Hello friends, and welcome back to club fi clubs podcast. I'm your host, Jess. And today we are joined by a new friend of mine, someone who have quickly helped to expand my thinking on the work the effort to value the process of building valuable communities. David spanks is a lifelong practitioner of community building. And we're lucky today to be able to dive into both the philosophical and the practical aspects of building communities. In Web three, this might be the most crucial episode for any of you who are out there who are building communities in web three, we start off talking about consumer empowerment, and how the role of community has evolved as consumers have grown in power. And then we dive into the specifics of how do we onboard people get more people into communities? How do we create the sense of belonging? And what roles and infrastructure required to actually be able to deliver on that over the long term? The first half is very philosophical. It's a wonderful conversation, the second half gets into the tactics, so make sure you stick around for that. Let's jump into it. Welcome, David.
Thanks for having me, Jess.
Yeah, Dave, why don't you just take a minute and introduce yourself?
Sure. I'm David. I co founded a company called cm x. Eight years ago, CMS is a network of community professionals. And we host conferences, research and online community events. And I've basically just been working in community for my whole career. Most of my life, I started building online communities when I was a kid for video games, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater four was like Game of choice. And that kind of opened my mind to the opportunity of building community online. And then I got into it as a career. My first job was a community manager helped co found the community manager calm. And I've just been basically banging this drum of community driven business for a long, long time. And now in the world of web three, it feels like the world of community and business have finally merged into one, just how I always wanted it. And that's me. Oh, I should add also that I recently published a book called The business of belonging, which kind of just sums up my 13 years of experience, building community and trying to help businesses have a playbook that makes it easier for them. So
like the boss move for me would be to have that book here and hold it up. It is in my other room, just so I don't have that here. But yeah, I think like, some very interested this conversation, because I think you've been on my radar for a number of years. So I think I've seen you sort of lean it. Well, I think through CMS and all the work we've been doing over there for last couple years, you just been a very prolific writer and speaker and advocate, I think for for communities, which it seems like that's shifted quite a bit lately, I think you're kind of alluding to here with a sort of combination of business and community. And so it's just like a whole host of threads that I kind of want to pull on, you know, the like, I think there's that there's a conversation area here for us to go into sort of like the high level philosophy and like impact of community driven businesses or organizations. And then there's like this other set of very practical, like, how do you go build, do etc. And I think both of those are probably really interesting to to our listeners here. So like, I think maybe an interesting place to start is your book. You know, you're saying it's a culmination of a 10, maybe even longer years of work. What is the core thesis through that? And maybe a couple of the core insights that you think would be relevant here?
Yeah, yeah. So 13 years of doing this work professionally now. And it's a very practical book. It's not necessarily making a lot of bold points after chapter one, like chapter ones kind of why you should care and why I always believe that community would be the future of business, and why it's important and valuable and smart for businesses to invest in community. And then the rest of the book is basically the the playbook. Great. All right. If you're bought in, you believe that community is going to be really important for your business. How do you put together a strategy starting from the business outcomes that you're trying to achieve all the way through to the day to day work that you're going to do to engage people facilitate connections, build belonging, and grow the community?
So it was sort of that first part then chapter one like fate that's maybe where we've seen the biggest shift in the last little while around like the understanding and importance of why community is so central to business and maybe I would almost say that like the big shift recently has been away from like build business and then tap community on top of it to now community kind of truly being the core of business, but how are you making that point to the broader market?
Yeah, so there's a couple lines here. One is the historical context of how business has been evolving over time. If you go like way back when to the start of business, you know, literally the the enemy The word company comes from calm, which means together and Panisse, which means bread. So it's coming together around bread, which goes back to, you know, the earliest days of businesses, which was traders traveling around and gathering in places and trading their goods and wares and eating together. And you know, over the years business developed all the way up to the Industrial Revolution, where it really became about mass production, and just creating products at this extreme scale. And the worker, and the consumer was not very human centric, it was very commodified, right, like the worker was just a means to create the product. And consumers didn't have a lot of power, right? If you bought something, and it didn't work, or you didn't like it, you could tell the people around you. But you know, outside of the telegraph, there were in a lot of communication channels to spread word of mouth if a product was bad. But since then, what we've seen is the continuous growth of the ability of consumers to talk to each other to communicate, to share information to share reviews. And so eventually, that led, you know, with the advent of the Internet, and our ability to review products and talk about them, companies started to have to care about customer service more and more and more, until it got to, you know, the companies like Zappos that kind of pioneered customer service as a competitive advantage for businesses, which back then was a bold idea to say, like, you should care about your customers and have customer service, they really carved out a competitive advantage, even though they're just selling shoes, it was because of customer service that people really got to know them, then that led to customer success, where it's like, Alright, we're going to proactively invest in making our customers successful in their work and careers and and using our products. And, and just as consumers have grown in power, thanks to the internet, because they could collectively work together and combine their efforts and their voice. Companies have had to care more about what the consumers need, and about empowering them. And that's led all the way to, when I publish this book talking about community led business or community driven business, which I think is taking it even a step farther than customer success to say like, Alright, we're going to invest in us helping you into like, we are going to start creating ecosystems, where you are now able to help each other and you can actually take on leadership roles within the community you can create for each other, you can support each other, you can feel like you have ownership in what we're building. And then that I think, I mean, it's crazy how fast things are evolving now into the next evolution of these kinds of ecosystems over in web three, where it's going beyond like, We are a company, and we're gonna make you feel like you have ownership even though you know that Uber driver doesn't have ownership and Uber and Airbnb host doesn't have ownership, they might feel ownership or influence, but they literally don't have it. And now in web three, we're seeing what I see now is kind of the ultimate culmination of this trend towards community driven business, which is like, literally the community is owning the business and creating it, and building it. And so there's that line. And then real quickly, the other line of it is that it's just like, the reason why you should care about this as a business is because it's just really smart. It's really efficient, it's really practical. Because the simplest way I can explain it is imagine you're a 10 person company, and you're building a product, and you're doing marketing and doing all these things, but you are doing everything as a company, right? Like you are building everything you're marketing it, you are creating all the value. And compare that to a company that has the same 10 people, but has 1000 people around it, who are advocating and creating content and helping build the product and contribute to it, which company is going to be more successful. It's obvious, right? It's going to be the one that has this community are built around it a people who believe in it, who feel a sense of belonging to it, who are building into this whole ecosystem, who are adding their value to it. And that's where you see a company like Duolingo, that's running 2600 events a month with a team of three people or Google Developer Groups with over 1000 chapters all over the world. It these are all community driven programs, where instead of the company saying we're going to host all the events, they build a community ecosystem where they empower people to create that value for each other.
