The Gate-Gain community framework
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The Gate-Gain community framework
Every community in web3 has a gate and a gain. Based on where you are or want to be regarding the gate & the gain, your community-building strategy across the funnel will vary.
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Hi frens - Moon speaking,
Since unveiling our goal of taking Jericho back in LFB’s first edition, we’ve made good progress onboarding new members in the resistance.
We spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out the kind of people that’s needed to take Jericho back from the Goblins. We know numbers are necessary to make a difference, but we don’t want to count on mercenaries. We want to gather people around our cause, and so our strategy is based on curation and mission-alignment.
Because you can only understand that mission if we explain it, we decided to share our framework for approaching these decisions.
For the next edition: Should we first identify investors to rebuild Jericho (web3 VC mapping) or train aspiring builders (tips to get hired in web3)?
Community is everything in web3
Community directly translates to revenue through token-based economics (once you have a token), and even more directly to token appreciation (more buyers for a fixed supply = the price goes up).
Community is so important that building a community before starting on the product has been the path chosen by many successful projects. This strategy became known as the Minimum Viable Community (vs. MVP).
Prioritize community-building
Don’t half-ass the community, don’t think it’s easy.
Building a good community requires a lot of effort to attract, engage and retain members. There are tons of communities out there that people can join. If you don’t understand your funnel, persona, and why/how people will be aligned with your interests, you’re ngmi.
Community managers are essential in web3, and their job isn’t just posting stuff on Instagram - it’s about acquiring and leveraging the community members to improve the experience, the product & send tokens to the moon.
They do so across a 3-stage funnel: member acquisition, activation & retention. That’s just a general approximation of the reality, but it’s still a good model to have in mind when thinking about efficient community-building.
About acquisition
Above all, you need to acquire new members.
In web3, acquisition channels are actually very limited. Unless your focus is to onboard new users to crypto - in which case you can use paid acquisition channels like Facebook/Google Ads or SEO, for example -, the main levers to drive acquisition are:
Social Media (especially Twitter, including promotional activities such as Twitter ads or giveaways)
Referral (incentivizing current members to refer new members)
Content (videos, podcasts, newsletters)
PR (press)
Partnerships/Sponsoring (events, podcasts, newsletters…)
Influencer marketing
We’re closer to marketing/brand strategies than growth strategies in web3 (at least for the moment).
You usually want to direct attention to either your Twitter account, content, website, or Discord. If you are into building a community in web3, Discord is the tool you need to set up correctly and use to leverage your community.
About activation
When members are landing in your community, you need to keep them engaged and performing the tasks you want them to perform.
You’ve drawn the attention of a potential community member and now she’s landed in your Discord. Now it’s time to get her involved via:
Quests & bounties
Community calls
Governance
Contests
Working groups (or pods)
Internal events
Games
Product use
To nail activation, you need to know the persona really well: What drives her? What are her values? What does she love to spend time doing?
Make sure you get this part down, otherwise you’re just spending $ filling up a leaky bucket. Optimize priority engagement and/or intended actions before doubling down on acquisition.
If you don’t do activation correctly, members will join and either leave the Discord in a matter of minutes/hours/days or be completely inactive until they eventually leave your Discord months later.
Ultimate activation is the conversion from community member to product user (and then frequent product user). The only exception is (obviously) if you don’t have a product yet, which can be the case for some DAO models & pre-product early-stage projects.
About retention
Finally, when you have engaged users, you want to make sure you keep them.
To keep members engaged for months/years, you need to foster perfect long-term alignment.
Ownership (sub-DAO or working group leadership)
On-chain voting
veTokens
Product features
If a member ends up joining you full-time and working for your organization, you’ve nailed it, creating a viable path from user to contributor to operator.
Now that we’ve gone through the basics, let’s dive into community-specific strategies.
The Gate-Gain community framework
Every community in web3 has a gate and a gain.
The gate is the community entrance. You can either value quantity by making it open or quality by making it closed.
The gain is the reason why members join your community. Besides your product’s value proposition, you can leverage two types of incentives: social and financial.
Based on where you are or want to be regarding the gate & the gain, your community-building strategy across the funnel will vary. Here are some across-the-funnel ideas and tips for each community type.
