by
Yasi ZhangFor tech startups, especially blockchain tech startups, creating and nurturing a healthy and robust community can lead to enormous success. Without it, many projects failed to launch in the market.
The relationship between a blockchain and its users is symbiotic by nature. The decentralized network thrives with active developers and users — similarly, the community blossoms when the blockchain project is active, competent, and conducive to growth.
It is in everyone’s interest to create a climate that will enable and further this relationship. The fact that an ICO aims to raise funds from investors and kickstart the network’s decentralization by dispersing tokens makes it obvious why this factor is so important. And these are just surface-level benefits. As we’ll see later in this article, many other benefits exist that are not immediately apparent.
Why a Strong Community Is Crucial
As someone looking to hold an ICO, building a solid community should be top of your priority list. There are many reasons for this.
Crowdfunding
If no one wants to participate in your fundraising, then what is the point? For the offering to be successful, you need many investors waiting impatiently in the queue to buy your token and invest in your project. Many of the top ICOs in 2021 had upwards of 150,000 investors in the queue. While these cases may be outliers, remember that you need only a fraction of that for your own ICO to be a success. If 10,000 people invested just $100 in your ICO, and you’ve already raised $1,000,000. Therefore, to raise enough funds for your blockchain project, you need a strong community willing to support you.
For the Health of a Decentralized Network
We need to remember the central tenet of cryptocurrency, don’t be central. In other words, get your tokens into as many different hands as possible. This process will jumpstart the decentralization of your network and improve its long-term health. This mindset of being as decentralized as possible doesn’t only benefit the health of the network. It will also play a significant role further down the line when your token gets listed on exchanges. More users holding your tokens means more liquidity. Once trading commences, there is more price stability.
Raising Funds From Professional Investors
Yet another benefit of being very decentralized comes from investor perception. It’s widely known that investors see token dispersion across the userbase as an essential factor when analyzing a potential investment. No one likes when a large portion of the network’s tokens are concentrated in the hands of a few. If investors see that very few “whales” exist and the tokens are split between countless users, they are more likely to invest in your token.
For Promoting Your Project Organically
The next major benefit of having a large community lies within the Marketing department. Your community represents a unique marketing opportunity, one that is both highly desirable and free of charge. People like to talk about the things they are passionate about. If your users are passionate about your project, they will surely talk about it online and help you spread the word. Every day, places like Twitter, Reddit, and Telegram are abuzz with posts and comments regarding new blockchain platforms and upcoming projects. Therefore, having a core of engaged and passionate users, even if it is small at first, can give you access to a form of potent organic marketing that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to leverage.
It is important to stress that you do not need thousands of eager users spreading the word online about your project. There is a certain snowball effect when it comes to this. As little as a few posts or comments on Reddit/Twitter that go viral can kickstart awareness of your project. It usually goes like this; A user that is passionate about your project will attempt to talk about it, and they make a post, which gets seen by other online users who are intrigued and go to research your project. A small portion of these newcomers will, in turn, fall in love with it and will probably end up talking about it somewhere. This can lead to awareness of your platform or upcoming projects spread like wildfire through these online communities. Your goal is to ensure that you grab users’ attention as soon as they look you up online. This is where your fantastic website, whitepaper, team, and other factors come into play to hook them in.
How To Build a Strong Community
Successful ICOs have done exceptionally well to build large and active communities. That being said, best practices for running a successful ICO aren’t an exact science. There isn’t a magic, one-size-fits-all solution we can use to achieve our goals. But, we can look to some examples from the past and draw some valuable insights from their strategies.
Initially, ICOs used to rely on word-of-mouth advertising and airdrops to kickstart their launch. However, as competition for available funds quickly ramped up, companies holding ICOs had to adapt and improve their strategies to gain an edge. This evolution gave birth to a diverse set of strategies used to attract users and build a community. Let’s take a look at them:
Communicate a Unique Project Identity
As we’ve discussed earlier, passionate users make for great organic marketing. So how do you achieve that? First, you need to give your potential users something to identify and connect with. This is done by creating a solid and unique identity for your project, which sets you apart in a vast sea of other projects. Users are more likely to care and develop a passion for your project if they know exactly what it is and what it stands for. For example, the core idea of the now famous Tezos ICO, which raised $238,000,000 back in 2017, was a unique system of self-governance that promised to put the power in the hands of the users for all major decisions regarding the network. This concept greatly appealed to users and made them connect to the project’s identity.
Engage With Your Communities Regularly and Directly
Next comes the digital infrastructure. Back in the day, if users wanted to discuss their favorite projects, they had little choice. It was mostly scrappy forums or Facebook groups. Nowadays, all successful projects take this very seriously, and for a good reason. Every project has an official Telegram channel that is usually the first stop for any new user that wants to learn more, and because of that, you need to set up the channel properly. Having an automated bot that responds to common questions and redirects links can save you thousands of hours as most newcomers ask the same questions.
Apart from that, hiring professional community managers is also very important. Having pros managing your channels gives a sense of legitimacy to your project and will undoubtedly come in handy if there is a massive influx of new users. It would be best if you didn’t stop at only having Telegram channels. Dedicated forums, Discord channels, and a GitHub presence can be powerful tools if you want to fulfill the needs of advanced users. This is especially true if you’re going to attract committed developers to your platform.
Recognize, Involve, and Reward Your Communities
Aside from defining your identity and building your communication infrastructure, there are other more active methods that blockchain companies use to develop their communities. These include AirDrops, referral programs, leaderboards, bounties, and content incentives, among others.
A prime example of how to effectively utilize these strategies is the recent Mina Protocol ICO. Their ICO was a massive success, attracting more than 150,000 investors and crashing the CoinList website in the process. So what made their ICO so enticing? Well, many things. Let’s take a look at the diverse set of community-building tools they used.
The first method Mina used was a community leaderboard based on activities that contributed to the project. The leaderboard incentivized users with MINA tokens based on various available challenges. These challenges included activities such as ‘Like, Retweet and Tag,’ which significantly boosted their Social Media numbers, ‘Telegram Referrals,’ ‘Values Champion,’ which awarded users based on their connection to MINA’s values. And it didn’t stop there; users were also rewarded for creating content on the platform’s subreddit and creating “Mina Deep Dive Videos’ in the form of educational videos or podcasts.
As you can see, the Mina Foundation leveraged its passionate userbase to create a powerful marketing growth strategy. This effort was backed up by a strong Telegram, Discord, and forum presence that connected all users in various activities.
Mina didn’t stop at just this, however. They developed a strong Grants program designed to encourage community members to take up projects on the Mina protocol. This program offers grants for technical projects, such as developing a Browser Wallet or various APIs, and marketing and community projects. These grants are paid out monthly in Mina tokens and offer an excellent opportunity to recruit talent to their platform.
Conclusion
Many strategies and methods are available when it comes to effective community building. In this article, I have outlined a number of them that have worked wonders for projects in the past. Of course, creating your own unique community-building tools and combining them with existing methods can also lead to great results.
In the end, the best way to attract people and form a community is to create a solid project based on the values you find, communicate your project clearly to attract people who share the same values, and engage with them directly. Building a large and engaging community is not a one-night result; it requires the project team to know how to use marketing tools and channels effectively so that you can reach out to your future community members effectively.
If you want to learn more about using marketing to promote and scale your blockchain project effectively, write to us or book a 15 minutes consultation call.