How to build a community around your product? 10 lessons from 17 months of Kiwi - Mac Budkowski

okay so this is mik Bowski obviously speaking about Community um yes uh so I will like as you can see there will be only 10 lessons so if it's too long you can know okay there's only 10 more uh and 17 months because this is more or less the time when we started working on kiwi uh and before we start I will give you a little bit context what is kiwi because I will reference to all our experiences and whenever you hear me talking about our experiences please try to filter it through your product or your idea or things that you know so you can just adapt our experience to your particular case so what is kiwi it looks like this uh if you are familiar with Hacker News uh this is basically crypto Hacker News it's also decentralized bu on top of PTO protocol so basically it means like people submit links related to crypto like news essays products un dashboard and so on and other other people upot these links if they like them of course and they can also comment on these links so the idea is to have like all most important Crypton news assays and products in one app so you don't need to scroll Twitter for an hour subscribe to 27 newsletters eight podcasts and 51 group chats so this is the idea and of course it's all this thing is being done by the community so that's why community building for us was like super important thing and it's used by Builders from these and like other companies and the reason I highlight that is because all lessons here about are about Builders Community I have no experience with Traders Community VC's Community or nft artists community of course we have some nftd artist we have some VCS we have some Traders but it's predominantly Builders so uh uh have this filter in mind and this is the scale we have we have like 1,400 people who check out every month about 500 people in the community and 120 people who submit up vote and comment on links every month of course it fluctuates sometimes it's more sometimes it's uh less so before we start bear in mind that it's Insight it's not like we knew all that things and we are like super smart like McKenzie Consultants that make a smart presentation how to build a community we learned everything as we were going through that so this is our inside analysis here I see no one's laughing so that's a COR joke sorry but I found it funny uh so okay what is a community like do you have any uh thoughts like if if you had to Define community with one sentence what is it core users okay do we have anything more that that's a good one I see everyone is so active with their ideas okay let's say core users you could say well these are people that are interested in think you do these are people who care these are people who I know you I they can solve their problems with your product or your community but I I think this is okay but there's a like very broad definition that I like the most that Community is just a container it's a container for things that are already happening so many people when whenever they come to building a community they're like oh yeah I do this I don't know defi derivatives trading platform and I want to build a community so I want now everyone to care about defi derivatives but it's hard to build something out of thin air it's more like you build a container for something people already care about kind of like you build a product you know for for the ni that's already there like people wanted to move so you build an Uber if people didn't want to move by car like uber would be a total flop and same with communi so since we are in Poland I will do a quick history lesson this is a solidos which is which was like a social movement that basically ended communism in Poland and eventually in Soviet Union and the the way it worked it was a container for people who were dissatisfied with the system that we had particularly it started with Factory workers but it expanded to many many people at the height it had 10 million members which was about 25% of all people in Poland was in that movement and the reason it worked was because people were dissatisfied with the system if everyone was happy with the system there would be like five dudes saying oh yeah like it's bad we should do something about it but it wouldn't work the same with Bitcoin there was a reason why Satoshi put this reference to financial crisis in the Genesis block because it was like a message like hey guy if you and or girl if you dislike the financial crisis if you dislike these banksters we are working on an alternative so this was a container for people who thought that this problem is important and really wanted to put a lot of efforts to do something about it and another example much less serious is Con Constitution da which as we remember wanted to buy the US Constitution eventually they didn't manage to do it but it was a container for all this optimism and this crazy bullrun Vibes that we had like you know we can do everything wag me you know let's buy Constitution let's you know reinvent the whole world and so on so this was a container for that and that's the reason why it worked if you know try building Constitution down now and like good luck with these kind of Vibes on the market it just like you wouldn't have people to put in that container so if you build a community it's important to catch the way in our case catching the people that we caught the container that we built was for people who were looking for Relevant crypto content it's just not you know just like Twitter gacha takes like you know D they just wanted to have a Nuance conversation so we didn't create this community out of fer we just created a container for these people uh the second thing it's like a first uh uh cast from Tim where kiwi was live and whenever you okay you say okay I have a container I want you know have these people that care about some problem or have some share some Vibes now the question is where do you find these people what we did back then what basically Tim Tim started was he was okay I'm on farcaster I know a lot of people there I will start on farcaster and this is where we got a lot of our initial users because we thought well people like crypto content they don't they are dissatisfied with crypto Twitter because they went to farcaster otherwise they would stay at crypto Twitter so we thought that there's a good opening here and and there was uh but you know for you it doesn't mean that you need to start on farcaster it could be like telegram group chat Discord Channel Reddit maybe some comment section of some uh you know crypto influencer like let's let's say you want to go after ethereum Foundation researchers then the best way to find them is to go to if research ethereum magicians and probably comment section of people who work at e so in our case it was farcaster eventually we grew up and went to Twitter and other places but we were very uh particular about looking after people that uh care about the thing that we care about as well uh so this is sorry to I'm not sure if I should share but like I I shared it because it's like a very strong message that was here uh so it's like GM we are changing our moderation policy and I want to enforce it more strictly in the upcoming days comically I set out to create kiwi news as an opposing po to Hacker News which has become two mainstream Fiat and web 2 but I'm frankly also bored by