Open Gate / Financial Gain
L1, L2, DEXes, Lending protocols - technically heavy and permissionless open protocols like Aave, Polygon, Sushi, Ethereum
Acquisition:
Explain your vision clearly and how you differentiate yourself - if people believe in it, they will seek profits by investing and supporting
Use a well-written whitepaper (Gitbook or PDF), PR campaigns, & influencer marketing (especially YouTube)
In general, invest in educating the market about your solution
Activation:
Retroactively airdrop tokens based on on-chain activity
Set up a forum to get ideas & feedback from the community
Ease governance as much as possible to allow anyone to participate
Retention:
Network effects kick in when people build on top of your protocol - invest massively in developer onboarding for integration development (grow-the-pie strategy)
Align the financial incentives over the long-term with veTokens
Closed Gate / Financial Gain
Investment & collector DAOs and guilds like PleasrDAO, YGG, or BitDAO
Acquisition:
Your mission is to build FOMO - this is how the brand will become strong
Communicate a lot about the members (who they are, why they are cool), returns, & perks
Invite-based member acquisition
Activation:
Demand financial input/investment as part of the selection process
Make sure people know each other, foster 1-1 relationships
Retention:
Generate returns (absolute prerequisite to drive word-of-mouth)
Be transparent on asset allocations and performance
Foster the feeling of asset co-ownership (we’re proud to own it together, it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise)
Open Gate / Social Gain
Onboarding solutions and open DAOs like Rabbithole, Layer3 or UkraineDAO
Acquisition:
Get as much mainstream awareness as possible
Use web2 acquisition channels (incl. paid)
PR & content campaigns
Personal branding from the founders (the more the vision/mission is communicated, the better)
Activation:
As financial incentives are lacking, either your mission must be very strong (like UkraineDAO or ConstitutionDAO) or your tool must be solving a really strong need (like education)
Make the onboarding as smooth as possible: People should quickly understand the context & know how they can contribute
Orient the topics of channels, activities, and discussions toward the cause/values/culture
Retention:
If you feel like the community moat isn’t big enough, find needs and build a product (besides the community) to strengthen the moat
Strengthen the community feeling with merch, events, or NFTs
As it’s social and open, people can easily come and go - create alignment by embodying the values perfectly as a team
Be transparent by communicating often about everything you’re doing
Closed Gate / Social Gain
Acquisition:
Even more than for Closed Gate / Financial Gain communities, build FOMO
Your community is a club, you’re in or you’re out - the stronger the mystery from the outside, the stronger the desire to get in will be
Generate value for members, let word of mouth play its role
Invite-based member acquisition
Activation:
Make sure people know each other, foster 1-1 relationships
Off-chain votes
Communicate internally - daily or weekly recaps are key
Make people feel like they’re part of the same movement by defining clear values and communicating about them
Talk to & onboard everyone individually
Retention:
Sub-divide the community with as much granularity as possible to keep groups small, accountability real, and connections strong (sub-DAOs of sub-DAOs of sub-DAOs of su…)
Involve people in governance and give them leadership
Use social status as a retention tool via NFTs (you lose the NFT = you lose access, you lose the community = you lose the status)
Even if you want to build an open community, I suggest starting small. It’s the best way to get quality feedback, understand people’s needs, and refine your setup/product/offer to fit the needs. Only then does opening it up make sense.
The GG framework is just that: a framework. It’s a spectrum, you could have part of your experience that is closed and another aspect open (access open, but contribution closed). BAYC, for example, is such a vast community with different asset holders and incentives that it could fit in all of the buckets.
Also, it’s not because your project is in one bucket right now that it will stay there. Some buckets make sense at a given point of the roadmap, but then things need to change later. You could decide to use social incentives and a closed gate to first build up a brand and then later open things up when needed to accelerate your growth.
More articles about web3 community-building:
Web3 work opportunities
Kiln (staking-as-a-service) is hiring a Smart Contract Engineer (Solidity)
Exclusible (luxury web3 platform) is hiring a Chief Product Officer
Crew3 (community quests) is hiring a Software Engineer
Eman.eth is looking for an UI design freelancer
Arthaud is looking for a technical co-founder to build the OS for on-chain companies
Let’s fucking build,
--
Moon