Community is more important than art and utility

Mfers floor rose by 4683% without a roadmap and laughable art. @alienfrens broke Twitter with a floor increase of 7350% — based entirely on good vibes.

Here are some reasons why community outweighs the rest 🧵

Blue chips projects are the leaders of the NFT world for one good reason: They’re the perfect marriage between community, utility, and art.

Take BAYC for example. It’s a disruptive PFP art that created a lasting trend, an exclusive community, and utility via the Mutant Arcade, charitable acts, and club benefits.

The thing is, as a founder, you don’t need genre-bending art nor proven utility for your holders. You just need to be able to build a strong initial community within the same interest group. You need to grow a community that will stick with you through thick and thin.

You need to be able to listen to your community, weed out low-quality inputs, then execute on your community’s best and brightest ideas. If you’re able to achieve this, you’ll reach mid-cap status in no time. Why?

Well, a community builds the project. Art and utility do not. Without community, there would be no project.

This is due to the Network Flywheel.

With the onset of web2, consumers bought products online through Amazon, AOL, and eBay. With the evolution of web2, consumers became the product through the monetization of data. With web3, the consumer became a community member, investor, marketer, and so much more.

The community member is an integral part of the web3 business model. The power hierarchy has been substantially flattened. The dynamics of the network have changed.

The consumer has much more at stake now. It’s not just about purchasing a product, it’s about investing in a project they believe in.

A powerful community will promote your project for you. What does the marketing world say?

Word of mouth is powerful, trusted, and cheap

More UGC about your project = A larger community = More $$$.

Community members are investors. Think of your web3 project as crowdsourcing, except you aren’t asking for money to develop your product… you're asking for a stake in your project, with tokens as the investment medium.

The community is your primary source of funding.

And it really boils down to these points:

Art can bring in investors, but it won’t make your project last. You can sell your generative art, but once your supporters hop on of the latest trend, your floor price will be going to zero.

Utility brings value to the user. Investors will stick with your project if you line their (digital) pockets. The thing is, your project won’t grow at the same rate as a strong community.

The community also brings value to the user, but it’s more about fulfilling social needs than anything else. This is where utility takes the win. Profit surpasses social needs for the user.

Potential consumers are incentivized by the utility, and they’ll continue using it if it aligns with their monetary needs. But again, going back to my point — utility only fulfills one need and it’s mainly for the user.

Community, on the other hand, supports both the user and the creator.

Web3 isn’t a one-way street. Both the user and creator need to build a win-win situation for themselves, or the model won’t work.

So you may already know how to build an initial community, but how do you scale it?

Establish scalable systems that align with your community’s desires. You’ll be thanking yourself later as this eases scalability. The beauty of web3 is that network scalable systems are integrated within the blockchain.

As the number of network participants increases, so does the number of nodes in the blockchain. The network becomes more valuable. When I talk about scalable systems, I should specify that it’s about building communication systems that will allow your community to flourish.

If your community is built on gaming, then you must feed their appetite by building a GameFi experience. Members must be able to interact with each other to strengthen the community’s bond.

The easiest way to implement this is through Discord.

Keep your channels limited in the early days of your project. As your community grows, they’ll let you know when it’s time to open new channels.

You don’t want to fragment your community at the start, as a segregated community leads to a disconnected project.

More about building a Minimal Viable Community down here.

TL;DR

• Community is your investor

• Community is your consumer

• Community is your marketing team

• Utility drives first-time buyers, community keeps repeat customers

• Art dies through trends (99% of the time)

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Originally published on my Twitter account and republished on Medium.