So let’s take a stroll down memory lane and reflect on some of our favourite moments of the past year before looking ahead to what the future holds. After all, 2022 may be coming to an end, but Beyond’s journey is just beginning.

Major Product Milestones

2022 was the year we completed the first phases of our product roadmap that lay the foundation upon which a lot of new, exciting features will be built in 2023.

• Beyond officially launched on October 17th.

• We worked with our private beta clients to launch advanced token gating, activity levels and insights.

• We dedicated our first company-wide hackathon to building a community growth engine for startups. If you want to try it out, applications for our Pilot Program are still open. Register your interest here.

• We launched our new brand!

Beyond’s Community

We grew our community to 2000+ builders who share our vision to advance the online community space. We’ve continuously felt inspired and are grateful for your enthusiasm in sharing your perspectives to help us all become better community builders.

A special shout out to LocalTourist, Barnabas, Ez, Abasiekeme, Eric, Jonay, StephAsavale and MilkMoney for their contributions this year.

Here’s to learning more together in the year(s) ahead! 🤗

Inside Beyond

In 2022, we added seven new faces to the team (yes, it was just our founders, Shane and Alex, at the start of the year). 😯

We also had our first offsite in Barcelona, where we met each other in person for the first time and spent a week heads down in workshops and team building activities.

What’s next for Beyond?

During 2022, our team has been busy creating educational content about all things community building. We hosted weekly Twitter Spaces about the biggest challenges community-led businesses face, and have been interviewing web3’s best community builders to learn their tips and tricks. Stay in the loop by following us on Twitter or joining our Discord.

We also have some exciting developments in the pipeline for 2023, including a product upgrade that helps builders foster community-led growth, updates to our community channels that will unlock new ways to interact with Beyond, and collaborations with other brands.

We can’t wait to see what 2023 brings. Thank you for being on this journey with us!

PS. Happy holidays from the Beyond pets 🐶🐱❤️

The past weeks and months have been pretty tough out there in the markets.

It’s the first time in history that we’ve had this perfect storm. Crypto bear market, beginning of a recession period, and the FTX debacle as a cherry on top. Sentiment in general is grim. Venture capital is tightening up globally over the next 24+ months, and uncertainty is at a maximum high.

The only thing certain is that it’s going to be a tough time for startups in the coming months and years.

But, we are not going anywhere. At Beyond we know that the importance of community never wavers, and it may be what we need now more than ever. We’ll still be here, building for you.

While it has been a tough time for many, and it will be a tough time to come, we know that some market change is also important. Hype-driven growth is not healthy. Hype can be exciting, but it also makes it really hard to build a real product that solves a real problem.

It can be difficult to know if you’re on the right path to product/market fit, or whether you’re just riding the wave, ready to crash with everything else. It can be difficult to know if you’re addressing a real market, or whether your customers are swept up in the hype too, ready to bail at any moment.

Products need to solve a real problem for a broader group — when a group of people in a bubble are just building things for each other, they’re in for a bad time. When it pops, everyone loses.

So, the silver lining to this macro negative: The ones who are building real products for real people will stay, and the net result will still be a leap forward.

In my last blog post, I mentioned how we build from first principles. First principles never waver. They remain true no matter the market. We’re still here to innovate fresh, to bring the online community space three steps forward. The way that this happens will grow and evolve over time, to match what the market and the people need.

Beyond is rooted in a timeless purpose, which is to serve online communities. We believe that online communities have the power to bring people together in a powerful way, whether that’s for making a friend over a common passion, discovering a new product, or collaborating with your favourite brand.

In the coming months we will make some changes to our product and how we communicate. But the one thing that won’t change: we’re not going anywhere.

Wishing everyone a very happy holidays, and a wonderful start to 2023. Take care of yourself, and those around you.

But let's take a step back first. Why did we decide to build exactly these features?

Building a community is hard. There are a lot of moving parts, and it takes a lot of work to keep everything running smoothly. With Beyond we want to help community builders to build the next generation of digital communities. We understand that this will be done with a collaborative and data-driven approach.

If you don't know your members and understand what is going on in your community it becomes even harder to build a long-lasting community. You can’t make informed decisions about how to serve your community best. 🥲

🔎 Activity Levels

That’s why we built our activity levels feature — to give you the insight you need to make better, data-driven decisions 📊

Say goodbye to guessing and hello to data-driven community management. With Beyond you can now easily segment your community.

☀️ Who are your "Top 10%"?

💬 Who is actually “Active”?

👁️ Who are your “Lurkers”?

💤 & Who is “Inactive”?

The next step is to use this data as the foundation of your community-building activities. Dig deep into your community structure. Use this information to understand who your top performers are.

What has enabled your most valuable members (MVM) to contribute to your community? What are their interests? What are their similarities? What are their differences?