I love that framing of looking at through the lens of consumer empowerment, and then almost to sort of see like that line almost gets extended more as you go beyond empowerment to ownership. And also it's funny to me how little these sort of words or concepts are actually being talked about in web three. Like there seems to be this like very big firewall between like corporate discussions of community and you know, the idea of customer success. Those sort of roles haven't even bubbled up over in Doull answer in web three and yet, you know, the roles. I think some of my big lessons in building these organizations is that like, shouldn't probably just reinvent everything, right? Like, there's probably insight baked into all of these things. And that like those types of roles are structures, with ownership with governance with with sort of exit built in, or actually maybe the right way of structuring it. So I'm just gonna give a flashback to when I started working in marketing and branding and, you know, strategic initiatives within corporations. Yeah, catching me off guard a little bit. It's kind of interesting.
I had a lot of time. I mean, one, yes, web three is definitely reinventing a lot of wheels, including community to is like, I'm interested to see what happens when these Dows start working, and they start building products. And then those products have consumers and those consumers aren't necessarily members of the dowel. And they're just literally going to be building the same things over again, like, Okay, well, those customers need support, and success and marketing and product. And all these things great, like the Dow is going to still have to be able to solve for those problems and provide those those services. My third thought on it, which is a rabbit hole, we could go down. But I think there's like part of a challenge right now for web three that I've observed, as I've been kind of straddling both worlds is this idea that web two is just all going to have to come to web three, it's inevitable. And so we don't really have to work together, when in reality, I think the next 10 years are going to look much more collaborative between web two, and web three, like web two is still going to be here, a lot of systems are still going to be web two, it's not going to replace web two, it's additive. It's not either, or,
okay, that's a conversation I'm very eager to have with you. Because I have opinions on it as well, when it comes up when you're talking about sort like that, how Dows are actually gonna be able to manage customers, etc. Like we're seeing this right now. You see this through projects, like party Dow that are very focused on building tech tools, and also are like servicing customers, people coming together, buying building, you know, maybe in a different way, like somebody like mirror, more of a traditional structure, they're not fully a dowel yet. But what you're seeing is sort of this crowd as Dallas customer service role really be taken on customer service meets marketing, these customer success, who kind of like banging those together. But I was also on a call earlier this morning with a liquidity platform and with their partnerships team and watching them like struggle to kind of put together how to actually structure and manage these things. And it came off as kind of like, not super well thought out, well intentioned, great people like there's just like a lot of forgiveness. I think it's we are trying to figure this stuff out right now. But without a doubt, like the big gap in a space, I think, is professional actors, right? So how do you step up and actually take responsibility to deliver an outcome at a level that is on par or greater than they what's available, especially as competition comes in? And I think so much of the space that we're in right now that I think gets to your second point around like web two versus web three is that there is this like, wonderful gap in time right now where the regulations are super unclear. There isn't a huge user base here, right now, there's a ton of concerns around environmentalism or just broad misunderstanding by the consumers generally, that makes trying to step into the space, like literally toxic for many of these companies, which is creating this huge opportunity for web three native Dows. Right, I think it's actually probably one of like the most bullish things for Dows. Today is just how hard it is for more traditional organizations to jump in. But it's not always going to be like that. So yeah, super interesting to kind of go down that thread. But I think I could be mistaken if I didn't just take the time to to, like I always feel I used the word community to mean a lot of different things in a lot of different contexts. And I realized I'm guilty of that. And when I talk about community ownership or participation, I think my big fear is somebody's like, Okay, well, what do you really what do you really mean by that? And maybe I can think well on my feet, but like, you come across as somebody who's put a lot of thought into, like, what the definition of community is. And I'm curious if you can help us, help us define that or like, what's the appropriate way of using it?
Yeah, it's both my favorite and least favorite question. Because they like, there's no one answer that does it full justice. There's different ways that I like to think about this question. On one hand, you have the aspect of the anatomy of a community, right? So when you say something as a community, what what is the anatomy of that group? And when people talk about it that way, it tends to make this sort of assumption that a group or community is homogenous that like it has to be this group that has a consistent experience that have a community, when in reality, no group is ever homogenous in its level of community. It's always going to be these concentric circles. Imagine it like a solar system, with the sun at the middle and then the circles around it, where you're going to have a core of people who feel a very strong sense of commitment and belonging and connection. And then as you move outward from that core, the people who are involved are going to have less and less commitment and a sense of belonging and that sense of connection, but there's still going to have some level of connection, right? And so like a web two examples, Airbnb, you know, when they IPO, they said the word community over 300 times in their paper, and people were like, it's bullshit. They're using the word community just to like market it. And I said, Well, it depends who you talking about within the Airbnb ecosystem, if you're just talking about people who follow them on social media knows about the brand. Yeah, they're not going to feel a strong sense of community. But then as you move more into the middle rings of what if they're a host? What if they're a super host? What if they work at the company? What if their founder like as you move more into the middle, the level of community is going to grow and grow and grow? And so my first answer that question is generally, like, all groups are communities, they're not necessarily deep or meaningful communities if they don't have a strong core. And it depends who within that community you look at specifically, but all groups of people that have anything in common, which is technically all all groups, because we're all people. On the most basic level, we have that in common, we are all human. All of them have communities just on a spectrum of depth. So that's one way that I like to help kind of reframe the answer to that question. It's not a yes or no, it's, it's to what extent, and then I'll just share another way of defining it or way of thinking about it that has stuck with me for a while that I really like because it distinguishes between, we're just a group of people in a forum, or a discord or an event, who are connected versus actually feeling a sense of community. And that is a community is a group of people who are willing to make your problems, their problems. And so if you really feel like this is a group of people that if I were to have a problem, if I were to need money, if I were to need help, if I were to need someone to show up for me, this is a group that would do that. And if I don't feel confident in that being true, then it's probably not going to feel like a very strong community to me.
