CTRL/SHIFT - 13 06 2026 CHAPEL STAGE - DAN RODMAN - GO TO COMMUNITY STRATEGY

Hey guys, thank you thank you for being patient.

[laughter]

Couple little technical difficulties. And yeah, I'm excited to talk to you a little bit about I call GTC go-to-community strategy. And it's like a parallel component that works together with your go-to-market, right? And I think we've all seen that community is a really big buzzword, you know, everyone has a different definition for what community is. Sometimes it's very kind of Kumbaya, sometimes it's much more around like customer retention and ROI and these things like this, right?

So, we're going to talk a little bit about some strategies on how if you have a product, if you have a business, how you can leverage these elements of a GTC strategy and hopefully give you some ideas. Um we may do like a little bit of a half quick live demo on my laptop while I'm showing some of the stuff up here as well, which could be fun. But first off, why should you why should you trust me? Um well, one I'm Canadian, so you can always trust a Canadian. But uh I have a quite a diverse background and I think really good community building has this element of you know, I have an approach that's very engineering focused cuz I was a mechanical engineer, got my master's degree, worked on drones and robotics.

And then also a lot of risk-taking. I'm a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. I have my paragliding license, I love to jump off mountains, go backcountry skiing. And I used to be a professional footballer in the US for an indoor team. Um so, if you're a football fan, I mean I'm stoked about the World Cup right now.

But um yeah, so that's a bit about me and now around this element of about 15 years ago there was a big revolution around being more proactive about your customer and thinking about retention. Um and this whole space called uh customer success started to become a thing. And the thing about customer success is you're focusing a lot on being more proactive and thinking about the retention side. This is where the whole adage came around, it's much more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain your existing, right? That's where this thing started to get some traction.

So, I wrote a bit of an article comparing, well, what does it mean to look at community with the same laws and the same elements, right? And that's a little bit of what we're going to get into. So, actually on a previous trip to Miami for Consensus, I uh vibe coded an agent framework that'll help you launch your community, and it's something I'm going to share with you guys um after at the end there so that we can kind of go through that, right? Um so, first off, a little bit of an overview on like the macro side of what is GTC. And comparing it to like go-to-market, what is the difference between the two?

So, go-to-market's looking a lot more about value capture. How do you get attention? How do you get people's eyeballs and awareness around your product, around your brand, around your business? GTC is thinking through value creation. It's a really big component around value exchange, and how do you focus more on the middle of the funnel and the bottom of your funnel to even drive more growth into the top?

And then also have this component where they stick around, and often a lot of times the community indicators and metrics are the leading indicators to like your revenue metrics for customer success side, right? So, a little bit of an analogy is that you know, if uh marketing is much like fishing, you're going out and you're getting the attention, you're trying to put out, you know, good lines, and you have to be very strategic and creative with how you do this. Um we've seen all sorts of wild guerrilla marketing strategies and different things there. GTC is thinking about designing like this watering hole. It's like engineering a place that people can come to.

Um and this is all about thinking through the value exchange. One kind of component to this is that uh the better your product is, the better it is what you're offering in its own use case, and the better and easier it is to rally the community around that mission. Um there's some examples around that, but obviously if your product's kind of then it's not going to be easy to rally a bunch of people around it, right? It needs to be something that's that's good. Um and so like this is like component of that.

Now, when it comes to breaking down just what even is the minimum viable community, like what is community if you broke it down into its core concepts, there's three main things that have to come together. There's an aspect of identity of the people who are there. There's the experiences of what they're doing together, and then there's the structure. Um there's some great guys at Community Canvas. They have a bunch of frameworks on this, a full kind of walk-through on the different kind of subcategories as well under these three pillars.

I'm just going to touch on them really briefly. Um the identity side is really answering the question on why we exist. Why do we need this group of people here, and who are they? I think [clears throat] in the Web3 space, we have a a lot of difficulty sometimes because there's so many different types of personas. There might be someone who's a a staker and an operator looking for yield.

There might be a builder, a developer. Then there's your token holders. And so a lot of projects struggle sometimes with how they map out their identity, right? Um and so that's something to kind of think through. It often makes sense to kind of map a specific profile for each of those individual identities and how they map and connect to your project, to your product, right?

And a good example is we did some work um with Ritual, which is like a AI native L1. And we ran this campaign where people had to go through this little mini experience, and they had to actually opt in and put like the little sigils in their bio on X. And we had 26,000 people do this as a part of the campaign that we ran. We We this really cool storytelling element to it. And it's just an example of you can't really just go viral with a logo.

