Web3 Community Growth Handbook: How to Overcome Internal and External Challenges in Community Building from 0 to 1
How to perform a cold start for a community.A project can start once it has gathered the Founder, technology, product manager, and community operations.
As one of the four essential elements, community operations face the most challenging issue in the initial stage: how to perform a cold start for the community.
Internal and External Challenges in 0-1 Community Building
In the early stages, community managers often find themselves in a situation of internal and external challenges:
Internal Challenges
Resource Limitations
At the beginning of a project, there may be a lack of sufficient manpower, time, and financial resources to support community building efforts. Community managers may need to accomplish a large amount of work with limited resources.
Lack of Mature Operational Experience and Community Management Mechanisms
In the process of building a community from scratch, community managers need to test different community management strategies to find the most suitable one for the project. However, this trial-and-error process often comes with high risks and costs. Due to limited team resources, community managers must cautiously bear the risks of trial and error and cannot afford to experiment too much.
External Challenges
Difficulty in Customer Acquisition
High barriers to product usage and poor user experience are hurdles that Web3 projects face in customer acquisition. Compared to the multi-channel customer acquisition strategies of Web2, the difficulty of acquiring customers in Web3 is even greater. Another hurdle is that during a bull market, new projects emerge continuously, leading to fierce competition and significantly increased options for users. Even attracting users who have already entered Web3 is challenging, as they have many alternatives, and projects must compete with numerous competitors.
Low Awareness and Weak Community Culture
The entire market is highly profit-driven, with users more focused on how to make a profit rather than the intrinsic value of the project itself. As a result, awareness of the project is low. Overemphasizing TGE to attract users may lead to low user loyalty and hinder the atmosphere and culture needed for the community to transition from the initial stage to maturity.
How to Address External Challenges?
Community Customer Acquisition
The first step in establishing a community is customer acquisition; a community only exists where there are people. The first hurdle community managers face is how to acquire customers. By considering the following three questions, community managers can find the best way to acquire customers for the community:
Who: Define the Target Users of the Community
The various tracks in the Web3 field can be roughly divided into trading and non-trading categories, with significant differences in the behaviors and habits of these two user groups.
Trading users primarily focus on market fluctuations and investment opportunities, seeking to maximize returns. They are highly sensitive to aspects such as the security and liquidity of trading platforms and tend to use professional trading tools and platforms while paying attention to the project's technical strength and team background.
Non-trading users are more interested in the application of digital assets in real life and innovative fields. They emphasize community building, product functionality, and user experience, and are willing to contribute time and resources to socially impactful and innovative projects.
After clearly defining the target users for customer acquisition, community managers can create suitable acquisition hooks based on the characteristics of different user groups combined with product attributes.
What: The Acquisition Hook
For trading users, TGE is one of the fastest methods to attract them, but relying solely on TGE is not conducive to the long-term, healthy development of the community, as these users tend to have low loyalty. When choosing hooks, community managers should consider multiple factors. In addition to TGE, they can promote aspects such as the product's professionalism, security, solutions, and the project's technical strength.
For non-trading users, they are more abstract and focus on connections between people. Therefore, the hook for community managers should resonate emotionally with this group, making them feel that this project and community can deepen their sense of identity in the virtual world.
Community managers need to carefully consider the choice of hooks, as inappropriate hooks may create unrealistic expectations before users join the community, leading to backlash.
Where: Choosing the Channels
In addition to traditional channels such as social platforms and media advertising, KOLs are also an important channel chosen by many projects. Over time, growth platforms have become an increasingly popular choice for many projects. For example, since 2023, 1inch has launched growth activities on various growth platforms:
Why are more and more community managers choosing growth conversion platforms like TaskOn?
Growth platforms typically have strong user data and analytical capabilities, helping communities accurately target user groups. This means the platform can display promotional and marketing activities specifically to users who are most likely to be interested, improving community customer acquisition efficiency.
They reduce the cost of user education, as users obtained through growth platforms generally possess basic knowledge, thus reducing the workload for community managers.