And maybe even more important - what hinders Lurkers to become Active?

What differentiates a top 10% member from an average community member? How can you unlock the full potential of every single member?

Beyond gives you the starting point to answer all of these questions.

🪢 Cross-Channel Insights

We wouldn’t be Beyond if we wouldn’t go beyond off-chain metrics. 😋

But what does this mean and why is it so f*** exciting?

It means that we are connecting on-chain and off-chain data to provide holistic community member profiles. With this, you will know exactly how your members interact with you across channels.

The easiest way to describe it is: better community insights = better understanding = better experience for your members.

Here is some inspiration on how to utilize the new feature:

🧐 Find out how members interact with you on-chain and off-chain 💬 See which token holders are active in your community 💎 Discover which Discord Roles are most likely to hold tokens

If your mind is now overflowing with creative ideas to supercharge your community - let’s talk, and schedule an onboarding with our team. We have limited spots available for our private beta.

🤝 Multiple Admins

Building a community is a collaborative effort. This is exactly what our third new feature reflects. Beyond goes multiplayer 🎮

From now on you are able to invite everyone from your team to use Beyond together with you!

The best thing about it? It's easy and takes you less than 5 seconds

Just add their wallet address and they are good to go! 🚀

That’s it from our first product update! You’ll hear from us soon & keep your eyes open, we have a lot more coming 🔥

Before being able to define our new branding and come up with a visual representation, we looked more holistically at what we wanted to communicate, who our target group was, and how we could reach them.

We concluded that we want to create a super simple and smooth experience for our communities and their members. Dealing with the on-chain & off-chain data and moving the heavy lifting into the background helps us to keep the experience as easy and focused as possible.

So how do we make this as simple as possible? Imagine having the panel to control your community designed by the famous Dieter Rams, creator of the Braun design philosophy. What would it look like? That was the question we started with.

Focusing on ease of use and simplicity, inspired by timeless objects and products that express confidence, elegance and functionality through their brilliant design.

Nodes and edges are used to visualize a community network and its members. The density of connections between nodes can show how closely knit a community network is. We used this common practice to simplify our visual language when talking about the community.

We defined a dotted grid and two joint ellipses as the core elements from which all further graphics are developed. These elements are a visual representation of a control room that enables connection and community building. The grid visually introduces control, the filled ellipse community members, and the connected ellipses represent the connection between those members.

These network structures can be wild and confusing. They almost seem impossible to analyze. It is almost a full-time job to draw actionable conclusions from these unstructured data sets.

We want to embrace this chaos within a community and bring clarity to community managers simultaneously.

This seemingly contradicts the philosophy of Dieter Rams:

“Less, but better because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.”

The nodes and edges of our new visual system perfectly represent the sense of community, connection, and coherence.

Beyond's palette uses color psychology to reflect our brand's main concepts. It represents simplicity by using a single corporate color—orange.

Orange represents empowerment and growth while being a warm color still relays a feeling of community.

A carefully considered choice of secondary shades adds depth and hierarchy to the product that, together with the main palette, forms a key part of Beyond's identity.

Beyond's logotype works as a nod to the previous visual identity, creating nostalgia from its similarity to the previous icon's shapes, but bringing a more sophisticated and mature look to the brand. The sharp and pointed shapes of the letters, contrasted with the icon’s roundness, give a sensibility that helps set the brand apart.

Bringing everything together, we end up with a well-rounded, simple visual identity that supports our ambitions to build the most easy-to-use and beautiful product that lets community builders 10x their time and spend it on the community, not management.

The final result:

Check out beyond.so for our new brand.

For this full rebranding, our lead designer Denis Sharypin worked together with Claudia Aran and David Leon Fiene

Mission

We want to facilitate serendipity for community builders to grow their skills, bond with each other, and share their learnings and struggles.

Beyond’s community is designed for community builders looking to expand their skills, and find high-quality content & connections, as well as a low-stress community to chat with. We wish to provide a network through which community builders can find answers to their questions as they build. To provide a platform for CMs to connect, develop their personal network, and chime in where they want.

Vision

Community is in our DNA and has been from the start, and forever will be.

Our community allows us to get insights from top community managers as we develop the product, creating something truly built for its core users and relevant to the current state of technology. This community is the best quality control any product developer could ask for and drives us to continue improving the value for community builders. We are not just about hype or fomo, we want authenticity and genuine relationships. We’ve built trust with community managers—and more than that, we’ve built a product for them.

Community First

Beyond is a multi-faceted project, and our community caters to two sides of the company.

Today we’ll explain to you the objectives of our community and its setup, why we’ve designed it like this, and how you can be a part of the community!

💻

Our product provides a solution for our community members to install in their communities, powering up control and community-building efforts.