I love that. That's the soundbite I was looking for.
Sorry, I give the long winded answer first.
No, no. I mean, that's why I love these open conversations. I think truly what you did there was give me permission to use community very broadly. Because I think that's kind of how I think intuitive as well. But then ultimately, like, there's when we start to think about making decisions around community, so how do we choose a community to work with? Like, is there a community there that it actually becomes a little bit more of a practical question? And I think that's where I still end up in this, like, you know, community could be 10,000 people for a certain project and three for another. And it really depends on like, what you're trying to go after and achieve. So
yeah, and I would say that, like the companies that use community but aren't genuinely working to create depth within those inner rings are kind of full of shit, right? Like they're trying to call community when they're only focused on the loosest, the most outer rings, they're not really focused on building that depth and sense of belonging and connection. Probably shouldn't be using it to to broadly,
right. I think, actually, that's how we got connected. I think I was tweeting something about Dows, and community and you had a wonderful retort, which was like, What have no doubt in our communities? What are we trying to get out there? And maybe, I mean, I've seen your studies in your Twitter name, so I was like, okay, he's gone down the rabbit hole pretty quickly. But yeah, I'm curious, like, what were you thinking there? And what sort of changed? Yeah, I
mean, that that was definitely in the early stage of my journey down the rabbit hole. And just like maybe this is a good perspective for people who are web three natives as well to see like, alright, if I came in, and I'm looking at all these downs, you know, for the most part, I'm joining discords, that are very noisy, have very little actual community facilitation, or onboarding, or design, it feels very haphazard. I'm seeing groups that are very financially incentivized, which financial incentives are proven to replace intrinsic motivation. So where you have social value of like, I'm going to help you because I'm your friend. But as soon as financial incentives are added to the equation, it replaces that motivation in my mind that I'm going to start measuring it based on that transactional value. And so you see NF T drops that are so financially driven and people just trying to get in, because they hope that you know, they get lucky and it's something that works and will go up in value. And you see these noisy, you know, discords that aren't very thoughtfully organized. And you can't help but wonder like, is there a deep community here? Or is there really just those outer rings of people who are are jumping from one hot thing to the next hot thing. And they're not willing to make other members problems, their own problems, they are really there for tapping into the opportunity to become wealthy or to tap into a meme, not because they genuinely care about the other people in the room. And I mean, I would still say that's probably a fair analysis of 98.3 things that are out there and lead three right now, like a lot of what you see is still that, but I've also been able to find some groups that seem to be taking a more thoughtful approach, since I've gone down the rabbit hole. And and that's really what I'm looking for. That's what I'm trying to get engaged with and understand and do my work is working with teams and projects that are trying to do it the right way.
Yeah, I think I broadly agree with all of that. And I'd admired greatly the teams that take a very slow and measured approach and do not chase the obscene financial rewards that can exist for, you know, watching a PFT project and making it purely financial and really driving and pumping. Like it's it is truly a lucrative thing. And so when when we talk to teams who, and it's something we hope you continue to be really great at is is filtering for folks that have that, that deeper desire to build meaningful connection, and also to be built to build for 510 years out, rather than, you know, three to five months out. And I think that the big open question I have in my mind is more around that the former point you made it like where financial incentives change the nature of relationships or actions that people take within these communities. And I think what's interesting, my entire experience in this space has been one of they're sort of being of wherever, wherever I sort of look at black and white, he realized there's just like, a lot more gray around it, right? And so, like, I think, intuitively I go Yeah, right. Like all of a sudden, people are just measuring based on dollar amounts like that, that doesn't seem to make sense. And yet, what we're seeing is like still a ton of that sort of intrinsic motivation, even though there are financial rewards on top, or at least maybe trying to think through how you sort of structure those two different levels where there is like maybe a financial reward and ownership at one level, but that the reason for coming together and interacting on a regular basis doesn't have the financial aspects tied into it. I think one of our early insights was thinking that like, you know, this isn't about designing a micro economy with a whole bunch of micro transactions and incentives to get things done. Like I look at what Reddit is doing with their sort of like the ups and downs. But to me, that just feels like the very wrong way to go about it, you're sort of adding a game in into the how community should interact purely around financial rewards now, whereas if we look at say something like friends with benefits were like, yes, you can earn tokens, yes, everybody has a buy in and is holding a certain number of tokens, that ownership is sort of in the background, and truly the interactions and value is being created and creativity that's happening in there doesn't have this sort of like dollar amount attached to it in any way. So I'm very curious as to how that plays out. Because I think it is probably one of the biggest risk factors to whether this world really comes to fruition or if it's just sort of like, I wouldn't say it's a flash in the pan, but like, how it comes to fruition,
whether it has staying power, right, and really becomes something that achieves these, like big visions and promises that we have, like more access to more equity. But like, you know, if we look at what it is today, it's not accessible, and it's not equitable. I joined at WB a few weeks ago now in large part because because like I wanted to learn, and it seemed like probably the best place to learn how dials are working, and how these communities look, cost me about $1,000 to buy the tokens. Token price went up for like, a couple of weeks, I was like, Oh, cool. My membership in this community actually, like made me money. And now it's like, down by two grand. It's interesting to see how that's impacting me how I feel about it, right? Like I can, I can kind of reflect on my personal experience. And I didn't do it for financial investment at all. I did it to learn, but like it still sucked to see $2,000 disappear from my account when that happens. I've started I've been to an events and I met up with a couple members separately from F WB. And I actually thought they were really, really good events that the one thing I commented on on Twitter was that it was the first event, first community or tech event I've ever been to where the majority of the conversation was focused on how to improve the community. A lot of the conversation there was like, about governance about proposals that were on the docket about the inaccessibility of the community because of the token price currently about how to like improve the structure just like all these things about how to improve the community. Whereas like every other event I've ever been to, you're only talking about yourself or maybe the larger industry, but never like the how to improve the community of the event that you're currently at. You know, like, people don't come to CMS events frankly and say like, how do we prove CMS, they come to CMS events and they say like, how do I improve my community, which is how we built it, right? Nf WB is just an interesting example where I am feeling a connection of community, I want to get more involved. I don't feel like it's a financial investment from like, that's not why I'm in it. And yet the financial component, I can't help but feel like it has influence. And if it were to go to zero tomorrow, what would that do to the community? Right, like, what would it do to me what to do to others? I'm very excited to see the kind of research and data that comes out in the coming years of essentially the the correlation or causation between token price and community health and engagement.
