Block Zero Stage | From Code to Community: The Dual Path of Building in Web3

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

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   um next up I'll please I'll ask you to please welcome Marcus as we will be talking about from code to community yeah yeah yeah yeah

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   all right hey welcome everybody thank you all so much for being here I just want to say we're incredibly lucky to be joined today on stage by this Allstar uh panel um a lot of these people or all of these people up here with us today are near ogs they've been contributing to a building on near for well over a year some two plus um so in this panel we're going to be diving into the intertwined

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   journey of technical development and Community cultivation in web 3 uh as you probably all know I mean the impact of a of a successful Community um you know in web 3 is is pretty much it's massive um so who better to discuss this topic than this diverse uh this this this um panel full of people with diverse backgrounds um so I'm going to go ahead and let them introduce themselves uh you know provide a little overview of what you're working on um you know what you do and we can dive into it Naomi we'll start with you

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   yeah uh I'm Naomi and I'm as you can see the only one who doesn't have like a project on there because I'm um yeah I'm a freelancer mostly I work at the ASA Foundation but I've been in the near ecosystem for roughly a year and last nion nobody knew me and now everybody thinks I work for the foundation so I must have done something right um and yeah I'm excited to be here I'm quite fond of the community topic

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   and looking forward to talking about it me next hi guys I'm uh Reza from ludero ludero is a gamified web 3 uh in Market intelligence platform uh we use games to collect zero party data from your users and help you make better decisions uh hello does this work oh lit my name is shot some of y'all know me as web3 plugs I lead decentralization at Banning Collective which is essentially the US arm of uh near and uh yeah I work with

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   Dev Dows and Founders I also run minority programmers we're International group of devs you might see some of our products here in the near ecosystem hello my name is Dan um I'm the co-founder of call 42 the third um nft Marketplace largest n Market on year right now we have a pivot which is a42 lab laboratory building Mass adoption products focusing on mass adoption products and also providing B2B

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   Solutions we worked with companies like BMW Europe danu Japanese agency and right now creating a whole new product mobile applications Podium uh that is focused on the intersection uh between augmented reality in the whole web free space cool um yeah awesome to be up here with all you feel honored um I want to like start with with a question right like it's almost like the Chicken and

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   the Egg um and I love your unique uh kind of approaches to this what comes first uh the community or the project a lot of times we see uh a team build out a project and then they start focusing on building Community around it uh other times probably more often we see people uh you know building Community around a concept um you know what are your opinions there okay I can I can start maybe so I think um Community is great right but

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   the I believe that the the real strong Community is organically created Community right created usually uh by some True Believers in the product the platform a protocol we have plenty of use case in in the web pre space so like Mo moderation stuff is important but uh but when you you the real engagement comes from the real people so if you have like moderators and your employees chatting with each other with each with each other and talking to each other in the community that's not how it works

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    unless you want to uh essentially create pump and dump token on or show some stats to venture capitalist how many how many users you have in your Discord Community right but yeah so it depends but for for me and from our side of view the real Community is essentially community created by true members of of of the whole product Pro protocol or or project yeah I mean uh for me it really depends on uh what the community is and

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    what it attends to achieve um often When developing a product I think the most uh critical thing you should do is address paid points directly if you're already existing Community uh that might be the inspiration for your paid point uh but uh at the same time a community doesn't necessarily need a product at all um we work a lot in like the nearest ecosystem in general um that's not necessarily uh

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    kind of doing this type of Eco relations product oriented uh but uh certain communities like for example like the boss Community uh we needed like a developer tooling uh so we uh so we teamed up with Jutsu to build that out that's example of like essentially a product coming out um of a community based on pain points um at the same time communities may never need a product or they realize uh or they're just there to kind of hang out so I I I really am kind of skeptical about projects that uh

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    build the Community First rather than address a paid Port I really think most effective products come up from um addressing a paid port in a segment and kind of going to the places where those communities exist yeah and like to your point um we've seen like you know we always kind of make the joke like there's 12 active users in web 3 because I think of all the focus on community rather than the

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    focus on product uh but as like you say if you're addressing a pain point and then the community can kind of grow from that naturally and you know you get word of mouth and people tell each other stuff like we're building decentralized system but information still flowing in the same way so yeah product first and then Community if you're building a business if you're just trying to do something else then it doesn't really matter what the product is yeah I don't

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    think actually everything in web 3 is like worth a business or can even be commercialized and a lot of times projects build the Community to kind of dump on them um which obviously then is not a great way um to go about it I think another way to build a community can also just be you have some aspirational goal you have some shared values and you want to do something cool like I don't know you want to make an Amin together or you want to see like a

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    certain type of art be created and then you come together like I mean in the near ecosystem there's near Chanda and it's just a bunch of artist making like cute art of this one thing and it's a community there's no token there's no nothing um like that and it works and people are having fun and it's small I think that's also another like challenge everybody wants to scale super fast and go from their Community from like 10