Providing community managers with the promise of tokenized communities, making it easy to provide access and perks to members and a better way to understand their community members, coming with on-chain and off-chain community insights.

🫂

Our community provides a safe space in which members are encouraged to engage with fellow members, ask a question, build their network, and prioritize valuable educational discussions.

Weekly voice chats, topic discussions, and community mixers are some of the events we host to encourage relationship building along with high-level content & questions posted from the Beyond team.

Beyond’s tool for CMs optimizes web3 community management, providing more power to the builders.

📚

Meanwhile, members of Beyond have access to support from real community managers, and a chance to exchange, learn and improve on skills to implement in their own community.

We know that it’s tough for community managers and that there still is no main place for us to exchange and learn together.

Even though the increase of community managers is huge and mostly due to the rise of web3, the position is considered to be one of the most important roles in the future of tech.

👇

So where is the community support for these individuals and education for their careers?

We plan to fill that lack of community and support for the progress of community managers. As Beyond is building tools for CMs, we felt that it was only right to have an additional support system for community managers.

First Impressions

To complement the tools for building & managing, we aim to have a community for Community Builders & web3 LOVERS. Of course, we are open to discussing all sides of web3, but our focus is on empowering communities to have the resources they need to grow.

Community builders are always searching for more education and safe spaces to ask questions and meet other CMs. Most community experts in web3 are using the limited tools available to build the best experience for their community members.

🧪

Beyond is building a tool that supercharges your community. In tandem with the tool, our community acts as a support for the public. Users of Beyond can find non-stop connections to our team, and connect with other members using the tool. Non-users of Beyond still have access to a public community for daily brainstorming and education on community building.

You can find all info about Beyond and our product in the Beyond Info category of our Discord server. The community is always open for anyone to ask questions in our Discord, 24 hours 7 days a week. Message anyone from the @Beyond Crew and you’ll have a response promptly.

🔮

We believe clarification of community initiatives is important. We feel it is important for us to provide a clear description of the mission we aim to achieve with our community.

Our company goal is to improve the lives of every CM & to connect more communities to web3 and the power of its tech.

We’ve chosen to offer a little bit of handholding in the onboarding. We want every member to be confident in their entry into the community. Let’s clear up any questions from the beginning so that our community members know how to engage properly.

Knowing our mission as leaders of the community helps you, the members know why you should join our community.

Onboarding

The community of Beyond will be an all-engaging audience that we aspire to be full of natural connection and relationship building. This means it is important for us to get to know each member who joins. If you are a new member, you’ll most likely receive a welcome message from the team and be asked to introduce yourself.

If you leave an introduction, our CM, @scoopcheerios will enthusiastically reply & welcome you.

🫂

The goal is to get to know you, for others to connect as well, and for the CM to know the community well enough to facilitate in the introductions or connections between community members.

Onboarding is our ice-breaker and gives us an opportunity to start a conversation. Not all onboarding calls are efficient, but we prioritize building genuine relationships with our members over anything else.

This is why we also host live voice chat events, for the chance to connect and discuss. Voice chats along with curated topics/content for learning, and experimentation in web3 community building.

🔗

If you would like to participate in a match-making experiment with the Beyond team and our Intros bot, it will help us improve your experience.

This form is for US to get to know YOU, and we would like to build a community with intertwined connections. If you have matching answers to another member, you will be proposed with some prompts to start a conversation.

Additionally, our community team will take these responses to optimize events and content for you.

Routine opportunities to show up

After testing times and days in the first few months with Beyond, we have optimized our event schedule. However, with the data from the Intros form, we continue to optimize for a time that works better for more people.

𝘾𝙖𝙢𝙥𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙩 - Every Tuesday @ 15h UTC

📆  Every week we open the voice chat to have a casual chat with our community.

🏆  The goal of this space is to allow anyone to ask a question or speak their mind on any subject in web3.

💬  We pick a starting topic for the session of the week and invite you to join us down the rabbit hole.

💡 If you have any suggestions for topics or would like to lead a chat please feel free to send us a message!

𝘽𝙚𝙮𝙤𝙣𝙙 𝙒𝙚𝙗3 𝘾𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙪𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙚𝙨 - Every Wednesday @ 17h UTC

💜  𝐖𝐞𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐁𝐞𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐖𝐞𝐛𝟑 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬!

🎙  A Twitter Space hosted every Wednesday by Kyle and the Beyond Team.

🌐  Every week we discover a part of community building in Web3.

🗓️  New topic every week!

❓  Diving into the "what" and "why", which content should be public and not, and some examples of how it’s already being done.

We designed our token gating to not only be simple to set up but also easy to control community access. Providing token gating means your community can easily assign roles and incentivize members with things like exclusive content, special access, and other community-based perks.

