Now you will not find any wording related to communities in web3. Community as a service, community as a product, community as a marketing, etc.

Over the 4+ year history of CGP, we have created our own, outsourcing and support, advising more than 40 crypto communities. Far from all web3, but the time has not yet come for CGP. While we are heating up our expertise, building and testing on other projects, we are helping. We ourselves, as holders and participants in other projects, also contribute.

Tried and explored different approaches. We can confirm that the community can perform a huge range of tasks and be more effective than traditional tools, but it is quite difficult to activate it. It feels like no more than 1% of the communities in the entire crypt were able to do this. Even less in the CIS space. And of the companies that have moved from web2, there are only a few.

Despite all the instructions for sales, whitepapers, roadmaps, support services and more: the point of attraction, user research and most of the interaction takes place for the user in the community. And some web3 users spend more time in the project's community than they use the product.

With what it can be connected?

Probably primarily with the user's meta and ownership. In web3, the open economy and the user journey and the whole ecosystem is different from what we are used to in web2. A Web3 user cannot just go to the appstore, download the application and enjoy it, and if anything happens, then Apple Pay will take care of renewing the subscription 🙂 yeah. The ecosystem in web3 is highly fragmented into hundreds and thousands of related services with the help of which the user can interact with his application in a semi-manual mode.

A banal example: as a player, when using a web3 application, I come across analytical platforms and several at once. no one provides all the information about the game (websites, medium, youtube), wallets (also a few for security), exchanges, marketplaces, blockchain explorers, community tools created for the game or I create my own, excel tables, crunchbase, various other web3 services when you need to get a role. And this is just to fully and effectively play. You can do without half of everything, but then the efficiency will decrease. And it's not even about efficiency, it's Metagame layers of your product, which are also addictive and interesting to use despite overcoming pain and discuss all this in the community.

A Web3 user, even if he found your product through a search, in most cases, his next step will be to join your Discord or Telegram to look at health and atmosphere, ask about childbirth, what and how, pull support and ask tricky questions before using product. Again, I guess this is more often due to the fact that access requires an investment or with the development of a strategy for gaming and social behavior within the community for further earnings.

And the user also has a lot of problems: He needs to deal with cryptocurrency, install wallets (for different blockchains and understand which one is better), find out how to buy, secure and sell it and where it is best to do and safer. How does the crypto ecosystem work in general and why does some news affect the rate of his token, seemingly unrelated to this news. All these questions are usually answered by more experienced users and if they get some kind of recognition, then they continue to do so.

Based on the experience of people with whom I had to interact like a mentor (although it seems to me that he is so-so from me), I can say that more or less basic adaptation in the crypt takes about a year with intensive study of everything that happens in the crypt and direct participation in the process. 1% theory and 99% practice. And if the team tries to scrape together something on its own without a guide, it may take 2+ years or it will do it poorly, and by the end more than half of the knowledge will become completely irrelevant.

We are in a stage of rigid entropy and approaches and practices are changing very quickly. It feels like 1 week = 1 month in crypto. But something is still cemented after a few iterations.

In crypto, many projects are at the MVP stage and users act as testers and as voters, as contributors, and as investors and marketers, and help with user onboarding. They need to follow the steps and vision of the developers in order to understand how it will affect the token and in turn try to influence the developers. Sometimes it goes into the plane of politics. Disagreements with the community often ruin web3 projects.

Web3 applications often work with bugs, and not only your product, but also third-party applications, infrastructure, api, etc., and it is the community that helps with all these issues. Somewhere they can break the bridge and the effect of this can spread to you.

The best support is the community because they will react faster and answer a non-standard question, as they have already encountered similar cases. The collective mind solves this more effectively. In crypto communities, this is generally the basis of the basics. It also works as a career lift. Active community members are invited to the project. In general, it can be said that it must be done. Without delegation, it will be difficult to activate the community.

This is especially noticeable in the early stages of community building. Early adopters come, study the project: its prospects, get acquainted with the team, the idea of ​​​​how it works, and decide whether this project is worth spending time on or not. If yes, then who knows how to create content, invest, become an ambassador, tell friends, draw charts of the future price, study the code, test and contribute in every possible way and share conclusions in other channels. And the stronger the core community of older and more professional web3 users, the more successful it tends to be and the better the product in the eyes of the next customers.

To search for cases of how communities are built in web3, it is better to go either to top protocols, DeFi, DAO or to the NFT collection bluechip. In crypto gaming communities, best practices often come from NFTs rather than being born there. NFT is generally a cool sandbox for experiments. Use while they give 😉