You really need to think about how you shape that whole movement, that culture, and that identity. And that's how that can really start to show it working really well when you've got that many people pulling together around it. The second pillar is around those experiences. Um I think this is what are what are we doing together, right? What is the actual action?

And one element a lot of projects struggle with is this part I call like the OX, the actual onboarding experience. And I think there's an element to this which is a very close parallel to product design. When you're really thinking through how do I get people how do I create a sticky product? There's this cool metric called like TTFB, which is time to first value. And there's this element where the quicker that you can get a win with your product with someone getting some value out of it, the longer their retention is, the stickiness for it, right?

And so for a community or a group where you're bringing people together, the TTFB is time to first belonging. The quicker you can get some sort of win with them in the community, the longer they're going to stick around cuz there's some aspect of value exchange. It's it's helpful for them, right? And so that's just one way to look at that. And you know, like I said, the better your product really is and um whatnot, then the better your community and easier it is to really rally around it.

I think product feedback is something that's one of the most valuable things as well for products is like getting people to even launch a little beta private community and getting little bits of product feedback to help you shape what you're building and how you're structuring it can be super helpful. Um good examples of an amazing like experience when it comes to product and whatnot in the community would be also think about Cursor. They actually spent $0 on marketing to make a hundred million in their first revenue in their first year. And and a component of that was it was like a 10X product. As a developer, when you jumped on and started using it, you know, analyze your whole code base in less than 5 minutes, you know, TTFV, you were like, "Holy, this is a game changer, right?"

Then you told your friends about it, you told your family about it, and it just spreads like wildfire, right? Through all these different circles. Um So, the third element then would be the actual structure. So, this is the details of how are we actually coming together. We have an identity, we know who it's for, we have something that we're doing together, and now it's like, what where is this held?

Some examples of this which are interesting, like think about the Burning Man community. They only meet once a year, right? But there's such a strong community around it. When you think about like religion, we go to church once a week, there's a really strong community around that. That's weekly.

Um this is some of the IRL examples, but when you think through the digital form, you know, whether it's elements of Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, Discord spaces, um there's a lot to be said about trying to first analyze and think through who it's for, meeting them where they're at, and then designing the structure that makes sense for that, right? So, the last part about some of this as well as then this element of strategy, right? And what is, you know, good strategy, right? So, I think the best definition of strategy just comes to prioritization, right? Good strategy is literally just prioritizing where you're spending your resources, where you're spending your time.

And there's an element and a component to finding that strategy, which comes to leveraging a closed-loop system. And you'll be like, "So, what is that exactly?" And honestly, another component to this closed-loop systems to keep in mind is we're all obviously loving using AI. AI is an amazing tool. AI works really well with closed-loop systems, right?

Um the models themselves are actually improving through this when it comes to reinforced human learning, right? And so, when it comes to designing a community experience and what are we doing together, I'm really big into this component of you know, getting a little bit risk-taking and experimenting. So, try something out, something small, put something out there, and then look at measuring it. Use analytics to measure and see, you know, did that work or not? And then you basically, you know, whether or not you can double down, tweak it, or drop it, right?

And uh the element I'll share at the end here, which maybe we have some time to try and see if it if it can work, is an element that will give you some ideas on where to start for this. It's like a AI framework that I'll share to give you some ideas to start, but the whole concept here is just this element around using data to understand how things are going, tweaking, adjusting, experimenting with your next move, this feedback loop, right? As an engineer, like as an example, when I was in like the I used to love, you know, obviously I got my paragliding license shortly after college. I used to love this component around playing with aerodynamics, right? Putting things into the wind tunnel, measuring how much lift we kind of get, tweaking things, then going again.

Um a more kind of radical fun way is like this was me a few weeks ago um in Lisbon, where I'm based, doing indoor skydiving. And the feedback loop in indoor skydiving is crazy. Like, you're in a wind tunnel, uh the winds are here around 150 km an hour, 115, and I'm being coached actually by this guy, Frankie, who's the Portuguese world champion with a record of 444 km an hour skydiving out of a plane. And he's teaching me a lot about how if you move your hands forward, you instantly move backwards. If you move your legs back, you instantly move forwards, right?

There's these super quick feedback loops that happen. So, the quicker we can think about how can we get fast feedback loops, will help you with the element of strategically thinking through your next decisions, right? Um and so I'm going to talk a little bit about this tool that I built, which I'm going to share. And um I've like uh built this on Cloud Code while I was flying three or four weeks ago to Miami for Consensus. And it's just incredible that you can build these types of tools and things for yourself so quickly, right?

