Audiences Post, Communities Host
Audiences Post, Communities Host
Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of…..your first event
There are profound differences in how participants of a community and an audience interact, broadly…
an audience sits in rows but a community flows
an audience hears one voice but a community makes noise
an audience subscribes but a community vibes
an audience has only silent lurkers but a community also has workers
an audience just retweets but a community also meets and greets
an audience just views but a community also brews
an audience just posts but a community also hosts…
The default way for a Superteam member to interact with their community is via a gated Discord. And while these are likely some of the highest signal conversations in all of crypto, they’re just the tip of the Superteam iceberg.
The optimal way to participate in Superteam is to use that signal & trust to find your niche interest and the people you can collaborate with to create weekend projects, products or companies around it.
Those who do it right will find themselves in more group chats than they can count, spontaneously joining zoom calls and taking cabs/trains/planes to meet their internet friends.
All of this is to say that if the only way you’re interacting with other Superteam members is via the official discord – you’re missing out.
From sharing memes to forming teams
The journey from joining a Discord to starting a company with total strangers you’ve met there isn’t apparent or intuitive, but it is possible.
It happens through some combination of shared interests, complementary skills & common goals discovered through repeated organic interactions. We know this because it has happened multiple times within Superteam over the past 2 years.
Here are three such stories presented in no particular order:
#1 Shek, Founder, Gum & Resident Guru Dev
Shek talks about how he found both the inspiration and early hires for his startup, Gum, within Superteam…
“ I started spending more time in the Discord, writing technical deep dives, hosting office hours and source surfing Solana. I remember Kunal, ddude and Kirat coming with the technical challenges/roadblocks they were facing with their projects.
Though, I was spending a lot of time on discord, I hadn't taken web3 seriously yet, this changed when I visited Dubai Hacker House, built a quick prototype of Wordcel and presented it. Meeting the community members in person and seeing the ecosystem alive made me realize that web3 could be something.
Next thing you know, Wordcel won the first place in Riptide, I hired Kunal, Paarug and ddude (Vijay) in a blink and I had made the best trade of my life, web2 for web3. ”
#2 Tushar, Co-Founder, Little Unusual
Tushar shares the story of how he & his co-founder Aditya went from doing a few freelance gigs together to starting Little Unusual, their product studio.
“Back in January 2023, on a Discord channel, a conversation between two artists ignited a spark of a unique idea that would later become something truly unusual. Many Zoom calls and boring logistics later, Little Unusual was born.
Almost one year later, we’re an intimate team of 5 core members and have a bunch of visual enthusiasts just like us who step in to assist in different projects.”
#3 Ujjwal & Bolt, Co-Founders, Stellar Sol
Ujjwal & Bolt talk about how they met in the Superteam Discord and started Stellar Sol, a hackathon winning project that lets you pay on Amazon & Flipkart using Solana USDC. You can watch their story from this timestamped link or catch the entire documentary below.
So, how many repeated organic interactions is it going to take? If it wasn’t obvious from the framing of that question, let us re-emphasise that you can’t “network” or “game” your way to this. There’s no formula or guarantee of success. It has to be genuine.
Your best bet is to double down on topics you are genuinely curious about & constructively engage with the community.
Events for Producers, Not Consumers
The key is to attend or create events where you can contribute, not just consume. This could be as a host/moderator, a practitioner or with earnest questions. And if you’re not sure which events you can contribute to, attend as many as you can until you find out.
The MVP equivalent for an event is 3 or more people coming together, over Zoom or IRL, to talk and not just listen.
Some ideas to help you get started:
Virtual Events
Three types of events that have worked well so far:
Skill or Interest Based: Take a skill (design, writing, growth, dev, etc) or an interest area ( RWA, DePIN, Mobile, etc) and pick from a range of formats including up-skilling sessions, weekly roundups, product breakdowns, etc.
Flow co-working hours: If you spend long hours working in isolation, you can now spin up your own co-working space on Zoom.
All you need is a zoom room with a few other people who are looking to get work done. Once you’re on the call, everyone should announce their goals at the start, keep their video on & share progress at the end.
Counterintuitively, this is probably the most important type of event to gate access to. In my experience it works best with 4-6 people who are actually looking to get work done. Too few and it’s an awkward zoom call, too many and you’ll spend more time doing intros & updates than working.
Gaming & Trivia: This one’s easy, get together with members for a game of chess, poker, trivia, etc.
Education & Workshops
This is ideal for anyone who is interested in conducting technical workshops related to Solana, Anchor, Rust, or broadly getting started in crypto as a developer to blockchain clubs in Universities.
A few best practices to set you up for success:
Select universities with active computer science or engineering departments that have lots of students with active interest or curiosity about crypto.
Have a clear format and topic for the talk. Some kinds of workshops you can conduct are:
Intro to crypto, web3, and getting started with web3js & Rust
Intro to Rust and Solana development
Specific topic overview: Bitcoin, cNFTs, DeFi, DePIN, etc.
Hands on Solana Dev Workshop
Create presentation slides or educational materials to accompany your talk.
