Community Building: Attracting Developers and Scaling Together in Crypto | Theodore Essery - Doric

[Music] everybody uh thank you so much for having me at eth Denver it's uh going to be an incredible week just to start off it's amazing having so many like-minded individuals in one spot so we can all learn from each other and build off each other I know for a fact that the Bedrock of our business is building a strong community so to give you guys a little bit of a background on myself my name is Theodore es I'm head of globalization at the Dork Network I have an extensive background in crypto by working on a number of different projects on the marketing side as well as help raising money for a number of crypto funds prior to this I worked in the financial space more on the institutional wealth side where I worked with a lot of different family offices and Foundations helping them raise money and deploy Capital into a number of different funds as well as individual projects and we did a lot of great business deploying millions of dollars and that's sort of what brings me to what I wanted to talk to you guys about today is how do you actually Bridge those two worlds the traditional crypto world of building a strong foundation and telegram channels and all of the basics as well as how do you bring those sort of projects to a more Institutional Investor okay because right now we're getting to a point with everything that's getting released with black rock and whatnot that real institutional wealth is looking at our industry in a much more serious Manner and that's essentially what I've kind of bridged my world between traditional finance and crypto so to kind of give you a little bit of a background on the Dork Network we are own blockchain it's our goal to democratize blockchain for all users we want to have a scalable secure and flexible blockchain and our main focus is engaging with developers and investors as well as users to give you guys just a couple of points from our uh from our blockchain we want to tokenize assets safely and seamlessly we want to have efficiency and security with our proof of authority consensus we want transparency at its core we are also evm compatible and we have a proof of stake mechanism and we want to have a tamperproof Online Registry but the main point of today's conversation is I want to kind of get into the educational aspect of what we work on all right so I want to start talking about building a strong Foundation all right obviously the main thing you want to focus on is getting diverse channels up and running this is everything from Discord to Twitter to Telegram and to Instagram all right this is a this is what allows you to essentially build funnels of an audience member into your project all right this is how they find your project and this is how you be diverse in that sense this ensures consistent branding and messaging and allows you to reach many different audiences the next thing you got to do is you have to implement Bots across all these different channels utilizing Bots is possibly the smartest thing you could do all right telegram has tons of these Bots as well as Discord if people are constantly looking for your chart or want to get updates about coin market cap or proper links these are the sort of bots that'll allow you to be different all right this will enhance user experience as well as response time the next thing is content is King even for example right now we're recording all of this all right this is something that we're going to be pushing to our user base and our followers and investors for the next couple months you constantly want to be out there generating content okay this isn't just necessarily have to be about your own project this can be General news okay you can talk about the price of Bitcoin where ethereum is going but content is King in our industry and you guys have to remember that it allows you to Showcase project progression and your community achievements next thing you have to do is demonstrate Commitment if you're going to have these channels you have to be on top of them you have to be posting every single day you have to be constantly giving updates you need to show that credibility through this demonstration of constantly putting good information in front of your followers in front of your users and investors the next thing is tools for Success all right I can give you guys a list of these tools afterwards but right now you can use so many AI tools for analytics consolidating your social platforms the one thing that a lot of projects don't have is human capital so if you can figure out a way to use online tools to make your life simpler and make your life more efficient then that's what you have to do and you can find a lot of these online and I'm more than happy to share with you what we have all right and this will allow you to adapt different strategies based on Data Insights and as well get community feedback one of the other things that I always like to talk about as well is reputable sources and getting good Publications done and this sort of ties into building a strong foundation and having these communities for example if you're going to buy an article on Forbes for example okay you want to be able to have the people on Forbes who are seeing this go to an active telegram go to an active Instagram and actually see that things are going on with in your community and more importantly that you can use this the reverse way if you have an active community and you say to them hey we just got an article written about us on Forbes then they can use this as a leverage point to generate more interest in your project so it doesn't just go one way or another and that's why you need both sides of this coin all right as far as activating communities I want just go over a couple things that I've used in the past for projects Twitter raids are probably one of the most important things you can use this is a bot that you can Implement on your Discord and on your telegram which will allow you to track people in the way they interact on your Twitter it will match and