Um so I'll talk a little bit about what it's made up of. So it's an agent framework. It's got seven different markdown files. And the input that you give it when you run it um is your project name and your website and a little bit about one of the personas or customers or you can just ramble into it a little bit about uh one of your products, right? And then it's going to use a couple different mechanisms um as well as frameworks for community that can get you started on ideas like what should I do in my community to activate them.

Um and so I pulled this all together and it's pretty interesting that all you have to do is drop the link into um into your Cloud Co-work chat or code and it will guide you through it, right? So the mechanisms that it uses, the first one here is the 10 laws of gamification. Uh these are little mechanisms that leverage our human psyche and principles, things like challenges, chance, rewards, resources and defines all those components. Um I mention here there's a book that's actually really great called For the Win um and it's all about how you leverage gamification in your business, right? Um and so pulling this into community experiences is something that's one of the helpful flavors and ingredients to this element.

The other one that it uses is and this is a really cool framework um which is from Fogg's uh BJ Fogg, it's his behavior model. And I actually think about this a lot even within my own agency. We've got, you know, 15 people on the team and everyone has a a wide degree of motivation and ability. And so what this is mapping out is for anything to be a successive action, whether it's a community campaign or whether it's something you're delegating even within your organization or your company, if someone has a high ability and experience um to to be able to do that and they've got a high motivation, it'll fall above the success line and it'll very likely be a success, right? If they've got low skill set, maybe they don't really know how to do it, but they've got really high motivation, it could be a success, it could be a failure, right?

If they've got low on both sides, if they're not motivated and they don't know how to do it and you ask them to do something, it's probably not going to end up very well, right? Um and so the component that this mechanism focuses on from the framework that I built, it actually leans in more on the motivation side. I think motivation is a really interesting element when it comes to community design. I think there's so much uh what you could say pain points and problems when it comes to motivation design the web 3 space. Everyone's like, "Do this for points.

There might be an airdrop, you know, stuff like that." And then it creates this element where people are extrinsically motivated, right? Um they just want the reward. And so thinking through intrinsic motivation is like a really core powerful principle to design these elements to make things more sticky. And um the elements of that motivation BJ Fogg breaks down into sensation, anticipation, and belonging.

Each of them on a little bit of a scale. The sensation from pleasure to pain, anticipation is from hope to fear, and belonging is from acceptance to rejection. Um and so that's a little bit of what uh of what those are when you think through motivation. So then taking all these things together, uh the output of what this agent framework just gives you is an interactive little, um, almost like a mini app. It's just an HTML thing you can pop open on your on your laptop.

And it maps a bunch of ideas of what you can do in your community onto this community commitment curve. And so, what is this? What does that mean? Basically, when it comes to marketing on like the discovering side, getting someone's attention, then when it comes to what are the, you know, experiences within our community, that second pillar, it maps you just a bunch of ideas on what can you do from early stage getting someone's, you know, attention to discover you to onboarding them, thinking about the onboarding experience, what are some early campaigns you could do to engaging them more into them even leading and like eventually maybe even becoming ambassadors or user-generated content for your product or helping answer support questions, right? Um, and so that's the full flow of it.

Um, and if you actually if you want to, there's a little Telegram group here and if you join that, uh, pinned at the top of the group is a link to the GitHub repo. You can just literally put it into your Claude co-worker Claude chat and say, "Hey, please run this." And then it'll guide you through all the components to it, right? Um, but yeah, honestly, I feel like a lot of community strategy has been run a little bit on defense. People are moderating community, they're managing it, right?

And I think we can play community a bit more on offense. We can think about how we can activate people. We can think a little bit more about how we can find those ambassadors, bring them up that community commitment curve and leverage them for more growth. And this is the type of thing that's obviously very, uh, cost-efficient at a certain sense. Um, and also like when it comes to someone getting to that leading side on the community, the the element of like what it takes for them to say, "Hey, you should check this product out."

just like with Cursor, the conversion on that is very high, right? Because there's this element of um trust from someone that's not the brand saying, "Hey, this is just an ad. Go buy my product. Go check out my thing." But, leveraging the people around you to talk more about it, it just really increases that, right?

Um so, yeah. That's uh that's about it. I don't know if there's any specific questions or not. I was hoping to run like a demo with someone even building it for them live here, but um unfortunately had the connection thing. But, all good.

Thank you guys for your time. Hopefully, this was helpful and interesting, and I'll see you guys around.