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- Communis, Communitas, Community
Product-Community Fit
Web3 is a space without boundaries, rules, or precedence. As individuals and teams strive for innovation, they quickly reach a fork in the road – should they help set the foundation for the space or start building on top of it?
There is no clear answer to that question, but this dilemma is just one of many that founders will continue to encounter. Although a universal dogma, deliberate decision-making is paramount in order to capture the endless potential of blockchain technology and more specifically of NFTs.
One primary issue with a lack of foundational precedence is the resulting mess of ‘blind follows blind’. Every Discord server, Twitter setup, and go-to-market strategy are cookie cutter replicas of those that came immediately before. This painstakingly incremental growth of cornerstones such as community building is rarely intentional. Rather, founders are focused on minimum viable products and/or products they hope to ship in the far future. There is no doubt that building a good product alone is a gargantuan effort, but this leads many to lean on existing templates for building communities as opposed to designing “Product-Community Fit”.
Community is one of the sole distinguishing characteristics of NFTs that sets it apart from other asset classes, such as stocks and cryptocurrencies. The rise of non-fungible tokens over the last couple of years gave rise to a slew of experiments, rugs, and groundbreaking successes. One undeniable truth that has emerged is that, unlike Web2 companies, a strong community is necessary for building a successful Web3 project.
Communis, Communitas, Community
I had the exciting and humbling opportunity of deconstructing the concept of “community” with Dem – a thought leader and trailblazer in community building. We explored everything from high level comparisons of Web2 and Web3 definitions of the word to dissecting the philosophies that led to the wildly successful community behind Azuki today.
“Community is a group of people that are sharing an experience either by choice or because they’re forced to… Community is a fickle beast because it’s a group of people with their own feelings and opinions… Community is truly the people that create, the people that I create for, and the people that make it worth getting up in the morning.”
Web3 provides a vast, open space for virtually anything to be formed free of traditional structures, boundaries, or rules. Thus, it has been exceptionally fascinating to witness the self-organizing nature, in many contexts, of NFT communities around common threads across both space and time. As Dem elegantly put it, community gives meaning to creation in a similar way as to how experiences and observers give meaning to art. In this sense, community building at the highest levels is truly an art form in itself.
Building a Home for Strangers
“As a Google product manager, community was almost an afterthought. It was a place you go to mine information. It was a place where you can do user research, but it was very much like a sort of box that you threw features at and got data out of. It was never a living, breathing group of people, and there was a massive wall between me as a product manager and the people that were using my product. It was a wall created by process and by how little people care about the product.”
As building communities taught us more and more about what makes Web3 communities unique, Dem felt an incredibly deep shift in his perspectives around these topics. For Dem, community evolved from an afterthought to groups with overlapping vested interests, and ultimately to anyone who identified as being part of a community. In the example of Azuki, the community includes not only holders of Azukis, Beanz, and Bobus, but anyone who resonates with the values of or simply cares about the project.
“It's an ever-evolving word, but at the end of the day, it's a group of people with human emotions. And there are human beings at the other end… You have to talk to each one of them and realize that they are real people and not just numbers. And you have to remind yourself of that everyday.”
If we take that bold step away from following what everyone else has been doing and what are ostensibly the models for success, we can begin exploring the true potential of building a community in Web3. As you stare at this wonderfully blank canvas, you can’t help but wonder what might possibly be the best way to seed a community. What colors, brushes, and textures should you use? How many layers do you need? What is the goal, and what values are important in the creation process?
In the case of NFTs, communities are commonly seeded in Discord servers, and one question that has continued to resurface as we built and innovated on top of community infrastructure is:
“How do you build a Discord server? More importantly, how do you build a home for people you haven't met yet?”
Right before you open up the server and just before you invite anyone in, you are setting up channels after channels. You are setting up not only security and infrastructure but for all intents and purposes the UI/UX for your project, brand, and future community. So, how do you even begin to design in such an unpredictably complex landscape?
“I was heavily influenced by Rules for Radicals as one of the books that I kept referencing constantly about how to create active communities of participators. So, how do you personally reconcile with the dichotomy of creating tools and frameworks and mental models around this thing without actually losing touch with the organic nature of communities?”
One strategy I have constructed is called a dynamic expansion approach, which leverages a minimalistic foundation and a utilitarian perspective. We focus on identifying what people need, as opposed to what we think they might want. Throughout the community curation process, We take extreme care in understanding each member and component of that group. We begin with the bare minimum for server functionality, and we integrate tools and experiences that serve intentional purposes as the community grows. The dynamic expansion approach is difficult to execute and something I am still actively learning more about. But I believe it's a perspective that isn't leveraged enough today that we hope more teams will keep in mind moving forward.