Yeah, I think it's gonna be fascinating. And I think we're seeing just a number of really interesting sort of versions of that experiment being run right now. And my take on it is just how rudimentary I think all this is going to look in a few years, right? Like, we're it's very blunt instruments we're using across the board. And I don't exactly know which direction that goes. As far as like, user experience, or access, or like probably token, it's probably all those sort of things that come together to sort of change it. But this, I keep coming back to the sort of core inside of like, a tool like, you know, automated market maker, like uniswap, the ability to mint a token and the ability to gate access for like a collab land or guild dot XYZ, just all of a sudden allows people to have ownership or a sense of ownership or, or ownership in a community, and it just seems like a big shift to me in some way. And then, you know, the chips are gonna sort of fall as a as a fall as people experiment with them. But when I come back to like, Okay, well, what are we trying to do here? To me, it's just like, that is new communities now have these new superpowers that only existed within companies or governments before, the ability to issue to have a cap table or a bank account to make agreements to sort of govern outside of like, a legal structure instead, through through smart contracts? Internationally.
Yeah. And, like, I want to be clear, too, there's a very positive aspect to the financial side of things where I think one of the fundamental flaws of web 2.0 community driven business that was kind of like talked about in hushed tones behind the scenes, because no one really wants to call it out was that like, you have these massive corporations that are running volunteer driven programs, and those volunteers aren't seeing the upside of their contributions, right like that people hosting those events aren't capturing the value financially of those events. Generally speaking, the people who are answering the questions on your forums aren't capturing that value, the people who are advocating on your behalf aren't capturing that value. Even if they get compensated, they don't have the upside of the future value that comes out of that, right. The Uber drivers didn't have the upside of Uber the same way Travis Kalanick. And the team did. And so that when I think about the potential positive impact that web three can bring to the concept of community driven business, it can actually create an ecosystem that is more equitable and give the people creating value, the opportunity to capture that value as well.
Yeah, that's exactly where my internal dialogue went. When I saw you reply to that tweet before I was like, okay, yeah, but like corporate communities really, is this example gonna hold up to but yeah, I think I keep coming back to that Uber example you give. There's somewhere out there, there is an Uber driver, who was number one to number 100. That told a ton of his friends that had five star ratings that just provided an incredible amount of value. And eight 910 Whatever it was six years later, when the IPO happened, you got nothing. That nothing Yeah, shocking. It's gonna it's gonna look back on this and it's gonna look like that like how we look on the Middle Ages right now. We hold on you have to work for somebody, you don't own the land. You're working. You got to give certain number across back to this dude in a castle just sweet protects you from marauding marauders. Like I've used that line twice in two podcasts. That's weird. Yes, it's crazy, right? So okay, so I want to shift the conversation a little bit here. I love the philosophical conversation and truly, would love to just sit down in a bar and gotcha, we can get into that. But also, like people here listening to this podcast are participating in wanting to have an impact on the space, I think that's like, to me, the most inspiring part of this entire thing is that we feel like we have an ability to change the course of history through participation right now. And you also have a depth of knowledge and understanding in the practical sense of how to build and run these communities that I'd really love to get in into here. And maybe just to start off at pulling a recent tweet you have here he says, number one community misconception is if you build it, they will come. And number two community misconception is if they come, they will stay. You know, we think of those as sort of the framing of a conversation on some more practical or tactical matters. How do we go build better communities that actually will stand the test of time?
Great question and Yeah, that tweet came from a conversation I was having with my friend John Howard, who's a co founder of Big Head, big head Club, which they're, you know, launching a lot of NFT projects and doing really cool stuff they did. Donor casts are doing Ghostbusters. Oni Ronin, and we're talking about like, what goes into a successful NFT projects, and how the mentality that a lot of people have when they launch these projects is there is the if you build it, they will come. But then as a next step of okay, we've like launched this thing, people are in our Discord great, like our job here is kind of done, we'll just kind of, you know, we if we set the right systems and incentives will kind of take care of itself in a way. And I think my theory is that this is a little bit rooted in web threes, you know, how it came to be in the first place of like, the idea of Satoshi just dropping the Bitcoin white paper. And just like with, it was very simple, but it just sparked this entire ecosystem and world, right, like, All he needed was just like Spark and the fire took off. And, and like, yes, that can happen. But it's almost always the exception to the rule, not the rule. And so when you're launching a dowel, or an NFT, or any of these things, step one is do rolling up your sleeves and doing the work to get people in the room in the first place. But once they're in there, it's continuing to keep those sleeves rolled up and showing up consistently, you like these projects need leaders who are going to pour their energy into it every single day, you can't just like launch it, and then hand it to a community and say like, great like, run it yourselves or like establish your own leadership, maybe that works if it's so successful, like the board a club or something where there's so much status and value that people really like start taking on leadership roles. But even those, you know, had kind of leaders that's like stuck with it over a long time and built it up. So yeah, that's the idea is think about how you're going to get people in the room in the first place in a really thoughtful, meaningful way. And then I used to say, I don't know if this still applies to web three, you never launch a community, you're just like, consistently, always building it, there might be a point where you like you go public or open up, but you're always going to be working to build that engagement and facilitate and bring that energy into the community.
