Adventures in Web3 Marketing - Panel moderated by Arisa Toyosaki

Good morning, everyone. Morning. It's it's quite an early panel, so I wasn't really sure if all of our panelists were going to be able to get up and uh make it here this morning, so I over invited. Hence we have six people today. Who said we're here, right?

So yeah, maybe we can just like start off with like a round of intros. We're going to be pretty quick with our answers, but yeah, if anyone wants to elaborate on anything they want. Um feel free. Um so yeah, do you want to start? Sure.

Thanks, Alyssa. I'm Dagan. I do community work over at Vega Protocol. I've been with them for a number of years and pick up the yellow hoodies in the crowd. Got my own, we're good.

My name is Jared Wein. I am the CEO of Win Solutions, former senior vice president at Binance. Hey guys, I'm Jim. I I run experiments at Aave. Hey guys, this is Mirza, head of business development at Interjective.

I'm Justine, head of strategy at Rabbit Hole, and I help to stand up our community-driven meta-governance bot. Awesome. Yeah, thanks everyone. I think we have like a very interesting panel with a lot of different protocols. Um so maybe we can just like kick it off by I guess asking like, you know, I guess what is what is community to you?

And I guess how big is your community right now? And I guess one word to describe it. Okay, you asked three questions. Um And in 20 minutes. In 20 minutes.

So we can do it, we can do it. Um community are the people that you have deep relations with and the people that are like you have marketing to get people from afar. Community are the people that you bring close and you help you help get ownership and live and breathe your project. What was the other two questions? Well, how big is your community right now in Vega?

And one word to describe it. So it depends which social channels you look at or what different things, but our community is fairly big, like maybe 40, 50,000 across different channels and it depends there's probably bigger reach than that. And one word to describe it is vibrant. So well we're an advisory agency. We're we work with anywhere from 10 to 15 clients at any given time.

So our community across them is probably hundreds of thousands, but ultimately community for us is everything. Community is the initiation of what actually occurs with the project and without it it's never going to be successful with that regard. So community is loyalty, community is trust, community is everything that you do what you do for in my opinion. So that's where we kind of come in and help. We kind of help that chicken and egg situation of what comes first the investment or the community.

So we kind of help with that kindling and ultimately trying to create that. So that comes with the narrative and everything behind it. Community for me is like co-ownership. So it's you know, I think when you're a team starting to build something open source in crypto you want to think about your team as a steward of something that other people are ultimately going to own and and build on and so that is kind of like the North Star of what we do at Ave. Our community depends how you slice it, but the Ave protocol community is large and awesome and we just launched a new protocol called Lens.

That's the hat I'm wearing, which is a social graph protocol and so that's about 20,000 people in our Discord. How do I describe it? It is collaborative and we partner with our community in order to push on the open source code that we push out. So definitely very grateful to work with them. Yeah, I think in one word community is probably the early champions of your project and there's definitely levels to it.

It's not a monolith. A lot of them might be early devs coming on to help you guys and act as an extension of your team. Some of them might just be purchasers of your token and just follow you on Twitter and not do much else. So there's definitely levels to it. I think depending on yeah again how you slice it.

Injective right now I think it has like 200,000 people across things like Discord and Twitter. So fairly big and growing really fast in one word I would say community is adventurous. I think the way we think about community at rabbit hole is trying to enable our community members to be co-creators with us. So we're not a doubt yet, but we have certain aspects of our business that our community driven, which is like content and governance. I would say if I had to describe our community in one word, they're very like mission driven.

Awesome. Thanks so much. I mean I think everything about like you know, co-creation collaboration. That is definitely like the essence of community. It's something that you know, when I'm launching my projects that I definitely care about a lot.

Um Excuse me. I guess like one thing I've you know, heard from a lot of projects and a lot of founders is that it's just really hard to find a good community manager who can really build a culture within a dowel or an organization protocol. I guess how did you guys like you know, get hired or how did you guys find your community manager and what do you think made them special? Okay. So so yeah, I'm doing a lot of community work now.

I've been building communities in the blockchain space since 2017, but I didn't expect or intend to be doing any of this when I first started. I think a lot of community managers come into their role by accident. It's just someone you need you're working on a project. You want to help in any way you can you're doing many millions of different things, but the community needs to grow and you need someone that's willing to talk to people engage with them and build those relationships and I always found that I was pretty good at building relationships and I really quite enjoy talking to people finding out what they think about the project and I kind of naturally fell into the role of Vega when I I just met that team quite early on and I was building communities. I was actually running conferences myself in the blockchain space and then they they were invited and Uh, yeah, we really messed from there and I got really active in their early community, and then joined the team from there.

