever you want as a community manager so did anyone have any questions or should I go into kind of the setup go into the setup all right let's go into the setup so it's kind of basic but this is our this is our home page we've got some nice mid-journey assets in there as a as our community goes we like to have kind of like plant-based plant-based Vibes we like to uh think that communities are you know natural organisms and ecosystems that are growing all together and so we kind of add that in when you once you log in through Discord you're going to see all your Discord servers that you're a manager of and you can just go ahead and invite the bot it's a pretty standard invite the bot just in the bite the vot flow and so you you know you click through a little pop-up will come up you can invite the bot into your server and then the first thing to do whenever you invite a bot into a server is raise it up the rolls in your server or else the bot won't work and actually no one ever does it and it throws all these errors and we have to tell people to do it and actually when I was taking these screenshots I didn't do it and and I paid for it but uh you're going to get a little message we're we're trying to add these one of our next steps is to add these messages into into the browser so it's kind of like a zendesk like experience so you can take your contacts from your community from the Discord to the browser to the discourse because a lot of these communities are actually active on multiple platforms right they have a discourse Forum a Discord Community they're on Snapshot they're on Facebook Instagram Twitter and so how do we keep that context in your context within the community across across platforms so you will have raised your your your Bot up the rolls in your Discord and then we're going to set up the authors right and the authors are those little remember the spork Dao logo and the sporky the sporky and also Russell cassignaro it's a really easy way to do this we are a scrappy startup and so we have offloaded all of our image hosting to Discord so you just post your image to Discord and copy the link and uh we get it right in there so now um oops yep and so we've got a little a little screen here where you can add your author and so I added myself that's my chippy uh that's my nft all the cool people and bankless Dao when I joined had chippies and so I decided I'd jump in and get one they're they're pretty cool it matches my top hat which has been awesome at the conference people have been coming up to me oh you're John Belgian that uh you know I never knew before and so you add your author and that's going to be your custom branding you can have multiple of these I think I've got 40 of them in this forked out server alone all different sporkies and different styles doing different little moves and so as you go through it's kind of delightful and then as you can see after you add your author we're going to jump right into your next message which is going to be to build your first Quest or build your first flow and once you add your first author all the subsequent messages will be in the style that you picked throughout your onboarding process and so what we're going to do here is uh we're just going to tell Yerba about your community and you just you know everyone every Community kind of has a focus a mission there's the Simon Sinex why how and what what you do and so I just kind of asked people to fill out this form tell us about your community be intentional about it what are the baby steps that people can take as they join and what we're going to do actually is we're going to use this form to prompt gpt3 that's our next step so a problem that we have is setting up these virtual agents is kind of hard right and so I wanted to get rid of that tyranny of the blank page so we're going to use what you've input here and you can change it whenever we're going to use this to prompt gpt3 on the back end and so we're going to add another there's another quick form that actually is pretty much predefined for you and it's just gonna it this is going to be your welcome flow you can build as many flows as you want but I think a way that you can get Yerba to add value to your community right away is just simply by welcoming people and telling like just that little bit of welcoming tell them what what you are who what your community is about where to go what to do is just really helpful and it's something that I would have appreciated right away so I try to get people when they're signing up just do these welcome flows first and then you can build all of the rest of the complexity if you want the follow-on flows the forking flows but let's just start with the welcome so you fill out this little form it's actually pre-filled out for you and you just push build Quest and then with the magic of AI it's going to send you into this uh this next screen which is the quest or flow Builder and this top message right here we don't really need so much yet but that's going to add different requirements and I'll tell you about that later but you can see the the first message comes through uh right down there and I I wanted to edit it because I like to use a lot of spaces in my messaging I think it makes it a lot easier to read so I like to add a lot of new lines and so you can see I've gone through and I've edited it I've just you just click right in a text field comes up you can edit it however you want and then you click out and it saves it all saves right away so if you are like me and you realize you had a typo in the spork Dao Quest that thousands of people are going through you can go right into the front end edit it and every next person who goes through will not see your typo so so you can you can edit these steps and you can add new steps and so what I kind of wanted to demonstrate here is we have these little checks right so this has a little check that that the AI put in for us and I talked about asking people to go to a channel and just say GM just as their first step and so it's done that but the issue is that it's out of order so the AI which is never quite perfect has put it out of order but all of these are draggable and so you can drag them on top of each other and so I just wanted to demonstrate that that I have dragged and dropped and now it is in the correct order and then a common thing in Discord is you have to get roles right you have to get a verified role as you enter and so we can add verified roles at any or we can add any Discord role at any step in this process and you can add you know you could actually if you wanted to create a flow where every channel that someone accessed was granted by a role if you wanted to but this is a simple demo and so we're just going to add the verified rule at the end of the step here and you can also we call it as like a crossword request reward you can also add po apps in there as well right now we've got more more coming soon so one thing I wanted to do was add a little survey question to see where my where my uh community members how you know how did you find us right and so I've clicked there's an add step button in between each interaction that I will show you and I I clicked add survey and so you can see these this uh green add step button and I've added a survey and I just that is uh the survey is this one right here and I'm going to go in and I'm going to edit that survey and you can just