We’re building tools to empower communities. One of the other initial ways we’re doing that is by providing community insights, which are crucial to the success of any community. We help you identify your most engaged members so you can get to know and serve them even better.

What’s our product focus?

For our launch, we focus on solving two core components in web3 community management: token gating and community insights.

Existing solutions feel clunky and cumbersome, with Beyond, we’ve designed and developed an intuitive, fast, and reliable product that integrates seamlessly with your Discord.

With the Beyond Discord integration, managing member roles and channel access is extraordinarily simple.

The Beyond dashboard also puts important information and insights in front of you at a glance. You can find both high-level community insights as well as member-specific ones including — the number of active Discord members, number of unique token-holders, and most engaged community members.

Think of the Beyond dashboard as a place to learn more about your community: what’s the overall community health? Where can you improve? Who’s actively participating?

Why is this our focus?

We talked with hundreds of community builders in web3 and came to a number of conclusions that ultimately led us to build Beyond. One of those conclusions is that communities don’t want another hard-to-customize and token-gated-only solution. Instead, we learned that communities want to be able to apply new technology and web3 concepts into their existing flows with the ability to easily customize. The other side of this is that your community members are often less experienced with web3 than you may realize, reinforcing the need for more clear and simple language when engaging in your community to make it more accessible. Your community shouldn’t be confused when trying to connect their wallet to get access to special content, art, or perks.

In our talks with community builders we recognized a few common goals nearly all of them are working towards:

• Finding, engaging, and incentivizing the right people is key to building a thriving community. The communities that thrive the most are interconnected. As a community builder, it’s your job to connect and introduce people together who could benefit from knowing one another. But going about identifying, engaging, and incentivizing your community can be difficult without the right tools. At Beyond, we solve this.

• Saving time on repetitive and boring operational tasks. Managing a community is no small feat. It requires a time commitment and a great deal of effort. Beyond is helping community builders save time on tedious tasks such as managing member roles and access.

• Owning the connection to members. Platform independence is crucial for communities and with Beyond you get to own that connection data.

How Beyond works

Beyond makes it super simple to get started offering token gating in your community. Bring your own token, connect Beyond to your Discord, have your members connect their wallets to get access, and you’re ready to go. Plus, once Beyond is set up, you will start receiving both on-and-off chain analytics about your community.

Where we are heading

This is the beginning of our journey to building the best control room for communities. We are on a mission to make it easy for community builders to leverage web3 technologies and tokenization. At Beyond, we’re committed to building a product that helps you spend more time creating and growing your communities — and less time on the boring tedious management stuff.

We can’t wait for you to try out Beyond with your community. We are onboarding more and more communities! Interested in seeing what Beyond can offer you and your community?

https://554a6esc0i4.typeform.com/beyondbeta?utm_source=tweet&utm_medium=twitter

They facilitated you with the essentials to have a good time. It was up to you to determine the outcome of your time spent. Of course, if a boost was needed, an introduction or topic change when needed, the host was there. Just like a community manager.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions and those of the people around you. Emotional intelligence differentiates a bad party host from a good one. It is essential for leaders, politicians, founders, caregivers, and especially community builders.

Relationships

Community builders know that the most important part of building their community is the relationships they build.

Building connections during onboarding is key for new members to have a smooth journey to join the community and eliminate as many basic questions that one might ask.

It’s important to start by realizing that onboarding begins before one enters your community platform.

This could be from an exterior connection you made through other mediums of sharing. At the core of this lies the real principle. Relationship.

Onboarding

Hot take: Your onboarding process has nothing to do with how members join the community. But EVERYTHING with the way you interact with them

Onboarding is not just the sequence of events, pinned messages, and “guidelines” you give when a user joins your Discord. Neither is it determined by their follows and likes on social media. The truth is none of that means anything to them.

What your future member cares about the most (whether they know it or not) is the conversations to be had with you.

In Web3 it’s even more important to facilitate the feeling of genuine relationship building. However, we can use the technology to our advantage in this case. Reach a larger audience 24 hours a day. Your community can be borderless, and even cross-universal.

Sure, Meta’s metaverse isn’t that sexy yet, but AR and VR technology still has miles of potential ahead of it. Many projects have already been working on the ability to recreate our reality as best as possible. On the plus side, we have gradually seen adoption and usage amounts rise in online communication. Ask anyone born after 2000 if they use a dating app, I bet 99% of them do. Virtual community building, and what might fit into Web2 concepts of community building is not that far off from Web3.

Simple integrations and features built-in Web3 will be catalysts. Simple features like wallet connect & token gated communities. Analytics & community insights as well. Our movement for Web3 will actually benefit the community builders. Giving them the ability to enhance their communities, and create new experiences.

When all dialogue is virtual and personal connection feels filtered, it is the community manager’s job to facilitate a sense of belonging.

