Building the Community vs. Building the Product - What comes first?

Summary: The Chicken or the Egg

What should be built first? The Community or the Product. Web3 is all about the community - ownership, involvement, growing together, rewarding your community and so much more. Traditionally, the recommendation was to build an MVP and then start engaging with your customers. While that still is the way to go, it sometimes doesn't hurt to start building your community (Minimum Viable Community) or users / investors / builders who are passionate about your vision even as you start building the MVP. The benefits are really around the support and feedback that you get as you build, potential investment to accelerate your journey and even potential team members that could in turn help you accelerate your journey.

Benefits of building the Community First

Getting Feedback

Engaging with your early community and listening to their feedback has some unique advantages. For one, it tells your early users that you value their input and more importantly, it helps you fine-tune your product and focus on building features that are sought after by the community. Especially when resources are constrained, it actually means that you are moving closer to traction faster. Of course, like Steve Jobs said, the Customer sometimes doesn't know what they want. So, balance the opinion of customers with what your vision is and what you've learnt from your own unique experience as well. The buck stops with you as an entrepreneur / builder.

Getting Investors

Web3 is really about the community having ownership of the product. In that sense, when you do end up doing your token launch / fund-raise, you should have reached a critical mass of early backers and investors who will not only invest in your token, but also promote you within their networks so that their own rich friends also come in to support you. While one way to look at building a Web3 community is looking at them as creators who get paid for their own work, the viral effects come in first when they get rewarded for bringing users in and more importantly, they also get rewarded for growing the network. If you are able to factor the ideal network effects of this referral chain, you are making sure that everyone in your network who likes your product treats this as his own venture and promotes the hell out of it. This is the ideal state you want to be in.

Building a Stronger Team

As you build a Web3 product, there will be people in the community who you will get to know and like. Some of them might end up having the skills that you really need to accelerate your product development. This could be developers with skills your team needs more off or Community Managers that are already engaging and helping others within your Discord or as someone who tests your product and provides feedback. They could be onboarded depending on their time availability, interest levels and passion as either a full-time team member or even as someone who works a few hours per day to help you build your community.

Summary

Build the Community Early and Keep up the Engagement.