Episode 5 – Building a Community

Hello everybody and welcome to the RunningWeb3 podcast where we talk about running a web3 or crypto business. I’m your host, Paul Lambert, and today we’re going to talk about one of your biggest assets and most powerful marketing tools in web3: the community that you build.

So there are two main parts to your community, and you’ll be doing both of them constantly. It’s not like a “do it once and you’re done” kind of thing. There’s building and there’s maintaining. You’ll need to build in order to create a community and you’ll need to maintain to keep that community.

So first let’s look at building. Why is building important? There’s quite a few reasons, but the first one we’re gonna look at is building trust in your product or your project.

We see this not just in web3, but in web2 as well. One of the first things that you do when you look at a product, whether you’re planning to invest – and investing doesn’t necessarily mean money. It could be literally investing in like a company or a project. It could be just buying a product or a service, or it could be something free like downloading a free app or signing up for a newsletter, anything like that.

All of those, for the purposes of this, I’m going to consider investing. People are hesitant to invest. So before they decide to move forward on something, oftentimes they’ll look for, for some sort of proof that it works or that it is what they want. So the classic example of this would be in web2, um, like reviews on Amazon. So before you decide to buy something on Amazon, or I know certainly before I do, I look at the reviews and if something has 3 or 4 reviews, I am a lot less likely to buy it than something that has say, 4,600 reviews that show it’s like a 4.6, 4.7 out of 5, something like that. Those reviews are from a community. Now, in this case, the community is, is sort of like a passive community. It was built not by the person who created the product, but just it happened to kind of spring up around.

And that community is just people who have used that product and they chose to review it. But that passive interaction with that community, that looking at those reviews, looking at those ratings, gives you that social proof that may convince you that it’s worth looking at. You go, okay, well if it has four reviews, I don’t really know if this is the product that that I want. I don’t know if this is the thing that works for me. Whereas if I see that 4,600 people have used it and 4,300 of them had no problem, that bodes well, like 4,300 people saying yes to a product is something that if I was already interested in it, all of a sudden I’m like, okay, yeah, no, that, that seems like a good idea. So it builds that trust in your product or in your project. Now that’s the passive form. That is people looking at it and seeing, oh, there are a bunch of people that gave reviews, or inside web3 on like telegram, discord servers, anything like that.

When you go to a project and you see that there are 18,000 members, that speaks to the project’s legitimacy. If they thought that it was a scam, they probably wouldn’t still be in there. Um, so those are sort of the passive forms. That’s where you just as a consumer, you go in and you see that there are people and those people have, uh, have interacted with and chosen to stay with that product, project, service, whatever it is that they were a community for.

The more powerful form of this is the marketing that can be done by a community. So this is when the community advocates for you, they become your advocates. And that’s a big, a big change, a big step. It’s a very small, uh, discrepancy or a very small adjustment in the way that you’re thinking, but it’s a very big effect. So this is a change from me going to somebody’s community and seeing that they have these reviews, seeing that they are talking about it within that community, saying, oh, “this is a great product.

This is a great project. I did this thing and it worked really well.” It’s a change from that to that community going out and saying, this is an amazing product, and I don’t mean necessarily in the like spammy way that you see on Twitter all the time, although that I guess would also fall into this category. Um, but it’s not necessarily going out to random completely unrelated pages and saying, Hey, you guys should buy X, Y, Z. Instead it is in areas where it could be helpful.

So let, let’s, let’s take an example. Cause it’s gonna be easier to explain. Let’s say that you are creating a product and that product is, um, a new type of hairbrush, and that hairbrush is, is for the specific, uh, category of people. It, it’s a lot easier on the hand, it does a better job combing through and getting out those tangles, all of that.

So I could go as a consumer and see that hairbrush, I can see the ratings, I can go to the website and I can see reviews from the people that have used that and go, oh, okay, cool. It’s a, it’s a good hairbrush. That’s the passive form of marketing. That active form of marketing are when people start advocating for you. So this is when I go to a hairbrush forum or a, a hair care forum, I guess, um, where people are talking about like the best methods for different types of hair and their hair care routine and this sort of stuff. And there are people on there saying, guys, I just used this hairbrush for the first time and it actually worked. Like I used to have all these, these problems where I have like sensitive hair or, um, I have curls that don’t like to come out the way that they should, and I used this hairbrush and it worked really well.

