Community led-growth ⚡

Hello!

Welcome to "note to self" #7 focused on marketing in web3. 💻

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Today we're discussing community-led growth. Let's dig in 🍽

Community-led growth - an overview

To begin with, let's define community. A community has a home such as Slack or Discord, to bring people together. Within those channels, if the content is being created by you, you have an audience, but if the content is being created by the members of the community without you having to do anything, you have a community. This is a good way to work out if you have a community or an audience.

Community-led growth is a go-to-market strategy where companies give value by providing a platform to deepen customer interactions and brand interactions. Community-led growth is a go-to-market ( GTM ) strategy enhancer, it makes any GTM better or enhances it. It is not a new type of GTM.

Patrick Woods of Orbit clearly outlined the 3 community types in a recent article, which are important in order to categorize your community.

• Community of play: People coming together around a common interest ( e.g. a Basketball team ).

• Community of practice: People coming together to level up a skill or discipline ( e.g. a Slack group for designers to up-skill in their design work ).

• Community of product: People coming together to learn about and discuss a specific product ( e.g. a Discord group aimed at Figma usability ).

There are some key factors needed in a successful community-led growth strategy which include: Brands must establish their community as a trusted authority. Trusting the salesperson (in a sales-driven world), trusting yourself (in a product-led world), or trusting a community of peers/friends (in a community-led growth world) when it comes to seeking guidance or making decisions are good analogies ( h/t Corinne Riley ). Brands must create value before they extract value, and give more than they take. Ultimately, go-to-community helps build positive-sum relationships beyond just sales. But businesses should work out what the bridge between community and product is.

Community-led growth in play

The impact of the community is long-lasting. People have relationships with each other. The net expenses go down and the community goes up ( grows itself ). A great community returns compound at a better rate.

Having a strong community provides defensibility against competitor products or businesses that might enter your market. Developing an ongoing relationship throughout a community can mean a business will be a harder moat to disrupt.

1. Incentivised community

Your community needs clear incentives and these should be aligned with the company's success. Through the power of web3 we can incentive community-led growth, but before this, we need to establish an existing community or tribe and use tokens as an incentivization layer combined or on top of something that’s already working. You don’t want people coming into your community only to speculate on the token price. You want people who will drive value for the community.

Tokenisation creates a community of ownership, and community members become like stockholders. So these community members are incentivized to spread the word about your brand. The goal is for sustained community growth to occur.

As mentioned above, if the content is being created by you, you have an audience, but if the content is being created by the community without you having to do anything, you have a community. If your audience begins to decentralise and content creation and conversations are handed over to the wider community, you have a community.

Gaming and lifestyle brand 100 thieves incentivised engagement within their audience by releasing free digital collectables ( NFTs ). They now hold this web3 relationship with their audience, and this audience is more likely to be bound to the 100 thieves community. Interestingly they didn’t mention NFT, blockchain, or crypto at all when releasing them, engaging a larger non-crypto native audience.

2. Enhancing your product

To start, I want to define what a community-based product is ( h/t Greg Isenberg ). It's when the community is the product ( e.g. Clubhouse ) or the community enhances the product ( e.g. BAYC ). As mentioned above, community-led growth or CLG enhances GTM strategies. The relationship between your go-to community ( GTC ) and GTM should be synergistic.

An engaged community of customers of your product(s) and potential customers within a forum will naturally share ideas, and more experienced customers can help new customers. Community-led support like this will likely lead to the improved adoption of your product and increased product retention.

The conversations and content within a community can reveal what actually matters to them and what they struggle with. By engaging with your community, you can establish great feedback loops and you can feed these insights back into your product or business. An engaged community can be a fantastic complement to a product-led GTM.

Understanding community motivations and customers' key points of success are important. A community journey can be similar to a customer journey. Understand why people joined your community and what milestone they want to hit from being in your community, then provide them with the tools or products to help them hit that milestone.

CLG ( community-led growth ) case study: Notion

Notion’s community strategy is fantastic. Using their own customers as brand advocates ( or 'Notion Pros' ), for example, has led to user-to-user interaction and engagement to promote the Notion product. Notion has created a flywheel of customers and Notion Pros to grow their business. The below shows community channels utilised by Notion.

As visualised below, a large amount of Notions growth comes from organic search, which is a compliment to the value it fosters for its community.

In other news: 📰

-> Jack Dorsey says Twitter should be an open source protocol, and Elon Musk thinks a social media company based on blockchain is needed.

-> Robinhood tests out self custodial wallet with Polygon.

-> Blog/Pod/Video of the week: The Four Growth Frameworks You Need to Build a $100M Product.

Spotlight💡: Orbit

What: The leading community growth platform. Orbit helps you understand and grow your community across all of your platforms online or off. Customers include The Graph, Dfinity, Stripe, Vercel, Github, and many more.

Why: Building and scaling communities are hard, and the growing number of community platforms makes it even harder. Orbit unifies the member journey into a single place, where you can manage members, build reports, and take action to grow a high-gravity community.

Who: Patrick Woods ( CEO & Co-Founder ) and Josh Dzielak ( CTO & Co-Founder). Both founders are heavily involved with the community.

Check them out!

Thank you to Patrick Woods of Orbit for their feature this week.

Next time: ⏭️

Next week I will discuss web3 go-to-market ( GTM ) and GTM motions. 📈

Note that we'll be releasing each Monday from now on, to provide you with some wisdom going into the week.

Have a great week!

Harry Arkwright