Finding fit in a community-first (web3) world

Why it makes sense to put community-market and community-product fit before product-market fit

A go-to-community (GTC) approach can be a very effective first stage in a go-to-market (GTM) strategy, or even trump the entire go-to-market strategy, especially in a decentralised and web3 context where community is a key foundation and enabler.

Building community and engaging with your early member base throughout the product development process can provide valuable feedback, validation, and social proof for your idea, proposition and product. And having an active and engaged community can help to drive network effects and virality, which in turn will fuel your growth flywheel through community-driven acquisition, engagement, and retention.

By making community engagement a key part of your go-to-market strategy, you can:

• Get early feedback and validation from potential users
• Build trust and credibility with early adopters
• Create a sense of ownership and investment in the project and product among community members
• Drive user acquisition, engagement, and retention through community network effects and virality

The key difference between the incentives in go-to-market vs. go-to-community strategy can be summarized as the difference between value capture vs. value creation.
Community ≠ Marketing: Why We Need Go-to-Community, Not Just Go-to-Market | Future

By & for the community

Community building, first and foremost, is a mindset. It’s an approach that emphasises the importance of building relationships and fostering engagement with a group of people who share a common interest, purpose or set of values. It can help to create a sense of belonging and ownership among community members, which in turn can lead to increased engagement, retention and growth. It requires authenticity, empathy, inclusivity, and collaboration, valuing the community’s needs, interests and goals above your own:

• Authenticity: taking a human-first approach by being authentic, transparent and honest in all peer-level interactions with the community
• Empathy: being able to understand and empathise with the community’s perspectives, painpoints, and needs, through active listening
• Inclusivity: creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for all members of the community, valuing diversity and co-creation as key enablers
• Collaboration: working together with the community to co-create solutions and build a shared vision for the future
• Long-term perspective: seeing community building not as a one-time task but an ongoing process, continuously gathering feedback, iterating and improving based on the community’s evolving needs

Minimum viable community (MVC)

Similar to applying a LEAN methodology to product development by starting small and iterating around a minimum viable product (MVP), developing and building community also benefits from creating a minimal version first to test reception and fit, before investing more resources into it. Minimum viable community (MVC) refers to the minimum state of community interaction and supporting programs, for a small group of core members to come together around a shared purpose and find value and belonging in what you’ve built.

MVC is a great way to test out whether your purpose resonates with early community members and to find out what brings the most value. Starting small helps you to focus on building relationships and understanding between a core team first, before scaling out.

It’s also less risky as it gives you the freedom to experiment and test things out, without the complexity of big community, tools and processes. Authenticity and trust come more naturally when starting small, which will be essential stepping stones to learn about your member wants, needs, and pains. In turn, these learnings can be incorporated into finetuning your community purpose and scope, as well as the values and culture you are establishing.

Starting small means you start to really learn about what people want, need, love or struggle with. This means you can build these learnings into building your community and the conversations you co-create. Starting small means you can be mindful of the culture you are creating, through your own behaviour and of those that you invite in.
A guide to building a Minimum Viable Community (MVC) (rosie.land)

10–20 invested or committed contributors is all it takes to form an MVC. However, identifying and recruiting your initial core team of early members and contributors is critical to ensure that there is sufficient of a common foundation and alignment around your why, your high-level purpose. Influencers, thought leaders, power users or super fans are excellent candidates for inviting into your community early on. They often share the same passion and values, have proven skin-in-the-game, and would be willing to commit time and effort in iterating through the initial community forming and norming stages. In addition, these ‘power’ member types are often seen as social leaders who can help onboard their followers once the community is ready to scale out, triggering a cycle of user acquisition and ever-increasing network effects.

Community-member & community-market fit

The key, when building minimum viable community, is to focus on finding community-member fit for a small group of believers. When you start building community with the people who are most likely to contribute meaningfully, you get to establish a solid and cohesive foundation for community growth and gravity. Community-member fit is the point at which your initial core team of members is consistently providing meaningful value to one another without being asked.

