How to build a powerful Web3 communityin five steps

In real-world contexts, 80% of Web3 projects don’t do what it takes to build a thriving community. We’ve been consulting blockchain platforms for over six years on various matters and have professionally interacted with all kinds of audiences along the way. 

Motivated to share the knowledge, we’ve written this step-by-step guide on creating a solid Web3 community. 

Step 1: Determine your business goals 

Why do you need a community? 8 out of 10 projects that approached us with a request to build their community were unaware of why they needed this. Everyone’s heard that in the Web3 space, community is king, and growing one is a sure way to succeed. To understand the true goal, we had to ask the teams a series of leading questions. Surprisingly, the lack of insight into the underlying reasons for creating community became a revelation to most CMOs and CEOs.

Below are the most common business goals for the community in terms of request frequency. 

“We need clients.”

And any client, whether a GameFi player or a DEX user, will do. As long as they are using or will use the product the company is offering, they can become a part of the community. 

“We need people to buy our token or NFT.”

Keep in mind that the community of holders and the community of users are not the same. In most cases, the projects tend to combine both of these groups into one, ignoring the fact that they ask for completely different platforms and content.  Holders usually hang out in Telegram groups, while NFT investors and users stick to Discord. 

“We need to inspire trust to kick-start our fundraising campaign.”

Small and artificially inflated communities are huge red flags for investors. Early traction, on the other hand, tells the funds that the project already has an audience interested in it. This, in turn, increases the chances to kick off the first sales.

Step 2: Determine what a community member should contribute to your project

Establishing the fact that your project lacks users is one thing, but you also need to understand which steps people take before becoming your clients. For instance, if you’re looking to attract users for the DeFi analytics service, what will they do as a part of your community? 

Should they study the functionality in detail, figure out the product, realize its value, and eventually become clients? Or are you searching for a team to participate in your testnet launch?

Step 3: Decide on the size of your community

Think of the numbers, what would you consider a success, and which one would be a failure? The metrics will depend on specific business tasks that you identify during the first step. About 500 to 1,000 users, 10% of whom would complete the program, will be more than enough for a testnet.  

When we’re talking about regular clients, the calculations are slightly more complex. Plan your profit goals and decompose the number based on the funnel metrics. If you don’t have any, just take the average values at the start. 

For example, if the website conversion rate is 10% and one client brings you $1,000, to get a $100,000 profit, you’ll need:

• 100 clients
• 1,000 website visitors that come from your community (CR 10%)

In an average community, 20% of subscribers tend to visit the website (exceptions do happen, and the conversion rate can reach up to 70%), meaning that you need to aim for at least 5,000 subscribers. 

Step 4: Determine how the new members will join the community

Only big brands grow organic reach; everyone else needs to fight for traffic.

Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) wield influence, quizzes engage and educate, collaborations with other projects bring a synergistic buzz, and referral programs create a chain reaction of community growth. 

Step 5: Hire the right team 

Since even the most well-thought-out strategy can fail due to poor execution, a well-chosen team is 90% of the success. For one of our current projects, we selected four collaboration managers and worked with each of them for 1 to 2 weeks to see the results. Three collaboration managers brought in from 500 to 1,000 subscribers per week. The fourth one scored 10,000 in four days.

The Bottom Line

Web3 community building can be a bit like finding your way through a maze, and let's face it, most projects miss the mark. Why build a community? What do you want from your community members? How big should your community be? 

Everything depends on your version of success; that should not be a vague idea but a well-thought-out plan. And there’s a secret sauce: the people. We've seen it firsthand. A dream team makes dreams happen.