And now you’re drawing other people that are already interested in this topic, and maybe they’re not looking at this particular hairbrush, but they know that they want things to improve their hair routine. And they go and they, they’re on this forum and all of a sudden they see this thing and they go check it out and they end up purchasing or, um, deciding to purchase later or something like that. This, this marketing is so powerful because it’s advocating to others who are already in a position where your community used to be. The people in your community used to need a hairbrush. They used to really care about their, their hair routine. They probably still do, but they used to be in this position and now they found a solution to it, and now they’re going out on your behalf, not even necessarily because you ask them to, but because they’re passionate about it, they’re going out on your behalf and finding people who have that problem, who are in the position they used to be in, and they are saying, Hey, I’ve made this transformation.

I made this transformation from where you are, this problem that you have to the place I’m in now where I’ve already solved this, I’ve, I’ve found a solution and I’m in a better place now. And having a whole bunch of people that are going out and advocating for you like that is so, so powerful. The other thing that it does as, as part of this building trust is it builds this passion. Um, it turns a product from just a product into a community, into things, into a place where people can come to talk about things they’re passionate about. Um, so <laugh>, uh, maybe choosing a hairbrush wasn’t the best idea. I don’t have as much experience as, as some other people probably do. I got very lucky with my hair. It’s very low maintenance. But, um, so forgive, forgive me if this example is not good, but, um, people that I know, people with curly hair are constantly fighting with their hair.

Um, I unfortunately, I don’t know the exact like fight that they’re, they’re fighting there, but, um, I know that it’s a constant problem for them. And so they’re, they’re very passionate about solutions to this. They’re passionate about their hair. Um, same thing with like, people who are into makeup are going to be very passionate about the makeup that they use. Um, people who are into carpentry are very passionate about the things that they make and the tools that they use in order to do woodworking. And this passion is infectious. If I go, if I’m say a woodworker and I find a a tool that I like and it has no community, I may be like, oh, okay, cool. This is a great tool and maybe I’ll tell some friends about it who are also in woodworking. If they bring up that they’re looking for a new table saw, I’m like, oh yeah, I, I found this new table saw.

It’s got all this cool technology. Um, and it, it was really helpful for me. And that may be kind of the end of the conversation, but if there’s hundreds or thousands of other people that have also bought this and they’re talking about all these cool things that they did with it, all of a sudden now instead of just a table saw, this is a tool that I use to make art. This is a tool that I use to make a table that, um, my family or my neighbors use every day. And it becomes a lot cooler when I can then share that. Um, I’m sharing pictures of things that I did or, um, blueprints for things that I made, and I’m looking at other people in that community and they’re sharing those same things. So that passion is infectious and it’s good for all the people in the community, and it’s also good for the brand.

It’s good for your project or your product. Um, because when people see that passion and they get fired up about it, they’re a lot more likely to join into that community. They can ask questions about it, they can decide that they want to buy it, they can start creating other content for it. There’s a lot of things that that passion kind of spurs and, uh, kicks off for you. But more than just marketing, this is also helpful for the people that are in that community. Um, so going back to a web3 example, um, the community is one of the most powerful tools that you have when you have people coming in to a new project. So I’m going to specifically choose crypto in this case just because I have examples from this. Um, but it works the same for other areas within web3 if you’re looking at education.

Um, and actually we’ll probably take a look at those in one of the upcoming episodes on community and building in public. Um, but for now, let’s, let’s look at crypto specifically. This community is really helpful for people who are looking at joining that project. So specifically, um, with a cryptocurrency, if people are thinking about buying that cryptocurrency or they want to trade it, or they wanna kind of figure out what is this crypto about? Um, why would I, why would I invest in this? Why would I decide to join this project rather than having to go to the website, which is always going to have limited, uh, responses, limited answers to any questions that happen. And that’s not necessarily a slam at the people that are running that project. That’s just, there’s only so many questions you can answer. And there’s only so many different ways that you can arrange that so that everybody can find the answer to their question, no matter how will you arrange it.