add simple questions with just you can answer with the buttons so this is going to add this is going to ask the user did you hear about us on Twitter or did you hear us about us on Instagram and they will they will answer and as they answer they will progress through the flow and get the verified role now this is a screen this is our Quest screen or our flow screen and so what I can do is I can add another follow-on Quest right this is like what I talked about with the bittleathon where if you say you're interested then it will give you another flow where you can learn more about it so I've just added the uh the Instagram Quest on there and then I talked about the requirements on here and so when you open up the quest this is the blank page this is the tyranny of the blank page you can use the quest Builder again and prompt it to you know tell them whatever you want but uh I decided I just wanted to show the requirements and so here I've added that you to get to this flow you have to have completed the welcome to East Denver talk Quest that was the first one we went through and then you had to have answered that you heard about us on Instagram so that's just an example of a it's not very a super useful one like the billison example is better but it's just showing you how you can set it up uh finally this is this is the author's page again so if you wanted to add more authors it's the same it's the same look like uh like it was on the setup but you can add another author here I've added a little sporky guy and then when you go through back to your quest if you wanted to add the Spore key in there you can just click on like the top level where it says Yerba it should say John Val John but I forgot to save it as that um and you can click on it and then you can select your little sporky and then uh there you've got sporky in there so you can you know really use the symbols of your community to welcome people as they come in you can also add poapps you can ask poapps as rewards for completing these flows and you can also do manual uh and poapps are little badges that web3 people love to collect they're little kind of like Proto nfts or I guess they are nfts but they're they're a little different and they're really easy to grab and collect and a lot of people in web 3 love these poapps and they will go to extreme lengths to get them right and we look as giving them out um pretty well for meeting people so as you join as you're meeting people at East Denver people might give you a pull out and we can also use these poapp drops you can set up a poapp drop and then give them out automatically for calls and so you can use the slash event command and uh it will it will award everyone in the call with a poab you can add as many admins as you'd like just with adding Discord usernames just going through some of the screens here and then you can also deploy these flows right away or they can be inactive so if you're in development mode on these you can have them as an active and you can demo them as an admin right in Discord and then you can deploy them with just the the click of a button and so what we're going to do now we've got about seven minutes we're just gonna go real quick we we're gonna go into Discord now this is what Discord looks like if you don't know and we're going to use the slash Yerba command it's going to say welcome to Yerba since I've never interacted with the bot before this is kind of like our terms of service and you're going to get to the admin panel and from the admin panel what we want to do is we want to deploy that first welcome message that we made in at the setups section and so we've got just a welcome channel right here and since I'm an admin of the server I can see all the channels on a lot of the more established channels or servers you're going to see just a wall of channels and that's what like kind of we're fighting against right it's a lot more approachable when there's just a few to click through and the information is held in these little messages so now I've posted this uh welcome message and so that's what anyone's going to see when they enter my community it's going to tell them about what to do tell them about who we are they can click the button and they're going to get that follow-on information oops that was a little out of order but this is what it would look like if you were going to post that message right you're just going to get a little drop down you choose post to public post a public message you're going to get a drop down and you can put it in right there now kind of one of the trickier Parts on this is setting up the permissions I like to set up this welcome Channel so that everyone can see it but nobody can post on it okay and that's important so that people don't it doesn't get buried your message doesn't get buried there's just one message one button it's pretty hard to screw up some people find ways but so there's I have all these permissions in the docs to show you how to do it we could set it up for you but we try to keep like a low level of permissions for ourselves it's a lot easier for Community managers to invite the bot when we don't ask for that many permissions on their server and yeah so now that we have that set up anyone who enters into our server is going to see one message one button they can click through and we can welcome them into our server grant them the roles so that they can see the other channels and yeah join our community so yeah that's it any questions or we're probably about out of time uh that sorry the question was do you have a website yes we do have a website it is GM yerba.xyz and anyone can set this up we are an open Beta right now so set it up and you will be grandfathered into a extended free trial cool thank you I was looking up on Google earlier and I couldn't find it so I was wondering what it was we got to work on our SEO thank you yeah call you yeah we've got a lot to do we're a team of two so there's a lot a lot in the backlog but uh it's running pretty smoothly uh what would you say is different from your Bot than like the major Bots that are being used right now like the me six and or is it me six or could you what is the difference major differences what sets your Bot apart from the others that most people are using yeah I think what sets our bottom part is just like I think it's the flows and what I try to set us apart with is like I speak a lot in the language of community and the science of community and getting people engaged with those stories the identity the symbols the rituals of the community and I think that um all the other Bots are kind of most of the other Bots are kind of what I was fighting against right when I joined Bank lists well I'm not gonna say the name even though I already did when I joined these other Dows you know there's the verify click here there's all the channels and you have to know that you have to click through all that stuff and I think web3 ux is hard enough so if we're trying to bring people into our communities to learn let's open that up right and then we can bring them in to teach them metamask or you know all the other things and so I think what sets us apart and what I try and encourage Community managers to do one message one button and you know easy digestible content use your stories use your branding how can people participate in your community and get them going Round of Applause thank you guys