No structure results in chaos, but too much structure suffocates organic conversation and growth. Instead, lean on pre-established principles and philosophies that continuously evolve through interactions with communities.
One lasting visual we discussed was envisioning your community as a piece of marble. As you chisel away the excess and refine your medium, you reveal in many ways the community that was there all along.
Beyond the Art and Scalable Identities
One of the most misconstrued views of NFTs is that they are ‘just art’, and even crypto natives often misunderstand what NFTs are. Underneath these ‘non-fungible tokens pointing to URIs’ lies a beautiful piece of technology that has barely been tapped into. The existing layers found in Web3 today are only a fraction of what is possible with the countless points of interaction any individual might have with this technology. Importantly, this labile and pluripotent state of NFTs is one major contributor to the multifaceted identities NFT community members are able to create and make their own.
“I consider [Web3 communities] different in the sense that each individual is able to be multiple things. This means the community cares at an investment level, but they also care at the technology, ideology, and aesthetics levels. They care about coolness and what is trendy. Each individual has more layers because of NFT ownership, and the NFT technology allows for them to have everything from deep financial investment, all the way up to more surface level attachments.”
Even more fascinating is the intuitive, instinctive, and arguably visceral components of NFTs. Simply participating in or associating with NFTs comes with deep emotional effects that are in part derived from a sense of ‘ownership’. Tabling technical discussions about semantics for a moment, NFTs give individuals a sense of belonging to groups, families, and brands with or without actually owning an NFT. On the other hand, fungible tokens like cryptocurrency are, as Dem described, “too quick.” There are virtually no surfaces for community or identity to latch onto, and this temporal comparison provides in some ways the speed and texture of NFTs as an asset. In other words, NFTs exist in a slow enough environment, where meaningful human interactions are able to culminate into something bigger.
“The minute I run into an Azuki profile picture, I feel like I'm talking to a family member or somebody that is rooting for the same football team. I feel an instant connection with that person. They may not even speak my language, and it’s a tribal feeling.”
Gaming is one of the most intuitive use cases for NFTs after art, and one major obstacle for Web3 gaming is scaling of communities from tens of thousands to potentially millions of people. If a project scaled successfully and had millions of community members, do the identities and communities we have been discussing regress in proportion to that scaling?
“I don't necessarily think so because one thing you and I have talked about is the reality of a community as an illusion. A community is just a bunch of little sub-communities and within those little sub communities, sub-sub-sub-communities. So, how high up this hierarchy can you go? I don't want to say unlimited, but one hundred thousand or even half a million could still be sustainable.”
Bobu fractions is one extreme example of a semi-scaled collection with an intentional removal of unique identities, where every token points at the same image. In this experiment of sorts, the single variable we’ve altered is the PFP, which allows us to interrogate how important it is to have that image file. Everything else is in place, from the on-chain functionalities to Discord channel access.
“I would put good money on the hypothesis that there must be a PFP, and it must be anthropomorphically human. Or humanized to a sense that you can see eyes, mouth, nose, and know you’re talking to a person. I think that's the key to this whole thing…That's the final transformation of a random Twitter user or Discord user to a community member.”
One guiding principle I have followed when studying projects is the decoupling of rarity and aesthetics of traits. Rarity distribution of NFT traits is an early pain point nearly every team has faced, and these seemingly innocent numerical values can dramatically influence the final product. Intentionally or not, the Azuki team has done an incredible job at maintaining flat distributions of identity traits such as skin and hair color, where each option is relatively as common as the next. On the contrary, non-identity traits (e.g. offhand traits) have a much steeper distribution, where there is a significantly larger gap between the most common and most rare traits. In this context, potential community members are able to buy the NFTs they feel most represent them, while potential investors and collectors are able to simultaneously purchase NFTs based on financial factors such as scarcity.
“When Azuki launched, and I was looking for ones to buy, I couldn’t tell what was rare or not. And that allowed me to pick one that I liked.”
Effectively addressing this nuance in art design significantly expands the potential target population(s) and creates a much healthier economic environment.
“It’s a matter of how good the artist is and how much time the artist spends on the collection…a more skillful artist will set a higher bar for themselves, and they’ll say they need one more round of art. And if a team has enough vision, they’ll get one more round, and one more round, and one more round… I agree with you that doing anything else would be a disservice to the community because there are people coming here to look for an identity. And if you haven’t taken care of making sure the ‘floor’ provides a good identity for people, then you haven't made a good product.”
