Launching a crypto project is hard work. The amount of research and labor that go into projects that have been launched is admirable. Projects have to consider factors such as bearish markets, DEXes/CEXes, liquidity, community adoption, marketing outreach, funding and acquiring talented team members to scale growth – phew! 

These factors, whilst important do not mean much without community support. Community is often cited as the most important factor in the success of a crypto project – especially projects with tokens! In the world of fiat, the community is important, but not remotely as much as crypto. There are a few key considerations to note when trying to understand the community’s importance to crypto projects. Firstly, your project will need token holders to maintain its value, and the holders of these tokens are often community members. Secondly, widespread adoption is usually sparked by diligent community members. 

Fiat companies usually don’t require community involvement at the same level that crypto projects do. Take a fiat B2B payments company for example. The main client of a B2B payments company is another company – not much of a community required. However, a crypto B2B project with its own token would require support from an active community to maintain its token’s value. Communities are the lifeline of projects that have been listed on a market, and a project with a dull community will probably have a token that performs badly, which leads to a doomed project! 

So the burning question is how does one support a project after its launch? 

1. Follow Its Social Media Platforms

One of the first steps to supporting a project after launch is to follow them on all platforms. Getting onto whitelists usually requires social media participation, but the numbers mean little without active community engagement. It’s important to note that following a project without interacting with it makes the project’s following look fake. 

Projects attract VCs and partners when they have an active and committed community. At DAOLaunch, a requirement that ranks high on our criteria is an active community. ‘We look for engaged existing communities across Telegram, Discord, Twitter, etc. to ensure there is a primed group of passionate users. We also look for an updated and detailed roadmap; transparency with the community is critical for success.

Some patterns that hurt a project’s chances include dead or broken channels, incongruent or misleading information, an outsized presence of bots and spam accounts, and low engagement with the community.’

Interaction influences the algorithms of social media platforms a lot. It tells the machine learning engine who to show a certain page, and this page might be the project you’re backing. It goes a long way when a user can point out what they like or don’t like about a project publicly, especially directly to the project’s pages. 

2. Become a Brand Advocate

Being a brand advocate is tough. It means explaining a project’s vision and goals in your spare time. It also means explaining why WGMI (We’re Going To Make It) when someone believes you’re NGMI (Not Going To Make It. Alas, wooing the non-believers and naysayers. 

The pillars of strong communities are these advocates that will take time out of their day to make new users understand the value of the project, and why it’s good for the world. Now bear in mind that we’re obviously referring to quality projects that are not rug-pulls. It’s breathtakingly painful to see how quiet brand advocates of rugpulls and scammy projects become when the founders vanish and the social media accounts are deleted. DYOR before convincing your grandmother that her pension will be well spent on a project’s tokens! 

Being a brand advocate does not only include inviting your grandmother’s best friend to join the community and buy tokens. It also includes being brutally honest about the project you’re backing. Brand advocates are 50% more likely to influence a purchase! The power you have in convincing a person to join a project you’ve recommended means that you have to manage expectation – which people often leave out when they advocate. 

Every project has weak points, make sure to highlight the weak, not-so-shiny points to the people you’re trying to onboard to allow them the opportunity to judge fairly. This helps the brand because it reduces users that promote FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt). A lot of pure-hearted users become FUDers because they were promised a Porsche but ended up driving into the sunset in a Toyota Prius. Communicating a project’s status in a very honest manner also reduces the amount of pressure on the shoulders of the project’s team. 

In this light, think of advocating for a brand as being an influencer that sells you a product that has paid them to promote it. Whilst you might not have received an eye-watering amount of money to organically promote a project, your stake in it is your remuneration and it ultimately decides whether you turn a profit or not it a project. So, promote-wisely. Thus, an influencer with a stake in a project is convinced to declare it. 

Invite people in your circle and people that you know to follow the projects on all of its platforms, and encourage them to interact with it when they can. Follow count is the car, but the fuel that makes the car move is engagement. And a project’s community is as good as its least active user. 

3. Add Value To The Project

Value can take the form of many different things depending on what a project does. Communities that add value to projects are important to their success. Newly launched projects often don’t have the resources to cover many community-facing expenses. 

One of the most common value adds for projects is content creation. Communities rely on a constant feed of content to stay alive. This content can include updates on a project’s progress, memes, or blogs. Projects will also make sure that community members are rewarded in tokens or rewards to support these efforts. 

Another way to add value is to guide new community members. Growth attracts new, clueless community members. These members will ask countless questions up until they’re satisfied with the amount of knowledge they have acquired. These questions are often answered by the moderators, but there’s an added value of insight with answers from direct community members. These answers do not have the blindness that comes with constantly developing a project daily. Being part of an organization from the inside can make team members blind to pain points that are visible to new eyes. This is where your interaction counts a lot! 

Projects require a lot of critical analyses. New businesses pivot and change their offering as they grow. Crypto projects tend to launch with a lot of community members, which is different from the norm. Community members that offer honest commentary after a project has announced changes to its fundamentals are very important. Projects will not understand the depth of certain decisions without insight from users. A crucial piece of advice offered to businesses in their growth journey is to gain user insight directly from listening to users based on their experiences. Constructive criticism will help a project to identify its downsides and understand how it needs to address these issues. 

Users that have experience using a project’s product can provide insight that is more valuable than the project’s team members. No one actively uses a product as organically as the user. It is important to share this information with the project’s team to influence the direction in which the wheel steers the ship. 

Translation services work well for crypto projects. The world is filled with many languages and translation services are key to almost every crypto community we have come across. You can assist a project by translating its content to a language that you’re familiar with. 

DAOLaunch aims to bridge to gap between retail investors and incredible crypto projects. In doing so, we’re committed to creating a community of quality investors that understand the benefits of supporting projects for the long term. 

DAOLaunch offers retail investors preferential investment conditions depending on their investment performance recorded on the blockchain. Recorded investments are not editable, as all negotiations are on-chain. DAOLaunch investors can brand themselves as Decentralized Venture Capitalists and much like traditional VCs, they can negotiate more favorable investment terms. Stay tuned for more educational content. 

About DAOLaunch

DAOLaunch aims to create an open and inclusive competitive environment for startup investment- the Decentralized Venture Capital concept.

DAOLaunch offers retail investors preferential investment conditions depending on their investment performance recorded on the blockchain. Recorded investments are not editable, as all negotiations are all on-chain. DAOLaunch investors can brand themselves as Decentralized Venture Capitalists and much like traditional VCs, they can negotiate more favorable investment terms.

DAOLaunch aims to change the structure of shady behind-closed-door investment deals to an open and more competitive deal structure that takes place on the blockchain. This will drastically shake up the startup industry.

Website |  Telegram |  Twitter | LINE OC | DISCORD