People are only gonna look at the first couple of questions, and if there’s isn’t on there, then they’re going to be frustrated because their answer wasn’t in the FAQ or their answer wasn’t up at the top of the page or whatever. It’s with a community though, they can go into that community and they can ask that question. And you have people who are excited and passionate about the project talking to them. So we see this all the time, specifically in crypto with use case. People will look at a website and they go, oh, this looks cool, it’s flashy, it does whatever. Um, and then they come in and they have questions and they go to the community and they say, but what is the use case? And rather than have somebody just copy and paste off the website, they can say, well, I did this really cool thing.

Um, the use case is staking, but I staked a year and a half ago and I’ve kept renewing it and it’s allowed me to whatever, uh, pay part of my rent each month, or, um, this is a governance token and it’s allowed me to vote. And not only I started voting at first, but now I’ve started creating proposals for other people to vote on so they can combine that passion and combine the answers to these questions to provide this not just an answer to the question, but a personal experience, a story on how, how it was important and why it was important to this member of the community. And that allowed these, allows these new people to come in and go, oh, well, I can see how that might apply to my situation. Especially when you have multiple people answering and they say, oh, well this helped me in this way and this helped me in that way.

The person that comes in can then see, oh, well, maybe it could help me in this way for my particular scenario. So it’s helpful for people that are looking to join the community and people that are new to the community. And then it also provides new perspective for people that have been in that community for a while. It’s kind of helpful for everybody in there. On the other side of things, as the owner of that community or as the leader of that community, you also get new perspective. So I know at Ultra Coin with our community, we constantly got community suggestions, and these suggestions are sometimes they were things we’d already thought of, and that helps us validate and go, okay, yeah, if, if we have this idea and a bunch of people who are in the community have this idea, it’s probably a good idea.

Um, but we also got suggestions from things that we might not have otherwise thought of or feedback on how easy or hard some feature was to use. So this became one of the things that, that’s a constant problem for people who are designing some sort of product. You spend hours and hours a day every day on this product. And so you are used to all those ins and outs, the intricacies of how to use it, but new users are not. And so oftentimes if people don’t have somebody that does like UX design or UX testing, they will design something and they get used to all those little quirks. And so they go, oh, yeah, I can do this. It takes like three minutes to sign up, go through the entire registration process, and then it’s done. It’s super easy. And then a new user comes in and they don’t know the order of the buttons to hit.

Um, they don’t know that this field doesn’t accept special characters because they’re not using it all day every day. And so having a community that’s able to give that feedback and say, Hey, this doesn’t really make sense, or I don’t like the way that this flows, or something like that is very, very helpful. So that’s why building a community is so important. Let’s take a quick look at some of the tools that you might use when you’re first building a community. And there’s a couple different, like, categories of this, I guess. Um, the first one is going to be the hosting platform. Um, the second one is going to be tools to help you automate and improve the way that you communicate. And then the third one is just general design. So first, let’s look at the platform, the most common ones within web3.

Um, and all of these are are web2 platforms that are used for web3 currently. Um, as you guys know, we’re in that weird kind of web 2.5, and that’s just kinda how it goes right now. So the tools that are very commonly used within this space are Discord, uh, telegram, Twitter, nas.io, and ck. And these are kind of broken into two distinct sections, I guess, or three really. So Discord and Telegram, I kind of lump into the same area. Um, we’ve talked about this before when I was talking about social media, but Discord is, is just a better version of Telegram really, in my opinion. I know a lot of people really love Telegram, but both of these are are platforms where you can cultivate a community and they work as sort of an instant message forum style, um, where people are able to put in information, they can put in comments, questions, um, different pieces of media like pictures or documents, whatever, and they’re able to communicate with each other and you’re able to communicate with them.

So, um, community members talking amongst themselves, you talking with them, you putting out updates and notifications, that sort of thing. Um, Twitter also sort of falls in here. It’s a little bit more like stood off in that most of it is kind of intended for you to put out announcements. And then there are dms and there are definitely replies that you can do back and forth with Twitter. And in good community building you will be doing that back and forth. But a lot of it, it feels like it’s more nowy and a little bit more like I speak to the community instead of with the community. Um, that’s how I personally see it. Other people definitely disagree with that, and I’m putting it on this list because Twitter is a very common, uh, community platform that people use and use very successfully. So I don’t want to discredit it.