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    people to 100 to thousand to a million in like really short time and I think you usually lose like the initial culture when you do that yeah I also think it's important to understand what a product is um often when you're doing a community without a business model um there's a lot of operational overhead there's a lot of some someone who's actually onboarding someone um or you have kind of a decentralized way of like creating an

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    onboarding checklist or a user joury for community members um but it that's the product in itself but a lot of times when you have kind of that operational overhead and you don't have a business bottle um the community dies and leaves without that person and so I think it's um also kind of important to understand like who in the community is providing that onboarding process what kind of that onboarding product to the community is and um yeah and and how to exactly

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    sustain that so yeah the answer is it depends Marcus and it's always better to build the product first I believe everyone agrees here not always um something I want to address uh you know just I guess it's relatable to the to the group here as well um but with with web with the open um you know open source nature of of web 3 you know web 3 is a space where a bunch of like awesome people are building towards the future of an open web user owned assets use your owned data uh developer like an active

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    developer community and presence is super important but this seems to be one of the biggest pain points in web 3 right is is kind of how do you effectively build uh an Engaged community of developers that can contribute to the protocol or the project um and also provide like input from a technical standpoint but also ensure that they're retained like I'd love to hear from some of you with each

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    of your respective kind of uh backgrounds and roles that you bring to the table what some like creative kind of methods around this could be or what you've seen that worked um and and then kind of what your thought what your thoughts on like what would you do what would you implement to kind of get something like this going I mean I do a lot of like developer relations work especially um in a decentralized way even before the near ecosystem uh working at the

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    minority programmers um and it really depends on what the objective uh of what you're trying to achieve uh so for minority programmers initially we just want to skill people um across all the world uh to actually have upward Mobility through development and this for us is how do we effectively equip the with the skills so that they can get a job um that developer journey is very different than having someone retain in

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    near ecosystem and doing devil uh for that so um particularly what I think is most effective especially with kind of breaking down the numbers in the developer report for full-time developers which is what I want to see in the ecosystem is actual um outside of like these hackathons and and just Builder groups and touch fors theirs how exactly can we find them full time opportunities and a lot of times um this

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    doesn't uh uh a lot of the time this trickles down to like who what projects are effectively getting funded if we could pipeline developers into the founder Journey um and continue it uh there uh at the same time I think um an open source culture um where people are excited to innovate and constantly innovating not only on the front ends but in the protocol level um is kind of in cently needed for um building a a

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    robust kind of near ecosystem um but at at the same time um you see this in like rust in a lot of times a lot of the contributors there are also contributing because in their day job they happen to um be dependent on Rust for uh for a lot of the infrastructure tooling they're they're building so um to me that's that's pable making sure that there are companies who are building on here that

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    are are dependent on this open source infrastructure and that are kind of pipelining Junior and senior developers into uh contributing to the overall protocol yeah I can add some thoughts um as you know we nowadays we have like uh the biggest developer communities uh in crypto in the wety space are gitcoin Community I believe uh and developer da we have also like projects she 256 I

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    believe nonprofit organization focus on developers but the main issue there is the issue of the whole web free space is we separate each other from other chains so even if you in this community there are still subcommunities that are working on only one layer one layer two or help the the the this layer to succeed to protocal Smart contract Etc it doesn't matter so I believe the next stage for developer communities is to go mult multi-chain and that's exactly Marcus what I had like two three days

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    ago I told you about multichain protocol concept and you said just wait a minute then relax Elia will say everything and we had an announcement about this multichain thing and so I think this is the future and this is the first step of course and uh that's amazing so in terms of developer Community we have near devhub we have other also small developer communi and we have to focus on building multi-chain infrastructure

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    multi-chain protocols because the feature is multi-chain basically I think maybe I mean I'm I'm a marketer and what I feel is like we're always just like focusing on such a small p and I mean developers want to BU build for like people in the end right I mean okay some of them want to build because it's just cool to build and it's fun um but I mean if you look at web 3 it's so small like Roblox probably has like 10 times as many monthly active users as web 3 so if you want to like

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    make money and maybe also get your work out to a big audience then maybe that's where you go and and I think that's like a bigger problem in the space is that we and everybody's been saying that that we have too much infrastructure now and we kind of lack the consumer apps and now we've got this Focus so um maybe once we actually get to the point where we have more consumer apps then it also gets more attractive to build on web 3 in

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    general and of course I agree like multi-chain but also it shouldn't be so hard right like it's like solidity then there's like rust there's wasm there's like what not and even like if a chain like Solana has rust but if you want to write rust smart contracts on Solana it's a very different Beast than writing rust smart contracts on near so I think there's still a a lot of like things that can be improved to actually make this multi-chain death experience easier