How do you create a sense of belonging?

Start off by reaching out to your members personally, and make them feel noticed. Get to know them. Who are they? Where are they from? What are they working on? What are their struggles?

It’s important to know that you’re not selling here. You’re making a friend. You’re collecting data to be the best matchmaker possible.

You might be asking yourself now… Does that mean I have to spend my days messaging people? Not necessarily.

Although it’s good to be personal, reaching out in DMs, and asking genuine questions in private can build a connection quickly. However, we want to keep in mind that this is not about only you.

Jake Scott calls it out in this tweet:

https://twitter.com/Jake_Stott/status/1559465001483657217?s=20&t=yzemdtxxt02LWNYCAJtPdQ

If the community relies on the CM to carry on the discussions and share the resources to engage the community, then clearly something isn’t working. The community should not be based on 1-to-many relationships but rather many-to-many. It is the job of the CM to create a community culture that intertwines the members and facilitates the building of relationships between members.

If this is the case for you, analyze the situation and try to identify why community members are disconnecting.

Returning back to the initial statement and emphasis on relationship building, there are 3 key reasons why relationship building will combat any cases like the tweet mentioned above.

1. Get to know your community. You are the overseer with the power to find commonalities between individuals and pair them together.

2. Emotional connection ties them in, it breaks the virtual barrier, and subconsciously these members will feel inclined to participate.

3. Listen to your members. You can find the evangelists, and the thought leaders, listen to what they’re into and create a place to breed those conversations.

Now it’s time for you to go out into your community and work on building those relationships. Reach out to your community members and start to chat with them.

Host a community call, be casual, let them ask questions, and see where the conversation takes you.

The key here is to really be personal and don’t let the digital aspect of this growing community hold you back from creating quality connections.

Get out there and chat with your community!

collect://

Web3 is empowering the collaboration between financial incentives and intrinsic motivation, from the leaders perspective to the members. Tokenization and blockchain utilization paired with a strategized content distribution, can potentially enhance the experiences for your community dramatically.

Financial access and viability can increase the “quality” of the communities. Integrating a monetary system, payment-gated access, and token-gated content or events unlock a whole new level of control that community builders have never had. Not only does this create an extra incentive for the members along with the community leaders, but this also unlocks more ability for community leaders to enhance their community.

Before we get into how and why this change will happen, we need to break apart what exactly a niche is, or can be. Because Web3 is going to change that even more.

Definition of niche

1. a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted

2. a habitat supplying the factors necessary for the existence of an organism or species

3. the ecological role of an organism in a community especially in regard to food consumption

4. a specialized market

Starting with #1, this could be considered in terms of location, hobbies, skills, talents, religions, etc. So when we describe a niche community, imagine your local pub, or a rock climbing gym, artists, companies & associations, non-profit organizations…you get the point.

A habitat, as used in #2 refers to the way that we may feel different levels of comfort in other habitats. When we have found our niche habitat is when we can feel a positive effect of the environment we are in. And this ties into #3.

The ecological role in a community. Have we even found our niche role in our environment? It is human nature to progress and evolve throughout a lifetime, and the search for one's niche role is not an easy quest.

Quite blandly rounding out the uses of the word niche, #4 is a specialized market. However, last but not least, it is an important distinction to tie in with Web3. Because Web3 is where the people create a fusion with the market. They have the chance to make the specialized market evolve and improve their role in the environment to change their environment.

Why is niche specifically so important in Web3?

Everyone is different, we all like different things, and we also like lots of things. Hobbies. As we’ve evolved throughout the 21st century, we’ve created categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories for hobbies, activities, and more. There are 1000s of niches and counting.

And one thing Web3 is doing its best at is covering niche after niche and connecting them. DAOs are bringing together members from all over the world to join community servers and discuss topics for their intrinsic value. Connecting money, to passions, to internet profile, and career succession.

Niche communities will be given opportunities, if clever enough, to manifest rewards and sustainability in progress toward a common goal. A prime example of that will be eco-focused communities integrating Web3. In the past, individuals who wanted to be closer to nature, or out of the rate race, had to be isolated and excluded. Communities are formed from the shared passion to grow and build together, Web3 enables leaders to create a self-sustainable community. Dually Web3 connects monetary value to a network of individuals throughout the world.

Pros of Web3 for niche communities.

Typically, when you think of niche communities you would imagine something like a photographer, maybe a woodworker, or a birdwatcher. There is only a small number of individuals living through this passion compared to labor or service jobs.

These niche career types have always had to rely on themselves or piggybacking off of another platform to sell their services. Now, these individuals can own their own content and not lose ownership when they want to share, but can monetize the sharing of the content and the community that surrounds their content.