record bookmarks retweets and create more of a competition within it the next is buying competitions this will in fact increase wallet holders as well as your ability to create a more of a competitive nature within your communities obviously buying competitions create drives in the chart and this will also allow you to give back to your community with prizes hashtag campaigns couldn't stress how more important this is every single project out there must have a hashtag once you have a hashtag this is how you become trending online through all these different resources we just spoke about and this will in turn incentivize user engagement you can reward your users for sharing project information offering tokens so on so forth and the best part about this that actually will Foster a sense of ownership and Community involvement which is extremely important for what we do so I want to go over a little bit about strategic influence or access K's are super important partnering with different YouTubers and Twitter accounts all right these guys they have their own credibility they have their own followers all right so it's your job to tap into their guys so that they can essentially say to their Community hey if this guy believes in what I'm doing then they're going to believe in what I'm doing as well all right right so this is great to tap into you can do this with YouTubers you can do this with different Twitter accounts and that sort of brings us to the next point which is hosting amas okay and this is probably one of the most important things I've ever utilized in any of my projects I like to make a reference point for let's just say you're selling any sort of product okay I'm looking at a seller or a buyer and I'm engaging with them they're not going to give me their money unless they see my face and hear my voice all right our version of that Sal pitch is the AMA you got to get your voice out there you got to get your name out there and that's the way to create credibility all right to go over to the benefits all right so we're looking at an expanded reach to audience increased engagement and interaction and most importantly creating trust and credibility within the community so if we're going to talk about incentives for developers and build aons well we're obviously out of buildon right now it clearly works all right we're actually going to be doing something very similar ilar this week we are generating and giving out developer grants all week to Pro to projects that we find promising so this will mean that we're going to be handing out financial support to a lot of different projects so if you guys are developers and want to chat with us about developing on our blockchain please come and ask some questions but not only are we going to help you financially but we're also going to give you corporate assistance which I think is huge all right we're not just going to say hey here's the Money Take It Go no we have a back end of amazing developers that will help you build out your project and we want to look at this as a group effort and a team effort all right the next thing we want to talk about is the benefits that all this stuff is going for us all right this will Foster Innovation so we can have new novel Solutions and projects we're looking at Community growth bringing in new developers who are able to work with us and more importantly for our blockchain we're going to have a diverse group of many projects so as we go forward one thing that I've always utilized in the past is Partnerships with Central exchanges okay this is very important this gives you Global exposure gives you access to a wide range of new investors this gives you increased visibility within the crypto Community not only that this will give you an incredible boost of credibility all right what I mean by that is that a lot of these exchanges require kyc okay which means that you're going to be putting your name out there and they're going to be looking at it in that sort of fashion so once you get on these exchanges you're essentially telling your community that hey you know I'm willing to be in front of the the fire the next thing this gives you access to is liquidity all right there's a lot of global money out there a lot of exchanges have a lot of liquidity more investors more opportunity Market access geographically a lot of these exchanges can only operate in certain regions this is super important to understand because you need to be accessible worldwide to a lot of different investors that may not be trading on you know the pancake swap or uni swap but may only be trading on two coin and coinbase all right and this again will create marketing opportunities if you can go to your group or even go to Publications and say hey my XYZ project just was launched on C coin this is something that you can take back to your community and utilize very very well so again all this stuff is great but you also have to remember that you need measurable goals all right every single month you got to figure out what do you want to do how do you want to get there for example developer engagement up we we want it up 30% we want monthly user grow 20% increase in price in holders how many projects are we launching if you're building a project and you have a team it's your job to hold them accountable all right without you everything else will fall apart and if you aren't meeking kpy on a monthly basis then you are not operating a good project and that goes to budget allocation as well this is even more important all right for example we're looking at deploying capital for developer grants social media marketing Partnerships educational content events so on so forth this is incredibly important to understand because yes sure there is some sort of you know brick work to marketing a project but not everything works for every single project so it's your job to test this out and then figure out what works for you and focus on that completely because I can tell you this sometimes stuff works for projects and sometimes it doesn't so I just want to say a couple things utilizing airdrops and