Next is Nasta io and ck and both of these are used especially, um, on LinkedIn and used with communities that are kind of built through that and, and web3 communities that are centered around education and, um, community participation. And the idea is that it puts everything in one spot where you can find articles, you can find updates, you can communicate with each other, um, but it also allows for like gated information. So if you want, um, specific community members to be able to access certain things, that becomes a lot easier to do on these platforms than it would be on something like Twitter or Telegram. Next, let’s look at some of the tools that are useful for helping you automate or more effectively communicate with your community. So the three that I have in here are the content matrix, Zapier or Zapier. I’m not, I’m not sure which one it is.

Um, and Tweet deck. So a content matrix is something that helps you ensure that you have constant updates and or rather constant content for your community. So this is something that you put together and, um, it’s discussed in depth actually in Justin Welsh’s, um, LinkedIn OS operating system, um, manual, I believe it’s called. But it is a way for you to generate content that is useful for your community that talks in a couple of different ways. So this might be different tones or different subjects or, um, like adding in a listicle versus adding in a, uh, how-to article. Both of those are things that the community might use, but they are presented differently, and you can do both of those on a variety of different topics. So the content matrix is a way of kind of putting that together and understanding how you can produce content for your community on a consistent basis.

It makes it a lot easier when you have this, this grid, this matrix to refer to if you start to run out of ideas and you go, oh, what can I post today? Or What can I post next month? This allows you to kind of plan it out and, um, come up with ideas a lot easier. Next is Zapier or Zapier. I don’t, I don’t know if it’s French or not <laugh>. Um, but this is a program, uh, software that is very useful for automating processes. So say for instance, you have a community and you, you talk with that community through Instagram and through Discord and through, um, your website and through Twitter, Zapier kind of helps you put it together in a way that lets you repost things very quickly or lets you say like, if this, then this across different platforms. So the way that a lot of, um, web3 communities will use this is just to repost everything automatically on their website, um, sorry, on their social media or even more recently with the introduction of ChatGPT.

Uh, one thing that I’ve seen is somebody will say, okay, I’m going to tweet this piece of content. Now I’m going to use Zapier to, uh, automate this, this next process that I’m gonna talk to and talk about. So what’ll happen is they’ll post on Twitter, and then Zapier will take that post and it will run it through ChatGPT and say, I want you to, to take the content of this message and just change it a little bit. I don’t want an exact repost from Twitter to the other social media, but I want it to be mostly the same. And so ChatGPT will then, uh, rephrase it for you, and then Zapier will take that rephrase version and it will post it to your Instagram with the media that you chose or that you already posted on, on Twitter or something like that.

Then it will take that and it will post it to Discord with a slightly different message, and it will tag the people who, uh, who need to be tagged for that. Um, it will @everyone or @ like a specific part of your community or something like that. And so it just allows you to automate these processes that are across different sections. And the third one on here is TweetDeck. So TweetDeck, um, has been around for a very long time, and it’s just a way for you to plan tweets. Um, well, it’s not just a way, it does a bunch of other things, but the main thing that people use it for is to plan tweets. And so you can say, here are the tweets that I’m going to post for the next month, and you can put them all through there. And if you have a social media manager, you can have them also log on and they can reply to dms, they can reply to tweets, they can reply to anything in there.

So it’s just an easier way of having multiple people access Twitter and plan out those tweets in advance and schedule them. And the last tool we’re going to talk about is a way to design different pieces of content. So obviously a good portion of your content is just going to be text-based or audio-based. You’re holding an AMA with your community or you’re posting an update, something like that. But you should also have different images and different media in there. Those images are going to be valuable for the people in your community because they’re able to understand information a little bit more easily in things like flow charts or with graphics. And also it’s going to be more interesting visually to, to see these pieces than just to see text. It’s going to catch people’s eye. They’re going to be more interested in it. So the tool that I put for this is Canva. Canva’s, just a free tool.

I’m sure you’ve all seen a thousand different ads for it. Um, it works fairly well. There are other tools that you can use that maybe are better at different areas, but as a good little like catchall tool, um, Canva is, is a great way of making sure that you’re able to create basic things and put them out there that are going to be more interesting and more valuable to your community than just a text post might be. And obviously mix and match these. You should have text and images together, not just image, not just text. All right, the final thing that we’re going to talk about in the building section is strategies. So strategies for building your community. There are a couple of quick ones that I’m going to put in here, and every community is going to be different. So it’s, it’s a little bit hard to say, like, use these strategies and this’ll work.

