From Minimal Viable Product to Minimal Viable Community
It used to be all about attracting prospective consumers with a Minimal Viable Product.
Startups would develop a new, base product and take it directly to the market with a mission to grab the consumer’s attention. By establishing a base product, the marketing team would be able to gauge the responses of the market and thus tailor the product according to the market’s needs. Simple, right?
In the case of web2, marketers would often implement a go-to-market (GTM) strategy, building leads and acquiring consumers via the customer acquisition funnel.
The relationship between the seller and the consumer was a two-way street: The company had to pitch a product that was good enough for consumers (at least, in the beginning), and consumers needed products that fulfilled their needs. If one of the parties in the relationship toppled over, all hell would break loose.
Now designing a Minimal Viable Product and selling it to consumers had three key benefits for marketers:
There were enough features for consumers to purchase the product granting the firm a small portion of the market share
The product integrated a feedback loop, where consumers expressed their thoughts about the product after usage
The firm could offer future benefits for its early adopters
These benefits meant the world to startups, as it provided them with a launchpad to penetrate the industry. It armed them with tools to break through the noise, improve their product according to the consumer’s needs, and reward the consumers who adopted their product first.
In short — creating a Minimal Viable Product and ushering it into the market under the GTM approach was the status quo. It was cost-effective and adaptive to market conditions — a real no-brainer for new entrants.
What's a Minimal Viable Community?
The advent of web3 has turned this strategy on its head: Instead of promoting a Minimal Viable Product, now it’s all about establishing a Minimal Viable Community.
Why? Well, web3 has flattened the power hierarchy and changed the dynamics of the network. Consumers aren’t just buyers in the market — they’re shareholders. They now care about the well-being of the companies they buy from, even if it’s a startup.
The buying process isn’t as simple anymore. If consumers want a product from a promising web3 initiative, they’ll need to acquire products by investing in the project.
So now, the firm isn’t at the top of the buyer-seller relationship. They aren’t cutting-out consumers from development, selling them a basic product, then tinkering with the product until it reaches the consumer’s standards. Rather, they’re integrating the consumer in the development process. As a result, the Minimal Viable Product ethos is being thrown out the window.
Enter Minimal Viable Community: A concept linked to grassroots initiatives. You could think of it as crowdsourcing. It’s all about curating community and inspiring a community-owned business model in the new and improved web3 firm.
It isn’t as easy anymore for startups. They can’t just target the consumer’s needs; They need to involve the consumer, the developer, and the creator in the company’s processes and decision-making. Building a Minimal Viable Community is all about rethinking the “we” mentality in the business ecosystem.
Why is it Important to build a Minimal Viable Community?
First things first, if a new entrant doesn’t put the community at the forefront of their project, they will fail. Like I said before, consumers aren’t stakeholders anymore… they’re investors. Investors that care about the well-being of your project just as much as you do.
Aside from picturing this approach as a suffocating lifeline to the web3 firm, try looking at the benefits of building a Minimal Viable Community.
The Minimal Viable Community is a body that’s constantly evolving. It reshapes itself according to the needs and values of the members that form the launchpad.
Startups don’t have to worry about being one step behind market trends and spending money on products that don’t fulfill ever-changing consumer preferences. Since the consumer is a shareholder, the feedback loop has been streamlined. They’ll tell you what they want at the push of a button, instead of having to wait for them to try your products and write out a survey.
Minimal Viable Communities are also a greater asset than products. You could think of the Minimal Viable Community as a brand instead of a product. A strong brand won’t fail, even if it releases new products that don’t necessarily satisfy the consumer’s needs. If the community is tight-knit, then the product isn’t what matters.
What matters is the project’s principles. If the community lives by the founders’ principles, then the community is unbreakable.
Minimal Viable Communities also offer something unique: Free marketing. But, more importantly, the marketing is through word-of-mouth. If you ask any marketing professional, student, or professor, they’ll tell you word-of-mouth is the strongest form of marketing as people trust the word of their friends and family over an advertiser’s message.
When the community enjoys a project just as much as the founders do, they will gladly promote it to their friends, families, and interest groups.