Signals that you have community-member fit:
> Members are coming back regularly without being asked
> Interaction is happening without you facilitating
> Members are enforcing community rules and guidelines on your behalf
> Members are self-organizing events
> Members are recruiting other members
> The vibes are immaculate
> Members are giving you unsolicited feedback
The Community-Member-Fit Score (CMFS) (substack.com)

Community-market fit, on the other hand, is knowing you have built a community that can scale beyond a core group of believers. You will know you have built a community that people want if it addresses enough of a (market) need to sustain itself; when your community is fulfilling a need of belonging and delivering on a purpose that resonates with a real ‘market’ segment and need. At this point, your community has achieved minimal gravity to attract and retain new members.

How do you know you’ve built a community that people want?

• you have established a core consistent base of super users and contributors
• there is sufficient initial vibrancy such that new members are being consistenly pulled in and closer to the center
• growth is happening organically through member get member and community virality and network effects
• members are interacting and gradually taking over engagement and ownership (from initial community leaders and stewards)
• you have strong new member retention and there is sufficient FOMO amongst them

Community-product fit & minimum viable product (MVP)

Building a minimum viable community and achieving community-market fit is an important step in delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) as it allows you to gather feedback and validate your product idea before investing a lot of time and resources into further development. Community-driven product development combines the speed of centralised decision-making with the customer-centric development patterns of open-source. Product market fit is a lot easier to find when the market is by your side constantly telling you what it wants.

Community-product fit is when you apply the LEAN methodology of rapid prototyping and validation through community feedback. A “by & for the community” approach implies that the product is developed by the community for the community, meaning that the community is actively involved in the development and decision making process. The content and conversations that arise from your community will reveal their needs and priorities, as well as which features they value and which features they struggle with. This approach ensures that the product meets the needs of the target community and is more likely to be adopted and used by them. By building a community of early believers and adopters who are invested in your purpose, you can ensure that the product you are co-creating meets their needs and that they will be more likely to use and promote the product.

Startups building MVCs tell the story of what they’re going to build, share their vision with the internet, invite people to join in its inception on Discord, provide them some vested interest in the realization of the vision (tokens or otherwise), give them a platform to share ideas, listen, and then deliver.
Community Is Essential to Scale Your MVP: Here’s Why (unita.co)

Community-led growth & product-market fit (PMF)

When it comes to scaling adoption, a strong community-market fit is critical. It helps to ensure that the product or service is well-received by the community, which can make it easier to expand to other users with similar needs and desires. Furthermore, having a community that is already engaged with your product, and that has a high degree of trust in your company, can be a valuable asset when scaling up your business. They will be more likely to be your early adopters and evangelists, which will help you to expand your reach and reach more potential customers.

As such, establishing community fit (both market and product) can be a powerful foundation for virality and network effects by bootstrapping early adoption, providing product validation and social proof, and generating network effects that can help drive growth through ongoing user acquisition, engagement, and retention.

Having an active and engaged community can provide social proof for your product, making it more attractive to potential users. As more people join your community, it becomes a powerful marketing tool that can help attract new users and members. Moreover, by continuously engaging with your community and iterating your product based on their feedback, you can foster a sense of ownership and investment in the product among your early community members, turning them into evangelists, once your MVP is launched. In this way, community becomes the new moat and a powerful force in driving growth and establishing product-market fit.

Ultimately, by encouraging and incentivising member agency and co-creation, a community-driven business has the potential of activating an additional dimension to growth, beyond user acquisition, loyalty and network effects. When members feel a sense of ownership, and aligned incentives enable them to share in the upside, a brand’s value will grow as a result of active participation and value co-creation by a diverse and committed community.

A new marketing and growth framework

Combining a go-to-community (GTC) approach with the LEAN methodology of iterating through multiple validation stages, fundamentally repivots the traditional go-to-market funnel. No longer is it about building a product and engaging an audience through a linear sequence of acquisition-activation-retention stages.

Instead, implementing a GTC approach provides you with a new growth framework to find traction for your product, aka the “ACP funnel”

• Audience: bring people into the stories you’re telling
• Community: create a space for people who love your stories and identify with your brand
• Product: give your community a product to achieve their goal and improve their own story

In summary, community-first is about starting small, inviting a group of early believers, tapping into their desires and creating a narrative that resonates with them. By using their feedback and validation to create a product that meets their needs and solves their pain points, you establish product fit while building social proof at the same time. And by putting community-market fit before product-market fit, you get to leverage a committed base of agents and evangelists that will help you grow and scale more quickly and (what’s even more important) more sustainably.