Well, he took most of my answer, but no, exactly what he said. What I found often times, and honestly, the way I first got into cryptocurrency and blockchain was was I saw an event, and I was so passionate about it, I said, "I want to do this for you for free. I'm going to help you however I can." And when you get that level of advocacy and enthusiasm when it comes to a subject matter, the loyalty, the dedication, and the passion, everything kind of comes with it naturally. So, if you look towards your community, and look towards those who are most active, the ones that are most passionate, those are the ones, if they're already working for you for free, you imagine what Imagine what they'll do when they're actually being paid money.

Um, so, in that regard, that's in my opinion, the people who are most passionate will do the best work for you, and you those are the ones that you want to reward and incentivize to continue doing so. So, if anyone wants to do free work, hit me up. Yeah, I would like echo the sentiment that finding community manager has to come within your community. You can't pull a community manager from another community because they're not just going to be as intrinsically motivated or inspired to do the thing you want to do. Uh, when I think about like hiring a community manager, it's all about like who is like a true generalist.

Like a community manager is a combo of like marketing and program management, and uh, capabilities development, and even like some growth in product. And so, uh, it's a it's a really, really weird new role that we're seeing in in crypto. And uh, yeah, you just have to find someone that is going to essentially raise their hand and and put in the hours before they are going to get compensated for it. Yeah, I mean, echoing all the sentiments before, the way we founded substantively was, um, we looked at the people answering questions within our Discord or Telegram actively. Um, and then after we saw that for a couple of weeks, we literally reached out to them and promoted them into official roles as community managers and started compensating them.

Um, I think that's the best way because you can't hire this role from AngelList or anywhere else because if you try to do it, you're going to end up with someone who's not as dedicated and if they're not as dedicated, it sort of flows into the rest of the community because the community manager is seen as the champion of the project. So, if they're not seen as being like the flag bearers or constantly talking about it, the rest of the community will show that. So, you definitely want to make sure you get this thing right because I think a lot of projects will focus a lot on dev talent, but I think it's uh it's a pretty underrated career path. Yeah, totally. Just like echoing what everyone else said, like finding the people in the Discord that are already like engaging and answering questions, and then we created like a little squad of like a group that does it together um because it's like a 24/7 role.

Burnout is real. So, being able to like share the load of it and have uh kind of like a support group for each other has been like really helpful. And to that point, the one thing I want to say is sometimes not only about finding the right community person, but how you continue to motivate them. And in that regard, if there's a way for them to otherwise be compensated in token or anything of that, you want them to be equally enthusiastic about the project as it continues to grow. So, the best way to kind of foster that in that way, in my opinion, is by giving them that skin in the game, getting them to be passionate about what it is that they're participating in, and giving them more of a reason to be excited with the community as things continue to develop.

Yeah, that's such a great question. I mean, great answer. Thank you so much, Jared. Um so, maybe like we can talk about the future a little more. So, right now a lot of communities within the crypto space are, you know, fairly small.

Um you know, some of them are pretty big, but um it's still, you know, very nascent. Um as communities and as the crypto industry grows, um what do you think like how do you think Web3 communities will change? And maybe we can start from Justine this time. How do I think the web3 community like the broad community will change? Yeah, like how do you think the way communities are organized currently and governed currently like will change in the future?

Yeah. Um I think like what we're really focused on at RabbitHole is like helping users move into like participants and then into contributors. So, hopefully as we get like a new wave of users, like the current users can move into more active contributors and be like more active participants in like the communities that they're engaged with. That's awesome. It's like uh you know, not only is the tech going to become composable, but users are also going to be composable.

Yeah. Um I think it's a transition for every company. At the beginning, I think most community will sort of just be people on Telegram or Discord just chatting, socializing. As the protocol becomes more decentralized, um I think platforms like Snapshot or uh governance portals like Commonwealth come into play because then they are actually taking an active role in using the token to govern the protocol itself. So, that's sort of the next step up, but every single platform I think has to start off Well, most platforms have to start off a bit centralized at the beginning where they're sort of disorganized and handling things through social media and over time it becomes more and more decentralized and governed through DAOs or different types of DAO tooling.