Collaborate with the university's crypto or blockchain club to promote the event to students and faculty members.
You may also choose to use Solanasync, by Superteam member Bolt, that you may use to help manage attendees, quizzes & POAPs.
You can apply to the Superteam Education Fund to get up to $200 in funding for your workshop.
Outreach & Onboarding
Host a meet up over coffee or pizza or an outdoor activity with people in your city or neighbourhood. Community dinners, meet-ups, experiences, weekend hackathons, etc. are all fair game.
You could plan these as one-offs to build on existing momentum (e.g. a coffee catch up to talk about Chapter 2 ) or a recurring feature (e.g. Saturday morning walks) or adjacent to bigger events such as Solana Hacker houses, Breakpoint — including those from other ecosystems like ETHGlobal, Jump Pit, etc. — that congregate interested folks in one place.
During the event, optimise for helping your guests get to know each other by ensuring proper introductions, room and ambience for conversation and a post event TG/WhatsApp group.
If you’re doing anything to bring the community closer together and onboard those on the sidelines into crypto, feel free to apply to the Pizza Fund. Currently, only Superteam members can be hosts but anyone can attend.
IRL Ecosystem Call
January was the first time we tested the format where local communities could come together and watch the Ecosystem Call IRL. Local communities came together in 50+ cities all over the world to celebrate wins of the month, meet their online friends or make new ones & get project alpha along with some exclusive earning opportunities.
Check out the recap video from India where community members across 10 cities stepped up at a few days notice to host their local ecosystem. Hosting these events is a great way to start off because you can build your programming and distribution off of the momentum generated by these calls instead of starting from scratch.
Chris will likely publish a detailed hosting guide that you can refer to. At the very least you want to ensure that you have a venue with a dedicated space, good lighting, a screen & sound system, no background noise and fast internet to live stream the call.
Planning & Logistics
This will vary depending on the type of event but here are some broad guidelines:
Where? Virtual events are best hosted over your choice of video conferencing platform, e.g. Zoom, Google Meet, Discord, etc.
For IRL events you can choose a coffee shop, boardroom, co-working space, mini-theatre etc. Think about what’s important for your specific event, e.g. a watch party needs a very different setting than a roundtable. Err on the side of caution when thinking of organizing a “party”, especially a relatively large one. People could abuse free-flowing alcohol and might create a scene.
Who? Optimize for quality not quantity. It’s acceptable & encouraged to limit attendance to people who have the requisite skills or context.
Crypto meet-ups have a bad rep of being wasteful; any event labeled as a “meetup” attracts a fair amount of low-intent people. This ruins the experience of high-value people, therefore tarnishing the name of the community. For small IRL events with limited capacity, it’s best to get personal confirmations over DM from your guests.
How? Just conceptualise & submit your event via the Superteam page on River. Once your event is approved, drop a message on the #events channel in the Discord. Feel free to tag the relevant skill roles but don’t spam fellow members. You can also DM Srijani to get your event spotlighted in the weekly comm call.
Community Projects. Try and involve your local Superteam/Solana projects in the process of hosting the meet-up. This could be as simple as giving them a spotlight to showcase their product & ask the community for feedback and other help. This experience will be a boon to these projects, who are always looking for early users and product feedback. Doing this will help build trust and value within the community, while also giving the attendees a taste of using crypto in the real world.
Free Attendance NFT. This is mostly optional but encouraged, as it’s a great way to seed a sense of belonging, re-target your attendees in a crypto native way & makes everyone feel good. Check out tools like Underdog or TipLink if you want to do this.
Events as a Proposal
River is a community centric events platform, currently in beta, that we used to organise the IRL Ecosystem calls, you can check out the Superteam page here.
It all started when Rae & Ryan accidentally started All In Meetups around Episode 100 of the podcast and felt both the joy & pains of organising meet ups in 24 cities around the world. Your typical events software assumes that you already have a host & venue locked-in and it is designed to help that host manage attendees, check-ins, reminders, payments, etc. That breaks here because while podcasts like All-In have a global audience there’s no designated host per city or list of official cities– you need to community source both of those things.
River converts events into proposals (h/t Chris) such that anyone from a global core team or local community can simply create an event they wish would happen and observe how many people sign up to attend or step up to host. Once the community admin approves someone as a host they get full control of the event and access to resources like River’s hosting guide , Slack group, etc.
This isn’t just about a product feature but about turning the idea of an event inside out. Ironically, this “web2” platform decentralises meet ups more than any crypto product ever has.
Specifically, members in productive communities like Superteam can use River to send a Bat-Signal to fellow members to gather around a specific topic, time and venue. It may not seem like it yet but this is a Delta 4 improvement over the current alternatives, which is sending a message in the Discord/TG asking “is someone interested in…?”
So if you’re a Superteam member…don’t just post, apply to host.
Credits & Attribution: Thanks to Kash, Akshay & Chris for their inputs to this post. Part of the section on outreach & onboarding events has been reproduced from contributions made by Pratik D to the Superteam playbook. The cover image is generated by DALL-E.