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    and maybe also possible yeah I think like you know just focusing like the for better for worse people are focusing on developers but kind of like Entre non-technical entrepreneurs are probably being overlooked a little bit um that have ideas and just need a bit of help bringing it to Market and on the coding side uh and I think that would be a very very interesting way for whichever found

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    whichever blockchain decides to pursue the opportunity actually on that note I think the uh current move with AI is really interesting because even people like me who've got no clue of coding they can figure out how to build like a POC at least of something that somewhat Works without having to know like I mean I have some basic understanding of all these things but you can do it so I think maybe if some communities figure out how they can empower people who are non-technical to do those things and

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    teach them like hey look this is how you need to phrase it and then you can get to a stage where you can actually show it to somebody and they might have some constructive feedback yeah and I want to note that like especially when the near ecosystem um unlike the kind of other siloed like developer ecosystems it's like we have rust which is one of the fastest growing languages we have JavaScript on the front ends we have the exposure um

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    through solidity um and uh you yeah I think it's like I I think it's very kind of important to note like when we're training kind of engineering Talent um they're not Silo to our ecosystem alone this is skills that can lead to overall upward Mobility I think we have that um really unique selling proposition as opposed to solidity in ethereum people are kind of like if if they're kind of siloed into that ecosystem and so um that's one of the main things I like about near and even on the rust

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    Frameworks kind of alone it's way easier than chewing glass on Sal on Solano on Cosmos or on uh polka dot is from what I've been hearing just kind of from uh developer feedback well I'd love to actually segue from there and kind of like build on top of that right so I mean you know we web 3 right now like this what determines the success of any web 3 project and like a lot of these people here might be

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    building something really cool that they want to turn into a project later on or they've already been building something um so we all know it it is community right so for instance all of us probably subscribe to Netflix but if you consider yourself a Netflix Community member like in web 3 it's it's all about community so again to kind of like build on that topic what are what are some of the challenges that uh that some teams can

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    expect to face in in harmonizing like you know technical development it's like building a project while you know kind of trying to make sure that they ramp up Community engagement um I believe that you know this thesis that web three as a community I think we should get rid of it to be honest because yes uh web free community is a part of web fre very big part but if we're talking about the

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    projects protocols products the main stat should be users right not total value locked not how many community members you have users right monthly active users daily active users uh Etc because the example is you know sandbox the game they have like dozens of thousands of community members very active how many monthly active users they have around 4K so it doesn't tell a lot of things yes this people want to

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    get some benefits from interacting um you know with with each other and get some reward for that you know how Discord communities work cor but still we need to focus on users first and attracting users not community members well I think it depends on what you're building like for example take me social I mean to be honest I don't use it much because I think it's not as great as other decentralized social

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    networks um but what I've seen for example when using forecaster is what they managed is that the initial Community They Se it was like really high quality and everybody kind of had a shared understanding of what is like socially acceptable in this context and what is in and there was a lot of alpha as well so if you were there you would usually get some news early um and now they're scaling it up but I think um if you have a product like that that lifts

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    from the community interactions then you definitely definitely should focus on building that Community or if you have I mean some nft projects um depending on how they structure it they might want to get a lot of input from their Community right um and maybe they want to have like a collaborative thing because I think that's like one of the main propositions of web 3 is that we can align incentives we can work on stuff

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    together we don't have to be as Cutthroat which I mean we're not there yet but yeah can I can I add something uh totally agree on me with you because you know but we I speak from the products point of view you speak from the community point point of view right so um and I totally agree but um we have to keep in mind that it depends on the user conversion from the community to the product right if you have like hundreds of thousands of U community members that are interacting with each other and you have just 2K mly active

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    users in the product doesn't work like this right it's it's a failed project essentially but it depends how you really attract those community members to really use your product and that's the the the essential task for you as a head of product or or or some or someone from from the product itself of course unless you use your community to sell your token to and if all these people buy a token and your measure is like how

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    high can I pump my token then it might still be a success but that's a bad way of doing things yeah of course of course it's a bad thing but I still think it's like 70% of the projects at the moment I mean um which obviously has to change but I think they're completely like kind of different uh personas I mean a token holder is not a user and a user is not necessarily customer um and I think in web 3 we overhype Community um and when

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    you look at the overall near Community how many people are actually using the protocol on chain I actually everybody on my team I have all their wallets I have the learn near watchbot wallet I track exactly what applications they're interacting with um and I yeah completely if on here I lit will walk up to them and show their action hash um because I want to make sure that everybody on my team is actually especially as ecosyst practitioners are

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    using the projects on near I think there is a also a disconnect of between uh kind of the biggest like I don't necessarily know if my if if ludero users are also using my applications too I think uh when it comes to community in web 3 um as as a product founder I think it's very important that we understand kind of how in the ecosystem this community translates into user retention across applications otherwise they're just kind of people there um to hype and they're actually not using the core