the submission on kwis for the past few days and I think we can do much better in terms of Link novelty factor and by not submitting non- newsworthy links or links that are generally me so this was a controversial take right because people are like yeah I'm submitting link like I think it's interesting and team says well I think it's not interesting basically but this it was a great move although like super risky because if you run a community it's very easy to lose the niche that you're after you know we run a website where you can put on links so if team hasn't reacted back then people in the man would submit links oh there is a cute cat video you know and here's like a very funny article about Middle Eastern politics yes but like we were after crypto and crypto adjacent content so if we haven't protected that it would just like become this faceless mob not a community anymore so what we did of course afterwards is we worked with the community we created like guidelines like this is what we are looking for and this is what we are not looking for and the fact that we did it with the community it felt like organic and they could be hurt so that was very effective and these guidelines are up to this day online and we basically have no problem with content that's of topic it's just it it just doesn't exist so if you create a community and you have some Niche that you're after you need to really protect it and just be very specific what it is about so if it's about defi derivatives and someone posts about nfts then probably you should react to that although it feels cring right because you're like yeah someone is active I want any activity because it's just like a small group chat but it may kill your community in the long run the other thing is like this is a post from a long long time ago because you know the whole idea was okay people are supposed to submit links but we had no users so how do you get links so the way we found out we found out a way to bootstrap the community and the links was like hey there's a smart guy that Everyone likes let's ask him for free links that he would like to share with the world and this is how kiwi looked for the first few weeks or even months where there were just like three links every day on the website submitted by a specific person and the reason it worked was because on Twitter you cannot share links like you can but you know algorithm doesn't like it on foraster you could could do it but like if someone shared like five links per day it it doesn't feel like a social app right it feels like I don't know News app so it wasn't a good place so we gave people a new way to express themselves and if you create a community it's also good to find them find for them a new way to express themselves because like you know I'm part of probably 50 group chats if you say hey bro can you come to my group chat I'm like okay but like why like what new can I find there that I don't have in my 50 group chats maybe it's just you post memes maybe you just post you know know the most interesting things from Twitter every day or maybe it's just like about some ZK tag that's like super specific or maybe people that you have there are very elaborate when it comes to comments so they're just you know they they share a lot of knowledge and I can learn a lot and also I can contribute to that then this community is interesting otherwise it's just like another group chat um other thing these are just like some links from our website but but I mentioned solidos and Constitution da at the beginning solidos right now is not that important not as important as it was before Constitution now is basically I don't know if it either exists but like it's like not important anymore the reason is because they had a finite game the game for solid arage was to end communism communism ended so the community just you know disengaged right with Constitution now the goal was to buy a constitution they didn't manage to do it so the community just disass sample with Bitcoin it's different because it's an infinite game I probably hopefully it's not an infinite game but and we'll finally change the financial system and have a good alternative but for now it feels like infinite game so you can be focus on crypto and Bitcoin for years decades probably and still have something to do in our case the thing is curating links so you know every day there's new crypto content and the longer crypto is there will be more crypto content so this is an infinite game to play with the community so if you uh build your community it's good to think about infinite game like something that you can do every day or like every week but it wouldn't end with some event just like solidar on Constitution down because then people can just get engaged and and can last forever uh and yeah this is a picture from our Meetup in Istanbul we had meetups in Istanbul waro Paris Brussels Berlin also I met a lot of people in La New York and we meet a lot in real life because first of all it's nice not to like to talk with people instead of chatting with some usernames on telegram uh but also because it makes things real uh there's this story from GitHub co-founder where he said that you know GitHub is as digital product as it gets it's for developers who typically work from home or from office and it's online and it's for C it's like why do you even need to get out of the building but he said that he spent years just traveling the world and having beer with every developer that he could meet just because he felt like this personal connection is important and for us it's also very important because let's say you have 100 users you would be like well 100 users then it's not a lot but let's say all your users came to your talk then if you have hundred people for your talk that's like it you feel like well this is serious thing I would prepare very well and so on but because on the internet we often don't feel that these numbers are real uh it's easy to just not appreciate the thing that you build and when people meet in your life of course they talk about everything you know about their pets Hobbies whatever they like so this is also very uh valuable so this is something that we also uh recommend the other thing you know when we uh started we used a lot of memes to have something actually I had this task in my app where every day I tried to make some meme about kiwi some of them were cringe uh some of them were funny but eventually uh it it it was working well well but at some point we decided to stop it and the reason we decided to stop it was because you know sometimes you feel there is a Vibe but sometimes you feel the vibe died up like it's kind of like playing you know uh old song right now you could play let's say I don't know Harlem Shake if you tried to record Harlem Shake in 2024 it would feel like very off like what the hell are you doing you're not like cool anymore and same with memes we felt like this meme kind of died out we created this website where we can learn about it we created some uh nft collection during onchain summer to just like commemorate it and finish but we stopped using it so I would say it's useful to share Ms and memes and symbols but only when they are relevant uh otherwise you feel like this you know hello fellow kids Guy where tries to be funny but it's not funny anymore uh the other thing these These are the uh the on the left hand side there's a screenshot from our uh both