Community is the core of the ecosystem's growth flywheel.
Author: Nick Martitsch
Translation: DeepTechFlow
Many crypto teams are too focused on short-term growth strategies, striving to cultivate high-cost user acquisition work into active long-term communities. Recently, I had a roundtable discussion with @monad_xyz from @intern and @binji_x from @Optimism, exploring what drives the network effects of Superchain applications and the rapid growth of the Nads ecosystem, and how other teams can apply these experiences to their early growth efforts.
Here are five key insights I have in building a sticky user base in the crypto space:
Community is the core of your ecosystem's growth flywheel
Everyone wants to interact with users where they already exist. When community members promote your project, it signals to app developers and infrastructure providers, reducing their decision risk to join your ecosystem. These new infrastructures and apps attract new community members and users, creating a virtuous cycle.
Link Marines are a typical example of this phenomenon, promoting @chainlink's core value propositions on Twitter, protocol forums, and other oracles decision-making media.
The social proof of the Monad community has become a key selling point for development teams considering where to deploy their apps. Some teams only need to post "gmonad" on Twitter to find that this is their most engaging post, thanks to the enthusiastic response from Nads. The Optimism ecosystem team often mentions this, with the slogan: "Community isn't everything, it's the only thing," and uses it as a guiding principle for developer adoption.
Teams should incorporate community experience into their day one growth strategies and consider recruiting community roles in the early stages to kickstart this flywheel—lowering the difficulty of future infrastructure and app business development work.
For early community building, qualitative experience trumps quantitative metrics
Engaging with your community should feel like the beginning of the next wave of the internet, where members actively shape discussions and influence development trajectories. Spending ten minutes on your Discord/forum should not only be about whether you truly enjoy the experience and want to contribute to the vision, which is hard to measure.
Many teams mistakenly set targets as hard metrics, such as Discord membership and Twitter followers. This approach optimizes interaction with a large group of people similar to bots, who are only interested in surface-level content. This may undermine the genuine human connections needed to build a community and make it less likely for you to retain the most valuable members in the long run.
As the community expands, teams should find key metrics that still combine with qualitative experience. Kevin likes to track the number of high-quality replies to Monad's Twitter account, filtering out "GM" messages to see how many people are truly engaged. Binji also likes to observe the number of replies to subsequent comments in the main thread—indicating genuine interaction among community members.
Incentives may be the reason for users to join, but culture is the reason for them to stay
The crypto industry is not the only one using economic incentives to attract new users. PayPal, Uber, Airbnb, and many other Web2 companies seeking to solve the cold start problem have long done so. The uniqueness of the crypto industry lies in the scale of incentives and the over-reliance on this mechanism to drive short-term adoption.
Any user onboarding scheme needs to be combined with user retention strategies, a point too few teams carefully consider. In the process of large-scale onboarding through tasks, airdrops, and other incentive programs, teams may weaken the initial genuine interaction of the community by attracting bots and farmers.
If users find a use case, experience, or connection that deeply resonates with them, they will stay in the ecosystem. Teams should view the onboarding process as the starting point of the user funnel, focusing on creating experiences that make it hard for users to forget and prompting them to return continuously.
Promote within the community and optimistically delegate trust
Your community is the most effective leverage for reaching new territories, crowdsourcing product ideas, and extending beyond the capabilities of the founding team. To fully leverage the wisdom of the community, create a structured process to identify and empower the best community members to take on formal roles.
Optimism has established different contribution paths for data analysts, content creators, developer support, and other key functions, where participants can receive retroactive rewards for their hard work. Monad has elevated over 15 community members to key roles to expand and educate the community, without revoking any responsibilities due to lost trust.
If you don't empower your community, don't expect them to stand up for you.
Human-centric onboarding creates a human-centric community
People want to interact with other people, not with companies or bots. Find ways to enhance interaction between people during the onboarding process, even if it seems difficult to scale.
Monad has opened a new user channel on Discord, where new users need to have a conversation with a real person to pass the atmosphere check. Counterintuitively, this additional onboarding barrier has led to increased retention, as users spend 10 to 15 minutes upon joining, feeling a stronger emotional connection to this Discord channel.
At Optimism, Binji intentionally interacts with the OP community through his personal account at a frequency comparable to, if not more than, the main Optimism account. When community members can interact with real people and build good relationships, they are more likely to engage in meaningful conversations.
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