I love that we had a shiny, who was sort of in deep in the Ford APR club world. And, you know, one of his core points about the success of that project has been how deeply involved the founding members have been in building that community and showing up and asking questions and empowering people. And so like, I think that the challenge is you sort of see, you see the end result, most often, like most of us are coming to communities later in their development. It's just like the reality of things. And so it kind of is formed and and, you know, we're late majority early majority into it. But so many of those decisions early on are being made. And I think one of the things that I always talk to our project leaders about is just how I think there is this sort of frame, it's like, okay, there's this community, it's gonna figure out itself, I think endows it's this idea that the community will just get it done or that through consensus, we'll get it done. And what is true, I think, across every single community that are our leaders who are taking action, and investing their heartbeats and moving something forward with consistency, to the point of building momentum, to the point of having those sort of flywheel start to build people wanting finding pathways and having the ability to contribute, it's very hard to see that and I think it actually stops, it stops people from taking consistent action early on, because it feels hard, and it doesn't feel like it's actually working, when in reality, that's just how you have to go to to build, it might not work. But like that's not that the deciding point or the starting point is some consistent effort over time, that then results in something or doesn't, I think if you build it they will come is maybe this is the two part blog posts that I want you to write for C club, because I think they're sort of like the main part of my inspiration in speaking with you early on, is I think we want to do much better at helping our teams take a very practical, thoughtful approach to building these communities. And I think you know, broadly in the space that you were talking about earlier about what it looks like from the outside. The reality is we're just trying to like keep up with all the craziness that's happening and we're just now getting to the phase of like, okay, how do we actually practically and thoughtfully design onboarding experiences and, and ways of connecting people with work and opportunities? It just hasn't really existed? Now obviously, there are teams that are taking great leadership strides at this so index Co Op and the cross has team or to cap and Dallek many through our portfolio are really thinking about this but I don't think we're great at it and I don't think there's a template that we're rolling out right now that's consistent. So I always sort of frame the call to adventure is maybe like the if you build it they will come right so there is like this, this effort for put into like a narrative and something that people care about and you're showing up consistently. So, what are you seeing on sort of that that first part of like getting people in the door that's maybe essential or replicable or, or strategic.
So as in terms of like the onboarding, experience,
onboarding, enrolling, getting people into the community as sort of like, the solution to, you know, if you build it, they will come? What is the work that needs to get done to make that true?
Yeah. So first off, the community members journey starts before they become a member, right? It comes from like, the first time that someone tells them about your community, it comes from reading the about page, it comes from seeing people talk about it in public, being intentional about what information you're putting out there, and how you welcome people into the ecosystem in the broadest sense, is a good place to start, right. Like, if all the information about your community is behind a discord join wall, then you're hindering people's ability to start to feel confident and competent in your community. And actually, like the first time they join is in one of the most overwhelming points where they actually stepped foot in the door. It's like, you know, that first point where you step into a conference, that feeling that you get of like, there's 1000 people here, and I'm overwhelmed, and there's booths and noise. And it's like, it's the most overwhelming point. And that's also the point where you're trying to teach them about who you are and what you do. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of web three projects make. They're they're like keeping too much in discord. Rather than looking at discord as a step that you ask people to take a little bit further along in what we call the commitment curve. Like they've already built up some awareness and commitment and understanding. And now they're like, Alright, I want to take this step to be an active participant. And then And then so okay, you educate them on who you are, and what you are, why you exist, things like that, that person wants to take that step and get more involved. So they go to join the discord. There are two problems there. One is information overload, and the other is social overload. So information overload is like, for one, some of the discourse are doing a good job of this now, where you just go into like an intro one. And like, there's one place with one message. And that's all you have to read to start. And that's great. And then some of them are doing this, choose your own journey approach of like you, you, you know, respond with an emoji based on what project you're interested in, or what your skill set is. And that like opens up new channels. So that kind of like slow rolling out of content is really important. So you're not like I joined up web, there's 100 channels and web, it's, I still feel overwhelmed. And I've been there for a month, right. And so that's an information overload. And what you want to do is slow drip it in terms of their experience, you could also slow drip it, you know, use the age old technology of like, I know, no one uses email in web three, but like in whatever way you can drip content out to people do something every day, just say like, just don't worry about anything yet, click this button, and we're gonna send you a little welcome tip every day for the next 14 days. Day. One is like, Why do we exist day two is our community values. Day three is who's the team that like, if you need something you can go to day four is spotlighting a few great members, day five is here is like some actionable things that you can do to start engaging the community. And so you're just dripping out these ways of understanding and getting more involved over time. Rather than saying, like, Here, read the manual, like, spend a ton of time on this, especially when people are in 100 discords. Like, they're not gonna have time to do it all at once. And then you have the social overload. So social overload is coming into an event or room, it's like imagine moving to a new city, everyone's already got their cliques, everyone already understands the culture, there's language that they don't understand. And you feel like an outsider right away. When you join a community, you're always going to feel like an outsider. And the extent to which communities are solving for this is basically saying like, welcome, you know, introduce yourself in the introduction channel, which is fine, you know, one, make sure that every single person who introduces themselves gets a response, like an actual response, because that's going to make them feel heard and seen if they post an intro unknown response, and you're missing a really prime opportunity to make them feel valued and welcome in this space. But think about other creative ways to essentially shrink down the size of the groups that they are being asked to participate in, and how to break through the feeling of like, there's cliques that exist that I'm not a part of. And you can do that in some very simple ways. One is doing a buddy system. So ask your engaged members of your existing community to raise their hand to volunteer to be buddies. So whenever a new member joins, you can offer to match them up with a buddy and all it does is like connect them over DM or something. And and now that buddies job is just to say like, Hey, welcome. If you have any questions about the community Let me know, here are some of my favorite channels, I'm also going to introduce you to a couple people that I know here, right. So they get this welcome in, you can think about it almost like fraternities who have like the family system, the family tree system of like you have a big and a little. And that bigs job is to like, represent you and bring you in and make you feel like you're a part of it. You can also do cohorts, sometimes communities do that. So invite all the new members to join this last week to a private event where they get to meet each other and get to know each other. So you must create a new clique for them. So just like shrinking down the size into smaller groups, or one on ones will help people navigate that social overwhelm of joining a really fast moving active community.
