May 15, 2022

Building Community with Web 3.0

29 minutes

Episode 15 - Building Community with Web 3.0

In this episode of Understanding Crypto, Paul Abercrombie and James Burtt announce the successful launch of their creator coin on the Rally network, which allows members of their Winner's Club to become stakeholders in the community. They explain that the creator coin is essentially a membership pass that allows users to own a piece of the community. When you buy these coins you become “raving super fans” because you now own a digital asset which is linked to the value of the community, and which can appreciate as the community’s value increases.

Building The Winner’s Club

Reflecting on their own experiences, Paul and James highlight the highs and lows associated with community building and continuity. They reminisce on the initial days of Winner’s Club, when they created the social audio platform without really knowing what they were doing. 18 months later the platform, which targets small business owners and entrepreneurs, boasts an accumulated membership of 42,000. One of their major concerns was the pressure that comes with ownership and "having to make the decisions about the direction of the community based on what we think the community wants, based on what they tell us," James says. The introduction of the creator coin alleviates this pressure as they "can now put it to the community to help to govern and have governance over it, because they can now buy in and they can buy their seat at the table effectively." [Listen from 6:36]

Web3 Tools: Fostering Greater Ownership

One word [that] describes Web3 is community," Paul says. A major goal of Web3 tools is to unlock potential value within communities across the web. By comparing a traditional business to that of their growing digital community, Paul highlights the major flaws in their initial administrative structure, exposing the ways in which emotional investment could not translate to operational authority. In the Web 2.0 world, community means that you’re part of a target audience to be sold to. Conversely in web3, you own part of the community. “With this it's a genuine community, because there's nothing to sell anybody because they've already bought into the community,” James points out. True participation and ownership could finally occur through the layering of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) over digitized communities. "You can unlock the membership to that DAO with the creator coin. So now you can say okay, you can participate in the community at one level … you have to hold x amount of creator coins and that unlocks your voting rights within the DAO," Paul remarks. They explain the benefits listeners could access when they buy into the Winners Club community, including access to the Discord server and premium mobile app, and exclusive content. [Listen from 9:27]

Innovative Strategies for Community-based Membership Programs

Using digital assets such as NFTs and creator coins to galvanize users around membership is a good strategy, Paul and James agree. Another important strategy is community events, and they have run several successful ones. Creators should ensure that their events are tied to a specific purpose associated with the growth of the community. Their purpose was to grow their brand, James tells listeners, “which is tangible, actionable, usable content for small business owners and entrepreneurs." Paul adds, "The definition of community should be about giving people a voice … allowing people to represent themselves in the way they want to represent themselves." They explain how using NFTs as tickets grows the community both from a community and marketing perspective. Build your community before launching an NFT, they advise listeners. The work they put in to build the Winners Club illustrates this principle, and is why they can now launch with confidence. Both James and Paul believe that their goal of creating "... an ecosystem that actually gives real value, gets real value and becomes really valuable as a result of it" is well on its way to materialization. [Listen from 17:57]

Key Takeaways