giveaways is also very important too we're going to be giving away free dorks all week all right so if you guys want to come by and hang out with us we're more than welcome okay and this is something that you guys should Implement into your systems as well so just to kind of go over everything I just chatted about you know benefits of community engagement you know we're looking at Community growth token distribution incentivized engagement project visibility and brand advocacy so I now spent SP a little bit of time talking about you know the crypto side of things and building the community now I kind of want to talk about how do you access the institutional wealth component all right I can tell you this I've been in the institutional wealth space for a very long time I've helped deploy over $25 million into a number of different projects over the last couple years I can tell you this right now it's a very small-knit community and you need to be active in it and you need to be around these people on a constant basis all right think of it as a small friend group probably similar to the crypto space is like and the way to get in front of these people I'm going to go over them right now so family office conferences in my opinion has been one of the most beneficial things I've ever done I go to about 10 of them 20 of them every single year I get invited to them I've spoken at them before and this is an incredibly important aspect because this is how you get in front of the wealthiest people in the world and now that crypto has sort of come out of the Shadows people are now looking at crypto not just as a crypto investment but more as a global alternative alternative investment and now with everything expanding and markets and shambles people are looking for different long-term Investments and crypto is going to be the new one all right so now more importantly is your time to build these relationships because people are going to start venturing off from Bitcoin ETFs and they're going to want to start to get into true utility projects and now we talk about global events and exhibitions the best example I have for this is Art basil okay art basil is an incredibly fun event in Miami but I can tell you this is not really about art art is the disguise of the event it is a crypto and it is a finance event the amount of family office events I go to during that week and crypto events are huge it's your job to be around during these weeks get down to Miami go meet some people get out there you need to start building relationships the whole art of fundraising is getting in front of people and building a strong Rapport the next thing is targeted groups and associations there are databases online that have every single Raa out there it's your job to tap into these These are funds crypto funds these are Global investment funds that you can actually tap into and start put them on your mailing list that's what I do I have hundreds and hundreds of these offices on my mailing list I get in front of them in fact sometimes I give them a cold call you have to do everything in your power to build these relationships so that you can actually get invited to these events so that's an incredibly important thing you can do too my favorite thing and this is something that I've been extremely successful in is targeting foundations and endowments and this is for any developer out there that actually has let's just say a socially friendly project all right a lot of Foundations in there they have a mandate for what they have to invest in all right this can be something that benefits the environment Charities all right we're talking about orphanages all right if you can find yourself in a position to build a project that has one of these social responsibilities involved in it you can Target foundations and endowments worldwide and they right now more particularly are looking to be deploying their money in more diverse spaces so if you can hit the prong of being in a diverse space as well as something that they're actually invested in as well like an orphanage for example or a charity this can be a massive play for you guys so it's just something to keep in mind that maybe you could utilize in the future so I kind of just want to go over you know I think today is going to be a great day I think the week is going to be great everything that I just spoke about as far far as bridging these two worlds I think is very important because I come from an Institutional background where not a lot of people understand to build a crypto project but they want to get into the space but they don't understand how to build the proper channels they don't understand how to build Bots they don't know what K's are and then I work with people in crypto who are like Theo how do I get in front of you know an institution how do I get in front of a hedge fund how do I get in front of a family office and that's why I've been working so closely with dork because I've helped Bridge those two worlds for our company so again thank you so much for having me and allowing me to speak today I hope it's been informative for the people who are listening and if you guys have any questions honestly I'm a very welcoming guy uh please come up to me just just ask me just if you see me walking around like I'm just I'm just another guy in the space so you know don't don't be afraid to talk to me I got a lot of team members here all week so please you know come ask me some questions I'm happy to chat my email is right there as well so if you want to shoot me an email please I'm looking forward to innovating collaborating all right let's build it's going to be a fun week first time in Denver by the way I like it actually it's an interesting spot hopefully I'll have enough time to get out to Aspen but we'll see if time permits but again thank you so much we got a bunch of social medias up there you can check out more importantly if you want to scan that QR code it will take you to our link tree you can uh you know see what we got going on and I hope everybody has a incredibly Good Friday uh let's go eth Denver thank you