Artist communities, that deal with the same issues, will now be able to control and own their personal communities, which can lead to their enhancement. Hobby communities, Educational, Spiritual, and more. They will all now be able to connect deeper and come together to create more meaningful experiences.

Web3 empowers small niche communities and enables the ability to reward the amazing people who are the backbone of these communities. The community builders, managers, and moderators can all be rewarded for the effort they put into creating and building their community.

Tokens are a fundamental feature of Web3 and in effect, communities who utilize this power. On-chain connections are created between the users' wallets and smart contract addresses. Decentralizing our data, using the blockchains as storage instead of centralized platforms owning our data (i.e Facebook), tokens define the relationship between a community and its members. Users can easily use a dApp that will recognize their assets without needing to know anything more about a new user.

Niche communities also come in the form of PFPs or your “identity” as you exist in Web3 and on the blockchain. These features help connect people and you might be able to find or identify people who share the same interests or might be a part of the same community through the internet.

Cons of Web3 for niche communities.

As much as we all love financial incentives, they could also be a detriment to our community. Money has extensive power in the psychology of humans and in worst-case scenarios, could also destroy the culture of the community.

Can you be sure that people will join the community out of intrinsic motivation and passion for their respective niches? Or are they only there to make a quick buck and the only topic of their interest is floor prices? These are the questions that bring us to a tough reality. The truth is that most people will be inclined to make a choice for their financial benefit.

It is hard to define which niche or community type will be more prone to this situation, however when you are offering any kind of financial incentive through the growth of your project, there will be people who act selfishly. Founders must be aware, they must be cautious and ready to withstand any grief that might be thrown at them.

When introducing any payment or token-gated structure, the project aims to have a good reception from its audience and that they are in full support. With this promise comes the pressure to provide. If you are asking for any money for the action of your project, it is essential that the project returns in action or results for the members of the community.

Not doing so may result in any distrust or unsatisfied members. This should be taken with caution as any unhappy member or client could be the catalyst to spread a message that can harm your project. It is important to stay on point with your promises and expectations.

There are plenty more incentive possibilities that you could bring to your community, and we are only able to touch on the surface here. Stay connected to Beyond as we will be releasing more articles to dive in even deeper on the subject.

Examples of Web3 Niche Communities

Desire Path - Photography

What started off as a group of friends curious about how to get into NFTs turned into a growing community of over 800+ photographers, collaborating, networking, and learning together.

The Sun Spot - Creative Entrepreneurs

A community of design-centered creatives and entrepreneurs, talking business, relationships, art, TV shows, food, events, and more. They also have regular events like co-working calls, self-care check-ins, game nights, and more!

Houseplants - Houseplant & Gardening community.

Over 8,700 members talking all things gardening, houseplants, and the outdoors. The setup is huge, chats are active, and the server is even publicly verified. So good to see a thriving community not even based around a project but a non-digital activity as well.

If you want to receive more content on Web3 community building, follow us on Twitter and get early access to Beyond if you want to unleash the power of Web3 in your community.

Community building requires a new toolbox

To run a global community with thousands of people living and working around the globe, builders need a particular set of tools to be successful. Otherwise, they might end up in repetitive and mundane tasks like onboarding new community members manually. Giving them the required access or manually rewarding members for contributions can easily blow up a daily schedule.

They need to get data about how healthy their community is to make informed decisions in favor of their community (members). We're talking about measures like user engagement, growth rates, contribution, and governance.

Also, on a more personal level, they need to find like-minded folks within the community who are willing to drive topics on their own to bring the community forward as moderators, builders, designers, content creators, or general contributors.

Through the rise of Web3 technology, it's easier than ever to distribute ownership of the community in a scalable way to incentivize members. More members having skin in the game can lead to more people being interested in the community's success.

Community builders need tools that are not getting in the way. They require reliable applications that support, inform, and inspire them to try new things. Freeing up their calendars from annoying operational and repetitive work and giving them back time to focus on what they can do best: Bringing people together.

Building the control room every community deserves

We spoke to hundreds of community builders to learn about their fundamental problems, desires, and hopes for the future. In almost all discussions, we came to the same three fundamental goals:

• Finding, engaging, and incentivizing the right people is key to building a thriving community

• Saving time on repetitive and boring operational tasks

• Owning the connection to members (e.g., platform independence)

We believe they require better tooling to rewrite how people connect and find their tribe to improve the world.

Therefore our core mission is to build a trustworthy tech layer sitting on top of all the tools they are using already. They will be able to create powerful human experiences, distribute responsibilities and ownership, get meaningful insights on community health and member engagement, and they will be able to set up & automate these workflows in minutes.

Get ready for Beyond

At the moment, we're already having first communities gating their experiences with us, giving us valuable feedback, and helping us improve the product. In the following article of this series, we want to get even more into the details of our upcoming public launch, how we decided our scope, and what we learned so far.

