Communities have been at the center of all things Web3. Protocols/Projects depend on community members to be evangelists for their brand.

How do you build a web3 community the right way

How do you build a web3 community the right way&nbsp;

Communities have been at the center of all things Web3. Protocols/Projects depend on community members to be evangelists for their brand.&nbsp;

But how do you build a strong &amp; engaged community?

• How do you create the right incentives?

• How do you measure community growth/success?

In this essay, I'll try to address some of the above-mentioned questions &amp; provide mental models for the same.

I've spent a lot of time talking to founders &amp; community leads across the web3 ecosystem and helped guide their strategy towards effective community management.

Creating the right community structure based on your vision, product &amp; member profile plays a huge role in building a loyal &amp; highly engaged community.

Let's start with Understanding Community utility:

Everyone in the web3 ecosystem is focused on discovering projects with utility &amp; You'll often hear questions like

"What's the utility of this project?"

This is usually the case with NFT projects where the end product isn't always the NFT itself.

It's a lot less vague when it comes to web3 protocols with a specific use case.

Such as lending &amp; borrowing, decentralised communications, marketplaces, decentralised publishing, payment &amp; invoicing infrastructure, etc

But is this utility enough incentive to have a highly engaged community?

Founders struggle with being able to onboard new community members and create suitable incentive structures for members to stay active/engaged within the server.

1. There are plenty of projects that a user finds extremely cool and fascinating and is happy to join the discord just in case they catch some alpha early on.

2. There is barely any friction (No barrier to entry or exit). Thus eliminating any pain from doing so.

3. It's extremely hard to make a user or community member care about your community/product/vision.

The goal is to create a welcoming environment for anybody that wants to join your community and provide them with the necessary incentives &amp; tools to help them stay.

Especially if they believe in your vision.

You can start with defining your community utility.

Community utility is the one-liner pitch you'd use to explain the value you generate for your members and how you do it.

This will largely vary based on what your end product is but is extremely beneficial to Non-NFT project based communities since there isn't a direct financial incentive that drives engagement

The promise here is that members ( either join by buying their way in or by contribution) gain access to a valuable network of individuals. These could be founders/investors/artists/collectors &amp; so on.

These could lead to earning opportunities, deal flow, private events, etc.

In this case, the focus is toward providing quality alpha or information for every member that is a part of the community. This could be general web3 alpha but could also be highly curated and industry-specific insights.

The curation could be led by the project to begin with and eventually allow trusted community members to take charge.

Some communities are built around helping projects/individuals find access to capital either in the form of equity-free grants (Funded by the project to build on their technology or connect with other existing capital providers) or equity investing.

You could also focus on providing quality distribution to your members. This allows your members to be in absolute control of their reach and communication and leverage the same for all future growth opportunities. ( Writers, Devs, Designers, etc)

Next, you need to figure out what drives your community.

This will help you identify and build suitable programs and incentive structures.

Every community could have a different set of motivations but you can identify a few that matter the most.

Here are a few that could get you started:

2. Desire to participate/contribute/build

5. Looking for reach/syndication/distribution

6. Building reputation/credibility/status ( Leaderboards, Portfolios, etc)

Each of the above-mentioned potential motivators allows you to create internal community structures that can help members achieve their goals.

Thus, making your community the desired place for a member to contribute from &amp; towards.

It also increases the odds of your community becoming the base of all things built by your members. This includes Hiring, Early access, Rewards, Referring members &amp; so on.

All of which can help contribute towards your North Star.

Since every community is different in its vision, you need to identify what is it that you hope to achieve.

A few examples of potential success metrics:

1. Are you an NFT project with the focus of facilitating member connections and helping your community with resources to build alongside you?

2. Do you want to help members learn more about web3 ( Defi, NFTs, Infrastructure, etc) and get started in the space?

3. Do you want to help your community members earn/build in the space?

For eg: Do you help members build by funding their projects, and allowing access to experts or other resources? 

Let's discuss how do your members organize?

The best way to create &amp; capture value within a community is by helping members find companions/teams/groups and work on something together.

Everybody wants to belong and the only way you can retain community members for a healthy period is by facilitating meaningful connections and helping them build something together.

This could mean multiple things for various types of communities.

&nbsp;Questions you could ask:&nbsp;

1. Do members within your community have the necessary incentives to collaborate?

2. Do they have the resources ( stage, access, voice) to find, create &amp; manage these connections?

3. Where do these members or groups communicate? Do they use your community's official channel?

Based on your answers to the above questions, you can now start building the necessary infrastructure to help community members collaborate, communicate &amp; build together.&nbsp;

Here are some things you could do:

1. Create a database that records some of your most high value contributors.&nbsp;

2. Provide internal community roles ( especially if you are on Discord) to these contributors based on the impact they create.

3. Allow access to special channels or resources curated by experts from the community. These resources would depend on the type of activities you want to facilitate. 

4. If the goal is to allow members to form groups and ship projects then you could provide access to developer resources, capital, expert guidance/mentorship, etc.

5. You could now take this one step further and create systems that track, manage &amp; display contributions made by members. This helps in maintaining transparency as well as encourage other members to participate.

6. The system could be a leaderboard that has pre-determined tasks and a value attached to each task that can be recorded along with proof of work. This creates a system that highlights your inner circle.

7. Community members &amp; external participants can now view this leaderboard as the one stop solution to identifying who creates the most amount of value + is a credible resource and has reputation at stake.

There do exist some widely accepted models that reflect various levels of access or relationships an individual can have.

A similar process can be used to identify community members that are vital to the success of your community and contribute to 80% of your communities value but represent just 20% of the total member strength. This would be your inner circle that you can trust and delegate responsibilities to if needed.&nbsp;

Once you know who these members are, you can now start adding various roles that best describe their access/contribution/impact.

You can also play around and create a different set of names that best suit your community lore/vision/theme.

Adding distinct roles encourages members to pursue the "Level up" as an incentive. It also helps clarify every participant's role within the community &amp; eases communication and collaboration.

This ties in perfectly with the next section of this essay.

Web2 professional networks were built to find credible ways of recording proof of work, references, and reputation that can be used to either prove your ability to deliver or just provide a snapshot of your prior work experience ( LinkedIn ).&nbsp;

Web3 finds a different approach due to the permissionless nature of the ecosystem that allows anybody ( doxed or pseudonymous) with an internet connection, a device &amp; a private wallet to participate in global work environments and get paid based on global standards irrespective of the standard of living in your country of residence.&nbsp;

This also demands some interesting infrastructure that needs to be built to facilitate reputation records, proof of work, transparency, and portability across the space.

What does this have to do with building a community?

We are extremely early in this ecosystem and hence have a unique opportunity to build some of the earliest community contribution/activity leaderboards that can help distinguish a legitimate account from a fraudulent one and build bridges that can create earning opportunities for members.

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