There are a lot of small tips and tricks that can help towards that, but we’re going to talk about three that are, that are going to help you build that community a little bit more quickly. The first one here is having your own voice. The thing that makes you different than other people is your voice. It’s the, the way that you speak, the way that you address people, your personality. And a great example of this is actually in, in crypto. Again, sorry, I keep coming back to it, but it’s a very easy example. There are a thousand different people that all use the exact same code, like word for word. The code is the exact same. The only things that are different are the token address and maybe the name of the token. What makes one of them stand out above the others is the tone of that project, the way that it’s put together.

And this, this own tone, this own voice that you should have, um, is going to be what sets you apart from everybody else that could copy your product or copy your service or copy your project. It’s what makes you unique. Um, for more information on this, check out the Brand Voice episode. I believe it’s episode two of this where we go into depth on kind of how you put that together. The next strategy is using AI to help give outlines. So with AI recently becoming a lot more popular and a lot more mainstream, uh, this has become something that’s a lot easier to do. But using artificial intelligence to suggest outlines or suggest different media for you is a great way to take some of that load off. Now, like we just talked about, you’re supposed to have your own voice. That’s, that’s what’s both good for you and good for your brand and your project.

Using artificial intelligence to just write it and then copy paste is not good. Um, a, everybody’s going to see through it. It, it doesn’t feel like you, it feels like a robot wrote it. Um, and b, it’s going to make you lazy and not a good writer, but you can use it to give you an outline and help you come up with ideas, help you brainstorm, and then you can take that and put it in your own words. Write it in a way that is true to who you are and true to your community, and put it out there and it can save you a little bit of that initial brainstorming time. And the third strategy here is cross networking. So when you’re first starting out, especially, um, it’s going to be very important to network with other people that are in the same niche as you, the same, uh, community building phase as you.

So when you’re first starting out, find other people who are doing similar things and talk to them. Talk to the leader or the owner of that community, talk to people in their community and kind of see what’s going on and see what, what you like, what works. Bring that back to your community, talk to your community and say, Hey, I just talked with this other person and they seem pretty cool as well. And maybe sort of start building up that relationship as you talk with more and more people that are also working on building their communities. You get a better feel for what you want in your community and the type of way that you want to run that community. And that is something that you can’t really get as easily by yourself. Um, you’ll get there, I guess, eventually, but it is a lot faster to talk with other people and use their experience and kind of fit it into your story and figure out how does their experience work for me.

Now, for the second part, let’s quickly go over how to maintain a community. Now, maintaining a community is a big time commitment, but it’s 10 times easier to maintain a community than it is to build a community. A lot of people will spend a lot of time building up a community and then they will neglect it. They will just post information and assume that the community will continue to do well, but it doesn’t, it kind of falls apart. And like I said, it’s 10 times easier to maintain a community than it is to build it. So rather than spending all that time building it up and then letting it fall apart and then having to rebuild it, instead just maintain it, and obviously it sounds a lot easier than it actually is, but it’s very important that you stay on top of that because if you let it slide back, it’s going to be much, much harder to rebuild it than it is to just keep it going.

Now, each community is going to have different specific requirements, but there’s a couple different things that are going to be useful to every community. The first one is give constant updates, especially, especially in web3. But even in web2, the community loves updates. People love to know what’s going on. And so providing constant updates is going to be very good first for keeping them in the loop and second for keeping them satisfied and keeping them excited about these things. It can be a little bit hard or very hard to come up with constant updates, but that’s where that content planner content matrix comes in that I was talking about earlier. When you’re building your community, that’s something that you’re constantly keeping up with and constantly refreshing so that you always have something to give to your community. In web3, the rate at which you give updates is going to vary from project to project.

I would say that you want at least three times a week. That’s, that’s bare minimum. Anything less than that, and realistically, it’s going to be very hard to keep people engaged. Um, most projects, at least within crypto, try and give daily updates or multiple times a day, but it can be very hard to constantly provide that, both in terms of scaling, um, your, your effort. Um, as you grow the project, it, your time becomes more and more, um, accounted for. There are things that are already demanding your time and trying to give multiple updates every day becomes a little bit harder. Again, that’s where a lot of people start to slide and decide to not give updates, and then they stop caring for the community and then it falls apart. So it’s more find a way to provide updates and maybe set expectations early that you’re going to give updates a certain number of times a week or at certain milestones or things like that.