Uncompromising Principles
From the highs to the lows, Azuki has been built on uncompromising principles. Many of my perspectives and practices today were heavily influenced by my time as a member of Azuki’s prelaunch community team, and it was clear to me long before then that Azuki was beautifully unique. From a top-down pushback against the whitelist grinding meta to a refreshingly specific Asian aesthetic, I could almost hear, smell, and taste the project. The team embraced becoming a brand from day one, and almost every subsequent decision has been nothing short of profound foresight and flawlessly deliberate execution.
“Every community is different, and being able to clearly define, broadly, what it is you're trying to achieve with this group of people, these human beings, is so important. You can't just be random about it. You need to be deliberate. Definitions matter. And there needs to be a lot of thought and research into what you're doing.”
Principles allow leaders to quickly adapt to any situation and to maintain a state of absolute resilience. These guardrails and boundaries provide a controlled environment for aggressive experimentation. One such example is building of new community spaces, which often takes the shape of Discord channels. Dem innovated upon this process in a number of ways, including effective utilization of threads. Threads automatically disappear after lack of usage, which gives community members a novel form of agency around the existence of these spaces. Dem would also pull community members into threads he called ‘teahouses’. He saw existing groups of people who had things in common, in particular those magical moments when one person recognized another from somewhere else. Importantly, he realized that there must be more to these micro groups, and he would carefully pull on that string to bring more people into that budding sub-community.
“I understood that we needed to create micro groups of connective tissue…Kind of like you would do while hosting a party. You would start to create small circles, and it became easy for another person to join that circle… It was a very manual process, and it was definitely in-the-trenches kind of work. But methods and principles began to emerge over time.”
Over the course of this past year, the community building toolkit and landscape have evolved dramatically. While many have criticized Discord for failing NFT communities, my discussions with RareKoko (COO at SuperRare) led us to a different perspective. Discord was never intended to house hundreds, let alone tens of thousands, of people for the long term purpose of scaling online communities. This product was designed for tight-knit, intimate groups – largely used by gamers.
“From this perspective, Discord hasn't failed NFTs. Instead, many teams have failed in forcing a tool to conform to an unintended use. To address this, we need to approach both Discord and Twitter from a utilitarian view. How do we maximally leverage these tools as they are?”
By acknowledging Twitter as the original home for NFT communities, you are able to leverage this platform as a focal point for interactions, engagement, and building in public – a public domain. This perspective has already begun to take shape through changes such as increases in Twitter group chat limits. Importantly, this feature update represents more than just meeting consumer demands or a small victory for the few. This gesture signals a much larger shift in high level perspectives, a reexamination of building online communities, and a realignment of those communities with recent advancements in technology.
Discord, on the other hand, has been slowly but steadily developing and implementing its own product features. From auto-moderation to built-in soundboards, Discord is silently expanding its consumer base without the friction of publicly advocating for Web3 adoption. These efforts, however, require time, and the current Web3 communities can play a crucial role in meeting these companies halfway.
Azuki’s existing sub-communities are carefully planted seeds that are now receiving nourishing nutrients in the form of product evolution. The company’s newly launched community page serves as the earliest iteration of scaffoldings for guiding and supporting this explosive growth towards the brand vision. The Garden is an exceptional example of how teams are able to work hand-in-hand with their most loyal supporters to help build the future of online communities.
“A new kind of brand that we build together. A brand for the metaverse. By the community.”
Human Behavior and Experience
At the end of the day, human behavior is governed in large part by rewards and incentives, and Azuki has been a masterclass in managing expectations, anticipation, and ultimately satisfaction. They rewarded behaviors with praise instead of precedence. You never knew, fully, whether performing any one action would result in any one reward. But you learned, instead, that upholding certain principles often lead to desired outcomes. Through this kind of community infrastructure, the team was able to empower community members who were genuinely interested in contributing to this project and brand. And through this organic process of co-creation, we became more than friends, we became a family.
“Almost everyone is a part of multiple communities. But what makes people stay? I think that's a question that's not asked enough. You build a community, you attract people for a variety of reasons, and they show up. But why should they stay?”
People choose their homes and stay because of experiences, emotions, and memories. Companies that intimately understand their target audience will have the opportunity, but not guarantee, to create a lasting impression on those people. And, just maybe, we will be able to create a new world together, “…a world that's created by more and owned by all.”
