What I'm reading this week #010

My top 10 reads on community building.

Every week, I scour the web and curate 10 articles at the intersection of Web3, NFTs, macro, community & growth.

Time flies — it's already been 10 weeks! 🥹

In celebration of this little milestone, I'll start doing themed deep dives.

This edition is dedicated to community, inspired by my frens at Late Checkout Community College — a 4-week course on how to build communities I’m taking these days, hosted by the ones and only Greg Isenberg and April MacLean. ❤️

PS. If you want to have a sneak peek of the great folks that are part of this course, check out this Twitter list.

This is the second week of the course and it’s been nothing short of inspiring — I’ll most likely summarize the core learnings in bite-sized frameworks and infographics and share them here.

And now, onto this week’s content.

In this edition, you’ll find:

1. Why Community-First?

2. Start Small — You Can

3. Find Your Niche

4. Principles for Community Building

5. Community Narrative

6. Minimum Viable Expectation

7. Community Identity

8. Community Incentives

9. Rewards & Reputation

10. Community Management

Plus a little BONUS for the ones who stick around until the end. 🤫

Let’s! 🍕

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1. Why Community-First?

Why community-based products? Because they have high retention & engagement and form personal network effects — among the simplest yet strongest types of NFXs.

Read more about Building A “Community-First” Company on NFX’s blog.

2. Start Small — You Can

Communities don't have to be huge — they can start with free audiences, and then convert as few as 100 true fans as members. Just find a niche, start by building a free audience, and then a community.

Read more about your 100 True Fans on Li Jin’s blog.

3. Find Your Niche on Reddit

Scour Reddit and find a niche that is big enough, growing, trending, and that you're interested in. Join it, add value, and get to know the members, until you can create a closer space with some of them.

The Ultimate Guide to Unbundling Reddit

4. Principles for Community Building

Once you're ready to launch your community, don't forget to:

• Make it fun

• Bring it from the URL to IRL

• Set ambitious goals

• Bring in strategic partners early

• DON'T financialize it

• Keep it exclusive, but not exclusionary

Learn more about Community Principles on Coinvise’s Substack.

6 Principles For Building A Successful Web3 Community

5. Community Narrative

The most important piece of your community strategy is your narrative — WHO you're building for, WHAT problem you're solving, and HOW you're solving it. Use storytelling arches to bring this to life in a manifesto, whitepaper, or litepaper.

Learn more about Community Narrative on Coinvise’s Substack.

Shape A Narrative That Wins People Over To Your Community

6. Minimum Viable Expectation

In your narrative, be explicit about what members are expected to do — whether that's holding an asset (financial), spending time in the community (time-based), or providing a service (impact-based).

Learn more about MVEs on Coinvise’s Substack.

Shaping A Community Members Can't Help But Contribute To

7. Community Identity

To make your members feel like they belong, offer them aesthetic catalysts (eg. NFTs, merch, badging, etc.) right off the bat, to help them form their community identity and showcase it to the world.

Learn more about Community Identity on Three Quark’s Substack.

The Currency of Community

8. Community Incentives

To engage with your community, design rituals, quests, and homework that encourage autonomous action/contribution (agency) and reward mutuality (align the interest of the whole community aka grow the pie).

Read more about designing sustainable incentives on DocTom’s blog.

9. Rewards & Reputation

Reward members based on contribution to drive social capital (eg. badges, NFTs) vs. just financial — keep a leaderboard to encourage the formation of role models and leaders of sub-communities.

Read more about Reputation-Based Systems on Future’s blog.

10. Community Management

Define roles and MVEs so members know where they're at, can get more out of the community if they want to, and can choose when to advance to the next level. Design identity, incentives, and rewards fluidly.

Read more about The Three Circles model on Fabian Pfortmüller’s blog.

BONUS

Get tactical

Based on your strategy, grow your community — consider a social motivation and closed gate to start with to ensure member quality, long-term participation, and progressive value accumulation.

Learn more about community growth tactics on Jericho’s Substack.

The Gate-Gain community framework

Case study: Duolingo

How Duolingo scaled to 90 courses and 300M users via community building.

Case study: r/manga

How to mine community opportunities out of the r/manga sub@reddit.

Read more on Greg Isenberg’s Slideshare.

To close

1. Why community-First? Because of retention, engagement, and NFX

2. Start small, because you can, and should

3. Find your niche by mining Reddit communities

4. Design your community with strong principles

5. Articulate a powerful and compelling community narrative

6. Set a clear Minimum Viable Expectation for your members

7. Give members aesthetic catalysts to build community identity

8. Design incentives that optimize for mutuality and agency

9. Rewards based on contribution, and enable reputation systems

10. Design clear yet fluid roles for members to progressively grow their contribution

Thanks for reading all the way! Now, I’d love to hear from you.