High Demand Skills
The best web3 teams do two things really well: incentive design and community management.
Let’s explore what these are.
Incentive design
…is a mix of economics and game design. It influences how assets are valued and the type of user participation. The design will consider things like asset supply, pricing, scarcity, FOMO, exclusivity, and social status.
Let’s look at two different and successful approaches.
NBA TopShot is high engagement and accessible. The design characteristics include low price point entry, highly interactive to complete collector challenges, frequent pack drops adding new supply, closed IP, and collector score status.
Bored Apes is exclusive and encourages the community to create derivative products. Its characteristics include high price point, limited supply, and open IP (i.e. owners have full rights to commercialize).
Community management
The best web3 projects are highly engaged communities. The hard work to build an engaged community involves activities like build belonging, share information, resolve problems (e.g. technical issues, bad behavior, monitor spam), send feedback to product team, hype up new launches or activities, and foster community interactions.
This is a hard job that requires a lot of empathy and care.
One company doing this well is Pixel Vault who created PunksComic and MetaHeroes. They’ve repeatedly launched new products into a highly engaged fan base, while steadily growing the community as well. They also just raised $100m off this success.
On the negative side, StonerCats has done a poor job and lost ~7k members in their Discord the past few months. They had massive hype at launch raising $30m for the animated series production, but have taken months to release just a couple more episodes, losing all the community excitement. They took too long to deliver value to the token holders then they started promoting other unrelated NFT projects, which felt spammy. I’ve since muted their Discord.
Incentives and community are hard tasks, a mix of art and science, and learned best through experience. The web3 success stories shine through their skills in these departments.