Yeah, I would agree. If I had to say one word how to be different, I would pick probably like like initialization because everything that, you know, initial communities do is kind of communicated by the core team. Uh but as as communities um like feel more empowered as they mature, they should feel ownership over the protocol or the open source project that they're governing. And they should propose and initialize their own proposals in the way that they want to see it go forth and it should be up to the community to decide whether or not that's a that's a good choice. I have kind of a little bit more unique of a perspective in the way that I see communities evolving over time is I see a lot more segmentation with regards to various substacks of communities and or subsets in that regard.

So, for example, the impact of a KOL, their half-life really staggers over time. They start to become less impactful with what they say because a lot of people are like, "Okay, what which project do you have the loyalty or devotion to?" And what we found when creating communities that the most enthusiasm and the most passion comes from communities that are um isolated to cultures. So, for example, Turkish communities, Vietnamese communities, things of that nature where we see the greatest impact coming from those cultural bonds where regardless how much somebody tweets about projects and so forth, the affinity of what that culture is and that bond that somebody has with that is permanent. So, we see that really being coming becoming more segmented at different levels of technicalities, different levels of culture, and so forth.

Um two answers. I know we got 5 minutes left, so I'll keep it brief. Um one is the tooling I think will change in the future. I don't know if you can have big communities just living on Discord and as um you said earlier, Commonwealth or different other platforms will arise. And two, um I agree I really like the subset and segmentation because uh some early alpha, Vega's launching its ambassador program today.

And uh we've got we've got different teams in different segments of the community that we're trying to grow and grow them up into becoming trusted community leaders and people that eventually take a lot of the work that the team do and actually become the leaders that own the project and actually help govern it and direct it. So, you that's a direction we're trying to move more in over the next few months to years. And uh we'll work. Where do we join that program? Uh vega.

xyz/ambassadors. Plug. See you there. Congratulations on launching that pro- program. Um and maybe we can just do one last question before we wrap up.

So, for um you know, everyone who's like sitting here today, um if you were to give an advice on starting up a community in Web3 right now, what would be your number one advice? And maybe we can start off with Jimmy. I would build your community before you build your product. And that's kind of a tough thing to say, but your community will tell you what product you want to build. And you can still ship features, and you can still articulate what you want to build, but I would be building the open far earlier than having something come out in like open beta or something, and you realize that you know, people use it, but no one's really inspired to own it, and then you're not really building crypto at that point.

Hire good advisors. No, but really, with the with the community, I echo that sentiment. The vision is what people adopt, and frequently that's actually what drives the hype is the vision of what's soon to come. That is really what's going to drive the community. Community is more excited about what's in front of them versus what's actually happening and what they have now.

So, always get them excited, always put something in front of them, and never give them some a reason to feel that something isn't worth waiting for. I'll chip in and say also build a good product because if your community is rallying around something that eventually crashes and burns, then you've created a community for no reason. So, the product is also just as important, but the community get build them early and get people that are real ambassadors and people that will shout from the rooftops about the things that you're building. I mean, I was just going to add that so much of the momentum in Web23 comes from your community, and I think it made a lot of sense when Jim mentioned that, you know, you want to really build your community before you build your product, so that by the time your product is out, you have an entire fan base that is really excited for you. I think yeah, it's just really hard if you like, you know, make a really good product, but like no one is actually using it, and that, you know, I think community is just so so important for um everything in Web23.

Um maybe just uh Mirza and then Justine, and then we'll wrap it up. Yeah, very quickly. I think um give your community members ownership as early as possible. So, let's say if you're an NFT project, maybe you do like a quick airdrop. If you're building out a token, if you can initiate the community with an airdrop.

If you don't plan on launching your NFT or token soon, at least allow them to contribute to certain ideas or hold certain competitions internally where they feel like they're contributing and shaping your protocol because that's when your community really starts to build up because if there's not much to have ownership over, it's really hard to build a community. That's I'm so sorry, but that is a really good answer and I just want to echo always make them feel like they are earlier than the next person coming in. Yeah, I agree with all of this. We're trying to involve our community as early as possible. I think contributors primarily want two things and that's a sense of belonging and autonomy.

And then in the like contributor interviews we've done, the third thing that our contributors have said they chose to to work with us because they felt like they understood what Rabbit Hole believed in and so like being clear about your values, I think is like another factor. Um so many great answers. Um so this was a very quick panel. We are wrapping up now, but yeah, thank you so much everyone for joining this panel. Hope you guys learned something about communities and hopefully you guys got you know, inspired to build your own or keep running the ones that you currently are running.

We'll be around a couple minutes after this. Please come and say hi. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.