Stay tuned!

- Alex

Don’t want to wait until our public launch? Get early access now!

That’s great, and I hope it happens. In fact, I know it will. But you won’t get far without your community behind you to support you. Building a community is like building a family of superfans who are ready to fight for you and your idea to succeed. They believe in you, and they believe in each other.

Building a large community seeping of value and quality is no easy task. It takes time, dedication, and passion just like most good things in life. The effects your community can have on your product are invaluable and could lead to relationships or opportunities that are not worth any sale.

Here are 5 simple actions that you can take for literal action, and keep with you as mental models to help you at any stage of the process down the line.

1) Strategy & Purpose

Every community should have a purpose. Communities are made of people gathered together in support of a shared passion for an idea or project. Your community should serve a purpose to the people whom you wish will be joining.

Whether this purpose comes from the mission of a project that the community will be participating in, or if this is a community focused on education, art, plants, etc. Planning your strategy ahead can save you some time or headache, but be careful to not get stuck in the planning phase and move on to actually doing it.

Having a plan also includes having a strategy. You can open a server but having a strategy is important for keeping a structure along the process of growth. Here are some key thoughts when formulating your community strategy:

• What your goals are as a leader?

• What is the goal of the community?

• How will you achieve the goals together?

2) Structure

Once you have your strategy, you will be able to put some structure to your young community. Now that you have the purpose of the community designated, you will most likely be moving onto a platform like Discord so that you can have a communal place to hang out and chat with your community members.

So what needs to be done to build this structure?

First, channels and their respective categories. Having many channels designated to certain discussion types or topics will help organize and corral your members into the right discussions. You can have categories like “official” which will hold your official links, announcements, and no-reply type posts. The server needs a general chat, a place for anyone and everyone to talk freely.

Here is some inspiration from our Discord for other types of channels.

Roles will also be important for the organization of your community. One reason why you should have at least a basic role is to be able to perform a verification process, which only works when you have a basic role to begin with and steps to achieve the “verified” level role.

Having a role attached gives a sense of belonging, you’re in the server and perhaps your role will give you some extra advantages. Lastly, roles are important for permissions, which can be very customizable, like gating content to members who have performed certain actions to receive an exclusive role.

3) Social media & growth

Ok so you’ve got your strategy, and you’ve built your server to the point where you can start welcoming your first members. At the moment, the best way to increase your audience is with traditional Web2 platforms like Twitter. It seems to be the most Web3-friendly platform, the first stop for any developing Web3 project.

Create your accounts, add your PFP and start looking for similar accounts, search the hashtags related to your community, and most consistent, valuable content. Being active in the beginning is the most important, a lot of us feel like we have to compete to get in front of the audience, but the key is consistency and showing up every day.

When you’ve got your first members in your community, there are a few hacks that you can use to incentivize people to share your server more. Invite contests are one way, if you’re able to give a reward or certain privilege to those who support and share more, then empower your members and let them create the network effect for you.

Forewarning though, beware of creating a community that is not engaged superfans, or growing too dense too fast and feeling intimidating to new members. There is a fine line to balance, and we encourage organic relationship building for growth. Nothing will beat cultivating and actually nurturing the relationships you build along your path.

Events, both virtual and IRL, can be huge catalysts to setting your community apart and building stronger connections. Twitter spaces are a great location when having a mutual conversation with another account. This can also cross-pollinate your audiences, their followers will be notified they are talking in your space and just might click on your account to follow.

Discord chats are nice for inter-community chats, it is easy for anyone to jump on the mic and hop into the conversation. You can choose between the stage, where you must be invited to speak, or the regular voice chat which holds up to 50 members at once. We’ve started hosting onboarding calls to welcome the new members which join. 1:1 conversations and small intimate group chats are a great way to break the ice and create a genuine connection for your community.

Join us on Twitter for our Spaces chats with Founders, Community Managers, and other leaders every Thursday at 4 PM UTC.

In Discord, we have our onboarding chats every Monday at 1:30 PM UTC and Wednesday at 5:00 PM UTC, as well as our Campfire Chats every Tuesday at 1:30 PM UTC.

4) Data + Analytics

We are working with communities, people, and personal connections, which at times can be a vague process. Even though this really just boils down to relationship building, it is still important on a personal level to function with the mental model of being data-driven.

Set up your data and analytics trackers, Discord offers an analytics dashboard that works well enough for now, but Beyond will be coming out with the next-level tech app for Discord! Twitter has analytics for your individual tweets as well, but we recommend searching for additional alternatives for tracking your audience.

The emphasis on keeping up with your data and analytics is to help you make more accurate decisions for your community. Any community builder’s objective is to build and optimize for the good of the members. The results from your analytics will always help you readjust and improve your initial strategy from step #1.