But those constant updates are going to be important no matter the community. The next thing is to get people involved. So rather than just posting, um, and saying, here are the updates. I mean, you can do that on a website. You don’t need a a community for that. That’s, that’s sort of a one-sided thing. You want the community to be a little bit of back and forth, so get people involved. This could be, uh, doing giveaways and polls, but this could just be asking questions as simple as, Hey, with this new feature we just put out, what’s your favorite part? What’s your least favorite part? Um, what would make you want to tell a friend? Um, what was the way that you most recently used this? Anything like that. Get them talking with you. Uh, get them engaged. If they joined this community, it’s because they want to be engaged.

They want to talk with you, they want to talk with other people in the community. So give them a reason to give them an excuse to talk with you, to talk with others in the community. They already want to give them that reason to the next. And this sort of piggybacks on that last one is to talk to them as, as people, as individuals instead of a group. Sometimes this, it becomes very easy to see your entire community as a community, and that a community is, is important. That’s, um, that sense of oneness, but that’s also what lets you see them as kind of a homogenous group. And they have a shared interest. That shared interest is whatever you’re providing that community for. But these are a whole bunch of different people with different ideas, different personalities, different stories, different lives, and it can be useful to remind yourself to talk to them as individuals.

Sometimes no two people in your community are the same. They have, like I said, that same shared goal, but they are different people. And so taking the time to get to know individual people or, um, talking to them and saying, Hey, what, what was your experience? I know other people have all said that they liked this feature. Um, what made you like it or what made you dislike it? And talking to people as individuals is a great way to a, remind them that you still see them as a person, which <laugh>, um, sounds a little cynical maybe, but is, is very important, um, especially as your community grows. But it also, um, that, that like personal interaction is very important for people in the community and for keeping them fired up about your project. It’s also very good for providing feedback for you because when people feel like they’re having a conversation with you, it’s a lot easier for them to point out things that could be improved or point out things that they loved.

Um, so it fires them up. It’s beneficial for you. It’s just good for the community as a whole and for all the individuals in it. When you talk to people as individuals, sometimes most of your communication will be with them as a group, and that’s fine. But make sure to take some time to talk to individuals as well. And the final little tidbit here is to try and automate things to, uh, set this up in a way that is scalable. And so in this case, it is getting moderators and getting commands. Um, commands are very easy. There’s a lot of different bots and some native elements in some of the tools that we talked about. Uh, so for instance, within uh, telegram, you can use like Rose Bot and a bunch of other bots to set up commands to improve the experience of your community.

This could be things like, um, slash contract address in or slash ca in crypto very often for, um, providing the contract address of your project. Um, within education, this could be setting up like FAQs where people can go and find them much more easily within your project. Um, oftentimes it involves setting things up for like the links that you use, your social media, things like that, um, so that people can type in a command and it gives them all the different places that they can find you and your information. And then also moderators. So this allows you to delegate some of the responsibility, some of the things that you would normally need to do to people in your community that are able to kind of police for you. They’re able to delete comments that maybe shouldn’t be there, that are inappropriate for the community. They’re able to answer questions with authority on your behalf, um, things like that, that make your life a little bit easier and improve the experience of everybody in the community so that you have multiple people that are able to help with your authority.

And that’s it. I know this was a much longer episode than usual. I got very fired up about this because the community is, is that super important. Um, major aspect of any project, any, uh, product, any service, any person. When you build that community, it, it is so beneficial for you and for the people in that community. It’s a win-win. And the only thing that it costs is some time from you, um, and time from the people in your community. But it’s so important and so useful. So, uh, I’m sorry that this went a little bit longer, but I’m, I’m glad to kind of go through all of the different ways and the reasons for why and how to build and to maintain that community. A very big thanks to everybody who has made it all the way through this episode. Um, for those of you that are listening, if you are enjoying the podcast, please leave a review on your podcast platform, whether that’s Spotify, um, apple Music, anything like that. There, as always, is a quick summary in the description and the full transcript on my website. You can find me on my website www.runningweb3.com, and you can find me on different social media on Twitter and Instagram at RunningWeb3. Thank you all so much. I’m looking forward to seeing you next episode.