Overview

Gm tigers,

In our last Twitter Spaces session, we called on our friends from some of the biggest community-led projects in Web3—Shardeum, SuperteamDAO, and Layer3—to discuss the sweet science of community building. Don’t worry if you missed it, though; we have a recap for you right here.

But, first, introductions

Yash is a community lead at Shardeum and has been building communities since 2014. In the beginning, he just wanted a platform for meeting more people that were excited about MMA, but in 2019, he came across bitcoin and shortly after that joined Ethereum Layer 2 project Shardeum to help them with community building.

Sarah Lu takes care of product marketing and partnerships at Layer 3. Layer3 is an easy-to-use bounty platform that makes community engagement and building super easy.

Lastly, we have Abbas, who’s a member and bounty sheriff at Superteam DAO. which is a decentralized accelerator for emerging Solana projects.

What is community building?

Community building is essentially the process of bringing together a bunch of stakeholders that are motivated towards the same goal. Every organization, project, and even army is essentially a community that has gathered towards achieving an objective. Community leaders are responsible for conveying the mission statements and objectives of the projects to the members as clearly as possible and increasing cohesion between the members by organizing group activities.

In the context of Web3, community building is usually about creating a group of users, developers, and other stakeholders around a decentralized project. It is important for the early members of the community to lay the foundations of the community by organizing a variety of activities, including hosting events, facilitating online discussions, and providing support and resources to community members.

What makes Web3 community building unique?

One significant difference between Web3 community building and traditional online community building is that Web3 communities frequently place a strong emphasis on decentralization and distributed governance.which means that the project is controlled by the community rather than any single entity, so community members play a pivotal role in its development.

The Shardeum community works on the OCC principle. which stands for open, collaborative, and community-driven. Almost everything they do at Shardeum is done by the community, and the members receive full ownership of their contributions.

Another difference is that Web3 communities are usually free from geographical barriers. One of the benefits of putting everything on blockchain is that people from across the globe who might not speak the same language can trust each other. Web3 communities are usually global; anyone from any nation can participate in the project of their choice and receive rewards and recognition for their contributions.

What are some community building essentials?

Active product feedback

The best communities usually have a very active product feedback cycle. The benefit of Web3 is that users always have a stake in the final product, which makes them care about its development.

Considering utility first

Early on in Superteam's history, they determined what was most valuable to community members.Vibes are great, but web3 projects need to make sure that they’re providing some useful service or product to their community. That’s the only thing that’ll make a community member stay attached to the project. Community utilities need to be figured out first. In the last bull run, we saw a lot of communities pop up that were purely running on vibes but no product. These communities are nowhere to be found now. Validating your product before building a roadmap and gathering a community is not ideal.

Communication Channels 

As we explained, web3 projects are usually decentralized, and members often live in different timezones. which makes it crucial for the community to set up an effective communication channel. Communication begets collaboration. How will people work together if they can't connect?

Engaging content and resources

Providing engaging and informative content, such as blog posts, articles, videos, and podcasts, can help to attract and retain community members.

What are the community goals of our panel members?

1. SuperteamDAO is essentially a decentralized accelerator for promising projects on the Solana blockchain. However, they have created an amazing ecosystem where interested folks can learn Web3 skills and earn exciting rewards. Recently, they reached $1 million in GDP. They’re currently working on bringing in more members to the community.
2. Layer3’s top priority at the moment is to improve the user experience of their product. They’re looking to add more fun features. They’re currently working on incorporating Seasons, which will be a series of challenges that other communities can use as a template for their own engagement-accelerating program.
3. The Shardeum team is exploring quest-style challenges to accelerate community engagement.

Random Insight Nuggets

Many communities use growth tactics like raffles. While that attracts some members to the project, it's not exactly a sustainable way to bring in more people. Layer3 is working on creating "Seasons," which will be a series of challenges that the community members can solve to help the project. What’s interesting is that members are not informed about what rewards they’ll get for completing a task. This acts as a filter to bring in more people who are actually interested in working on the project instead of being there just for the rewards.

It would be fantastic if community leaders could come together and decide on some ground rules.Every community is different, and every project is different, but everything that builders are doing right now will serve as the foundation for what’s to come. A good mission statement for every project in Web3 should be "create net positive value for the world."

In Closing 

What a power-packed conversation this one was. Hopefully we were able to recreate some of the magic and convey some valuable insights to you through this article. However, if you want to hear directly from the experts, Follow Tegro on Twitter Spaces. We host one every Thursday at 8 p.m. UST. Until next time!