Before you start building anything or applying for a builders grant, try to create a community group on any popular social media in your region and gather users. It is not necessary to gather thousands of users; 1-2 hundred members will be fine, in fact even less. Try to validate your idea among them, ask them how they feel about the dapps or idea, and let them be part of the projects.
Those few hundred people in your community group are the prospective users, partners, or moderators, sometimes you even select co-founders among them while brainstorming together. You’ll gain a lot of insights that you wouldn’t receive from conducting one-on-one interviews or traditional product research.
“Community building is going to be one of the most important, if not the most important, skill sets for future founders across industries. You need a community, and you need it as early as possible for whatever product you’re going to build. One thing is clear: You need to be with the people who are invested in your project on a daily basis. They don’t want to see some moderator, they need to see the person who’s building it.”
Scenarios:
The first project in 2021 raised close to 90–100 BNB in our first presale, with zero dollars spent on promotion or marketing when BNB was close to 500 dollars. is a community-driven project
The second project is a grant one, with all the funds and exposure, but the product is suffering from a lack of market fit. There was a saying, “There’s no point in pushing a product that brings no real sustainable value to customers.” This is exactly what happened in the second scenario, where founders used incentives to buy users with unnecessary incentives, and this kind of do-or-die approach to acquiring users won’t go anywhere in the long run. You will have disastrous KPIs or metrics for user engagements, as well as challenges with user retention. you got the user signup to your dapps but you can’t force them to interact cox the product is not solving any problem that the users or particular target regions are facing, this goes back to the first paragraph, “community first before dapps”
By engaging with them, you will learn their pain points and test your dapps with them easily without much funding needed, and if your MVP is accepted by them, applying for a grant or contacting VCs with traction and a validated product will save time and reduce the long hours of meetings and questions from business analysts and investors.
Always Community first…