This is what you should seek as a web3 startup.
How do you build a Minimal Viable Community?
Great! We understand why Minimal Viable Communities are crucial for the web3 startup. So, how do we build one?
Launching a Token
Well, as previously discussed, you could consider Minimal Viable Communities as crowdsourcing. The difference is that you aren’t asking for money to develop the initial product or business. Instead, you’re asking for a stake in your project with tokens as the investment medium.
Your shareholders will now entail hundreds, to even thousands of small-time retail supporters, referred to as “evangelists.” Evangelists will purchase your project’s token, and this is how you open the doors to funding while creating the Minimal Viable Community.
Ok, cool. So you launched a token affiliated with your project. Now what?
Building the Right Network
Now you must build the right network. If you put all your efforts into a shotgun approach, where you market your project all over Twitter, then you will never see the Minimal Viable Community come to fruition.
A community shares interests. Attracting people from different walks of life with clashing interests is not the path you should take.
This is why most NFT projects fail after the minting process. People are only there for a flip, and that’s it. They don’t care about the project’s future, and they’re not willing to stick through the project’s lowest lows. They don’t believe in the project.
It would be best if you scoured the web for people plants: the early adopters who live by your project’s principles. Without a core group of individuals who are willing to build the initial community and help expand the onset of your project into sub-communities, your firm won’t take off.
Building the right network also involves becoming a role model to the first onboarded members. If you don’t show them the behaviour you want in the future of your community, then members will do whatever they please. You must show them how to act, and they’ll reflect your behaviours.
In basic terms, this means being active in your community (chatting in Discord, for example), establishing how you want users to interact (do you want to set a positive tone? Is your project tackling a severe issue?), and being transparent from the very beginning.
Make members feel like they’re your friend. Don’t put yourself over top of them, as they’re your lifeline.
So we’ve launched a token and attracted the initial community. What’s next?
Scaling the Minimal Viable Community
Scaling your community is the next big challenge. How can you grow your initial community and expand it into a web of smaller communities?
It first starts from forming an initial group of supporters. If you begin segregating your Minimal Viable Community before it reaches critical mass, then the foundation of your project will be disconnected. You need that tight-knit community that will stick with you through thick and thin.
As a project owner, you don’t need to worry about when the critical mass moment is reached, as your community will signal to you when the moment is near. They’ll tell you when to start dividing up your Discord into channels for your project’s respective sub-communities.
You need to set scalable systems to ease the expansion process. In web2, this meant purchasing additional servers to increase functionality as the network grows. In web3, you must establish a scalable infrastructure that aligns with your community’s needs.
Let’s say your project’s supporters have an appetite for gaming. So naturally, the next step as a founder would be to build a GameFi experience that exceeds your community’s expectations. Although your sub-communities may be comprised of RPG lovers, FPS fanatics, and Hack n’ Slash enthusiasts, every gamer loves refreshing gameplay with a P2E mechanism integrated within.
Do you see what I mean? Scaling involves looking back at your Minimal Viable Community’s identity and building infrastructure that reflects these principles. Don’t ever steer away from what made you, you.
What's Next?
It’s pretty easy to find lines of code on GitHub to create a shitcoin and market it on Twitter. It’s easy to generate 10,000 NFTs with over 100 traits and mint it out within weeks.
But what’s difficult is surviving the market through its trends, and more importantly, retaining your Minimal Viable Community. As a founder, your community depends on you every single day. Once you begin building, there’s no going back. You are at the mercy of your community.
And although I may have made it sound like you’re selling your soul, trust me, you’re not. If you’re passionate about a project, and you know others will feel the same way, then developing a relationship with your Minimal Viable Community will be one of the most fulfilling experiences for you.
Sources:
Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics
How Four NFT Novices Created a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem of Cartoon Apes
WHAT ARE NETWORK EFFECTS & IMPORTANCE | TAPAN DESAI
https://twitter.com/alive_eth/status/1296831069065375749
Building a Minimum Viable Community - MATH Venture Partners
Originally published on Medium.