Yeah, so many things in there that I'm like, right, you got to do. That's the thing that we got to do. And I love it, because I think there's so much room to improve, which gets me excited, right? I think like the, the underlying belief I have is that we can actually, yeah, we can have apply resources, people are aligned and trying to sort of build towards this bigger mission. There's strong incentive to bring people in. And I think there's such a, that feeling of being lost in a new discord or in a Dao is so pervasive that I think people are very willing to put the time and effort into trying to solve that, like, if I look at our internal team focused on onboarding, like, the level of giving a shit there is massive, and I think it's driven by that real life experience of feeling like you're just like, the lone person standing in the room, like that meme going, like, I don't, what am I doing? Who am I? What is this? Okay, so, you know, shifting into a little bit of like, if I build it, will they stay? What are some like the maybe the ways to sort of think about designing experiences to try to bring people closer together or connect them deeper within the organization?
Yeah, well, I think like, one other thing I'll say, that should have been a foundation for all of this is that community is an experiment. It's an ongoing experiment, and you have to look at it that way. And the same way you're looking for product market fit, if you're a startup, you're looking for community market fit. And the same way you have the Lean Startup model, I like to think of it like the Lean community model, just like how do you put things out there, test them iterate until until they click. And for community, you'll just find that process happen over and over and over again. And so I'm just constantly when I launch a new community, or you know, we were running Siemens for years, and I still do this all the time is like, we just experiment with new rituals and new new processes and new engagement techniques to see what works. And you know, 90% of them might not work, but then you find 10% that click, and you build it into your community, rituals and structure and you just consistently do that. And that and you know, it works because it resonated with the community. I mean, rituals is a big one, like having a regular newsletter that goes out every week, having like, threads that you start once a week, doing a monthly meetup, like anything that has this kind of recurring nature to it is going to make your life a lot easier as a community builder because you're not constantly reinventing how to engage people. And it makes it easy for your community members because they become confident and become more aware of these rituals, because they happen consistently. Right, then they know what to expect. Think about it like religions, right? Like, the holiday process is the same for Christmas. And for Hanukkah you get if I go to temple for Hanukkah, like I know what the like the prayers are going to be. And they generally follow an order with like some level of mixing it up. But that creates confidence and awareness and competence for me as a member that like I know what's happening. And it also makes me feel like I belong, because I'm in the know, on those tools. Having these kinds of recurring experiences is really powerful. Just like make sure to be consistent as well, if you can show up for 30 minutes a day, and just like post one discussion starter a day and respond to 10 people a day. But like, just make sure you do it every day, you just consistently show up until eventually, then it will start to happen organically and leaders will start to form and you won't have to be as much on you to keep like facilitating and pushing the kind of engagement you want to see because you'll have set the example. And then when new members come in, they see the example and they will replicate that. But in those early days, it really is up to the founding team and the core leadership to show up and just be like shaping the kind of culture and community that they want to see. until it starts to catch on organically.
The big thing that jumps out to me there is you know, really excited about the ability to pull multiple people together to like in these organizations and Dows communities to like brainstorm and figure out this to run and define experiments and just love this idea of sort of being core to like a core work stream within C club is to like, come up with crazy new ideas around engagement that can kind of be like spread throughout our number of communities or or even maybe just pull from Hold those in that I know our community, the communities that we're working with are experimenting with individually, that this sort of network collaboration, experimentation, I think is just like such a big thing here. I'm sure this is my assumption is you as a consultant in companies coming in helping them figure out how to sort of manage and enroll communities. I'm assuming there's a bit of like a long clip with a playbook there sort of like a resourcing or, like, what sort of roles need to exist to run and to really lean into building successful communities in a corporate world? I'm curious, maybe how you see that relating to this dour? Like, what what sort of structures roles? Is it a community manager? Is it a Community Working Group? Like? What would we need to if we want to really resource and lean into building a successful community? What are the core roles or responsibilities we need to have there?
Yeah, it's a great question. And it's definitely another issue I've been seeing in web three so far is that the community team has been tending to really be community moderators, moreso than a community strategist. And a lot of teams like the founders are kind of doing community but they don't really have anyone dedicated to it. So they all kind of chip in.
