[36] Evangelists Assemble
GM GM,
Hope you had a great weekend!
I recently did a talk about growth in the early stages of a community building. Specifically, how do you lean on the community to help grow the community when there aren’t many community members? Today we dive into the topic of Evangelists and how they can help kickstart the growth flywheel.
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Content is King, but Distribution is Queen.
The same is true for ideas.
You can have a good idea, but if it no one hears about it, it doesn’t really matter. 🌳🍃
The others hearing about it part is about distribution.
At heart, distribution is about growth and scale.
Distribution is one of the hardest things to scaling any company and/or project. We live in a world where everyone is trying to grab everyone else’s attention.
In a DAO or any decentralized organization, distribution is even harder because of the coordination challenges present. [See our piece on Coordination in Decentralized Organizations]. And with the growth of community-driven projects, the average person today has a lot of options out there.
But because DAOs are powered by their communities, the community should play a critical role in distribution, growth and scale.
As a project founder, you can try to tell everyone about your DAO and grow it by yourself OR you can mobilize your community members to tell others about your DAO.
But wait… in the early days I don’t have community members yet.
How do I solve this chicken or the egg problem? 🥚🐓🐣
Evangelists.
Evangelists
Evangelists are the early believers in your community who want to actively contribute to growing the community, DAO and/or project.
They are the people who:
jump in early even if all there is, is a dream
will help recruit others into the community
are willing to do actual work to help grow the community
Evangelists are the A-players in your community.
In the early stages of building a Web 3 project, you often don’t have resources, time or a team to help drive growth in the project. Evangelists end up being psuedo-team members that can drive important initiatives for the project.
If you’ve tried to build a community, you are probably thinking these people are unicorns. Evangelists do exist, the challenge of mobilizing them is often a coordination problem—how do you find them, reward them and keep them motivated?
Anyone in your community can become an Evangelist:
The people who volunteer to help you with specific things are potential evangelists
The people who show up regularly, even if it’s just a few moments here and there are potential evangelists
The people who ask a lot of questions are potential evangelists
But mobilizing evangelists requires project founders to think through incentives, particularly around Extrinsic and Intrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic: How do you reward people for their contribution with things they can “show off” with? (i.e. badges, awards, financial / social, etc.) 💰
Intrinsic: What do your evangelists care about beyond extrinsic, such as values, purpose, deeper goals, etc?
Extrinsic motivators work to compensate early adopters for the risk they’re taking on: mostly the unknown. This is why token-based economics under Web 3 are a genius way to garner contribution… you get something that has upside for the work you contribute.
But is this enough to sustain interest?
For example, let’s say there is some sort of prestige associated with being the first to own a new NFT. That’s exciting at first, but could wear off with time.
And it can be a lot easier to start with extrinsic motivation since these can be tested a lot quicker… but at some point needs to evolve to intrinsic motivation to drive stickiness, especially when the going gets tough. If an Evangelist really cares what your DAO is doing, they will see it through, when things inevitably start to break.
This is the beauty of early “recruits” to a DAO: just like the founders, evangelists feel super invested in its success. But that devotion isn’t a guarantee if you aren’t offering the right environment (a.k.a culture is important).
Community-Project Fit
Remember evangelists are some of the most sought-after community members. But people are people at the end of the day: short attention spans, a lot of other things going on, and endless optionality on the internet. As the project founder, you need to give them a reason to come back and contribute!
Not everyone in your community is going to be an evangelist for your project, so it’s better to design for the type of person you want to attract.
If you try to turn everyone into an evangelist, you’ll turn no one into an evangelist.
Just like there is product-market fit, in Web 3 and DAOs, there should also be community-project fit.
Community-Project Fit: Alignment between your community members and the project/DAO’s mission, vision, culture and product. I.e. your community is here for the intended reason and goals of the project.
Many projects and DAOs design different elements of their community at a high level. But because each community is different, it’s important to take the target persona you want to reach to heart and design for community-project fit.
For example, if your DAO’s community is filled with sports fans, then create a space for the community to debate sports. Sports fans already exhibit this behavior pre-Web 3.
Ultimately this is about understanding who your most evangelists and community members are. Evangelists may be patient with a lot of things, but they will leave and go somewhere else if they don’t have community-project fit.
Founders: The First Evangelists
Every project is seeded with an initial set of evangelists: the founding team.
To find evangelists and mobilize them, the Founder(s) should model the behavior they want in their evangelists.
There are a few critical things for founders to get right to find and empower the evangelists in their community:
Vibes and Values: Project founders, team, evangelists and ideally broader community should know the vibes, value and culture of the project. Project founders should communicate the values regularly. It’s hard building culture in real life… imagine building culture on Discord, asynchronously, across time zones with razor-thin attention spans.
Showing up: Evangelists expect Founders to show up regularly — this gives evangelists confidence the project is legit and high quality… which makes it exciting for evangelists to contribute their time and energy to the project.
Coordination: Make it easy for Evangelists to participate. Once you identify evangelists in the community, you still need to make “asks.” Often times Evangelists want to help, but they don’t know how to because you haven’t told them how to help.
The tendency is to think of growth through quantity, e.g. the number of community members. However, in grassroots and bottom-up models like DAOs, communities and Web 3 projects, having a core group of early believers makes growth more scalable.
It’s not just quantity that matters early on, it’s quality. ⚡
Once you convince a few evangelists to jump in, they can go find other evangelists, so on and so forth. They will embrace and spread the culture they rallied behind.
Because when the original founder can’t be everywhere at once (and this will happen a lot earlier than you think), your Evangelists will shine.