on Twitter and on the right hand side there's a newsletter cover so what we do is whenever someone submits a good link it gets a lot of upvotes it gets reposted on Twitter foraster and our newsletter and this is a subtle thing but very powerful because you know when people put energy and time into your community it's nice to reward it right like and the way we reward it is like okay we have some distribution and we share this distribution with you and everyone will know that in this case zinc. if shares the cool stuff uh so we had some you know user calls when we spoke hey why do you even use KV do you even care about it like why why do you even open the app and some people told told us well you know I start I joined you and I posted two links and one of them got into the newsletter and I felt wow people really notice that I share a cool stuff and this is very nice reward that I got so of course you don't need to have a newsletter it could be like you know weekly group chat post that says oh this person was cool and very active or you could do it inside your app there are many ways to do it but it's very important to appreciate the effort that people put in uh and here uh you can even go one step further this is a very cryptic eer scan transaction but this transaction actually says that we distributed funds from our multis with our contributors so we are a bootstraps product so we don't have a lot of money I would even say we are on the like low end of of having money uh but despite that since the beginning we have been sharing about 10% of all revenue and grants with contributors so people who shipped Cod who run D Dune dashboards did some graphic design consulting or helped us in any other way and already we shared like 134,000 which is like quite a big sum and it worked great I I was against the team was the team came up with this idea I was against because I was like man we are poor like how can you share money when you're poor right you share money when you're rich right this is how it work but it worked very well because it has given people understanding that this is really about the community and they share the upsid so the bigger we grow the easier it is for them to also make money and you know it's nice to say you know like a boss at work says oh yeah good job but you know if they give you a bonus it's a much stronger signal than saying good job so this is something that we started doing and this is something I would recommend you doing even if you know first SS were trival they were like you know $10 $5 $20 but it just made things uh real and the last thing uh what we did with our like group chat is we kind of turned it into company slack so we share a lot of ideas and problems that we have with our community and we help them co-create the product we also have Community calls of course where we discuss them through audio or video but it really helped people kind of like with Ikea you know if you spend like three hours assembling this desk you're like well I really like this desk like now it's like very personal thing very emotional and same with the community and the product because then it feels like you co-created it you feel this psychological ownership you might not have like shares or because you don't have like you know any uh like LLC or anything like that but you have the psychological ownership that you co-created something that you uh use so quick recap before we end so find the wave you know because communities are containers uh learn where are people interested in what you do protect your Niche help us users Express themselves in a new way find the infinite game to play together connect in Real Life share memes and symbols until they stop being relevant these people social recognition share money with most active contributors and let them co-create their product if someone wants to take a picture now there are like 5 Seconds Four 3 two one and we uh and we uh go so if you want we have a QE foro Meetup today so if you scan this QR code you can get all the details uh if you are here you can come without waiting for being approved or anything like that uh it's just like one minute from here uh and it's going to happen like a half an hour or something like that uh so yeah do you have any questions in terms of actual channels such as telegram or Discord do you have any and what's your take like are are they difficult to manage in your opinion yeah so so we are telegram Centric I feel like Discord was a thing for like 21 22 era I feel like now discords kind of die off like they're not as active and telegram like what we learned talking with some users they say well I use telegram for work so when I see some post on a group chat it's harder to miss than if you have to open a separate app like Discord so I'm a team telegram although now it could be hard with you know dur of getting arrested so let's see where it's going to lead us I wanted to ask what was your strategy for on wording first uh 100 uh community members uh cuz you know you can create uh a lot of uh posts Etc but uh at one time it needs to be um well know the yeah this this is a great question so actually with 100 and I would say probably even 300 400 500 first people we had either video call or just chatted with them on telegram every single person unless I missed someone sorry but we really were very elaborate about making them feel welcome asking them why they joined us in the first place what are their expectations what do they what do they do for work because it's also important for us to understand now we do it less regularly because of like 100 things to do and so on and also it's like if we already have a community then our community members can also do part of this work as well but yeah it was like very like you know how Paul Graham call it like schap where you just like do this work that like very manual and sometimes very tiring but it was definitely worth it so can I ask also um colleague asked about like the first on boarding part but what do you do and what do you think it's a good option to keep those Community this community engaged because as we said we have like 100 first then the community grow and yeah what we can do uh yeah sure so so in our case it's easier because our app is about sharing and up voting links so they have something to do every day and it's pretty lowkey like you if you're into crypto and you read interesting article and clicking up just you know few minutes per day uh but you know there are things that you can do like polls or like like making like tagging relevant people so let's say you have a conversation about Defi and you have someone who's into defi in your community you know tagging them and trying to engage them inside the conversation but also sometimes we've had people who are not active for a long time because they just forgot you know because people have you know they have WI kids work traveling and so on so sometimes I just dmed people that were not active and I asked them hey why you not active and sometimes it was because we did something that didn't work and sometimes it was just oh no sorry like I was like super busy and then they returned also like some people will uh leave and and this is painful of course but it's very important to understand that if you protect your Niche some people will not like because they want something broader and that's fine like unless you are very confident about the ISS you are after thank you