Be detail-oriented, notice the individuals who support you and are active, and enable them to be evangelists for your community. There will come a time when people will feel inclined to share and help you grow due to their connection to your community. If you host events, and people mark themselves as interested, but they don’t show up, feel free to reengage and show them that you care about them.

5) 1:1 Onboarding

We’ve made it through the building and setup of the server and can now welcome your community members.

Now that the gates are open you need to be there to greet them and introduce yourself. Especially in the very early stages, it is key to be connecting personally on a 1:1 level with your first collection of members.

Greet them in public, set up an introduction channel, and give the members very low-effort engagement opportunities. For even more effectiveness I would go as far as sending a private DM to each person who joins. I’m not saying that this is 100% accurate, as there are many cases of individuals who have closed their DMs due to the high number of scams.

Tying back to events, setting up onboarding calls, group ice-breakers, welcome sessions, or whatever you want to call it can be a great way for members to have a stress-free option to engage. Be abundant with it as well, they chose to come to you, and you need to respect their interests and give them plenty of options and chances to engage with you. Facilitate growth and serendipity.

If you manage to complete all 5 of these steps when launching your community, you will be on the path to having a happy and healthy community. It will take time, the beginning stages are a slow process and very tedious before scaling quickly.

It is important to be real and honest with your community, develop connections so that they naturally want to hang out on your server, and even become ambassadors.

I wish you the best of luck. We are building at full speed working tirelessly to provide you with a solution that will release a community’s full potential and give you the power of Web3.

Beyond is here for any questions you may have, stay connected with us for more educational content, lessons from founders, tips, and tricks regarding community building and to be one of the first community builders to get early access to Beyond!

- Kyle

You can find all of our upcoming events and important links here.

Ask any real innovator, and they’ll agree that to truly create something new, from 0 → 1, you need to go back, and solve a problem using first principles.

If you ask me why I’m excited about Web3, it’s not because of the hype, or the bored apes, or the quick-flip get-rich-quick attitudes.

I’m excited because Web3 gives us a new set of first principles to work from. For the first time in a long time, we have a new set of primitives for the Internet. A new set of tools to solve problems with. To innovate with.

What this means is that we don’t need to hunt for new problems to solve, but we can look at existing problems, and solve them in entirely new ways. That’s exciting.

Right now we have the opportunity to step back, unlearn how things have been done over the past couple of decades, and innovate.

So, what tools do we have at our disposal?

Digital ownership

For the first time ever, it’s possible to own something digitally. Not a copy of something, which is what software has been able to do for years. Really, verifiably, own a single digital asset. Something that’s unique, and can’t be copied or replaced.

It’s a subtle but really important difference.

You might own a copy of the latest Ed Sheeran track, purchased through iTunes. With blockchain technology, you could really own the latest Ed Sheeran track. The actual thing.

The concept of ownership on the Internet opens a world of possibilities, which we’re only exploring and discovering now. The use cases we see out there today are just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

And, with ownership, comes a natural human connection of those who share a common interest. If you’re an owner of something that you care about, and you encounter a stranger who cares about it too, that’s common ground upon which to establish a connection.

It’s the entire premise behind car clubs, for example. If I own a vintage Aston Martin and someone else does too, we can bond over that.

Now it’s possible digitally, too.

Community

Humans have been looking for connection for thousands of years. Collecting, bonding, supporting, and surviving together. It’s in our DNA.

In the offline world, we’ve been gathering around common interests for a long time, as well. Car clubs, stamp collectors, radio enthusiasts. If you’ve got one, you’re in the club. Even if you don’t know anyone in that space yet, you’ve found common ground to begin.

Only now are we able to solve this missing piece online, digitally. Owning a digital asset affords you the ability to gather with others who own one too.

With the world becoming more geographically dispersed, working remotely, finding peace outside of city hubs, this connection can be more difficult to find or establish in person. People look to online communities more and more.

The shift away from big-tech driven social media is unmissable. New social networks are more about entertainment than human connection. People are more aware of data privacy, and more careful about how they spend their attention online.

In other words, online community represents a vital part of the future of human connection.

Taking communities further

Sitting at the precipice of this monumental shift, we can’t ignore the opportunity to make a difference. To go back to the start, innovate with the tools and first principles we have today.

The community builder in the next years is going to be one of the most meaningful roles with regard to human impact. A good one will bring people together from all over the world, breaking down barriers, and delivering a sense of belonging. Satisfying a core human need. They will build a vision, a purpose, and gather those who care. They will build movements, and create change.

Beyond’s very purpose is to help them make that happen. We’re here to support community builders on their mission. Because with each one that we help, we’re potentially helping to change the lives of thousands of people.

- Shane

Thank you for reading! Follow us on Twitter to not miss out on anything Web3 community building.

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