And, and I just want to like, articulate that a moderator is very different than like a facilitator, which is different than a strategist. So like a moderator will definitely be able to like be in there and, you know, engage and respond to people and clean up spam and moderate, essentially, but they're not going to like proactively create engagement campaigns and engagement programs. And even someone who's doing that isn't necessarily going to know how to zoom out and see, how does, how do these engagement programs fit into a larger community program and strategy and plan over the next 12 months? And how does that all of that roll up into our business strategy. And so I think there's definitely an opportunity for web three companies to be a lot more strategic and intentional in how they create community teams. And I hope that it doesn't make the same mistake of web three of not properly resourcing it, if you want to put a team together, what we're starting to see even in web two is more specialization of roles coming together, which is really exciting, because actually, for until the last couple of years, when community started getting really hot. For the most part, you just kind of see the community professional that wears all the hats and are generalists and do everything. Now we're starting to see specializations. So if you know you could design the perfect community team, I would say you have a leader, you know, a strategic leader who has a seat at the table at the highest level of the company, Chief community officer, whatever it is, that person is overseeing strategy across all different community programs that you may be running, and essentially leading the team making sure the team is focused and knows what they're they're doing. And then the team itself will usually be a combination of community engagement managers, so people who are focused on facilitating engagement, driving growth, experimenting with different formats, there, they're going to be very public facing very active in the community themselves very curious, very engaged. community event organizers, which are often different, actually, because like running events at scale is a very different skill set than running like forum engagements. And so this is actually how we have our team structured at CMS, we have a full events team that runs our conferences, our monthly events that we run our master classes, all that kind of stuff. And then our community, our Senior Community Manager, he runs our community led events program, where we empower our community members to self organize events, we have 60 chapters around the world. And those chapters are run by members of the community. But that on its own can be a full time role doing community led event programs. It's a very complex kind of program. And then a really exciting role that's starting to form is community operations. And so this is a person who is behind the scenes more or less, less forward facing and more, how do we automate processes that take a lot of time? They're looking at the data and analytics behind community to say, how do we measure Community Health properly and tie it back to business metrics. They're making sure team operations are running smoothly communication channels are running smoothly. And so communities are very, very complex systems. So it's really exciting to see this roll starting to form where there's someone really who's just focused on making sure all like the pipes are connected properly and running smoothly. And it makes a whole team a lot more effective and efficient. And then you have like the the more junior level might just be like community associates Community moderators, which could be members of the community or part of the team, but they're kind of just like day to day helping execute on these things and helping moderate the community. And that's all in web two, I think in web three, we're going to start to see even more specialist roles. Because there's like the governance components, I imagine we're gonna see a lot of people with like political backgrounds and governance backgrounds coming in and saying, Alright, how do we really manage the voting processes and all the governance components of web three, there might be like financial components to the community, right, and people who specialize in really creating those systems and ecosystems from a community minded perspective. So I imagine that we're gonna see actually a lot of different specializations that are unique to web three start to form and community teams as well. There's
obviously such a huge breadth of work a cannon to get into here as far as like lessons and strategies and ways to think about how to actually do this part of web three of Dows. Very, very well. And my sense is most of that's actually not coming from web three, right? Where we're most of this work has been done in other contexts. And so I'm curious, you know, either through like your organization, or maybe even outside in sort of parallel streams, like, where do you go for the latest, greatest thinking, experimentation, awareness building around community management, design and strategy?
Yeah, I mean, I'm just constantly consuming and geeking out on everything I get my hands on that provides unique perspectives, whether it's on community psychology, and I'm an avid reader, I just love fine. I actually like books not about community, but like, have a thread to community Sapiens was one of my favorite books on not community that taught me about community because it just taught me about like, why humans exist and, and why social groups exist within humanity. Obviously, yeah, see MX, it's what we do. It's our bread and butter. I've been doing it for eight years, we have eight years of conferences, tons of free videos on YouTube Facebook group, a Slack space, we might be launching the discord soon, specifically to talk about the web three side of things, events, regularly, tons of research, tons of articles that we've published. So there's like, a huge rabbit hole, you can dive down just in BMX, I get a lot of my stuff on Twitter as well. I curate a few lists. If you go to my lists that I've made public, on my Twitter, there's the community builders list. There's a Masters of community list, which is all the guests that I've had on my masters of community podcast. Yeah, that that should give you plenty to chew on.
I love it. We're coming up on the hour now. We opened that thread, or I know, it's time flies when you're having fun, David,
and web three solves the time problem, like, come on?
Well, listen, I think that there's gonna be no shortage of conversations you and I are gonna have about this, because I think it is just so core to the world that we want to help our teams build. And that I think the big thing that I consistently get out of speaking to people like yourself, and others is just how like, how much further we have to go, which to me is like, the most positive thing that gets me extremely excited. And so I think there's just a whole host of things that we can do to, you know, really bring more focus and the experience that exists in the broader, you know, business world into one three, in a way that it Yeah, and to sort of use it to reinforce the, like, the visions and missions that these amazing communities have. I'm curious, though, you know, before we do go this this conversation starter of web two, web three, web two have to come to web three, or like, what does that world look like? And maybe I'll frame the question. And, you know, if we do cast our mind out three or four or five years, and we do see the mainstream coming into web three, how do you seen that ecosystem evolving? I think as having sort of like updating our mental models on the variety of potentials that could exist, there's probably very valuable.
Yeah, I mean, I see it as like, for one, there's a transition period now of making sure that people in web two are able to access web three, especially when we're looking at diversity, and making sure that it's an equitable space. I just heard a stat the other day from Jeremiah L. Yang said 26%, only 26% of crypto holders are women. And if you think about who has access to this space today, it's people who had connections to it, it's people who had the wealth to be able to invest in it. Still today. It's people who can like afford gas fees and like, can engage in this and has the time to engage in it. So there's a whole slew of very understandable reasons why it's lacking diversity already. But I think there's also a lot of solvable problems when it comes to the culture that we create in web three and how we bridge that to how we talk about it, how we are very intentional about not letting the default persist, like not making the same mistakes of web to where it's like, well, you know, like that, like, remember not too long ago, where like, the response from web two CEOs was like, Well, you know, we, we don't have a lot of black people working at our company, because like, there aren't a lot of black developers, it's like, it's just not taking responsibility or initiative at all, in helping solve the problem. And like, like getting to the root of that cause a root of that problem, rather. So how do we put in the work to bring people into this space in a thoughtful way, in an in a way that's inclusive, and not just have this mentality of I just wrote this newsletter, it was called the the cultural downside of inevitability. It's just this idea that like, well, you're going to end up here whether or not you like it, and I'm not going to put in the work to make that transition smoother, easier for you, which I want to I understand because people in web three have been like, talking about it forever and doubted a lot. So they feel exhausted explaining it. At the same time. It's like, Well, okay, people are here, now they're at the door, they're ready to learn, how do we make sure that we welcome them and bring them in, in a thoughtful way.
