Original author: Nick Martitsch
Original translation: TechFlow
Many crypto teams are too focused on short-term growth strategies, struggling to nurture high-cost user acquisition efforts into active, long-term communities. I recently had a roundtable discussion with intern from monad_xyz and binji_x from Optimism about what drives network effects for Superchain applications and the rapidly growing Nads ecosystem, and how other teams can apply these lessons to their early growth efforts.
Here are my five key learnings on building a sticky user base in crypto:
1. Community is the core of your ecosystem’s growth flywheel
Everyone wants to interact with users where they already are. When community members promote your project, this sends a signal to application developers and infrastructure providers, reducing the risk of their decision to join your ecosystem. These new infrastructure and applications attract new community members and users, and the virtuous cycle continues.
Link Marines are a prime example of this phenomenon, promoting Chainlink’s core value proposition on Twitter, protocol forums, and other mediums where oracle provider decisions are discussed.
The social proof of the Monad community has become a significant selling point for development teams considering where to deploy their applications. Some teams only need to tweet "gmonad" to find that this is their highest engagement post, thanks to the enthusiastic responses from Nads. The Optimism ecosystem team often mentions this, with the slogan: "Community isn't everything, it's the only thing" and uses it as a guiding principle for developers to adopt.
Teams should incorporate community experience into their day one growth strategy and consider hiring for community roles at an early stage to kick-start this flywheel – making future infrastructure and application business development work easier.
2. For early community building, qualitative experience trumps quantitative metrics
Participating in your community should feel like being at the start of the next wave of the internet, with members actively shaping the discussion and influencing the trajectory of development. This feeling is hard to measure other than spending ten minutes on your Discord/forum to see if you actually enjoy the experience and want to contribute to the vision.
Many teams make the mistake of setting goals based on hard metrics, like Discord member counts and Twitter followers. This approach optimizes for bot-like interactions with a large group of people who are only interested in surface-level content. This can hurt the real human connections needed to build a community and make it even less likely that you’ll retain your most valuable members in the long run.
As the community scales, the team should find key metrics that are still tied to qualitative experience. Kevin likes to track the number of high-quality replies to the Monad Twitter account, filtering out the “GM” messages to see how many people are actually engaging. Binji also likes to watch the number of replies to follow-up comments in the main thread — a sign that real human interaction is happening between community members.
3. Incentives may be why users join, but culture is why they stay
The crypto industry is not the only one using economic incentives to attract new users. PayPal, Uber, Airbnb, and many other Web2 companies seeking to solve the cold start problem have long done so. What is unique to the crypto industry is the scale of the incentives and the over-reliance on this mechanism to drive short-term adoption.
Any user onboarding scheme needs to be coupled with a user retention strategy, something too few teams think through. In the process of onboarding at scale through missions, airdrops, and other incentive programs, teams risk undercutting the real interactions that built the community in the first place by selecting bots and farmers.
If users discover a use case, experience, or connection that deeply resonates with them, they will stay in the ecosystem. Teams should view the onboarding process as the starting point of the user funnel and focus on creating memorable experiences that keep users coming back.
4. Promote and optimistically delegate trust within the community
Your community is your most effective lever for reaching new regions, crowdsourcing product ideas, and expanding beyond the capabilities of your founding team. To fully leverage the wisdom of your community, create a structured process to identify and empower your best community members into formal roles.
Optimism has different contribution paths for data analysts, content creators, developer support, and other key functions, and participants can be retroactively rewarded with grants for their hard work. Monad has promoted over 15 community members to key roles to expand and teach the community, and has yet to rescind any responsibilities due to a loss of trust.
If you don’t empower your community, don’t expect them to stand up for you.
5. People-centered leadership creates a people-centered community
People want to interact with other people, not with companies or robots. Look for ways to increase human interaction during onboarding, even if it seems difficult to scale.
Monad started a new channel on Discord where new users had to engage in conversations with real people in order to pass the vibe check. Counterintuitively, this additional onboarding barrier led to improved retention, as users felt a stronger emotional connection to the Discord channel after spending 10-15 minutes on it when they joined.
At Optimism, Binji intentionally engages with the OP community through his personal account as often or more frequently than through the main Optimism account. When community members are able to connect with real people and build relationships, they are more likely to have meaningful conversations.
