startup

hi everyone, i’ve been around crypto communities for a bit, talking to people running marketing and community.

nothing crazy, but enough to notice something, most teams are still playing tactics, the projects that feel alive are building systems.
↳ community is not a metric.
it’s not daily active users, not member/user count, and not screenshots for investors.community is made of real people with jobs, lives, and limited attentio.if your system treats them like bots, they’ll behave exactly like bots.
↳ marketing and community form a loop.
social platforms bring people in, group chats create stories, those stories flow back to social platforms.break this loop or silo these functions, and nothing compounds.
↳ your community reflects how much you care.
if the team doesn’t enjoy being there, no one else will.when your community feels forced, dry, or empty, it’s already dead.crypto has infinite places to spend time, and attention is always optional.
↳ most people are just running ads.
if your feed is all product updates, that’s still advertising, people don’t open social platform to read brochures.they open it for ideas, memes, opinions, energy, and perspective.

↳ you’re not competing with other protocols.
you’re competing with memes, influencers, drama, shitposts, and trends.same timeline, same attention span, if your content isn’t interesting, it disappears in half a second.
↳ the community usually creates better content than expected.
marketing isn’t about manufacturing everything top-down, it’s about amplifying what’s already happening organically.publicly engaging with community posts, even a simple shoutout, often beats incentives.
↳ people fall in love through association, not explanation.
RedBull rarely talks about ingredients or formulas.instead, it shows people doing exciting things, with the brand quietly present.in crypto, people connect with the feeling and culture first. Product understanding comes later.
↳ real people matter more than numbers.
auto quests, follow-like-retweet farming looks like growth, but it hollows out the community.100 people who genuinely care > 10,000 empty accounts.
↳ early on, do things that don’t scale.
reply to DMs » remember names » acknowledge small contributions.if you can’t do this when the community is small, you won’t magically do it at scale.
↳ there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy in this space.
every team is operating at a different stage, with a different audience, context, and reputation.what works perfectly for one project is rarely a clean copy for another.
> at the end of the day, ecosystem growth isn’t about copying playbooks or posting KPIs, it comes from creativity and intentional system design, do it right, and it compounds naturally, do it wrong, the more money spend, the worst it gets.

#blockchain #community #builders #startup #lessons