So I think that that point, there is actually really interesting because it is not not only were people doubted, there's like aggressive confrontation around the idea of web three, and I'm actually not as exposed to this. But if I think about my friends in the arts worlds, or in music, or who have that sort of, like, there's a lot of intensity that kind of comes at them, for me the message of the discord CEO posting, hey, we might do, you know, web three sign in, and just the insanity of some of the responses and the intensity of those responses. I think is is like, it's going to require, again, a long term mindset in web three, and really wanting to steward that into a better place. Because the, it's very challenging not to have an emotional response to that. And, and maybe I think a very fair response is like, you know, what, buddy? Fine, we're just gonna go over here and build it, I'm guilty of that response, too, because you probably not going to change that. But it also doesn't make your point, you know, incorrect, right? Which is that for us to really have both the the the growth and opportunity and impact that we want the space to have, we need to we need to overcome that. And I think to me, that's why these conversations are so important, because it is, in my opinion, communities that act as the best place to onboard people into web three, where you have that space, and you have the resources, the time, the the attention, the sense making mechanism, the support to overcome the awkwardness of operating and web three today. And I think that's going to persist a lot longer than most people think if we're taking asking people to take an immense amount of responsibility for something they haven't had to take responsibility for in the past, right? If you are you're responsible for your private keys, you are studying your own assets to be able to engage in this broader ecosystem, that's going to be true. And so how do we there's a whole lot of other barriers that are maybe not apparent to start, but what I will say is the biggest growth in the types of communities that I'm seeing happening right now are learning communities. You know, we have the web three baddies. We have the crypto culture community, we have projects like station, like there's just this whole host. And my hope is that there's 1000s of those that every niche in the world has some sort of learning community that's designed specifically to be like, here's your soft landing pad to come into crypto, the waters warm, come hang out,
we need lighthouses and landing pads, you know, like, we need to create places for people who want to who are like, alright, open minded to it, I want to learn, how do I do that you want those people to be able to come in, totally understand, you know, people were just trolling or negative. Like, that's going to be part of every ecosystem, especially one like this, that's like, financially driven and shaking up a lot of things. But especially now, there's a lot of people who genuinely want to learn, they're coming in with skepticism. But, you know, that I think, like, it's kind of also, you know, I think I feel responsibility as someone that's like, Okay, I'm coming into web three. Now, I haven't had that experience of, you know, the negative aspects of being passionate about web three for a long time. And I'm enjoying, you know, putting in the work to be a bridge, we just hosted the first CMS web 3.0 events. It was our largest events non conference event we've ever hosted, like the appetite was so like, very strong in our community of community builders. And the whole point we're like, this is an entry level event. It's every all the contents can be beginner friendly. We had a rule that we put in the chat that if you use an acronym, you had to define it. So everyone is finally learning what, what GM means and wag me means and all this stuff, and like it was great, like the vibe was great because it was really all focused on being a bridge on like helping people access is the space and like, I have the energy for that. So I'm going to do it. And I think it's cool to see people, you and a lot of other bridge builders really like starting to form in web three. I think that's what it needs.
I think that's what makes me the the most optimistic about the space is just how much of that work is going on right now. And then the impact that it's having. So, yeah, very much appreciate. I mean, David, I cannot tell you how excited I was when I looked at your Twitter account and saw you with your teeth. On aim. I was just like, we got, we got them. And then that's a good thing. That's a good thing. And I think this conversation is proven why I believe that to be true. I mean, just an absolute wealth of knowledge here. And I very much appreciate you taking, you know, an hour and bit out of your Friday afternoon to come and chat with us here. Is there a last thought to leave our audience with or maybe some places where where people can kind of find you, folks, I promise, we're gonna pull David into as many things as we possibly can. Because I think there's just so much value for the people who are building in these conversations. But yeah, what would you like to leave our audience with David?
Yeah, well, yeah, I'm very excited to get more involved in your community and be a part of C club and everything you're building, it's been a landing pad for me. So, you know, I'm here in part because of you just because of C club. So a good example, last thoughts just, you know, I think community building work is some of the most important work in the world, I think it's only become more important. You know, all this is also coming at a time that has been dubbed the loneliness epidemic. And part of that challenge has come from this fact that like, we've never had more options and access to communities, but we are lacking the depth and quality of communities that humans really require to, to be happy. There's a lot of science out there that shows that like, it's not wealth, or status, or a lot of other things that make you happy. It's really just the quality of your social relationships. So for those of you who are listening, who are putting in the work to build real, meaningful, inclusive, equitable communities, thank you for doing that work. And if there's anything I can do to help, I'm very accessible. I'm very active on Twitter. You can DM me, my DMs are open. I'm at David Spinks there, have a newsletter as well and substack that I respond to everyone who replies to me there and I just share my rants on web three and community their podcast is masters of community book is the business of belonging companies are cm x and bevi. And appreciate you having me Jess,
thank you, David. Appreciate it. And I look forward to having more conversations like this as we continue to go down the community rabbit hole, which I know you're very, very deep down. So thank you so much, and we'll make sure all those links are in the show notes. So you can head over to to our Twitter account at Sea Club podcast and find all the details there.
