Paradigm: Community is the foundation, five rules to create a warm crypto community

Original author: Nick Martitsch, Paradigm

Original translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Many crypto teams focus too much on short-term growth strategies and strive to cultivate high-cost user acquisition into active, long-term communities. Recently, I had a roundtable discussion with intern from monad_xyz and binji_x from Optimism to explore what drives the network effects of Superchain applications and the rapidly growing Nads ecosystem, and how other teams can apply these lessons to their early growth efforts.

Here are my five main revelations about building an active user base in the crypto space:

1. 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, this sends a signal that reduces the decision uncertainty for application developers and infrastructure providers to join your ecosystem. These new infrastructure and applications attract new community members and users, and the virtuous cycle begins again.

Link Marines are a prime example of this phenomenon, promoting chainlink’s core value proposition on Twitter, protocol forums, and other mediums where oracle provider decisions are discussed.

The social proof of the Monad community has become a unique selling point for development teams considering application deployment. Some teams have found that simply tweeting "gmonad" is their most engaged post, largely due to the enthusiastic response from Nads (community members). The Optimism ecosystem team often mentions this with the slogan: "Community is not everything, it's the only thing" and uses it as a guiding principle for developers.

Teams should incorporate community experience into their day one growth strategy and consider hiring for community roles at an early stage to kickstart this flywheel - reducing the difficulty of future infrastructure and application business development work.

2. Qualitative experience trumps quantitative metrics for early community building

Community communities should feel like they are at the starting point of the next wave of the Internet, with members actively shaping discussions and influencing the trajectory of development. This feeling is hard to measure except by spending ten minutes on your Discord/forum to see if you actually enjoy the experience and want to contribute to the vision.

Many teams make the mistake of setting goals on hard metrics, like number of Discord members and number of Twitter followers. This approach optimizes for bot-like interactions with a large group of people who are only interested in surface-level content. This can hurt the real human connections needed to build a community and make it less likely that you’ll retain your most valuable members in the long term.

As your community scales, teams should find key metrics that are still coupled with qualitative experience. Kevin likes to track the number of high-quality replies to the Monad Twitter account, filtering out the “GM” information to see how many people are actually engaging. Binji also likes to observe the number of replies to follow-up comments in the main thread — a sign that real human interactions are happening between community members.

3. Incentives may be the reason users join, but culture is the reason they stay

The crypto industry isn’t 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 already done so. Unique to the crypto industry is the scale of incentives and the over-reliance on such mechanisms to drive short-term adoption.

Any user onboarding scheme needs to be coupled with a user retention strategy, something too few teams think through. In the process of onboarding at scale through missions, airdrops, and other incentive programs, teams risk diluting the real interactions that initially built the community by selecting bots and shills.

Users will stay in the ecosystem if they find a use case, experience, or connection that deeply resonates with them. Teams should view the onboarding process as the starting point of the user funnel, focusing on creating experiences that are so memorable that users keep coming back.

4. Promote within the community and optimistically delegate trust

Your community is your best source of leverage to enter new regions, crowdsource product ideas, and outperform the capabilities of your founding team. To fully leverage the wisdom of your community, establish a structured process to identify and engage outstanding community members in formal roles.

Optimism has different contribution paths for data analysts, content creators, developer support, and other key functions, and participants can be retroactively rewarded for their hard work under the NERDs program. Monad has promoted 15+ community members to key roles to scale and educate the community, and they have yet to be removed from any duties for breaching trust.

If you don't empower your community, don't expect them to stand up for you.

5. Human-centered onboarding creates human-centered communities

People want to interact with other people, not with companies or bots. Look for ways to increase human interaction during onboarding, even if it seems difficult to scale.

Monad started a new user channel on Discord where new users were required to have conversations with real people in order to pass the community assessment. Counterintuitively, this additional onboarding hurdle led to improved retention because users felt a stronger emotional connection to the Discord channel after spending 10-15 minutes on the channel when they joined.

At Optimism, Binji intentionally interacted with the OP community through his personal account as often or more than the main Optimism account. When community members can engage with real people and build relationships, they are more likely to have meaningful conversations.

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