Growth platforms usually have their own growth incentives, as they aim to attract more users to achieve their growth goals. Therefore, collaborating with growth platforms can fully leverage their growth momentum, achieving "growth x growth" and helping the community expand rapidly.
Compared to other traditional marketing channels, choosing growth platforms for customer acquisition usually lowers user acquisition costs. Since growth platforms have a large user base and traffic, communities do not need to invest heavily in advertising or marketing activities.
With limited budgets, community managers need to be cautious in choosing channels to maximize the use of limited resources. Whether it is paid advertising on platforms, KOLs, or growth platforms, community managers need to evaluate costs. If choosing growth platforms, there are many options available in the market, and community managers need to fully understand the usage costs and effects of each growth platform, paying attention to changes and trends in growth platforms to ensure maximum customer acquisition effectiveness.
Channel Traffic Conversion
Clear user profiles × Precise hooks × Channels = Maximized Customer Acquisition Traffic. After determining and executing the growth model, the community's membership begins to grow. However, community managers need to realize that simply joining the community and then quickly exiting does not count as true community growth; community managers need to convert the traffic attracted by the channels into genuine community members.
Community Content
To address the issue of low awareness, enriching community content is key. The content of the community plays a crucial role when members first encounter it, determining their first impression of the community, understanding the discussion topics, and the expected content, subtly adjusting the mindset of new users.
Considering that newly joined users may have a highly profit-driven mindset, the community's content should be both attractive and educational, helping users understand the core values of the community and promoting interaction and communication with other members. Community managers can approach content production from two aspects: educational content and interactive content.
Educational Content: Convey Valuable Information and Knowledge
Educational content is crucial in community building. If new members cannot obtain necessary information or find the project's positioning in a timely manner, they may quickly lose interest and turn to other projects. Therefore, community managers should convey valuable information and knowledge to new members through the publication of special articles and guides, organizing AMA activities, etc., helping them better understand the project's core concepts and values.
In addition, a help manual is also very important; a good help manual can significantly reduce the repetitive workload for community managers. A help manual not only helps members understand the project's positioning but also serves as the first guiding material they encounter when they start experiencing the product. For example, Ethereum provides developers with a comprehensive, beginner-friendly Ethereum operation document:
Interactive Content: Promote User Interaction with the Product
Community interaction can be divided into interactions between members and interactions between members and the product. For community managers, promoting interaction between members and the product, and how to quickly convert community members into product users is the core goal of community operations. To achieve this, community managers can design interesting challenges and tasks, using game mechanics to cultivate users' habits of using the product. This is the first step for members to transition into product users, so it must be ensured that this process is simple and easy to follow. Some community managers set up Q&A sessions on third-party community platforms, placing the information they want to convey to users in a series of questions. As users explore the answers, they unknowingly build a preliminary impression of the project.
TaskOn supports systematic Q&A setups, which can take various forms, including simple questions or multiple-choice questions. The survey model can also help projects quickly collect user feedback.
Interactive content is not limited to Q&A. In communities like DeFi and GameFi, people hope to encourage users to gain a deeper understanding of the product through active usage.
Points and Levels System: Initial Construction of User Loyalty System
As the community customer acquisition channels are established and user education content is completed, the initial construction of the community is on the right track. Community managers need to invest some energy into building a user loyalty system. To cultivate the core user group of the community, community managers can consider introducing loyalty programs. Many community managers convert users' contributions into phased achievements.
In the early stages of the project, if time and energy are limited, community managers can use tools to complete the initial construction of the loyalty system: there are many community solution platforms on the market that can help community managers quickly build a loyalty system, starting with the establishment of a points system.
Reward users for their current behaviors with points, allowing users to accumulate points that can be exchanged for certain rights in the future, giving users something to look forward to.
Community Manager's Challenge: Internal Woes
Given the current state of Web3 development, the situation of insufficient team resources and personnel will continue for a long time. The internal challenges are not something that can be changed overnight. What community managers can do is to optimize community building through various means and tools within the limited time and resources. By quickly finding a suitable customer acquisition formula for the community using the 3W approach, leveraging tools to enhance their community management experience, and reducing trial-and-error costs, they can improve the efficiency and quality of community building.