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    product and to me one of the most valuable things um the community can do is provide like user feedback and help us actually develop a more meaningful product I mean take take the example of like like N is a great example right we have King and sweat two the most two out five of the most active users active daps in web 3 uh but they're not really part of like the near Community right they're like they're sending transactions through but they're not not

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    active on Twitter they're not I guess a majority of them aren't active on Twitter or Discord but there's still value being drived to the chain right so like like you said uh sh like about different personas and like where they're driving value and ultimately we you have to ask yourself is like where's the end goal in that customer journey and what does good retention look like does it mean them coming over to Twitter and dejing spaces with us and like like

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    buying like crappy nfts or is it just like using the tech under the hood and driving V to chain that way I want to add to R's word I think near has a reverse problem because we have so many transactions accounts being created but we don't really have as big as Community as dep depending on the transaction uh quantity of transactions and stuff so that's actually very good thought so we

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    we have in New York system has a reverse problem because we need to create Community to essentially make products and board people to products but as as Elia and your foundation and your protocol works and the fact that users should not really see what's the protocol they're building most of the users in the new ecosystem they don't know that they using near and that's the whole point so we need to work on the community side of things too right so we

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    create more products and projects but even that in itself I think is a product like paino so we have all these transactions on shade but we don't NE necessarily know on what level of the progressive onboarding process they are a lot of these wallets are made on behalf of users they can export um but we as the ecosystem have not trick that down um there I think wallets I think about Quest a bunch of kind of onboarding infrastructure could be put

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    in place so we do ACR that value but I think like overall that strategy needs to be developed because uh the fact of the matter is like like building products that are very near native where uh the the user owns their seed phrase we're not getting the benefits of sweat and kaching um and so um yeah that's that's that's just some things we need to strategize that's why we need to track every employees wellet really

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    understand and uh the activity of of the near ecosystem well uh you know definitely important to like dog food the ecosystem and make sure that kind of things that are being built in any ecosystem are actually being used you know by the by the kind of like core contributors um we have about five minutes left so I kind of want to end this off on um we have you know everybody up here has a very

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    important kind of um you know they they bring a really unique element to this this topic right um for instance like Naomi you you have your own Community behind you that you've built I mean you have a crazy following that's very engaged a big big following on Twitter like your Twitter spaces are popping off um shot you have like done amazing work in the neark ecosystem cure rating um you know developer communities vertical

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    communities uh you're on top of a lot of things so I would love to hear from all of you um what advice would you give to to these amazing people here today that are building um you know projects uh to Foster like FBR ecosystem while advancing their technical goals I would say um is your community going to last if you die um that's that's one of the things I kind of really worry about um a lot of times especially in these

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    ecosystems like a lot leaves with the person there's time for onboarding I think uh you have to design a robust ecosystem with a bunch of uh stewards and and align incentives from the beginning because um and this even happens for a lot of projects building like you'll build something because it's cool but you never had an inherent business model I think uh Community incentives are along the same

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    lines um and I've spent a lot of times I made a lot of mistakes uh uh in my past and even today where I'm hustling and bustling uh but I didn't build something that scales so I I think that should be uh the biggest priority or um I this is what I say often like you may feel like you have motion but you're really running up a wall and get nowhere um so um yeah keep that in mind yeah I think ask yourself like honestly in genuinely

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    like why should anybody care and why should anybody if if any somebody has like 30 minutes a day why should they join my community I would they could be joining like any other community uh and that's not an answer that you're going to get like pretty quickly it's going to take over time you're going to have to get feedback and engage with your community uh but just being really critical of what you offer where you stand in relation to the market uh we help you make better

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    insights yeah I mean for me the community that I guess marus is referring to that's behind me that's mostly just based on Vibes and being very honest with my opinions and uh high integrity and people value that especially in a space where everybody is moving onto the next hype thing so fast just in order to like grab a few more people from here and from there and I think um yeah I mean sometimes uh humans aren't just motivated by money they are

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    also very much motivated by just hanging out with cool people so I think if you start your initial Community with the kind of people you would love to spend the entire weekend with no phones no nothing like that's I think a good start because if you have an organic very active like community that maybe even rallies behind your product I think then uh yeah even if you grow fast they'll make sure that still the initial culture

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    remains and yeah so I think Vibes are very important when proof of Vibes yeah proof of Vibes cool Dan anything to say any advice I think these guys know about Community Building much more than I do so well I mean you've been around I agree to every everyone awesome communities yeah well it's been great hearing from you I'm completely honored to share the stage with with all you

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    amazing people hopefully you got some value out of that um but yeah let's give a round of applause for this amazing panel everybody